Again, inspiring the uninspired

The GUADEC folks keep harassing me for a photo and a bio and a urine sample. It is a neverending tirade from them. They just keep wanting more and more but never give anything. Blah, blah, blah! Anyhow, I did not have any self-portraits on hand--who does?--so I had to recruit Joey and my pinata, not coincidently named Lil' Joey, for a quick shoot in the office.

Another list from Tomboy.

First names that I have had: Robert.

Venezuela's Chavez finally figures out to which ideology he subscribes. In the process, he demonstrates that he has no understanding whatsoever of economics. Or of history, for that matter.

Yesterday, I hacked up a kernel patch and corresponding pmap(1) support for per-VMA RSS statistics. Today, I added per-VMA anonymous statistics.

This allows us to see exactly how much of a given mapping is physically in-core (for example, which pages of this 289MB file mapping are we actually using?) and how much of a mapping is anonymous (for example, which of these shared pages did we COW?). We have always had these statistics on a process-wide level, but never per-mapping. Our developers definitely have a need to see a per-VMA break down of total size, RSS, and anonymous versus file-backed pages.

The patch is a bit of a hack and the accounting is pretty naive, but for curiosity in user-space, it works.

    $ ./pmap 16449
    16449: gvim
    Start         Size       RSS      Anon  Perm  Mapping
    08048000     2000K     1076K        0K  r-xp  /usr/X11R6/bin/gvim
    0823c000      204K       64K       60K  rw-p  /usr/X11R6/bin/gvim
    0826f000     2552K      260K      260K  rw-p  [ anon ]
    ...

Good accounting or not, this definitely highlights how badly we need optimal function reordering, e.g. GROPE.

SUSE users can just grab a kernel package.

List of things that my second ex-wife took when she left me: The oven mitts, all of our fabric starch, the wooden leg we had on on the mantle, my pride.

Inspire the Uninspired

Again, it snows.

Just to the left of the Good News Messenger is my trusty steed, Tomboy. In addition to the usual Tomboy notes, such as an inventory of foodstuffs in our breakfast bonanza, I keep a lot of lists in Tomboy.

Breeds of dog I have owned: Golden Retriever

States in which I have lived, other than California, Florida, and Massachusetts:

Democratic nominees for President in 2000 whom I have met: Albert Arnold Gore, Jr.

Brick Killed a Guy

I finally gave up on the rml.org squatter and registered a new domain: rlove.org. My home page and blog have moved; as has my personal email. The old stuff, of course, will continue to work for awhile. Friends call me R. Love, or in certain circles El Contrabandista, so I think it works.

Nat's post about Dave Eggers is interesting, as I recently convinced my mother to read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. My mother appreciates good literature but, like Nat, I always thought there was something about Eggers' writing that just would not work with my parents. The I am witty, I am ironic, I am self-indulgent, and I know this, and I know I know this just isn't going to connect with them, I figured. But coming off my last recommendation--Franzen's The Corrections, which she enjoyed--I was confident. I pushed the book and she picked it up.

Prudential through the Common as Winter Holds tight

Thus far, she is actually enjoying it. I get a lot of emails like Oh my God this poor kid and The wallet was on the dresser the WHOLE time !!!! from her hip Gmail account (thanks, Chris). As of yet she has not called out any of the book's possible foibles and she is happily plowing onward. When she finishes it, I do not know if she will "get it" like "we" get it. I definitely think that the book has a connection with younger readers, with our generation. It is the only book I have read more than once, not counting stuff in elementary school that I reread ten times, intoxicated by this "reading" thing and, you know, Judy Blume is the shit. Jacob and Joey have both read AHWOSG more than once and, in Jacob's case, 517 times.

Also timely from Nat's latest entry: The other day we were in People Republik when this charming fellow, our new friend Jeff, comes over. You guys are those famous Linux geeks! Nat Friedman? Robert Love?

It was a long night.

The first definition is not irony

I finally finished the design of the great inotify locking rewrite. The plan is to remove the current incestuous interrelations between the various data structures and stick to a very strict, one-way, hierarchy. It is a bit too complicated to hash out here, but my whiteboard in the office enshrines the details.

SUSE 9.1, 9.2, NLD9, and SLES9 users can grab a Grand Unified kernel package and run.

If less fortunate: current patch.

Andy, Crashing on my couch

Readers of my book often ask what text editor I use. I do not know why they do not ask more interesting questions, such as, Can I have my money back? (My publisher says I need to point out here that I am kidding, the book is wonderful.) Anyhow, I use Vim.

More interestingly, Linus uses--last I checked--a variant of Emacs called uemacs (MicroEmacs). It is small and lightweight. In other words, a complete opposite of normal Emacs. SUSE users can install it via the "uemacs" package.

Nat has these pictures in his apartment that he took of these funky tiles. I was watching L'auberge espagnole the other day and they had the tiles, so similar, obviously the same.

Nat was there!

Nat took the photos in Barcelona. They are the same tiles.

Joey has me hooked on Netflix. I would expound on the greatness, the grandeur, of the whole operation, but he has imposed a blog-topic moratorium until he writes his grand treatise on the subject. Whatever.

Good Taste

I think Joey has been rubbing off on my book's readers:

Buy both LKD and FYOSS and receive a free kazoo!

The flood yesterday was pretty wild. We did not get to build a raft out of snow, but my apartment did have weak water pressure.

Finally

To loud cheers of adoration, I released gnome-volume-manager 1.1.3 (unstable branch) and 1.0.3 (stable).

Get on it.