Free download limit: 2.00GB
Current usage: 1.68GB
As of: 10/14/2005
Monthly projection: 871.59GB
I appear to have, umm, timed my usage today quite well. :)
Friday, October 14, 2005
Tuesday, October 11, 2005
Serenity
There's a good review of Serenity on Reason.com. (Spoilerific.)
I don't follow many of the references present in that review, but I think I get the idea, and I'll summarize it: Serenity is, in every sense of the word, Sci-Fi. Much of what we call Sci-Fi in the modern genre misses many of the older, classic Sci-Fi meanings. I think Serenity is a well executed reminder that Sci-Fi is more than just "guns in space".
I don't follow many of the references present in that review, but I think I get the idea, and I'll summarize it: Serenity is, in every sense of the word, Sci-Fi. Much of what we call Sci-Fi in the modern genre misses many of the older, classic Sci-Fi meanings. I think Serenity is a well executed reminder that Sci-Fi is more than just "guns in space".
Sunday, September 25, 2005
LaTeX, grad school
In the interests in doubling up some learning this weekend, I spent 5 or 6 hours using LaTeX to do some homework for my graduate-level Databases Class. (Aside: I'm attending Grad School at Oakland University now. I kinda missed going to school. On the other hand, I kinda miss free-time now. but whatever.) So, I really am intrigued by the power LaTeX has. The learning curve on it is a bit daunting at first, but once you get the hang of typing out equations in it, it's really not so bad.
I don't think I could imagine using anything else to do equation-laden things in the future.... So, for anyone reading this and pondering how to handle equation-laden stuff - I really don't think there are any realistic options for you, outside of learning LaTeX. If anyone is interested, post a comment and I'll put up the raw .tex file I used for this. (Well, after I turn the homework in. Gotta have some ethics.)
I don't think I could imagine using anything else to do equation-laden things in the future.... So, for anyone reading this and pondering how to handle equation-laden stuff - I really don't think there are any realistic options for you, outside of learning LaTeX. If anyone is interested, post a comment and I'll put up the raw .tex file I used for this. (Well, after I turn the homework in. Gotta have some ethics.)
Monday, September 5, 2005
I spoke to soon
The Intel wireless drivers are rather old, and seem to be less stable than the current development drivers.
I don't really understand why the 1.0.0 driver went in, rather than the 1.0.6 driver, given that the 1.0.6 driver has been out for several months.
In any case, I put a vote in for a more current driver, on the kernel list. Now I wait.
I don't really understand why the 1.0.0 driver went in, rather than the 1.0.6 driver, given that the 1.0.6 driver has been out for several months.
In any case, I put a vote in for a more current driver, on the kernel list. Now I wait.
Saturday, September 3, 2005
Finally, Intel wireless drivers in the kernel
I've been hand-building my IPW2200 drivers for a while, but as of today (maybe yesterday), the drivers are part of the main kernel tree.
This makes me very happy. My laptop is now fully functional from the mainline kernel. (Toshiba Satellite A55-[something])
This makes me very happy. My laptop is now fully functional from the mainline kernel. (Toshiba Satellite A55-[something])
Saturday, August 20, 2005
GenCon 2005
I'm at GenCon again this year, working for SaberTooth Games. (A division of Games Workshop now.)
This is pretty nice, relaxing, running small events and helping teach people how to play the game - and getting to know the people we'll be working with next year if things grow bigger. It's really the first low-stress GenCon I've had in 4 or 5 years. Something about not trying to run tournaments for 200+ people for 3 days straight is rather nice.
Oh, and I think the new Warhammer 40k CCG (Dark Millenium) is actually a pretty easy to learn game. Simple rules, nice level of tactics to expand into... so, I'm kinda enthused by it, too.
So, anyway, that's my thoughts from GenCon.
This is pretty nice, relaxing, running small events and helping teach people how to play the game - and getting to know the people we'll be working with next year if things grow bigger. It's really the first low-stress GenCon I've had in 4 or 5 years. Something about not trying to run tournaments for 200+ people for 3 days straight is rather nice.
Oh, and I think the new Warhammer 40k CCG (Dark Millenium) is actually a pretty easy to learn game. Simple rules, nice level of tactics to expand into... so, I'm kinda enthused by it, too.
So, anyway, that's my thoughts from GenCon.
Saturday, August 13, 2005
Thursday, July 28, 2005
Getting noticed, corrollaries
I've picked up some web browsing via "planet" sites recently. Most notably, Planet Arslinux, but also Planet Debian and Planet Kernel. On Planet Arslinux today, I saw Jay Wren's post about products being noticed.. This got me to thinking - and especially, his points about iTunes and Google made me think about why I'm a user of those two things, and also, other things.
As I ponder this, I realize that the products I'm passionate about, all share a common trait. Mostly, I hate their competition because it sucks. I think this is just another way of saying the "10 times" rule Jay postulates.
With Google, I switched because it worked, and found me the information I needed. This was a rather remarkable feature at the time. Mostly because search engines just sucked. With iTunes, I started using it because I bought an iPod. On the other hand, it's actually a really good mp3 player. And CD ripper. ID3 tag editor..... etc. It does a good job at all these things. None of the other players I've used provided all these features in one spot and got more than one of them right. In fact, most failed to get even one right. So, it's not that iTunes is great. It's just that the rest suck. (My mp3 player of choice before I stumbled on iTunes was a hand-written Perl script that I called "weightedplay", that automatically noticed new mp3s and played more recently added stuff slightly more often than older things. It was really quite simple, and other than it's lack of GUI, it was better than anything else I'd found for just playing songs.)
So those are the things that come to mind immediately, and why I switched away from their competitors. I'll bring up another one, that's occurred to me as I write this. A long, long time ago, I switched from using RedHat as my Linux distro of choice, to using Debian. In this case, it wasn't because Debian was great. I had done some customizations to my RedHat installation in strange places (/etc/inetd.conf, IIRC), and doing an upgrade wiped out those changes without warning. In retrospect, after years of being away, I realize that my customizations *might* have been saved in .rpmsave files. But I was angry, so I found another distro that I was promised would tell me before it nuked my customizations. In the meantime, I've realized that apt actually works, and that I don't really mind my packages being a little bit old if they work, so I'm happy with Debian. But I think this proves that it's not how good the new choice is, but how much you dislike the old choice that sets these patterns in our minds.
This is the thing MicroSoft doesn't get on search. For a very long time they thought that it was OK to fool their users by sneaking in paid-for results in their search listings. That's bad, and hurts the accuracy of their results, in the user's minds. This is why they will be struggling to recover influence in search for a very long time. (Oddly, I've noticed that Google's advertisements are usually well targetted at my searches, which is pretty nice. I've even occassionally clicked on one. The beauty of relevance.)
So, I guess that's my take on the thought. It's not how good you are, but how bad you make your competitor look.
As I ponder this, I realize that the products I'm passionate about, all share a common trait. Mostly, I hate their competition because it sucks. I think this is just another way of saying the "10 times" rule Jay postulates.
With Google, I switched because it worked, and found me the information I needed. This was a rather remarkable feature at the time. Mostly because search engines just sucked. With iTunes, I started using it because I bought an iPod. On the other hand, it's actually a really good mp3 player. And CD ripper. ID3 tag editor..... etc. It does a good job at all these things. None of the other players I've used provided all these features in one spot and got more than one of them right. In fact, most failed to get even one right. So, it's not that iTunes is great. It's just that the rest suck. (My mp3 player of choice before I stumbled on iTunes was a hand-written Perl script that I called "weightedplay", that automatically noticed new mp3s and played more recently added stuff slightly more often than older things. It was really quite simple, and other than it's lack of GUI, it was better than anything else I'd found for just playing songs.)
So those are the things that come to mind immediately, and why I switched away from their competitors. I'll bring up another one, that's occurred to me as I write this. A long, long time ago, I switched from using RedHat as my Linux distro of choice, to using Debian. In this case, it wasn't because Debian was great. I had done some customizations to my RedHat installation in strange places (/etc/inetd.conf, IIRC), and doing an upgrade wiped out those changes without warning. In retrospect, after years of being away, I realize that my customizations *might* have been saved in .rpmsave files. But I was angry, so I found another distro that I was promised would tell me before it nuked my customizations. In the meantime, I've realized that apt actually works, and that I don't really mind my packages being a little bit old if they work, so I'm happy with Debian. But I think this proves that it's not how good the new choice is, but how much you dislike the old choice that sets these patterns in our minds.
This is the thing MicroSoft doesn't get on search. For a very long time they thought that it was OK to fool their users by sneaking in paid-for results in their search listings. That's bad, and hurts the accuracy of their results, in the user's minds. This is why they will be struggling to recover influence in search for a very long time. (Oddly, I've noticed that Google's advertisements are usually well targetted at my searches, which is pretty nice. I've even occassionally clicked on one. The beauty of relevance.)
So, I guess that's my take on the thought. It's not how good you are, but how bad you make your competitor look.
Ok, fine...
Meme of the week - what OS are you?
Which OS are You?
Humourously, the only computers I have at home that aren't running Debian at the moment are my WRT54G and my Tivo.
That makes 7 others that are running Debian. I need a local mirror.
Which OS are You?
Humourously, the only computers I have at home that aren't running Debian at the moment are my WRT54G and my Tivo.
That makes 7 others that are running Debian. I need a local mirror.
Friday, July 22, 2005
Git - A short update
I've been spending my free time hacking away on "Git", the source code management tool created by Linus Torvalds. It's rather absorbing now that I'm really starting to grok how the command line tools all work, and I'm adding my own into the mix to fill the gaps. I guess the trick to everything is to just start using it so you figure out what is missing, either in the tool, or in your own knowledge.
I wish I felt up to trying to convert work to this tool - maybe I'll do that next year when our BK licenses come up for renewal again. I suppose I should get around to figuring out how to pull all the data out of BK and reimport all of it into Git then.
Ugh, to say the least.
I wish I felt up to trying to convert work to this tool - maybe I'll do that next year when our BK licenses come up for renewal again. I suppose I should get around to figuring out how to pull all the data out of BK and reimport all of it into Git then.
Ugh, to say the least.
OLS 2005 - Xen
Friday at OLS seems to be almost entirely "Xen" focused. Since I'm rather intrigued by all this stuff - I'll be sitting in these talks.
Xen is, basically, mainframe quality virtualization on x86.
It's incredibly cool stuff. In fact, I'm so intrigued by it that I'm going to try rebooting my laptop into Xen in a few minutes and having a virtualized system running on my laptop full-time.
If this works, I think I'll start converting my user mode linux setups at work into full-time xen systems, and I'll just limit them to running in 64 meg of ram each, and that should give me much much better performance than I got with uml doing the same thing.
Xen is, basically, mainframe quality virtualization on x86.
It's incredibly cool stuff. In fact, I'm so intrigued by it that I'm going to try rebooting my laptop into Xen in a few minutes and having a virtualized system running on my laptop full-time.
If this works, I think I'll start converting my user mode linux setups at work into full-time xen systems, and I'll just limit them to running in 64 meg of ram each, and that should give me much much better performance than I got with uml doing the same thing.
Thursday, July 21, 2005
State of Ext3 - OLS 2005 Day 2
Listening to a talk about Ext3 is going to be improved in the future - it seems that we've reached a plateau of the easy and obvious big fixes having occurred, and the next-gen Ext3 changes will hurt.
Extent based allocations (use logical block, physical block, length as a single 64-bit record, instead of older, more granular formats) require file system layout changes, so they will not happen right away. Other changes related to on-disk format changes will most likely sneak in when the extent based allocations happen.
These changes will probably not cause a rename to Ext4 - the system of capability flags means that you will just pick the features your filesystem needs and create it. Older kernel that understand the right flags or that have all the features that are flagged as "incompatible" for backwards functionality, will be able to mount the filesystem and use it (perhaps read-ony), but the compatibility will be rather complicated.
Extent based allocations (use logical block, physical block, length as a single 64-bit record, instead of older, more granular formats) require file system layout changes, so they will not happen right away. Other changes related to on-disk format changes will most likely sneak in when the extent based allocations happen.
These changes will probably not cause a rename to Ext4 - the system of capability flags means that you will just pick the features your filesystem needs and create it. Older kernel that understand the right flags or that have all the features that are flagged as "incompatible" for backwards functionality, will be able to mount the filesystem and use it (perhaps read-ony), but the compatibility will be rather complicated.
Wednesday, July 20, 2005
OLS - Thursday
My tentative plans for talks today (after I sleep) are:
nfsim: untested code is buggy code (Netfilter test suite)
Trusted Computing and Linux (Sorry, overslept)
State of Ext3 -- see the next entry.
eCryptFS - encrypted filesystem
This is something akin to "unionfs" - it overlays an already mounted directory and provides automatic encryption of the files in it, based upon a set of policies. This is kind of neat, but not really quite ready yet.
Clusterproc (clusterwide process management) or kdump/kexec
Then, BOF sessions:
NFSv4
iSCSI or Security
Spamikaze
Trusted Computing and Linux
State of Ext3 -- see the next entry.
eCryptFS - encrypted filesystem
This is something akin to "unionfs" - it overlays an already mounted directory and provides automatic encryption of the files in it, based upon a set of policies. This is kind of neat, but not really quite ready yet.
Clusterproc (clusterwide process management) or kdump/kexec
Then, BOF sessions:
NFSv4
iSCSI or Security
Spamikaze
OLS - Day 1
I'll try to update this as I go over the day.
Wednesday - 11:30
Sat in on the BlueTooth talk (BlueZ). Interesting, got a rough overview of hardware and what is going on with the stack - and since I've only recently started trying to use this, I have high hopes that it will work as easily as it should - i.e, pair with the my mouse once and never worry about it again.
Wednesday - 13:30
Next up was the ACPI talk - plagued by 30 minutes of projector and laptop problems.
Turns out that most of the ACPI problems were not bad BIOSes, but bugs in the ACPI implementation in Linux. A couple people asked for an independent ACPI tester - to use in manufacturing, and/or when shopping for a laptop. Random other things - the basic theme being "It's getting better than it was before - we think we're past the worst point of getting compatibility and support working." Lots of interesting new features in ACPI 3.0 - most of them haven't shown up in machines yet so there really isn't much (any) support for them, either. Support in the OS will happen after features start showing up in the BIOS and machines themselves. Some possible new devices, "operator present detector" (Is there a human in front of the machine?), "ambient light" (automatically dim the backlight in a low-light situation). Various physical connection, dependency, architecture things for CPUs.
Wednesday - 15:00
I went to the wrong room next, and sat in on the summary of how page cache performance was analyzed. (The page cache is the cache of things taht are file-backed, IIRC). Interesting, but hard to write about it without just repeating things - so go to http://linuxsymposium.org/ and download the papers yourself.
Wednesday - 18:00
Last up was the Keysigning - where we were, sadly, forced to implement a human merge-sort since the keysigning sheets were sorted by key-id and not by last name. Oh well. Next up to handle the actual signing, which always sucks. Gotta answer so many questions as part of the process.
Wednesday - 11:30
Sat in on the BlueTooth talk (BlueZ). Interesting, got a rough overview of hardware and what is going on with the stack - and since I've only recently started trying to use this, I have high hopes that it will work as easily as it should - i.e, pair with the my mouse once and never worry about it again.
Wednesday - 13:30
Next up was the ACPI talk - plagued by 30 minutes of projector and laptop problems.
Turns out that most of the ACPI problems were not bad BIOSes, but bugs in the ACPI implementation in Linux. A couple people asked for an independent ACPI tester - to use in manufacturing, and/or when shopping for a laptop. Random other things - the basic theme being "It's getting better than it was before - we think we're past the worst point of getting compatibility and support working." Lots of interesting new features in ACPI 3.0 - most of them haven't shown up in machines yet so there really isn't much (any) support for them, either. Support in the OS will happen after features start showing up in the BIOS and machines themselves. Some possible new devices, "operator present detector" (Is there a human in front of the machine?), "ambient light" (automatically dim the backlight in a low-light situation). Various physical connection, dependency, architecture things for CPUs.
Wednesday - 15:00
I went to the wrong room next, and sat in on the summary of how page cache performance was analyzed. (The page cache is the cache of things taht are file-backed, IIRC). Interesting, but hard to write about it without just repeating things - so go to http://linuxsymposium.org/ and download the papers yourself.
Wednesday - 18:00
Last up was the Keysigning - where we were, sadly, forced to implement a human merge-sort since the keysigning sheets were sorted by key-id and not by last name. Oh well. Next up to handle the actual signing, which always sucks. Gotta answer so many questions as part of the process.
Monday, July 18, 2005
OLS - Day -1 (sorta)
Well, it's 12:20am, on the day I fly to OLS.
I suppose I should pack, but I'm busy goofing off instead.
I'll be at the Ottawa Linux Symposium for the rest of the week, attending conferences where a bunch of really smart people talk about the impressive (and sometimes crazy) things they've done to Linux. I imagine there will be some conversations about Git, too. (Git is the SCM tool that replaced BitKeeper for kernel development.)
So, I'm looking forward to going tomorrow, and I think I'm going to go get packed and crash now.
I suppose I should pack, but I'm busy goofing off instead.
I'll be at the Ottawa Linux Symposium for the rest of the week, attending conferences where a bunch of really smart people talk about the impressive (and sometimes crazy) things they've done to Linux. I imagine there will be some conversations about Git, too. (Git is the SCM tool that replaced BitKeeper for kernel development.)
So, I'm looking forward to going tomorrow, and I think I'm going to go get packed and crash now.
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