Older blog entries for Bryce (starting at number 119)

Sunday

Erm nothing important or note worthy happened,.. kinda makes me wonder why I woke up. Notice petrol prices have dropped from $1.53 to $1.44 a gallon here. Also noticed that the UK motorists groups are staging petrol pump boycots soon. Wonder if the goverment will become the deserved victims of road rage 8)

Monday

After seeing some 'the logs are too damned big' posts in the lvs mail list, added a debug level option to piranha. Did some more LWE show preperations,... notice that the LWE show passes have a HUGE BSD logo on the back,.. very auspicious.

Killed another load of email on the QT. Made some notes on GUI changes I wanted. May have to fight to get them in else I may see if Keith will be amiable to a developers release. After all piranha is a community project. I wonder if that means I can externally of RHAT make changes and release them / submit patches,.. humm,.. actually, according to the GPL I can 8)
That would look so odd 8)

Went for dinner with Jeff Johnson (rpm code slave) to a fairly nice restraunt down near 15-501. Shared a porterhouse blue steak with him. Hat a nice long discussoin on RHAT, culture, chemistry, food etc. A very pleasent evening.

Saturday

Slept in,..
No, I really mean SLEPT.. woke up at 13:30 8)

Spent some time reading some books. I on't have any need to go shopping at all today so I'll probably spend the day at the apt.

Need to write out this damned weekly status report at some point

Also need to work out what to do when the lease for this apt is up,.. do I move? do I stay and if I move, where to and for how long? another 6 months? dunno

Friday

Spent most of the day going through the HA1.0 documentation and wondering just how much of it I would rewrite and the Ziff-Davies reporter had some fair points to make on the docs when he was installing it. Then again, you should expect difficulties when installing specalised network setups if you have limited network experiance 8)

Knocked off a load of support style questions through email. I've getting quite a few. It's just unfortunate it takes quite a bit of time to respond to them all..

Started detailing the configuration setups I require for the LWE show in just under 3 weeks time. I'm kinda looking forward to the show, even if I'm going to be couped up in a booth the whole time

Keith managed to release the piranha update twice through mistyping the release number 8). Actually thinking about it when you release linux software today, you have to announce it all over the place,.. comp.os.linux.announce, freshmeat.net the mail lists and any web sites that you are associated with. Not exactly a painless proceedure.

Ha! My good deed for the day, who would have thought it 8) Used my ex IBM tech skills to help Al Viro fix up the netfinity 5500 and it's scsi controller he's using for FS work. IBM needs to stop sending out of date prototype models to RHAT.

Rather dismayed that the share options I have in RHAT are absolutely worthless. I'm going to have to start looking seriously at my situation because it's not like I have a pension fund that I'm paying into (the one I had at IBM UK isn't particularly large and I can't pay into since I left IBM) also at present as yet I have no 401k to invest in. Time to start entertaining the thought of looking at other jobs I fear.

I have to look at it like this.
I have a finite working life. I am 30 now,.. I have a potential 35 years of working life ahead of me (if I survive that long) after which I retire. When I retire, I'm supposed to live off this amassed fortune in my pension fund/401k. This only works if money is going into such a fund and at present it is not. I have to look at each year as a resource that I get a return on and if the return is poor, then I'm in the wrong place no matter how much I enjoy the work. <rant> This was the *MAJOR* reason I left IBM/AT&T,.. not because the hours were slaveish or that there was too much work or that I hated it but because the cost of living was more than I was earning. Heck, I had to earn 1/3rd of my yearly salary through overtime just to break even and every attempt I made to get a pay rise was simply blown off so in the end IBM/AT&T lost out. Oh at the end, when I gave in myresignation they were suddenly very happy to entertain the idea of a pay rise, however, by principle I will NEVER use the threat of resignation to change my work conditions. Thats tantamount to blackmail in my book, so I left. It was actually at the point that if RHAT had not offered me a job, I would have quit and gone back to farming in N.Ireland. Oh well </rant>

Oh 8) don't worry,.. I'm nowhere near the leaving stage as yet

Thursday

Keith off ill today.

Helped the reporter from yesterday through the configuration of NAT through the piranha web panels. Minor hiccup as I find out the spec web clients are geared to pummel 200.1.32.250 which he defined the LVS server's real IP to be whereas the VIP was defined as 200.1.32.251. That sortted out he went off to do testing. I assume that he'll be ok with what he has.

Went off and hunted down a spare phone headset. Supporting phones on your shoulder while typing is very uncomfortable.

More the fool me 8/
He phoned back later in the day to tell me he'd hit a problem, he'd maxed out the network card/link... 8)
I'm not upset by that 8) it simply means the software exceeds the performance of the hardware provided. So I started into helping him reconfiguring the network into a direct routing configuration but we abandoned that because we realised that his hardware wasn't able to do support higher bandwidth.

Missed luch again while doing the phone support

Got the warm fuzzy's from him that the article will be mostly positive though with serious slap for lousy docs. Sems he'll be at LWE as well,... I shall have to wait and see his article before deciding on taking wire cutters or a rusty chopping axe to the show for the demo.

Caught up on world events.

Wednesday

Returned to helping the Ziff-Davies reporter with his test network. On and off it took up the majority of the day. I was getting a sore neck using my shoulder to support the phone while typing so I nicked Doug's phone headset.

Resolved to get a headset for myself tomorrow.

Not much else happened beyond doing admin tasks.

Tuesday

Ugh,.. I'm sure that the days are getting shorter

More fun stuff at the office.
Keith palmed off a Ziff-Davies reporter to me that was trying to setup RHAT HA-1.0 for to do comparison tests agains the Microsoft equivelent.

Spent ages on the phone explaining the topology required for a NAT setup. Got hampered by apache freaking out and refusing to serve pages as it went through a bout of being paranoid and anti-social.

Unfortunately for me he's on thw west coast so It was close on midnight before I got out of the office.

Monday

Woke up late (10:00)

Erk, my voice is a bit off key,.. I suspect thats down to listening to multiple accents and shouting a lot.

Went into work and started ploughing through my email. Far too much of it.

Skipped dinner.

Went shopping after work as I'd cleared out all the perishable food I had in the apt before going to OLS. Spent a small fortune at Harry Teeters.

The apt needs cleaning 8/ I may see about going to linen n things and buying a small hover.

Spent the evening watching all the cartoons' I had the VCR setup to record while I was away.

Sunday

Woke up at 09:00. dwmw2 ddn't come back from last night. Bit worried as the checkout time is 12:00.

Called him on his mbl phone to make sure he was ok.

12:00 we left the suite and went loking around the shopping centre for anything of intrest/value to take back home.

MUCH waiting around until it was time to go to the airport.

Sct/dwmw2 and myself got the airport bus and went on a mystery trip all all other hotels that the bus also served

I was starting to get a bit concerned as my flight was before theirs and I wasn't exactly sure how long the trip back to the airport was. As it turned out, I was ok for time.

Left sct/dwmw2 and went off to the US deptarture section of the airport and proceeded to fill in all kinds of beaurocratic paperwork nonsense. As it turned out, the flight was delayed by about 10 minutes.

Met up with msw and Dave Mason who were on the same flight back.

Got back to RDU after ~2 hrs. Gave msw a lift back to the office.

Went home, fell asleep.

What can I say about the Zero-Knowledge party,..
umm
ummm
Wel boarded the bus that was laid on for the party and was taken quite a few miles outside the main centre of Ottowa to a small farm/ranch (humm did I say I wouldn't be on a Canadian farm on the entry card to Canada? damn). First sign of trouble. There was some girl on a horse carrying a texas state flag,.. unfortunately it was upside down (sign of distress) umm,..

The bar (such that it was) was this tiny affair in the corner of the barn and wasn't really up to serving real beer which seemed to partially annoy some of the party attendees. I was ok though 8) pleanty of diet coke 8)

There was some sort of tabletop bouncy castle type novelty outside on which people would play some variant of 'king of the hill' trying to push each other off. This seemed to hold some mild attraction for people for a while until it started raining.

Realistically it wasn't a terribly good party and the fist bus out of there (22:00) was full. 8(
A pity really that it didn't go well

On getting back to Ottowa, a group of us went off to Art Cannon's suite (IBM rep at OLS) and jsut had a quit night talking about linux, free vs' commercial world, various upcoming technologies, tax, country/cultural differances etc. That was much better. and at least I didn't have to scream over loud music to get myself heard. 8) BIG BONUS.

Saturday

Last day of OLS *weep*

Had breakfast in the shopping centre. Some nice greasy sausages, some bacon and scrambled eggs with a glass of orange juice. Lovely 8)

Went to lmb's talk on failsafe if only to show moral support. There has been semi bad blood running in the mail-lists for a while and it would have been inapropriate to not turn up.

Skipped the next session to do some clothes shopping and lunch but came back to listen to Wensongs talk on LVS in the kernel. Nothing new or startling, I did talk to Wensong a couple of times throughout OLS so at least himself and I got to see each other in the flesh rather than being disembodied people at the end of an email.

Went of to the closing keynote by Dave Miller. Whats disturbing is that nearly everything he was talking about, I was around at the time watching the events unfold (I came into the linux fold at version 0.10 though 0.11 was available the same day)

Went downstair to do this diary but found that the OLS people were busy removing the terminals and networking 8(
Thought Id be able to copy it all up when I returned sunday night (Appendum: Ha! more fool me! I was knackered when I got back)

Went off to the Helixcode party at about 18:00. Turned out that we were probably the first people to arrive though by about 18:45 it was starting to fill up. Heavy drink ensued and I personally am responsible for putting away at least 6 diet cokes 8)

Spent some time talking to taj. quite a nice bloke to talk to, however, as with all other parties the music was too loud and I ended up shouting again <croak!>

Somewhere around 22:00 the drinking got a bit more serious and I saw all kinds of liquers and exotic looking fluids being ordered. dwmw2 and dan_b seemed to be on a mission from the Dionysus (greek god of wine) to consume 2x their body weight in alcohol.

The party went on and seemed to be a success, even if dwmw2 ended up sleeping at ajh's place and dan_b was seen by taj to rebound off the hotel's revolving doors 8)

Last night was fun,.. went off to the drink and food part that corel paid up for (very decent of them) at the Hard Rock Cafe. Good evening with lots of people to talk to though I did find myself becoming more hoarse through the night through the insistance of the staff increasing the music volume.

Was quite tired from the first night and my shins where quite sore through standing and walking around all day, so I went back to the hotel.

Woke up at 08:10am (I love my alarm clock,.. no really, I do) fell back asleep. Finally fell out of bed by 09:40 and quickly got dressed and ran off to the conference. (Skipped breakfast)

Met up with Telsa, and after a few plesentries with other conferance people, went off to the bookshop with her to look for something decent to read on the flight home come Sunday night. I did fine a pop-up-book of phobia's which I was going to show Telsa, but she ran away in terror before I could show her the contents (intresting things like snakes, spiders, first person view of being in the dentists chair etc. Bought a couple of books for myself. Must make a note to go back later on or tomorrow and buy some postcards. Apparently the ones that Telsa bought came with stamps which would save me having to find a post office.

I debated going and buying a pair of new shoes and a pair of jeans as Canada seems to be much less expensive that the US (when you do the money conversions).

Many more talks.

Went for lunch with Telsa, _A_ and Andrew (he who likes to grab everyones VAIO laptop and pull it apart in the hope of seeing system events via the sony SPIC chip).

Forgot to mention, Telsa is the owner of a nice new vaio, which despite her best efforst has already been subjected to many kernel and application hackers. On the good side, it's wonderful being at a convention where every possible problem you could have with linux on a laptop is easily fixed by looking around for the appropriate maintaner of the package you can't quite get working 8)

Speaking of laptops, I'm depressed at just how many people have one,.. I'm starting to feel a bit left out 8( the keyboard of the PC110 that _A_ sent over is just way too small for use (along with some mysterious japaneese keys) and the battary life is about 5 minutes before it needs recharging 8/ so that stays back at the apt. Nearly everyone here with a laptop is using a wavelan wireless ethernet card and it's quite funny to see them huddled around in groups the first day trying to get the driver for the card to actually work. (there was MUCH consternation as people got frustrated at having to recompile drivers etc). This all seems to have finally sortted itself out and now it's funny to look around in the talks at all the people who are busy typing stuff online while tilting their laptops in an effort to pick up a radio signal 8)

Things have quietend down a bit and there is a Zero-knowledge party tonight which of course I will obediantly atend 8)