Older blog entries for Zaitcev (starting at number 206)

Type 64 bis

Having a rotating banner is one thing which I cannot do at LJ. In this instance, Steven uses it to a good effect to display a Type 64 rifle:

I wrote about Type 64 before. Since then, I've read that Japanese brought it with them to Iraq. The reports by Americans weren't very complimentary. The gun is quite heavy, the bipod clicks and clacks to give out your position, ergonomics are dubious overall, clip is short. It is, however, reliable. Sounds just like something Russians would make, if they didn't hit upon the goldmine of AK.

Syndicated 2006-11-08 03:17:29 from Pete Zaitcev

Halleluya! grep works again!

In FC6, grep works again: running "grep foo" is only 60% slower than "LANG=C grep foo". It used to be 20000% (twenty thousand percent, or 200 times) slower. Not a day too soon, I'd say. I was getting tired from typing LANG=C in front of every goddamn xargs. It would be awesome if the remaining 60% regression could be addressed, but let's be realistic. Now if only someone designed a UTF-8 locale which did not screw the ordering files in ls output...

Syndicated 2006-11-07 04:41:42 from Pete Zaitcev

15 Nov 2006 (updated 30 Nov 2006 at 01:09 UTC) »

Futakoi drowns itself, Tenshi no Shippo

This is a harem week. I have just finished Futakoi, and by the end I started thinking "I could have watched Lain instead". Same tiring effort, but at least I'd see some classic. Who knew that it's going to be such an unfun run? Meanwhile, half of Lain sits in its store wrapper.

Futakoi started dumb as a post and had me rolling eyes a lot. The harem man, Nozomu, is utterly indecisive, and the only thing he is capable of doing is to ride his luck. However, I remembered that Mahoraba's lead was pretty bleak in the begining and stuck with it. I could have dropped the show even after that, but around the ep.7 the story abruptly turned from slapstick comedy into romance and drama. So I hoped for the better, only to be rewarded by a trainwreck ending which does not resolve any plotlines.

Of Tenshi no Shippo (Angel Tales in R1 version), I only saw one DVD. It starts as dumb as Futakoi, although the comedy is somewhat more easy-going and memorable. For the taste of it, I remember one moment when The Goddess, in her infinite majesty, reveals a Live CB (Crystal Ball) transmission of Goro fighting off his guardian angels as they attempt to undress him -- ostensibly for the purposes of hygiene. The idiocy of observed scene does not faze observers one iota, and they remain in the Goddess' bliss while the little image of Goro in the CB struggles to save last shreds of his battered dignity.

I fully expect Tenshi no Shippo to make a turn once the setup is done and start telling the story, but there's no telling if it's worth watching. Futakoi certainly wasn't.

Liked: Not violently against it, but it's no Mahoraba
Rewatch: No

{Update: I forgot to mention that twins make Futakoi's love dodecahedron harder to digest. They look exactly alike, but do not behave the same. I resorted to sketching a basic map with little tags for each character and arrows for love interest. Specifically, Kaoruko has a tail, whereas Sumireko doesn't (she is pictured above). Yura combs her hair to the right, Kira combs to the left. I can't help it, I'm dense.}

Syndicated 2006-11-06 06:06:25 (Updated 2006-11-08 02:58:50) from Pete Zaitcev

15 Nov 2006 (updated 30 Nov 2006 at 01:09 UTC) »

Anime KernelChix

I a fit of silliness, I considered what kind of kernel hacker some characters would be.

Chiyo Mihama: Finds bugs in futex and clone after one reading, makes Rusty's hair gray. Fixes locking in tty layer once and for all. Optimizes DaveM's code using packet classificator of her own making. Nobody can understand the way it works, it's too advanced.

Kasuga Ayumu: Spends her days sleeping and pondering the number of arguments to clone() and the way to reimplement lookup_dentry. Names a struct inode field "i_hemorroids".

Koyomi Mizuhara: Writes cleanest drivers ever. Cannot stay in one company for more than 6 months, because Tomo Takino gets hired in QA.

Tomo Takino: Challenges Mingming Cao and Stephen Tweedie to implement ext5 with 128 bit addresses. Argues with Adrian Bunk and Dick Johnson on linux-kernel.

Yurie Hitotsubashi: Can do magic, such as making /dev/fb not to suck. Her enormous capability is wasted when her manager Matsuri Saegusa makes her to do contract programming in drivers/s390/.

Shima Katase: Control and neatness freak. Programs a lightweight tracker to track every object in the kernel underneath slab and kobject. Also, makes use of AIGLX when hacking. Stops one step short of integrating VR headseat into the toolchain.

Chi Motosuwa: Learned to program in C by observing her boyfriend. Gets bored with kernel quickly, writes a continuously learning hypervisor. Never writes any comments, because she always sees the kernel as one whole. Builds kernels using her own brain and "make -j 32767".

Toru Honda: Always overloaded by bugfixes because she can't say "no". Is nice to everyone including Jeff Merkey, Theo deRaadt, and Larry McVoy. Out of pity for starving 3rd world children, visits Marvel CEO to plead for the release of firmware images (and succeeds). Hums sunny songs when trying to find normal functions mistakenly referencing __init sections.

Reki: Submits sparse annotations for 2.6.19-rc3, kills herself the moment 2.6.19 hits ftp.kernel.org. Her friends continue writing annotations.

Bulma: Compresses executables to 1 100th of their size, using her father's research. Uses software patents to make a ton of money on her compression technique, and gets ostracised by the community.

Karin Kikuhara: Is famous for her attention to detail (suspected to be autistic), but sometimes inserts {for(;;) printk("HELP\n");} in random places.

The challenge, of course, is to express the personatily through the code, and not through the socium. I can easily imagine Ayeka at LinuxChix meetings, but that's just uncool. Although with fora such as linux-kernel being such an integral part of kernel hackery, perhaps some of it is acceptable.

Syndicated 2006-11-05 06:13:04 (Updated 2006-11-06 16:54:48) from Pete Zaitcev

15 Nov 2006 (updated 30 Nov 2006 at 01:09 UTC) »

Azumanga, the true quality

By way of "link to someone new" mechanism at Chizumatic, I saw this article at Astronomicon:

I finally finished Azumanga Daioh after watching all 26 episodes in three days. How do I rate it? I’m almost ashamed to admit how much I enjoyed this.

Since I consider Azumanga the greatest anime series of all times, I find the "almost ashamed" formulation curious. But explanation is quite simple:

I saw the box-set for Azumanga Daioh on sale recently and picked it up mainly just so I could say I’ve seen Chiyo-chan (pictured above) who seems to be the universally accepted definition of kawaii. I wasn’t expecting it to be very good. I’d seen that SDB had rated it at only one star and a thumbs down - he didn’t even watch past the first DVD. Normally I trust his judgement completely - as I’ve started watching more and more anime I’ll look over at Chizumatic to see what he recommends, and I’ve found some really excellent stuff this way (Lain, Haibane Renmei, Noir, etc.) I have to say I don’t share his opinion of this one, though. Maybe he just gave up on it too early, although I have to say I was hooked by the time I saw the fifth episode.

Ah, yes. Steven's misrating of Azumanga is legendary. But all is well that ends well.

Syndicated 2006-11-02 23:36:40 (Updated 2006-11-05 03:53:58) from Pete Zaitcev

Monkeys

Today's mail:

Subject: refer a kernal monkey/engineer?

Dear Pete:
I’m a senior recruiter representing a fortune 500 company in The Silicon Valley. []

The monkey thing was launched in kernel by Jes Sorensen, in the shape of "trained monkey". I picked this from him and started putting "Kernel Monkey" on my resume (because I was not going to change jobs any time soon, so why not, right?) Later I discovered that DaveJ also played with the concept. Not sure if this was influenced by my jokes, or Dave's, or came about independently, but it's nice to see the meme spreading.

The Helix Code (now Ximian) used the monkey theme extensively too (e.g. their equivalent of people.redhat.com is called primates.ximian.com), but that, I think, was entirely independent from us, kernel monkeys. Their slant is very differnt, too. They have a pretty logo and other cult attributes, whereas kernel monkeys are largely invisible. Or were invisible, until now.

Syndicated 2006-11-02 04:37:29 from Pete Zaitcev

15 Nov 2006 (updated 30 Nov 2006 at 01:09 UTC) »

Costs of Shuttle again

So, the Hubble repair mission is approved. Wonderful. But here's what Pajamas aggregate:

By MIKE SCHNEIDER
...
The 11-day rehab mission, likely launching in May 2008 using space shuttle Discovery, would keep Hubble working until about 2013. Its estimated cost is $900 million.
No! This is not what the cost is! The Shuttle costs almost exactly the same, no matter if it flies or not. The cost of fuel for a launch is immaterial, twenty thousand bucks or so. Then, there's a million or two for the tank. But it's nothing, really. All costs are in salaries for the immense standing army which is needed to service the system.

This is exactly why the Hubble mission makes sense. Shuttle has to be kept in service anyway, so it might as well fly to Hubble. It would cost us almost exactly nothing.

What is so damned difficult to understand here?!

It is not just the Shuttle. Atlas V currently launches about 2 times a year, at a cost of 50 million charged to each customer (I thought it was $38 million quoted, plus extras like range fees). A couple of weeks ago Lockheed Martin posted a study of making Atlas V manned. They said, if we launch it 16 times a year, it will be what? 20 mil or so. But this rocket is expendable. You have to build a new one every time, so there's a limit just how low it can go.

Syndicated 2006-10-31 23:56:20 (Updated 2006-10-31 23:58:39) from Pete Zaitcev

F-35's Front Office

A recent article at Code One had one curious revelation: the touchscreen.

Many airplanes have MFDs today. An MFD consists of an LCD or EL screen, with buttons at its edge. The setup is familiar to anyone who used a banking machine in the 1990s. Newer ATMs have touchscreens and dispose of side buttons. The F-35 goes this too. But in an airplane, you have to touch screens while flying in a choppy air. How are you supposed to touch the correct area on screen? I, for one, can never hit the right button on ATM's touchscreen. Plus, there is no tactile feedback, which makes you look down to guide your fingers.

I think it may be possible by placing your throttle arm's elbow tight against your belly, then touching the screens, if you can reach that far. Still, it doesn't sound very convenient.

Syndicated 2006-10-31 01:43:33 from Pete Zaitcev

Things to hate about Kamichu

All right. By episode 9, the story is barely moving, but that's fine. Kamichu is still the best anime of the year 2005 by far. I'm going to give it due flogging when I see everything. Some things though, I just can't understand.

For example, Miko's character design really ticks me off.

Is this supposed to be a human or a frog?

Just needed to take this off the chest.

Syndicated 2006-10-29 05:18:01 from Pete Zaitcev

Open Source

I saw a very interesting interview with Brian Stevens, who runs our advanced development group.

What is your biggest frustration with the open source model? Do you ever feel limited by what the company can deliver?

Brian Stevens: I was one of the architects at DEC for roughly 15 years, and our pace of innovation there was very slow compared to Red Hat. Code ownership doesn't seem to accelerate innovation, and probably inhibits it. I'm very happy with the open source development model, at least the way we practice it.

This was my impression too, after 15 years of being a programmer at proprietary software companies. But my libertarian heart is very receptive to the argument that proper compensation of innovators should produce the best innovation. This is what we have startups for. Right?

In reality though, there doesn't seem to be any difference. Startups, of course, innovate, but they exhibit no advantage (that I can see). Bram Cohen created BitTorrent while destitute. Jeff Bonwick (et al.) created ZFS at a conventional, lame, over-bureaucratized company: my former home Sun Micro. Rusty developed futexes at the Open Source part of The Big Blue. Ingo, DaveM, SCT work here at Red Hat in purely FOSS environment.

Then, once the real innovation part is over, we beat other organizations due to the advantage of the Open Source which ESR documented. But that is beside the point.

It's a good thing I am not paid to think why this is happening. I have no idea. Let Paul Graham do it. Maybe it really is down to having an office with a door.

Syndicated 2006-10-28 09:14:08 from Pete Zaitcev

197 older entries...

New Advogato Features

New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.

Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.

If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!