Older blog entries for avriettea (starting at number 92)

Sad to hear that Westmoreland died.

Would like to go to LinuxWorld SF, but it looks like scheduling requirements back at home will prevent it. It's really too bad, they've got some great tracks.

Recent trip to Atlanta was pretty neat. Got to see Acrylic demoed. Also Windows Vista, which was really impressive.

What I think I found most interesting was the session on how LAMP is faring in the market against .NET. I realize that some people will just call me a shill, but I found the existence of DotNetNuke to be very heartening. It's Open Source, and it runs on software that you can get for free from Microsoft (or if you bump into me at a conference, I'll have a couple CD's I can give you). I think it is terrific that MSFT is reaching out to the community. They seem to understand that you need to embrace software developers (especially people of my generation, and those a bit younger, say people who are in college right now), or you risk losing them forever. To produce free and low-cost solutions, as well as to foster open source development on their platforms, is rather astute.

I've been continuing to write what code I can in the time that I have. My biggest frustration lately has been slogging through the MSDN documentation. I think that all the documentation is there, but it's almost as if they deliberately hard to get to. I heard at the briefing last week that there's a planned update to the MSDN site to help us get to the documentation better, but nobody gave us any details. What I really want is perldoc-style documentation for System.Net.Sockets. I forget who originally said it (maybe Damian?), but CPAN really is the "killer app" for perl. Likewise, the fact that C# lacks anything similar is close to "killing" the language for me.

I haven't ever been against Free or Open Source software. In fact, I contribute to the FOSS projects I use. I think that Linux in particular is a marvelous operating system as a project (this is why I run it at home and continue to develop on it). There's a huge marketing campaign, however, that has incorrectly portrayed it as enterprise ready. That was my opinion as a Solaris admin, and that's my opinion today. I also have no problem whatever with making money off free software. There seems to be a lot of resentment about this. However, releasing your source means that somebody might just be successful at selling it. You can't then be sour about it. Listen, people gotta make a living, and it's possible to continue working on F/free software development while working for a company that sells commercial software. It's even possible to be objective and recognize talent or intellect in that company. Objectivity is something that's been lacking in the FOSS community for a long time.

Secondly, I don't think anyone is "pro war". Pro-military, sure. I work with them, have a lot of friends in the service, and their safety is important to me. Certainly what you describe as "pro war" is comparable to the opposite? Surely you don't believe that mankind is capable of some non-warring static state?

And there's nothing wrong with France. I have a problem with individual people who cannot see their own hypocrisy.

Finally, advogato is a community site for free software developers. I do develop free software, I contribute to Free software, and the word "community" implies diverse opinions and political viewpoints. A little tolerance, if you please.

At the meeting I attended this morning, I saw Bill Gates keynote for the first time. He's a pretty well spoken dude, and I was impressed with what he had to say. One of the things that struck me about him is that he really seems to have a lot of faith in both people and in the industry (or maybe society in general if you want to stretch a little). He said that Microsoft has a lot of room to grow as a company, and their products as well. This is kind of counter to the common belief that we somehow have conquered the market and there's no room for anyone else. Well, he stated that computers aren't to the point that he and Paul Allen supposedly envisioned back in, what, the early 80's? That since computers had such a long way to go, that there was room for both our competition, and us, in the near term future. I think that really shows a lot of vision. People make a lot of jokes about Bill, and I'm probably guilty of it as well. But I think he's really grown up with the success of Microsoft, and he genuinely seems to be focused on the future. Furthermore, he seems to have a very altruistic view of how and why computers will continue to get better. One example of this is his statement several times that our business model is aimed at broad distribution of cheaper product. If you think about that, it justifies the gigantic marketshare Windows has. He wants to have software that does fantastic things available to everyone. Sure, he'll make a ton of money doing it, but the sheer size of the operation msft has means that people who might not have otherwise gotten ahold of things like Office now can.

This morning was not all smiles, however. When I got to the georgia dome for this morning's "general session" (as opposed to smaller, focused sessions with a clearer target audience and topic), I made sure to get there early enough to get a seat close enough to take pictures from. There were few people in the auditorium, so I took a seat close up, but not so close that I'd be blocking somebody else's view (I'm 6'5", and I think it's rude to pick a spot where I am knowingly going to obstruct somebody's view). So I sit down in an empty chair, and people start filing in around me. I realize they're all from the same european country. I offered to move so that they could sit together (I was roughly in the middle of a row), and they looked at me exasperatedly, finally saying that yes, they'd like me to move. By the time the speeches started, I was sitting on the far corner of the group of chairs, next to a man who was half my size, but nonetheless taking up a third of the seat I was on. Everyone stank of cologne, and my neighbor didn't understand the notion of "personal space," continually thrusting elbows into me, kicking me when crossing/uncrossing legs, etc.

What really got to me was their complete disdain for everyone there. Several awards were given out (this is a global meeting, with staff from all over the world), and these people were quite happy to clap for people from their country, and in one case, their locale, but when anyone else got an award, they didn't clap, and more often than not, made rude comments about the people, or their not deserving the award, or how they themselves deserved it. These people even booed (quietly) during Gates' speech and the Longhorn/Office 12 demos, which were both quite impressive, and very well received by the crowd. Everyone else in the audience was very gracious, uniformly cheering and clapping, louder for groups and individuals who had accomplished more (and there were some staggering numbers mentioned!). When the US received an award, they had the nerve to boo quite loudly, and did the same for a North America award. When one of their own accepted an award for them, they unfurled three huge flags, yelled and whistled, waving the flags proudly back and forth, standing up. Not one other country did that with the flag. Everyone else was happy for the whole company, realizing the work that everyone had put in during FY05.

I was so disgusted by this that I left the auditorium. The behavior of these people, thirty or forty of them, was appropriate for five year olds. And here they were, flown across the atlantic to a week long party, and they have the gall to be anti-american. Who is it they think employs them? It reminds me a lot of Johnny Depp or John Malkovich living in France and being such vocal critics of America, and yet raking in money from american studios, selling films to american consumers. Just shameful. I hope I never have to deal with these people professionally, as I have no idea what I'd say to them.

Got back from Seattle on Saturday morning. The flight out to SEA and the flight back home (DCA) was just terrible. Perhaps the worst flying experience I've ever had, save for the one flight home from HNL with the eight year old baseball team overnight in which both my wife and I got sick. The weather in ATL has cocked up Delta in all kinds of ways. I'm not looking forward to flying down to ATL again tomorrow. And then there's the whole conference thing that I'm also not particularly looking forward to.

A lot of stuff happened in Redmond, most of which is under NDA, and I thus cannot discuss it. I'm slightly perturbed about this, moreso than I would have expected. I suppose I relied more on hashing it out here than I realized.

One thing I learned in Redmond was that more important things take place between sessions in a meeting or conference than seem to actually take place in the sessions themselves. I had more meaningful discussions with engineers in the hallway than I did with any of the presenters.

It also seems (and sungo did tell me this once) that nobody will respond to an email that is more than a couple sentences long. This is maddening. I've gotten to the point where I will write an email, and then chop out all the meaningful parts, re-read it, and then decide it's not even worth sending because all the information I wanted to convey is gone anyways. I don't understand why this is. Personal email, I suppose, I'm pretty bad about. But this is work email, and it is my opinion that people have an obligation to reply.

I discovered that either MSFT or AXP or somebody is fucking up with my hotel reservations and I'm not getting credit for staying at the Marriotts I've been so carefully picking. I do so because we'd really like to return to the Ihilani and not have to pay for it. 270,000 Marriott points required for a week in a deluxe ocean view room.

Met a man on the flight back from SEA who was kind of a Linux hobbyist. He said he runs mandrake, but doesn't really understand how it worked. I eventually explained that I worked for Microsoft, and Linux was one of my primary technical foci. Perhaps surprising for both of us, I gave the guy my card and told him I could probably find LUGs in the Seattle area, and offered to help him with any problems he has. Naturally I suggested he try Fedora out. I did think about showing him my laptop so he could use it, but when you're on an airplane, what exactly can you do with it? Additionally, Fedora has no idea how to halt my machine, and instead prefers to set the cpu on "immolate" and hard-lock requiring I take the battery out. Tres slick.

The reform thing has not been going well. I figure that, while it's not so healthy, eggs benedict is a reasonably good breakfast, provided you don't go apeshit the rest of the day on the usual conference fare -- bagels, donuts, muffins, etc. But of course, when I ask for a decaf cappucino, they can't accomodate me, and I settle for a regular. Ugh. Caffeine. Then of course, the conference is catered and has a reasonable lunch (a curry tofu that was really good even), and everyone wants to party their butts off for dinner. So I wind up with a filet from RC, some nice wine (I don't know wines from the north west very well, and each RC has a different wine list which is tailored to the area, so Dave Lifka picked a nice one for us), followed by more Gin & Tonic. I understand that ethanol is particularly bad for you, as your body loves to burn it up, more than sugar even. Anyways, same story, repeated every day. More alcohol, more food, more schmoozing, etc. The airports are roughly the same. Have lunch or dinner, or whatever's appropriate for 3-in-the-morning-and-jetlagged, and it's almost certainly going to be fast food. Add a margarita or two, and it's just disastrous. So while I'm not exactly embracing caffeine and terrible food, it's sort of insidiously forcing itself on me. Maybe I should start bringing workout clothes with me. On the other hand, that'd require a gym and planning, which most of these events are not conducive to.

For those interested, I took a picture of the Gates residence (other photos in the set interesting as well). Considering its cost and the wealth of its owner, it is a very tasteful, subdued home. Much more so than some of the other people on the bay. (hmm, upon looking at my pictures again, I think I should try to go and hike Ranier next time I'm out in Seattle.)

I love how the Japanese aren't culpable for crimes currently committed, and previously committed, which more or less resulted in their being smote... somewhat decisively.

It seems that it is very easy to put a good face forward, make an effort of changing your ways, and look over your shoulder, taking potshots at those who lag behind you. Some have said that history is written by the victor. I've always held that history is written by the conquered.

Why do contemporary writers feel the need to convey their distaste with the west and/or progress with such negative imagery? It would be, in my opinion, just as accurate to portray a civilization whose leaders have taken liberties not originally given to them by the people they govern: a system which is static and unchangeable... as it is to portray some rogue power with incompetent leaders at the helm, intent on wanton destruction.

What recourse does the west have? Revolt in some child's tantrum stretched to the proportions of an entire country? Assuming for a second that it were actually possible, should we sit by and let some other country obliterate us so that some other nation or conglomerate thereof could shape the world in its own image?

As I have stated previously, I am not myself particularly happy with the way the world has changed under the influence of western power. It seems to me, though, that nobody's thought the question through enough to give an adequate answer to how many billions of people can coexist on the serface of a small, small, sphere. Until such point as somebody provides a solution that avoids kilo- and mega-death, it's business as usual for me. I don't complain about the tyranny of asian trade agreements, nor the coming power that is the European Union. Like most Americans, I think we really want to just be left alone. That's why we like those vast moats we have.

Finished Cowl by Neal Asher. Was recommended by amazon uk, and I purchased it with the last group of books from over there. Unforgivably bad book. Won't be reading another one of those.

The honeymoon, if there ever was one, is over. Editing the wikipedia is an irritating, time consuming kind of thing to do. What keeps me going at it is the enjoyment of seeing a woefully short article turned into something more, or a long maintenance project finished. So while I sit there editing hundreds of articles, or spending three or four hours writing a single article, I mutter about what idiots I'm surrounded by, how the previous edits were awful, how people are so insipidly anti-us-centric while claiming that the whole intarpedia is so pro-us-centric, and so on. I then vomit up said changes, smile at the newer, shinier thing, and then walk away shaking my head.

But it's better than reading Neal Asher. So, I finished the book just to get it off my plate, and went to get another couple books. Notably The Call of Cthulu and other stories by Lovecraft, and Niven's Ringworld. Neither of which I had yet read. I'll probably finish a couple of the new ones on the various plane trips coming up.

I didn't realize how much I was using my tablet until I broke the damn stylus. That's mildly irritating.

Also, learned to make a Yucatan-style pork dish. That'll save me from spending $75 at the local Mexican place to buy it (well, okay, to be fair, some of that is margarita-expenses, but I've got Tequila, Cointreau, Grand Marnier, and limes at home, too).

My wife tells me that her summer classes are roughly forty hours each. I realized as I was booking travel this weekend that many of the classes I will be attending, or conferences with "class tracks", are forty hours, give or take, in four to five days. Having never deemed it worthwhile to finish school, I find it somewhat ironic that I am taking semester-long courses from industry leaders, in the industry. The major difference is that I won't actually have a diploma or anything to show for it, save frequent flier miles, and knowledge which may or may not come up in a future interview. I find this troubling. Certifications are one way to prove "you've been there, done that", in regards to specific training (I'm on track to receive my MCSE later this year). But how do you quantify the amount of training you've received on the job, experiences you've learned from on the job, conversations you've had with people who have been at it for twice as long, and so on? I don't really believe there is much of a bias against people who don't have degrees anymore (in fact I do believe the opposite is true). However, there's no good way to measure what somebody knows in an interview setting. The next job I interview for, somebody may not notice that I've spent a "week-semester" taking embedded systems programming because it simply doesn't come up. But the guy with the MSEE on his resume will have all that, presupposed. Sigh.

Looking forward to seeing Avi Rubin keynote again.

roozbeh
I, too, find it troubling the effect that programming languages and American (or Western) language has had on the world via the Internet. I think often about what sort of effect having non-english speaking people learn english through (in the case of perl) constructs like if/elsif/else, for, while, do, map, print, and so on. It occurred to me some years ago that these people were in fact being forced to learn english. I still don't think english is anywhere near as attractive as some of the other extant languages, especially some of the more modern amalgams of language (such as Hawaiian Pidgin, which has a rugged charm about it). If I were to pick a language to subjugate the world with, english wouldn't be it. The same is true for Western culture. I wouldn't want to quash other culture in favor for the big-mac sort of cultural veneer we have here in the States.

What I find more worrisome by far, however, is the notion that languages and cultures may go extinct as this sweeping homogeneity gains hold in places where the internet has not quite become so dominant. Romansh being one example. I think we're close to losing a lot of languages and cultures from Africa and the south Pacific.

The problem seems to be one that is kind of intractable. Aside from cataloging and documenting such cultures and languages, what can we do? A common language seems a requirement for a global community, or at the most two or three. Most of the world speaks two or three languages, right? I mean, Americans don't really figure into the scale of the entire planet. I'd be interested in hearing if there was some solution that is eluding me.

london...
I haven't ever been to London. I don't even know a lot of people from London. For what it is worth, the lot of you have my deepest sympathies. I suspect that some of the things that happened here in 2001 may now be coming your way, and for that, no amount of regret can really compensate. As in 2001, we now have police on the subways (in DC) with machine guns. The "threat level" is again raised. And we've all been reminded, again, that for whatever reason, people who are just going to work are in fact targets.

I will say that I have been surprised to gain empathy with the remarks made by many people outside the US (in my case, such remarks were heard largely from europeans) immediately after the tragedy. I think that it is quite easy to remain detached and speculate that somehow the victim is part of the cause, when one does not live next door to the site of an explosion.

This, too, seems an intractable problem. We can't simply "kill enough of them," for there will always be more. We also can't remake them in our (or whatever) image, for we would lose what made them distinct from us to begin with. I don't favor the withdrawal of american troops, because I don't honestly believe it would end with that. But I fear that more attacks like Madrid, London, New York, and Arlington will happen with increasing frequency as the perpetrators realize there is political favor to be gained in the doing. Sigh.

Travel has finally caught up with me at work. I'll be gone the entire week, every other week, for the foreseeable future, and probably more. I look forward to seeing San Diego again, and Boston will probably be fun. I am also going to Seattle (many times), and will probably hit Maui and New York, with a possible trip to Arizona. And that's just before September. This is all really for work, which means I can't just run around taking pictures or seeing what the local food and flora is like. That's really quite a bummer. I'll also be getting a lot of frequent flier miles, so that we'll probably be able to take a vacation gratis when I poke my head out of the workosphere. We're thinking Scotland or Hawaii, or possibly Fiji. I had been thinking it would be more rewarding to go to Guam than Fiji. If we do Scotland, I'd love to see Edinburgh (since everyone I'm reading is from that area), and tour the distilleries. See Bowmore, Talisker, Aberlour, and the sadly-its-now-a-museum Dallas Dhu.

Speaking of cameras, at Arlington on the fourth, as I was about to capitalize on the absolutely great light we were having, I looked through the viewfinder to see two dust mites. I couldn't believe it. I took off the lens, had a look inside, and they were on the back surface of a refracting lens. Blowing on it didn't help, thwacking it didn't help, and when I finally became so frustrated I tapped it with the earpiece of my sunglasses (plastic!), I managed to scuff the refractor. So now the EOS is in the shop getting that repaired, and my AE-1 is also in the shop, getting a cleaning. And I leave for Seattle on Tuesday. Without either of my film cameras. Dammit!

My installation of Fedora Core 4 did not go particularly well. I did eventually get it online. I would say that the distribution is overall fairly good quality software. However, I think the QA process needs a lot of help. QA, like documentation, is one of those un-sexy tasks that always get left behind in software projects, especially FOSS projects. I actually had a dialogue pop up during the install that told me cheerfully that it had properly detected my sound card, but that it wasn't working, so just click "ah, fuck it" and be done with it. Come on people. You can do better than that. My laptop now has a staggering 370gb of storage (120 of which is internal!), and I'll be installing Longhorn along with my work-required XP and several distributions of Linux (probably Debian, SuSE, and of course Fedora). My hope is to have a linux-on-a-1gb-SD-card, as well. However, Linux doesn't seem to be supporting it. More on the whole Linux thing when I get my thoughts composed into something useful.

I may actually release parts of the talk I'm giving on Linux if it turns out well enough and legal says it's okay.

Bunches of stuff going on. Been working on some Linux demonstrations/briefings for upcoming meetings. It's really surprising the kinds of things you learn when you don't expect to. I downloaded all of Fedora Core 4, source included. So, eight ISOs in total. I downloaded them at home, while working at a coffee shop. When I got home, I greedily downloaded them from my webserver. A rather curious thing happened. mithril.posixnap.net, my webserver, resolves to (whatever external ip). However, my laptop, which was downloading the iso is inside the network, and maps to an internal ip. Thus the traffic hits the internal interface, and is received by the external interface. No problem, right? Well, except that I run a transparent squid cache at home, which cheerfully processed the traffic. This leaves me with 7mbyte/s throughput across gig ethernet. CPU is mostly pegged. I noticed I could open two streams, and get about 7mbyte from each CPU. So I had all my discs on the PC laptop, which has a faster burner than my powerbook. Only I discover that the burning software (sonic mumble) is utter crap. So I decide to move the files over to my powerbook and just do the burning there. I served up the files with IIS on the pc, and downloaded with firefox on the mac. (I couldn't use wget because it didn't understand authentication with a DOMAIN\username:password@host url) Then things got interesting. Firefox chewed up 70% of the cpu, and 30% of the cpu was sitting in iowait (on the mac). Now, transferring two files between my wife's powerbook and my own has yielded 17mbyte/s. When I opened up two sockets (two downloads in firefox), the throughput was an aggregate of about 7mbyte/s. I was annoyed to see CPU at 140% on my mac, and completely idle on my PC. Furthermore, when I queried the nic status on the pc, it cheerfully informed me that I was using 2.4% of my gig nic.

This tells me a number of things.

1. Gigabit NICs on laptops are absolutely worthless unless you're going to make the disks fast enough to actually use them. 5400rpm (powerbook) and even 7200rpm (toshiba) just doesn't cut it.
2. IIS6 would seem to be able to serve files faster than Firefox can actually suck them down. This is an interesting point, although not strictly proven. In this case, the CPU was at 70%, and I am guessing that it would top out at 100% cpu utilization before it ever reached 1gbit. There are some subtleties in the way IIS actually serves up files that could mean it is quite fast, but I'd have to look into this more. Of course, internal literature says it's faster, but I really prefer to see these things first hand.
3. Squid seems to actually handle file transfers pretty well. It used 70% cpu on one CPU for two simultaneous downloads and managed to aggregate more than 12mbyte/s. It is worth noting that it was of course working with Apache (which was serving files to squid). It is also worth noting that the packet filter (iptables) was not using CPU at all.
4. Firefox on my PC handled the downloads much more efficiently than Firefox on my mac. I have no idea why this would be. The difference is the platform, really. The CPU's are different, a 1.33ghz G4 (7450) and a 2.1ghz Pentium-Mobile, but the difference in CPU utilization (0% on the PC vs 70% on the Mac) would seem to be far greater than the disparity in hardware. I don't know what to make of this.

In other efforts, I've very much been engrossing myself in realtime systems and embedded systems (which aren't really such different topics). Some of the things that are currently either developed or out there are pretty interesting. Of note are JTRS, Loiter Missiles (which unfortunately have very little internet content), and network-centric warfighting a-la FCS. It's amazing what a force multiplier an order of magnitude more situational awareness will give you. Picture force tracking ("those guys over there are goodguys, and the guys on the other side of the hill are badguys") composited on top of realtime video, combined with a targeting and attack interface. Again, we're talking about killing people here, so it's a little morbid, but the technology itself is pretty impressive. I would normally think that realtime video compositing in general would be quite difficult to do, however. The technological hurdles between here and 2014 aren't insurmountable, but they're not insignificant either. I'd be really interested to hear if anyone has done realtime video compositing work, or knows of APIs to do it with.

Lastly, I've been researching "bags" (a woefully inadequate term in this case) for my laptop. The problem I'm having is that I have always used a Brenthaven bag for my laptop, since it's what Apple sold me (examples: Powerbook Ti15, Powerbook Al17), and they're just so sturdy. However, I'm now carrying two laptops, one of which has a protruding battery. This means that a) the first laptop doesn't fit into the "laptop case" inside the backpack, and b) that the second laptop doesn't fit at all, when the first is present, along with the various papers, books, journals, etc, I carry around. This is lame. So looking around for bags, we find some bags that fit the laptops, but don't have the support for them (eg they'll get crushed on planes), or bags that don't fit both laptops, but have support for one. So we went to HTO to check out some of the bags. Of particular note:

• Osprey Eclipse 42 has a huge amount of carry space. Lacking in laptop support. However, great ergo design. Somewhat unprofessional looking.
• Osprey Transit & Torque. The Torque actually holds both of my laptops, although only one is actually supported in a special sleeve. Timbuk2 has a sleeve which will fit the M200, and the M3 fits in the Torque's sleeve. The Torque has enough room (without the sleeve) for my books, papers, journals, and two laptops. It's unfortunately a shoulder bag, but I think I can deal with that, since it's a cross-shoulder carry item.
• Eagle Creek Big Deuce would be ideal, if they had two internal sleeves. However, the handle has two more-rigid-than-my-laptop tubes in the back. Any pressure from those, and the laptop gives. However, it thankfully has enough room for me to pack 3-4 days of clothing and a pair of shoes (I wear a 15 US, so this is an important concern). I figure that the combination of this and the aforementioned Torque is probably the way to go for both maximum carry potential, as well as sound ergonomics. Check the Deuce, carry the Torque.
• CamelBak BFM has some serious carry capability, and the added distinction of being carried in the field. That's pretty tough to beat as a recommendation.
• Tom Bihn's Brain Bag was recommended by a coworker, and has ample space for my larger-than-normal M3, but not enough room for both laptops and all my assorted stuff. Looks decent enough, and is modular, however.

Life is too short, and pain sucks too much to carry around non ergonomic bags. I was shocked to see the amount of engineering that goes into these bag constructs. I'm waiting for carbon fiber internal structure, kevlar and gore-tex external. Sheesh. A funny aside, the guy who helped us at HTO was very nice. I took the opportunity to show him an ad from Soldier of Fortune from Camel Bak. Two ads, actually. The former was a picture of two people in NBC suits with a large gasoline explosion behind them, captioned "Bugs and Gas? It'll save your ass!". The latter was a picture of straight-out-of-full-metal-jacket soldiers firing a Javelin, captioned "Suck on This!" The look on his face was priceless. He mentioned that he was accustomed to pictures of a jogger with a blue sky background behind them. I reckon it changed his outlook somewhat. Chuckle. life

see "work"

Working with embedded systems a lot. I'll be making the rounds this year (Boston in September, San Diego in October, possibly more) if you'd like to get together. FCS and USPS being interesting prospects. Been looking into PC-104 as well. It's quite interesting what's actually out there and being deployed. Some of these systems are far more powerful than I would expect from your traditional SBC, and all the devices available for them are quite impressive. I think it is a natural place for Linux to be, for what that's worth. However, I think the usual Linux caveats apply.

Specifically, I've been reading a lot about Lynux and their LynxOS-178. I find myself thinking, what's so great about a Linux which has deviated from the GNU and Linux base (eg the kernel and the gnu utils, as well as any environment on top of that)? Sure, developing in Linux is a familiar environment, even a rich one. My original start in Linux (as a developer -- as a user it was on a 486) was on a PowerMac G3 in 1999. This was very rewarding, having the guts of the development exposed to me. However, the knife cut both ways. Whenever something broke, I was presented with an uncaring community ("Well, it works on x86, if you really want to run Linux, you'll have to use something more standard than PPC"), and no readily available documentation. People like BenH were very helpful when they had time, but largely, they were busy maintaining stuff. Hollis was great, too, and then IBM snapped him up.

So it seems to me that you get the Linux environment, but since you have strapped an RTOS layer on top of it, and you're running it on a PPC SBC strapped to the backside of a HMMWV, the prospects of available in-the-field hotfixes go away. Unless your vendor is caring. But then, what separates you from any other product? The choice for Linux is arbitrary at that point. But enough about the Linux thing.

I've been reading _TCP/IP Sockets in C#_ by David Makofske, Michael Donahoo, and Kenneth Calvert lately, along with the gamut of ORA books on C#. I'm glad to find that most of the concepts in C# aren't anywhere near as foreign as somebody coming from Unix would think them to be. If you know several languages, moving between them takes a little adjustment, but once you get the vocabulary down, it's just expressing what you want to do in a different.. vernacular.

Anyways, the book is both good and bad. The subtitle is "Practical Guide for Programmers." However, the first thirty or so pages actually describes how network sockets work. It then gives you a code example which doesn't (overtly) even use sockets. It's a simple System.Dns example. It then goes on to cover blocking socket operations for most of the book.

This is just not the way solid programmers write code. Sure, lots of people write blocking socket code, but that's not the model we should try to achieve.

The discussion just following that actually describes the usual for (;;) {} and while (1) {} constructs, which are also not even close to non-blocking. It then discusses select() and thread pools. These are seemingly difficult processes for programmers to understand. Again, I don't see why this is so hard. The available examples, however, seem to implement just that, and be quite proud about it. I find myself again wondering about the quality of our college system.

Lastly, it gets down to Asynchronous IO, as implemented in C#. It's remarkably similar to POE, which is nice. You have a BeginWrite, BeginRead, and EndWrite/EndRead pair, and corresponding callbacks. It's a little more wordy than the state machine POE creates, but that just means if I want my own state machine for network applications, I'll just have to abstract it away a little. I'm very glad to find that C# implements non blocking IO in a sane way, and has callbacks as well. But why in the hell do all the available examples use none of it? Why is it viewed to be such arcane magic by the rest of the community? The book does somersaults trying to explain what is a very simple concept. It's the implementation that's the hard part, and that's up to the user. Not the authors. Anyways. It looks like I'll actually be able to start writing some code. I intend to have an MPICH application written soonish so that I can begin talking with customers more extensively about our cluster software. It's important to me to have written applications on the substrate that they'll be working with. I have the added advantage of being able to contact internal resources regarding anything I find that is problematic.

I mentioned a week or so ago that my apartment had been filled by kerosene vapor. Following that, I sent a message to the manager of the building explaining that I had both computers (sources of electrostatic discharge) and firearms in my apartment. As such, I had hoped they could provide better ventilation next time they wanted to do that. She responded by telling me that it was a violation of the lease to have firearms in my home. I told her to pound sand, explaining that it was legal in the city, county, and state that I live in, and that I am more than adequately trained and licensed, by civilian and military organizations, as well as a member of the NRA and NRA-ILA. Sigh. I don't know why people can't just realize that in some parts of the world, guns are a part of life. I didn't provoke anyone, and I'm more than polite to all the staff in the building, and extremely cautious and safe with the firearms. There's no need for this petty conflict.

That having been said, we had a terrific time at Quantico Shooting Club this weekend. I was very surprised how easy it was to accurately place bullets on targets 300 yards downrange. Even with a .22-250, which is relatively prone to windage, we simply adjusted the scope and fired. After some initial calibration, all four of us were on target, with accuracy from a couple inches up to a foot. This is refreshing. I had previously done a lot of shooting at 25-50 yards, but nothing out to 300. That's pretty far. We're going to slowly ramp up to 1000 yards. Probably will require a heavier gun for that. We're thinking of getting a 300 Win Mag to augment our 308 Win. I'll also need to get a spotting scope which doesn't suck eventually. I paid about twenty times what I paid for the current spotting scope for my rifle scope. I'm seriously regretting that now.

Unfortunately, at the range, I managed to take a large chunk out of my right ring finger on a target stand. It was pretty gross and dirty, and in a field full of deer, rabbit, and other feces. It's been six years since I had a tetanus booster, so we trundled off to the ER to get a tetanus shot. Sigh. It's painful as hell. I wonder whether I'm just getting older, and that's why it's such a drag (muscle pain all over, general malaise), or whether they gave me a bigger shot, or what. I can't imagine how awful it must have been to die of tetanus. It's interesting that exactly a year ago, I was in the same hospital for meningitis. This caused some internal reflection on my time at AOL (which was pretty unhappy that I had the gall to catch meningitis from one of their employees and spend a week in the hospital for it). Also on some of the asynchronous IO code I wrote for them. Interesting how life seems to be composed of cycles of similar events.

We'll be going to Arlington Cemetery today to see Bryan Jack. I need the exercise -- mexican food last night, scrambled eggs for breakfast -- and I'm going to take some time practicing black & white on the newer Canon. Hopefully the light will be nice. It is also important to me that we do go back to Arlington and see the monuments and fresh plots for people home from Iraq. It, sometimes rather jarringly, puts the whole situation into perspective, and the importance of what I do for a living, as well as what everyone else involved is doing. Yes Alex (the other Alex), plans are still on track. The few rolls of b&w will be developed soon, and I'll be trying to work more with both b&w and tungsten film. Probably will wind up on flickr, depending on whether they're horrid or not.

Smoke and Mirrors...

recentlog

haruspex
Pretentious, adj., the act of displaying pretense; pertaining to pretense.
Pretense, noun, a falsity; information presented for appearance sake, regardless of veracity
Fiction, noun, a work of pretense

So, what is it, exactly, that precludes a fiction author, nay a science fiction author, from being pretentious? I would counter that it is imperative that science fiction authors be pretentious. This is not to say that egoism must ooze from the pages (see Stephenson, Gibson). Play of words and creativity are key to the genre.

Sad to admit, my first real "windows crash" was experienced today. To be fair, it was the (mostly) fine product, Trillian, which crashed, but it crashed in such a way as to make the rest of the machine useless. This is precisely the kind of thing our customers throw at us, although usually not so neatly. "It's not stable!" "Well, can you give me an example of something that could be described as instability?" "No, it's just not stable!"

This is the problem with being a manufacturer of a platform, a vision, almost. We sell an operating system. We also sell an entire office suite. We sell photo cataloguing and inventorying and even editing software. We sell mice and keyboards. We even have our own line of video games and hardware. So when you say "windows crashes," you could mean a whole number of different things. You may be actually saying "some driver I am running for the WonkyFuss image capture board tanked and took the kernel out with it." I'd generally say that this is not really surprising. And we get it a lot. Additionally, you could say "well outlook is an abhorrent piece of software. I hate the editor, it's unstable or unintuitive, etc." I'd almost agree with you. But if I'm there to talk to you about Windows and Linux, outlook is not part of the equation. Neither is the driver. That's your vendor's issue. Most drivers these days, Unix, Linux, and Windows alike, run in kernel space. It's a necessary evil (see MSR project "Singularity" for how it might not be) of modern operating systems. Your driver tanks, and it could very well take your (our) kernel with it. Sorry about that.

I have seen Linux deployed successfully. America Online is a shining example of how to do it. At least in Global NetOps. Or whatever they call themselves these days. However, and without going into proprietary detail, they run their very own toolchain and distribution. You couldn't any more deploy an AS3/AS4 image in that space and expect it to work than you could image a random box with Windows and expect it to work. Linux is treated, in their case, as a substrate for an install that they grow on top of it. Many successful enterprises have a similar approach to deploying Windows. Get a substrate, say XP Pro, rip out the stuff you don't like (IE for example), and add stuff you want (your WonkyFuss capture board driver). Make an image, and push it out with MOM/SMS. Why is there this expectation that you, as a customer, would be deploying some fresh-off-our-cd install to every seat on your network, and hand tweaking each and every one of them? It's foolish. It's FUD. Us old wizened Solaris guys use Jumpstart to make sure our network looks like we want it to. Linux people use Kickstart and custom images. Microsoft people can use SMS and MOM. What exactly is the big deal here?

Envision, if you will, a product that we all agree has merit. Pass it around, neatly described in powerpoint presentations, and make some marketing and deployment objectives and milestones. Then put every team that worked on it in different rooms, across the country. Make sure they don't talk to eachother. Give them conflicting schedules, and make it difficult for them to communicate with one another. I described today, for a customer of ours, Unix as a "big ball of thorns." It's tough to handle. You don't know what to do with it, how to safely handle it, how to get to the point where it's less thorny, or you are better able to fit your fingers between those thorns. I feel like I've been put in this position with one of the projects (well, okay, two) at work. My wife (rightly) pointed out, after I described my frustrations with the pair, "gosh, that sounds like a job for project!" Ugh. At first I was disgusted. Project! But that's some pointy-hair cruftware that only incorribly pointy-haired people use! Worse, they use it to oppress the rest of us!

And then I guess I thought about it a little bit, and I realized that a Gantt chart would probably do the trick for helping me visualize the flow I need to attain on these ... sigh ... projects. A previous PHB had in fact used a Gantt chart on a project I was involved with, and I found it largely helpful, not oppressive. So, I bit the bullet, and went and installed it. I suppose it's a long road I'll have to traverse before I feel that I'm comfortable with it and gaining from it, rather than being frustrated with figuring the thing out (eg a net loss in productivity). I see it, I suppose, as evolutionary.

I should listen to my wife more often.

I awoke to the smell of kerosene. We have a home mostly overrun with books and papers, as well as expensive computing hardware. Not to mention firearms and ammunition. Lots of the latter. So waking up to this concerned me greatly. I went through the house, trying to find out what the problem was. What, in my small apartment, could possibly be leaking kerosene fumes? Solvents for the guns, of course. So, go through the house checking various toolboxes, finding the solvents. Check each of the bottles for a) familiarity of scent and b) whether they appear to be leaking. I guess I discovered this morning that I should be more careful with these solvents. I did find one that looked like it had been spilled. But the damage to the label on the bottle could just as easily have been caused by drips sustained while cleaning said guns. So I righted all the bottles, put them back in their places, and looked further. Seeing nothing really outstanding, I rushed off to work, as I had a meeting earlyish.

So I rush home, wondering whether my apartment is still there, or whether I didn't find the culprit and we won't be able to stay in the house until the vapors dissipate. Thankfully, the smell had cleared out. And was replaced with the smell of latex paint. See, our neighbors, down the hall, had lived there for fourteen years, before moving out last week. When they moved out, there was the putred smell of fourteen years of cigarette smoke, filling the hallway. It even made it difficult to stand in the doorway of our home, as the smell from the hall was overpowering, even in our apartment. The people renovating the apartment had seemed frustrated initially with the smell. I can't imagine how they tried to get rid of it. Apparently, they used kerosene or something similar this morning. I suppose that would do it. I can't imagine what the previous residents' lungs looked like. That's just amazing. Lessons learned: Smoking is bad. Probably could be a little more careful about guns and associated chemicals.

On the diet (as in what I eat, not as in I am dieting) front, I am dismayed at how difficult it actually is to eat healthily. You almost have to plan ahead for every meal, and take it with you. Breakfast on the road? Well, you could go to le mac do, but certainly that would just deposit itself in your colon in perpetuity. What, then, to drink? You have a choice: sugar or caffeine, or both. Okay, so meeting. These are a little better. When they feed you, it tends to be bagels and sodas, sometimes with fruits and juices. What about water? Or even seltzer water? Not likely. Post meeting team discussion? Sure, there's a restaurant up the road. There are salads, slathered with all kinds of creamy this, cheese that. Then to the entrée and it's all cheeseburgers, steaks, and more of the creamy cheesey stuff, and now add mashed potatoes. It's downright depressing. Being healthier, I'm told, is a lifestyle change. Not so much a diet (as in the latter term) change. I travel too much, I'm out of the office, out of the house, out of town, too darn much, to take healthy food with me everywhere. I don't have the patience to hit the treadmill for two hours to work off half a sausage mcmuffin with egg. Or the time, really. So, sad to admit, I probably had at least two caffeine intake routes this morning. That would explain the jitters and sweating. It's downright irritating that (here he goes again) in this society of frighteningly overbearing rules about pharmaceuticals, that I can't get away from one. That it's infused in everything from soap (soap!) to your beverage at lunch.

And lastly, I must spam some. Garden State (Netflix) is really a terrific film. Sort of like a happier Donnie Darko. Has the same feel and rhythm to it, without the demonic bunnies and death. What's more interesting, is it's a film without a shitty soundtrack. Despite the horrible way in which it is presented on iTMS, it's genuinely listenable. And I don't even really like Coldplay or The Shins. Understand I generally live under a rock when it comes to pop culture and most of non-technical society at large when I say this, but I also find it amazing that there is already a cover of Such Great Heights (by Iron & Wine). I do love The Postal Service (well, okay, anything Gibbard does, really), and I understand they even have a somewhat cultish following. But really, didn't this come out like a year ago? It's a great song, but usually it takes longer than that for a cover to show up. Right? I suppose this bodes well for Mr. Gibbard.

I'm beginning to think that most skills can be categorized and quantified by the vocabulary required for said skill and the depth of that vocabulary. Since my own strengths tend more to linguistic skills, it may not be appropriate for me to tap some as-yet-unformed leaning towards music and/or visual arts. We'll see about that. Rumination.

edit: good god, I'm gonna throw myself in front of a bus if I hit ctl-alt-delete to log into my mac again. for fuck's sake.