Older blog entries for dcoombs (starting at number 53)

Our CEO came for a visit and a motivational talk on Thursday. We decided to remind him, in case he had forgotten, that it is a dangerous idea to bring customers, investors, journalists, etc to our R&D MontrealOffice, by getting as many people as possible to not wear any pants.

Mission accomplished.

Music

The Yann Tiersen concert was amazing, and so much more than I expected since my only prior exposure was his beautiful work on the Amélie score. We got a lot of lovely piano music, yes, but we also got some pretty unique solos on accordion, violin, viola, and, I kid you not, he used a violin bow on a xylophone. His ability to play the piano and accordion at the same time is equally remarkable.

The man is the kind of mad genius modern composer I admire without hesitation. As a performer, talented and highly volatile. Full of anger, full of sweetness, alternating on a whim. He throws himself with no warning at all into raging passages, quite literally shredding his violin bow on the strings, and demonstrating that there aren't enough impassioned, fearless, bitter accordion virtuosos in the world today. A travesty, that.

The encore contained a 15-minute segment of echoed, feedback-laden electric violin and space-guitar noise. I've never seen anything quite like it.

I must hunt down some CDs.

Planes

YUL to LHR tonight on AC 864.

The parts of OLS that I haven't written about yet are kind of a blur at this point, due largely to the passage of time and increased beer consumption toward the end. I witness it every year; people really slow down during the last day or two of the conference. They start to arrive later in the morning, and have that glazed look in their eyes throughout the talks.

Someone suggested to me that Andrew and the other organizers should have the talks start an hour later each day to compensate. I thought about it, and I'm not sure it's a good idea. It's a fine line these guys walk between having a serious conference and having a big party. Right now it's both, but too much in either direction would ruin the effect.

I enjoyed Robert Love's talk about D-BUS, something I hadn't paid much attention to before. Beyond that, I can tell you that Colonnade Pizza was eaten, beer was drunk, foosball was played, sushi was devoured, more balloons were launched with surprising accuracy, PGP keys were signed, pants were dropped, rail-gun design was discussed with Donald Becker and Matthew Wilcox, death was cheated while swimming, and I think, at some point, that I actually managed to get some sleep. But I couldn't tell you what order it all happened in.

Pictures are here.

Off to Leeds

And soon I do it all again. I'm speaking about WvStreams and WvSync at the UKUUG Linux conference next week. I'm flying on Sunday, I'll spend a day in London, a day in Cambridge visiting a friend from a past life, and then up to Leeds I go.

Fun

But before that, I intend to see the last instantiation of the fireworks festival tonight, and on Friday I'm going with mich and dilu to see Yann Tiersen perform. This is the guy responsible for, among other things, the score for Amélie, which I find increasingly haunting every time I see it.

(Another cross-post. The real thing contains pictures.)

OLS Thursday

An extremely enjoyable day, overall! I hung out in the hacking area in the morning, where I met mulix and ladypine and chatted with them for a while.

The highlight of the day had to be Damian Conway's abridged, compressed, and abbreviated talk about Perl 6. It's taken years of work already, and it won't be ready for another couple of years, but it does look spectacularly neat. It left pphaneuf drooling, and it certainly left me interested. I talked with pzion and we agreed that they are not only cleaning up the language syntactically, they are actually creating some new, extremely interesting ideas in programming languages. In particular, junction types have never been done before as far as I can tell, and look like they could be handy. Ditto for iterating more than one list at the same time.

A bunch of us watched Jim Gettys and Keith Packard talk about the (re)architecture of X. It's partly about adding eye candy, and partly about improving efficiency in both 2D and 3D environments. The idea to add a customizable display manager process (separate from the window manager) which controls how windows and other controls are displayed (fade in/out of view, translucency, etc) is interesting, and I could imagine a lot of people wanting it. Keith gave a fantastic demo of this, with movies playing in overlapping windows, with translucency enabled. Very fast, and moving the windows around was pretty seamless. Most impressive. It ended, as so many talks do, with a resounding plea for help.

In the evening I went to an Indian buffet with Jean-Luc, Ken, Hugh Daniel, H. Peter Anvin, Mike Halcrow, and a couple others. They were discussing improvements to the kernel's crypto API to make it asynchronous, among other things.

I felt like being antisocial last night, so I figured some night photography was in order. I used to live in Ottawa, so I already know where everything is, and I'm far from being a tourist, but I never really took any pictures while I lived here, so I feel justified in my actions.

There was a free music thing on Parliament Hill including cool lighting and effects projected onto the façade of the Centre Block, but I only caught a glimpse as it was just ending. Regardless, I lay on the grass for a while and enjoyed the night.

(This is cross-posted. The real thing contains pictures.)

OLS Tuesday

The first day and a half of OLS has been a whirlwind of catching up with old friends, meeting new people, attending talks, and eating.

Tuesday night, the six of us representing NITI went to Patty Boland's pub for the opening party.

As the Desktop Conference had just ended, at Boland's we ran into wlach, ppatters, and apenwarr, whose presentation on UniConf apparently went well. I spent a while chatting with Ken Bantoft (Openswan) and Jean-Luc Cooke (kernel crypto), who I knew from last year's Linux-Kongress.

I left Boland's early due to extreme tiredness. I haven't been sleeping well lately.

OLS Wednesday

The talks started interesting and then my interest sort of dwindled toward the end of the day. I did, however, enjoy seeing Werner Almesberger and acme (more friends from Linux-Kongress last year) speak. Werner's TCP connection passing is pretty interesting, although still rather theoretical. It's interesting how he's using umlsim to test this, because it would be rather difficult to get the timing right otherwise.

At dinner and the welcome reception, sfllaw and jlavoie introduced me to Jeff, a super-interesting smart-seeming person who's been debating applying for a job at NITI. Go Jeff go. Also chatted with Alan and Telsa, who were forthcoming with advice about surviving English pubs during my trip to the UKUUG conference in a couple of weeks.

After the reception, where I escaped my off-by-1-or-2 curse by not being even remotely close, anonymous 16th-storey use was made of someone's water-balloon launcher (impressive stuff), and we retired to a nearby pub for more beer. Enjoyed meeting Jody McIntyre, who knew lots about NITI because he used to work for one of our competitors. Asked good questions.

And I am now, once again, tired.

Tomorrow I head to Ottawa for this year's instantiation of the Ottawa Linux Symposium. As usual, I intend to post updates, stories, and pictures as frequently as convenience and wakefulness allow.

Strike Force NITI this year consists of me, pphaneuf, sfllaw, jlavoie, pmccurdy, and pzion. I look forward to seeing, talking with, and/or getting drunk with as many people as possible. In addition, there is still a fighting chance that pphaneuf will keep his pants on.

Life

While in Ottawa, I will also be meeting with a real-estate agent, as Jess and I are attempting to sell our house. Managing it remotely is pretty difficult, especially when something goes wrong, plus the time is right for a number of reasons.

"Work"

Last night featured office-based bacchanalia, which is always a peculiar kind of fun. We used apenwarr's fabled non-corporate projector in his absence to watch Office Space (I think I was the only person alive who hadn't seen it), Pulp Fiction, and The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra. The latter is a purposely satiric spoof of campy 50's science fiction horror movies, and it's either really good, or really bad, depending on the degree to which your definitions of "good" and "bad" converge.

I went to see Camping Sauvage last night with pphaneuf, dilu and hub. It's a newish Québécois movie, and it's crazy. Exploding cars, people incessantly correcting each other's grammar, a witness protection program, a nerdy biker gang called the Wannabees, an old guy who just wants to die, some chainsaws, and lots of surreal humour that is blissfully accepted as though it were all perfectly normal. What more could you want?

It was not subtitled. I had some trouble keeping up with the French, but I was actually surprised how much I understood. Some characters were easier for me to understand than others, depending mainly on how they spoke. Practice is good.

Picture: The movie has also awakened hub's desire to learn

Poor Andrew

Poor andrewmp, the self-proclaimed Smartest Man Alive, has been sacked with his at-least-thrice-yearly job of updating our live demo of Nitix. He did it once, when it was nice and easy and small, and now he's stuck with it, because it's one gigantic set of CVS merge conflicts that makes him pull his hair out, and nobody else will touch it.

Picture: Smartest Man Alive

Toys

My camera has been great. As a newbie I really enjoyed its flexibility, manual controls, and good value, but lately I've been finding it annoying me more and more. It doesn't perform well in low light, and cranking up the sensitivity results in lots of noise. ISO 400 is (IMHO) unacceptable on it.

So I bit the bullet and got something new, just in time for OLS and the UKUUG conference, and I'm really pleased with it. Honestly I don't even care so much about the resolution, but the lens is substantially bigger and faster, and the CMOS sensor is so much better than the CCD that even ISO 1600 produces quite nice results. I'm still getting used to it, but it's exactly what I've been wanting for a while now.

Thank you, pphaneuf's friend, for lending him your EOS-10d and thus indirectly letting me play with it. That did the trick. If I end up in the poor-house because of this, I cheerfully blame you.

Finally got my most of my GUADEC pictures online. At least the ones that don't suck too horribly.

Other than that, been working on updating my WvStreams and WvSync papers for the UKUUG conference next month. Or more accurately, that's what I would have been doing if I hadn't been sorting pictures.

salmoni: Congrats on the job!

Hooray for advogato being back!

Since it sprang to life just after I returned from speaking at GUADEC, I suppose I might as well post links to random stuff I wrote during my first two days in Norway, as well as some other things I wrote during the conference. Just in case anybody cares or something.

Ordinarily I don't like marketing. I mention the following not to advertise, but because I think it is hilarious. Our new PR people are working hard to assure us a place somewhere in the afterlife. Click. Read the story. Enjoy.

Sorry Bill

By way of keeping the insanity juices flowing, I shall be doing a double-whammy speakathon, about WvStreams and WvSync (which, yes, still needs a project page) at the UKUUG Linux Technical Conference in Leeds this August.

With speaking there and at GVADEC, and attending OLS, and a couple of weddings, this is shaping up to be a busy summer.

Which is fine, because Jess is away for the summer. Boo. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go buy some clothes instead of doing laundry.