Advogato blog for phil

23 Apr 2000

Sun, 23 Apr 2000 23:59:04 GMT

Do not fuck around with glibc. It doesn't play fair either. It likes to ignore your prefix sometimes, smashing your old libc instead of installing onto the test partition.

(Sounds of phil looking for his bootable business card)

23 Apr 2000

Sun, 23 Apr 2000 18:22:28 GMT

More fun from m-w.com:

Main Entry: fair·ing
Pronunciation: 'far-i[ng], 'fer-
Function: noun
Date: 1574

1 British a : a present bought or given at a fair b : GIFT
2 British : DESERT

Or perhaps:

Main Entry: fairing
Function: noun
Date: 1914

: a member or structure whose primary function is to produce a smooth outline and to reduce drag (as on an airplane)

Aren't you supposed to look words up before you use them? Or is this another one of those cases where the word is "old", so you get to make up a new definition? I'm confused.

22 Apr 2000

Sat, 22 Apr 2000 07:03:27 GMT

Despite having my apartment for almost 7 weeks, I'm only just now getting around to cleaning my kitchen in preparation for putting everything away. It has led me to the following theory:

The last tenant, upon deciding to move out, wanted nothing to do with his or her leftover salt, pepper, and spaghetti. Instead of wastefully throwing it out, these people instead put it all in a blender, aimed it at the open cupboards, and turned it on without a lid.

There is more salt, pepper, and little bits of dried spaghetti in my cupboards than I have consumed in my entire life. The sheer volume of spice and carbohydrates is staggering.

shaver and his lovely wife Tyla arrive tomorrow afternoon for a weekend of good food and good drinks. I still don't have enough furniture, what the hell is wrong with me?

To go along with Harold's bit of grease wisdom, I give you this: do not fuck around with Fantastik. It will not play fair.

22 Apr 2000

Sat, 22 Apr 2000 03:15:48 GMT

<lilo> nonetheless, when marketing people piss in things it gets complicated
<lilo> my point is that when marketing is done cluelessly there are problems

That doesn't seem very constructive to me. It sounds like Captain Communication is still plagued by generalisations and unhelpful criticism. Tsk tsk.

20 Apr 2000

Thu, 20 Apr 2000 07:54:54 GMT

Someone just mentioned Ask Jeeves a minute ago, and it reminded me of the best part about Ask Jeeves: their backwards business cards.

I was staying in Berkeley for a night with an acquaintence who worked at Ask Jeeves, and he wrote his address on the back of his business card before we split up that afternoon. The front of every card shows Jeeves holding his little silver platter and a mock entry widget that reads "Who is [Person's Name]?". Cute, eh?

He noticed me chuckling at the card and thought that he should point out that I shouldn't try that.

"Well, actually, it doesn't know how to answer those kinds of questions. It won't returning anything appropriate."

20 Apr 2000

Thu, 20 Apr 2000 01:00:56 GMT

I'm not very good at this regular-diary-entry thing.

On the XFS front, I think I've got it working as the root filesystem, which involved making remount work, and log-replay-while-readonly, and all of those good bits. I don't think that many people are testing it, which makes me sad--please play with our software! Your future depends on it or something.

I started doing some tests with large-ish non-sparse files (8G or so) and found a bug in our page_buf interactions with the mm code when I try to remove them. I think that it's trying to remove the same page twice (which means that its mapping is invalid the second time around), but I'm not sure why just yet.

Achtung's tktext-based canvas widget should be capable of drawing text real soon now, and then a few more hours of hacking should yield something that's properly editable. Mike has done more amazing things with Bonobo and the view code; I'm told that it looks absolutely stunning, though I haven't pulled that branch to try it myself.

Tomorrow is mang's last day (before he heads back to Waterloo), which is too bad. We are going to miss him, as soon as we finish drinking heavily in his honour. Our favourite Collection bartendette is leaving soon as well, possibly as soon as Friday. Boo!

I'm still without furniture, and every day I think to myself, "Oh well, I've lasted this long, what's one more day?" Tonight will be an evening of mass cleaning and hockey (rah rah go Leafs). Maybe I can have Ikea bring me more nice things sometime next week.

For the record, shaver spends too much time at Globe.

12 Apr 2000

Wed, 12 Apr 2000 05:42:17 GMT

See how that last entry says that I'm back from Montreal? I'm in Montreal again. I'm allegedly responsible for the GNOME booth at the Montreal Linux Expo that ends tomorrow.

Our train hit a car on the way up here. To drive the point home about how little a train cares about things in its way, consider that I was actually unsure whether the train had hit something, or had just applied the brakes suddenly. Don't fuck around with the trains, mm'kay?

I just got back from Globe again, and the same comments pretty much apply this time around too. Steak tartar ("You know that's not cooked, right? I've had a couple of people look very surprised when I bring this out."), bring it on.

Back to Ottawa tomorrow evening, to return to some serious XFS and Achtung hacking. I have so much to get done in the next 8 weeks, it is unfunny. We really, really want to release a 0.1 version for everyone to use at OLS, which means getting it out at least 4 weeks before the show. I know that most people won't even start their slides until the day before, but some definitely will. Our goal (well, my goal anyways) is to have 100% speaker participation. I'm so glad that I'm not speaking this year--I'll be too busy convincing everyone to use my software.

3 Apr 2000

Mon, 3 Apr 2000 03:01:12 GMT

I'm back from Montreal, and elated at having spent the entirety of April 1 away from these bastard infernal machines. We spent it, instead, at Globe. I think Mike pretty much summed it up when he said, "If their special of the day was like sawdust and tar in a WD-40 sauce, it would be nummy." Never before have I been so gastronomically pampered. Good eats all weekend, really; need I even mention the 6 lb lobster that some other lucky Milos patron consumed on Friday?

Deb found a fantastic apartment, though I haven't actually seen it, as I was off doing other things at the time. Ask her all about it. It's very exciting.

On the Achtung front, Mike Kestner has been doing some great things lately, most recently relating to the Bonobification of the slides. He and Joe are going to polish that off while I finish the canvas item view for Havoc's tktext-port widget.

My XFS testing machines still haven't arrived. I had better call FedEx in the morning and see when, if ever, they're going to show up. Fuck.

31 Mar 2000

Fri, 31 Mar 2000 05:36:45 GMT

After more than a year, the SGI XFS encumberance review is finally complete, and the source code has been released to the world. We are so taking patches. In fact, we've already received some.

Hopefully, the machines from Minneapolis will arrive tomorrow so that I can get back to work; we didn't have any IA32 machines with spare disk that could be rebooted all day (funny, that), and it would have taken just as long to order a new one. Oh well. I got a lot done at home, anyways.

As Deb mentioned, we're going to go get our Party on in Montreal this weekend. Despite our pestering, we've been unable to lure Nat into abandoning his own party in Boston to join us.

Donnie is so cool. I need to go visit soon, I think.

28 Mar 2000

Tue, 28 Mar 2000 17:10:14 GMT

Ryan seems to think that I am a low-watt bulb. I cooked my first meal in my new apartment last night too. I guess the race is on to see who can get real furniture first.

Two of my hard disks died during the move, sigh. I did have an extra IBM 16G, but I had hoped to use that for XFS hacking until the hardware arrives from Minneapolis. Oh well. Lame.

Now I'm going to listen to the soundtrack of the musical where our founding fathers sing and dance, while I try to reassemble the sad pieces of what was once equipment fit for computing.