Recent blog entries for pzb

I moved my diary to http://www.linux.org.uk/~pzb/. More features, more reliable.

9 Feb 2002 (updated 9 Feb 2002 at 23:49 UTC) »

Old Job
I left Scyld at the end of January. I helped them get their latest version done, and a version based on Red Hat Linux 7.2 and the 2.4 kernel well underway. It was shown in New York at Linux World Expo.

New Job
I joined Ximian at the beginning of February. I managed to leave my self no vacation in between jobs, having my first day at Ximian be less than 24 hours after I left Scyld. I'm hacking on Red Carpet for a living now, and am trying to get a handle on the code base. It seems readable, but is large, given that is supports RPM, dpkg, and has a gnome front end.

Moving
As part of the new job, I moved to Boston. It was fairly easy, all told, but lining up the truck, packing, and unpacking have taken quite a bit of my free time. I still have a few boxes to unpack, and some clothes to organize, but, for the most part it went smoothly. I have not found anything missing, which is the important part. I used Movex, who I would highly recommend. They simply provide the truck, driver, and gas for the move. This was exactly what I needed. I didn't need a full service moving company to pack, load and unload my stuff, and they were fairly reasonable at about $200 per linear foot of truck space.

Boston
Everytime I move to a new city, I have to relearn basic stuff, like where the supermarket is, how to get around, etc. Thanks to the fact the I have roommates and coworkers who have lived here longer than I, I now know that Star Market is the mail supermarket chain, and Harvest Co-op in Central Square is great store with lots of good looking produce. I have been to some restraunts and bars, but haven't found a good guide to Boston nightlife yet. On the positive side, I don't need a car, as the T seems to go most anywhere I want. On the down side, the T closes at 12:30 AM everynight.

18 Jul 2001 (updated 9 Feb 2002 at 23:54 UTC) »

We finally announced our new version of Scyld Beowulf. It has a lot more user features and a lot fewer bugs than the last version.

With the CD getting sent off, I can now work on our talks at Ottawa Linux Symposium. We will be doing a tutorial and speaking about our second generation beowulf impelementation.

I also hope that I will now have the time to work on packaging some new software, including XFree86 4.0.3 and GNOME 1.4. While these are not necessary for clustering, I would like to have them on my laptop. GNOME 1.0.53 is somewhat out of date.

I have not been very good about posting diary entries, my last entry is aboutsix months old. Since then I my old company had financial trouble, and I was laid off.

I am now working for Scyld, doing development of the Beowulf cluster operation system.

I am currently working on our alpha distribution. As part of the project, I have written a build system that allows for easy creation of a Red Hat CD with updates. The existing ones that I found were missing some important features, such as proper RPM version comparison. Once I have it working on both i386 and alpha, I will release it, and send it to the redhat-cdrom-howto author.

After I get this version of the alpha distribution done, I am thinking about hacking on aboot to give it options like syslinux, so it can show user configurable messages at boot, have named boot labels, have a timeout, and have different default and timeout options. Aboot seems to be cleanly coded (at least the C part), and I think that most of these changes can be integrated into the main distribution without too many problems.

I am also hoping that linux 2.2.19 will be released soon, as I want to get a new kernel ready for our next release/errata, and don't want to try to track all the patches done to 2.2.18. I also want to get the update done for somewhat selfish reasons, as I want to get USB working on my laptop, and would like to try out ext3 and some other patches that are not integrated into the main kernel tree.

OK. It seems like that I will be posting about every two weeks. Since my last posting:

I went to OLS and had a great time. The talks were quite interesting, and I met a lot of people who I had only talked to online. The Free S/WAN guys gave a very interesting talk, and the talk by dcm and dria about docbook will prove to be quite usefull. Evolution is coming along nicely, and berlin is before its time.

I finished spot manager for work. The demo was Friday.

I am currently working on updating the manual errata system for PHP. I am working on getting it to recognize examples and do syntax highlighting. Rasmus beat me to centralizing formatting of the notes.

Oops. It has been a couple of weeks. I guess that I shouldn't have tried to start the day before a 5-day holiday weekend.

I am headed to OLS on Wed at 6:10 am, I think. I wanted to move the flight to Tuesday, but the travel agent said it would cost almost $900.

Work is going well. I am working on spot manager for the live component of the system. We have a big meeting on Monday, and things should get somewhat better worked out. The noon to 9pm schedule seems to work better than I thought. I've got to get down to ikea to get a desk. Then I will have to find a chair that I like. (Or buy an Aeron from my office)

Oh, and yes, run-time table names are supported in Oracle.

OK. I've had the account a few months, I might as well start keeping a diary.

I added database support to Spot Manager today. In the process, I discovered that oracle doesn't have nearly functionality in stored procedures. The idea of being able to pass a table name at run-time apparently is not supported, at least accoring to our DBA.

On another front, I did get further on creating a automated radio station. Unfortunately, it is currently running on WinAmp. I am changing this to use mpg123 and be fully opensource, now that MySQL is [L]GPL.

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