Advogato blog for pzb

31 Aug 2004

Tue, 31 Aug 2004 12:08:12 GMT

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

9 Feb 2002

Sat, 9 Feb 2002 23:38:24 GMT

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

Wed, 18 Jul 2001 23:04:38 GMT

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.

11 Mar 2001

Sun, 11 Mar 2001 18:04:10 GMT

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.

5 Aug 2000

Sat, 5 Aug 2000 22:59:39 GMT

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.

15 Jul 2000

Sat, 15 Jul 2000 16:31:38 GMT

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.

30 Jun 2000

Fri, 30 Jun 2000 21:57:08 GMT

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.