Older blog entries for robey (starting at number 15)

Weird, i just noticed that it's been a long time since i posted a diary that wasn't on a single-digit or 20-something day of the month. Okay sorry, that was even more geeky than usual for me.

Typical Friday: I woke up early to make it into work in time for a special "lunch" my group is having, and i fail to notice when everyone leaves without me, assuming i know where it is or how to get there. Instead, i went back home and had an extremely productive day doing long-neglected housechores, so i suppose i should be thankful.

The clueless corporation that we rent from sent us a letter, just like clockwork, announcing that we had new landlords. How can a company be in such distress for so long? We get new landlords about every 6 months. This time the welcome letter contained not only the usual array of typos and mispellings, but a request that we write back and tell them just who the heck is living here. It makes me wonder: if we don't write back, will they assume nobody lives here and stop charging us rent? How can a company forget who it rented to? Unbelievable.

The PR3 crunch is coming up at work, but i postponed a lot of grunt work for 1.0, so i'm doing okay so far. The install view of Nautilus will look different, but will behave exactly the same as PR2. Massive changes in its behavior will hit for 1.0 (and i'm looking forward to them with glee). My friend Rupe noticed that at night, you can see the entire inside of one of Eazel's conference rooms (including the whiteboard contents) through the plate glass windows on the front of the building. He called it "the open source conference room".

This mention of cubicles is merely to please skef.

Saw "crouching dragon, hidden tiger" (or similar name) at the Metreon last weekend. (Insert standard rant about the Metreon.) Okay, so like, this is an artsy Ang Lee movie and it's in Mandarin, so why the heck was every bubba in the bay area clamoring to get into this movie? I was perplexed. I can only assume that some TV show somewhere said it was a great "action movie" or something. Once the subtitles started, there was a general grumbling about "I didn't know this was subtitled", and there were several points in the movie where people laughed at just inexplicably inappropriate times. At any rate, the great hubbub of Stallone fans didn't prevent me from enjoying what may be my favorite movie of the year: it somehow managed to have awesome kung-fu scenes and still be emotional and interesting. You actually cared what was going to happen to these people, and nobody was cast as absolutely good or absolutely evil. Highly recommend.

The next night we tried to get into the new Coen brothers movie (sold out), so we got in a really long line for "Traffic" -- i guess it was let's see a movie weekend in SF! This long line i could understand, though, it's a movie by the "Erin Brockovich" dude. And the movie was worth being in a long line and cramming into the crowded theater. But i think i'll pass on new movies for a while now until the crowds chill out.

Been back at work for a few days now and starting to get into the rhythm again. For the first day or two i felt strangely antisocial, probably just coming down from all the socialness of the holidays. Eskil's still out of town for another week (and then probably further weeks for INS bullshit) so i've been peeking around in his code, figuring it out and filling in some spots.

On New Year's, Greg found out about this "porn-e-okie" thing being held by Chicken John in SF. Not many people were interested in this kind of concept, but he was eager so i went with him and Walt to check it out. Turned out to be what the name suggests: karaoke done over bad porn movies. Some of the movies involved dwarves and clowns, which was more than a little disturbing. And the karaoke selection had obviously been chosen with care, since it included songs like "Like a Virgin" and "Hit Me With Your Best Shot". After i got into the goofy mood of it, it turned out to be a lot of fun. The yuppies all left before midnight, and it turned out to be just a group of goofy creative people.

Got DirecTV[tm] set up, and it kicks so much ass. Free cable could never be this good. Went out and bought the equipment on the 27th on an impulse, and got the dish roughly configured and reception working within a day -- not too tough but i wouldn't recommend it for anyone who doesn't fix things around the house. "Professional" installation was free through a promo they were running, but i wanted the instant gratification of setting it up the very day i bought it. (I'm like that a lot.) Plus i'd heard that the Food Network was going to be running a marathon of Iron Chef over New Year's Eve and i wanted to be able to tape as much of that as possible. :) Anyway the next day i bought some tools and bolted the dish way down into my balcony, such that it may never be able to be removed, and got it tuned to about 80% reception, which seems to be as good as it can get, but which is plenty good enough to receive everything with no visible glitches.

That very night BBC America ran a marathon of Red Dwarf, so we stayed in and watched.

Haven't worked on my projects (say2 or goo) recently, because of all the distractions. Looks like say2 will need some loving soon, though.

Mmm Phoenix.

Our flight back from Atlanta made its first hop without incident: to Phoenix. But then when it came time for the next hop (to San Jose), the fates were not smiling. No, they were frowning. One might even say they were having a little temper tantrum. Okay, actually it wasn't that bad.

I'd been bragging to my parents that i had figured out how to avoid the Christmas airline crap: fly America West, which always transfers through Phoenix. Phoenix has no snow, no wind, no rain -- no weather to speak of. Therefore your connection can never be messed up! Well, obviously this direct challenge to my bad flying karma could not be ignored, so on our flight from Phoenix, the airplane's computer system blew up and could not be fixed.

I get very depressed when something like that happens, because i know what follows: many hours without food, sleep, comfort, or any resolution about how they're going to get you home. But, against all my expectations, America West did an absolutely incredible job about resolving things. We were herded downstairs to the ticket counters and given hotel vouchers (for hotels that actually had rooms available!) and some food vouchers and info on our new flight, leaving at 7.33 the next morning, in virtually identical seats to our original ones.

Feeling better, we took the shuttle to the hotel, got settled into what was actually a very nice room, and set about getting food. The desk clerk suggested that Papa John's would deliver to the hotel, but a quick call corrected that misinterpretation. "Nearest food?" we asked various people, including hotel staff (who, i thought, might have a personal interest in the answer), and we were consistently directed to the ampm across the street. (East coasters: it's like a 7- 11.)

Walking around a few blocks of Phoenix was just like I remembered it from my last visit a couple of years ago: the city seems to almost always be completely vacant. City blocks were about 1km to a side, filled with short flat unidentifiable buildings (offices? stores? hard to tell), poorly lit and spread out over unimaginable space. So we hiked "across the street" (actually a good city block for normal cities) to the ampm, got cold turkey pita sandwiches and doritos and went back to the hotel to watch Galaxy Quest on cable before passing out.

At what felt like about 10 minutes later, the alarm went off and we stumbled off to the airport to catch our early worm flight. Just to tease me, the pilot announced that they were having computer problems and we had to wait about an hour before the plane actually got fixed and took off. ("What, is this the same plane?" Greg asked.)

Anyway, we finally got back. Yay. My faith in America West is restored -- they still kick Delta's ass to Pluto and back.

Whoops, been too long since i wrote one of these... Work got really busy right before i left for winter break, and the dialup connections from eastern Tennessee aren't exactly the fastest and most reliable ones in the universe.

The week before i left, the cable in my apartment went out and never came back on. Prognosis: TCI finally figured out that we never paid for cable. But still, that seems kind of rude. There ought to some kind of statue of limitations on free cable -- if TCI couldn't figure out in 3 years that they never charged us for cable, they should've long since forfeit their right to complain about it.

Oh well, i think i'm going to try to get DirecTV instead now. The old TCI was only worth "free", since it had crap-all for channels, and less than 50 at that. In my parents' town, those little tiny dishes are everywhere! My parents even got it, in addition to still having cable. [???] I played around with it, and it's definitely a lot better than TCI ever provided, so i'll probably buy a starter kit when i get back to Mountain View, and see if i can get it set up before the end of the year.

Greg and i flew into Atlanta on the 19th, and in retrospect the whole thing was hilarious. First, it was snowing when we got there so the whole city was in a shambles. (Yes, it may have been only 1-2cm of snow, but this is the deep south, so that's enough to cause massive chaos.) Second, we went shopping the next day and traffic was just completely out of control. It was way worse than any bay area traffic i've seen, and i'm not sure they were consciously trying to immitate it. It was just that nobody knew how to deal with traffic, so they would do the stupidest things to cause it to foul up even more -- wasn't too fun to be in but sure is hilarious to think about in retrospect.

More later.

It's starting to become painfully evident that I need a haircut. I'm a little loathe to mention this particular piece of my personal life, since the last time i mentioned my hair, a whole website of hair fetishists found me through search engines and started spamming me with email. Please don't do that this time people.

Didn't do very much this weekend: bought a bunch of new CDs, went shopping for Chinese restaurant dishware (got two nice tea cups and some tiny plates) and watched Yojimbo [Kurasawa], and Wonderboys, both of which were very good, and not nearly as depressing as Requiem for a Dream. A bunch of us from work went to see that one last week, and while it's also a very good movie, it was obviously written and directed by someone who hates life.

Left say2 alone for now and did a little hacking on new goo innards. Probably just futzing around right now, but i did decide to go ahead and use antlr (a better yacc) and C++ this time. Amusingly that seems to have coincided with some sort of C++ revival -- several people have brought it up recently and i noticed that Advogato's main page has an article about it. Really it's very simple: C++ is not evil, but people who use C++ because they don't know how to code, that is evil.

I haven't had time lately to do even the most minimal of tasks (buy groceries, pay bills, etc). I'm really looking forward to Christmas break. Part of this is my own fault, though, i think maybe sometimes i enjoy having too much to do. We have some insane January deadline at work and still i find time to hack on my own projects a little bit. Whee...

Well that was a nice Thanksgiving. After work hell for the first half of the week, i worked "from home" on Wednesday and then avoided email and IRC/say2 from Thursday to Sunday: i highly recommend it.

Since i've forbidden myself to buy Final Fantasy IX until i finish a music project, i went by Blockbuster and picked up the "Final Fantasy Anthology" (V and VI). Both are more primitive than VII, obviously, but i liked V enough that i've gotten hooked and it's looking like renting them was an unwise choice. I think i'm going to have to wean myself from it before the late fees pile up too bad.

For Thanksgiving, Greg and i picked up some stuff from Safeway and make a nice "baked chicken" meal with veggies and bread, and watched Vertigo -- you know, the traditional Thanksgiving movie! I had a vague idea for veggies: slices of zucchini and squash cooked in a big pan. Greg was able to magically transform my vague idea into a viable dish (which was good!). I've learned to leave all vegetable cooking to him: anyone who can chop vegetables so well must be an expert.

Strick is back in town, so on Sunday night we all went (with Rupe, Matt, and Geoff) down to Santa Cruz and pigged out at Pink Godzilla sushi (a long-overdue idea). Strick and i swapped ideas about say2 and smilax on the way back, plus he'd been thinking of a say2-like mod to IRC, which proved to me that we're on the right track.

Got CVS working on the Mac, so i could hack on goo (and maybe even say2) over the coming holidays. Plugged my home machine into a fairly cheap (but servicable) UPS so it can shutdown cleanly when the monthly PG&E power outage happens. Otherwise avoiding work because i'm frustrated with the state of the installer, but hopefully it will be okay after they do this "patch" release, and we can stop wasting time and actually fix the broken parts.

Eazel rearranged the cube layout in our building last week (to add more cubes) so i arrived on Monday to find the building more "full" than before, and spent most of the day unpacking my stuff and getting my computers set up right. Shane, Mike, Eskil and i are now in one big (or not so big) cube. It's nice to sit close enough to the people i work with that i don't have to shout across the building anymore.

We're going to do another release of the bootstrap Nautilus installer early next week to fix some of the immediate bugs that were causing heartache: memory leaks, odd error messages, its uncanny desire to erase KDE packages -- the usual stuff that makes me doubt my own sanity. (Do i write code or just bugs?)

Greg and i got the rack-mount machine installed last weekend and it's pretty nice. It's weird now, because it's not in my living room anymore so i don't think about it much, but it's always around. I guess having a machine in a coloc is a lot like not having a machine at all, if it runs itself well.

In the post-PR2 lull i got a little bit more work done on say2 (but not a whole lot). I decided to try to tackle the SSL stuff because it's made me curious for a long time and nobody seems to know how the heck it works -- or how the heck to make it do anything useful. Getting client-mode SSL to work in ammonite was mostly copying other people's code and twiddling it until magic happened. So after fighting tooth and nail with this stuff, i finally managed to get some socket code written that can be an SSL server or client with a minimum of fuss. Wonder if any other gnome projects could use that? They'd probably rather write their own, i bet.

So the next step will be setting up cert swapping between sephiroth (say2 server) and the perl client, and getting them to make a secure connection. Hopefully this part will be a little easier (though i'm in utter fear of what the perl openssl library API looks like).

Just finished a very funny book Eli lent me: "Youth In Revolt" -- highly recommend it. Now halfway through "Soul of a New Machine", non-fiction about a computer company in Boston in the Carter era. I looked it up on the web: Data General was indeed a real company. Scary how quickly some things can fade into oblivion.

I just voted in the gnome foundation elections. If I know you and I didn't vote for you, it's because I'd rather have you coding than participating in politics. Especially those of you who were running "to pick up chicks": everyone knows that miserable sex-starved programmers write better code! :)

4 Nov 2000 (updated 4 Nov 2000 at 03:04 UTC) »

Been too long since i posted an entry. Things have been really busy at Eazel because we've been getting ready for the PR2 release of Nautilus, and it's the first time a lot of the trilobite stuff will be visible and easily accessible. Eskil and i have been working on the RPM installation system, and it's looking really nice. He took my quick hack for resolving a Redhat 6.2 installation problem and turned into this generalized problem-solver that's totally going to kick ass. I'm sure it all has lots of bugs that we haven't found yet, but the idea that this stuff works at all is really cool.

Greg and i finally solved the issue with the rack-mount case by taking it back to Central Computer and exchanging it for a Boom rack which had risers on two slots instead of one. To our surprise, the risers were actually on slots 2 and 3: they were prepared for the rise of AGP! So we can use both slots in this case, which was really nice. The whole case seems to be designed well, as if it was designed by people who actually do a lot of rack mounting. I'm impressed and pleased with Boom now.

We got the 3 60G drives in, and set up a RAID5 on it: 120G block device with a redundant drive. The 120G block device then became a 114G reiserfs partition (it journals, which makes it much faster at recovering from crashes on big disks than ext2). We need to do a little more testing, but i think we'll be ready to put this machine in the coloc next weekend -- yay!

Say2 switched over to using the database for user logins now. The next task (which i avoided starting while work was so heated up) is to figure out a way to use the openssl library to do encrypted connections, without using the cert baggage. I want to do my own authentication over ssl using raw DSA keys (Frank at work convinced me that the overhead of X509 certs is just not worth dealing with them). I figure the client and server could exchange keys when they first meet, just like ssh. At worst, i can make up a bogus cert that's used by all say2 servers. Also, answer convinced me that the details of splitting off the channel server merited a little more thought.

I'm incredibly infatuated with Plaid now. Bought a double-CD called "Trainer" which is just packed with stuff that burrows into my brain. Very little new music beyond that. Still working on the Venus EP, aiming for November. Did absolutely nothing for Halloween. My PS2 arrived a few days ago, and i bought a crappy game (Orphen) and tried out the DVD player (much cooler). Gonna bring it up to the city this weekend to show off and get better games for.

The rack-mount machine: we have most of the parts but unfortunately the rack case we got doesn't quite match the motherboard (the case assumes that your 1st slot is PCI, but on modern mobos the 1st slot is AGP). Probably this weekend we'll go exchange the case, since finding a flexible PCI extender has been nearly impossible. One place in the UK was selling them for 60 pounds!

Work has kept me busy this week -- so busy that i had to run out last night and buy cat food so poor Commie wouldn't starve. But it's been really productive, and hopefully next week it'll calm down a bit. Looking at the services stuff, I've actually started to feel like it's going to be pretty cool when we ship, i'm all excited about it again!

Lots of work stuff means not much say2 work, though we did get rudimentary database support working. The Big Switch will probably happen this weekend: next is either secure connections or channels (depending on which looks more interesting; right now its swaying toward secure connections).

My DSL works again, hooray!

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