Older blog entries for zeevon (starting at number 123)

Quite a lot to say now that I'm at OLS.

Wednesday July 25th

Attended dyork's talk about CVS, which was really good - he definitely speaks well in front of a crowd. Unfortunately, this means that I missed the User-Mode Linux talk, but CVS is definitely more practical for me at this point (and the talks are all released as MP3s, anyways).

Afterwards, I decided to check out the Powertweak talk. I went to the room, sat down and opened my OLS Programme to read the talk abstract before it started only to realize that it was being given by davej! Another good talk, and I spoke with him for a few minutes afterwards about the Kernel Janitor FAQ.

After the talks in the afternoon, there was a GPG key signing party, which went quite well. I signed the keys of 2 future Debian developers from the University of Waterloo (among others) and got my key signed by people like Ted T'so, Mark Crichton (from the GIMP), and quite a few other people (quite a few francophones there, which was cool).

The AMD Welcome Reception in the evening was also pretty cool. Hugh Daniel had some slides from last year's Zero Knowledge party being projected onto a screen, and I was really excited to see some of the 8-second exposures of me juggling photon lights in the dark. Hugh came up to me today and showed me his new "tri-light" configuration, which is much easier for juggling. I don't know if we're

Thursday July 26th

PowerPC 64-bit Kernel Internals in the morning. I actually understood more than I thought I would, so it was actually pretty interesting.

After lunch, I attended Hotpluggable devices by kroah, which was also pretty good (I wasn't aware of the project before, so it was all new to me). I had met him the night before at the key signing party - nice guy and also very comfortable in front of a crowd.

I also attended the BGP talk but I was nodding off during it. It actually sounded quite interesting but I had hit some sort of mid-afternoon energy lull.

So that has been my two days so far. There is so much more to say, but this is long enough already.

Dropped by the OLS registration desk at lunch and got my loot bag. I think Karine is already plotting to kidnap the cute little Ximian monkey that I got. A really nice addition this year was the inclusion of the proceedings on a CD-ROM. All of the material on it is in PDF and postscript, but it also includes the Makefiles and tex source, too. After not getting any proceedings last year, this more than makes up for it.

I went pillow shopping with Karine after work today. After a few semesters of being overly tired, I figured that I should try to make sure that I maximize the amount of sleep I get when I lie down to go to bed (last year I had some nights where I would go to bed at midnight and wake up at 3am for no apparent reason - and of course, I wasn't able to fall asleep again).

I almost released a new version of the Login.app Debian package tonight. It probably would have actually happened if I hadn't dozed off on my new ultra comfortable pillows...

dyork: I'm sorry to hear that you're no longer going to be heading the LPI project. After all the MCSE-like certs out there, the word "certification", at least in the computing world, was leaving a bad taste in my mouth. LPI, however, seems like a really cool initiative and you guys seem to want to actually provide a reliable certification process rather than just push more product at the consumer (which is what irritates me about the MCSE cert). Good luck to you and the other members of LPI. BTW, good luck with your talk tommorow. :-)

Finally started to work on the Kernel Janitor Project FAQ. Not much there yet but it's a start.

Looking forward to OLS next week.

Really Bad Country Song Titles - this is just too funny. Lists all the classics, like "Drop Kick Me Jesus Through the Goal Posts of Life" and "I Don't Know Whether To Kill Myself or Go Bowling." Ouch. One of the few kinds of music that I can't stand.

sad: I like the first option ( "There will be no quotes on OLS staff tshirts this year." - Andrew Hutton, Organizer, OLS). And as ugly as orange is, at least it will make you all easy to spot in the crowd (then again, anything other than black would do the trick).

kmcmartin: I'm worried about this whole crypto-in-main thing, too. The FreeS/WAN developers still won't allow any contributions from US residents because of the way the US has these laws set up. Either way, we'll find out in less than a week whether non-us will be around for woody.

BTW, where are you going when you're out west? Have you been before?

The Rammstein concert was amazing - lots of flamethrowers and fireworks.

maddog's talk has just been uploaded after a delayed review and spellcheck. Have already started working on the Berlin talk.

I don't have much time, tough, because I'm off to Montreal for a Rammstein concert in about an hour.

Wow. Now that hppa is a new targeted platform for Debian 3.0's release, anything that doesn't compile on it has just had a serious bug filed against it. Login.app managed to escape the bug spike that happened overnight (over 500 new bugs filed), so I'm safe for the time being. See this release critical bug graph. It will also be interesting to see what happens with crypto, too (will Mozilla be put in non-us or will it be allowed into main?).

I had the most wonderful time at work this week. I usually juggle outside during my lunch break, but this week there was a math camp for 9-year-old kids. They had been spending an hour each day in math camp learning how to juggle and quite a few of them had mastered the regular 3-ball cascade by the end of the week (of course, I was doing a little teaching of my own during lunch - it was fun to have so many eager students!). They were really impressed by some of my four ball patterns and my few attempts at 5-ball (I'm now up to about 7 throws/catches before I drop).

So yesterday at lunch they were all asking me if I would come see the show they were putting on for the parents that afternoon, which was very sweet. There was this really shy kid that was really good. I had taught him a few things during my lunch hour on Monday and he just figured out the rest on his own throughout the week. I started doing some steals with him - he would start juggling, I would steal the balls and keep juggling, then he would steal them back, all without any break in the pattern. Just a really sweet kid with a lot of natural ability.

Happy birthday Janus.

psj: So you're in Ottawa. Do you attend OCLUG meetings? I certified you as apprentice for the time being but I really don't know much about you. I'll try to keep an eye on your diary entries and change my cert accordingly.

I spent some time at Karine's last night. It was really nice to get away from the computer, relax and enjoy summer. We went up the Peace Tower and took some pictures. We then watched a horrible movie with some friends, which can be fun in a group (the sarcasm was flying...).

Apart from spellchecking and review, the transcription of "maddog's Fables" has been completed. All told, it took me about a week to get this done, as opposed to more than two months for Rasterman's X11 talk. What a difference summer makes.

Congradulations to the people at e-smith (dyork and skud on on here - not sure if there are any other employees). See Dan York's entry for more details.

dyork: Yes the citizen does suck. If you look back at the June 27 entries in the diaries of kmcmartin,sad and myself, you'll find that we mostly share the same opinion as most other people in this otherwise fine city.

Work on the kernel-janitor FAQ has stalled - I can't think of any more questions at the moment. I'll give it another day or so to roll around in my brain and then post to the list for suggestions and comments. I'm sure I have missed a lot so it would be a good idea to get some input from contributors to the project.

I'm looking forward to a few things these days:

• Karine is going to take me up the Peace Tower. I haven't been up there in the past 10 years or so, despite living right here in Ottawa.

• Going to see Rammstein in Montreal on Sunday. Plan: Catch a bus to get there, see the concert, catch a bus back, welcome my boss back from her vacation at 8:45 am on the following day. Should be fun.

• OLS in roughly two weeks.

maddog's talk is about 2/3 finished now. This is by far the easiest talk that I have done so far, so I'll try to take a tough one next time in order to maintain some sort of balance.