March 2, 2003

i think phil is coming to get simon today.

March 3, 2003

it's 2:30 am again and i can't sleep. it's probably going to be one of those entries again.

i blame the endless hours of dream-enriched sleep i got last night, but it's probably just the fact that i didn't get to sleep in time for my post-dinner coma to carry me into the morning.

and it was a pretty good dinner. joe and i went with sammy to bisuteki. i hadn't been there for a long time, but it was delicious as always. sammy probably agrees with that reviewer that the service is slow, but i wouldn't be surprised if he thought boca grande is slow too.

i need to trick phil into getting a hibachi thingie. i can see him dropping this brining riff-raff and starting to grill his cookies. although, i suppose you could brine and hibachi food.

joe and i have something around 15 devices on our home network these days. i still can't read the internet in my shower though.

also we can't play networked mario kart 64. sammy tricked us into pulling that out, so joe and i have been getting our kart on again. it's still the only game i ever got for my n64, but it's still fun. and although playing on Extra is pretty frustrating, it's not nearly as frustrating as legendary mode in halo. also it starts up immediately since there's no cd drive to read from.

i have been doing free software stuff for some 4 years now (actually, very close to 4 years), but it's still nice to get compliments on patches i submit (even if they're really simple ones).

i am out of things to blather about, but not yet tired. oh well.

March 4, 2003

the bruins won yay.

i finally got around to putting up a release of my OS X iPaq driver. it should be pretty good for a 0.1 release, but there are some tyops in the docs and stuff. i don't know if anyone is actually going to use it, but at least i can say i tried.

speaking of trying, this entry from 2000 is remarkably similar to the present.

it's 4:40 am and i'm up again.

March 5, 2003

i had a really crazy dream last night. it was really crazy.

i noticed it was 40° or so out so i went running.

March 6, 2003

it's 5 am again, but this time i stayed up hacking rather than not sleeping in bed.

this article is both scary and hillarious. i bet joe and i will never hear the end of it when shaver comes to town, since we're going to the leafs game mentioned in the article.

joe also should check out the PA icons.

shaver's code seems to be (somewhat) quickly finding a home in my tree. this probably is due to some law of code conservation or something:

jacob@krunk:cadet$ cvs diff -N | diffstat | grep -v '|' ............................................ 22 files changed, 676 insertions, 258 deletions jacob@krunk:cadet$ _

to be fair, some of that is fixing .cvsignore files, however most of it is pretty good code.

this morning i fixed some more endianness bugs in synce.

March 7, 2003

i should also note that when i originally looked at the diffstat stuff this morning, i had forgotten to cvs rm 2 files which had their code moved to another file, so it was +676 -101 or something more like that.

also my closet's light went out again. sylvania has joined frost king on some list i have.

i wrote ~+1000/-200 LOC today, and i think it only had one bug. i have a design think-o to fix tomorrow, and after that some things that seem hard, but just because i haven't written it down. the fog obscuring the grand picture of how it all fits together is lifting, which is a welcome change.

phil came over with pepper chicken and mango fried rice. we all hacked while listening to weird al, and later watched some cops (in boston, from '91) and some family feud. i think phil and i both got our stuff working at the same time or something. phil doesn't think i would do well on the feud:

Name a fabric a dress is made from.

Cloth.

nurr

if i had a tablet i would try to draw a comic, but i think you get the idea.

March 8, 2003

since i'm a mac lamer i got a new phone today:

i apologize for the lighting, but again sylvania lightbulbs don't last very long. i don't know that i'm switching to at&t, so i have my old # forwarding to the new phone, so people should still use that i guess.

the bluetooth stuff in os x is pretty fun, except i got the overgrown belkin dongle instead of the d-link one. it'll just stay connected to my desktop most of the time, so it doesn't really matter.

the bruins won in OT (again) and it was a pretty good game. hopefully they'll be able to get at least another point tomorrow against chicago. they could tie tampa if they win i think, which would be boss.

i am seriously dehydrated due to the consumption of bbq.

we drove to bbq with a hybrid zipcar. this wasn't my first time in a hybrid (one of my friends from home has one) but they are still very weird. we found out (the hard way) that one of the disadvantages to hybrids is that when the engine is off, blind people have no idea you are there.

on the darker side of things:

jacob@krunk:cadet$ cvs diff | diffstat 0 files changed

March 9, 2003

<phik> god, the feud the other day <phik> jacob only tells half the story <phik> "Name a fabric a dress is made from" <phik> jacob: "Cloth" <phik> joe: "Flannel" <boc> joe didn't say flannel <boc> he said felt <phik> he did so! <phik> lol <phik> that's right <boc> jesus <phik> first he said "felt" <phik> then flannel <boc> i may only tell half the story <boc> but at least it's accurate

after watching the bruins lose, we decided to go get a hockey net and try to skate around for a while. surprisingly enough, we managed to find one (on a sunday!) and do an hour or so of the skating and shooting. eventually our cookie-hole stuffing got the better of us, but not before we broke one ball, and got a couple of cracks in the left post. i think phil said it best when he quipped, "honestly, who buys a goal made of plastic?"

after that we got our pork on again, this time brined-and-somethinged (it was some curry/chili magic tasty dust - if phil ever updates his internet he may be able to provide details). joe said it was probably the best pork he's ever had, and i think joe's had a lot of pork so that's a remarkable thing to say.

phil and i were talking about how we can brine joe's birthday cake in a couple of months. the plain cakes probably won't work very well, so we'll probably have to get an ice cream cake.

i didn't write any code today (it's funny how i tend to do that on the weekends) but i feel a little confident that tomorrow could possibly be somewhat productive.

a couple of notes on the phone: i don't feel quite as comfortable dropping or throwing my new phone as much as the old sanyo 4000. and (2) i have 5 bars in my room.

i need to stuff my sleep hole.

March 10, 2003

i had so many vivid dreams last night that it seems like it should be tuesday.

today was quite productive:

25 files changed, 1281 insertions, 733 deletions

i would have liked for more lines to have been removed, but such is the cost of using subclasses in GObject.

the good things are that not only is the new code quite a bit better, but it actually is *working* unlike fridays stuff. i've done too much for me to try actually syncing two devices, but fortunately that's why there are tomorrows.

nothing else happened today.

March 11, 2003

terrorist related dreams seem to be back. 2 nights ago i had a dream where i was on a plane and wanted to get off, but it had pushed back from the dingus where you get on, and they thought might be a terrorist and there were a lot of security video cameras on the plane. last night, in one part of my dream someone was trying to shoot model rockets at passing airplanes.

i had marginal progress today. i can *almost* sync between my ipaq and osx address book the right way. i think a little debugging is all it needs, but we'll see tomorrow.

a couple of years ago now i got the groove armada "back to mine" album. i only listened to it once or so, and it didn't really endear itself to me. anyway i ripped it the other day and tracks from it keep coming on, and i like them.

March 12, 2003

honestly i'm not making any of this up.

i downloaded the free GTA release so i could try it on the vaio. windows was complaining that the sound card didn't work, which was weird because it used to. i rebooted, tried reinstalling directx, etc. to no avail. i booted linux to see if it worked there, and it complained about something not being able to initialize, and /dev/dsp didn't work.

so i went in the bios, and turned on the "logo motion" which makes the sony logo at POST animate and make a little noise.

i boot, and it does't make the noise!

so i go back, for some random reason i turn on "PNP OS" and reboot, and it makes the little noise and windows is happy. i play the game and turn it off since GTA1 sucks.

since my vaio stopped receiving pcmcia interrupts in linux, and i wanted to try my friends' new beta release (i tried looking for a link to some sort of announcement other than the one on the cfs homepage, but couldn't find one), i broke down and ordered a linksys usb wavelan dingus from amazon. however, that was before this sound fiasco, so i figured i may as well try the pcmcia stuff again.

so i go boot the stock phoebe2 kernel, and use the wavelan modules from the lustre kernel, since the phoebe2 ones have unresolved MODVERSION symbols (which is why i never use it). SURPRISE SURPRISE the stupid thing works.

i'd like to say that buying a usb dingus made it work, but i think this really is the story of how GTA fixed my linux pcmcia problems.

anyway i spent a few hours building/rebuilding lustre bits for the beta, but haven't had much success. when i run ls on the remote mount, i still get -14. when i cvs up in my web dir on the local mount, i get an LBUG. i might try bugging them tomorrow when they aren't partying or sleeping.

speaking of sleep, somehow it got to be 4 AM.

(oh and congrats to the evo team who recently had a beta release as well)

March 13, 2003

for some reason i tried to debug the -EFAULT bug in lustre this afternoon. i managed to track it down to a ll_copy_to_user() call somewhere inside tcp_recvmsg(). so that makes sense. however, i have no idea how to find out who is giving portals the lame buffer. that, compounded with the fact that i'm not paying for lustre development, means that it's not so much fixed. i am trying not to sound bitter, since i'm not in the least, and was in fact only trying to help - it was phil's suggestion to put a lustre server up. anyway this paragraph is really losing coherence quickly.

since i got a new phone, phil, joe and i were talking about george's answering machine. it turns out that they had never heard of the greatest american hero, so they didn't even get the full humor value of the answering machine thing.

i didn't do anything else today, and have nothing else planned, so i'm going to try to sleep. simon's been doing it all day, and it looks fun.

March 14, 2003

phil had been worried that he was leaving boston just in time for spring to arrive. i don't remember spring having an 8° windchill.

when i got out of bed this morning i thought it was 3 or 4 in the afternoon. it was around 9:43 a m. today might be one of those days.

simon was being a cutie today:

i fixed some of the bugs i had in cadet the other day, and generalized things so theoretically it can synce between multiple devices now. i should probably add some tests or something, but i think it's too early.

haha, weird al's "the alternative polka" is awesome.

i started really thinking about what is definitely the most difficult part of cadet to date: per-field merging. ie, if you edit the same card on multiple devices, but not necessarily the same field (like the name), they should all be nicely merged. the only thing more difficult that i forsee is auto-detecting of devices.

it's not really interesting, but there's a similarity in both of the things i think are going to be difficult: they have to do with real world things. rob pike (of "you don't need spaces in your file names" fame) i think said something about how over 90% of the work on plan 9 went into supporting interoperability standards such as mime and tcp/ip etc. and wasn't spent on "innovating." at least i think it was him, it might have been someone talking about BeOS.

hmm i really should get to sleep so i can catch the bruins game tomorrow at noon.

March 15, 2003

i managed to wake up just in time to catch the bruins trounce the panthers. the bruins were really playing on a different level than the panthers almost the whole game, which is refreshing to see.

last night as i was brushing my teeth before going to bed, it occured to me that i might want to check out syncml, since like my phone is supposed to do it and stuff. i figured it couldn't be any more boring than the vcard rfc i read last night.

i'm not a big fan of writing parsers. in fact, i'm not even a small fan. so writing the DevInf parser today wasn't the most fun i've ever had. it's not done, but i was going to lose my sanity if i didn't take a break.

and then andy kaufman's carnegie hall thing was on comedy central. i am kind of worried that if i don't finish this parser tonight, i'll never go back to it. but, not too worried.

watching animals lapping up water always makes me giggle. i don't really know what it is, but it's amazingly funny. it also amazes me that simon can figure out what his food is, and to drink water. i mean, it took me 20 years to find out that i liked indian food. but i guess if he can't figure out how to eat he dies. so i guess it makes sense.

i tried to take a lot of pictures of simon playing today, but a bunch were boring and then the others had my finger in them. the other two came out great though:

March 17, 2003

so far today i've taken 3 showers. the first was just after waking up, the second was before i was going to get lunch. after that one, i decided i should probably take advantage of the near 60° weather and go run. that was painful.

after the third shower i got a corned beef sandwich at the deli place. i think simon might like them more than i do.

right now i'm sitting on my porch, with full wavelan access to the internet and my mp3s. i really don't know if it gets any better than this.

ok, i do know. if afp didn't suck so much iTunes wouldn't skip.

March 19, 2003

well the big news today was that robbie ftorek was fired. i don't understand how they can fire the coach two weeks before the playoffs, but maybe that's why i'm not paid to run a hockey team.

i started playing halo again. i did two whole levels today, finished a third, and started a fourth. i think the next one is the last one. these weren't too difficult, at least compared to truth and reconciliation. hopefully i will finish it and be at the top of my game before zach and shaver arrive.

phil is back but simon is still here. i don't know what's going on.

March 20, 2003

as usual when we (well, it was really only phil) try to make potatoes, there are problems:

simon is back at phil's, which is good since he ran out of food. he was really cranky this morning. last night he was cute:

now i get to sleep without being woken up by a cat.

March 21, 2003

i am sick again. woke up with some throat scratchiness, and i've had some fever. i'm giving it 48 hours to evacuate my body. failure to do so will result in me being mad.

joe had to go to work but we managed to get the quicktime streaming stuff working so he could watch at work. if i could have gotten sound working, it would have almost been as though we were living in the year 2003.

i spent a while today checking out the air force's public domain photo gallery. the images range from amazing:

to downright frightening:

now it's time to have fun dreams. the combo of watching war all day, fever, and just having played halo should be a potent one.

March 22, 2003

i did not sleep well at all last night. fortunately zab didn't hear me.

i think i wasted my afternoon doing nothing, or putting the chairs from ryan together.

then i had indian with the guys and then we played risk. i thought i played a good game (i did make 3 or 4 mistakes) but phik and shaver had been teaming up from the start, and it's really tough to beat two other people. but, i lasted the longest of the three non-phik-n-shaver people (zab only had 1 turn) so i guess i should be happy. i mean i had fun so yeah.

now i need to convince people to play some halo.

the diplomacy failed. i was given 48 hours to go home.

March 24, 2003

shaver: when life gets boring, i find a little creativity with entries goes a long way.

for example, if, during the course of a boring day, i was going to throw some pasta at joe, and he said if i did he'd relieve himself in my bed, i might have this entry:

yesterday i threw some pasta at joe, and have been paying for it ever since i woke up this morning. these days, i don't really mind spending a couple of hours cleaning up when joe takes a dump in my bed, but the least he could do is wait for me to wake up and get out of it first. i understand that he has to go to work before i'm usually awake, but there has to be a comprimise. every time i close my eyes the scene is replayed over and over. is this what traumatic stress syndrome is like?

i had some incredible dreams last night. the (accurate) references to real life were pretty astounding. also, at one point i was listening to my iPod and a song came on which can only be described as the crystal method doing a cover of a beck song (after i woke up, i thought it was some song from odelay but now i can't remember which one).

March 26, 2003

the hockey game the other day was fun.

last night i had some ice cream.

today it is warm.

somehow, phil managed to trick me into making non-recursive makefiles for lustre. i have most of it working, but am not so thrilled with the results:

jacob@wet-pants:lustre-nonrec$ time make LD=i386-linux-ld ... real 6m4.944s user 4m37.980s sys 0m34.460s jacob@wet-pants:lustre-nonrec$ time make LD=i386-linux-ld real 0m6.325s user 0m3.380s sys 0m2.240s jacob@wet-pants:lustre$ time make LD=i386-linux-ld ... real 6m35.873s user 4m50.650s sys 0m41.200s jacob@wet-pants:lustre$ time make LD=i386-linux-ld real 0m5.094s user 0m3.340s sys 0m0.710s jacob@wet-pants:lustre$ _

hopefully there is something silly in there that will speed things up.

March 27, 2003

it turns out that ~2.6 seconds of the build-nothing case is spent in the kernel in stat() or fstat(), and another 2 seconds can be saved by using make -r (otherwise make does ~3000 stat() calls looking for RCS and SCCS directories).

of course, i haven't tried this on linux so it might be completely different there.

also, some great simpsons episodes have been on this week.

March 29, 2003

March 30, 2003

i want to do something like this, but can't figure out how to do it:

foo := foo bar baz foo_SRC := foo.c blah.c bar_SRC := bar.c baz_SRC := baz.c $(foo) : % : $(%_SRC) @echo gcc -o $@ $^

sometimes i can tell when i should go to sleep:

jacob@wet-pants:lustre-nonrec$ make make: *** No rule to make target `doc/lustre-HOWTO.txt)', needed by `all'. Stop. jacob@wet-pants:lustre-nonrec$ make doc/lustre-HOWTO.txt lyx --export text doc/lustre-HOWTO.lyx /bin/sh: lyx: command not found *** Warning: not creating text docs; install lyx to rectify this jacob@wet-pants:lustre-nonrec$ _

(that warning at the end there is ok)

duckman is funnier than futurama.

March 31, 2003

at 11:02 PM EST on monday march 31 2003, i won halo on legendary.

hmm, i suppose i should find a job now.

well, hours later the 3 phoebe boxes are running rh9. tip: if you are trying to boot the installer directly from grub (since you don't have floppy or cd drives), if you copy your initrd as your kernel image, it won't boot.

on the router, the installer kept complaining that i didn't have enough disk space, but when it was done:

[root@sausalito root]# df -h / Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/hda3 660M 382M 245M 61% /

i had to remove python, and emacs/X11-libs. the only package that requires perl was the dyndns client, so i could probably remove perl too.

hmm it's 4:01 on 4/01 so i am going to sleep.