WOW, it has been a long time, and since I'm lazy as hell to
use my ghostprotocols.net to create some webpage, diary, etc
I'll continue using this nice infrastructure provided by
the fine folks at advogato.org :-)

Today I submitted a proposal for OLS 2005 "DCCP on Linux",
for those, like a friend who said for some seconds he thought
I was going to talk about KDE, no, its not DCOP, its a new
internet transport protocol, interested people can take a

Buried alive merging patches.

Woke up to find that Alan had got to the bottom of the 'SATA blew up' problem
in the FC2/3 kernel updates. Turned out to be a latent bug thats been there
since early 2.4 days, that got tickled by Alans IDE changes in 2.6.9-ac.
Spent the day merging that and a bunch of other fixes, and then getting
FC2 & FC3 kernels built.

Did a bunch of queries on bugzilla to find out the state of play wrt
kernel bugs across releases.

RHL era: 43 bugs
FC1: 0 bugs
FC2: 572 bugs
FC3: 218 bugs
rawhide: 10 bugs (this is an odd one, as it spans releases)

With the updates pushed out today, over the next few days, hopefully
the FC2 bugs will drop noticably.

I've been trying to read Introduction to Quantum Computation and Information, a collection of papers on the subject used as an introduction to the field. I can't claim to understand it, but there are some interesting parts nonetheless.

So I was reading up a little about Dtrace, and got digging around
Sun's web page a little. Eventually I ended up googling for the names
of the folks behind it. Got amused when I found one of the
'dtrace three', Bryan Cantrill was the same person in
this old thread.
Davem's follow-up
was equally as amusing. There's even an insight from a

pre-gnome Miguel in there. (Though he doesn't say 'dude' once, which
is somewhat suspicious).

Bastien fed me a bug a few days ago, which turned out to be one of the most stupid errors I have ever committed. I thought about ranting about it, but really, what new can be said? Good thing I'm not some kind of a hacking Samurai, or I'd feel compelled to commit Harakiri in an act of public apology. Here's the code:

static void ohci_complete_add(struct ohci *ohci, struct urb *urb)

I won't mention that, despite drafting last, I am currently first in
our office fantasy football league.

P.S. Luis may be in last place in fantasy football, but he is in first
place in real-world managing.

Caught up with a lot of backlog of patches. Managed to get
the FC2/FC3 kernel updates pushed out.

Ziga Mahkovec has been kicking ass on the fedora-devel list
helping out understand why we take so damn long to boot.
With a
series
of
really
cool
graphs ,
a whole bunch of issues has been brought up.

• readahead may be hurting us more than benefiting.
  The list of files FC3 reads needs to be updated still, that one slipped
  through the net. Aparently we also open a lot less files on boot up
  than we used to in FC2, which is good to hear.
• syslogd startup is painful.
  A lot of synchronous writes to logfiles murders disk performance.
• rhgb sucks.
  But everyone knew that already.
• the rhn-applet-gui is a monster. It takes ages to start up,
  and once its loaded, it eats a shedload of resources. Nasty.

Japan-A-Radio rocks at present, but I cannot help but wonder about their business model, and thus, sustainability. Paying for all that bandwidth cannot be too cheap, and what about relationships with righs holders and liability insurance?

The quality of the 24kb/s stream is intolerable. I would be completely fine with a low bandwidth stream with low quality, because I need a radio to expand my horizons. I can listen of AM radio just fine. However, the low bandwidth stream is not frequency limited, it simply delivers a bunch of artifacts. Apparently, Ogg cannot be used in this application, but they do not want to bother with things like Speex.

Worked from home, and finally beat the build system into
submission, and squeezed kernels through it for FC2, FC3
and rawhide.

Victoria went off to the dentist around lunchtime
and came back looking pretty sore. I have all this to come.

Got set up (somewhat) in my loft/workspace. Rigged my laptop
up to my new 19" monitor. It's going to be a really good
work environment when I get the rest of my stuff shipped over.

Synced the FC-4 devel tree with whats in FC-3, and enabled
a bunch of debug options. For anyone brave enough to run
rawhide right now, they'll be doing FC2/FC3/RHEL4 users
a favour by bringing out any extra bugs that those options
highlight.

Fighting the build system some more. I don't think
it likes me. A few folks prodded it with pointy sticks,
and it prodded back. Still no kernel built.
Went out for pancakes and eggs with Victoria for lunch.
Attempted to reenact the 'maple syrup drinking' scene from

Super Troopers, much to Victoria's amusement.

To celebrate the installation of FC3 and thus a natural loss of all software capable of playing MP3s I have decided to build mpg123 with ALSA backend. It turned out that the ALSA support in mpg123 bitrotted and the API moved on so much that a rewrite was in order.

This hackery was an enlightening experience, to say the least. I pondered writing a nastigram to Jaroslav a few times while doing it. I discovered that the ALSA userland has all the features of the kernel side ALSA, that is to say, ridiculous complexity, pointless abstractions, and poor style and C craft level (featuring, but not limited to, passing structures willy-nilly).

We got our first glimpse at New England snow.
It was still coming down when I got into the office.
Victoria took Paul Nasrat out shopping for furniture
(Paul is pretty much in the same boat we were a month ago).
Around 5ish, they returned to the office. I joined them
and we sent off to Pauls place to drop off his newly
acquired bits and pieces. The trip back was a lot less
hectic as we took an alternative route that didn't
involve driving on the freeway.

More of the same. Fighting build system,
integrating patches. Lots of synchronising across
the various releases. Now FC2, FC3 and RHEL4 are
roughly on the same kernel level again.

Got back home to find that Victoria had painted the spare
room purple. It looks so much better than 'dirty white'.