joe may claim that we don't work at night, and here we are with it being 4:30 am and me working.
wednesday night / a site for sore eyes
choose one:
a few recent posts;
links to embarassing things;
rss was for robots.
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when i was at the airport i was on the phone with phil. he said something ludicrous, as he is wont to do, and (remembering his previous ramblings on caulking his new bathtub) i told him to shut his "caulk-hole". i got some strange looks from people who overheard.
i am going to high-tail it to bed before this kernel finishes building, and i get sucked into 12 more hours of debugging.
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December 4, 2003
pop is dead
hi. the other day i finally got pablo honey. i figured if i was going to get it, i'd get the japanese import version, since like, that seems to be my bag. i am glad i did, because inside my head is good.
speaking of good, shona and chris brough over bbq. we watched the leafs trounce the bruins.
i got a new harddrive for my laptop, so i can keep all my mp3s on it and be able to just do the sync-mode with my iPod which will make me happy.
yesterday (i think?) i actually debugged and fixed a kernel bug without (much of) phil's help. it was nice, since i more-or-less figured it out from reading some of the sources and stuff. phik has fixed like a thousand and one bugs since then.
i bit my lip.
* * *
i've got an exciting new kernel cooked up which has my on-board nforce2 firewire working, and i just stumbled up devlabel, which really has me all hot and bothered.
i am too tired to say anything else about it, but that's ok since i bet only shaver is really interested in it.
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December 8, 2003
we are disasters waiting to happen
not much has changed since the 4th:
- i keep biting my lip.
- i'm listening to pablo honey.
- i played with devlabel.
however, some changes:
- last night i burned my tongue on a pot pie (it was worth it).
- turns out devlabel doesn't work at all for what i need. fortunately, i stumbled upon mdadm which works quite well - i can create a mapping from md uuid to md device name, and it does magic scanning on the firewire disks to figure out which devices to mount (even though they can change depending on which drive is turned on/plugged in first).
i'm now running lustre off of firewire disks
shame about that browns game.
* * *
cookies and mac & cheese were on sale; made out like a bandit.
i got almost all of /home, /etc, and /var off of my dying disk, despite desperate attempts by the disk to keep this from happening. soon it will all be on lustre, and i will be able to sleep easy at night.
well, soon.
turns out the firewire drivers are not very robust in low memory situations. unfortunately, the vm wants nothing more than to be out of memory. i haven't found anything the it likes doing more than not freeing clean pages. so, any machine i use is always out of memory, and that leads to I/O errors and lustre timeouts.
fortunately i have friends that fix this sort of thing for a living.
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December 10, 2003
i don't belong here
i got about half way through this article before i realized they were talking about eating tuna, not dolphins. maybe i should go to sleep.
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last night i went to sleep a little after the browns game, around 8 or 9 i think. i woke up around midnight, when they plowed our back "yard", and couldn't fall asleep. then, the power went out. it sucks when you can't sleep, the weather is too gross for a walk, and there's no internet, TiVo, or GTA to pass the time.
fortunately, phik gave me a new gba game for xmas before he went travelling. so, i did that for a few hours until i fell asleep around 4.
i'm not sure whether it was the first or second period of sleep, but at some point i had an interesting dream. i had a flight to catch, going to new jersey. i was the only one on this flight, and it was a small plane (i suppose not unlike the ones blizzard flies). well, smaller, since it could take off from a street or a driveway.
anyway his girlfriend accompanied him on these flights, and they were pretty cool. we stopped to get some food at some diner-like place, and then while we were leaving, it occured to me that they might not have paid the bill. so, i went back to pay and they were running to the plane. apparently they would just do this for fun. it was kind of cute. but maybe you had to be there.
* * *
since i got my rma replacement shuttle, its disk performance was sub-par, and it has problems handling magic SysRq (ie, it ignores me).
hdparm said that the disks were only in udma2 mode (previous entries suggest that it can do better). i found seen some things on the internet about the ide problems; some page suggested passing ide0=66 ide1=66, however this yielded a /dev/hde and /dev/hdg, both in udma2.
the other day i couldn't sleep so i went looking again on the internet and some post mentioned 80-pin cables. so, i found some good page describing that and a bunch of other stuff about ide cables that i didn't know. unfortunately, when i checked the shuttle it had 80-pin cables.
today i was going to try to put a new BIOS on it, and noticed that the cables were plugged in backwards (which really matters for 80-pin, i guess). anyway it can do udma5 again.
magic SysRq still rarely works, either from the keyboard or from netconsole.
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Wednesday night. Rain. Windy. Lows in the mid 30s.
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December 18, 2003
race for the cure
yesterday i was flying high because i noticed that the indian place was open again, and they had my favorite dish on their (new) menu, along with some new stuff that looked good.
today i got indian but was disappointed - the chicken kadahi wasn't as good as i remember, and the naan had a chlorine-y smell to it. but i don't think i ever got it at lunch before, so i will probably go with joe tomorrow anyway.
2 days until i leave for skiing. i'm not taking my laptop, but iPod and gba attendance will be mandatory.
* * *
the last week or so i've been sleeping with earplugs in, because i wanted to leave some tests running overnight, and joe doesn't like it when i move all my computers into his bedroom at 4 am. since then, i've been sleeping really well. probably because when i scream in my dreams, it no longer wakes me up.
* * *
<robert> yeah, you've had a fun month or so
* * *
so far today hasn't been great:
<shaver> what are the odds that the kernel prints out NFS messages for _good_ news? <shaver> kernel: nfs: task 33408 never had it so good!
* * *
so far today hasn't gone as anticipated.
here's a little tip i learned today. if you have to wake up in the morning, perhaps to catch a flight, and you need to set your alarm clock, don't sleep with earplugs!
then, on the way to the airport, the taxi i was in kind of merged into a taxi in the next lane. since they were just taxis, the other driver just yelled a bit then we continued on our way.
i got in line to get my boarding pass, and when i got to the counter i found out that i was in line for the wrong airline. that's how i can tell i've been flying a lot.
my boarding pass reads:
Gate ****
i have no idea where that is, but i have 4 minutes to get there.
* * *
previously, the smallest airport i had been to was charlottesville, va.
rutland is a bit smaller. there is one gate, one check-in counter, and one airline. there are 2 arrivals and 2 departures daily, but even that seems to be overkill as there were 4 people on my flight saturday, and i think only 1 other person is going to be on the flight back to boston.
* * *
it's like christmas in december
today at virgin i found the japanese creep ep w/ a live inside my head on it. this is in addition to the japanese the bends w/ killer cars and how can you be sure that i got 2 weeks ago. there is still another version of killer cars i don't have - i think it's on an anyone can play guitar single or something. i think i saw it at hmv once, but i haven't seen it since.
* * *
if he's clean let him in
the other passenger on my flight into boston looked possibly mideastern. at some point, a state trooper came inside the airport (i didn't notice if this was before or after the other person checked in). this made me want to try a little social experiment: drive 15 middle eastern-looking us citizens to rutland, and fill up one of the flights to boston. i'm sure the airport staff would totally freak out. i'm also sure i'd be arrested for something related to the incident.
and of course, when that guy walked through the metal detector, it went off...
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December 24, 2003
we're just resting our eyes
every once in a while safari seems to forget about urls i go to (it doesn't auto-complete them). so i was wondering why it did this, since there's no (visible) setting for controlling this. i figure it's one of two methods: either it remembers the last n urls visited, or for the last n days.
it seems like neither of these work very well, as the former fails for people like me who visit a thousand and one pages per day, and the latter fails for people who use the internet infrequently.
* * *
my sister arrived in boston (unannounced thanks to spamassassin). tonight we went to blizzard's for some poker with dave. i lost, but not much of it was due to me being stupid. we are going to try to play mafia friday or saturday.
i am still on the skiing "time zone" so i need to go to sleep.
* * *
December 29, 2003
reading in cool
i think we watched like 6 hours of hockey, and didn't even see all of the games. the bruins won, but florida couldn't hold on to their lead and the leafs got another point.
the trip wasn't so great. my shoes set off the metal detector, they wouldn't let me listen to my iPod while the plane was sitting at the gate, they didn't offer me a beverage on the plane (although everyone else got one!) and then this little scene:
customs agent: what are you doing while you're up here?
me: visiting some friends for new year's.
ca: you know you're not allowed to lie to me? i know you don't have any friends.
me: ...
i will leave my retort for a future comic strip.
indian + hockey = sleepy.
* * *
i don't know why shaver doesn't post any pictures of the sunset from his office
* * *
i need to find an immigration lawyer. 5 more hours of hockey today ("do you want to watch the rangers' or the kings' feed?") and the most delicious pork i've ever had are making toronto look like a great place to live.
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December 31, 2003
it still smells like pork in here
yesterday i think it was, i had the following (consecutive!) thoughts:
- "hmm, i remember there being some trick to shaver's shower..."
- "why is the knob turned to cold?"
so close.
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