that’s whacked

geek my girl

Thursday, Jul 28. 2005  –  Category: Musings

Some people do the whole pimp my ride bit. I, on the other hand, have apparently geeked my girl. Last night Wendy was looking through her bag and she pulled out her Dell Axim x50v, her Ipod Mini, and her new digital camera, a Sony DSC-T33.
Meanwhile, I look at my 4 year old digital camera (which I still love and am satisfied with), my Dell Inspiron 700m (which is admittedly great, and I love it - but not quite in that ‘hip’ category), and my Rio Carbon (which I personally love, but eh… they’ve apparently failed). Oh well… at least I’ve geeked my girl. :-

Garden State

Thursday, Jul 28. 2005  –  Category: Movies&TV

I finally got around to watching Garden State. Wow, I’d totally gotten this movie wrong. When I first saw the trailers for it, I figured it was some kind of irreverent comedy. And for the first few minutes, when I realised it was Zach Braff (the Scrubs guy), I thought that was my confirmation. I was way-off. It was definitely a comedy, but it was surprisingly serious. The way he wanted to feel emotional turmoil was really actually quite poignant. It’s strange to realise how a calm emotion-less face can convey such strong emotion. And the music soundtrack was great… I’ve already ordered the CD. Then I get to the end, and realise not only did he star in it - he was the writer and director. Wow. And that concludes my year old movie review of the day

skippy

Wednesday, Jul 27. 2005  –  Category: Code, OpenSolaris

so i’ve been using skippy for a while now on my Linux laptop. i read on [moinak's]( http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/moinakg?entry=whenthetaskbarisnot) blog that he had to make a slight modification for Solaris… turns out this isn’t necessary under Xfce since Xfce supports the XGrabKey call.

only problem is that skippy doesn’t support Xsun’s xinerama extension. doh. i make a quick hack to wrap the Xorg Xinerama extensions, and now it works great!

you can grab my skippy-0.5.0.Xsun.tar.gz tarball and try it out. i’ve tested it on Solaris 10/SPARC under Xfce.

switchin’ to xfce

Wednesday, Jul 27. 2005  –  Category: Computers, OpenSolaris

alright. i tried. i realy did. maybe JDS/Gnome on S10/x86 is faster/more stable. i dunno. but after having gnome-terminal hang on me and losing a build for like the 10th time, i give up.

pkg-get -i xfce4

yes. i switched my sparc workstation (a SunBlade 2000, so definitely not a shabby machine) to XFCE, and it’s so much snappier. i also switched back to good ‘ol xterm. i’m still a GNOME fan (running it on my laptop with FC3 right now), but it’s just slow on SPARC. nothing major, but little collective lags here and there that you don’t really notice until you try something faster.

that, and having all your gnome-terminals freeze on you just sucks. the whole one-process thing is not that hot when it hangs. (and yes, i know about –disable-factory, but then it takes like 3-5 seconds to start a new terminal, and that’s just lame).

libgtop on Solaris 10

Monday, Jul 25. 2005  –  Category: Code, OpenSolaris, OpenSource

If you are trying to compile libgtop on Solaris 10, you will notice that a bunch of the sysdeps/solaris files won’t compile, specifically sem_limits.c, shm_limits.c, and msg_limits.c. You’ll probably see errours about shminfo, etc. etc.

This is because many of these interfaces were unstable and obsoleted in Solaris 10 in favour of the (much better) rctladm interfaces. In short, you can get use getrctl to get those interfaces now.

You can read some forum msgs on dbForums regarding it.

or look at the Solaris 10 Tunable Parameters Reference Manual for a complete list of what was obsoleted.

I’ve made a patch to libgtop-2.8.3 which should fix this (it does for me, anyway). As usual - this is not an official Sun-endorsed patch in any way, form, shape, blah blah blah. Your mileage may vary.

Sun Ultra 20 Workstation

Friday, Jul 22. 2005  –  Category: Musings

Sun Ultra 20 Workstation

hrghghghhh… employee discount pricing was finally put up for the Ultra 20.

…

[captain kirk voice]

must…resist…buying….ultra…20…

[/captain kirk voice]

Bill Joy knocked as ‘conspiracy theorist’ by tech zealot | The Register

Friday, Jul 22. 2005  –  Category: Quotage

Bill Joy knocked as ‘conspiracy theorist’ by tech zealot | The Register

Joy, partaking in an AlwaysOn 2005 Innovation Summit panel discussion entitled “Is technology making us safer?”, went on to say global warming and pandemics like Asian bird flue can only be solved using strong public policy.

“Political constipation” and partisanship in Washington meant Non Government Organizations (NGOs) are better placed to tackle these issues, Joy said.

Interesting article at The Register. I would have liked to have heard the debate, or at least read the transcript. Gilder’s counterpoint to Joy’s push for better public-policy & NGO involvement was to say: “What worries me is people today who are worried about global warming. We have these real phobias that distract our attention. The best remedy for Bill’s threat is very fast advances in bio engineering and pharmacology, and an array of scientific advances,” Gilder observed.”

While I agree that advances in bioengineering/pharmacology/science-in-general can help some things like the avian flu/global warming/etc… it’s not the complete solution. We can’t rely on a steady stream of advances. Scientific genius and progress is not always dependable.

We need public policy to try and decrease our emissions to stop the increase in global warming. But we also need science/tech advancement. The two have to go hand in hand. We need pharmacology to help figure out exactly how the avian flu spread to humans, and we need public policy to ensure it doesn’t happen again. (okay, that’s slightly generalising the problem - but you get my picture)

our recent crime wave…and debating with my councilmember

Friday, Jul 22. 2005  –  Category: Musings

my neighbourhood has been hit by a recent crime wave that’s getting really out of hand. some of the recent problems:

• 100+ cars had their windows shot out by 3 idiots with BB guns, and way too much time on their hands
• two neighbours robbed at gunpoint, one of them in front of her own house
• countless cars stolen (i recall at least 6)
• people shooting guns

a bunch of us have been petitioning our councilmember, Jean Quan to do something. if you read the Oakland Tribune article above, you can see her quote:

“It doesn’t appear to be a crime wave statistically,” she said. “I just think awareness is up.”

oh. my mistake. our awareness is just up. that’s all. does this mean that this crime is not any different from previous crime. was i just unaware of the last time 100 cars in my neighbourhood were shot up? was i just oblivious the last time my neighbours were held up at gunpoint?

this is getting ridiculous and out of hand. in an email exchange i had with the councilmember asking to get more frequent police patrols in the neighbourhood temporarily, her answer was:

we will begin to get new officers out of the academy in the fall and through the next two years the number of police will increase.

uh. great. that does NOTHING for me now. i’ll be sure to politely ask all the thieves holding my neighbours up at gunpoint, shooting guns on my street, stealing cars, and damaging our neighbourhood’s property to please come back again in the fall, or better yet… in 2 years time.

audioscrobbler

Thursday, Jul 21. 2005  –  Category: Music, OpenSource

following geoff, i installed the rhythmbox plugin for audioscrobbler.

you can check out my user page and see what kind of trash i’m listening to at work.

isis, hard at work

Thursday, Jul 21. 2005  –  Category: Pets, Photos

eric took a couple photos of Isis yesterday at our NUMA/Autobahn meeting. Given that we have so much work to do, and not enough engineers, Isis kindly volunteered to take on some work. After all… 1 dog-month = 7 people/programmer months!