that’s whacked

danger. you are stupid. you have been warned.

Saturday, Jan 28. 2006  –  Category: Musings

we English-speaking people often like to make fun of foreign (usually Asian) countries’ poor grammar or poor choice of words. so it was heartening to see a good ‘ol fashioned perfectly worded English label:

WARNING: EXPLOSIVE. DO NOT HOLD IN HANDS

i mean, it can’t get any more clear than that right?

but… but… the firecracker vendor said hold it in my hands and light it.

sigh. it was such a dilemma. was this a nice sparkler that i could hold in my hands and twirl like a kid with a lollipop? or was it going to be a rocket that would blow my hand off.

i mean, should i take heed of the ALL-CAPITAL LETTER warning, which someone had clearly gone to good effort to word in such a way that it could not be misinterpreted in any way whatsoever? or should i follow the advice of a 14 or 15 year old kid who sold it to me, tossed me a lighter, pointed vaguely at the booth next door and said “safe”, and then disinterestedly turned back to his drink (apparently he meant i should go to the beach BEHIND the booth, where it would be safe to light said firework).

of course i lit it.

the trepidation was only slightly alleviated by the thought that i had death and dismemberment insurance. of course it was slightly tempered by the thought that surely they wouldn’t award me dismemberment insurance if i lost it lighting a firecracker whilst holding it in my hand.

Happy (White-Washed) Chinese New Year…

Saturday, Jan 28. 2006  –  Category: Food, Musings

It’s always been interesting for me around Chinese events like Chinese New Year, or Qing Ming (literally ‘grave sweeping’ where people go to visit their ancestor’s graves to pay respects; our family goes to Toronto where my grandmother is buried).

I’m one of many ABC’s (American Born Chinese) I know, though technically (and patriotically) I claim myself as a BBC (British Born Chinese) with an ABC culture and upbringing.

Anyway, I’ve always liked how strong a role family plays in Chinese culture. Our families believe very strongly that our ancestors watch out for us, and that honouring them will bring good fortune/luck. One aspect of this which I’ve always wondered about is honouring ancestors with food. We do this on both New Years and Qing Ming, when our family lays out a veritable banquet feast in front of my grandmother’s grave, and all my cousins, uncles, aunts, etc. stand around in the cold Canadian springtime staring (and inwardly drooling) at all the hot steaming food getting cold while we wait and pray/pay respects. I’m never really sure what we’re waiting for exactly.

So I’m conflicted. I mean… sure, waiting a few hours for food is a small price to pay to make sure my super kung-fu great-great-great-grandfather has got my spiritual back. But at the same time… do spirits really need real-world food?

I know if I were a spirit, watching over future generations of little stevel’s (perish the thought), I would send a message saying “you know what… you spent hours slaving over that feast…. not to mention the two hours waiting in line at 99 Ranch picking up the huge roast pig… go ahead, eat up. I’ll grab leftovers”. In fact, I’m going to write that down in my will…

“Future Lau’s, when you gather together to pay respects and honour your ancestors. Go ahead, take a little bite before praying. I know you’re all hungry, and at the same time I can’t say I speak for your other ancestors – but I’ll let you go ahead and eat my share instead.”

I’m going to start a revolution in Chinese celebration….

Kstats & OpenGrok Toolbar

Friday, Jan 27. 2006  –  Category: OpenSolaris

(this is an update of my post from yesterday)

I putback my wad this morning that moves Kstat.pm, and its build dependencies (ac, fhc, environ, envctrl, simmstat, and sysctrl) from usr/closed to usr/src, so that should be available in our next source drop.

chandan posted my OpenGrok Toolbar Firefox extension I wrote that allows for querying the cvs.opensolaris.org OpenGrok source browser, as well as b.o.o. I like to keep my search engine plugin on Google, and I use cvs.opensolaris.org enough that it was worth having a separate toolbar for, so here it is. You can download it from the OpenGrok Files Downloads section.

pkgs, kstats, sunfire, and more…

Thursday, Jan 26. 2006  –  Category: OpenSolaris

a roundup of my status for the week…

the packaging tools source cleanup has gone well. i’m pretty much done, and just processing code review feedback. i need to send it to the Install gate guys for review and get their feedback as well. bonnie and i are hopeful for a mid-February release.

i’ve got a wad ready to go back that moves the Perl Kstat modules to the open tree. this is a fairly major component that has been missing, so i’ll be glad to get this (and the pkg tools!) source out there. part of the build-time dependencies for Kstat involved me having to move a bunch of the sunfire platform code (usr/src/uts/sun4u/sunfire) to open as well. so for all of you who have been waiting desperately for the environmental control source, they’ll soon be available.

i found one bug in my Teamware->SVN bridge which killed my server when a putback consisted only of renames, and no updates/creates. this has been fixed, and it’s back in place processing ONNV putbacks. i’m not sure what the status is for this and how soon we can get our read-only SVN repository out on opensolaris.org…

i’ve also got my OpenGrok Firefox toolbar ready to go. chandan kindly made me a bugs icon, and I think it’s ready for release. i even got all the legal approvals.. just waiting for one review before i post it in the OpenGrok community.

neat photo zoom effect

Monday, Jan 23. 2006  –  Category: Musings

i added a kind of neat photo zoom effect for the recent photos block in my sidebar. okay, i think i’m done mucking around with my blog for the weekend now…. and now back to your regularly scheduled OpenSolaris (aka: real) work.

new blog look/theme

Sunday, Jan 22. 2006  –  Category: Musings

i installed a new theme (WPAndreas07), and heavily modified it. i wasn’t happy with how cluttered my previous sidebar was getting, and i like the minimal/clean feel of WPAndreas07. however, it didn’t have the blogroll/categories/archives/etc. that i liked, so i hacked it up to have “foldable” (maybe collapsible is the better term) menus for those. i also wrote a quick “recent photos” bit of php that gives a compact view of my recent additions in my photo gallery which i quite like.

one thing i still need to do is make my own header graphic as the default (that pink flower) doesn’t really fit in with the colour scheme i decided upon.

okay, i made my new graphic. i’m still not sure about it… let me know what you think.

SXCR b30 is live

Friday, Jan 20. 2006  –  Category: OpenSolaris

Solaris Express Community Release build 30 (snv_30) just got legal approval to be pushed. Unfortunately, I don’t have access to update the links on the Downloads page – and I don’t know if Karyn or Derek will be around this weekend to update the links, so I’ll paste them here.

DVD

CD

enjoy!

some status

Friday, Jan 20. 2006  –  Category: OpenSolaris

i’m too drained (not sure whether it’s from being tired, or from having half my blood sucked out by mosquitos) to think of a creative title.

i’m pretty happy with the state of the Teamware->Subversion bridge i’ve made. it’s been processing all the onnv-gate putbacks for the past week without any hiccups whatsoever. i checked out a workspace from my SVN repository and was able to build succesfully (finding and filing a small bug in the dodatadm Makefile in the process, 6374221) from it. so things are looking good for getting a read-only Subversion up and mirrouring onnv-gate soon.

i’m also happy with the delivery stuff. i can make an entire delivery with one command now, so i’m hoping to publish 32 on tuesday. we’ll probably still be at one week deliveries for a while until we get Alan Hargreave’s work back in. i just need to muck with my delivery script to create a nicer looking downloads page, since the raw web server file directory listing output kinda sucks.

and i think i just finished the first part of code cleanup on the packaging tools. just sent it off for code review… i should have more of a status update on this when i hear back from people.

blog upgrade

Wednesday, Jan 18. 2006  –  Category: Musings

i upgraded my blog to wordpress 2.0

so far so good. that was a very painless upgrade.

buld 31 done! (opensol-20060118)

Tuesday, Jan 17. 2006  –  Category: OpenSolaris

i just uploaded the latest delivery… 2006-01-18. it’s the 18th here where i am in taiwan, so for a limited time only (3 hours if you’re on the west coast), you can be running a build from the future.

anyway, the downloads page is going to be rewhacked by Bonnie, and i don’t have access to update the links at the moment – so this entry is going to probably be the sole pointer to the new delivery until we get that page updated.

you can download build 31 here

there are a few notable changes, namely the delivery process is significantly more automated now. also please note the opensolaris- prefix has changed to on- to reflect the fact that opensolaris is larger than ON now

also, i uploaded the changelog (a nice HTML formatted version w/ full putback comments + files updated), as well as a putbacks list of just the raw CR/PSARC ids that were putback (thanks to Rich Lowe for that suggestion).

enjoy!