links for 2006-12-31

Sunday, Dec 31. 2006  –  Category: Linkage

flying beagles

Thursday, Dec 28. 2006  –  Category: OpenSolaris

… well maybe not quite flying, but their ears were definitely flapping pretty hard in the wind. i took the dogs over to Pt. Isabel yesterday and today. i took a few photos yesterday, but then got turned back quickly by the cold, the insane wind, and more importantly…. a dying battery. we returned today with hat, gloves, a hot cup of coffee, and a fully charged battery.

armed with my new 2GB SD card, i took 130 photos over a 1 hour walk. the D80 definitely lets you get some great action shots. i was able to whittle it down to 91 photos. at this rate, i’m definitely going to need to add storage to grommit.. or maybe i should just stop taking so many photos at 10 megapixels.

anyway, here are some of the highlight photos:

links for 2006-12-28

Thursday, Dec 28. 2006  –  Category: Linkage

would you? could you?

Tuesday, Dec 26. 2006  –  Category: Musings

goddamn

now that’s just pure motherly instinct. “would you” and “could you” thoughts aside for the moment… could you even physically react that fast?

i’d like to think i could, and i would. but wow. that story just got me on so many levels: sorrow, joy, and awe.

…. i don’t believe in heaven, but if i did – you know she’s there.

i do believe in karma, and that mother just got a lifetime of good karma for her sacrifice.

of all the……

Thursday, Dec 21. 2006  –  Category: Pets

sigh.

char-siu’s separation anxiety is definitely getting worse. i think we’re going to call in some professional help.

of all the things the beagles had to find…. why did it have to be the peanut butter? and of all the places they had to eat it…. why did it have to be our bed??

i suppose i should back up. sometime in between wendy and i leaving for work (~7am) and me coming home (~6pm), char-siu managed to get into the fridge.

between the two dogs, they managed to get the following out of the fridge:

  • dried mushrooms (easy to cleanup)
  • ramen & soup base (fairly easy to cleanup)
  • garlic (easy to cleanup, but smelly)
  • a pitcher of tea (messy, but easy)
  • peanut butter (@#)%(@#)(%@#)(%)
  • garlic butter spread (just as fun to cleanup)
  • 3 raw eggs (how?!?!? the egg shelf is like 4 feet high!!)

having got all this bounty… eating in the kitchen the tile laminate floor wasn’t enough… oh no… they’re very territorial with their food, they always take their treats to separate rooms to eat. which is how we got peanut butter in the bed, along with garlic butter spread, and 1 egg. the living room was blessed with 2 eggs, and a bunch of ramen. and the kitchen had the rest scattered around.

anyway, what do you usually do after a huge buffet bounty? that’s right. it’s bathroom time.

again, the kitchen tile floor wasn’t good enough. let’s find the bathmat instead.

on top of that, one of the beagles managed to push over a chair and jump from the chair to the piano… and scratch the surface of the piano…… the very expensive $30-$35k piano. so that’s probably gonna be like $500-$700 to repair the finish.

sigh.

the two of them are cowering in fear under the piano in the corner of the living room right now because they can tell how seething furious i am with them.

[update: at alan’s suggestion, here’s the IRC log where i relayed all this to (a very off-topic) #opensolaris: 

(18:49:37) stevel: sigh
(18:49:45) stevel: of all the things my beagles had to find, why did it have to be the peanut butter
(18:49:54) stevel: and of all the places they had to eat it.... why did it have to be my bed
(18:50:40) Tpenta: ROFL
(18:51:33) Tpenta: could have been worse
(18:51:40) Tpenta: it could have happened while you were away
(18:51:47) gisburn: no
(18:52:12) stevel: tpenta: it did... happened today while i was out
(18:52:17) gisburn: s/beagle/komodo dragons/ would be worse since they would've picked a deer
instead of the peanut butter.
(18:52:19) stevel: they got into the fridge
(18:53:02) Tpenta: oh dear
(18:53:06) stevel: got the dried mushrooms, leftover stinky tofu (that one is fun to cleanup),
a pitcher of tea, garlic, peanut butter, garlic butter spread (that one's fun too), 3 eggs, and
a bunch of packets of ramen
(18:53:12) Tpenta: and it's not really wash the sheets and hang them out to dry weather
(18:53:22) stevel: thankfully we have a drier
(18:53:34) stevel: s/drier/dryer/
(18:53:57) stevel: ... and then to top it off, they decided that eating all this newfound 
bounty in the kitchen wasn't enough
(18:54:02) stevel: they had to take it into various rooms of the house
(18:54:03) gisburn: stevel: seriouly: the beagles ate the garlic ?
(18:54:15) stevel: how the @#)$(@#$ does a beagle carry a *raw egg to another room
and then decide to bite into it
(18:54:36) richlowe: stevel: carefully.
(18:54:54) stevel: and one of them somehow managed to tip a chair over, jump from there
to the fireplace mantle, and then from there onto the top of our piano
(18:55:06) stevel: so he's left scratches all over the piano
(18:55:08) gisburn: stevel: instinct. Our cats do the same. Even the dragon puppies I raised
did the same - grab foodm drag it into an edge and swallow it there.
(18:55:27) stevel: which, btw, is a $35,000 piano.  so that's gonna be probably about
$500-$700 to repair the finish on that
(18:55:38) richlowe: ouch.
(18:55:39) gisburn: ugh
(18:55:52) stevel: and of course... what do dogs do after they eat and drink too much?
(18:56:01) stevel: poop and pee.... 
(18:56:08) stevel: again, the kitchen wasn't good enough for that
(18:56:14) stevel: no no... they had to go on the bathmat instead
(18:56:20) Tpenta: yea, I have two dogs. this is the reason we have vinyl downstairs now
instead of carpet
(18:56:28) Tpenta: the cat goes in the bath
(18:56:49) Tpenta: steve this is blog material man
(18:56:57) richlowe: oh yeah.
(18:57:17) gisburn: stevel: please blog it.
(18:57:21) gisburn: steleman_: with photos
(18:57:26) gisburn: LOTS of photos
(18:57:57) stevel: i've already cleaned up most of it, but i can take photos of the scratches
(18:58:12) stevel: and i can take photos of the two of them hiding in the corner of the living
room underneath the piano cause they can tell i'm f-ing pissed at them

disabling verizon evdo

Thursday, Dec 21. 2006  –  Category: Musings

I moved offices recently, and noticed some serious deficiency in my cell phone, both in charge and in coverage…. I noticed my battery drained considerably quicker, and would run out around 2pm (despite an overnight charge) when it was normally good for at least a day and a half. And a lot of my calls would cut in and out and then drop.

I flipped it open and watched the signal strength. It would start at 1 bar, after a few seconds, go up to 2 bars, after a few more seconds, go up to 3 bars, and then after about 5 seconds it would go to 4 bars, which usually means pretty high strength. What was peculiar was that I then saw it switch from 1xRTT (older/slower data communications) to EVDO (Verizon’s high speed data), at which point it would drop back down to 0 bars.

After some Googling, I tried disabling EVDO on my phone and that seems to have solved it so far. I’m getting a consistent strong 3/4 bar signal in 1xRTT mode (which is fine, since I don’t use the EVDO data rate anyway). Hopefully this is a good long term solution while I’m stuck in my Verizon contract.

gman in the house!

Monday, Dec 18. 2006  –  Category: OpenSolaris

… or board, rather…

according to the preliminary election results, it looks like our very own good ‘ol gman has been voted into the GNOME Foundation Board.

step 1 of our* insiduous plan to take over the world has been completed

* opensolaris.org’s insiduous plan… not Sun Microsystem’s

new camera!

Monday, Dec 18. 2006  –  Category: Musings, Pets, Photos

we got a new camera over the weekend… the Nikon D80.

it’s been fun playing with my first DSLR… of course, the first photos i took were of the beagles. i’m particularly happy with this shot of the two dogs sharing a bed.

on saturday night we headed into the city with wendy’s cousin and nephew to have dinner and walk around Union Square and check out the Christmas madness (we BARTed in, not wanting to participate in the Christmas madness occurring on the Bay Bridge), and then on sunday we had a winter bbq (on a gloriously sunny day) with wendy’s family.

both opportunities gave me chances to play with the camera :)

so far i’m loving it… it’s a wicked camera.

scm migration (teamware is dead, long live mercurial… and svn… and teamware…)

Thursday, Dec 14. 2006  –  Category: OpenSolaris

the project i’ve been working on recently is the SCM Migration project, which encompasses the SCM Migration efforts for ON; though it’s hoped that tools/extensions/etc. that we develop can and will be utilised by other software groups.

here are some of the areas that i hope to cover with our project:

  1. conversion of Teamware workspaces to Mercurial repositories
  2. conversion of onnv-gate to Mercurial
  3. conversion of ON development tools to support Mercurial

#2 has partly been achieved via #1. unfortunately, my tools for #1 are pretty tied to ON at the moment. i’d started playing around with writing additional code to genericise my tools to convert any Teamware workspace, but set it aside to work on #3. i’d like to get back to it when we finish some of the more pressing issues though.

#3 is my current primary focus, and is kind of interesting. it encompasses a lot of things actually. a lot of consolidations other than ON, and a lot of individuals use ON tools such as nightly, webrev, wx, etc. one problem we’ve had is code for doing checks, now live in tons of different places (independent tools like cstyle.pl, aggregate tool enhancements like wx, and CRT advocate tools like wsck). one of my goals is to common-ize all these checks into Python modules. we can then write wrappers to call them individually (ala cstyle.py), or call them as inline Python from Mercurial extensions (i.e.: for developer & gate-side Mercurial repository hooks).

richlowe, dmarker, and i have started poking around, filing bugs, and porting code. so far we’ve made progress on cstyle, comments-checking, and copyright checking.

linus on copyrights and closed-source binary kernel modules

Thursday, Dec 14. 2006  –  Category: OpenSolaris

linus had a great post today. my favourite paragraph:

There’s a big difference between “copy” and “use”. It’s exatcly the same issue whether it’s music or code. You can’t re-distribute other peoples music (becuase it’s their copyright), but they shouldn’t put limits on how you personally use it (because it’s your life).

Same goes for code. Copyright is about distribution, not about use. We shouldn’t limit how people use the code.

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