my last week of bachelorhood

Monday, Apr 30. 2007  –  Category: OpenSolaris

as my officemate esaxe predicted, my last week of bachelorhood has snuck up on me. i now find myself analysing every little thing i do.

yesterday was my last sunday as a single person.

this morning was my last monday commute as a single person.

tangentially, this morning was the (hopefully) last time i’ll have locked myself out of my office by losing my key…. as a single person. which explains why i have time to post this blog entry. ;)

so i’ll soon be off. i’ll be working up through wednesday and then taking a couple of days off to scramble around and do last minute wedding stuff before the big day on saturday. i think we’ve got pretty much everything taken care off. wendy spent this last weekend finishing up the programs and menus while i packed up the living room and kitchen so we can have our kitchen remodelled while we’re gone.

this last week has been somewhat hectic what with trying to plan the kitchen remodel, making sure our honeymoon is all arranged… and oh yeah - that wedding ceremony thing.

i’m hoping for things to go smoothly. come saturday night, i’ll be a married (and undoubtedly tired) man. sunday will be filled with more packing, and then we’re off on monday for 3 weeks of vacation. i’m looking forward to it :)

on the road to 100% openness

Thursday, Apr 26. 2007  –  Category: OpenSolaris

glad to see john is making some progress in the emancipation project.

i don’t think people realise how important this project is to the long-term future of OpenSolaris. as long as we have closed binaries, even the minimal (1 on x86, 2 on sparc) set, we won’t be a completely open source project. john’s work to remove the libc_i18n.a closed binary build requirement will make OpenSolaris completely 100% open source for x86. (the second requirement on sparc is the sparc disassembler).

so bookmark john’s blog and track his progress and give him a cheer every now and then.

priorities

Wednesday, Apr 25. 2007  –  Category: OpenSolaris

i’m getting married in 10 days…

… so why is it that all my thoughts are instead consumed with SCM Migration, the Sun internal misconceptions of the Solaris/OpenSolaris relationship (which i need to blog about), and the Community/Project reclassification/reorganisation proposal I’m trying to guide … ?

sigh. i love my job, i love my work - but jeez, i think i need a break.

we went to meet with our DJ tonight, and one of the songs that we’ve requested he play is Queen & David Bowie’s “Under Pressure”, a song i swear i can hear softly playing as my background music every waking hour this past week.

10 days.

nosy beagle

Monday, Apr 23. 2007  –  Category: Pets

this is hands down my favourite photo of Isis i’ve taken yet:

OpenSolaris/Solaris on Sony VAIO TX

Sunday, Apr 22. 2007  –  Category: OpenSolaris

I just recently got a new laptop, a Sony Vaio TX - and have found that it supports OpenSolaris quite nicely… specifically, I’ve installed builds 60 and 62 of Solaris Express Community Edition and have been really happy with it.

Discounting the whole Vista/GRUB fight (many thanks to moinak for his blog entries walking through how to get that up)

So here’s a brief run down of what works and what doesn’t work:

  • Wireless: Yes, using the soon-to-be-released wpi driver for the Intel 3945ABG mini-PCIe card. No, you can’t just replace it with an Atheros, since this machine uses the mini-PCIe (PCI Express) bus.
  • Speedstep: Yes, frkit’s powernow driver seems to support it quite well cycling between 1.33ghz, 1ghz, and 800mhz (I get about 4.5-5 hours under Solaris)
  • X: Yes. Initially I wasn’t able to get it to work until I got a prototype agpgart driver from the guys in ERI (should be integrating soon) that adds support for the i945GMS card in this laptop. This allows the X i810 driver to allocate more than 8 megs of RAM. Once I got that up, I noticed X defaulted to 1368×768, which gives a 2 pixel pan and scan horizontally - but 1366×768 is a supported resolution, so it was just a simple matter of going to the Screen Resolution Properties and changing back to 1366×768.
  • External video out: Yes, had to add the following two lines to my i810 “Device” section: 
    Option          "MonitorLayout" "CRT,LFP"
Option          "Clone" "true"

Here are the things that don’t work:

  • Internal SD/memory stick memory card reader. There is a Linux driver, and a prototype (non-functional) BSD driver.
  • Bluetooth
  • Wireless WAN (though I hear it’s just a USB modem, so maybe… who knows. I don’t use Sprint, so I don’t really care)
  • The Fn controls. This is problematic in that two of them control the LCD brightness. Up until last night I thought the only way to change the brightness would be to boot into Vista and do it, which is really tedious. Last night I realised that an easier (but still annoying) method is to boot into the AV/DVD player mode, and change the brightness from there before booting into Solaris. Like I said, still annoying - but manageable. There is a Linux driver that adds support for those controls which hook into ACPI; unfortunately, we’d have to reverse-engineer it cleanly since that driver is GPLd.

The screen brightness is a tad annoying - but I can live with it since I don’t change the brightness that often. I’ve been really stoked with this laptop… 5 hours of battery life with a 2.8 pound laptop is great… this thing is heaps better and nicer to commute with than the Ferrari 4000 I previously had.

marsh-ed?

Tuesday, Apr 17. 2007  –  Category: Musings, Pets, Sun, Travel

i’ve always wondered where the origin of the word swamped came from (as in “i’m so swamped with work”). why not marshed? i notice swamped does share some commonality with bogged, as in “i’m bogged down”.

but anyway, i digress.

i’m swamped, bogged, marshed, whatever…

the SCM Migration Project is predictably going slower than we planned. on the plus side, i’m seeing lots of interest from other engineers - but we haven’t been getting the internal resources we’d hoped for, so for now it’s primarily me, richlowe, and kupfer plowing ahead. we’ve picked up a couple guys from ERI that should help.

of course, the other major thing on my plate at the moment is my very-very-upcoming wedding (18 days!!!), so my days are oft filled with wedding errands and such.

so of course, with all this stuff going on in our lives… wendy and i thought it would be best to …. remodel our kitchen. a combination of a decent tax refund, and the realisation that the one-month estimate to remodel our kitchen (during which our house would be a disaster) coincided nicely with the one month of time we would be taking for our honeymoon and vacation. so now we’re rushing about trying to secure contractors, and get permits in the two weeks before we leave.

i feel like our lives our pure chaos right now. on the one hand, it’s hectic, crazy, and i’m getting crappy anxiety-ridden nights of sleep. but on the other hand, i’m really starting to appreciate the small quiet moments… like the 8 minutes i took after the electrician left today during which i just laid out on the sofa/futon with one beagle slumped across my feet and the other splayed out next to me resting her head on my chest. within 45 seconds, both were snoring. those 7 minutes and 15 seconds of blissful peace (i won’t say quiet, since they were filled with the snores of two hound dogs) and doing nothing but vegging felt great.

links for 2007-04-17

Tuesday, Apr 17. 2007  –  Category: Linkage

a look back in time…

Friday, Apr 6. 2007  –  Category: OpenSolaris

Over lunch today, I thought back to a blog posting I made almost two years ago… clearly before I joined the OpenSolaris team:

http://whacked.net/2004/05/02/open-source-solaris/

Reading it now, I can’t help but laugh.

“anyway, from my near-peon position down as an MTS2 in sun, i just can’t see the technological or business advantages of open sourcing/GPL’ing Solaris.”

well, I still can’t see the advantage of GPL’ing it - but boy was I totally wrong on the open source part.

Deskbar SWAN handlers

Wednesday, Apr 4. 2007  –  Category: OpenSolaris, Sun

I wrote a couple of Deskbar handlers that I find incredibly useful in my day to day use at work on the SWAN. The first, Monaco simply adds a handler to open a bugID on Monaco. The second, NameX, does a query against the namex database to quickly lookup a user in the employee database to get their extension.

links for 2007-04-03

Tuesday, Apr 3. 2007  –  Category: Linkage

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