The Mandelbear's Musings

07:43 pm - Notes from $work

My performance review yesterday seemed to go pretty well. No numbers until $boss goes to $grandboss and things grind through the mill, but... On average, my income has not kept up with inflation; I don't expect that to change. $boss had some good suggestions about my next project; it's starting to come together into something coherent. And useful, which is always good.

There was a group in the lunchroom this afternoon (or maybe it was yesterday; everything runs together these days) discussing code readability. Somebody remarked that my Perl code always looks like I expected it to be read by somebody else. I responded that I know damned well that when it comes back to me in a year or so, I'll be somebody else.

... but that doesn't always help. Our form-handling system was written nearly a decade ago, by $boss.previous, on top of an old version of the world's third-ugliest programming language. Which, to my lasting embarassment, I designed. (Aside: PIA is basically a stripped-down Lisp with XML syntax. HTML, in the beta version. Just for comparison, the fourth ugliest language is INTERCAL. Trust me, you don't want to meet ATLAS or the Advantest IC tester language (the name of which I have mercifully forgotten) which are in second and first place respectively. Syntax by H.P.Lovecraft; architecture by Sarah Winchester. There are things you're better off not knowing.)

Anyway, our intrepid system administrator was trying to get it running on a modern Linux box so he could pull out the historical records. M. is fscking brilliant (fluent in five or six languages, degree in CS, ...) but let's face it: mouldering code, dead language, written by people who should have known better... Took us about an hour to find both places where an absolute pathname was hard-coded in. Just because it was my own stupid design didn't mean I remembered it: thank goodness for find, grep, and man.

Could probably have done it in half the time if it'd been me at the keyboard. Nice to know that, even with my brain mostly turned to mush from old age and chronic caffeine addiction, I can still out-debug a bright young whippersnapper half my age.

Current Mood: geeky

01:56 pm - TANSTAAFL

Went out for a business lunch at the Bombay Oven -- tasty, inexpensive Indian buffet. Unfortunately the company isn't paying for the parking ticket...

The really stupid part is that I saw the sign, it just didn't register that today was the first Wednesday of the month, and therefore one of the two days when I couldn't park on that side of the street.

11:00 pm - The fires of Beltane

Note to my friends: this is a much happier post than the one I'm glad I didn't finish this morning. Things are well with me. Thank you for your patience. (/me waves cheerfully at those who have had the most to put up with from me over the last couple of weeks.)

Yesterday and today had a distinct feeling of transition; many things have become clearer in my mind, and I've started putting them into practice. Events have converged, and emotional uphevals have been processed. Things are different. The ghosts are gone, as they should be, and a few hours after the April finally left the planet by way of the International Date Line I felt as though a weight had lifted from my heart. The fires of Beltane have done their work, burning away the last of the old year's dead leaves and fallen branches.

Spring is here, and by some ways of reckoning it's the New Year. Wherever you place that mark on the calendar, I hope that the fires of this Beltane have burned away your sorrows, and that the year to come brings you joy and contentment.

08:16 am - Sleepless in San Jose

Woke at maybe 2am and had trouble getting back to sleep. Brain wouldn't shut up. I'm reassessing some things, mainly about travel. (The flower_cat told her doctor about our zoo trip and he immediately wrote out a prescription for a wheelchair. His only questions were height, weight, and folding. But that's just part of it, and not even the hard part.)

About 4am the Cat woke as well; we took turns sleeping in a close embrace until the alarm went off at 6:30. Normally we can't sleep that way; I think it was just the exhaustion that made it possible. She said as I got up that I didn't even snore. She's sleeping soundly now.

Got up with my nose congested and my throat dry; I'm probably coming down with something. Make that have come down with something.

There are dry-runs all this week at work for a major technical review next week; today's is at 9am, which is an unusual starting hour for our normally laid-back California Research Center. They've also completed the process of moving the administrative staff into the offices next door, and swapping suite numbers. Starting today they'll be keeping our door locked, since there's nobody to watch it.

It'll be a little good deal less convenient, but since my office is only a few steps from the door, I was always the one who got tapped when nobody was at the front desk. So that's a win.

Every silver lining has a cloud around it, though, and right now my life is distinctly overcast.

05:21 pm - Transitions

Got home about 45 minutes ago from a retirement party at work. Peter Hart is retiring as Lab Director and CEO; it'll take three people (Lab Director, Executive VP, and President) to replace him. Four once he resigns as Chairman of the Board, which hopefully won't happen for a while. (The incoming President is Japanese, and will only be on-site part time; the Exec VP and Lab Director will do most of the hands-on work. But still...)

The party was fun -- a Japanese buffet lunch (I am feeling particularly well-fed), champagne for a toast, short speeches, and a filksong (not mine) that took advantage of the fact that "Peter Hart" scans to "Spider Man". No, you probably don't want to hear it.

Got home early, because when the incoming Lab Director waves at you in the parking lot and says "See you tomorrow" it's safe to take that as a strong hint.

07:48 pm - All-in-all a pretty good day

A nice walk at lunchtime, and it looks as though $BOSS is going to buy off on my latest idea for a "research" project. I put "research" in quotes because what I actually seem to do is come up with ideas and build infrastructure that my coworkers can use to do things more traditionally thought of as research. Sort of like the people who design particle accelerators and electron microscopes.

My title is "chief software scientist". It really means "ageing hacker"; I figure that if you have to put "scientist" in the name of your field, you probably aren't one. Dad was a chemist. (On the other hand, his sub-field was spectroscopy, so he was primarily an instrument-builder too. Family tradition, along with folk music, computers and science fiction. *Sigh* -- he would have enjoyed the wedding.)

Left work a little early so that I could meet Colleen and the kids at Kobe, our usual sushi boat place. Emmy's grades came in over the weekend and weren't anywhere near good enough to earn a reward, but we were already planning on sushi for her 16th birthday, so that took precedence.

I'll be leaving shortly to take the Wolfling to school for her HTML final - it was a self-paced class, but there's a written final tonight. I'll be back 9:30-ish; there's no reason to spend 40 extra minutes driving when I could be spending it reading.

08:38 am - Balance

Here's wishing a happy -- or at least a calm -- Equinox to those who mark it. It seems like a good day to talk about balance.

My life, like my finances, has been significantly out of balance for years. Things are starting to find a new equilibrium, though sometimes I feel like I've finally gotten it all together just in time to be forgetting where I put it.

Things like blog reading and IM usage are still a bit of a problem -- I always tend to do the fun stuff first -- but I'm trying to limit them and have been mostly successful. This week, anyway.

Financially, it's too early to say for sure, but I may have finally gotten both the Cat and I interested in setting up a household budget. Suggestions for Linux programs or locally-installable web applications will be gratefully accepted. (The ones I know about from "apt-cache search budget" on Ubuntu are grisbi, homebank, and equonimize; haven't had a chance to look at any of them.)

I may have been the only one to notice that last night's selection of cheeses was smaller than usual.

Balance plays a part in conversation, too. Last night's geekish conversation in the office was marked by comparatively little of it; people were more intent on making their own points -- repeatedly -- than in noting their areas of agreement and disagreement and moving on to something more interesting. Yes, scanning, printing, and vector drawing programs in Linux are broken. You really only have to say that once. Yes, human interface studies and guidelines are important. But if you dumb things down to match what your study has determined to be the "average" user's expectations, you leave off what may be a surprisingly long tail of users who aren't average and weren't included in your pitifully small study. (It's my blog -- I get to have the last word there.)

I'm blathering. Balance. Right.

(Note: The trainwreck and river tags are for discussion of financial and psychological issues respectively; there will be corresponding filters for non-public aspects of these, but I haven't started using them yet.)

08:08 am - The insanity begins...

... in about an hour. The plan is for me to load the van, then stay here while Colleen plays truck-driver. I get to accept delivery of packages, reload the van whenever it shows up, search for the missing con suite supplies, collect the Y.D. at school, and finally end up at the hotel in time for the rehearsal dinner.

(11:00 all supplies found, including the large coffeepot, which finally turned up under the dining table behind a case of wine. I still have to hard-boil a big pile of eggs, and of course pack, but I'm not actually moving in to the hotel until tomorrow.)

The real insanity starts tomorrow.

I got a little less than I expected done yesterday at work, but only a little. The little CGI side-project got sidelined, but the main rush job (also a CGI) was brought to a workable state in time for the other group needing it. It was down to the wire: I was sending pessimistic status emails right up until 5:15, when it finally worked. All hail Perl, the Swiss army chainsaw of programming languages.

A lot of things have fallen through the cracks. I don't think any of my songs made it into the CD-ROM "songbook", for example, and no work to speak of has been done on the next album or the collaboration/subscription website that is intended to serve in lieu of pre-orders. And taxes? Hah!

This comic strip by ohiblather is, unfortunately, right on target for me.

Current Mood: indescribable

07:37 am - The insanity begins

Saturday my older daughter is getting married. At Consonance. But I'm getting ahead of myself...

Saturday the 15th is the annual "It's Green" potluck party. It's the Ides of March, which seems fitting somehow.

Sunday I collapse in a heap, lulled to sleep by the soft weeping of my credit cards.

Current Mood: awake

09:59 pm - Notes on the implementation of RFC 2617

It's been a busy couple of days at work: talks with, and demos for, some high-level visitors from Europe and Canada, plus a patent review meeting this afternoon. So I find it kind of amusing that I've probably gotten more actual programming done than usual.

In this case, it was an implementation of HTTP digest authorization from RFC 2617, in my little Java mini-server that's being used for $secret_project. Took me less time to actually write the code than it did to read and understand the RFC.

On the other hand, it took me about an hour to figure out why the chaoswolf's new computer couldn't connect to the internal network. Typed in the wrong IP address, of course; I had it in the DMZ. Dumb bear.

10:58 pm - Ticket to ride

Have my airplane ticket for OVFF - it's a one-stop on American, having decided I didn't want to take my chances with USAir. Gets me in at 9pm on Thursday the 25th, but I'll have enough time in Dallas to grab some dinner. Paid for with Wells Fargo bonus points.

Managed to squeeze in a 2-mile walk at lunchtime. I'm still feeling a little dubious about my health, and didn't want to push it. I'll do my walking in the neighborhood over the weekend, thanks.

Some fascinating things coming up at work, which of course I can't talk about yet.

The flower_cat noticed "endless shrimp" on Red Lobster's menu this week -- or was it this month? Anyway, we went, though neither she nor the Younger Daughter actually called for refills. So RL wins this round. (I just had grilled snapper, since I can only get fish at restaurants these days, and the chaoswolf had shrimp-and-lobster linguini.

09:22 am - Hello to yesterday's tomorrow

Yesterday's schedule turned out to be a little too tight. By the time I'd finished with my doctor's appointment (my shoulder problem appears to be tendinitis in the biceps tendon; I also gave him a signed copy of CC&S) and the associated pharmacy visit (prescription-strength naproxin and a change of statins from lovastatin to simvastatin) I had to fly low to have any chance of getting to my group meeting at 10am. Figured I'd go to the post office at lunchtime, but forgot to factor in the fact that we were having our Service Awards Lunch.

Lunch was delicious -- Il Fornaio in Palo Alto. I had salad, salmon, and tiramisu for desert. I also got my 15-year service award, which came with a lovely (and very heavy) stainless-steel-cased clock from Tiffany & Co. Do you have any idea how many engraved clocks and pen-and-pencil sets one accumulates in 30-odd years at a small number of jobs?

Never did make it to the Post Awful, because my OpenMoko phone arrived mere minutes before lunch, and by the time I looked up from playing with it, it was after 6pm. Still definitely a work in progress -- I'm not even sure it's a phone at this point. Nice little linux box, though, with a VGA display, USB, and BlueTooth. Twice the pixels of an iPhone at half the price, and unlocked as well. Sweet. The consumer version, due in October (which may be optimistic) will have Wi-Fi and accelerometers.

I will get to the Post Awful today. In about 15 minutes. Really. (Most pre-orders will nevertheless have to wait until after ConChord to get mailed. We're driving down tomorrow.)

10:09 pm - This and that

Woke up with my shoulder feeling considerably better: down from pain all over to pain that was pretty localized and felt like a muscle spasm. It's been getting gradually better all day, though it still hurts to shrug or to raise my left arm more than 45^o above horizontal. Even that's an improvement: last night horizontal was as far as I could go. Hooray for gin and Flexoril.

Took a 2.5 mile walk at lunchtime. Went much better than yesterday, when I only went 2 miles and was feeling distinctly shaky by the time I was done.

I've been moderately productive at work this week, getting involved in an interesting side-project involving Google Maps and a bit of browser-side scripting. So I'm learning Javascript. The syntax is, of course, familiar; the prototype-based (classless) object semantics are a little unusual, but fun. (There's a proof, by the way, that classes and prototypes are formally equivalent in the computations they can perform, but that's small consolation when you need an anonymous closure for a callback and the language you're using doesn't provide them. JS does provide them.)

The equivalence of function in Javascript, blocks in Smalltalk, and function plus lambda in LISP makes me feel all warm and comfortable inside.

For the last couple of days I've been trying to work through the exercises in my old recorder book. I've taken to practicing in the car before heading home from work, so as to avoid driving my family crazy. (Some might argue that it's more of a short walk, but I digress.) The book, Enjoy Your Recorder by the Trapp Family Singers, has been in my possession for roughly half a century, and I have not been practicing in all that time, but the fingerings seem oddly familiar.

The album is progressing through the fab line at Oasis; the press run has started and the CD replication is scheduled. Their tracking web page leaves a lot to be desired: refreshing the job status page puts you back two clicks away. Weird. I'm not sure how you would get that effect in the first place; it may be a side-effect of whatever weird Microsoft crud they're using on the server side. (It's all .aspx pages, and some of what they claim are links aren't.)

I've been plagued by doubts about just how thoroughly I QA'ed the master. I really wish one could simply upload .wav files and a table of contents, and let them put it together.

04:00 pm - Tracks and hacks, again

Spend an hour or so this morning working on "Vampire Megabyte". Still needs some sound effects, but it's getting there. A little more bass rolloff on the guitar, and some reverb on the sound of the stake being hammered in. It turned out that the various hammer-strikes, which all sounded pretty much the same dry, reacted very differently to reverb. I picked the best of them and duplicated it.

There was a power failure at work, about 15 minutes before our group's regularly-scheduled meeting. We all powered down our computers and went home to our live outlets and fast connections in hopes of getting some work done. Only thing left on my work agenda today is making reservations for OSCon, July 24-27. Unfortunately I have few friends left in Portland anymore.

The "hopefully quiet" CPU fan I acquired yesterday, a 60mm Thermaltake fan, turned out to be anything but. Loud, with a high-pitched whine that bored right through the noise-isolating case. I replaced it shortly after I got home with one of the 80mm CoolerMaster "neon" fans that worked so well on the Fry's computers. The results were astoundingly good. It's held onto the heatsink with gaffer's tape and a couple of business cards as spacers.

It's a good thing the fan worked out -- the alternative would have been deciding whether to spend $30 for a new fan and heatsink, or about three times that for a new CPU and motherboard. Which is a purchase I really don't need to be making right now. 8:10pm but I'll have to, because it turns out that gaffer's tape doesn't hold when it gets hot. Oops!

Current Mood: sleepy

04:16 pm - The downtrodden, powerless masses

Well, powerless, anyway. There was a massive power failure in the neighborhood of our lab at about 1:40. As the scope of it became clear I shut things down (except for one server box that I'd forgotten about... oops!) while my manager rounded up people so we could hold our 2:00 meeting a little early in the naturally-lit conference room.

Now I'm home. Before I left this morning I'd gotten the new router properly configured, so I now no longer have to worry about the laptop and its easily-removed power cord, and the other denizens of the household no longer have to sip the net through a soda straw. I'll need to install the new, twice-as-big backup drive in the fileserver sometime today, but that should be pretty easy (he says). It may require a couple of minutes with a rescue disk to reconfigure the bootloader, but I can handle that.

11:54 am - Answer hazy

You know the universe is trying to tell you something when your UPS dies -- completely and without warning -- in the middle of composing an email.

I only wish the universe wouldn't mumble.

update: after I got back from lunch and a walk I determined that a small power surge had tripped the UPS's breaker. I was under the impression that that was the kind of thing a UPS is expected to protect against. Silly me. It was made by Belkin, of course. I've specified APC for the next one.

Current Mood: annoyed

06:30 pm - World Domination at the CELF Embedded Linux Conference

Spent the day at the CELF (CE Linux Forum) Embedded Linux Conference in the Techmart in Santa Clara. Nice venue -- I don't think I'd been there for an event before, in spite of working just down the street for five years. I only found out about the event yesterday, from an article in Linux Weekly News (which comes out Wednesday night), so I missed the first two days out of three. But $EMPLOYER still got their money's worth, so I'm not complaining.

One of the things I learned from my late father, who was fond of pithy one-liners, was "If you get one good idea out of a conference or trade show, it was worth it." This was worth a good deal more than that -- today turned out to be "Linux on mobile devices" day -- a whole day's worth of good, useful sessions, starting with the Gnome Foundation's announcement of their Mobile and Embedded Initiative.

It is estimated that there will be over 200M cell phones running Linux five years from now. Talk about world domination! Motorola and Nokia had a big presence at the conference.

Also good sessions on X on mobile devices, CELF's mobile phone profile working group, building small root file systems (4MB RAM and 4MB flash), OpenKODE, and a cool hallway demo of FancyPants, a mobile multimedia framework derived from Enlightenment.

05:29 pm - That's better...

After a couple of meetings, one of which started at noon and dovetailed neatly into a very productive two-hour conversation which will almost certainly end up with an invention disclosure, I came home to put the Y.D.'s desk together. First thing I noticed was a piece of crumpled-up paper on the floor by the diningroom table that turned out, on closer inspection, to be the missing Ikea receipt for the damaged desk. Yay! Fell out of somebody's pocket, from the look of it.

Put the desk together, which took about 2 hours. The super_star_girl said, "It's just as pretty as it was in the showroom!" So she's happy, which means I'm happy. I don't think I was in any shape to assemble the thing last night -- daylight and rest were essential. Just installed her computer. Her sister's old Canon printer is missing somewhere in the garage attic, but everything else is up and running.

The DSL install is scheduled for Friday, and the modem is on its way via UPS. Still need to run cat5 to the demarc.

Still need to do taxes. I'll start data-entry tonight. Still have three or four parts to record, and a half-dozen or so songs to mix. Probably Friday, since I have to be here for the DSL install.

11:25 pm - tracks, and so on

Fixed many of the problems with this morning's dump CD; revised four tracks in all. Mostly just levels, though fixing "Uncle Ernie" involved going back to before I damaged it with too much eq. Sounds better without, I think. Still a couple of timing oddities -- singing against a scratch track is hard if you haven't done it much. I'm getting better, but...

I haven't been getting much work done, but the situation is gradually improving. Spent most of the afternoon reading our annual research report and chasing links to some of the technical reports. Fascinating reading; I had one idea that looks as though it'll turn into a tecnical report for next year. Nothing like getting an early start.

The weather seemed cold and damp, and the forecast included rain, so I skipped my usual walk and went to Fry's, chasing a 400GB Seagate SATA drive advertised for $100. I've heard fewer complaints about Seagate than Maxtor recently; now I have one of each and upgrading my main fileserver is going to be much simpler -- I'll just double my existing partitions. My main drive, currently a 200GB, is 95% full in the main partition. Audio and a Debian partition will do that.

Sure enough, it was starting to rain as I was leaving Fry's. If I'd gone out for my usual 1-hour walk I would have spent the last 20 minutes getting wet.

Ordered another isolation transformer, a mic stand bag, and a couple of other items from Musician's Friend. Free shipping for orders over $99.

I'm starting to get fuzzy around the edges. Time for bed.

08:57 pm - Homing from work

Went in to work today mainly for two reasons: to make sure my tech reports got printed on time (mr_kurt took care of that, along with the rest of the group's -- thank you), and to attend a talk that turned out to be almost content-free. So after a delightful birthday lunch with the flower_cat at Cafe Bombay (an old favorite that we hadn't been back to since it moved about a year ago), a short walk, and about an hour's worth of email I decided to take the rest of the day off.

I'd been planning to take some time off this week anyway. So instead of working from home I found myself homing from work, taking advantage of a T1 line and a fast computer to have a careful look at Oasis' graphics templates. The Gimp is happy to import both PDF and Photoshop files, so it was easy to get the information I needed off the templates, but there aren't any open-source equivalents for the layout software they want me to use. I'll probably end up borrowing a machine at work, if I can find anyone there with Pagemaker or Illustrator.

Finished off the work day with a bit of Linux evangelism (posted both here in LJ and in my work blog) and looking over finagler's slides for Thursday's patent review committee meeting -- I'm a co-inventer.

07:36 pm - Friday update

Walked today at lunchtime -- probably 2.5 or 3 miles. I lost track somewhere around the pond because I was thinking about something else, and didn't go back via the hill. Possibly just as well -- I was feeling a little more tired than usual by the time I got back to the lab.

Hopefully sometime tonight I can move my recording machine out to the office, where I have my comfy chair and my monitor speakers, and do some mixing. I also have to split up last Saturday's concert. I've been pretty unproductive over the last week. Grumf.

At least the gigabit ethernet connection to the back of the house seems to be working well over the old cat5 cable I put back into service when the cat6 flaked out. Hopefully replacing the connectors will fix that. Meanwhile, my fileserver has been up for a solid 10 days, so I think whatever was causing it to crash every day or so must have been fixed in a recent update. I'm guessing kernel.

09:07 am - Post-Consonance, pre-Party post

Came home from work Monday evening and found cflute and jenkitty still at the Starport, with Callie seriously under the weather. After dinner, the flower_cat and I went off to artbeco's and it_aint_easy's after-con party. Fun, and a little bit of good singing, though many people had to leave early to get to work/school in the morning. Including me, though I stayed up late to talk to Callie. I'll take good conversation over sleep any time.

There's a housefilk at Kanef's this Saturday, and the March party at theStarport next Saturday (the 17th.)

Sometime next week I should be finished with technical reports at work -- all but one are basically done except for data entry (due tomorrow, but I'll get it done today) and final submission to rowanf. That means that sometime next week I should be able to take a little time off to work on the album.

Current Mood: awake

10:28 pm - Long day

In spite of getting to bed after midnight last night, I got up at my usual 6am. I've been on my feet most of the afternoon at our in-house conference. (It was, and is, fantastic, but mostly in ways I can't talk about without having to kill you.) Managed to unload a few of my personal hacker/songwriter cards as well -- the ones with the album preorder URL on them.

I am going to take a nice relaxing hot bath, hope I don't fall asleep in the tub, and decant myself into bed. G'night.

07:12 pm - The Green Hills of California

They may be small compared to other mountains, and the weather in California may be warm compared to winters elsewhere, but there was still snow on the peaks this morning. It was still there as I drove home, the white domes of Lick Observatory floating among the clouds on a raft of white snow. Below the snowline, the grass on the hills is green.

Walked 2.5 miles today, which makes up in part for missing yesterday completely. Things have been busy this week at work, getting ready for a week of visitors, demos, and posters next week. Most of them will be there Tuesday and Wednesday; hopefully I'll be able to get away most of Thursday. And Consonance starts Friday. I'm not ready!

Managed to get a crude but effective data-entry form mostly working; I'll have it finished this evening. Then we can start mailing confirmations and URLs to the people who preordered Coffee, Computers, and Song! during the last two months. ( implementation notes )

The fileserver is still freezing; there's a Debian install in my near future.

07:35 am - GIP with walking and computers

It's raining, with occasional rumbles of thunder. I'm very glad I got in a two mile walk yesterday, since it doesn't look promising today. Possibly in the evening. I probably wouldn't have done much walking today even if it was clear -- today is the cleanup day for next week's massive influx of visitors and two days of demos, presentations, and discussions.

In other news, the disk with the final version of the artwork for Coffee, Computers, and Song arrived from artbeco, giving me a chance to show off the user icon I made from the cover.

My fileserver has been up for two days without crashing. All I did was rebuild the swap partition (i.e. rerun mkswap). I got the idea from a boot-time message that flashed by on a different machine that I upgraded at work. It may not actually have solved the problem, but it fits the symptoms. (update but it didn't fix the problem.)

10:20 pm - Wheee!

Thanks to a Fry's loss-leader -- a 5-port GigE switch for $7/port -- last weekend's cable-stringing, and a new hole in the garage-to-bedroom wall, I now have Gigabit Ethernet all the way back to my recording machine. This makes me happy, and will make slinging audio files back and forth a lot faster. With a little more work, I'll be able to run the line out from the onboard soundcard back to the office over some of the extra Cat5 pairs I've freed up.

Apart from a bit of easily-corrected stupidity with my edits to the boot menu, a bit of strangeness with the display configuration, and the inability of the machines to see the built-in WiFi card, the tablet computers at work are actually working. They'll be good enough for a demo, anyway.

09:48 pm - Making some progress

Joyce had to reschedule our practice session, so I've been catching up on a few other things, like making sure that all my lyrics pages link to the corresponding PDF, OGG, and MP3 files (if they exist, of course). (Making sure they get rebuilt when new oggs or mp3s get added is left as an exercise for another day.) I do have a tentative setlist, though.

Next thing I'm planning to do this evening is upgrade my main internal fileserver (nova) from Debian Sarge (the current stable release) to Etch (testing, and soon to be stable). I've done this on several systems by now and so far it's gone pretty smoothly. Email might get disrupted for a while, but hopefully not too long. (update about an hour and a half for the upgrade, as it turns out.)

The major accomplishment at work was getting the touchscreen on my old Linux tablet PC working in Etch. We have two of them -- they were originally made by Element Computing (now defunct) and shipped with a hacked-up Xandros installed. The software was distinctly flaky, and I was never able to find a version of Linux that worked well until a couple of weeks ago. I finally figured out the proper incantation for the touchscreen, which turns out to use the "fpit" (Fujitsu) driver. It was called something different in XFree86.

Tomorrow's task will be making the touchscreen continue to work when it's rotated into portrait position, set up an auto-login for the account we're running the demos in, and then duplicate the whole thing on the other machine. And then try to get the built-in wireless card working. Should be... um... interesting. Yeah, that's the word.

Current Mood: accomplished

10:22 am - How geeky am I?

Just after my last post I went in to work, telling the flower_cat that I was just going to put in a "half day", since I knew that we usually lock up at 3pm on the Friday before a holiday weekend. I found out when I got home that Colleen had been expecting me home for lunch. Sorry, Love -- when you get to work at 10am "half a day" does not end at Noon.

As I expected, I didn't get much actual work done, but there was some email I needed to attend to, a backup drive I'd forgotten to mount after the last reboot (when you boot a machine every six months or so you tend to forget), and some downloading to do.

Some of the downloading was due to the fact that VMware just started the beta program for Fusion, their desktop product for Intel Macs. The rest was due to the fact that I'm going to be working on Mom's old PC in a couple of weeks, archiving her files and wiping the disk. Not knowing exactly what vintage machine I was dealing with, I wanted to have a reasonable supply of up-to-date live Linux CDs to work from. I downloaded and burned Slax, DSL, and the latest Debian installer; I already had Ubuntu Edgy.

By that time it was closer to 4pm than to 3, so I headed for home. Along the way I managed to get in an hour's worth of walking, and my usual light lunch of mixed nuts and dried fruit (dates and figs at the moment).

Continuing in the vein of extreme geekiness, I spent most of the evening finishing up the Makefile recipes that import songs and fiction into the CDROM portion of my bonus CD, About Bleeding Time. Main things left to do for that are getting clean tracks out of the various concert recordings, writing the top-level web page, and making the CD art.

I've discovered that one of my favorite forms of hacking is writing Makefile rules and the scripts that I use in them. Make is the perfect tool for anything that involves updating and dependency-checking. It comes into things like CDs and songbooks because I'm constantly tweaking things all through the production process.

Now I'm going to finish my coffee and go out for a walk.

11:08 pm - Saturday wrap-up

I did, finally, get the new recording box installed. It took an extra trip back to the "office", which has a monitor and keyboard, because I'd neglected to set up the BIOS not to stop on errors. But after that, the afternoon wasn't particularly productive.

At about a quarter to five we set out toward Menlo Park for my office holiday party at Flea Street Café. Good food, great company, great conversation. Oddly, music didn't come up much at all.

Came home on surface streets -- a very pleasant little drive. Lots of pretty lights.

08:26 pm - Back in the workday groove, more or less

For the first time in several years, my practice of keeping a good shirt at work paid off -- it rained while I was out for my lunchtime walk. I had just decided to turn back because the weather suddenly seemed cold and threatening when it started. By the time I got back indoors, about 15 minutes later, my shirt was soaked. Fortunately I'd worn my hat.

Backing up to the morning, I managed to turn off my alarm last night (it's a new alarm clock, and I'm not quite familiar with its controls yet). As a result I woke up at about 7:20. Fortunately I was able to get the kids out of bed and ready to go in 20 minutes, about half the usual time. Contrats to the chaoswolf and super_star_girl. But this is why I need you to learn to wake up to your own alarm clocks.

To top it off, I only had one mug of coffee instead of my usual three, so I got to work with far too much blood in my caffeine stream. Fortunately my two Monday meetings and catching up on a week's worth of mail and web reading didn't require more than a couple of functioning neurons.

08:51 pm - Assorted grumbles

I've been feeling under the weather for several days now; sleepy and sniffly. I'm seeing the world through a light haze of low-grade headache and decongestants. I don't want to just go to bed, because I'll be driving home from San Francisco late tomorrow night. Hopefully I'll be able to sleep in tomorrow morning.

Meanwhile, I discovered when I got my paycheck on the 15th that I'd maxed out my carried-over accrued vacation. There it sits, pinned at twice my annual total. Guess I'm taking next Tuesday and Wednesday off. Plus the week between Christmas and New Year, and a little more in December. Plus the trip in January for GAFilk and a visit to my Mom.

On top of that, I've managed to go walking only about twice this week that I can remember. Foo.

And I've been pretty unproductive the last two weeks. Hopefully I'll be able to get some guitar work done for the album -- I think the vocal work will have to wait until my throat improves. Fortunately there's not much of it left.

10:58 pm - Monday

Instead of taking a nice healthy walk, I got to spend my lunch hour eating half a tuna salad sandwitch and signing up for next years' benefits. There have been major changes, but not in plans that affect me. The changes that do affect me are in my life, mainly the younger daughter's braces (ouch!). The fact that the older one now has a job and hence doesn't qualify as a dependent on my health insurance will be painful to her, and I'll be taking a tax hit next year.

My throat is still dicey; spent some time figuring out the chords for "Last Train". It seems most comfortable for me in C, and the chords are simpler too (Janis plays it in G capoed up one, and in a nonstandard tuning).

It's raining gently outside; hopefully the sound will help me sleep.

09:24 pm - Monday evening

As it turned out, I went to sleep about 10pm last night and got up at 6am. 8 hours. But getting to bed at 10 takes such a huge bite out of my evening, that I'll try hard not to do it too often. Aren't you supposed to need less sleep as you get older?

Didn't manage to get in a walk at lunchtime; the hour was taken up by a couple of discussions following an interesting presentation about some recent research directions.

Got out of work about 5:40 and it was dark out. Graak!

09:48 pm - Getting stuff done at work

Got a good afternoon's worth of programming done at work -- I'm midway through implementing the web interface that finagler and I spent most of last week designing. We're working on separate implementations: his is in Java on top of the little web mini-server we've based many of our recent projects on, and mine is a Perl CGI. His will be easy to integrate with a lot of our other software, which is mostly in Java these days, and mine will be more scalable.

07:25 am - Yesterday...

... Good filking last night at the Starport. Filkers are always welcome, though we realize that Wednesdays are kind of inconvenient for weekend visitors. Sent Arwen and Ilana back to the Netherlands with the first copy of the CD of my Worldcon 2006 concert. Haven't listened to it all the way through myself, so no idea whether I got the levels right. This was my first attempt at normalization and noise removal.

Spent the day at work thinking about blob servers some more; I think I now have a good handle on what we're doing, and I'm reasonably confident that it will do everything it needs to.

11:13 pm - Talk like a pi rate

... that would be, for example, 30rpm = pi radians/sec.

[15 minutes] Not much uncluttering tonight; I'm not sure one can legitimately count the regularly-scheduled weekly task of taking out the trash and the recycling. Takes more than 15 minutes, though.

[album] Started writing the track descriptions. About 2/3 of the way through the list now.

[work] Spent most of the day deep in conversation with mr_kurt and finagler (sometimes one or the other, sometimes both; we talked about halfway through lunchtime as well). Got quite a lot hashed out about how to build elaborate structures out of content-addressed immutable blobs plus a few auxiliary structures. Hacked and slashed our way to a considerable simplification. Can't say much more until we publish it, unfortunately. But it'll be cool.

09:37 pm - Shiny!

Just transferred about 1.3GB of concert data (two Audacity projects) from my MacTel laptop to my fileserver. Took under 5 minutes over gigabit ethernet. Yay for shiny new network hardware. (Had to sit the lappy on top of the laser printer because all I have in Cat6 or Cat5e at the moment are a couple of 1m patch cables.) Split-up concert pieces Real Soon Now.

The Mac has been a distinctly mixed bag. Sure, everything "just works", provided you drink the Apple KoolAid and haven't had over 20 years' worth of Unix experience setting your expectations. And we'll ignore the fact that I had to discharge the battery and leave the thing turned off and charging overnight to convince the power applet that it had anything other than an 83%-charged battery. I expect it'll make a nice Linux machine.

Meanwhile, the departure two weeks ago of our group's summer intern has freed up a lovely Dell widescreen (1920x1200) monitor, which is now sitting on my desk. I wasn't expecting to be able to get one until next fiscal year, having burned up this year's hardware budget on the Mac. It remains to be seen whether my desktop machine will drive it, but I'm hopeful. (Update: just added 1920x1200 to all the mode lists in xorg.conf, and it worked. You wouldn't think 320 pixels would make that much difference, but it does.)

Current Mood: geeky

09:09 pm - Making a little progress

Music: I've been trying to get ready for Worldcon, which is coming up in (help!!) about a week and a half. This will be the first con in about 9 months, and only the second in well over a year, where I haven't had cflute doing flute and backup vocals. Some things just don't sound right anymore without a second melody line, and some (like "Demon Lover") are just plain impossible. So I've been working with Joyce Uggla, a folksinger and folk dancer who I've known for years and who is getting more and more interested in filk. We had a good practice session Tuesday night; she doesn't play flute, but she does play drum. Sounds like it'll work. And I have to start thinking about whether I can use a second guitar part.

Work: Finally put some code together to make log entries chained together by hashes (rather like git's commit log) -- it's a simple Perl script meant to be called from the command line. I'm not sure why it's taken me several weeks to get around to it: I kept getting distracted. Maybe because it seemed so trivial that I kept hoping it would just write itself. As it turned out, there were enough minor subtleties to keep it interesting, including learning all about Perl's implementation of flock(2).

Health: I've been gradually getting back into walking, and trying to put in at least 45 minutes/day. Managed to get back to my weekend preference of an hour and a half on Sunday, but backslid some during the week. My ankle still isn't quite back to normal; I tried wearing ordinary shoes on Tuesday and had to go back to the high-tops. Feh. My weight stays stubbornly constant; the problem is that a steady gain of two pounds/year is well below the day-to-day noise floor.

Recording: Finally got my recording system back in operation, delayed a little by stupidly forgetting to connect my X terminal to the hub and spending an hour trying to figure out why the recording box wasn't showing up in the XDMCP chooser. Duh. But it's finally quiet -- the only moving part is the hard drive, and I can't hear it from more than a foot or so away. So it's probably OK. The thing looks pretty kludgy -- the parts are all mounted on a plastic clipboard (sort of a homebrew blade server) -- but it's light and compact, which is what I was aiming for.

(Almost immediate edit) and almost forgot to mention -- I've figured out how to rip the audio track off a DVD, as part of trying to pull a couple of songs off the video that hvideo made of my Baycon 2006 concert. I've been doing it with transcode, though there may be a simpler method. It was complicated by the fact that it would hang if I tried to do more than about 25MB at once. And it would have been greatly simplified if the chapter (scene) breaks actually corresponded to song boundaries instead of being arbitrarily assigned by the DVD-writer. Fortunately audacity makes short work of that kind of thing, using "export selection".

Current Mood: accomplished

09:19 pm - Shiny!

Power and internet finally came back at work at about 11:30, by which time the flower_cat and I had managed to assemble an early lunch of Pon-Pon Chicken (basically shredded cold chicken, cucumber strips, and peanut sauce).

Sometime around 2pm our sysadmin came back from his Fry's run with my shiny new 15.4" Macbook Pro. It's the high-end one, with a 2.1GHz CPU, 1GB of RAM, and a 100GB disk (actually more like 95, with almost 25GB of stuff already on it). It took the rest of the afternoon for it to download something approaching half a gig of updates over our T1 line. Meanwhile, I installed Firefox, fink, X11, the software development kit (called, for some unguessable marketing reason, X-code), and Emacs21, and copied my ssh keys over from my desktop.

Now, people who know me and my operating-system preference (Linux) may be wondering why I decided to get a Mac laptop. You may well ask. There are several reasons:

And, of course, it's a nice shiny silver color. Our traditional naming scheme is rivers, and my personal scheme is "rivers of Middle Earth", so I'll probably go with silverlode. It also ties back to the Silvermine River, that runs near my parents' old house in Connecticut.

10:23 am - Why am I still at home this morning?

(8:30am) Power is still out at work -- at least on the circuit our router is plugged in to. Just as well that I'm going to be spending the morning taking my car in for an oilchange. I should really have powered down the two Linux boxen in my office before I left, but since they're backed up daily in several different places I'm not going to worry too much.

Next week I'm off to OSCon -- I'll be in Portland Tuesday afternoon through Saturday afternoon. ( contact info behind cut )

(9:55am) The car's likely to run me somewhere north of $400 by the time you add two new tires, an alignment job, and diagnosing the problem with the driver's side window to the oilchange it already needed. Power is still out at work.

I've been thinking again about getting a rolling duffel so that I can take my travel guitar (31" long) on plane trips. Still probably a bad idea; the duffels are awkward, wouldn't work well with my rolling briefcase, and in any case the travel guitar in its gig bag fits in the overhead rack. Looked briefly at some smaller travel guitars -- basically just six strings on a stick -- that might fit in a regular-size suitcase. About the price of two rolling duffels, but less than a car repair. It'll just have to wait, I guess.

Current Mood: awake

06:50 pm - It's a little warm in here.

There was an odd, partial power failure at work around 4:30 this afternoon. Some computers stayed up, some lights stayed up; others went down. I assume that it was a matter of which side of the 220 line things were on. My office had computers but no lights; I unmounted the backup drive and started thinking about going home before the traffic lights went down. The server room appeared to have fileservers, but no router. After about 15 minutes of dithering, I bailed.

Stopped at REI on the way home and ordered a pair of mid-top Keen walking shoes. Hopefully they'll arrive before the weekend; my ankle is still giving me a little trouble and could use the extra support. (They're back-ordered on the website and were out of stock at the local store, but there was one at another store in the Bay Area.)

The Zoo animal adoption papers I gave chaoswolf for her birthday arrived: a Siberian tiger named "Tony". He looks very contented and relaxed in his pictures. She's supposed to be getting a plushie, too; it may be travelling under separate cover.

Software patents should be abolished. Preferably before I have to apply for another one on the stuff I'm working on. Please?

09:33 pm - Not a terribly productive day

A day full of annoyances. Trying to get an authorization code to transfer thestarport.org out of Network Solutions Problems, and discovering that the email they were sending wasn't getting through. Turns out our sysadmin had installed a new spam-filtering appliance on Monday, which of course had a new address. The DNS hadn't propagated to Netsol yet. And the problem I was having yesterday was that the mail server for what used to be the lab's domain when I set up my contact info, rsv.ricoh.com, was down. Naturally it took until 11am or so for our admin to arrive and fix it. But by that time I'd already changed my contact email address to point to my home address here at thestarport.org.

Went out at noon to Fry's (taking the fact that my ankle is bothering me as a sufficient excuse to skip my usual walk) to buy an MP3 player. The ad assured me that the Samsung I bought would play ogg files, and indeed they have a reputation for doing so. Just to be sure, I checked several other vendors (having noticed that many of the boxes had phone numbers on them) and determined that, no, none of them played oggs.

What I didn't discover until I got the damned thing back to work was that it's totally locked down, and will only play files if you transfer them with Windows Media Player. So much for Samsung -- my respect for them just went down several notches.

Actually got a little work done in the latter part of the afternoon (mostly nailing down and documenting the encrypted blob format that finagler's software is writing) before trying to get an appointment with my doctor. The next available one was August 1^st until I mentioned the ankle, at which point I got one for this Friday. OK, I understand about triage. By this time it was 5:05 and the opthalmology department was closed, in spite of the entry in the phone directory that said the appointment desk was open until 5:30.

Back to Fry's to exchange the MP3 player. One thing about Fry's -- they'll take their stuff back for just about any reason. That's why I keep going there.

Aside to whoever took the glass bottles out for recycling: would it have killed you to unstack the bins and put the bottles in the one labeled "glass" instead of just setting them down in the driveway?

Current Mood: annoyed

08:14 pm - Hackery

Spent some time this morning filling in the remaining holes in my Java git blob classes -- specifically the part that conses up a header into a byte array. I didn't need it for the stream code, since it was more efficient to write it into the stream piecewise.

Spent most of the afternoon hacking Emacs lisp to finally solve a problem with gnus automatic mail-foldering that's been bothering me for a long time. You see, gnus (the Emacs mail/news reader) lets you match a series of regular expressions against your mail headers in order to decide what folder it belongs in. A lot of mail from mailing lists contains strings like "[mumble]" -- a tag in square brackets. Turns out our new spam-filtering appliance does that, too. Trouble is, gnus insists that the thing you match look like a word, meaning it has to begin and end with an alphanumeric.

08:32 pm - Midweek update

I'm actually getting a few things done at work: my Java classes for reading and writing git blobs appear to be working. A little bit of clean-up and I'll post them (there being no IP whatever to protect).

Went out for about a half-hour walk at lunchtime; no major problems with the ankle, though there's a tiny bit of an ache in the background; I don't want to push it. Also I'm out of shape, after two weeks of very little walking. Bleagh.

08:34 am - Back to the code mines

After several weeks of demos, presentations, patent disclosures, and the like, I am finally back to actual coding. Admittedly, a couple of one- or two-page Java stream classes for reading and writing git blobs are hardly earth-shaking, but they get me off my tail.

10:06 pm - Back to the bit mines

I've spent the last three days getting back into work after a delightful and musical Baycon. It's a slightly rough transition, but as I told my boss mr_kurt (also a fan) it's something of a vacation by comparison.

In any case, I spent Tuesday, Wednesday, and this morning preparing a slide presentation for the Patent Review Committee -- that's the group that meets every couple of months to decide which of our hare-brained ideas are worth throwing a large pile of lawyers and money at. I still don't know if this particular idea passed the test, but I'm feeling pretty good about it.

The other interesting feature of this presentation is that I did it in HTML instead of OpenOffice, using the HTML slidy package from the W3C's collection of slide show tools. It was distinctly rough around the edges; fortunately I'm a quick study. I may try S5 for the next one, but I definitely like being able to develop a presentation entirely in a text editor. On the flip side, Firefox seriously sucks as a presentation tool on the Mac -- there's no full-screen mode, so you can't cover up the menu bar and the dock. Luckily it didn't seem to matter.

I'm starting to give serious thought to using Javascript on the website, especially for highly-interactive stuff like setlist and playlist management. My current setlist-maker is a Perl script that works well enough, but only on a fast network inside the firewall.

07:55 pm - DocBug on Heisenbugs

Now that my cow-orker has posted his excellent list of things to avoid in a demo in public, I can link to it. And as he says, "Never one to take the easy route, my current research project contains every one of these features. No matter how many successful trials I run, I never really know whether this time it'll go boom."

And it's true -- it failed again this afternoon, though not as badly as Monday. There are subtle timing problems in there, methinks.

10:48 pm - A pretty good day, but expensive

I had a teeth-cleaning appointment this morning. Learned that the large filling with a little decay around it really needs to get fixed, before the tooth breaks. It's been a year since it was noticed. So I go in for a crown on Thursday. That was the cheap part: insurance pays half.

The other nagging problem was that my 20+-year-old Roland synth is in really bad shape, and the chaoswolf is taking beginning piano this quarter. And Guitar Showcase is right across the street from the dentist's office. So for about $750 I now have a Casio PX-310 digital piano, a sturdy stand for it, and a folding bench. It sounds, and feels, great -- I may have to re-learn piano.

We re-did our demo this afternoon with a slightly smaller audience, an ad-hoc wireless network instead of an access point, and about four more run-throughs. It worked, of course. And we had a little more time to discuss the system, which on the whole was a good thing. It dovetails neatly with some of the other things the company is doing, but getting the people who do the actual product planning to understand what we have is going to take a lot of work.

08:40 pm - So, how did your demo go, Bear?

Today was the annual (more-or-less) research review at our lab, where we tell our Japanese overlords what we've been doing with their money all year in hopes they'll let us play again this year. It's mostly a formality -- they're friendly, they like us, and we do lots of good stuff for the company -- but one likes to put on a good show and leave them feeling as though they've gotten their money's worth.

This year, instead of the usual two or three days, we had to cram everything into a single long day, which left our four-person group about 45 minutes into which to cram an innovative bit of user interface magic, a secure peer-to-peer document-sharing system, and quite a lot of verbiage.

Luckily, mr_kurt, our fearless leader, is a brilliant presenter, and Kim's UI demo was a big hit (totally expected -- it'll blow you away when it finally gets out of the lab and into the wild). That left finagler and me with a good build-up for the second demo, which involves four laptops, a USB keychain drive, multicast DNS, HTTP, and some unusual and subtle applications of strong crypto.

And it didn't work. Mind you, it worked fine on our three rehearsals on Friday and our two run-throughs this morning, and it worked fine back in finagler's office (all on different access points), and again outside the conference room on the same access point we'd used for the live demo. But when it came down to the wire, none of the machines could do GETs from one another, even though they could see their DNS records. Our best current thinking is that a power glitch (and we know there was one, because a UPS sounded off just about then) took out the access point right when we needed it.

Did I mention that mr_kurt is a brilliant presenter? It didn't really hurt the presentation much, since the slides covered the basic principles of the thing, but it was pretty disappointing, and left us with an intriguing puzzle on our hands. And another demo to do tomorrow afternoon. We're going to bypass the access point, thank you very much, and run in ad-hoc mode. And some other group can have the failed demo next year (there's always one).

Current Mood: disappointed

08:40 pm - Home from the snail race

Well, after some four hours of [edit disk-grinding, clicking, and] downloading, Tiger finally got installed on my Mac laptop at work, at least to the point where it will run finagler and mr_kurt's software that we for the demo on Monday. Spent a couple of hours debugging the demo with Brad (it's peer-to-peer stuff; so the final version of the demo will involve four laptops and a USB keychain drive). We'll beat on it some more tomorrow.

Still not particularly impressed with MacOS X.

Meanwhile, my ancient Roland HS-60 keyboard, which has been gathering dust for most of the last two decades, has been misbehaving -- we hauled it out of semi-retirement so the chaoswolf, who's taking beginning piano this quarter, would have something to practice on. Problem is that in a lot of the patches the notes just don't cut off properly. I suspect a bad envelope generator or VCA.

So I'm now in the market for a keyboard, preferably 88 keys, with good feel, and not particularly bulky (since it may get lent to visiting keyboard players at local cons). Preferably on the low end of the $500-1000 range. A pure MIDI controller is a possibility, since I have an old but still functional computer with a MIDI soundcard that I can probably figure out how to hack into a sound module. Any suggestions?