Linus' blog

Glamorous pictures?

2011-03-02T07:28:00.001-08:00

The event last weekend was a "no cameras" event, and while we'll have pictures, I don't have them yet.

And I think I'll keep them private when we get them - no need to embarrass the beautiful people any more than we already did.

So to make up for that, here's a glamorous shot from about seventeen years ago that maddog (on the left) found the other day. It's from DECUS, New Orleans, 1994.

As you can tell, I knew how to party back then too. I'm the handsome young man on the right, in case you couldn't guess.

They called me "The Stud".

Pearls before swine..

2011-02-28T10:01:00.000-08:00

My life isn't glamorous.

I know that comes as a big shock to everybody, since geeks in general are seen as the crème de la crème of society, and the common perception is that we live the life of rock-stars and party all night with all the other glamorous people.

Not so.

I sit in my office (which used to be in the basement, now it's a room above the garage), usually in my ratty bathrobe, reading and writing email all day. And a lot of wasting time while waiting for people to answer or just report problems. I go to bed at ten, and wake up at seven to get the kids to school. And then it all repeats.

So not glamorous. When I actually write code (which is usually in the mail reader these days - mostly telling people "do it like this" rather than actually writing real code), that's about the most exciting part of the day.

But then, once in a while, I get to live the high life. This weekend, we got invited to the Night Before Oscar party (thanks Renée and Doug!) because sometimes the companies I work with apparently think that I need to get a night out.

Toto, I don't think we're talking white-socks-and-sandals any more.

So me and the wife were completely out of our depth, and knew absolutely nobody. We go out for a date night every week, so we a fair number of movies, but we really aren't movie people - the kinds of movies we go to don't make a huge impression. So there we were, cram-packed with celebrities, not remembering names or faces.

The good news was, that as Tove said, there was no real downside. Nobody knew us, and nobody would ever remember us the next day. So we could go whole retard quite openly, and brazenly just ask people "You look really familiar, who are you?". Which we did. With some discreet google image searches when we could guess, and just wanted to verify it ("John Cusack or Paul Rudd?").

Everybody seemed to take it in good cheer. We interrupted David Spade chatting up Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis (that's what Tove says, I was oblivious - it's those famous geek social graces again. I told her I'm sure I'd have noticed Natalie Portman and that she can't possibly have been there, but whatever), and Tove pissed off Warren Beatty by asking his name not just once, but twice.

So here's a shout-out to my new BFF's Jon Hamm and DJ.

We probably won't be invited again. But we have pictures for the kids, to prove to them that their parents are cool people.

Thank you for ...

2010-12-06T11:35:00.001-08:00

The kids all got their black belts in TKD a couple of weeks ago, and what do I find in the mailbox today if it isn't their "thank you" notes that they apparently wrote as part of that whole experience.

(Side note: they put them in the mail without any stamps. So the USPS happily returned them to the sender address - the kids' - which obviously happened to be the same as the actual destination. Either there's somebody at the USPS that goes "Aww, how cute, more clueless children in action", or I can see a gaping hole in the USPS business plan)

And I'm starting to see a pattern about this whole "thank you" business. I blogged about a similar event last year ("Parenting gold star (?)") where Celeste - under similar forced circumstances - was thanking us for being such great parents and not flushing their dead pets down the toilet.

This time around, she apparently had an even harder time to figure out what to thank us for. Because this is what she says: "Thank you for caring enough to feed me". Yes, there's more, but that's the opening line. Wow. We're really top-notch parents. Because we care just enough to feed our kids!

Apparently childhood in the Torvalds family is a tough affair. There's this constant nagging worry about the parents caring enough that the kids are being fed. Only to be occasionally overshadowed by the terror of dead pets being flushed.

Early Halloween Guest

2010-10-13T12:56:00.000-07:00

It's not the greatest picture ever taken in the history of man-kind, but that blurry thing inside the plastic container is a small cute bat being very angry at being caught. The rock face is the fireplace in the kids playroom.

You can kind of see the mouth and the three-inch-long fangs bared, ready to spill the blood of its captors. What you cannot hear is the furious roaring of its mighty mouth, but if you mentally visualize the old MGM Lion, you can kind of imagine what it didn't sound like.

I have no idea how it actually got into our house, but with a graceful flick of the red construction paper, I got it just barely out the door, and it flew away.

Bye bye, little bat.

"13744 supplied"

2010-08-03T13:16:00.000-07:00

Yeah, I'm not talking about the number of burgers McD supplies each second or anything like that. No, I'm talking about our fully automatic coffee maker. I just did a cleaning cycle, and ended up looking up what the coffee count was.

I may have an addiction problem.

Now, admittedly this is a coffee maker that we've had for something like 8 years, but that's still 4.7 doubleshots of coffee supplied every day for those eight years (you can ask for a single or a double, and the counter just counts "events").

Ok, I lie. The coffee maker counts the different types of coffee it makes separately, and "only" about two thirds of the events are actually double-shots. But I make that up by still supporting Starbucks (and Peet's) enough to make up the difference. And Tove accounts for about half, so when I say that I have an addiction problem, I should probably have said "we".

So every time I see some piece of medical research saying that caffeine is good for you, I high-five myself. Because I'm going to live forever.

Meanwhile, in Finland..

2010-05-29T11:20:00.001-07:00

Being known as a Finn living in the US, sometimes people send me pointers to things Finnish.

Now, this weekend is obviously the Eurovision song contest (you all knew that, right?). And I expect Finland to do as well as it usually does ("Finland, nul point" - it's a national tradition!), and you can spend up to several minutes on youtube transfixed by the glory, or just start from the official home page.

But before that glorious tradition had time to take off, Tim Elliott sent me this gem of Finnish culture seen from the outside: the sauna championships.

What can I say? We have a sauna in our house. Even if we don't use it all that often, it's a Finnish thing.

A Pig Lover's Oath

2010-05-16T12:10:00.000-07:00

I honor and love
Every pig that I see
For maybe one day
That pig will love me.

Our friendship with pigs
will always last
It doesn't matter
Whether it's slow or fast.

If we continue to hug
Every pig we can
Our love will grow
As large as this land.

So I promise to help
Every pig in defeat
For if it weren't for pigs
There would be no bacon to eat.

What can I say? Daniela (my middle one) is a real poet. It scans a bit oddly, but I think that falls solidly under the heading of "artistic".

Silly grin

2010-03-31T13:20:00.001-07:00

This is actually from last year (LCA in Tasmania), but Oscar, who took the picture, was diving around the world for many months and only made the pictures he took available to me the other day. I thought I had a good life, but Oscar and Annemarie clearly has this whole life thing figured out.

Those weedy sea-dragons are pretty cool. And they weren't the only cool thing there, if you get my meaning. Brrr. I prefer warm water diving.

Turst me, I know what I'm doing...

2010-02-24T10:01:00.001-08:00

I'm probably moving my office to be above the garage.

In preparation for that, I did the whole "get CAT6 networking to the new location" thing, which has involved re-acquainting myself with our crawlspace. Spending my days crawling around, hoping I'm not going to encounter any dead mice (or live ones, for that matter).

I obviously already had cable going to various locations in the house, but the way that had happened, I'd done them one at a time, and my current office ended up being the hub for it all. And since I really wasn't going to re-route all the cables and make the new office be another hub of chaos, and I certainly wasn't going to leave the hub in what will become a kids bedroom, the above is the result.

Beautiful it ain't. It's a real media center enclosure, but the networking hubs that are meant for those things are overpriced and generally just pitiful 4-port 100Mbps switches with dubious firewall capabilities, so I'm just installing my own. And some day, I'll actually add the screws that hold the boxes where they are supposed to go, rather than just sitting in a pile on top of each other at the bottom of the box.

I haven't had the energy to fix the telephone wiring. As you can see, I now have the header for getting that particular mess sorted out too, but I'm not the person who created that particular "rat king" of cabling under our house in the first place. So I'm not feeling the need quite acutely enough to spend another few hours crawling around straightening out all that wiring. Same goes for TV cabling. You can kind of tell what part of the house wiring I actually care about...

Demons? Really?

2010-02-19T11:35:00.000-08:00

So I was in Costco waiting for a car tire rotation and check yesterday. Wasting time, I blew three bucks on a slice of pizza and a sundae, and looked around for a place to sit down and pig out. The place was packed, and it was the middle of the day.

So I sat down next to this group of people, and realized that one reason it was busy was that apparently people use the Costco foodcourt as a lunch place. Fair enough. A couple of bucks gets you a long way there.

Sitting there, I can't but help overhear that it's apparently some religious discussion going on. Ok, so it's the local God Squad having their lunch meeting, no biggie. They're apparently talking about Africa, and about life and death decisions etc - at least one of them is a missionary.

And that's when it gets strange. One of them starts to seriously talk about praying demons away, and then after the prayer has driven the demon out of the person, you have to support the person so that the demon doesn't come back. And nobody laughs at him.

Seriously? What year is it again? I'm pretty sure they didn't have Costco foodcourts in the middle ages, but maybe there was some time warping going on.

What the hell is wrong with people?

Happy camper

2010-02-06T13:06:00.000-08:00

I broke down and bought a Nexus One last week.

I got the original G1 phone from google when it came out, and I hardly ever used it. Why? I generally hate phones - they are irritating and disturb you as you work or read or whatever - and a cellphone to me is just an opportunity to be irritated wherever you are. Which is not a good thing.

At the same time I love the concept of having a phone that runs Linux, and I've had a number of them over the years (in addition to the G1, I had one of the early China-only Motorola Linux phones) etc. But my hatred of phones ends up resulting in me not really ever using them. The G1, for example, ended up being mostly used for playing Galaga and Solitaire on long flights, since I had almost no reason to carry it with me except when traveling.

But I have to admit, the Nexus One is a winner. I wasn't enthusiastic about buying a phone on the internet sight unseen, but the day it was reported that it finally had the pinch-to-zoom thing enabled, I decided to take the plunge. I've wanted to have a GPS unit for my car anyway, and I thought that google navigation might finally make a phone useful.

And it does. What a difference! I no longer feel like I'm dragging a phone with me "just in case" I would need to get in touch with somebody - now I'm having a useful (and admittedly pretty good-looking) gadget instead. The fact that you can use it as a phone too is kind of secondary.

Embroidery.. gaah

2010-01-13T15:27:00.001-08:00

So for Christmas, Tove got this embroidery machine from Santa Claus. Since then, she's busily been filling the kids clothes with names, re-doing their Tae-Kwon-Do uniforms etc etc.

And why do I care? It turns out that all those embroidery machines can be extended with new patterns, and most of them - including the one Tove has - seem to use this special and pretty much undocumented "PES" format that was designed by Brother. So Tove has been buying embroidery patterns, but actually seeing them on the computer and transferring them to the sewing machine is a big pain.

So the above beautiful png file is what I did today. It's the result of me doing a thumbnailer for those PES files (and yes, "PES" stands for "PESky", I'm convinced), so that Tove can see the designs in her file manager as she moves them around.

I can read them (largely thanks to converting a php script written by Robert Heel - which in turn seems to be based on a GPL C# project from njcrawford.com - into C code) and then drawing them and writing the result out as a png out with cairo. Sadly, it seems that the embroidery machine itself sometimes has a rather harder time. When uploading the designs to the machine, a number of them just say "Data Error", which is very annoying.

I wonder what those embroidery machine firmware people were thinking. No diagnostics, no nothing. If a design is too large for the hoop of the machine, the machine accepts it (no "Data Error"), but doesn't actually show or use the design - it just silently ignores it.

Whee. Undocumented formats, bad firmware, lack of sane error messages. And did I mention crazy interfaces? The embroidery machine itself shows up as a USB storage device when you connect it, except it for some reason takes about half a minute to calm down enough to be mounted. And forget about the embroidery card reader/writer - that one needs some magic USB driver too.

But hey, if somebody else is fighting with PES files, here's a pointer to 'pesconvert', my git source tree for that silly thumbnailer that created the above png. You'll need pnglib-devel and cairo-devel to compile it, but it's small and simple. And in case you wonder about the source PES file, it's Jan_heartsdelight.pes, a demonstration PES image from brother.

Finnish culture...

2009-12-21T08:11:00.000-08:00

It's not all that often that we encounter things from Finland here in Portland. So imagine my surprise when we're on our way to our weekly date-night with Tove, and our baby-sitter is gushing about this adorable and wonderful Finnish YouTube video.. She apparently have been watching it three or four times a day for the last few days (weeks?), laughing hysterically.

I'm intrigued by this notion, so I look it up, and notice that I am very late to an internet phenomenon. The thing in question is Armi & Danny's "I Want to Love You Tender", which has apparently been a big hit on youtube for several years now.

Now, people who aren't from Finland may not realize the whole depth of that video. To an outsider, it may look like some highschool musical number with particularly inept dancing. It's funny, yes, but you go on to watch keyboard cat and dramatic chipmunk.

But to somebody from Finland, the first reaction is "I recognize that tune". The second reaction is "Oh, it's them!". That's not some inept highschool musical number, that's one of the most beloved Finnish entertainers ever! Ok, so the version you hear in Finland is in Finnish, and the above is the English version - and Finns back in the seventies weren't really all that good at English. That explains some of it.

When I grew up, the Swedes had ABBA and Björn Borg. The Finns had Armi ja Danny. Really.

Now I just find myself wishing that we'd have Finnish meal-pouches with musical accompaniments. "Rudolf in a Bag" MRE's (reindeer meat with lingonberries) with Armi and Danny on BluRay.

Although I'm not sure I could take the concentrated awesomeness that is "I Want to Love You Tender" in glorious HD. Maybe it's safer in that low-quality YouTube version.

WTF?

2009-10-03T14:10:00.000-07:00

So Tove is off learning how to judge Tae-Kwon-Do competitions, and the kids are roaming the neighborhood like jackals (or maybe they're upstairs reading a book. Who knows? I take a "hands off" approach to parenting).

So I'm stalking the kitchen looking for food, my trusted canine companion by my side. My prey hides quietly on a remote shelf, but I outsmart the cardboard packaging easily (along with the NASA-designed internal metallic pouch), and am soon ready to feast on the guts of some random Indian lentil stew.

And that's when it hits me.

A quiet rattling emanates ominously from inside the nutritionally uninteresting outer shell as I'm about to discard it. I go on high alert, and ancient instincts immediately raise my adrenaline levels. What's going on?

So I look inside, and in addition to the metallic pouch with the actual food, my meal has come with a CD full of (and I quote) "Authentic Indian Cuisine". No, wait! Underneath that it says "Indian Classical Duets".

Which brings me to today's title: "WTF?" Have I been leading an unusually sheltered life, and this is actually normal? What's next? Happy Meals that come with Beyonce CD's?

Now I'm intrigued, and considering going through our other indian ready-made meals. Was this a one-off? Or had I not just noticed before, and do all those $2.99 pre-made indian meal pouches come with these odd musical accompaniments?

Programming

2009-08-09T12:48:00.000-07:00

I've actually written code lately, although for some reason it's been all these stupid projects. First I needed to fix the kernel tty refcounting, then I got all OCD on the git SHA1 routines.

I don't quite know why I wasted that much time on something as trivial as SHA1 hashing, but it was kind of fun in a "let's use the compiler as a glorified assembler" kind of way. Some people seem to think that C is a real programming language, but they are sadly mistaken. It really is about writing almost-portable assembly language, and it turns out that getting good results from SHA1 really is mostly about trying to fight the compilers tendency to try to be clever.

So here is the current result of me trying to get gcc (well, arguably of it is mostly the C pre-processor, rather than the compiler proper ) to generate good assembly code. On my Nehalem machine (but not Netburst or Atom - poor fragile micro-architectures that they are), it actually seems to outperform the OpenSSL hand-written assembly language implementation.

And once I get rid of libcrypt from openssl, I get rid of two silly runtime loadable libraries that git no longer needs. And that in turn speeds up the test-suite by a couple of seconds.

Did I mention that I seem to have some OCD issues?

Parenting gold star (?)

2009-07-14T08:26:00.001-07:00

It's summer.

Which in our family means summer camps.

Oh, the kids are happy playing together, and we usually have one or two of the neighbors kids running around too, so it's not like they tend to get bored. But Tove is a big believer in making doubly sure that they don't go stir crazy around the house, so summer camps it is.

Last week was Tae-Kwon-Do camp (Tove is also a big believer in beating up other people), and apparently it was all fine. But what do I know - I wasn't interested in sports when I was small, I'm not interested in sports now either.

And as part of their camp (presumably when they were taking a breather from trying to kill each other), they had to write a letter home about how they are thankful to their parents. Oh, those wacky Asian self-defense sports and their respect for their elders - another thing I don't seem to recall from my own childhood.

Anyway, very cute. They all seem to be well on their path of writing pleasing prose, and I see a promising career of writing Hallmark cards (and made-for-TV shows) for all of them.

Except possibly Celeste. There's a WTF moment here:

You buy me lunch, breakfast and dinner. You bought me animals to play with so I could have a lot of fun in my life.

Ok, fine so far. She's a bit hung up on the "buying" part of this whole parenting gig, but hey, she's just eight. She'll get over it, and if she doesn't, I guess she'll fit right into the culture. But then comes the kicker:

You also let me bury them instead of flushing them down the toilet.

Ooh, yeah! That's some premium parenting there. Gold stars all around! It just makes me glow with pride.

Of course, she has clearly forgotten about the fish. We did flush those.

Not-so-evil empire

2009-07-12T16:36:00.000-07:00

I'm usually not enamoured with the customer service of big companies, and you always tend to hear all the horror stories. But I want to give a shout-out to Comcast.

Yeah, that Comcast. That same one that everybody loves to hate.

I switched from DSL to cable a couple of days ago, mainly because I had been hoping for a long time for our phone company (Qwest, who I also have had nothing but good service from) to offer faster DSL speeds. And they never did. So I decided that I should look at the alternatives.

I went for the "professional install" from Comcast, because I was pretty sure that our cable needed upgrading (it did). And since I hate renting any electronics equipment in our house, so I was off to Fry's before-hand, and I got a Comcast-approved Linksys cable modem with built-in firewall ethernet and wireless router.

Everything worked out fine, the installer was a few hours late, but he was friendly and knew what he was doing. He did say that he would have suggested going with a stand-alone modem and separate router box, but I've used Linksys routers before, so I wasn't too worried and liked the all-in-one box. I was left with some temporary cable laid in our back yard, and it's probably going to be that way for a few weeks, but all in all, a good experience.

Until later in the day, when the Linksys box rebooted.

And then it did it again. And again. Roughly once an hour or so. It came up each time, but there was a very annoying 70-second pause in my internet connection each time. I had good statistics on exactly when it happened, and how long the internet was off-line, because I'd done some silly tools to keep track of that earlier when I had had DSL line trouble (due to just bad signal and constant retraining).

In other words, it turns out that the cable installer was not just friendly and knew what he was doing, he really was right on the money. I don't know why, but that Linksys cable router is apparently total crap. And googling for it, I was clearly not the only one with the problem. It looks like you should avoid the WCG200v2 like the plague.

I asked Comcast (email support, just to see how that works) whether they can upgrade the firmware of the thing, or can do anything about it, but they answered that they can't do anything about customer equipment. Hey, fair enough. Not their fault.

So, like any self-respecting geek, I decided that I'll just buy more equipment, because let's face it, you can never have enough toys in your home. So off to Fry's I went again, and got myself a DOCSIS-3.0 motorola box and a separate Netgear router.

Not only did I decide to avoid Linksys this time, but the Netgear one made a big deal about running open-source software, and I assume the "L" at the end of the name means that the open-source in question is Linux. Sure, Linksys had a Linux router too (with a penguin!) but let's face it, they screwed up, so I'm giving the competition a go this time.

So I need to provision it (ie letting Comcast know about the new modem MAC address), so I call up Comcast. It being a Sunday afternoon, I was expecting that I'll just have to wait for Monday to get it sorted out. But no, not only is there a friendly tech who is greeting me with neither silly muzak nor waiting, but she's happy to get my all provisioned and up and running with a new cable modem in minutes (ok, so it took more than a couple of minutes, but a lot of it was literally waiting for the new cable box to boot up a few times).

And so far, the new box isn't rebooting constantly whenever there's more than a few internet connections going on. Which is just as well, since it clearly does take longer to boot than the old one. Knock wood.

So what can I say? Friendly competence all around. Good for Comcast. And a big black eye for Linksys.

Pathetic

2009-07-04T14:53:00.000-07:00

It's the 4th of July, the kids are out playing, Tove's at the mall, and I'm following my new toy as it crawls across the map of the US towards me, courtesy of UPS tracking and google maps.

This fall, we'll go for two scuba trips: in addition to our yearly week in Hawaii, Tove is treating me to a week in Belize. Because I only turn 40 once, I'm told. Little does she know that if that trip turns out successful, I'm planning on turning forty the year after too!

Anyway. In preparation of all this, my new toy is a dive computer, and it should arrive in a few days. I always just rent all my gear, and as a result on some dives I then end up following the dive master like a dog on a leash because I don't carry my own computer. The divers who know what they are doing always like feeling like everybody keeps track of their own nitrogen levels.

But I will be leashed no more. Paraphrasing Braveheart: "They may paint my butt blue, but they'll never take our Freedom". Or something like that. I never actually saw the movie.

Of course, the trips are months away, and in the meantime I'll just have to amuse myself by taking long baths with my toy. Once it arrives. I may be turning 40, but that doesn't mean I can't act like a little child. I may not live the dream, but I can dream the life.

Am also considering taking a Nitrox course. Just because. Because that way I'll have more buttons I can press, and modes I can set, on my new toy. Anybody got suggestions on places that do that around Portland?

Outwitting the fashion police

2009-06-17T15:00:00.001-07:00

This is a public service announcement for all geeks.

Are you tired of people pointing out that you shouldn't use socks and sandals? I know, it really annoyed me too. It's like they are trying to take away your geek card.

But there's a solution.

For a year now, I've been avoiding the fashion police by instead of "sandals" wearing "shoes with holes in their sides". I've got these Keen's that look enough like shoes that nobody ever bats an eye at you wearing them with socks (Ok, by "nobody", I mean my wife, but that's all that matters, right?).

The problem is that it looks like the fashion police may be starting to figure it out. The model I have seems to be no longer in production, and now all the new ones I find are pretty obviously sandals (toes and/or heel showing).

So when I wear out my current ones, I'm going to be in trouble again. Damn.

Happiness is a warm SCM

2009-06-11T13:43:00.000-07:00

I'll have to post this while I'm still happy, because the merge window for Linux 2.6.31 opened a day ago (well, somewhat more, but I don't take patches immediately after doing a release), and so far it's been such a nice thing that I thought I'd better post while in a good mood. Before somebody sends me the merge request from hell.

So why am I in a good mood?

My real "work" is not really writing code any more, and hasn't been for a long time. No, I worry most about the whole "flow of patches", and the way development happens, rather than so much about any individual piece of code I maintain. And the last few release cycles have had a couple of really hard-to-merge issues - not because the code was necessarily bad, but because of how it was then presented to me as a fairly messy history.

And so far, the 2.6.31 merge window is going swimmingly. The x86 tree, which has gone through a yo-yo of different development models with (different) problems, seems to have gotten to that "good place" where it seems to be working.

Part of the problem is that 'git' is such a flexible tool that you can use it in various modes, and mix things up freely. The whole distributed nature means that there's no gatekeeper, you can do whatever you want. And the flexibility and power is good, but it does mean that it's also easy to make a mess of it - the old UNIX philosophy of giving people rope, and letting them hang themselves with it if they want to.

So it takes time for people (me included) to learn the rules that work. And it seems people are learning. And that feels really good.

Yet more reading

2009-05-28T12:54:00.000-07:00

Somebody in the comments wondered how I have time to read so much.. Part of it is simply that reading is my only real hobby (scuba? Sure - one week a year. Reading? 51 weeks a year). So I literally spend my time either in front of my computer or reading - and I don't waste it on commuting.

Another part obviously ends up being that I'm just a fast reader. Oh, I know people who read faster, but if it's some easily read sci-fi or fantasy, I'll read at a pace of 100-150 pages per hour, and you simply cannot distract me while I'm reading. Try to talk to me, and I won't hear a word.

So most books I finish in a single sitting, and weekends I might read two books in a day. The more sciency books I read take longer, but that may explain why I probably average about three books per week, and sometimes do many more - especially during the later parts of the merge window when things aren't as hectic on the kernel front.

Anyway, the haul over the last couple of weeks has been mostly random stuff (Fire Upon the Deep by Vernon Vinge, Golden Torc by Simon Green, Turn Coat by Jim Butcher, The Laurentine Spy by Emily Gee). Don't ask me what the common thread is, because there is none. Some were randomly picked up from the book store in desperation over not having anything at all to read, others were things I'd read the authors before. I enjoyed them all, in different ways.

On the non-fluff front, I read Phantoms int he Brain by V.S. Ramachandran, based on a recommendation in the comments of the last reading post. I have to say, it is a better book than The Brain that Changes Itself (the one that triggered the recommendation), but at the same time I was also a bit disappointed with it.

Why? All the chapters on different disorders were absolutely fascinating, but then the last chapter just stood out as a big disappointment. It seems that any time that people start discussing "qualia" and guessing about what consciousness is, otherwise sane and coherent people end up being just confused and crazy (example: Roger Penrose). Ramachandran avoids the outright crazy, but chapter 12 ended up being a big disappointment to an otherwise engrossing book for me. But even that disappointing chapter had interesting content in it.

So, highly recommended, despite the small nagging feeling that the last chapter really could have been so much better. Most of the book is about the fascinating ways the brain fails at what it's supposed to do, and what it teaches us about how people really function.

The other non-fluff book was Bart Ehrman's "Jesus Interrupted", a kind of follow-up to the earlier Misquoting Jesus that I read some time ago. Bible study is actually fairly interesting, although in many ways I always thought the Old Testament was way more interesting. Ehrman, of course, concentrates pretty much exclusively on just the New Testament, with just passing mention of OT issues as they relate to NT issues. The book was also the inspiration for the current kernel naming ("Man-Eating Seals of Antiquity"), since it fit perfectly with my pattern of nonsensical animal-related naming scheme.

Recommended. Not nearly as engrossing as Phantoms, but an interesting read none-the-less.

Memorial day BBQ

2009-05-26T16:00:00.001-07:00

I've always liked the demotivational posters from despair.com a lot more than those inane motivational ones. And this one obviously hits close to home.

So what do our neighbors bring with them when we invite them for a BBQ? Yup.

Do my friends know me or what? Of course, my favourite is probably the one that says something like "The point of your life may be just to act as a warning to others", but that one doesn't have penguins.

The downside to actually finally having the physical thing, of course, is that I'm not much for hanging things up. So it will probably end up propped up in my office somewhere, adding to the general messiness.

Reading: Evil Genes

2009-05-06T09:24:00.000-07:00

.. by Barbara Oakley.

I have to say that I was a bit disappointed in the lack of any actual science (it starts out much more promising than it then ends up being).

But that disappointment is balanced by the fact that it was actually a fun read, mostly because you end up trying to match some of the traits being discussed to yourself, your crazy relatives, your psychotic co-workers etc.

So I'd say that it ended up having not a lot about genes, and a lot of armchair psychology of people Barbara never actually met (apart from her sister). But I'll still have to give it a thumbs up just for being entertaining.

The merge window is calming down, so I've been reading other things too, but they've been eminently forgettable. I'm now steeling myself to begin "Renegade's Magic", the third installment of Robin Hobb's Soldier Son trilogy. The two first ones were big disappointments, and I had already decided that I'm not even going to bother finishing the trilogy, but I guess I can't.

Here's to hoping Nevare turns out to be less of a fat whining idiot in the third book. But I'm not really holding my breath.

Peeve of the day

2009-05-04T09:33:00.000-07:00

Ok, so I have lots of pet peeves, and if I wanted to blog them all I'd have no time for anything else (and a lot more blog posts than the occasional one), but this one struck me the other day.

I was at the optometrist with Patricia, who is near-sighted like me. Or rather - not like me, since I've had lasik, and since she's more nearsighted than I ever was. She's blind as a bat without glasses or contacts, in other words.

Also like me, she's allergic to pollen. She gets itchy, watery eyes. So at the optometrist, when they ask about whether she's had problems with her eyes, the allergies come up. And what do you know, they have eye-drops for that.

Ok, not surprising. But what I do find surprising is the kind of eye-drops they have. This is a doctor's office, you'd expect them to be professional. But their eye-drops are homeopathic, and the doctor talks them up as not having any harsh medication in them. Well, duh! They're saline solution.

So I sit there quietly, and don't call him out for being a quack, because real doctors do actually prescribe placebos, and maybe he does know better. And there's also no question that plain saline solution isn't a fine thing to use when your eyes are itchy.

So afterwards, I spend some time afterwards talking to Patricia about placebos and homeopathy and quackery, in my never-ending hope that my kids won't grow up to be morons. But it's been a few days, and quite frankly, it still disturbs me. I've not had any other issues with that optometrist, but I'm seriously wondering if this is worth switching eye doctors over.

Do I want somebody who sells snake-oil (ok, so he gave a free sample, and no way would I have paid for it anyway) looking at my kids eyes? Even if it's harmless and even beneficial?

I'd much rather have seen free samples of "sterile saline solution". And oh yes, please feel free to make a big deal out of the "sterile" part, and feel free to talk about how it is "all natural" and free of Tetrahydrozoline or other chemicals.

But this piece-of-crap saline solution talked about the magical homeopathic "active ingredients" (non-existent and bogus), and while it did list the "inactive ingredients" (ie water and sodium chloride - aka "saline solution"), it was basically a huge advert for teaching people bad science and paying extra for it.

And I'm not crazy. I'm not going to make my own saline solution to save money. I'll happily pay extra for "sterile". I'll pay extra for nice prepared droppers in tiny sizes, even if it means you pay actual money for just tiny amounts of water with some table salt in it (no iodine - get the "kosher" salt if you want to make your own, and use distilled water). I'll happily pay for the convenience of having somebody else prepare saline solution of the proper strength and in a convenient package.

And the funny thing is, I don't mind it when I see the same thing at the checkout counter in the organic grocery store I prefer to go to. I go there because quite frankly, the average meat department in something like a Safeway or Albertsons leaves a lot to be desired. And hey, it's an organic store, so I kind of expect it to then cater to the ignorant and the crack-pots too.

But at the doctors' office?

New logo

2009-03-18T11:13:00.001-07:00

So 2.6.29 isn't quite out yet, but I've merged the new Tuz logo, so now my laptop boots up with two of these guys showing. See an earlier post about the plush version of this that I got while in Hobart for LCA 2009.

Also see the Save The Tasmanian Devil site for details about the devils plight.

All told, I think the kernel came out looking better than Bdale.

SSD followup

2009-03-18T10:50:00.000-07:00

I wrote a couple of months ago how the Intel SSD's were the only ones on the market that seemed to be worth buying - all the cheaper ones were unusable due to having horrible random write performance, which is something you notice really quickly in real life as nasty pauses.

Sadly, almost none of the reviews seemed to ever catch on to that, as they were all looking at the (totally irrelevant) throughput numbers that basically don't matter in any real-life situation. Everybody just quoted the nice big marketing numbers, because finding the numbers that matter more to actual human perception (notably: average and maximum latency) was so much harder, and most disk benchmarks are crap and don't even give those numbers.

Which is why I was so happy to see this review at AnandTech. Half the numbers quoted are still the worthless ones (I guess you can't avoid quoting the industry standard benchmarks, even when they are horribly bad), but much of the actual discussion is about how unusable a drive is when it has maximum latencies in the hundreds of milliseconds.

Looks like people are catching on. And as the reviewers are catching on, so are the manufacturers. I still see too many reviews that gush over throughput numbers, but here's one that got it right, and apparently got a manufacturer to actually understand. Good job.

(And I still love my Intel SSD's , but Anand is certainly correct in pointing out that they aren't cheap. And it looks like "cheap" will no longer necessarily mean "sucks so bad that they are unusable" in the upcoming drives. Hallelujah)

Reading..

2009-02-26T14:48:00.001-08:00

It's getting later in the release cycle, so I'm spending more time in my "wait for people to complain" mode, allowing me to read more.

And happily, I found Lois McMaster Bujold. I don't think I've read anything by her before, but picked up The Curse of Chalion and The Hallowed Hunt and read them very happily over the last couple of days.

Now I guess I'll have to go out and buy some more books by her to see if I was just lucky, or whether she just is consistently good.

And judging by reviews on Amazon, it wasn't just me being lucky in the two I picked up.

Reading

2009-02-23T13:57:00.000-08:00

Genesis.

No, not that book, the other one: Genesis: The Scientific Quest for Life's Origins by Robert Hazen.

Usually, I tend to read about genetics or similar (that is, when I read anything serious to begin with, which tends to be less than 10% of the time). This one is obviously related, but about the processes that came before it all began. And it also gives more of a look into the issues faced by somebody trying to do experiments in the area.

Me likee. It's a pretty easy read, and I liked the mix of talking about the theories and talking about the life of a scientist and the not-always-so-successful experiments.

25 things about me

2009-02-11T17:08:00.000-08:00

1. I get bored really easily

Getting older...

2009-02-07T14:12:00.000-08:00

Tove was cleaning out some random stuff, and came upon this Japanese model that I had bought years ago and never built up. So she told me to build it (with the perhaps implied threat that if I didn't, she'd throw it out).

So I did. That's an Aerobase 1:160 scale model of a Fokker Dr 1 in photo-etched metal. And a US quarter, just for scale. It came as this flat-packed thin sheet of copper, and building it involved bending and connecting all these really tiny pieces of thin brass.

Building that thing, I remembered how much I like model building (which was why I had bought it in the first place, of course), but even more than that, I noticed how my eyes really can't focus close enough to see the small details. Fitting it all together involves threading infinitesimally small pieces of metal through barely larger holes in same.

I'm getting old.

And yes, it looks a bit rickety, and I clearly also lack the manual dexterity required to not bend thin copper a bit out of shape while building it. But maybe it's just an extra-realistic scale model of a Fokker that had had a few crash-landings?

Fantastic!

2009-01-31T21:07:00.000-08:00

This may be a shock to everybody, but I have to admit that I'm not generally a huge fan of most Microsoft software ("No, really, Linus? Tell us more!").

But I may have to admit that I was wrong.

No, I'm not talking about Windows 7. I'm talking about Songsmith, which is clearly a true work of genius. Yes, yes, the commercials are painfully cheesy, but when used right the end result is undeniably art.

The thing that convinced me was hearing Billy Idol's "White Wedding" as re-interpreted through Songsmith. Nobody will ever convince me that that isn't just impossibly brilliant. Sheer genius on just an incredible scale. I'm getting carpal tunnel syndrome from just clicking "Replay" over and over again.

Thank you, azz100c.

Now that's cute

2009-01-18T11:58:00.001-08:00

Ok, so that's a plush Linux Tasmanian devil.

It's sitting in a bathtub, because my innate instinct for great photography (Ansel Adams has got nothing on me) made me think that "Hey, I'm in a hotel room in Hobart - and it's exactly like I was in a fancy photography studio if I just put the dang thing into the bath tub".

Very fetching. I think I really "captured" it. Whoever had the idea of dressing up a plush tasmanian devil as the Linux penguin deserves some kind of medal. And the beak only slightly makes me think "snoopy doing his vulture impersonation". Otherwise it's a dead-on penguin.

Right?

Odd hardware

2009-01-13T12:30:00.001-08:00

I'm totally not very sentimental about technology - the good old days really weren't very good at all, and I'm solidly in the "good riddance" camp when it comes to old computers and peripherals. I'll take the newest/smallest/fastest thing over those clunky machines of yesteryear.

As a result, when somebody sends me an email saying that the Sinclair QL turned 25 years old yesterday, and that I should mention it on my blog, I just went "hmm". Because while I had one and loved it, I have to say that I was so much happier with the PC I ended up replacing it with, and decided that I'll never use an odd-ball machine ever again.

(A promise I then broke several times, since I ended up playing with both alpha and PowerPC in my efforts to make sure that Linux wasn't too PC-centric. Oh well. Each time I ended up re-promising myself never to do that, and each experience just convinced me more that hardware that isn't mass market tends to not be worth it in the long run. But it can certainly be fun and interesting and a teaching experience).

But the email from Urs König (aka cowo) did end up festering in my mind and brought back fond memories. So here we are, twenty five years and one day later, and I'm writing a shout-out to the QL anyway. It was odd, and it was flaky to the point of being the only machine I had to do hardware surgery on to make stable and useful, but I guess I was at an impressionable age. And while I don't think there were many QL's that ever made it outside Britain, it was an interesting machine for its time.

Here's to odd hardware.

Spastically flailing around..

2008-12-30T15:14:00.000-08:00

It's that magical time of year when I actually play video games. I have one rule for christmas (and bday, for that matter) gifts for Tove: she should buy me toys. No practical gifts, no soft packages with sweaters or socks. I didn't enjoy them when I was little, and I don't enjoy them now. I refuse to grow up.

And none of that "toys for men" crap either. I couldn't care less about a new miter saw or something like that. I'll buy manly toys myself if I have some project in the yard that needs them, I don't want them as a present. The week after christmas is when I regress to my teenage years, and play games, build models, or play with RC cars.

In other words, I want presents that I wouldn't really ever buy myself.

But since I usually do it for just about a week each year, I really suck at it. So this year the suckage involved me playing the new Prince of Persia (christmas), and flying around a small electric indoor RC micro-helicopter (birthday).

Talk about spastic.

In PoP, I'm actually pretty good at the acrobatics (I like the platforming part, and I've played all the versions of PoP over the years), but the fights are really frustrating. You're supposed to be able to create those wondrous fight sequences with the right button combinations. I can't do it, so I just flail wildly around, mashing the buttons as best I can, and eventually I wear the opponent down. I'm pretty certain some of the bosses just decided that suicide was better than watching me jump around and hit things at random. Or maybe I just embarrassed them to death. But as long as they die, I don't care.

And Ubisoft must have known that no normal person actually ever gets any of those magic 14-hit combos, and I could finish the game in just over two days. Some people may complain that it's too short a game, but for me, that was just perfect. Last years game was Assassin's Creed, and the thing was just too long - I got pretty good at killing guards, and it was all beautiful, but it just took me too long. So I eventually just left it with the last long assassination sequence not even started.

As to my mad skillz at flying RC helicopters, I have yet to ever succeed in actually landing the damn thing in a designated spot, unless "on the floor, possibly with a crunch that sounds like the helicopter barely avoided becoming scrap" counts as such. And I probably never will.

But hey, it's all good. It's what christmas is all about. Killing people and crashing helicopters? Isn't it? Even if you're not very good at it.

White stuff..

2008-12-20T15:14:00.000-08:00

It looks like we may well have a white Christmas in Portland this year. Schools were closed all week long, and while it's easy to laugh at that when you come from Finland ("if it's colder than -20°C, you don't have to go outside for recess, and can do PE inside"), it's rather understandable when most years you only get a day or two of snow.

Here's a plant in our back yard. But don't ask me what it is. I strictly sort plants by "edible" and "not edible", and I think this one falls in the second category.

And I find I like snow when I know it's not going to stay much longer, and it only happens once a year or so.

Reading

2008-12-14T19:28:00.000-08:00

Two books this week: "Survival of the Sickest" by Sharon Moalem, and "The Hero of Ages", the final part of Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn trilogy.

The first one is a fairly light read on disease and genetics, and was really quite enjoyable. It's the kind of book I tend to read when I decide I want to read something intelligent, and it's a lot more modern about genetics in that it discusses genes as being much more dynamic than you'd find in more traditional ("older") books on the subject.

It's a bit unorthodox in other areas too. I like the aquatic ape hypothesis that the book brings up as much as anybody, but I guess that's not very mainstream. But whether mainstream or not, the book is a very enjoyable read and definitely merits reading.

Recommended.

As to Hero of Ages, I'm happy to finish the trilogy. It was a worthy finish, and I like Sanderson (both in Mistborn and in Elantris).

My only real complaint is that I just hate being forced to buy hard-cover books - they take up too much space in our already cramped bookshelves, but more importantly they're also much harder to read. I like reading lying on my back, and since I don't do any sports my muscles have atrophied to the point where holding up a hard-cover book for hours counts as more exercise than I really consider enjoyable.

(I keed, I keed. I can bench-press a hardcover book all day long. But it's true that they're less convenient)

So if you haven't already been suckered into the Mistborn trilogy, I'd suggest holding off until you can find it as mass-market paperbacks. I didn't have that choice - as usual, I had made the mistake of starting the series too early, and I'm not big on the whole "delayed gratification" thing. Which is why publishers do that whole hard-cover thing, of course.

But maybe you like hardcover books. Some people seem to think that it's a status sign. I'd personally much prefer that publishers just came out with a (more expensive, by all means) paperback initial printing, but I guess I'm odd. I pay for the words, not for the bulk.

Road-rage explained

2008-12-09T08:11:00.001-08:00

Nobody will ever claim that I have any real taste in music. I mainly listen while driving, and mostly just to classic rock. Sue me.

But every once in a while I get that "stabby feeling", and yesterday I realized why. It's "Brandi (You're a fine girl)". It's one of those songs that make me change stations really quickly, even to the insipid nasty soft-rock channel that Tove listens to (which does only christmas songs this time of year - a nice improvement over their normal fare).

I'm sure that song explains at least half the road-rage incidents out there. A less stable person would quite reasonably decide that rather than change the channel, they just need to stab somebody in the face.

I realize that there are probably people out there that view that song with nostalgia, but please: before you request that song, think of the consequences.

Think of the children.

Life is good again..

2008-12-06T09:41:00.000-08:00

...because it looks like we figured out what the suspend/resume problem was. And as suspected, the actual resource code had nothing what-so-ever to do with it, and was apparently just a trigger for timing.

It's frustrating with bugs like that, but on the other hand it's then a big relief when it gets resolved, and in this case we also ended up going through a lot of code and I think we'll be much better off as a result. It's also a huge relief to find the actual root cause, rather than seeing things that can be used to paper over and hide the problem.

And kudos to the people who actually saw the problem (Rafael and Frans), and who spent a lot of time trying out different things and sending out logs and looking at the resource allocation. The real clue was in a log from a successful suspend/resume cycle that showed some questionable behaviour despite not actually failing.

Debugging hell

2008-12-04T15:31:00.001-08:00

So I've spent much of the last couple of days remotely debugging this insane suspend failure (or to be exact, resume failure) that happens occasionally for a couple of people.

Now, suspend/resume debugging is some of the nastiest crud around, because when you suspend a machine, you end up (obviously) having to turn all the devices off. And guess what? That also means that you have no way to then inform the user about what is going on when things go wrong, because all those nice devices (like the screen - duh) will not be available. So no screen output, no serial console traces, no network dumps, no nothing.

To make matters worse, we even know how to trigger the problem (on those particular machines, neither of which are mine), but the particular PCI resource layout that is needed seems to have nothing what-so-ever to do with the actual failure itself. It seems to be just a way to trigger it, nothing more.

(And that's also why I've been debugging it personally - the whole resource allocation thing is one of the areas where very few other people know how things work. Most of the time I can try to prod others into looking at the bugs, but in this case it was one of those rare "Linus or nobody" choices).

So I'm frustrated. I'm doubly frustrated because it's a reasonably recent Intel chipset, and some simple debugging facilities is the one thing I've been asking Intel to add to the core chipset for the last several years so that we could do some kind of sane tracing over complete failures where all other devices are unavailable and you have to power off the machine to get it back.

Grr.

I want to be back under water.

Reading

2008-11-30T12:38:00.000-08:00

So I read Brent Weeks' Night Angel trilogy last week mostly while on planes.

Kudos to a new writer for a good debut trilogy, but also extra kudos for releasing a trilogy all at once and having a clean ending and not leaving things hanging just for the future. I guess the two are related (publisher not wanting to publish something from a new author without having the whole series in hand and being able to judge it), but I hate reading an interesting first novel in a series and then having to wait for the rest (hint: "Name of the Wind". Grrr).

Ok, so technically the books were released a month apart, and I also guess that I was lucky that the third one was apparently available a few days early at the Ka'anapali Barnes & Noble, but that's still "together" as far as I'm concerned.

Recommended.

The incredible shrinking wetsuit

2008-11-30T11:46:00.001-08:00

So I was in Maui the last week, doing my best to spend as much time under-water as possible, given the constraint that I also had to at least occasionally meet up with my family for dinners etc.

And I got in a solid lucky thirteen tanks, with the added bonus that I don't think I had a single dive where I came up with less than 1200psi. Which means that I'm definitely no longer the person that forces other divers to come up early due to being low on air. Woot!

So I was being good and sporty all week, but despite that, roughly half-way through the trip, I noticed that I had a much easier time fitting in the ML (male large) suit than the MM (male medium) ones.

And it wasn't just one of them that had shrunk - I checked a couple just to be sure. The suits that were a perfectly good fit on Saturday had suddenly shrunk and become tight by Wednesday.

It's magic, I tell you. Magic. The wetsuit-fairy is out to get me.

In Memoriam

2008-11-09T16:38:00.001-08:00

It's been about two years now since Randi walked away and never came back.

He was 17+ years old, and his kidneys were failing. He often woke us up (and probably the neighbours too) by being fairly loud about something in the night. But he was a good cat, and I'm surprised at how sad this post made me.

Reading

2008-11-06T20:53:00.000-08:00

Book of the day: "Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast" by Lewis Wolpert.

Ok, I really wanted to like it, since the subject matter is interesting. But in the end, I think it was too light on the science. The most interesting parts were when Wolpert talks about human mental development or about the various odd belief systems of tribes, but both of those were really not very deep. They were there to explain the arguments, nothing more.

End result: it didn't really grab me. It wasn't bad, but it also wasn't terribly intriguing.

It may be the same thing as with Dawkins - I really found his scientific books more interesting than the one about belief. I'll take his old "Selfish Gene" any day over "The God Delusion".

On another angle entirely, I read 'Warrior' and 'Witch' by Marie Brennan. I find myself looking at literature that I think Patricia might enjoy - so I'm looking at women protagonists. She loved the Twilight series, for example. I just want to read it first myself, because some of the female-oriented stuff really does seem to be sometimes closer to soft-porn rather than anything I'd suggest to a pre-teen girl.

They were fine.

Oh, and the girls are giggling over "Little Big Planet". Maybe trying to find books for them was a waste of time ;)

"Healthy lifestyle.."

2008-11-05T13:11:00.000-08:00

I dunno about you guys, but I'm all for giving nature a bit of help. I've had lasik, for example, and am very happy with it.

Not that I actually ever really minded wearing glasses, but I could not recognize my own kids when in a swimming pool and they were more than six feet away. And let's face it. swimming after other peoples kids and tickling them is not socially acceptable. At least in the US.

Which brings me to the other little help I'd like to give nature: I have never found a sport that I find in the least interesting. Sure, I play pool and snooker, and it's technically a sport, I guess. After all, you do move a ball around. And scuba-diving is lovely, but I think that if you see it as an aerobic exercise, you're doing something wrong (the best part of scuba diving is the floating and looking around - very much avoiding exercise).

So let's face it, I sit around like a vegetable 99% of the time. My job is sitting in front of a computer, and when I relax, the last thing I want to do is run around. I used to swim a while, and for half a year or so I actually spent about 45 minutes in the pool almost every day, and it helped, but while I enjoy swimming, at some point it just became counting laps.

So then I lapsed (I kill myself - I'll be here all week), and didn't get back in the habit, and now while there's a pool nearby, parking is inconvenient and I just can't be bothered. I've tried things you can do at home (jump-rope? I actually enjoy it, but not enough to do it. Air pistol? Doesn't really do that whole "body sculpting" thing - you can do it sitting down and eating cheetos. Everything else? Totally horrible).

So I eat fairly healthy instead. It works. I have enough self-control (and genes - I'm convinced it's largely genetic) to keep from looking like "the blob" from the movie, and I happily like most healthy food. But the exercise nuts just irritate me.

So today google news had another cluster about new reports about SRT1720 (short version: it kicks up your metabolism and makes you burn fat without that stupid and boring exercise. At least if you're a mouse. And it probably will work the same way in humans, because the pathways are all the same).

And just about every single damn article about it had that annoying "Eat healthy and exercise" note.

I want to kick the next person who says that in the nuts. And I'll call that my exercise for the day (or, to be honest, for the week).

Sure, some people apparently get a runners high and really enjoy exercise, and they'll say how much people like me are "missing". My dad is apparently one of those freaks, as is my wife. I'm not. I have never in my life felt like exercise has made me feel that way. I spent eleven months in the Finnish army, and I was probably in the best shape of my life, and all I ever felt was sweaty (and cold. And bored).

So bring on the drugs. If I can kick up my metabolism with a pill, I'll do it in a heartbeat. And the next sanctimonious bastard that talks about all I'm missing can damn well walk away holding his nuts and going "Oww, Oww, oww".

Because I'm not missing anything.

Kellogg

2008-11-03T13:35:00.001-08:00

Because he's a frosted corn-flsnake. Geddit?

Black and white

2008-11-02T11:52:00.000-08:00

So I'm pretty well-known for not exactly being a huge fan of the FSF and Richard Stallman, despite the fact that I obviously love the GPLv2 and use it as the license for all my projects that I care about.

The reason has always been that I don't like single-issue people, nor do I think that people who turn the world into black and white are very nice or ultimately very useful. The fact is, there aren't just two sides to any issue, there's almost always a range or responses, and "it depends" is almost always the right answer in any big question. And not being even willing to see the other side makes for bad decisions.

Don't get me wrong - I love seeing people who are really passionate about what they do, and many people have something they really care about. It's just that when that becomes something exclusionary, it often gets ugly. It's not passion for something, it becomes passion against something else.

This is, just to take an example, one of the reasons I try to avoid talking much about Microsoft - I'm very passionate about Linux (obviously), but quite frankly, I really find the whole notion of Linux as being "against Microsoft" to be silly and wrong-headed. Yeah, I might make an occasional tongue-in-cheek joke or two, but does anybody really seriously think that you can put 17+ years of your life and make good decisions based on hate and fear?

That was also why I didn't (and don't) like GPLv3 - I think many of the changes weren't due to being "pro free software", but more a mindless reaction against things like TiVO, and the whole black-and-white, "good vs evil" mindset.

The reason I bring this up is that while I can't vote, I did want to say publicly anyway that I really really hope that Obama will be the US president elect after Tuesday night. I realize it probably won't come as a big shock to anybody (yes, I'm a socially liberal open source freak from Europe - so what would you expect?), and others will just be angry.

If anybody wants a reason for that, just watch (or listen to) Obama's "Call to Renewal" keynote speech from 2006. It looks like it's split into 5 pieces on youtube - the whole thing is about 40 minutes - but it's worth it, just to hear something rare: mentioning religion in the US without being black-or-white.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tdoQr3BQ1g

It's not a rick-roll, I promise. It's also probably not the best link (the thing must exist somewhere as a single video - it's how I remember seeing it originally), but it's the one I found now.

There are other reasons, but that's the one that originally made me hope Obama would take the democratic nomination. And what he has done since hasn't changed that. He's obviously smart and thoughtful, and he has a very interesting background that makes me believe that he really can see the other side not just when it comes to religion, but when it comes to international issues too.

Of course I'm biased (we all have our quirks), but I think it makes a difference to have actually lived in another culture. I suspect Obama understands the US better because he has seen something else, and has seen it from a wider background. He's not a black and white person - and ironically, that is probably partly exactly because he is a black and white person in a totally different sense.

And this really is about more than just being positive about the issues (as opposed to negative campaigning). It's about having the capability of understanding - and accepting - that others have other motivations than you do, even when you don't share them.

Not that I'm saying that I'm always a great example myself. I get angry and negative, and quite frankly, I have a really hard time understanding and accepting some of the nuts I see out there. But hey - that's why I'm endorsing Barack Obama, not myself, for president.

Penguins on parade

2008-10-29T18:55:00.001-07:00

I don't always dress in a T-shirt and jeans. Sometimes people give me awards, and I dress like a penguin instead. Here's a shout-out for the computer history museum.

Reading

2008-10-28T12:01:00.000-07:00

So the merge window is over, and the subsequent "oops-that-needs-fixing" period is calming down, and so I get to read again.

Today's book was Dark Banquet by Bill Schutt.

Most of the time I read random fantasy or sci-fi (ie my previous books were re-reading Robin Hobb's Farseer and Tawny man trilogies), but when I read anything else it tends to be about biology or evolution. Sometimes physics, and essentially never about computers.

So this time it was biology, and if you're interested in blood-sucking bats (the real kind, not the mythical ones), I don't think you can go wrong. It's fairly light reading, with a couple of laugh-out-loud moments. Recommended.

Candyland

2008-10-26T14:49:00.000-07:00

So, I wrote about election season in the US, without getting more than one or two "go back to where you came from" comments.

That clearly means that I need to ratchet up the controversy level, and bring up an issue near and dear to my heart - and given the times, possibly even more relevant than the election.

Yes, Halloween is almost upon us. That most holiest of holidays, when the whole country comes together, and without regards to race, religion or age, people join a common cause. Namely the gluttonous eating of candy.

It's a holiday without the stress of finding presents (or feeling alone if you have nobody to find presents for). And not even the crazies will go on national TV to complain about the "war against Halloween" - they'll be in WalMart, Target, and Costco, buying candy by the metric ton, exactly like the rest of us.

But there is a dark underbelly to even this friendliest of holidays.

No, I'm not talking about the binge eating ("I bought 15 lbs of candy, but I'll sit in the dark the whole evening so that nobody will ring the door bell, so that tomorrow I'll have the excuse to eat it all") and the inevitable diabetic shock and amputated limbs that follow.

Nor even about the pre-teen girls dressing up (or rather, down) as sluts, because it's the one night of the year when it's cute to look like a under-age hooker.

No. I'm talking about the horrible quality of candy in the US.

Because if you eat three times your body weight in candy in one day, shouldn't it be at least good candy?

Oh, I'm not expecting Belgian chocolate truffles (which really are way over-rated anyway, and a sure sign of snobbishness rather than any appreciation of the better side of life). I'm just talking about stuff that has some taste rather than being just colored sugar with corn starch.

In other words, I'm talking about the sad - and almost total - lack of ammonium chloride.

As every dietician worth his (or her) title knows, you need to balance the sugars with some taste. No, it doesn't really have to be ammonium chloride (NH₄Cl), but any self-respecting candy should be mostly something that makes your taste-buds go Whee!

Because that's the whole point. Sure, the diabetic shock may a fine way to weed out the weak, and while you could probably see Halloween as some kind of Darwinistic ritual of survival of the fittest (because it really is a holiday that works for all people, regardless of beliefs or lack there-of), I'm sure that in the end we can all agree on the whole taste-buds-go-whee-factor.

But most US candy really does seem to be more about thumbing your nose at diabetics than it is about taste buds. And this needs to change!

I realize that I can drag my sorry ass off to the nearest Finnish store (yeah, there is one in Portland), and I also realize that the Dutch store also is an excellent source of candy that actually tastes like something. And yes, sometimes you can even find Licorice Allsorts (an acceptably tasty treat) even in regular stores. So I can get my fix.

But I'm saddened how the biggest feast of the year seems designed to perpetuate the lack of any real taste in candy.

I've tried to introduce Americans to some real candy. Most of them just spit it out, because they've been indoctrinated in the whole "sugar with some bland taste" religion of candy eating. And I blame Halloween.

We need fun-sized bags of ammonium chloride, or at least licorice!

On making releases..

2008-10-09T20:07:00.000-07:00

So I cut the 2.6.27 release today, and it's always a somewhat anti-climactic thing.

The whole point of a release is that it should be something reasonably stable. Stable enough so that people can take that release and use it as a base for the stable tree, which in turn tends to be a base for most Linux distributions. It doesn't have to be perfect (and obviously no release ever is), but it needs to be in reasonable shape.

Of course, depending on the exact requirements of the distributions (whether it is for specific features they are waiting for or simply due to their timing of releases), any particular kernel release I do will be more or less relevant for most end users. I have little input on that, nor do I actually want to have any. I can only put my mark and say "This is a reasonable base after the craziness that went before".

So in a very real way, a release is just a starting point for further work, but very little of that "further work" is actually things I have anything to do with what-so-ever or much interest in. Yes, I see the patches that are queued up for the stable kernels, but mostly as an observer. And the distributions do their own thing.

So what makes a release anti-climactic is that from a development standpoint - at least as far as I'm concerned - it is inevitably at the end of a gradual slowing down of interest. So to me a release is not so much of a birth of a new kernel version, it's more of a laying-to-rest of an old one. It's also an end to a fairly quiet period.

So I tagged the release five hours ago, and during the few days before that I had barely a score of commits to merge. But now that I have cut the release, my mailbox is starting to come alive with merge requests for the next version - with thousands of commits queuing up for merging in just a few hours, as opposed to the slow trickle in the days that went before.

This is all exactly as it should be, of course, but it still feels bass-ackwards, in that people always talk about the death-march to a release, and how you're supposed to take a well-deserved vacation after the release.

For example, when I worked for Transmeta, the hardware people would basically take a month off after doing a tape-out. That seems somewhat natural just deserts. But when it comes to Linux development the "tape-out" of making a release acts the other way around. The calm was before, now comes the week or two of crazy merging.

Of course, the craziness won't start today. I want to give releases at least one nightly snapshot before I start merging stuff. So tonight, the release is done, and I won't be reading any email at all for a change. I'll need to finish the book I'm reading, since for a couple of weeks I'll not have much time for it.

Teddy

2008-10-09T20:05:00.000-07:00

"Faster than a speeding bullet, dumber than a potted plant".

Stranger in a strange land

2008-10-07T11:13:00.001-07:00

So I'm not the kind of alien that Heinlein wrote about in the book that gives this post its name, but I'm the "resident" kind, still a green card holder.

Yeah, yeah, we should probably have done the citizenship thing a long time ago, since we've been here long enough (and two of the kids are US citizens by virtue of being born here), but anybody who has had dealings with the INS will likely want to avoid any more of them, and maybe things have gotten better with a new name and changes, but nothing has really made me feel like I really need that paperwork headache again.

So I'm a stranger in a strange land, and seldom more so than when voting season is upon us.

Most of the rest of the time I can kind of ignore it. We've been in the US for over a decade, and it's definitely "home", and we like living here. But being an alien means that you can't vote, and seeing all the news being about the presidential election (and all the streets here locally littered with signs about the local school bond) tends to remind you about that issue.

But being reminded about not being able to vote is actually the much smaller thing: much more than that, election season reminds you about what an odd place the US is.

Most of the rest of the time, you can forget that you live in the US of A, and you really tend to live much more locally. We've been in Portland, OR, for the last 4+ years, and before that in the Bay Area, and part of being here - as opposed to other parts of the US - is that it's certainly much more like Finland than many other parts of the US.

But then voting season comes and reminds you that all those Americans that are individually sane and normal tend to be collectively crazy and very odd. And that's when you really notice that you're not in Finland any more.

That's when you also notice that the whole US voting system is apparently expressly designed to be polarizing (winner-take-all electoral system etc). To somebody from Finland, that looks like a rather obvious and fundamental design flaw. In Finland, government is quite commonly a quilt-work of different parties, and the "rainbow coalition" of many many parties working together was the norm for a long time. And it seems to result in much more civilized political behaviour.

Of course, in the US there are also much wider social, educational, religious and economic differences between people, and issues range all over the map. Which then means that it's hard to bring up any nuances in politics, since either people won't care about them (not relevant for that group), or they simply won't understand them (what does "foreign policy" matter to somebody who has likely never been outside the US unless you count things like day-trips to Tijuana?).

So you couple a polarizing voting system with a campaign that has to make simplified black-and-white statements, and what do you get?

Ugly, is what you get.

Most of the time I really like living in the US. But voting season sometimes makes you wonder.

Tracking the time kids spend online

2008-10-02T11:14:00.000-07:00

I've got several machines downstairs in my basement office, of course, but in our family the others have computers too. Tove has hers in her office, and the kids share one upstairs (and we're getting to the point where I guess I'll set up a second machine for them one of these days: three kids and one computer works fine most of the time, but sometimes they have homework that requires it, and then sharing doesn't always work so well).

And obviously I'm happy with the kids being comfy with a computer, but we've set some basic rules for it. Notably, they can't just play all those flash games all the time. And sometimes, if they don't do their homework, we disallow it entirely, or - happily more commonly - we give extra time for good behaviour or for some homework that needs more googling.

But I'm a geek, and I'm not at all interested in trying to do any of this manually.

So I wrote (and recently re-wrote, since a disk crash destroyed my original) a simple internet usage tracker for them, which allows me to set usage limits per kid, and which tracks how much time they use online, and forcibly logs them off if they go over the limits. It's a stupid program, but it works pretty well (if you run Linux, of course ;), and since I had to rewrite it I asked some of the git people for help with the simple graphical UI that shows the kids how much time they have left.

So for any other Linux user with kids and git, and who wants to do the same, here's a pointer to the git summary page: tracker.git, and you can get it with

git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/tracker

if you want to play around with it. It's not fancy, it has no docs, no installation instructions etc, but if people are actually interested, I'll be happy to help. Why? Because I've always noticed that my own projects get so much better if others are involved, even if it's just as a user...

.. so I got one of the new Intel SSD's

2008-10-02T10:48:00.000-07:00

The kernel summit was two weeks ago, and at the end of that I got one of the new 80GB solid state disks from Intel. Since then, I've been wanting to talk to people about it because I'm so impressed with it, but at the same time I don't much like using the kernel mailing list as some kind of odd public publishing place that isn't really kernel-related, so since I'm testing this whole blogging thing, I might as well vent about it here.

That thing absolutely rocks.

I've been impressed by Intel before (Core 2), but they've had their share of total mistakes and idiotic screw-ups too (Itanic), but the things Intel tends to have done well are the things where they do incremental improvements. So it's a nice thing to be able to say that they can do new things very well too. And while I often tend to get early access to technology, seldom have I looked forward to it so much, and seldom have things lived up to my expectations so well.

In fact, I can't recall the last time that a new tech toy I got made such a dramatic difference in performance and just plain usability of a machine of mine.

So what's so special about that Intel SSD, you ask? Sure, it gets up to 250MB/s reads and 70MB/s writes, but fancy disk arrays can certainly do as well or better. Why am I not gushing about soem nice NAS box? I didn't even put the thing into a laptop, after all, it's actually in Tove's Mac Mini (running Linux, in case anybody was confused ;), so a RAID NAS box would certainly have been a lot bigger and probably have more features.

But no, forget about the throughput figures. Others can match - or at last come close - to the throughput, but what that Intel SSD does so well is random reads and writes. You can do small random accesses to it and still get great performance, and quite frankly, that's the whole point of not having some stupid mechanical latencies as far as I'm concerned.

And the sad part is that other SSD's generally absolutely suck when it comes to especially random write performance. And small random writes is what you get when you update various filesystem meta-data on any normal filesystem, so it really does matter. For example, a vendor who shall remain nameless has an SSD disk out there that they were also hawking at the Kernel Summit, and while they get fine throughput (something like 50+MB/s on big contiguous writes), they benchmark a pitiful 10 (yes, that's ten, as in "how many fingers do you have) small random writes per second. That is slower than a rotational disk.

In contrast, the Intel SSD does about 8,500 4kB random writes per second. Yeah, that's over eight thousand IOps on random write accesses with a relevant block size, rather than some silly and unrealistic contiguous write test. That's what I call solid-state media.

The whole thing just rocks. Everything performs well. You can put that disk in a machine, and suddenly you almost don't even need to care whether things were in your page cache or not. Firefox starts up pretty much as snappily in the cold-cache case as it does hot-cache. You can do package installation and big untars, and you don't even notice it, because your desktop doesn't get laggy or anything.

So here's the deal: right now, don't buy any other SSD than the Intel ones, because as far as I can tell, all the other ones are pretty much inferior to the much cheaper traditional disks, unless you never do any writes at all (and turn off 'atime', for that matter).

So people - ignore the manufacturer write throughput numbers. They don't mean squat. The fact that you may be able to push 50MB/s to the SSD is meaningless if that can only happen when you do big, aligned, writes.

If anybody knows of any reasonable SSDs that work as well as Intel's, let me know.

First post

2008-10-02T10:33:00.000-07:00

So, having avoided the whole blogging thing so far, yesterday Alan DeClerck sent a pointer to his family blog with pictures of the kids friends, and I decided that maybe it's actually worth having a place for our family too that we can do the same on.

Of course, I'll need to see what Tove wants to do, but in the meantime, here's a trial blog.

Linus' blog

Glamorous pictures?

Pearls before swine..

Thank you for ...

Early Halloween Guest

"13744 supplied"

Meanwhile, in Finland..

A Pig Lover's Oath

Silly grin

Turst me, I know what I'm doing...

Demons? Really?

Happy camper

Embroidery.. gaah

Finnish culture...

WTF?

Programming

Parenting gold star (?)

Not-so-evil empire

Pathetic

Outwitting the fashion police

Happiness is a warm SCM

Yet more reading

Memorial day BBQ

More reading..

Reading: Evil Genes

Peeve of the day

New logo

SSD followup

Reading..

Reading

25 things about me

Getting older...

Fantastic!

Now that's cute

Odd hardware

Spastically flailing around..

White stuff..

Reading

Road-rage explained

Life is good again..

Debugging hell

Reading

The incredible shrinking wetsuit

In Memoriam

Reading

"Healthy lifestyle.."

Kellogg

Black and white

Penguins on parade

Reading

Candyland

On making releases..

Teddy

Stranger in a strange land

Tracking the time kids spend online

.. so I got one of the new Intel SSD's

First post