jcm's blog

Photo: An Air France advertisement on the London Underground. Still cheaper to buy with ATP.

I called up about all those annoying jabs I probably should have already had before going to Ahmedabad for my friend’s wedding. Apparently I need to get a shot of Hepatitis A and Typhoid as well as beginning a course of Chloroquine and Proguanil as soon as possible. Due to the potential for side effects, I’ll start the latter two later in the week. All in all, I’m looking forward to my first visit to India (and indeed my first visit to Asia) although I’m still in need of making some of the final arrangements, paying for an internal flight and that kind of thing.

I’ve been asked to give a few talks over the next couple of months and have just started yet another column, with hopefully some more writing coming. One of the guys also just backed out of my book, so I’m now in the wonderful position of having a lot to write about and needing to just get myself organised. I’ve just finished this month’s LU&D work with a column on USB hacking for Linux and another on the state of Linux Flash memory support. I’ve almost got the DVD materials put together and need to pull in a few last minute things. I’ll submit a proposal for writing a series on PowerPC porting in the next few days and then need to get cracking on this month’s two chapters for the book. Probably also should sort out having some photos taken of the two remaining authors (myself and a friend from the OSDL).

I have to get something ready for Wednesday’s LinuxWorld Expo as I am running the technical track at the conference and need to figure out how to introduce a bunch of really cool people. I’ll probably try not to be too annoying and just hand over to the speakers without a lot of prelude but will need to say something. Meh. I should think about that. This means I probably won’t have all day to wonder around the show, but I’ll have something I have to do. Wednesday evening will be taken up with the awards ceremony (I was one of the awards judges this time so I better not say much more about that yet) and I’ll have to dust off an actual suit for this grand occasion (or call up today and get something booked in the way of a hire outfit).

I’ve sorted out some stuff at home and figured out the next stage in this little life of mine. Project Canada is moving forward, via a little detour since I need to pay for the whole thing (so there are a few things I’m going to do there that I will mention when I do them) and the few folks I’ve spoken to about moving to Canada aren’t in a position to pay me through the whole process right now (but obviously, I’m very keen to speak to anyone who’d be interested in employing me to telework/relocate to Ontario). As always, I’m a random hacky type who’s very good at integration and kernel debugging – especially without a debugger – and you love me.

There were a few fun LKML posts lately. Did you see the one about having an XML generator in kernel? That’s right up there with the finest crack money can buy, but someone will do it. Yay! Why not swap out simple text files for pointless amounts of extra dead code and lots and lots of new bugs. But it would be another checkbox item on the buzzwordologist’s list of marketing terms. Someone else asked about process transactioning (they didn’t call it that, I did, but that’s what they meant). I pointed out a few things and I don’t think that’ll go anywhere – but it’d be cool if it did. It’s what I would have worked on if I’d done a PhD at some point. Maybe I will someday – but I’m more interested in emigrating now. On the subject of development, I figured out a few more things about the default NPTL/linuxthreads/whatever setup on Debian and on Linux in general. The LD_ASSUME_KERNEL hacks and all that crap make more sense once you read about the versioning support in ELF.

I managed to miss the deadline for filing my self assessment tax return because I was ill on Friday and then generally crap at getting it done beforehand (though the real deadline for tax returns isn’t until January if I undertake to calculate it myself), but I’ll get it done this week and hope for the best

Jon.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 2nd, 2005 at 9:25 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.