jcm's blog

I got $50 sent to my paypal account for filling in a survey a while back and decided to waste it on random ebay purchases. So I just bought myself a X100P digium FXO (in English this is a piece of hardware that allows me to connect regular telephone lines to any computer and can be used to build my own telephone exchange) . I’ll use that as part of an Asterisk installation that I keep threatening to actually get done. It’ll help me bridge calls seemlessly from the UK to wherever I happen to be. My main UK cellphone will be handled differently, probably through a dedicated VoIP relay service, but I might also have it forward to the line I’ll have this setup to use.

I also bought a couple more wireless cameras. Hannah and Joe had their car attacked by a vandal the other night and my dad recently had someone attempt to break into his car. No longer! For we shall soon have motion watching their every single move with various unpleasant automated reactions, depending upon how evil it is felt must be the response to complete fuckwits fucking around with people’s cars.

Jon.

Well it turns out that the FSF have announced that their annual Associate Meeting will take place on April 1 at the MIT campus. I don’t know if they deliberately timed this to co-incide with Linux World or some other event, but in any case I am looking forward to it.

I’ve booked for the evening dinner and am a member of the strong set, so am keen on participating in the keysigning activities happening too.

Jon.

I finally got around to joining the EFF having previously bought t-shirts or whatever. The work they’re doing now is more important than ever.

Perhaps you’re interested in joining too.

Jon.

What’s more screwed up? jailing a newspaper editor for claiming someone is gay or actually having “forced anal examinations” in a country so conservative that gay rights are completely ignored?

I think the latter. It’s nobody’s business what sexual orientation somebody is or is not and it’s certainly not an issue for the State to enforce some misguided quasi-religious/conservative inspired pseudo-beliefset upon the whole populous. But then this is Africa and there are more than a few dozen other major issues affecting African nations that dominate the headlines so stories such as this one are relegated to the sidelines. It’s bad enough that there are fucked up whackjob “ministers” of religion dancing about on sea planes proclaiming AIDS as a curse from God (it isn’t, AIDS is an unfortunate disease which affects all people equally) but it’s 10 times worse when the government of a country gets in on the act.

Jon.

So I’m confirmed over in the US for Boston LinuxWorld. I’ll be hanging out for the whole week of 1 April – 9 April and might also get time to swing by Portland for a day on the weekend. I’m a little nuts as this will be two firsts for me: my first weekend trip to Canada followed by the first time I’ve done two transatlantic crossings within a week of oneanother. Someday, I’d like to just travel for a living I think or if I win a lottery – going from place to place is fun. It’s my main environmental indiscretion but I don’t do it deliberately to hurt the environment.

One of the guys on IRC was talking about LCD monitors just now. I gave some advice, and decided that I really do want one for this machine now – this monitor is just horrible and using it every day for work is going to be very painful indeed. I should probably also get my glasses sorted sometime. I also want to throw out some of these many SPARCs (or probably put them into parental storage instead) and consolidate a lot of kit before I can relocate. I’m thinking that a Mac Mini is on the list now, it’s just a pity they’re all McMinis.

Jon.

Sleep is an evil, evil thing. It deprives me of the ability to work around the clock and forces me to consider that I can’t do everything I want to in the space of a day (especially with the amount of time I otherwise seem to end up wasting on crap). I need to find some of that medication they’ve been trying on Air Force pilots to enable them to run sleep-free for extended periods without any apparent (yet) side effects.

So I got one column in (quite late, annoying) and am finishing another on kernel performance tuning at the moment. I decided to write about things like OProfile and how I’ve used this to benchmark things like RT performance or just for general system profiling. I’ll probably end up with a brief look at lock-free algorithms, since that came up at FOSDEM on the weekend too. Luckily, I’ve reduced my writing commitments from next month down from around 12-14 pages plus book chapters, to a more manageable 6-8 pages of articles in a month.

I bought jonmasters.net last night and jonmasters.co.uk and jonmasters.me.uk this morning. Maybe I’ll try one of those “here’s the main site, he’s the play site” approaches and stick up stuff that I’d otherwise just not care about on one of those. I dunno. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Unfortunately for my attempt at global namespace pollution, someone else has myname.com (seems like a nice enough guy too) so I’m not likely to grab that one – but I did wait 2 or 3 years for the .co.uk variant to expire, so you never know.

Jon.

Photo: A typical New England covered bridge (from my weekend in New Hampshire).

Looks like I’m definately swinging by LWE Boston 2006, which is now next month. I’m planning to sync up the trip with a one night visit to Portland (Oregon) on the weekend in order to catch up with Deepak and hang out for a while with some coffee. I could be persuaded to go via SFO if enough people are interested in also having coffee.

I’ll be scoping out the Boston area while I’m over too, figuring out where all the cool cats hang out and what kind of rates are charged for living in town (and also over in Cambridge too). There are some driver folks at the expo this year, so I’ll probably have a chat about that stuff too.

Jon.