jcm's blog

I just received confirmation of my order for a shiny new Apple Powerbook from the folks at Terra Soft Solutions, who were obviously working New Year’s Eve to get these orders processed. Thanks guys.

With this purchase, I will now need to get a bunch of hardware up and running, including chipsets we know don’t work. I guess I’ll start out with USB wifi and take it from there – but I’d be greatful of emails about ongoing projects to get other bits ‘n’ pieces working.

Note that’s POWERbook, with the word POWER at the beginning, not WINTEL. I don’t want an Intelbook from Apple, so luckily the option to upgrade my existing 15″ model came along just in time. Otherwise, I’d have had to deal with inferior Linux support for x86 Wintelbooks. I doubt benh will even care enough to do a port for those things.

Jon.

As the last few minutes of the year are upon us, now is the time to reflect upon the year that was 2005 and to consider how many of those new year’s resolutions need some adjustment. 2005 was an interesting time for me, it was the first year where I began to feel happy about my longer term plans and to set some specific goals. I entered the year as I leave it, still quite the singleton but on reflection am not as bothered by this as I might have been a year ago. Over the past year, I’ve realised that I enjoy flying around the world and that there is a wealth of knowledge and adventure out there. I would never have considered myself interested in climbing this time last year, nor would I have found myself deleting cheesy pop music from my ipod.

So, in 2005:

Overall, I enjoyed 2005. There are always ups and downs in life, but that’s a universal. My primary new year’s resolutions are actually pretty straightforward:

• Lose some weight, exercise and climb more.
• Save and apply for Canadian immigration in 2006/2007.
• A few other more private ambitions.

I hope you all have a good holiday. See you in 2006.

Jon.

Ok. I’ve made some bookings. The following is more for my use than anyone else’s, but if you need to know where I’m going to be, it might be useful.


Thursday - 2005/12/15 (London->New York)

Jon.

Did you know that the Star Spangled Banner is a song about how the Americans thwarted the evil British empire on September 3 1814?

Their national anthem is based upon a poem originally written during the battle at Fort McHenry in Baltimore during the War of 1812. It’s set to the music of an english drinking song (apparently), which is all the more ironic since it is basically a song about how the evil British were thwarted that day. “And the rockets red glare, bombs bursting in air” are British rockets and bombs being lobbed at the Americans in some fit of desperation trying to convince them to accept assimilation and rejoin the evil empire. “Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight, O’er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming?” refers to the fact that the Americans had erected the largest flag in their history in Baltimore so that the British could clearly see it from their boats. It also inspired Francis Scott Key in his lyrics and caused at least one of the British sailors to note its grandeur in his journal.

I know all this because I watched a documentary on the History Channel tonight. I’ve been fascinated by documentaries for years but have recently elected to continue to pay for Sky (that’s our primary incumbent digital satellite television service in the UK) simply because I find Discovery and National Geographic so thoroughly interesting (as opposed to the more than 10 “God” related television channels we now receive – which I frankly find both alarming and increadibly amusing quite simultaneously – which seem to believe I should donate money to them so they can spread the word of God via TV rather than me giving that money to worthy charities instead, how sickening). I’m adding the History Channel to the list of cool channels to while away a Sunday afternoon after lunch. That documentary had all the ingredients of a good edutainment show – light on frilly pointlessness and heavy enough on useful historical fact. I also watch far too much “Seconds From Disaster” these days (National Geographic) but they haven’t quite got the message about silly pointlessness.

There’s no real point to this post, except perhaps “watch documentaries”. Oh and I’ll have to swing by Philly now during my trip because I want to see the original articles of the Constitution.

Jon.

Random factoid. Incidentally, the War of 1812 – also known as the “forgotten war” – was the one where the British burned the Whitehouse to the ground after they (the US) had burned the Canadian Parliament (but that wasn’t the last fire they had). Rather than being a forgotten war, I think it’s actually got a lot of relevence to the makeup of the modern world. Incidentally, the British also burned the Library of Congress in the process of torching Washington – something that I can’t possibly think served any useful purpose whatsoever but possibly destroyed historical documents that we might otherwise have today. The British were so frightfully evil.

[Update: The Canadian government has been toppled in an unprecidented vote of no-confidence. Hopefully the liberals will return on January 23. ]

Ottawa has pledged extra money to keep skilled workers in Canada rather than force them to leave before applying for citizenship. This is excellent news, and makes my goals even more achievable. Anyone want to offer me a job?

Now all Martin needs is to get past Monday and those annoying Conservatives. Every country has its very own pointless political institutions. Many of them begin with the letter “C” and just don’t seem to get the tree-huggingness of my perfect political environment.

It’s 04:51. I’m on JST again.

Jon.

This weekend is the US Thanksgiving (Canadian Thanksgiving is in October and celebrates the generally earlier Canadian harvest), which is basically a celebration of the tibulations of a bunch of Pilgrims who fled to the New World to escape religious persecution (having tried Holland but not gotten on so well with the dutch). It’s interesting, because most of the pilgrims died in the first year and had a truly horrid time – so historically, not the best of outcomes for people heading to North America. Today, it would seem that Thanksgiving is such an important family event because it’s the one time in the year when the whole country enters a shutdown for a long weekend (bearing in mind that my US friends are lucky if they have 4 weeks of holiday a year vs. our statutory allowances) and people can go visit one another – it’s also a very important shopping weekend and marks the turn in trade as things subsequently ramp up for the pre-Christmas shopping days which now lie ahead. Anyway, as part of my North American studies, I’m going to a Thanksgiving tomorrow and am looking forward to that with some interest.

I’ve booked a bunch more flights and just generally gone a little crazy over the last day. I’m now up to 10 flights around the States and a few booked trains so far (including going to Toronto basically just to get some Maple Tea for myself – I’ll need to bring back a few kilos – and to convince Whittard tasters that they should have it). I’ve been talking to some guys I know in States I’ve not been to yet – the map below shows that I’ve generally only been to the coastal regions. Next year, I hope to visit Texas and some of the American heartland States. I’d also like to do a road trip on US66 if that can be arranged ahead of next summer’s OLS. I will try to go to Burning Man next year, since it’s something all the cool cats have been to and I hate feeling left out.

Figure: Plan for world domination 2005 – visited 22% of US States by year’s end.

I was tinkering around with OSS last night for various reasons. Turns out that setting mixer settings is actually not as hard as I thought, but I’m sure it is lovingly more complex under ALSA. Anyway, since I didn’t care to spend hours reading ALSA API, I found that it all I needed was a couple of ioctls and a bit of masking magic to do what I wanted – the moral is, never underestimate the power of what was there before. I had sushi at the Canonical offices yesterday and found an excellent little cookie and coffee place on Kensington Highstreet. I’ve got a few articles done, just three more to get finished up over the weekend and a chapter on the book.

Jon.

Last night was a super conference call day knockout bonanza! Amongst other things, I had a chat with the kind folks at Cray about their XD1 and Linux involvement over the last few years. I pointed out that I used my first Cray around 10 years ago and that of the Virtex II Pro technology they use, I did one of the three Linux ports myself. So, we had some good pretext for a lively conversation – then I learned that the guys I was talking to were mostly in Canada at the time (I thought so, from the accents) and just geeked out a little bit more. Looks like I’ll be up visiting a UK installation over the next couple of weeks – I’d be keen to get involved with that a bit more (I’ve probably still got some massively parallel array sorts I wrote kicking around here someplace). After that call, the next call with the publisher went quite well too and I decided to try sleeping early and getting online again early today.

Planning for $thing at the moment. Certainly should be quite interesting (looking forward to being able to say more about it) but will require a bit more time this week. Currently, I’m using my uptime to get synced up with some deadlines as I’m out and about on Thurs/Fri of this week doing the lunch thang. Andrew Morton is being typically demanding by asking that my floppy fix from a couple of weeks back actually work under all circumstances It’s not easy with the current driver because it likes to poll the floppy drive async with respect to operations which need to know if they can currently write to the inserted disk. All this means is that I’m going to have to re-jig bits of the rest of it so that it works how I wanted. On the subject of amusing kernel patches (was I on that subject anyway?), Greg KH posted a super-piss-off-the-anti-GPL-people patch yesterday with his not so subtle s/EXPORT_SYMBOL/EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL/ replacement in the PCI core driver code. That’ll make it impossible to write non-GPL PCI drivers if it gets accepted (cool!).

Back to work now.

Jon.