I’m over in Boston from Friday (2006/03/31) for 9 days. I’ll be at LinuxWorld and then hanging around for some meetings and to check out the local area on the weekend. If you’re in town and we haven’t already arranged to hook up next week, please send me mail.
Jon.
Photo: Maple Tea. I brought back 4 boxes (800g) and some Inuit herbal tea too.
So ajh invited people to a party over the weekend. Since I’d gotten an invite, I wasn’t about to let 3306 miles get in the way of some fun, so I hopped on a plane on Friday night, stayed for the party and then flew back on Sunday. This was a trial run to see if weekend transatlantic trips really are feasible (they are) and I get to do it all again on Friday – I’m off to LinuxWorld in Boston.
Andrew and Emilie’s Mardi Gras was quite amusing and I got to see a couple of other people I know in Ottawa too (though there are more to catch up with next time). We had dinner on Friday night and (aside from the party) a sedate Saturday afternoon getting ready around the house. We went shopping at the new Tea Shop location at the Byward Market and I used that as an opportunity to buy 800g of maple tea (Whittard now have some samples that I gave them on the way back home). On Sunday, I went for a stroll around parliament hill and reminded myself how much I still want to live in Canada some day – I’m sure living in Boston will be great, albeit without the context of the fantastic Canadian way of life.
Check out the photos on my flickr pages. I’ve got a load of photos on the cameraphone from the weekend too, but that’ll have to wait until I feel like taking it apart (perhaps another few hours then).
One thing’s for sure, I’m not coming back here. Not any time soon. I’ve really gone off the notion of living in the United Kingdom. Our legislature sucks, the whole thing is built on outdated class models and we have no fundamental rights. Plus the signage in this country really really sucks 
I got back to Heathrow to find that they’ve managed yet another round of central bus station optimization. They’ve not bothered to hook up any of the information systems but they have managed to stick up really tiny and pointless signs that nobody can see without having already done the right thing (typically British). It’s ceased to amuse me that this stuff happens here and is moaned about in a joking way. It’s just plain broken.
Anyway. I got back, submitted some figures for one of the book chapters and got back to work. But not for long. It wasn’t very long until I discovered that apogee (my router) had finally gotten very unhappy with the ailing/failing disk that it’s had for a while. I replaced the disk only to find that the one I’d replaced it with was also faulty, the disk cable was too long and out of spec (I didn’t build this machine as I picked it up used) and a lot of other things. I do need to fix this all properly by dropping all these machines at home altogether and moving such facilities over to colo accounts, but that’ll take me a bit longer to get sorted how I want. Anyway, in the meantime, I seem to be back online again.
Before I wrap up, I’d like to spare a thought for those customs guys I met on Friday night. Now, doing these crazy weekend trips may be fun, but not in the eyes of customs officials. They “knew” I was up to something, but couldn’t figure out what it was (I was genuinely just at a party, yes, I’ll fly that far for fun with no strings attached) so decided to spend about 20-30 minutes figuring it out. They called my friend, checked my bags, rooted around my laptop, that kind of thing. At least I’ve now got a precident for doing this so that when I do it again in another month or two, it’ll hopefully be less of an issue (or more of one, if they think they can find a pattern or something). For once I will agree that they were just doing their job – I bumped into the same customs guy on Sunday night as we were both buying food at Harveys. I told him that I really had been there for the weekend and really was leaving. I think he might have finally believed me.
Jon.
Well, it had to happen eventually. Firefox finally became the bloatzilla mozilla always was.
Yep, that’s right. This is yet another rant about the stupid caching feature they added in 1.5 in an effort to find a way to waste as much RAM as is possible in a particular machine. This might be a packaging issue (I’ll leave that caveat), but I don’t think so. The fact is, today I had to kill firefox several times with RSS’s of 234MB and other shocking amounts of waste. That’s giving mozilla a run for its money. But it hadn’t even started – last week, the damn thing managed to bring the machine down to such a crawl that it took almost an hour for the system to page itself out of a frenzy.
I’ll try upgrading to the next release, but if they don’t quickly see the folly of what’s going on there then I guess I’ll have to look for another browser in a hurry. No, I don’t want an option to turn it off, I want it to not be broken in the first place. Hint: the previous release was perfect in that it did everything I need from a browser.
Jon.
I’m going to be swinging by Ottawa for ajh’s house party this coming weekend (24-26 March). If you’re in town and want coffee, mail me.
Jon.
Photo: I took a day trip to Zurich in order to hook up with Sven-Thorsten Dietrich, his cousin and Thomas Gleixner over in Uhldingen in Germany. The Gleixner’s kindly cooked us lunch and showed us around the local region.
I like doing some fun things on the weekend. I decided it might be real fun to swing by Zurich for the day on Sunday, despite having too much else I should be doing (I just didn’t sleep Saturday night). I wanted to hook up with Sven and Thomas and talk Real Time for a while, while having lunch and a stroll around the local region. Thomas certainly lives in a nice area and he’s up to some seriously interesting stuff with mingo et al, so that’s all pretty cool.
I had never been to Switzerland (or, by extension, to Zurich) before and even though I spent most of my time across the border, I have to say that I think I quite like the Swiss. It’s just a nice country – nice and neutral too, 12% income tax (apparently), but otherwise expensive. I got a 06:something flight out on Sunday morning, got picked up by Sven and his cousin at the airport and then we drove to Germany (taking the car ferry across Lake Constance, which we later walked around another small part of). We had lunch, lots of coffee and dessert, did some fun things, talked quite a lot, then Sven, Nicole and I went back to Zurich for dinner. All in all, that ranks up there with one of the more fun Sunday outings that I’ve had. I got the early flight this morning back to London City and then worked from home for the rest of the day – though I did work on Saturday so I didn’t get a lot really useful stuff done today.
I’ve synced down a ppc rawhide from a couple of days back onto a workstation here (3.5GB or whatever) and will go do an installation thang onto a laptop in the course of this week. I’m trying to get up to speed and figure out which way is up at work, so I figured it was probably also a very good idea to start properly tracking things like rawhide in my spare time. Did some work on the book too over the weekend and I think I’ve got the portability chapter nearly finished. That only involved covering all of the following in 30 pages (yes, ok the I18N stuff really should have had its own chapter, maybe, but it is actually a portability issue – just not a straight hardware thing):
I didn’t realize that when you write books, you actually need to write a lot And if you think you understood what I just wrote, go try it sometime.
Jon.
I’ve got a vanity cellphone number in the UK that ends in 131337, as many of you already know. I plan to keep this number pretty much indefinately and once I relocate, I’ll continue to pay for it and have it direct to a VoIP gateway that’ll shove traffic over to a cellphone wherever I’m actually at. This is all well and good, but I want a vanity number in the US too (cheaper for people to call me).
So, last night I had another look at vanity numbers. This time, I think I want a DID VoIP style number that can fallback to a direct cellphone. Specifically, I want a 617 area code DID number that ends in 31337 and I’m willing to pay a reasonable amount for this vanity too. I’ve mailed a bunch of providers about it but I’m interested in recommendations.
The fallback is to get a regular cell number of the form that I want, but I can’t so easily do that prior to having a residence in the United States. I have incidentally already inquired with HSBC about setting up an account with them in the UK since they can help me to port over my financial history to the US that way. But I nonetheless expect it to be hassle.
Jon.
I hate spam, you hate spam, we all hate spam…
(to the tune of that annoying Barney song)
Anyway. I’ve moderated all of those comments you left for me (I approved them all – I don’t throw away any comments unless they’re actually legally iffy or whatever) and I’m sorry I didn’t do it before but I do tend to get a lot of spam these days, even after tagging things as spam. For example, last month I had around 20,000 spams in my email. A few hundred spam comments got through the filter I have in wordpress and while I was moderating, several new spams appeared during that time. I’ll try to do this more often, I guess.
The worst thing about spam is when things break under it. Like how printk recently suffered from mailman problems due to the sheer weight of spam backed up in the mailman queues (dudes – please please please fix the admin interface for mailman and please make it wipe its bum after you manually delete pending mail and not just crash out horribly. Pretty please). There have been other spam problems too but I have a cunning plan. The main thing I need to do right now is to get the hosting sorted out for my email/websites under my own Xen so that I can twiddle things properly. We’re upgrading our boxen next month so it’ll hopefully happen around that time – then I just need to work out way to make my Xen VM port itself properly to boxes running on different physical networking infrastructures. I’ll get it done.
In no particular order:
Anyway. I finally got up and started doing stuff. My DE changed so the book is getting some figuring out over the next few days as we adjust the schedule to make it more realistic (thanks go to the contributors so far – you’re great!). I’m switching to EST properly soon so I’m getting a few clocks setup here with different times on them and I’m probably going to buy myself a new desktop machine soon. You might also notice an insane amount of weekend travelling is now booked – Zurich next weekend, Ottawa the weekend after that, then Boston, and finally Portland. It’s looking likely that I’ll have to go to Ottawa again in the middle of April for various reasons. I find I’m able to think better when I’m someplace interesting with my laptop. Viva le weekend!
We did some printk stuff yesterday. As part of that, I hooked up with hj at the Apple store in London and played around a bit. I checked out the new Apple Mac Mini and was photographing the device tree output on my cellphone camera when I had the realization that these are probably one of the most supportable Apple products on the market at the moment. Since Hussein isn’t interested in trading his PowerPC Mini, I might buy one. I need to think about that – on the one hand, it’s an Intel Mac (it’s not a laptop though and I currently have an x86 desktop PC that it would swap for) but on the other it has a graphics chipset that has a vendor supported Open Source driver. Mumble. Anyway, the Apple Store annoyed me for all the reasons I thought that it would.
Jon.