- Up early; another short walk before work.
- For lunch I poured the leftover turkey/spaghetti sauce from last night over some also-leftover rice form last week. Surprisingly tasty. I should start a bizarre-leftover-combination food blog.
- Emily made chicken with pierogi and peas for dinner. Yum.
- Went for another walk after dinner. This time with Emily. Walked in the other direction just to mix things up.
- Played around a bit with Google+. I like the user interface. It’s really well thought-out. it doesn’t get in the way as much as I remember Facebook doing. The interface actually reminds me quite a bit of Diaspora*, which makes me sad in a way because now it’s even less likely to take off. Still, the ideal outcome for me is for Google+ to become king of the hill, then start supporting OStatus, so I can leave it and communicate with everyone from my StatusNet account.
Category: Computer Geekery
7 July 2011
- Up early; short walk around the block before work.
- Had lunch at Nicky’s Thai Kitchen in the North Side with Justin and HEAD. Got caught up on the Timesys comings and goings while gushing about having a job that does not require putting on pants in the morning.
- After lunch finally shipped my old laptop to an organization that refurbishes them and gives them to school children.
- Emily and I went to see our “Financial Dude” (the guy who manages our IRAs and whatnot). It appears our financial house is in order for the time being.
- Stopped for dinner at the Bite Bistro in Bellevue. My hanger steak was delicious. I don’t know what’s in their sauce but I want to put it on everything I eat now. Emily had a pork loin over sweet potato that was also quite tasty.
- Came home and put a fresh install of Ubuntu 11.04 on my replacement hard drive, which arrived today. Started the long process of transferring my stuff over. Also installed Déjà Dup and set up a regular automated backup scheme.
30 June 2011
- Up early; to work.
- Emily made a really nice dinner of shrimp korma over basmati rice with summer squash. Delicious.
- We finally reinstated our Farscape/Buffy the Vampire Slayer exchange, wherein I show her one episode of Farscape (my favorite show) in exchange for one of Buffy (hers). We left off in the middle of the second season of both several months ago but it was pretty easy to pick up again.
- Getting some weird I/O errors from my hard drive. Sat at the computer to find everything mounted read-only. Not good. Looks like it’s time to go shopping.
27 June 2011 (Mom’s and Amy’s Birthday)
- Happy birthday Mom and Amy!
- Up early; to work.
- Moved the router and modem up to the new office since the wireless signal wasn’t quite reaching there.
- Made vegetable stir-fry for dinner. Emily made the rice and tofu last week but we didn’t have any vegetables. Now we have some and the meal is complete.
- Stopped at Best Buy to pick up a wireless extender. Now there is no place in this house without a good signal.
13 June 2011
- Up early; to work.
- Grilled up some chicken thighs with a pineapple juice and rum glaze for dinner. Had some trouble starting the grill. Propane tank is probably empty. Luckily we have a spare. Unluckily, it was also low and couldn’t get the grill hot enough to fully cook the chicken. Oh well, that’s what the toaster oven is for.
- Chicken was tasty at any rate. Went well with some mashed potatoes and steamed veggies.
- Spent the rest of the evening trying to un-break whatever the GNOME3 PPA did to Unity on my desktop. Finally fixed it by reinstalling libdconf. I have no idea why it worked but it did.
8 June 2011 (World IPv6 Day)
- Up early. Happy World IPv6 Day!
- Found out that I may not have Broken The Build™ but just uncovered an existing bug in the build. Will know more tomorrow.
- More research. Learning how to write browser extensions.
- Bought some new toys, which I’ll claim are for work. One of these, one of these, oh, and one of these!
- Grilled up some steak for dinner, while Emily made mashed potatoes. Starting to get the hang of grilling, though I think I left the steaks on a bit too long this time.
- Fermenter is still bubbling, but it seems to be slowing down.
- Watched Brazil, the “Love Conquers All” cut, from Netflix. Now I want to go back and see the original cut to find out what the studio messed with.
Happy World IPv6 Day!
As a programmer and professional nerd it’s tough for me not to get excited about new technologies. Or about old technologies whose time in the spotlight has finally come.
IPv6 was created in 1998 as a solution to the impending exhaustion of addresses from the dominant network technology (IPv4). Unfortunately adoption has been slow, since as we saw with the Y2K problem nobody in technology wants to fix or update anything until the absolute last minute. Fortunately, that last minute is upon us so more efforts are going into deploying IPv6.
Part of that effort is World IPv6 Day, during which many organizations like Google, Yahoo! and even Sesame Street are serving up their content via IPv6 for 24 hours as both a “test flight” and as motivation to make sure that the full transition (whenever that will be) goes smoothly.
Last week the fine folks at Linode who host this site were kind enough to enable native IPv6 for me, so this site is ready for today and for the future.
14 May 2011
- Up early, caught the shuttle to the airport.
- Long wait at the check-in desk. Looks like the self-check-in machines were broken, but in such a way that each person got to try to check-in twice before being sent to the desk to have it done manually.
- Got myself checked in and made my way to the gate. Lots of other UDS folks also heading to Frankfurt. Talked to a few of them. Sat next to one of the other OEM team members on the plane.
- This time the connection through Frankfurt airport went smoothly. I did have to head out and find the US Airways check-in desk to grab my remaining boarding passes but I had plenty of time and made it to my gate without incident.
- On the plane back to the States I sat next to one of the gentlemen from Monday’s Frankfurt Airport Support Group. We caught up a bit and soon after we took off he was fast asleep.
- Finally caught the end of Green Hornet. The movie itself was OK but it seems like Seth Rogen’s style of comedy didn’t really fit the character or tone of the movie. It just felt off. Also watched a documentary on rice that led to a nice 40-minute nap and another on personal flying vehicles that I actually found fascinating. Also watched the Tom Cruise/Cameron Diaz vehicle Knight and Day which was surprisingly entertaining.
- Arrived in Philadelphia and waited an hour in line to go through immigration, then through customs and another half an hour to get back through security for my flight to Pittsburgh. Once again no hiccups but I was in no mood to stand in line all evening.
- Landed in Pittsburgh just ahead of a thunderstorm. Unfortunately they can’t unload baggage from an airplane during a lightning storm so about three planefuls of people had to sit at baggage claim for an hour and a half before we could collect our things and head home. Emily showed no end of patience and even had a granola bar and a bottle of pop waiting for me in the car when she picked me up. Have I mentioned that I am a very lucky man?
- We drove home through some heavy rain. Unpacked and passed right the hell out.
13 May 2011 (UDS-O Day 5)
- Up rather late, had to skip breakfast. Probably for the best.
- First session of the day was a roundtable discussion about desktop technologies that will appear in the next release. Most notably there was lots of discussion on porting the manifold Ubuntu-specific tools and apps to GTK/GNOME3. (notes)
- Next was a review of desktop performance. Much time was spent looking at timing diagrams of what took how long to do what during startup. There was also some discussion of which programs were causing the CPU to wake up most often. (blueprint, notes)
- Then there was a session on speeding up software upgrades. Apparently there are lots of post-install operations that are run multiple times depending on which packages are updated which could be delayed to run once at the end of the upgrade. Other tweaks and some crackerific hacks were also on the table. (blueprint, notes)
- After lunch there was a group of “lightning talks”, quick 5-10 minute presentations on cool things going on with the project. Lots of improvements to Launchpad and byobu.
- Thanks to a lack of interesting sessions after that I had a chance to walk around Budapest for a while. I ducked into a couple of shops and generally tried to take in as much as I could before returning for the wrap-up talk.
- At the wrap-up Jono announced that the next UDS will be in Orlando. I haven’t been there since I was a kid so I’m looking forward to seeing it with a different perspective.
- At 7 the UDS party got into full swing. There was free food and drink, music and merriment. The Ubuntu Allstars is a group that gets together for every UDS and puts together a loose set over the course of the week to be played at th
e after party. The music ranged from ballads to blues to classic rock and 80s pop. Matt Zimmerman sang a rousing rendition of George Michael’s Faith. - Around 10 I’d decided I’d had enough fun and called it a night. I was exhausted from this marathon week and had to catch a shuttle at 7AM to the airport. Sleep came easily.
12 May 2011 (UDS-O Day 4)
- Up early, down to breakfast.
- First session was on what to do about ubuntu-dev-tools, a set of scripts that make Ubuntu developers’ lives easier. Mostly the goals were to get all the relevant ones into Debian and split the rest into more topical packages. (blueprint, notes)
- Next was a session on integrating applications that ship by default with the Unity interface. Most of the ideas revolved around adding items to the right-click menu for each of the icons in the launcher bar (that’s the spiffy icon bar on the left if you’re using the latest Ubuntu) or little progress bars in the icons for things like downloads. (blueprint, notes)
- Then there was a session on what the default email client should be in the next Ubuntu release. It was decided that Mozilla Thunderbird will get the nod if certain conditions are met (the most onerous being enough space on the CD). (blueprint, notes)
- Next I attended a session reviewing the Linux kernel configurations for the various flavors of Ubuntu. This was every bit as boring as it sounds. (blueprint, notes)
- After lunch everyone got together for a group photo (if you zoom in you can see me towards the front on the left).
- There was a session discussing the relationship between Ubuntu and GNOME. There was a bit of tension as the two projects have started moving in different directions and those differences haven’t always been communicated with the utmost tact and diplomacy. (blueprint, notes)
- Next was a pretty interesting discussion on session saving, or saving the set of open programs and their state when you log out. This was removed in the last release but they’re looking to put it back in, though in a less hackish way than before. (blueprint, notes)
- Last meeting of the day was a session on how to reduce the number of patches carried in Ubuntu packages. This session quickly degenerated into a review of specific patches against GNOME packages. (blueprint, notes)
- The OEM team had its team dinner, which started as a cocktail hour, then moved to a nearby restaurant for pizza (again!) and beer, then to another place for even more
beer. I got to know my new teammates a bit, and got to chat with the likes of Jono Bacon, Stuart Langridge, and Ken VanDine. Eventually I made it back to my room and promptly passed out.