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Free-IQTest.net - Online IQ Test

So our Friend's the Mauery's posted their test scores so I had to try it. Not to bad considering I guessed on a few, I made it into the "Gifted" category. Lots of advertisements trying to get you to sign up for stuff at the end before they give you your score though. You can wade past it all but it takes a while.

I spent the latter half of last week at the Linux Plumbers Conference in downtown Portland. And despite being a new conference, I found it to be one of the best conferences I've attended. I think this might be in part to its small size, there was a much better average developer to community leader ratio than at other conferences, indeed some of the key leaders don't even attend some of the larger conferences. The fact that LPC piggy-backed on Kernel Summit had a lot to do with the turnout. So what was exciting?

"If you want to do it right, do what IBM does, do what Intel does. -- Greg KH"
Well, maybe that was only funny to me...

While there was a lot of great content, the things that stood out to me were:

From Naught to Sixty in 5 Seconds

Arjam van de Ven and Auke Kok shared their work on getting Fedora and Ubuntu to boot in under 5 seconds on a netbook. While the SSD drives were key here, they still could do 10 seconds with rotating platters. Key bits including Super Read Ahead, disabling everthing you don't use, and picking on everyone that wasted boot time :-) Canonical took another hit here for GDM taking 3 seconds to start (60% of their total schedule!) due to storing massive pngs that it scaled down at each run to fit the current resolution. Definitely plan to look at my boot process and see if I can knock a few 10s of seconds off.

Git Tutorial

So was this cool only because it was Linus presenting? Yes and no. Linus is actually a great presenter. He is bright (duh) but also witty and engaging. He had no slides and simply walked the room through some git usage. While most everyone in the room had used git before, no-one seemed ruffled by it. It was nice to hear first-hand why git is the way it is. Did I come away from it loving git - uh... no. But it did clear up some of the issues I had with it - mostly by correcting my perspective on how it should be used.

Graphics Drivers in the Kernel: 20 Years Late

Dave Ailie and Jesse Barnes (among others) discussed the work being done to move video drivers into the kernel (from xorg userspace where they are now). Specifically memory management and mode setting. There was some good debate between the speakers and Linus, which ended with three of the speakers simultaneously stating "Well, you're wrong!" to the chief penguin. There was a good chuckle from the crowd, things usually go the other way. The presenters knew their work, they knew the interactions of the various pieces, and they were able to defend their approach which Linus didn't accept at first. His pragmatism was very apparent during the discussion and his drive toward simplicity made very clear. An excellent discussion. So what does this mean for users? hopefully those of us with the right chipsets will not have to watch our screens struggle through resolution changes 3 times during a single boot :-)

Hallway Dialog

While the formal talks and discussions were great, the best part of any conference is the one on one time with the people you work with over email and irc the rest of the year. For me this was a lunch with Thomas Gleixner, Steven Rostedt, and Gregory Haskins. We discussed the problems pthread condition variables have with priority inheritance, and formed a game plan to get the solution moving forward. It's a tough problem, and largely logistical in nature rather than technical. Changing APIs (and ABIs) at the glibc level is a painful process (for good reason).

All in all, it was a great conference. A lot of good discussion between the developers of various systems was had (which was of course the intent). Thanks to IBM for letting me attend, and thanks to the organizers who donated so much of their time to the event.

We've been spending time on and off over the last several years trying to transform our front room into something nice. It's an awkward little space with traffic flow problems, lack of natural light, odd architectural relationships, etc. Over the last several weeks we've really been trying hard to nail down some decisions, and we've done pretty well. We've chosen some furniture: the chair and ottamans are visible in the picture, the new couch has been ordered, and wall color is final (the patch closest to the leather chair - 50% tint of Miller Devine Filbert). Color selection has been particularly painful due to the lack of natural light, the very red floors, and our limited choices for couch fabric and area rug colors. After several iterations, it's been finalized and we're just waiting for things to arrive.

OK, so while all my co-workers took a half-day to check their systems for each of the openssh and dns exploits earlier this year, I foolishly let it slide, thinking I had more important things to do. So while I didn't procrastinate so long as to get hacked/phished/etc. I did wait until tonight. So after a few hours research (and a couple educational jems, I've finally regenerated all my system's host keys and have deleted all my .ssh keys and regenerated them on systems where I have console access, relying on ssh agent forwarding everywhere else (thanks Josh). As for DNS, I've redirected my router to opendns which is looking to be an excellent service (thanks John). So I should be all buttoned up again...

It's a very novel concept I know, but the guys at wicd have managed to write a wifi network manager that does things like remember your WPA key (unlike some other more common NetworkManagers). I still need to see if it can do really complicated things like save a config for a hidden network (ooooooh!) and handle enterprise authentication (LEAP), but for now I am very happy to have replaced NetworkManager with something that appears to just work. Check it out: http://wicd.sourceforge.net/. Now, how 'bout it Ubuntu, can we ditch NM already - isn't two broken release cycles enough?

The front yard landscape project continues on helped along by great friends who willing gave up an entire SUNNY Portland Saturday to work in our front yard last weekend. We were finally ready for plants so I took a trip to a recommended nursery, Farmington Gardens, and had a wonderful time picking out plants. We ended up with over 30 plants that need to planted and as quickly as possible. When the Mauery's offered their help we gladly to them up on the offer. We got to work at 10 am and other then a lunch break pretty much worked through until 5 that evening, but we got all the plants in. The kids were great and played together or watched tv most of the day so we could work. It was amazing how much we got done. Even more amazing was the transformation to the house, plants just add so much.

Darren's mom came out to visit 2 weeks ago and I have been very remiss in getting the pictures posted. Devon had a great time with Grandma Hope putting puzzles together, working in the yard, going on walks, riding his bike, and playing at the park. I think everyone had a great time and Devon was very sad to see her go. We just don't get to see family often enough. Oh well we enjoy the time we do get together. See a few more pictures in Devon's 3rd Year Album

I've been enjoying streaming music to my Playstation 3 with the most excellent MediaTomb uPNP DNLA Media Server for a while. Tonight I managed to get MediaTomb to present the MythTV recordings in a format the PS3 could actually understand. I used the Cidero UPnP A/V Controller to debug the XML presented to the UPnP client by the server. Turns out the PS3 prefers video/mpeg over video/mp2p for MPEG2 video files - picky picky. Simply adding the following:

<map from="mpg" to="video/mpeg"/>

to the MediaTomb config.xml and removing/adding the recordings folder got my PS3 streaming video from MediaTomb. Excellent!

Okay last post for the day (I think). So Saturday before our big scare Darren and our neighbor David got the old water feature set back up in its new home. Darren estimates that the basalt beast is about 500 lbs., and the landscape plan mapped a 5 foot diameter hole, so it was a big job -- says the girl who really only had to keep the 2 year old out of the way. Darren spent a lot of spare time last week figuring out what he needed and gathering supplies to get the monster in place so that Saturday he could just work.

First off he had to dig the hole. It was 20 inches deep in the center square and the square is about 2 feet wide. The outer circle is only 6 inches deep but is about 5 feet across. Unfortunately it rained the night before so our lovely clay soil was also not very forgiving. The nice thing was that it was a cloudy day. Because of the recent rain it was also a bit humid so after about and hour of digging Darren decided to ditch his shirt. It took him about 2 1/2 hours to dig the hole -- and haul all the wheelbarrows of dirt (about 8) to the back yard. Then he lined the hole with landscape fabric and pond liner (at which point I decided that it might make a pretty nice personal hot tub!).

After a quick break and a clean shirt Darren got David and they went to work devising how they were going to get the behemoth into the hole. They ended up rolling it onto the wood supports across the hole and then David acted as a counter weight as Darren lowered it into place on the concrete blocks (they had to do this very carefully because they couldn't afford to break the 1 inch pipe on the bottom of the fountain that would connect to the water pump - nor would they ever get it out of the hole once it was in). Once it was in place Darren held the rock while David shimmed it so that it was stable -- since we are pretty sure Devon will try and climb it at some point. :) Then they put in the pump, added some fill rock, some water, plugged in the pump, and tested it out.

Darren hooked it to a switch so it's easy to turn on/off -- even a 2 year old can do it. Devon loves it and loves playing with it. We (by which I mean Darren) still needs to add a bit more fill rock and then we'll add a few bigger stones to break up the splash a little bit and add some more interest (luckily we have quite a few large rocks laying around in our yard). Then we'll add some larger river rock so that we don't have a pool of standing water (that way I don't have to keep Devon out of it) and the feature will be done. Then a few more plants and some mulch and I think we'll have the front yard pretty well cleaned up.

It looks beautiful and I am very thankful to Darren who worked so hard. His entire body was sore that evening. And it turned out that we both stupidly forgot sunblock for him - his whole back is bright red just adding to his over-all pain. I think he'll be taking a bit of Ibuprofen for the next couple of days. Thanks Darren.

Parks So this summer I tried to do a weekly park trip with women in our yard. There are a few pictures of one park which turned out to be lots of fun. Water, sand, and spinning toys -- Devon was in heaven. Also included are pictures of Devon and his Friends Nicole & Nathan playing at the big tree house play structure at the outlet mall. They had a grand time and Lauren got to shop in peace. Devon loves being able to get out and move around, climbing, jumping, running, spinning, rolling, tossing,... the list goes on so I am glad that Portland has so many great parks -- now if his mom wasn't so lazy and would take him more often.