Josef “Jeff” Sipek

Beware, rant follows…

In America, many people believe that Canadians speak english, but they spell it wrong. That’s utter crap. First of all, the phrase “spell it wrong” is rather single minded, and self-centered, but let’s disregard that for a minute. As any Canadian, Brit, Australan(?) will tell you, they speak the Queen’s english, and that is the real way to spell things. In addition to that, it is a known fact that in 18th and 19th century, American scholars modified the english language as much as possible to create a certain distinction between England and it’s colonies (pre 1776), and United States of America (post 1776).

Note: I am not saying that all people think this way, but I realized (quite a while back) that many do.

I do realize that this post is very delayed. Anyway, read it and enjoy it.

Ah, finally going home. Don’t take this the wrong way, I love OLS, and I hope to go next year, but I kind of missed my desktop. I woke up at 7:00, got ready and it was time to go to the Aldershot train station. David dropped me off at 8:40, and the train was supposed to come at 9:11. Of course it was late. I boarded the train at about 9:50 and off to New York I went. At the border, we got delayed by about an hour, but everything (as far as I know) went smoothly. We are approaching Amsterdam, NY as I write this, so it will be a while before I get home, and before you can even read this :-) but I think it is kind of cool. Few minutes ago, the train stopped in the middle of nowhere, and coincidentally, there was a freight train right next to us. I had a clear view of the end of train transmitter/device, and by the time I grabbed my camera, our train started moving. So all I got is a photo shot through slightly tinted, and very dirty window:

We just left Amsterdam, NY, and I heard a detector on one of the radios that a conductor had…24 axles, no defects - good.

Update:

It is now 01:11 UTC (July 26 2005) and we are nearing New York. In the past few hours, we got to Albany, NY where we switched engines - I got this crappy photo of the two engines near each other (shot though even dirtier window):

Other than that, not much happened; I spend most of the time coding Mercurial. It is starting to look really good. The features are just appearing one after another. The hgweb-redesign.patch is almost complete. Soon enough, I’ll submit a patch to the Mercurial mailing list, but I’ll submit it as a request for comment not a finalized thing.

I woke up rather tired at 11:30. After a quick shower, I packed most of my things, and then went to explore historic Ottawa. I took about 100 photos, some of which turned out quite nice:

I also saw the Canadian equivalent of IRS:

It was time to go home. Unfortunately, we didn’t get to organize a #secretIRCchannel BOF, so we did the only thing we could do — take a group photo of the Les Suites room 814 subset of #secretIRCchannel users:

At about 17:00, we (David, Laura, Shawn and I) started heading toward Toronto. Over those approximately 6 hours we spend in the car, I had my temperature sensor (which I got at OLS) sensing the temperature in the car and logging it into a database (PostgreSQL 8.0 running on my laptop if you must know). So, I have about 21600 temperature measurements. (I’ll write another entry with some statistical analysis.) On the way there, we stopped for chinese food which made David very happy:

When we were entering the outskirts of Toronto, an accident occured in the middle lane — backing up traffic. Fortunatelly, they cleared it quickly. I got one blury photo of a tow truck…

…right on the side of 401 (the number of the highway) going through Toronto and Kingston (where you turn north to go to Ottawa). Once inside Toronto, we got off the 401 and drove to Shawn’s house to drop him off. Shawn’s house, in all its glory:

Then it was time to go back to Guelph. We arrived there at 23:40-ish. A quick email and some IRC later, I went to bed.

Today was a very short day at OLS. The first talk began at 12:00 and the last ended at about 16:00. I started the day with Matt Makall’s talk on Mercurial, which was the new topic instead of the planed Netpoll. That two hour tutorial was great. Sure he started with basics, but he included certain information that made it interesting, like what’s the plan for certain areas of the program, etc. The second talk was about sysfs. Shortly after that, the Keynote was presented by Dave Jones:

The content of his talk can be summarized by:

• Bug reporting in the OS community sucks
• He likes monkeys

He told a story which ended with him waking up from a nightmare and telling his significant other “my monkey crashed my spaceship”.

Then I got a copy of the proceedings and went to the hotel. There I promptly started hacking on Mercurial. I’m trying to make the web interface nicer. Git/Cogito has a web interface, gitweb, which is very nice looking — so, I’m copying the design of gitweb and grafting it onto Mercurial’s hgweb. For the most part, the peices are very similar but here and there, it is different enough to take some time to change. I hope to finish it by the end of Monday, so that I can send a patch to the mercurial mailing list.

At approximately 19:15, Shawn and I left the hotel for the party at Black Thorn Cafe. The whole place was reserved for OLS people. It was quite crowded, but there was a lot of interesting chatter. As the evening progressed, people were getting more and more drunk. It was quite interesting, to see that — all the high up people (Dave Jones, et.al.) were quite sober (I think that they try to remain sober because their words matter a lot.) At 2:30 the cafe people threw everyone out because they were closing. We got back to the hotel at 3:03. Then we started hacking on stuff…I kept on hacking on Mercurial, and Shawn worked on something, I forgot what it is, but I remember that it involves creating a Kate (KDE Advanced Text Editor) module. I went to bed at 5:00. Yay!

Because of the hackfest, I decided to sleep a little late so I got up at 10:03, which meant, I missed about half of the first talk on pktgen. The second half wasn’t really that exciting. Afterwards, I went to the dmraid talk. It seemed quite cool, but useless since I don’t have a pseudo-hardware raid. Then I ate at:

Then I went to a talk about Active Block I/O scheduling, but instead of paying attention, I was on IRC helping Con debug Interbench. :-) Then I went to the next talk, about safe/idiot-proofed kernel probes. Quite interesting. During the talk I tried to download the Novel Linux Kernel Debugger to play with, but the patch is only against SuSE’s kernel which is based on 2.6.5-ish (read: awful).

Afterwards, I went to a network flow accounting talk, which I didn’t pay attention to iether, because of Con - he’s very disruptive :-P Then I went to these BOFs: Linux Device Persistant Naming Policy, 2 talks about Linux Clusters, and Linux Power Management. Inbetween I took photos of some people that are interesting:

Donald Becker (Beowulf creator - for all intents and purposes):

Pavel Machek (software suspend):

Jim Gettys (X11 co-author):

Then we (Shawn and I) went to the hotel, and ordered pizza:

This is what the pizza looked like before we ate it:

We flushed it down with:

Shawn, Con, and I had a little hackfest today. It was fun! We started at 23:30 and I went to bed at 4:00. Con was hacking on Interbench, Shawn was reading Linux Device Drivers, 3rd edition, and I was looking for cool stuff to do. About 30 minutes before we called it quits, Con suggested I try Interbench and see if the bug he was trying to fix happened on my box. I did that and the bug happened when I ran it too. It was fun!

Oh, and here’s a good photo of Con:

Today started with “Write a real, working Linux driver” by Greg Kroah-Hartman. It was cool.

We got these temperature probes:

He’s an (almost) action shot:

There was also this guy, who if I remember correctly is responsible for udev:

The rest of the day was cool. I had steak for dinner; Matt Newhall (the LILUG president) accompanied me (well, he suggested we go to a steak place). Then I saw some more talks, including BOF on Hotplug Memory (full of IBM, Intel and AMD employees), X Window System, and Spamikaze. Overall, a fun day. Again, I suggest any self respecting geek goes to an OLS.

Today was a nice day..after the first presentation, I saw some people…

Matt Mackall, the Mercurial creator:

Then, I went some other talks and ate some food. Then I went to a talk about linux kernel page_shift, that wasn’t overly exciting, so I decided to drop by to room C to see what was going on at the application start up time talk…well, I didn’t get there in time. I saw this guy:

I chatted with him for some time about my patches, and kernel hacking in general. He seems like a cool guy.

Later on, I got a chance to meet some mad people. Here’s a photo of one:

Ah, what a day :-) OLS is definitely great. I recommend it to any self-respecting Linux geek.

After the rather quick trip from Guelph, we picked up Shawn:

And then we left for Ottawa. We made two stops, one for food (Wendy’s) and one for gas (not sure which). During the trip, I had my wifi card set up as an access point with the SSID of "toofastforyou". As far as I know, the only person who noticed and/or connected to it was Shawn.

In the car, we played with Shawns webcam, and tried to record the journey, but we failed. Other than that, we saw a garbage truck burn in Toronto:

…and a military cargo plane near the middle of nowhere.

We arrived at the hotel at 18:15. After we checked in, and moved in (18:45) Seth (sarnold) came by (well, we called him on his cellphone and basically told him to came to the hotel). He brought along Stingray and Anyutka (I don’t remember their real names). We then collectively went to a restaurant and met up with Con Kolivas (yes, Con is blurry and the TV in the background is in perfect focus, I promise to take a good photo):

We ate, we drank water, we chated. Then most of us went to the pre-registration thing which was closed by the time we got there. So we decided to look at the pub which was supposed to expect lots of Linux geeks. They had a whole floor pretty much reserved for us, but David (cdlu) and Laura (cdlu’s wife, aka lan) and I decided that it didn’t look like much fun so we went back to the hotel.

At the hotel, chatting on IRC was the activity of choice:

This is the vehicle I’ll be taking from Guelph to Ottawa (and after the Symposium back to Guelph).

If you don’t remember how exactly the Ontario license plates look like: