Josef “Jeff” Sipek

Today, I came across a link to a photo with a long description. I'm going to include both below:

ISS020-E-009048 (12 June 2009) --- Sarychev Peak Volcano eruption, Kuril Islands, is featured in this image photographed by an Expedition 20 crew member on the International Space Station. A fortuitous orbit of the International Space Station allowed the astronauts this striking view of Sarychev volcano (Russia's Kuril Islands, northeast of Japan) in an early stage of eruption on June 12, 2009. Sarychev Peak is one of the most active volcanoes in the Kuril Island chain and is located on the northwestern end of Matua Island. Prior to June 12, the last explosive eruption had occurred in 1989 with eruptions in 1986, 1976, 1954, and 1946 also producing lava flows. Ash from the June 2009 eruption has been detected 2407 kilometers ESE and 926 kilometers WNW of the volcano, and commercial airline flights are being diverted away from the region to minimize the danger of engine failures from ash intake. This detailed photograph is exciting to volcanologists because it captures several phenomena that occur during the earliest stages of an explosive volcanic eruption. The main column is one of a series of plumes that rose above Matua Island (48.1 degrees north latitude and 153.2 degrees east longitude) on June 12. The plume appears to be a combination of brown ash and white steam. The vigorously rising plume gives the steam a bubble-like appearance; the surrounding atmosphere has been shoved up by the shock wave of the eruption. The smooth white cloud on top may be water condensation that resulted from rapid rising and cooling of the air mass above the ash column, and is probably a transient feature (the eruption plume is starting to punch through). The structure also indicates that little to no shearing winds were present at the time to disrupt the plume. Another series of images, acquired 2-3 days after the start of eruptive activity, illustrate the effect of shearing winds on extent of the ash plumes across the Pacific Ocean. By contrast, a cloud of denser, gray ash -- most probably a pyroclastic flow -- appears to be hugging the ground, descending from the volcano summit. The rising eruption plume casts a shadow to the northwest of the island (bottom center). Brown ash at a lower altitude of the atmosphere spreads out above the ground at upper right. Low-level stratus clouds approach Matua Island from the east, wrapping around the lower slopes of the volcano. Only about 1.5 kilometers of the coastline of Matua Island (upper center) can be seen beneath the clouds and ash.

As promised, here's more of the day-by-day summary of Usenix '09.

Friday

The last day of the conference. As before, I got to the place at 8:30, and had breakfast.

The first session, System Optimization, was interesting. It started with Reducing Seek Overhead with Application-Directed Prefetching. The idea is pretty obvious. You have a library that takes lists of future accesses from the application, and tries to prefetch the data while monitoring the application's IO accesses. The first deviation from the prefetch-list causes an invocation of a call-back. This allows the application to specify a new prefetch list.

The second talk of the session, Fido: Fast Inter-Virtual-Machine Communication for Enterprise Appliances, was about a simple and fast way to have multiple VMs communicating. Their target was a collection of virtual machines running in an appliance box. Since the OSes were inherently trustworthy (before virtualization took off and even now, there was one OS that did everything), they achieve zero-copy by mapping all the other OSes into each address space. For example, suppose you have 3 VMs (red, green, blue), their address spaces would be something like:

Each VM gets all the VM's address spaces read-only, and its own read-write. Then a simple message can be exchanged to specify buffer addresses.

The Web, Internet, Data Center session wasn't very exciting. The one talk that stuck in my head was RCB: A Simple and Practical Framework for Real-time Collaborative Browsing. What they did was some javascript-fu that synchronized the DOM trees between two (or more?) browsers.

The last session for the day (and the conference) was Bugs and Software Updates. It opened with The Beauty and the Beast: Vulnerabilities in Red Hat's Packages. The authors did some crazy statistics and found that there was some correlation between packages' dependencies and the number of vulnerabilities. Several audience members pointed out that publishing these findings may cause a feedback that completely maybe either exaggerate this correlation, or it may cause the developers to make dependency choices to make their software seem less likely to have vulnerabilities.

The second talk, Immediate Multi-Threaded Dynamic Software Updates Using Stack Reconstruction sounded interesting, but I really feel like I need to look at the paper first before drawing any further conclusions.

The last talk of the session, Zephyr: Efficient Incremental Reprogramming of Sensor Nodes using Function Call Indirections and Difference Computation, seemed like 2 talks in one. First, we were told about rsync protocol's shortcomings, and how they fixed them, and then we were told about their function call indirection scheme to make the deltas smaller. This function call indirection sounded far too much like dynamically linked binaries, with GOT pointer and all that good stuff.

After a short break, the last invited talk began. The speaker was David Brin - a science fiction writer. He is one of those people that really knows how to present. He gives off an aura of knowing exactly what he'll say next. I can't tell for sure if he does know what he'll say next, or if he merely has an idea where he wants to get to, and "improvises" to get there.

I went back to the hotel, but got bored soon after. Not knowing what to do, I went for a walk. I just took the first street away from the hotel. It turned out to be a road that went considerably uphill toward the San Diego Medical Campus (or whatever it was called). After some exploring, I got some food (this was the only place I saw that had fast food joints, the hotel area was about as boring as it can get).

Saturday

I woke up relatively late - 10am. I blame getting used to the pacific timezone (grr, just in time to fly back!). After packing up, and checking out, I ran into Swami. We went to get breakfast, and talked about all sort of stuff - grad school, conferences, the good ol' days at FSL. After some time, he and another student from Wisconsin took off. I decided to go for a walk. I ended up in the same fast food place. There, I started typing up the previous blahg post. After about 2 hours of working my laptop, I went back and got a shuttle to the airport.

At the airport, I tried to do some work. Before long, I switched to reading a book. Shortly after, it was time to board. The flight itself was mostly uneventful. Sadly, the 2 hour layover in Charlotte, NC was painful. The free wifi that was there few days earlier disappeared. I survived it. Two-ish hours later, we landed at DTW. Due to some miscommunication, I ended up without a ride back to Ann Arbor. I managed to call up a friend that drove me back.

Phew! It's been a fun couple of days. I'm going to provide a day-by-day summary of what's been going on.

Tuesday

More or less the entire day was take up by travel. The flight was mostly uneventful, with a 1 hour layover in Charlotte, NC. The one hour was long enough to get from one terminal to the other and get food, yet short enough that by the time I was done eating, the first class passengers were about to board. For virtually the entire duration of the flight, I was preoccupied with a book I took with me.

Wednesday

Waking up for a 9am event was never easier! I guess it was the timezone difference. Instead of going to bed at about 3am, I went to bed at around midnight (which happens to be 3am on the other coast!).

I woke up at about 6:30 - not due the alarm. I went back to sleep. At 7:30, I woke up for real. Before long, it was 8:30, and I was already at the conference about to get my proceedings and badge. Free food, namely orange juice and crossionts followed.

Nine o'clock rolled around, and the conference began. The keynote was ok. I wasn't amazed by it, even though the speaker had valid points.

At 11, the first session began - virtualization. This was one of the sessions I've been looking forward to. Well, I was interested in one paper specifically: vNUMA: A Virtual Shared-Memory Multiprocessor. The name summarizes the idea very nicely. Why was I interested in it? Well, a long time ago, when you couldn't walk down the street and buy a multi-core system, the year was 2003 - I had the same idea. It's a rather obvious idea, as is the name. At first, I was going to hack the Linux kernel to accomplish it (I still have a couple of patches I started), but other things sapped up my time. (The fact that everyone I mentioned it to told me that the paging over ethernet overheads were going to make it impractical made me want to do it even more!) As it turns out, the folks from University of New South Wales, that got a publication out of it, started working on it in 2002.

Their implementation is for the Itanium architecture. They said that they chose it because at the time they started, Intel was pushing Itanium as the architecture that'll replace x86. Unfortunately, I didn't get to talk to any of them at the conference.

The lunchtime invited talk was nice. It was about how faculty at Harvard tried to make the intro to computer science course fun and appealing, yet still retain the same important intro material. The big thing: they used Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instead of the on-campus computer network. They liked being in charge of the system (not having to wait for some admin to take care of a request for some change), but at the same time they didn't like being the admins themselves. Some of the students were also not exactly "thrilled" about hearing about the cloud so often - especially since they didn't have to use it in a cloud-way. One of the most memorable parts of the talk was when the speaker whipped out a phone book, asked the audience about how to find something in it, and shortly after proceeded to do binary search - ripping the book in half, then tossing a half across the podium, and then ripping the remainder in half.

Afterward, the networking session took place. The one talk that was fun was StrobeLight: Lightweight Availability Mapping and Anomaly Detection. The summary of the idea: ping the subnet, then some time later, ping it again, and count the number of IPs that changed - essentially XOR and then count ones. It's a simple idea that apparently works rather well.

The next session was about storage. It started with a paper that got a best paper award. One of the authors is Swami - a former FSL member, not at University of Wisconsin-Madison. While he never said it during the talk, they essentially implemented a stackable filesystem. Right after it was a talk by guys from the MIT AI lab, about decentralized deduplication in SAN cluster filesystems.

After a short break, the last invited talk for the day happened. A dude from Sun talked about SunSPOTs. SunSPOT is a small wireless sensor/actuator platform that's based on Java. It reminded me of several other such platforms, but seemed a lot more polished. Unfortunately, it's Java-centric way was rather disappointing. (More or less everyone that knows me, knows that I don't like Java.)

The day concluded with a poster session & food.

Thursday

Again, waking up wasn't a problem. The breakfast happened to be bagels.

9am: the first talk of the distributed systems session, was Object Storage on CRAQ: High-Throughput Chain Replication for Read-Mostly Workloads. This is one of the papers I'm intending to look at. The other two I found less interesting.

11am: the kernel development session had 2 interesting talks. The first, Decaf: Moving Device Drivers to a Modern Language talked about taking device drivers, splitting them into two portions (a performance critical section in C, and a non-performance critical section that could be moved to "a modern language" - read: Java). While I strongly disagree with the language choice, the overall idea is interesting. Java (along with other more managed languages) provides stronger static checking than C. They actually took some Linux drivers, and split them up. I want to go over their evaluation again. The next interesting talk was about executing filesystems in a userspace framework (Rump File System: Kernel Code Reborn). Unlike FUSE and other attempts, this one aims to take in-kernel filesystem code, and execute it in userspace without any modifications.

The lunchtime invited talk about about how teaching students how to program is hard. How some error messages the compiler outputs are completely misleading and confuse students.

I zoned out for most of the 2pm session about automated management. There were emails & other things to catch up on.

The short paper session started off nicely with The Restoration of Early UNIX Artifacts. The speaker mentioned that he managed to get his hands on a copy of first edition UNIX kernel source. While it was slightly mangled up, he managed to get it up and running. After a bit of effort, he got his hands on some near-second edition UNIX userspace. Another short paper was about how Linux kernel developers respond to static analysis bug reports.

The last invited talk for the day was unusual. It was about the Antikythera mechanism. He used Squeak EToys (a Smalltalk environment) to simulate the mechanism. He put the "software" up on the web: http://www.spinellis.gr/sw/ameso/

Afterwards, more food. This time without posters. And after the food, there were some BOFs. The one I went to was about ancient UNIX artifacts. There I got to see first edition UNIX running. Really neat. It felt like UNIX - same but different in some ways. The prompt was '@'; the 'cd' command didn't exist, instead you had 'chdir'... that's right, the "tersness" of UNIX wasn't always there!; the 'rwx' bits you see when you do ls -l were different, you had one 'x' bit, and 2 rw pairs. On my way out, I got more or less dragged into a mobile cluster BOF (or whatever the title was), the most interesting part was when we got to talk about Plan 9 all the way at the end.

I'm going to lose an email address I had for a long while: jeffpc@optonline.net. It's because of an ISP switch. I haven't used it as my primary email address for a long while, but either way, you'll want to update my contact info to jeffpc@josefsipek.net.

Every so often I needed to extract a .deb package manually. Usually I ended up installing Midnight Commander, and used it to copy the contents out. This time around, I did some search, and found a straight forward description how to do it for .debs and .rpms.

RPM

rpm2cpio mypackage.rpm | cpio -vid

DEB

ar vx mypackage.deb
tar -xzvf data.tar.gz

or

ar p mypackage.deb data.tar.gz | tar zx

About two weeks ago, I went to see a play called Bleeding Red. This was at Purple Rose --- a small theatre in Chelsea, MI.

Their summary of what the play was about says it pretty much all:

In this ball-kicking comedy with adult humor, the biggest football match in twenty years is about to kick off across the pond in London. Tommy, confirmed bachelor and passionate Liverpool fan, arrives at his best mate Bobby's flat to discover he's been dumped by his fiancee. Trouble is, Bobby is the linchpin of the all-important pre-game ritual. Tommy must get him to the pub before the game starts, even if it means recruiting the help of another traitorous female, Bobby's fetching sister Sarah.

Featuring:
Heidi Bennett
Matthew David
Matthew Gwynn
Stacie Hadgikosti
Michael Brian Ogden

Stage Manager: Jessica Garrett
Set Designer: Vincent Mountain
Properties Designer: Danna Segrest
Costume Designer: Sally Converse-Doucette
Lighting Designer: Dana White
Sound Designer: Quintessa Gallinat

Directed by Guy Sanville

It was a nice story. As the story involves Liverpool fans, the actors were doing a Liverpudlian accent.

Two days ago, I decided to release HVF v0.15. It's been over a year since I did the v0.14 release. There were 4 -rc's inbetween. All in all, there have been 132 commits with lots of changes all around.

You can get the source code via Git (git://repo.or.cz/hvf.git), or a tarball.

Over a week ago, I mentioned reading Frazz. Another fun comic I came across is called Dork Tower.