Josef “Jeff” Sipek

Jaunty Jackass

From IRC:

<jeffpc> Event: Happy Jaunty Release Day Everyone!
<jeffpc> Where: Corner Brewery
<jeffpc> Why: Because Ubuntu is awesome! Because we?re awesome! Right on.
* jeffpc groans
<jeffpc> obiwan: don't you ever take drugs, young man!
<jeffpc> obiwan: or you'll turn into one of those ubuntu lovers
<obiwan> hahahahahahahahhahahaahahahhaa
<obiwan> I was wondering why you cared about Jaunty Jackass or whatever the
         hell they call their releases
<jeffpc> hahaha
<jeffpc> that's awesome
<jeffpc> Jaunty Jackass
<obiwan> they just call it "Jaunty" like we're supposed to mentally fill in
         the other word
<obiwan> well there you go

TV "Science"

Over the past year or so, I tend to let a few comics accumulate before reading them. One of these accumulated comics is this PhD Comics:

If TV science was more like real science

I have to say: bravo! MythBusters always bothered me. I find their pseudo-scientific approach irritating. It’s nice to see that I’m not the only one.

Licenses can be amusing

So, I had to install Sun’s Java, and my eyes noticed the following text in the license agreement (I bolded the amusing section):

3. RESTRICTIONS. Software is confidential and copyrighted.
Title to Software and all associated intellectual property
rights is retained by Sun and/or its licensors. Unless
enforcement is prohibited by applicable law, you may not
modify, decompile, or reverse engineer Software. You
acknowledge that Licensed Software is not designed or
intended for use in the design, construction, operation or
maintenance of any nuclear facility. Sun Microsystems, Inc.
disclaims any express or implied warranty of fitness for
such uses. No right, title or interest in or to any
trademark, service mark, logo or trade name of Sun or its
licensors is granted under this Agreement. Additional
restrictions for developers and/or publishers licenses are
set forth in the Supplemental License Terms.

I understand that Sun is just trying to cover all possible mega-misuses, and I think it is amusing that they felt the need to put that into the license.

Porcelain Incident

Earlier today, July 25 2008 at 9:35 AM EDT, in Les Suites hotel room 1614 located in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, an unidentified Canadian national going under the alias Shawn, was caught by security moving porcelain items from one of the bathrooms into his bed.

Porcelain Incident, exhibit 1 Porcelain Incident, exhibit 2 Porcelain Incident, exhibit 3

Ancient Storage Device

I decided to clean out my room aaaand I found this:

ancient storage device

I vaguely remember hearing that it was an ancient storage device of some sort… :)

Birds

Just before Thanksgiving, someone I know, someone who happens to be a little bit obsessed with taking photos of birds, asked me to take some photos of birds around the NY area. Well, I didn’t intend to actually do it, but… The day before Thanksgiving, I went outside with my camera to take some photos of the colorful leaves all over the place:

Leaves

More leaves

Even more leaves

and at one point, I ran into a gigantic turkey, I could not help but take a photo of it:

Turkey

Smile!

Last night, I forget who, challenged me to make a smilie with disk io and seekwatcher. Well, I couldn’t let such challenge just pass me by (click to enlarge):

Smile!

All that I used was: blktrace, seekwatcher, python (to do the math - sin, cos, etc.), and dd (to do the disk io). I am already planning bigger and better things :)

Wikipedia

Today I decided to check something on wikipedia, and I stumbled on the page about Wikipedia article: time. I was quickly scrolling through, when I decided to read a random paragraph in the Wikipedia article: Definitions and standards section:

The definition of time is extremely important in science and for our everyday life. All known properties of time follow directly from this definition. For example, this definition of time coupled with current definition of space makes our space and time to be Minkowski space-time and makes special relativity theory absolutely correct (true) by definition.

It took me a while to realize, but the last sentence is funny…“special relativity is absolutely correct.”

Linux Kernel Developers Go Insane

This is a continuation of the lguest: The New Kid on the Block post I made the other day.

In responses to Rusty’s patches, Linus Torvalds and Alan Cox attempt poetry.

First, Linus…

There’s a reason for [not having enough poetry in the kernel].

There once was a lad from Braidwood
With a wife and a hatred for FUD
He hacked kernels for fun,
couldn’t get them to run.
But he always felt that he should.

See?

So when you say "there’s not enough poetry", next time you’ll know why. You *really* don’t want want poetry.

Then Alan Cox replied with modified lyrics to Eleanor Rigby:

Ah look at all the laundered pages
Ah look at all the laundered pages

Handling Pages
Pick up the list and the link where kswap has been
A paging scheme
Runs down the I/O
Watching the queues that now keep me a list of the store
Who is it for

All the laundered pages
Where do they all come from
All the laundered pages
Where do they all belong

Meeting bdflush
Writing the pages of a disk file that no one will clear
No task comes near
Look at it working
Sleeping a lot in the night when there’s no pressure there
What does it care

All the laundered pages
Where do they all come from
All the laundered pages
Where do they all belong

Ah look at all the laundered pages
Ah look at all the laundered pages

Oracle DB
Died under load and was freed along with its name
No admin came
Good old bdflush
Wiping the dirt from the pages as it walks down the chain
Nothing was aged

All the laundered pages
(Ah look at all the laundered pages)
Where do they all come from
All the laundered pages
(Ah look at all the laundered pages)
Where do they all belong

Then, there was an exchange of limerics between Rusty and Alan…

Rusty:

There once was a virtualization coder,
Whose patches kept getting older,
Each time upstream would drop,
His documentation would slightly rot,
SO APPLY MY FUCKING PATCHES OR I’LL KEEP WRITING LIMERICKS.

Alan:

There once was a man they called rusty
Who patches were terribly crusty
Though his patches were right
And Linus was bright
They sat on the list getting dusty.

Rusty:

There was a poetic infection
Which distorted the kernel’s direction,
The code got no time
As they all tried to rhyme
And it shipped needing lots of correction.

And finally, Alan:

Dear Rusty I think that we know
Your code has good things to show
But an unreliable guide
To the poetic aside
Would probably steal the show

Either way, these are the people that write your operating system. :)

lguest: The New Kid on the Block

As most of you know, virtuallization doesn’t really interest me, so me writing about lguest is rather unusual. For those who don’t know, lguest is Rusty Russell’s way of saying virtualization sucks and I can make it better (don’t quote me on that).

Yesterday, Rusty sent out 7 patch series ( 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7) that contains most of the documentation for lguest. This is not the normal style of documentation you’ll find in the kernel. Here’s Rusty’s description…

Lguest is an adventure, with you, the reader, as Hero. I can’t think of many 5000-line projects which offer both such capability and glimpses of future potential; it is an exciting time to be delving into the source!

But be warned; this is an arduous journey of several hours or more! And as we know, all true Heroes are driven by a Noble Goal. Thus I offer a Beer (or equivalent) to anyone I meet who has completed this documentation.

So get comfortable and keep your wits about you (both quick and humorous). Along your way to the Noble Goal, you will also gain masterly insight into lguest, and hypervisors and x86 virtualization in general.

There is a very large number of totally hillarious comments. It looks like one doesn’t have to be an x86 expert to get a laugh out of them, but knowing a thing or two about the architecture makes it all the more enjoyable.

I can’t help but include few excerpts here…

Intel provided a special instruction to clear the TS bit for people too cool to use write_cr0() to do it. This "clts" instruction is faster, because all the vowels have been optimized out.

I’m told there are only two stories in the world worth telling: love and hate. So there used to be a love scene here like this:

Launcher: We could make beautiful I/O together, you and I.
Guest: My, that’s a big disk!

Unfortunately, it was just too raunchy for our otherwise-gentle tale.

Just read the patches. They are really amusing :)

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