Josef “Jeff” Sipek

Eternity's Missing Children

Some time ago, I stumbled across a Wikipedia article about a book: Wikipedia article: Eternity’s Missing Children.

Apparently, it’s some obscure book that no one really cares about — at least that’s what the “this article may not meet the general notability guideline” box implies.

Anyhow, here’s the entire description from the wiki page (copied because I wouldn’t be surprised if it got deleted on Wikipedia).

The Devil and Jesus sit down for a cocktail in New Orleans, with a myriad of shared worries and personal relationships to resolve. These two historic gentlemen find themselves in the One Wheel Louisiana, a New Orleans bar on the outskirts of town, where an aging black bluesman finds his soul and Jesus is reminded of a former romance. As the night roles on, with libation and song consumed, these half-brothers of biblical proportions find a world in peril with genuine faith shaken and manipulated by our earthly guardians of organized religion; but they both agree with belief in their hearts and their futures in question that New Orleans never looked so good.

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

First month

It’s been a month today since I moved to MI. Time flies! I know, I have been neglecting this blahg a whole lot, and I promise to try harder :)

Here are some photos of stuff from the past few days…

I like bread. This one even looks tasty:

Bread!

A couple of days ago, I got myself a can of Spam. Unfortunately, it turns out, the can’s seal got compromised, and the insides look quite uneatable:

Bad Spam!

Today, I was doing some more grocery shopping, and I couldn’t resist but get some drink worthy of a warrior:

Warrior’s drink

(Yes, that’s a 40th anniversary of the IBM S/360 mug.) It’s hard to identify the contents of the mug, so here’s a photo of the bottle:

Bottle of warrior’s drink

That’s it for today’s what’s-Jeff-up-to post.

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. :)

Geek? Dork? Nerd?

So, which one am I, and why? :)

500 Miles

Very interesting…over the past month, it dawned on me that distance of 500 miles came up a number of times. For example, my commute to work is 500 miles/week. Another example is the distance between Long Island and Ottawa is just under 500 miles. There are others but they are somewhat boring :) The Ottawa number is not something completely random…you see, I’m heading to the airport in little over an hour to fly to Ottawa for the Ottawa Linux Symposium 2007! OLS 2007, here I come!

XFS & ext3

So, here’s a mini-rant…There are just as many XFS complaints as ext3 complaints on the linux-kernel mailing list. Yep. It is that simple. I can’t stand the fact that some people make a big deal out of complaints about XFS, but are oddly silent (or ignorant?) of the fact that there are just as many “problems” with Ext2/3. I’m not even considering Ext4, as it is in development.

Ping, Pong

Someone I know sent me this link. It is an interesting program that appears to make tunneling traffic though ICMP Echo Requst and Response packets easy. I have heard of the idea before, and I was thinking that one day if I got bored, I’d do it. Well, I guess I don’t have to :)

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