Josef “Jeff” Sipek

Here’s something I stole from here:

I kind of feel like the hero in the cartoon at times…basically whenever someone asks me if something is possible to do in bash, I hack for a minute or two and then give them a nice script (which generally consists of some awk, which I am liking more and more, and possibly some sed). Sure, I don’t just write scripts for everyone at that asks for one, but I do it for fun when it sounds like the script should be sufficiently complex and enjoyable to do. Did I mention that I enjoy bash? Hrm. Speaking of bash, I’ll be presenting about it on Tuesday, January 30th at 7pm, for Linux Users Group @ Stony Brook. :)

So, it would seem that Linus has gone insane. His announcement of 2.6.18 is rather odd — I didn’t expect him to go for the Internation Talk-like a Pirate day thing…

Ahoy!

She’s good to go, hoist anchor!

Here’s some real booty for all you land-lubbers.

There’s not too many changes, with t’bulk of the patch bein’ defconfig updates, but the shortlog at the aft of this here email describes the details if you care, you scurvy dogs.

Header cleanups, various one-liners, and random other fixes.

Linus "but you can call me Cap’n"

Oh, and I got a simple patch into the kernel. I have about 8 more of similar ones that should get into 2.6.19-rc1. Oh, and of course, I should resubmit Unionfs in the next week or two. Grr…so much to do!

Some people are outright stupid. Thankfully, there are people that are able to make fun of the stupid people, and still give constructive criticsm in the process. Very amusing, in my opinion.

So, I was in #linuxfs on OFTC, and a whole discussion happened about XFS and ext3. Eric Sandeen was working on fixing up few bugs in ext3 to make it work on 16TB of storage. I couldn’t help but mention XFS. The discussion then evolved into XFS is a large pile of code that is really nasty in places (I do agree with that) but it still performs very well. Eric pasted a link to this image (I copied it for archival purposes.) which shows the code size of XFS over time. It is actually kind of scary.

So, I was happily browsing around the internet, when I clicked on this one link which opened a new window in firefox. At first, I almost burst out laughing. But by the time, I made the screenshot, I was very annoyed. Here’s the screenshot:

The wording is really crappy. I, as an open source/free software supporter, don’t like this very much. (I am more of an open source than free software person.) It will confuse people that don’t know any better - just like people call GPL/BSD/etc. licensed software "freeware." Grrrr. Can’t you get it? Freeware is the crap you get for Windows. Free software and Open source refer to more than that. Maybe I should send the screenshot to RMS, and let him raise hell :)

So, today this one very odd looking piece of spam got into my inbox (this is just the begining):

The wounded, the sick animals and birds swam to it. Theres a slide about a quarter of a mile over there to the left, hesaid. They will be ofthe pure blood like yourself, Dwayanu, and you shall find mates among the women. I wondered uneasily whether the Uighurs knew of a shorter road and were outflanking me. I had read terror in the eyes of many of the women. …

Of course there was a lot of attachments which probably had the real spam crap, and this text was used only to get past spam filters. Anyway, I found it rather amusing — I guess long gone are the days when spam had (if you were lucky) a bunch of random words that didn’t even make a coherent sentence. :)

So, today was interesting. Some of the people I saw and/or talked with included: Andrew Morton, Alan Cox, Dave Jones, Jim Gettys, Matt Mackall, and so many others I don’t even remember.

When I got back to the hotel, I noticed this one interesting sign on it (on the inside), I couldn’t resist to take a photo of it. Here’s a cropped portion of it that has the amusing part (there was presumably the same text in French as well as a map to the nearest emergency exit):

While cleaning my laptop hard drive, I found this little quote which I wrote down about two years ago. I think it is absolutely priceless.

If work in equals work out, then if I put in a lot of work, why don’t I get anything out of it?

- Matt Senenman

So, yeah. I finally forced myself to write one of these blog entries. Woohoo! I’ve been quite busy for the past two weeks (doing some cluster building, and then slideshow making - I leave for OLS in only 4 days!) I must say it should be interesting - the presentation, the impromptu stackable filesystems BOF.

I just found this very bizarre image (mirror) (too wide to include it here) which explains rather humorously  RAID.

So, while I was finishing a paper for LISA (a part of USENIX), I was going through the ACM Digital Library looking for some useful papers, when I came across: An environmental simulator for the FDNY computer aided dispatch system (PDF). The amusing thing is the begining of the abstract:

FDNY’s MICS computer-aided dispatch system is designed about dual PDP 11/45s and supported in fallback by dual INTEL 8080 micro-processors. The computer processes alarms, assigns available units, notifies these units by voice and hard copy terminals located in the fire stations, monitors status changes of firefighting units and incidents, and dynamically adjusts firefighting coverage for maximum effect.

Well, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised when the paper was published in 1976.