Sigh.. Advogato

Well, with Advogato offline, I finally bit the bullet and set up my own blog, based on dcoombs' blog, NITlog. I hacked it to heck because there was a bunch of stuff I didn't need, but it appears to kinda sorta mostly work now :)

2.6 I/O Scheduling and NFS

The anticipatory I/O scheduler in 2.6 kernels is definitely pretty sweet. I've noticed improvements on my box at home while using it. For example, I can easily play Quake3 now while compiling OpenOffice. That should definitely be possible with an SMP system, but in 2.4 Quake3 was somewhat choppy (though still marginally playable) with a big compile going on. In 2.6, however, the improved I/O scheduler and better process affinity appear to help a lot.

However, it seems that the NFS client in 2.6 has actually gotten worse. Or maybe it's an interaction between the new I/O scheduler and NFS. In any case, I used to be able to dump huge files on to my fileserver while listening to mp3s or watching movies off of it in 2.4, but not in 2.6. The writes totally starve the reads. I can reboot into 2.4, and it all works great again. Interesting. I'm not a kernel hacker, otherwise I'd look into this, because it seems to be a pretty serious regression. (This is NFS v3.)

Life

Did the Tour de l'Ile yesterday, with pzion, pmccurdy, mrwise and dfcarney. It was pretty fun. I was going nice and strong for the first 2/3, at which point I felt extremely faint (probably due to my not eating any breakfast :) and had to slow down for a while and eventually purchase some Gatorade.

Dancers at the 3rd checkpoint

GUADEC

I will be going, although Niti will not pay all my expenses, so it'll be a bit tight come fall when I need to pay tuition. But whatever, that's what being a student's all about! I'm really looking forward to it, hearing dcoombs talk about WvSync, hanging out with wlach, and meeting various people.

June 11, 2004 (link)

Work

Got around to doing some major cleaning in the Evolution ExchangeIt plugin this week. A few issues remain, but the code is much cleaner now, and we handle "tough" situations (like getting crap from the server or being disconnected) much better.

wlach wrote a funky "manager" for the plugin today, which has similar de-uglifying and robustness effects. So between that and my fixes, the Evolution plugin is starting to come together a bit more, which is nice to see.

Next on the chopping block is WvMAPI. I'd really like for it to reach a point where it could be used in the ExchangeIt server as well as the Evolution client, but it definitely needs some love before then. As a plus, the bugs I fixed in it a few weeks ago seem to have made it pretty darn reliable lately, in that I haven't seen any TNEF parsing or writing errors in weeks.

Life

There have been very loud noises in front of my apartment from about 0600 to 1030 this week, which is pretty annoying because (as you can imagine) I like to sleep during that time. I can usually still sleep, but it's that crappy kind of sleep you get when you're waking up every now and then, which sucks. So I've haven't been feeling very well rested this week. Hopefully the crappy noise will stop soon.

June 13, 2004 (link)

Work

New machines arrived for pphaneuf, wlach and I on Thursday. I've installed Gentoo on mine :) Oh, the blasphemy! But seriously, I had a few "last straw" kind of experiences with Debian recently: for example, since I do GNOME and desktop-type stuff, I wanted to upgrade to the GNOME 2.6 that was recently added to Debian unstable. apt wanted to remove Evolution for some reason, which is completely unacceptable for me, since 90% of what I do is Evolution stuff. In the past, when I've used dpkg to manually do things apt didn't want, it's turned out badly. Of course, I could just install GNOME 2.6 using apt, and then compile Evolution, but as soon as I start compiling stuff I use on a daily basis because the packages in the distro aren't good enough, I might as well just use Gentoo, where I can compile stuff and have it integrated into the distro's native package management system.

ppatters suggested yesterday that we just do the totally "people really want this shiny thing" stuff for the Evolution ExchangeIt plugin, and then give it to people (probably just internally at first) to use. It makes sense to me, and I must admit I was probably going a bit far thinking of Bad Things (tm) you could do to make it act up. ppatters reminded me of NinetyNinePercent, YAGNI (You Ain't Gonna Need It), and a bunch of other things we do around here at Niti. The trick is knowing when it's a good idea to apply these philosophies. I think part of that comes from experience, of which I have relatively little at the moment :)

June 16, 2004 (link)

Work

Well, the ExchangeIt plugin is really getting close! It's pretty exciting for me, since I was one of the people who started working on it almost 8 months ago now. The last "big thing" we need is now pretty much done, that being the progress bar. Here's proof:

Clicky progress-y goodness

It was done in a pretty hacky way, however. We have a tiny faked-out camel provider to get the progress bar. It connects to our shell component over a named pipe (PF_UNIX SOCK_STREAM socket) and tells it to sync, and the shell component sends back progress updates. This is pretty ugly, but I think our choice to use a shell component back in the fall was the right choice: as a separate process, we're much easier to debug (hell, we can run the plugin in Valgrind!) and we don't have to worry about thread issues. I just wish Evolution architecture were a bit nicer for writing plugins. The need to be a camel provider to be a "first-class citizen" is kind of odd, especially since shell components can do most things you'd want to do for a plugin.

Life

I'm heading to Waterloo tomorrow, for my sister's convocation. She's receiving her Ph.D. in applied mathematics. For me, not even done my lowly undergrad, it's kind of hard to fathom. Her general area was quantum mechanics, and her thesis was on electron trajectories in hydrogen atoms. I attended the defense back in December, which was pretty interesting.

While in Waterloo, I'll probably go pester some CS advisors, because real-time is full for the fall, and I'd really like to take it with mag. He easily smokes just as much crack as pphaneuf, so working with him is pretty fun :)

June 17, 2004 (link)

Evolution

Ok, bit of a rant here: whose bright idea was it to stick XML files into GConf as string values for Evolution? This is such an insanely stupid idea it makes me want to, well, start dishing out kicks to the head. GConf gives you a perfectly good hierarchy! Use it! You can set bools, ints, strings, and freakin' floats for crying out loud! Sticking XML files into GConf for your app is stupid, and only serves to tempt those who have to deal with it later to cause you physical pain. I might just have to go hunting at GUADEC...... :)

June 25, 2004 (link)

saul: Gentoo is an excellent choice! I installed my box at home over 2 years ago now and it's still fine and fully up to date. If you just follow the installation docs you'll be fine; it's all pretty straightforward.

Life

Spent last weekend in Waterloo for my sister's convocation, which was good, if a bit long. On the way to Waterloo, we stopped for dinner in Toronto. While working there as an EvilDeathRay, I lived in the annex, near Kensington Market. Strolling through there last Thursday, I remembered how nice Toronto can be.

Mannequins on a shop roof in Kensington Market

While in Waterloo, I also managed to see a few friends who are there this summer, which was fun. I gotta say, though, with my parents and my grandparents there, it was a lot of family for one weekend.

Now I'm off to Norway for GUADEC. I'm really looking forward to this; the talks look pretty good overall, and I imagine I'll get to meet hub. And I hear rumors of a beer shortage are highly exaggerated.

I bought an AirPort card on Wednesday, so I should be able to get online a bit at GUADEC.

Work

It's released! It's been a long time coming. I spent the better part of yesterday, a holiday in Québec, fixing WvMAPI bugs, and a lot of time on Wednesday hacking makefiles. But's it's ready! And by "it", I mean our ExchangeItEvolution connector, of course.

June 26, 2004 (link)

Schipol

So I'm here in Schipol airport in Amsterdam. wlach and I found a place with wireless internet. They charge 10 euros per day per laptop. However, you can get on their internal network free of charge. So I'm currently leeching from Will over ssh. Suckers.

Surprise! More KLM here than Air Canada!

Schipol has definitely changed since the last time I was here in 2002. It's almost entirely in English now, whereas in 2002 stuff was still Dutch and English. And you can get US dollars and Euros out of bank machines. Convenient.

The new Schipol

Anyway, I quite like Schipol. It's easy to navigate, has only a single terminal, and has more cafés and bars than you can shake a stick at. Heck, you can even get an aqua massage or go to a casino here!

June 27, 2004 (link)

Norway

Man, this country's great for signs. Only one day, and I already got 2 great ones:

For andrew and mrwise especially, walking from campus to the student flats.

The Grim Bakery. Note the 'Kylling' sandwich that's availble on the right.

Managed to get over my jetlag by staying up until 11 last night after not sleeping, watching an incredibly boring football (i.e. soccer) match between the Netherlands and Sweden. After 90 minutes nobody had scored. Apparently the Netherlands won (yay?) after another half hour in the penalties. One thing's for sure: Europeans sure have more patience when it comes to sports. 90 minutes without scoring? Nobody would ever watch a game like that in North America.

Anyway, when I finally did go to bed, it was still light out! It stays light incredibly late here. Here's a shot at about 11:30.

From the bridge over the river Otra.

GUADEC

Went on the boat tour today, and met some of the Novell guys from Bangalore who are working on the Groupwise and Exchange connectors for Evolution. We talked about various connector design issues, discussed differences between Groupwise and ExchangeIt in terms of protocol, and did a little mutual moaning and groaning about Evolution design.

Met dcoombs and hub for dinner, but dcoombs was a chump and had already eaten, so he didn't join us. hub and Séphanie seemed nice, though.

Tomorrow's the first full day of the actual conference, and I'm looking forward to it a lot.

Life

The Canadian election is tomorrow. Here's hoping for "anything but Stephen Harper." I've threatened to remain here if he gets in. Currently contemplating the seriousness of that threat...

June 29, 2004 (link)

GUADEC

Having a pretty good time here so far. Saw some good talks today and yesterday, including stuff on GStreamer, e-d-s (Evolution Data Server), the Gimp, and of course hub's talk on digital photography and dcoombs' talk on WvSync, which were both good and pretty well received.

wlach and I talked to some more Evolution people from Novell last night, who brought up the possibility of getting evo-eit into e-d-s for the 2.2 release, which would be pretty cool. Of course, a lot of stuff would have to happen before then, like (most obviously) us switching over to the 1.5 branch.

After all that, wlach was pretty tired:

wlach's in there somewhere, believe it or not

Norway

I guess Norwegians like their meat, because it can be pretty tough to get vegetarian food here. OTOH, when you do, it tends to be quite a bit cheaper.

Moonlight reflection near the flats where we're staying

Next: July 2004