Travels

So today was the big day I was going to go to California. It was going so well. I caught my flight from Calgary, and it was only 20 minutes late in Vancouver. I got through US immigration with no problems. I got my bags and trundled them through US customs. And then.. my flight was cancelled, along with every other flight to San Francisco leaving today.

Stupid Vancouverites and their being unable to handle a few cm of snow. You'd never have this many cancelled flights at Calgary or Montréal due to a measely 4cm of snow. Wimps. At least this airport has (expensive) wireless...

January 10, 2005 (link)

Travels

Well, I did eventually make it to California, after spending a night at the overly expensive airport hotel in Vancouver (an expense for which I was not compensated by Air Canada). After that delay, I didn't have any more problems; I and my bags got here just fine. Both mag and drheld weren't as lucky with their bags, however.

So far, Palo Alto seems pretty nice. It's vaguely Vancouver-like, except a bit warmer for this time of year, and super rich (think Kitselano on steroids). Haven't done too much exciting since getting here; today we went out and bought some stuff, and got all our various stuff (wireless router and internet phone) set up.

Orange tree in our back yard

Laptop

It just completely hard locked on me while I was writing this post a few minutes ago, in OS X. I don't think I've ever had OS X do that to me. I do have Ubuntu on this thing, and over Christmas I did make some headway on making it suck less; just using the powersave governor for CPU frequency seems to be better than cpufreqd; it keeps the clock low until you run something CPU-intesive, which is more or less what you want, except maybe if you're getting really low on battery. But it's a start, since all I could ever make cpufreqd do is either run at max all the time or at min all the time, both of which are clearly undesirable. (Out of the box that's all it would do, and I did fiddle with its configuration files for a while before giving up on it, to no effect.)

I still need to get Linux to turn the fan on at a lower temperature though, because for some reason it lets the machine totally bake before firing it up, and I still need to take an axe to Ubuntu's stupid cron jobs and stupid syslog daemon that doesn't do write caching so every time you sudo the disk has to fire up to write to syslog.

And people ask me why I don't think Ubuntu is the greatest thing since sliced bread. With this much tinkering necessary, you might as well just use Debian with the new installer...

Liquor

People sometimes don't believe me when I say that we buy liquor at the Liquor Barn in Alberta. Well, I offer proof, although it isn't really much of a barn:

The oft-fabled Liquor Barn of Alberta

Liquor sale is privatised in Alberta, meaning anybody can get the requisite license and open up a liquor store. I personally think it's much better than Ontario, where you have to go to the stupid LCBO or Beer Store, both of which have annoying hours and are often inconveniently located. There was a Beer Store near where I lived in downtown Toronto that closed at 8! 8 o'clock.. in the centre of Canada's biggest city! I couldn't even buy beer on my way home from work!

In Alberta, you can buy your liquor 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. And despite rumours to the contrary, it's a reasonably civilised place; you can bring your own wine to many restaurants too.

Of course, Québec trumps them all with booze in the grocery stores and deps, although it's still not 24 hours a day...

And speaking of Québec, it appears I won't need to be subjected to awful American beer this term, as the local organic food store carries several Unibroue beers, as well as a bunch of other imported stuff. Phew.

January 11, 2005 (link)

Google

So, today was my first day at Google. Man.. that place is schweet. The food is amazing, with tons of veggie and vegan stuff. There are professional Italian espresso/cappucino machines on every floor of every building. And of course the typical high-tech fare: pool tables, foos tables, ping pong tables, etc. They even have two of those "swim forever" pools, where you keep swimming against a current.

The work I'll be doing also seems pretty damn interesting. It's a new product Google's doing, and it's similar in some ways to some stuff I did at Niti, and that's probably all I can say :) But it's cool. These guys can do some amazing things with JavaScript...

Driving

mtsai: Why didn't you go to the Québec driver's license people while you were there and exchange your G2 license for a full Québec license? Then you could have come back to Ontraio and exchanged your full Québec license for a G license! I haven't done that but several people I know have, and it does apparently work...

January 15, 2005 (link)

Google

I gotta say, it's pretty damn sweet. The thing that bothers me the most is probably how confidentiality-happy they are. drheld mentioned that in a previous post, and I feel similarly. People ask me what I'm working on, what I'm doing, etc. and I have to be careful not to be too specific, which I'm totally not used to.

But I'm definitely enjoying the work I'm doing. This week I've been doing a lot of hacking in Ruby, which I didn't really expect at all. But so far I've been enjoying it; I like how you can define mutator members to essentially override '=', and its syntax is terse while still being relatively clean.

One of the things that's been hard to get used to is the scale of it all. Google is bigger than any other company I've worked for, by orders of magnitude. And it's apparent everywhere; many things are more bureaucratic, and there's a kind of "lushness" to it all, from the food to the on-site gym to the massages and car washes, it all just seems a bit surreal at the moment.

Life

I've borrowed a pretty sweet road bike for while I'm here, and I've used it to cycle to work a few times. I even have the clip-in shoes (alright I'll admit it; I did fall once the first time I used them :) I've never had a road bike and it's pretty cool. You sure can go pretty damn fast; I was doing 60 the other day for a while. The downside, of course, is that you really can only use the thing on roads. Gravel of any kind is a serious no-no, so I can't go explore any bike trails near here unless I borrow somebody else's bike.

Got a bank account the other day, without a social security number! Take that, homeland security! That brings the number of countries in which I have accounts to 5.. I should really close some of the ones I don't use sometime. It has a whopping $20 USD in it right now, but at least I can in theory get paid. I'm thinking Monday will be "get social security number day" (or rather, "apply for SSN day"), a process that is apparently not much fun.

Rio Karma

So, I had the damn thing for about a week, and then the other day the disk went and died on me. So now I have to go and try to get it fixed or replaced, and I'm obviously wondering whether it was a good decision in the first place.. sigh. I didn't want to go iPod because of the whole Ogg thing, but at least iPods work. I guess I'll get it fixed and see how it goes, but I don't think I can really recommend it any more...

January 16, 2005 (link)

Rio Karma

So I Googled around a bit tonight about the problem I was having with my Karma. Apparently some people had managed to make previously-busted Karmas work again by smacking them against blunt objects. I figured I didn't really have anything to lose, so I tried it, and it worked. My Karma now starts up again and appears to be working normally. The only thing is.. maybe I should have left it broken so I could have gotten it replaced. Now I feel like I have to break it again to be able to send it in.

But if smacking it against stuff fixes it.. how the block do I break it??

January 19, 2005 (link)

Noogling

I've officially survived more than a week at Google, and here's what I've got to show for it:

I'm officially a "Noogler"

My cube-mate apparently wore hers home the day we got them. Mine's still at the office :)

Flex Hours

So I guess flex hours were partially rescinded at Niti, based on PlaNit. Wow. Times change, eh? I was definitely one of the "baddies" when I was there, typically showing up between noon and 1. But I often worked until 2am, and I liked it that way, and it made me happy to sleep until 11:30.

Now, you might read that and think either:

• I worked insanely hard and killed myself at Niti.
• I'm so insanely stupid that it took me a billion years to get anything done at Niti.

In fact, neither of these is true (well, there's evidence that I'm insanely stupid, but it didn't take me a billion years to do stuff at Niti). It's just that I found that during the day at Niti, I wasn't all that productive. I talked to people, helped people with their problems, they helped with mine, I made espresso, played foosball, etc. At night, when nobody was around, I could just blast through the bugs (and espresso) like nobody's business. I guess the same effect could have been acheived by showing up insanely early, but I just can't think very well before 11 or so. I tried going to bed early and getting up early in Waterloo for a while, and it just didn't work for me...

At Google there are flex hours too, although almost everybody is in by 11 so you feel a bit odd showing up much later. The funny thing is people were still there tonight when I left at 12:30. Typical silicon valley hardcore-ness I guess. I've taken to showering there (which makes sense, since I cycle in) thus avoiding the 4 to 1 person to shower bottleneck at our home in the morning, giving me a few more minutes of sweet, sweet unconsciousness :)

Proprietary software

So the last few days I've been dealing with a binary-only shared library provided by a certain software vendor. All I have is the header, a PDF doc, and a .so. But this particular software vendor is particularly evil, in that their header file blatantly lies. It lies by telling you some functions want a foo * instead of a foo **, and your stuff is segfaulting all over the place until you objdump the .so to look at the asm and realise it's dereferencing twice. (I became very intimately familiar with objdump during my training; it's a life saver).

And then there's the PDF API docs, which also blatantly lie, by telling you stuff like "If you pass in a foo ** here, we'll point it to something valid with some stuff in it." No you won't, you liars, you'll just leave it as NULL. I mean the least you can do if you're going to release a binary-only .so is have some decent docs and accurate headers.

Fortunately, I've managed to work around most of this crud and should be ready for my first code review tomorrow. My first checkin will involve no less than 5 languages. Fun stuff.

January 24, 2005 (link)

mplayer

So I recently installed Debian on my laptop, because Ubuntu just wasn't doing it for me (long story). I found a deb source with a PPC mplayer and installed it. Great. So I fire it up and try to watch something, but it's insanely slow and the audio is out of sync and it isn't full screen (well it is, but it's not scaled, so there's a tiny video in the middle of the screen).

After reading the man page for a while, it turns out that the magic incantation to make things not suck is mplayer -cache 8192 -vo xv -zoom <filename>. Oh, of course. That's so obvious. If that's what makes it not suck, why the fork isn't that the default!? Sigh. I mean it's not hard to detect that I have XV and use it, and it's obviously not hard to detect that I need cache because if I don't use it, it prints a message telling me to. Clue for the clueless: if you're going to print a message telling the user to turn on an option, just turn the bloody thing on already!

Totem did work out of the box, of course, but turned out to be not quite fast enough to play things smoothly. It usually is my preferred video player though, for precisely the above reason.

That was this week's cynical software rant. Be sure to join us next time :)

January 27, 2005 (link)

Gaim

hub: My biggest complaint about Gaim is this:

I can make Gaim almost usable if I minimise my buddy list and chat window, put them on all desktops (in GNOME), use audio notifications (notification icon would be much nicer though) and turn off window raise. Window raise pisses me the hell off, because I'll be typing in Vim or something, and a freaking window will pop up and steal focus. So I'll end up telling my friend something like "foo.bar();" Not to mention it completely disrupted my train of thought, etc.

So fine, I set everything up that way. What's the problem? As soon as a new buddy (i.e. one for which there is no tab in my message window) messages me or I double-click a new buddy to add a tab to my message window, the window becomes "un-sticky" again. Meaning I have to re-stick it, or I'll lose it among all my desktops.

If they just made it so the message window didn't steal focus when it popped up, I could stand to use the pop-up mode. But my ideal way to use it would be to have a notification icon, no sounds, no popups, and no stupidly becoming "un-sticky". Ah well, maybe someday...

January 31, 2005 (link)

Debian

So, after a fair bit of tweaking, I have the Debian on my laptop setup decently, with Ion as my window manager. Ion just makes more sense on a laptop, where your mouse probably sucks and your resources are probably more limited (and they certainly are on my laptop :) Although to get certain settings, I have to run gnome-settings-daemon from my .xinitrc, which doesn't seem to be mucking too much stuff up yet, but apparently it horribly screwed some stuff up for mag and drheld, so I guess we'll see. They had some weird Xresources problem I think.

Life

I haven't blogged too much about the goings on down here. Mostly because my laptop was semi-functional and I was too lazy to actually nab pictures off my camera. But we've been having a lot of fun. Last weekend we walked around Stanford.

mag and drheld ride the, uh, the thingy

Stanford has a pretty darn nice campus, of course, with a big forest, nice grassy areas, a statue garden and a cactus garden. But that doesn't mean it escapes America's more crass customs...

You know you're in America when...

And did I say cactus garden? Actually I meant penis garden.

The rare species penis catusitis.. er sumthin

This weekend we went with our landlord, a very strange but well-meaning guy, for a drive around the coast and a bit of a hike. It was nice, and it was good to get out of Palo Alto for a bit. And I hadn't seen the Pacific in over a year, so that was fun.

Sunset from Highway 1

Finally, I leave you with the "inverse mohawk" with which I was temporarily endowed.

It's all the rage these days

Back: December 2004

Next: February 2005