Interrupts

pphaneuf: Keep in mind that I'm an idiot, here.

At first I interpreted your post to mean that in realtime devices, like iPods, spending a long time in the interrupt handler can be a desirable behaviour. This, of course, doesn't make much sense. Rarely, if ever, do you want your interrupt-handling code to be slow (precisely because interrupts are usually disabled when that code is being executed, so you risk missing them if you take too long).

What you almost certainly meant was that in realtime systems it's important to process interrupts fast (i.e. before a hard deadline) which can lead to spending a (relatively) large portion of CPU time handling interrupts, but not because your interrupt handling code is slow, because there are a lot of interrupts and you handle them all right away.

For an idiot like me, it was easy to mis-interpret your post.

Work

Been insanely busy. The project I'm working on has seen much faster growth than anticipated internally. Basically that's good news, but it meant there were (are) some growing pains.

It got to the point today where drheld, someone I live with, had to call me at work and ask what I wanted to do this weekend. Must redouble my efforts to leave work at a reasonable hour from now on, though apparently I'm not yet as bad as one of the other interns who frequently doesn't sleep at night, and when he does, tends to do it on a couch at the office.

The thing is during the day it's all noisy, with people coming and asking me questions, talking all around me, dragging me off to meetings, etc. At night I can think clearly and get stuff done so much easier. Some people get around this by showing up insanely early, but I'm so not a morning person...

Life

My parents were here for a while, and they had a good time. I showed them around Google, we visited Berkeley and SF, and basically just hung out. My mum enjoyed the climate, coming from a very chilly Winnipeg.

Going to Vegas in 2 weeks, which should be interesting. I've never gambled before and I'm not particularly interested in it, but I'll play some black jack just for the heck of it ("... our own company, with black jack.. and hookers!") I anticipate being appalled at the cheesiness of it all, but, you know, "when in Rome"...

Next Friday drheld and my cube mate and I are heading over to Berkeley to a beer and pizza receoption with Joel Spolsky. Hopefully it'll be interesting and a chance to chat with Joel, but if not at least there'll be free beer.

March 13, 2005 (link)

Evince

So, it looks like some good folks have finally taken it upon themselves to fix the deplorable state of PDF viewers on Linux.

This thing hasn't been around all that long, and already it's better than xpdf, gpdf, ggv, and kghostview in that you can search PDFs. Yay! Finally, a way to search PDFs on Linux that isn't Adobe's incredibly awful and rediculously ancient acroread.

When matches are displayed from the search, the text is selected, too. Maybe they'll do text selection and X-style copy and paste, like Apple's preview does. That'd be schweet.

So, a hand to the Evince folks for rolling up their sleeves and, in a relatively short period of time, making a PDF viewer that sucks less than all the others.

You knew there was a catch

So after mag, drheld and I oohed and ahhed about the search capabilities this morning, we looked for a way to set Evince as the default PDF viewer. What a nightmare.

Between the three of us, all either CS or Soft Eng majors, and all currently employed doing software development, we couldn't figure out how to do this, other than hacking the defaults.list file. Now even if you assume that all three of us are complete and utter idiots, there were still three of us and we couldn't figure it out. I think most users, on their own, are going to be in trouble here.

But I don't want to sound like a certain other person who spoke about development decisions in GNOME recently. If the GNOME people want it to be (almost) necessary to hack defaults.list to set this kind of thing, fine. Who am I to tell them what to do? I doubt that's what anybody actually wants, however.

Can somebody point me to some bugids, and tell me what the "approved" way to do this is?

March 15, 2005 (link)

Prius

So drheld and I test drove a Prius this morning, since they were hawking them at Google employees when we biked in. I gotta say, it was pretty cool. Really quiet, wireless key (though I guess there have been some security concerns with that) and bluetooth phone integration. It also has a voice-activated GPS dealy, but it should really be integrated with Google Maps so it can support my most important use-case of being able to just say "coffee" and have it automagically direct me to the nearest coffee shop.

Colin Powell

He came here and spoke yesterday. It was mildly interesting; he's one of the few people involved with the previous Bush administration for which I have some respect. He was asked some questions about the war in Iraq, and although I don't agree with him, his responses were at least thoughtful, which is more than I can say for anything that comes out of Bush.

March 16, 2005 (link)

Quest

Ok, so not only does the stupid thing have a horrible interface that is inexcusably slow, but it's actually just downright broken. I'm trying to add courses, but I just keep getting this, pretty much no matter what I click on.

What a lovely, user-friendly error

Fucktards.

March 17, 2005 (link)

Pants (and lack thereof)

pphaneuf: You know the answer to your own question. There's only one place to keep it. Enjoy!

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