ipw2200, take 2

So it turns out my previous ipw2200 card was a dud. drheld put the sucker in his laptop and it was just as crappy there.

I got a new one today, and it's working fine. So no more ndiswrapper for me! Although I understand the bcm43xx people are making good progress; jdeboer seems to have it working on is iBook. It's a heroic effort, and I'm sure many, many people will thank them for it. I still don't want to use crappy hardware made by a crappy company that won't release specs, though...

(Says he who currently runs an nVidia desktop machine; at least in their case the hardware is generally good, just no specs... *sigh* In related news, I'm interviewing with them tomorrow, for the Linux driver team, so maybe I'll get a chance to bug them first-hand!)

March 14, 2006 (link)

Trip

It all started with a request from a_chatterbox to reunite Pooh with his long-lost buddy quikchange. And so it began.

Pooh's excited about the trip!

Aren't flights fun?

• Flight to Dallas cancelled due to weather; reroute through Chicago
• Flight to Chicago delayed over an hour due to weather; miss flight to San Jose
• Get told by American Airlines that there are no other flights to the bay area out of Chicago that night
• Get told by another kind soul in the same situation that there is, indeed a flight to San Francisco leaving shortly
• Attempt to convince AA people of same, and fail
• Attempt to convince other AA people of same, and succeed
• Mad dash across O'Hare (jeebus is that place giant) to get on flight
• Stand in line with 30 other people in pretty much the same boat
• Get on flight; wait while we sit on tarmac for 2 hours due to weather
• Arrive in San Francisco at 2:30am (5:30 eastern), cab (!) to Santa Clara
• Pay cabby, 4 hours sleep, knock back rediculous quantities of coffee before heading off to nVidia

Thankfully, I had Pooh's good, kind company for this ordeal. I also read Orson Scott's Ender's Game, which was pretty damn awesome. Though it killed my Treo's batteries.

Drinky

After interviews, I met up with Saul and Jimbo for some drinky drinky. Somehow, these blokes have managed to find a hick Irish dance pub in Mountain View. It was somewhat alarming to me to discover that such a place exists.

Jim gets his drink on

Needless to say, much beer was had by all, and Jimbo even joined me for some prairie fire (though a proper prairie fire, like you'll get in Calgary, will have a full shot of Tabasco).

San Francisco

After a long sleep and some french toast at the creamery, I hit SF (with my trusty Peet's Coffee of course; they still remembered my order!)

Just basically did some sights (Fisherman's Wharf, Golden Gate Park, Union Square) and then met up with a friend for dinner in little Italy. A nice, restful day before another day of planes and airports.

The city from Fisherman's Wharf

All in all, it was a good trip. I got to quite like the bay area, and it seems I may not be back there for quite some time, so it was sort of a chance see the old haunts and say "good bye".

March 16, 2006 (link)

Boy meets Girl

Started seeing slatepelican. She rocks my world.

March 18, 2006 (link)

Conversation

me: Do you want poopcakes for dinner?
mrwise: Yeah, could be. Haven't had poopcakes in a while, and my eggs will go bad if I don't ... fertilise them.
me: I'll fertilise your eggs!
mrwise: I give you full rights to my ... unfertilised eggs.

March 23, 2006 (link)

White Board Fetish

I appear to have developed a white board fetish. At Google I had a bunch in my office and I would fill them up with designs and steps for implementing them. And as I went along I would add little notes about how specific problems would be solved, how the changes would influence other areas of the code, etc.

Before the white boards, I didn't really make many notes at all when coding. Sometimes I'd write a little diagram in a notebook or sometimes I'd put some things in a text file, but it was pretty rare.

I think the biggest appeal of the whiteboards (besides the psychotropic smell of the markers, of course) to me is the "look and feel." Smoother than a blackboard, not as dirty, and easier to read. And they're way better than a (paper) notebook or text file, because they're staring you in the face all the time. No need to shuffle things around on your desk to find your notes, or open the text file, or figure out which window it's in.

In any case, this fetish has led me to conduct much of my recent work in compilers in the graphics lab, despite me not actually taking graphics this term. BTW, if anyone wants free Google pizza the graphics lab is a good place to be over the next week or so, as I have a bunch of Google pizza money to burn before the end of term...

March 24, 2006 (link)

Employed

This happened a while ago, actually, but I'll mention it here for the record. I officially accepted an offer to work at Google in New York when I graduate. Planning to live with dreamage and andukar, which should be pretty fun. And I'm totally looking forward to New York; I hear it's pretty damn awesome.

March 28, 2006 (link)

AnnoyingQuote

"I have to poop so much I have to pee" — mrwise

March 30, 2006 (link)

End of an Era

Today I had my last university lecture ever at the University of Waterloo. It's been a long haul, but I've had fun and met a lot of cool people along the way.

To celebrate, I've been coding pantsless in the graphics lab. While this has alarmed some people, I feel it's perfectly appropriate.

Much to my disappointment, however, the monkeys down in the real-time lab are all wearing pants. A disgrace I tell you, a disgrace!

March 31, 2006 (link)

Andy Tanenbaum Talk

This is a bit late, but I thought I'd mention a few things about it anyway. Andy Tanenbaum (of Minix fame) came to give a talk here the other day.

He motivated his discussion of Minix by saying that consumers want PCs that work like TVs; you buy one and plug it in and it works for 10 years. No patching, installing virus scanners, updating virus scanners, re-installing Windows, etc. The goal should be "it just works" for 10 years. Keep that in mind.

He then began to discuss Minix, and in so doing essentially described the OS everyone who takes trains implements. A couple things really stood out, though:

1. no virtual memory
2. no paging
3. number of processes fixed at compile time
4. complicated-sounding configuration files to specify which process can access which hardware

Numbers 1, 2 and 3 mean that Minix is completely unusable as a general-purpose consumer OS.

No virtual memory and no paging means you force users to have enough physical memory to fit all the applications they're going to want to use in RAM. Using a lot of memory and want to open another tab in Firefox? Close that terminal first!

A compile-time fixed-size process table means you say at compile time that users will never use more than n processes. Tanenbaum must really like Bill Gates and his "640k" philosophy. This one is funny, too, because his reasoning was mainly that he didn't want to do dynamic memory allocation in the kernel. Well in about 5 minutes I came up with a way to have the process tables managed in a user-space program with a fixed-size cache in the kernel (and I'm pretty stupid), so that's really a non-argument.

The last item, number 4, is more interesting. Specifying what hardware drivers can access is not a bad idea, but the implementation sounds really bad; he didn't get too detailed describing it, but essentially said that there are a bunch of config files that "the administrator" will have to set up. If you need "the administrator" to do anything, your OS will never be a general-purpose consumer OS.

Note that I am only holding Minix up to the "general-purpose consumer OS" ruler because Tanenbaum himself did, by motivating Minix in the way he did. For embedded or real-time applications, these design decisions make a lot more sense, of course.

He also spent a fair amount of time bashing Linux, which is to be expected I suppose. He definitely had some faulty reasoning, though: he claims that number of bugs is roughly proportional to lines of code. Ok, sure, could well be. He then claimed that because Linux keeps adding so many drivers, they're adding bugs faster than they can fix them (and even worse, these bugs can affect the entire system since drivers in Linux essentially get free reign). Well maybe, but you don't use every driver in existence on your system! You only use a few. When a new driver enters the kernel, it may well be buggy. But after some shake-down, it's fine, and then other new drivers that get added won't affect you, since you'll never even load them!

Back: February 2006

Next: April 2006