zabbo

I was cleaning up some files this morning and ran across a set of photos from OLS 2000. I wasn’t more than five or six photos in before I found myself lost in a fit of giggles. What I came to find more interesting, though, were how many were actually decent photos of my lovely friends!

So I put the whole lot in a set on flickr entitled, wait for it, OLS 2000. I figure seven years is long enough for embarrassment to have ripened into nostalgia.

It’s funny to put funny things on your head:

And these aren’t half bad:

To be honest, the loftice has been done for quite a few weeks now. I fell asleep at the blog wheel.

The final polish was done just in time for Alice to start working from home and for me to get fed up with commuting to a lonely downtown office. We have a theory that our new pleasant home office is all that’s keeping us civil as we sit in the same room all day.

The final bits were ornamental. Alice, painting super star, took care of the bedroom door and the banister. Bringing a whole bunch of fabric into the room was the final touch . The windows are pretty straight forward but the closet and the drapes which close off the loftice deserve some attention.

We bought a system from Ikea (DEKA. No, of course you can’t order it online — Ikea is Swedish for “etailing luddite”) that lets one attach mounts and run taught wires to hang drapes from. The drapes hang from clips with rings that slip over the wire. In the closet the wire runs just behind a bit of trim that drops down from the front of the closet. It’s mostly out of sight. The wire for the curtains that separate the room follows the contour of the roof. When shut the curtains form a wall with a few inches separating it from the ceiling.

The result is visually simple and appealing and the drapes slide along the wire with surprising ease. It’s especially nice to not have to fight with the wooden folding doors that were originally installed in the closet. I was convinced that their track was primarily designed to induce uncontrollable fits of rage. That it could kind of guide the motion of the doors seemed to be an afterthought.

Anyway, all this means that our friends from far afield have to come visit. When’s the last time any of you got to slide your privacy drape closed after wishing your hosts good night?

As promised, we managed to get the bulk of the painting of the new office completed last night. Liz generously volunteered her time to the cause. It turned out that it took us about four hours to get it done.

We had previously painted the windows and ceiling. The drywallers had mudded over some parts of the ceiling which needed to be touched up, but otherwise all we did was put on two coats of color on the vertical walls. They’re tiny walls, too, so it went very smoothly.

I got the unenviable job of putting the light green on the wall that connects the first and second floor through the staircase. Alice and Liz had already claimed the grown-up rollers so I was stuck wielding a 4″ roller on the end of a 8′ extension. That kept us entertained for a solid half hour.

True to form, the very first thing that felt the cool touch of wet paint was my calf. Turned out the back of that tray liner was still wet!

The amazing drywall ninjas finally finished their work today. The loftice no longer has nasty wood paneling, nor gaping holes, but proper smooth walls.

They did a much better job than the previous knuckle-draggers who did the drywall in the rest of the house. Their seams aren’t all squiggly. They actually went to the trouble of using those strips of whatever on the corners so that it isn’t just compound standing up to dings. They drywalled the inside of the closet. Imagine.

Now Alice and I have to paint the walls before we jet off to Phoenix this weekend so that the work can remain on schedule. The drywall ninjas (I should have gotten their names, or something.) did prime on their way out so we just have to put on the coats of color. It’ll be a breeze.

Work began this week on our project to clean up the upstairs office. This will be our only major project for the season and we’re hoping to get it done in time to enjoy most of the summer. We don’t have the energy for a repeat performance of last summer with the painting and the bathrooms and the ugh.

The original idea for the office was simple. When we bought the house the office was finished not with something reasonable, like sheetrock, but with reversed cedar planks. The side of the planks that faced the room were rough and only sort of painted. If you brushed up against them they’d catch your clothes. Replacing that nonsense with a normal surface was the driver for the project. Along for the ride came sanding and finishing the floors, trimming out the room to match most of the house, insulating while we had the walls open, and of course painting. We love painting.

That was the original idea, anyway. The stairs that lead to the office came up through a small enclosed space that was sandwiched between the walls of either bedroom. Alice never liked that it felt so cramped and that the walls above the stairs themselves were pretty useless. She made the clever suggestion that we knock down the wall that seperated the stairwell from the office. This creates more of a loft office that the stairs come into and that our bedroom happens to hang off of.

So that’s what we went for. The wall was flimsy and not holding anything up so it was easy to tear out. Now when you come up the stairs you get a nice view into the office. Light actually flows into the stairwell via the office windows.

I’m still fascinated by getting to peer into the dirty guts of this old house. The highlight photo along side this post features the dirty old chimney in the center. It was painted white but gunk (roofing tar?) seems to have made inroads at some point in the past. It’s fun to see fir floor boards all over the place up there. The entire upper floor was built from them and the extra bits were used as scraps for framing the walls. The crawl spaces look like they haven’t been touched since the knee walls first hid them away from the main space.

Next week: electrician and sheet rock ninjas. Here’s to hoping.

Last weekend marked the five year anniversary of Darrell’s successful cancer treatment. Brandon took the opportunity to arrange a surprise outing to the Metolius River Lodges. It was fantastic. I took some pictures and, well, here seemed as good a place as any to make them available to the group. I apologize to those of you who will have little idea what’s going on in the photos, but I can’t find the energy to type up compelling commentary.

I spent last week in Ottawa for this years Ottawa Linux Symposium along with my fantastic Belgian boss and a flotilla of Linux aficianados. I’m told the attendance this year came in at a good eight hundred which seems like quite a bit to those of us who stumbled through the first. I think they had it right back then — minimize the casualties incurred during nonsensical talks.

This year, my first visit after a long hiatus, was also my first time attending the Kernel Summit which has preceded the main conference for the last few years. I’m still not entirely sure what to make of it. I was very encouraged by some clear-thinking shining stars and somewhat discouraged by some poo-slinging children. On balance I think I’d have to say that the people worth listening too outnumbered the destructive vocal minority. Just like any non-trivial group of people, I suppose. I’m told that this year’s was not as exciting and contentious as previous years and I could certainly buy that. I was particularly glad to see Linus sitting down to a Mercurial demo with Matt. Here’s to hoping.

As for the main conference, I really enjoyed Ian Pratt’s talk on Xen — and not just because Robert now works for Xensource. I have only been admiring Xen from the periphery so it was quite interesting to see how it really gets things done, particularly the page sharing business. Its domain migration business also looks pretty exciting. There was a great moment during his talk when he showed a graph of some web benchmark that ran while the domain with the web server was transparently being migrated between machines. Migration’s problem can be basically narrowed down to trying to keep pages in sync between the old and new host while the task is actively dirtying new pages. It employes this clever algorithm where it allows itself to consume, say, 10% of the system migrating pages, hopefully at a higher rate than the task can dirty them. Eventually there will be such a small amount of pages dirty left that the task can be stopped and finally migrated to the new host with a small amount of down time. The graph of the throughput of the web benchmark during the migration showed exactly this. There was a stable degredation of the throughput down 10% for a few seconds and then a painless few milliseconds of idle while the task hoped over to the new host. I only remember this, and apologize for wandering through it with you, because the audience broke into spontaneous applause at the slide. When’s the last time you heard of that happening? Not sarcastic “haha, the IA64 doesn’t have ISA” applause — real honest-to-god “holy crap, it Just Works” applause.

I was more actively involved in an AIO BOF later on in the conference that seemed to go pretty well. We spent a fair amount of time worrying about how to really demonstrate the benefits of buffered filesystem AIO interfaces. Samba’s use will help, but that might not be enough. There was also a pretty interesting revivial of the O_STREAMING discussion which seems to come up every few years. This time there was a interesting twist, mostly driven by sct, involving directories and alleviating dcache pressure. I might see if I can find some time to whip together an implementation, we’ll see.

Primarily, though, it was just good fun to reconnect with friends that I hadn’t seen in ages. Jes and I got to talk quite a bit about home ownership and msw made sure to point out how old and ridiculous my various techy toys are. Good times! Being in Ottawa also provided a great excuse to hang out with Deb and Rob. I got to spend some time in their lovely apartment in the Glebe hanging out with their kitties, eating fun food, and playing way too much ogame. I wish all my friends lived in one place. And that it was a good place. And that I lived there, too.

To top it off, United bumped me up into first on the long leg back from O’Hare as part of some grand seat shuffling arrangement to get a family seated together. To all the unruly families who usually make traveling on summer weekends as enjoyable as eating ones own face, I take it all back — cheers!

Alice and I are happy to be spending Christmas this year with her parents and family in Winnipeg. The timing of our arrival was perhaps not the greatest for two reasons. First, we just managed to miss the yearly dinner party. We just caught the tail end of it as we got out of the cab at a solid 10:30 at night. Next time we’ll try to be a little more clever, but orchestrating time off sort of tied our hands.

Secondly, and perhaps more alarmingly, it is freaking cold. Winnipeg always has a pleasingly hearty winter but we arrived during a cold snap. It’s predicted that the daily highs will rise from the current 40 below up into the negative twenties. (all figures celsius, but we all know that they line up at -40, right?) We brought along our piles of winter wear, so we’ll be fine, but it was still a little startling to inhale that burst of cold air as we left the airport. Maybe it wasn’t a good sign when we spent an hour on the tarmac in Minneapolis waiting for them to load luggage because their fancy luggage scanners had frozen.

It’s been very relaxing so far. I’ve huddled on the couch with my book most of the time. Alice and the ladies escaped to a local spa today. Reports indicate that it’s indeed pleasant to be wrapped in seaweed and rubbed with warm stones.

Alice has been bugging me to put up the photos we took at a recent trip in Seattle. It was partially on a whim to visit our friend Colette and partially an excuse to visit some fun ex-neighbours who have since moved to Seattle. I’m afraid that I don’t have a large reserve of colorful commentary but I can try to remember some high points.

We ran into the sand castles, uhm, outside the monorail stop. I don’t really know where that is. One of the castles was built around this great track that let kids put balls in the top and watch them roll down through the castle. They loved it.

It took us quite a while to get to the top of Smith tower. They kept turning us away because they weren’t open or were having some private party, or whatever. It ended up being a great view. One of the pictures I took in particular because it reminded me so much of a Sim City cityscape. I’m not sure how I feel about that.

I think everyone agreed that the ferry ride back from, uhm.. whatever island we took it to, was terrific. The breeze was pretty chilly but the view of the city as we approached was a great way to finish a day buzzing around back roads on the islands.

The last few days of our stay in Manhattan involved more predictable sight-seeing. We made a run down Museum Mile and stopped in at the Cooper-Hewitt and, of course, at the Met. The Cooper-Hewitt was great. Small but interesting and housed in Carnegie’s impressive former fifth-avenue mansion. The Met was entirely intimidating. We bobbed along happily for a few hours, the Temple of Dendur was especially grand, but it’s an incredible amount of stuff to take in. After a few hours it all starts to blur.

Trinity Church was also very cool, especially the graveyard. I wish we could find the text of a particularly pleasing monument in the graveyard. The inscription, written in the 19th century, was sure to explicitly mention how becoming the monument was.

We were more careful to eat modestly after our adventure at Aquavit. George took us to an Italian place near Columbia with some of his architect crew (Julia Stiles didn’t make a return appearance, sadly). Ben and Janet took us to a Korean BBQ place near Korea Way (32nd) which was some of the best food we had all weekend. Big Nick’s was a fun dive diner which brought the added benefit of being seated between German and what sounded like Norwegian tourists.

Alice asked me to be sure to point out that her big exciting pretzel was actually indistinguishble from a nasty hot dog by taste. We guessed that it had been stewing in hot dog run-off all day which is not something that any bread product should do.

All in all, a great trip.

A while ago some of us helped Chris move his machines from his office on the 8th floor of a building in downtown Portland down into the building’s basement. I don’t think I ever put the pictures of this up anywhere. Doing so gives me an opportunity to try out this Exhibit plugin that I’ve been considering.

The machines in question were noteworthy. They were very powerful for their time but that time was, well, a decade ago. They are from the era of solid metal and large fans all rolled into a heavy chassis the size of a North American household appliance on casters. Sun sparc center 2000s and Cray 6400s to be exact.

The path from the office to the basement passed through the elevators, through the lobby and out onto the sidewalk, around the building and in a service door, and down another elevator into the gargantuan basement. You can imagine the looks five scruffy guys got while rolling these noisy machines around the corner of a building downtown on a weekend.

Also, it was raining.