There are lots of pictures at Flickr. There are some below, interspersed throughout the words, too…

Say what?!

On Saturday, just after 10PM, Delta flight 6372 from JFK to BTV landed on the tarmac in Burlington, and I was able to breathe a sigh of relief! I was finally home, after my first solo trip, my first trip across the Atlantic, and my first UDS.

I was in Barcelona attending the Ubuntu Developer Summit for the next release, Karmic Koala (that’s 9.10, for those of you counting)… talking (mostly listening, actually) about GNOME, fast boot, X, mobile stuff (Android and Moblin), NM, prettiness, and who knows what else! I met lots of awesome people, saw lots of awesome sights and ate lots of awesome food (sometimes). I don’t think it’s possible to properly describe the last week, so I’m just going to write bulleted bits to the best of my ability, separated into UDS-things and Barcelona-things.

UDS

• Scott/Mark want boot in 10/12/15 seconds on a Mini 9.
• It’s not clear if all of gnome-games is going to be in main (partially my fault; oops).
• Ekiga isn’t going to be in main anymore, but WebKit will!
• GDM Face Browser? Maybe! (just like every year) That would mean Clutter in main, too.

• Non-KMS systems and wake-from-hibernate lose bootsplash.
• “OS switcher” during boot and GDM.
• Running a demo (Moblin) on alpha hardware is not a good idea, but it looked shiny anyway.
• KMS by default on Intel and ATI. Damn NVidia. (nouveau KMS maybe someday)
• Canonical has a design team; they all seemed very cool!
• Someone (design team?) wants to have a theme that has both dark and light bits which applications can request.
• Ryan wants windows to be able to display whether they have escalated privileges or not (PolicyKit).
• Client-side window decorations!! Also, discussions about what happens if you draw to (0, 0) now, and how to solve that…
• Some talk about putting Wayland between X and the video card, mostly for fast-user-switching and the like. Probably not Karmic? I really just want a system where Wayland is easy to install…
• 10.04 or 10.10 is going to be LTS, so we can’t expect to change anything drastically after Karmic and before then… so this release is probably going to be very experimental..
• Compiz, gnome-panel, and nautilus (was it nautilus?) are the big problems with GNOME startup. Has anyone tried anything more intelligent and useful than printf? DTrace? If not, I’ll do it, later this week…

• gobject-introspection is going to be packaged; I don’t remember exactly what we decided on but it was mostly “make upstream get typelib generation out of gir-repository and into projects themselves”.
• I started a Seed+Clutter+Cairo+DBus nm-applet mockup based off of a blog post about NM 0.8 which I can’t find right now… just for fun!
• Got lots of work done on LO3 in the airports and stuff.

Barcelona

• The region around the airport is slightly frightening compared to the rest of the city; I was a little uneasy until I got off the metro at Zona Universitària. The fact that I’d just been dumped somewhere where it was really hard to understand everyone (even with 4 useless years of Spanish) certainly didn’t help any either.
• The power is a lie. You need the grounded plug or it doesn’t work, unless you’re in the rooms (not the lobby) of the Hotel Rey Juan Carlos. The Palau and my hotel both require the big plug, somehow. This is a problem; a brand new 15″ MBP battery only lasts 3-4 hours in a fresh install of Karmic.
• There’s a train to Valencia about 2 minutes before the train to the airport, from the same platform. Far too tempting…
• Universitat de Barcelona students are significantly more kind and helpful than the average RPI student.
• It’s a poor choice to schedule a conference during what is practically a national holiday (the Barça vs. Manchester United soccer game). The city was insane that night and the night after…

• Parc Güell is beautiful and crazy; Gaudi must have been insane, but that makes it all the more worth a trip.
• Apparently carrying around a DSLR suggests to people that you’re qualified to use their strange point-’n-shoots; I took quite a few pictures for other people while wandering around the Parc.

• Sagrada Família is actually still under active construction (I didn’t believe it until I got there)… going to finish in 2026!? But it’s one of the most ridiculously complex and beautiful buildings I’ve ever seen…
• It’s really hard to find Casa Batlló (I failed).
• The Mediterranean is pretty much the same as any other harbor-bearing sea, at least from the Paral•lel region. The sunset from down there is really nice, though!

• There are lots of street musicians, especially around the touristy parts, like Parc Güell. A good number of them were pretty good; then there were these subset who make the strangest noises with their mouths… they sound like irritating birds or something
• The whole philosophy of tapas seems like a much better way to do dinner than what we do here in the States. I much enjoyed the various tapas bars, especially the night of the game, out with the GNOMEites.

I probably have a lot more things to say, but I can’t keep writing in this post! Too many words! I’ll probably tell more stories as the days go on or something…

Transportation

I walked a lot more than I usually do during the trip; I also rode the metro to many different places around the city. I totaled the distances of the walking and public-transit parts of my trip with Google Earth last night (approximations, of course), and discovered that I’d walked about 41 km (26 miles), and ridden (on the ubiquitous trams and metro) somewhere in the vicinity of 101 km (63 miles). I took notes while I was measuring, too, detailing the trips of each day to the best of my ability.

I’ve staved off our storage problems for a few more months…

Lots and lots of bits and pieces:

Just before I headed home for spring break, Mom and Dad decided that Dad and I should go to Florida: STS-119 was supposed to launch on Wednesday night, and there’s only a year’s worth of shuttle launches left before we never get a chance to see one. We decided to fly down Wednesday morning, and back up Thursday afternoon, and stay overnight at my grandfather’s house, in Fellsmere.

Our flight out was at 6 AM, so we had to get up at 4 and head on over to BTV; the security people were irritating as usual, and decided to pat me down in order to find my entirely non-metallic wallet (or is it? duct tape? I don’t know… Dad got through with his without any trouble). The flight was mostly uneventful; my ears aren’t horribly happy with me, with the pressure changes while I’m coming off a little cold… We had a layover in JFK for an hour, and then the remainder of the flight. Again, uneventful.

We got to Pepa’s after a long drive down the highway, just in time to discover that the launch had gotten scrubbed. DARN! Apparently it’s a good thing they scrubbed it, though, apparently there was so much hydrogen leaked around the engines that it would have caused an enormous explosion…

After we all took a nap, we heard that it was delayed more than a day (initially they said they’d try again the next day), so we couldn’t delay our flight and hang out in Florida until it went. NOOOO! So, unfortunately, that part of our trip was lost. Still, we decided to go to Kennedy Space Center the next day, take the tours, look around, see what we could see…

That’s Dad in front of the next-generation Orion capsule (part of the Constellation program that’s replacing the Shuttles). There are lots of other cool pictures of stuff over on Flickr, including a picture of Discovery’s fuel tank peeking over the scaffolding out on the pad, which was, unfortunately, all we could see.

We flew back Thursday afternoon, after a many-hour delay due to the plane we were supposed to leave on having hit a duck on its way into Orlando… they found us another plane, and we left at about 10:30, though we were supposed to leave at 7… got back at some time after 1 AM…

All in all it was a fun trip – an adventure off in Florida with Dad, and I got to visit Pepa’s new house in Florida, and hang out with him and Bernice for the evening.

Battlestar Galactica: everyone at school has been raving about it and watching it, Reddit is obsessed, the Internet is up in arms, and I hadn’t watched any of it up until recently. During the past week, I’ve run through the whole first season, and most of the second, and I have to say: if you haven’t been watching it, you must. It’s not a TV show, or a movie, or a book. It’s a story, and it’s amazing.

Jayne mk. II is up and running. I decided not to change the name because coming up with a new name is really hard, and because it shares so many parts with the original Jayne that it really doesn’t deserve a new name. All is going well, and I’ve not yet had any more temperature/power/whatever problems. Awesome!

Anyway, it’s back to Troy for me, tomorrow…

It was becoming very clear around the last time I posted about Jayne’s troubles that I needed to do something about the seemingly ailing server that hosts this site, as well as Carol’s, Matt’s, and Robb’s, as well as tons and tons of media and backups for the five of us… it’s really unacceptable to have your backup machine going down every few weeks (or quicker) with disk errors!

Last week, I ordered the first shipment of parts for Jayne’s replacement. I, sadly, had to give up on building my “ideal” machine, a tiny little thing, realizing that such computers are for thermal engineers and Johnny Ive to design, not a mere mortal like me! So I’ve ended up with an absolutely gigantic case. It’s actually a silver version of one of Mike’s cases, though I didn’t know that until it got here on Friday.

The motherboard, power supply, and video card (oooold NVidia 7000 series, for cheap, since I really only need console graphics but the motherboard doesn’t have anything onboard) are coming on Monday (though I don’t expect the mailroom to be open then, so Tuesday!!).

My main conundrum right now is what I should do with the old case/motherboard. It’s clear to me that the motherboard would be perfectly fine without any storage in the machine, as a net-booted compile/render server, and I could get a new CPU for the new (unnamed as of yet) computer… a Core 2 Quad, or something… but that seems rather counterproductive to the whole having-money-for-potential-late-Spring-early-Summer-plans-thing (UDS?!). That would leave Jayne as a compute node without any storage, which would be cool, but expensive. And considering the fact that Jayne’s load average is currently 0.01, it doesn’t make much sense (though I’m careful, because of the potential heat problem).

It’s unfortunate that it’s either that, or leave the board/case completely unused. Oh, well…

Anyway, I’m pretty sure I’m going to move Jayne’s CPU to the new machine, for now. Maybe after the summer I’ll work something else out.

Well that was a disconnected, early-morning rant. I’m off to sleep now!!

A few years back, I got the idea that I should archive my email to disk every few years; mostly because Apple Mail used to be sluggish with lots of mail. I suppose this might have been a result of Trillian not having much memory, or Mail just being crappy at the time (noo!), but whatever it was, it wasn’t Gmail’s fault!

A few days ago, Robb was moving his mail from RPI’s webmail to his Gmail, happily reorganizing, reading old emails, and reminiscing, and I remembered the archives sitting on Jayne (and on CD, somewhere…). I copied them down, and poked around for a way to try to move them back into my live Gmail account.

It turns out Mail can’t import its own files… you need to convert them first. Anyway, after a long conversion session, I spent the better part of the last few days slowly copying tens of thousands of emails back up to Gmail.

Now, I have a mess… a single folder, with more than 52,000 emails in it; everything from 2004 on to now. What’s really amazing is instantaneous search both in Mail and in the Gmail web interface… I’m impressed that everything is holding together!

Anyway – if you wanted to know how much mail Mail can handle, it’s well over 52,000, at least on a 2007 MBP…

The plan was for Jayne (the machine that serves this blog, the rest of my web stuff, Robb’s blog, lots of code, backups, etc.) to be a reasonably stable and very large (storage-wise) machine. The storage part worked, more or less, but the stability is ehh-not-so-much. I have a very consistent problem with libata, but it’s not clear why…

Anyway. Here’s the facts:

• I’m using Debian unstable, with Linux 2.6.28.
• I’ve got a Shuttle case, and a 100 W PSU (!!).
• I get the libata errors above, but only after the machine is up for two or so weeks.
• I didn’t get the error at all during a one-month-long winter break, but it happened once again, two weeks after coming back to RPI.
• The problem has never happened when the case is open and a large house fan is on top of the case, which was true for a significant part of last semester.
• After the problem occurs, the machine must be left off for a few hours before it will successfully restart.
• The disks never report getting anywhere over about 44 degrees C.
• Only the root partition ever acquires any errors. Not the big (1.2TB) main partition.
• The total potential power use of the system is well over 100 W, and Shuttle recommended against putting both a Core 2 and two disks in this particular combination of case/mobo/PSU.

Any ideas?

I’ve thought about it a lot, and cannot seem to come up with a reasonable explanation. If it’s power, software, or the cables, the cooldown time doesn’t make any sense; if it’s the disks, running for a long time doesn’t make any sense, and I’ve spent a lot of time beating on the disks to try to reproduce it and cannot; if it’s heat (which seems most likely), the fact that it’s 20 degrees C under the acceptable working temperature of the disks makes that make very little sense (and I never get SMART warnings or anything, just libata transmission errors!)…

If not, I’m pretty sure a good bit of RCOS money this semester is going to head towards a new case/mobo/PSU (keeping the CPU/disks/memory/etc. from Jayne). Unfortunately, that will end up being a much bigger case… I’d also, in that case, have a really adorable little case that would almost definitely work fine with a single disk/an Atom/etc… anyone, anyone?

It’s been a long time (20 days) since my last post – in that time:

• I’ve moved back to RPI and gotten settled in.
• We have a new President! And he’s already doing a much better job. *high hopes*
• Robb and Matt (and Nate!!) and I have started our next project after Seed. I can’t tell you about it yet, because we want to wow everyone once it’s done.
• I sat through a 3 hour lecture by RMS, who then stayed in Matt’s dorm room, down the hall, and went to dinner with Robb and Matt! (more about this experience later)
• I finished and ordered the second revision Intervalometer PCB, this time, for a “dual-core” intervalometer!
• We’ve had two weeks of class. LITEC is … incredibly disorganized but awesome; Graph Theory is boring and, so far, a repeat of DSA; ModComp… we’ll see; SD&D is strange because it involves designing and writing software with a group of people that I don’t know (they all seem cool, though!).
• Seed got a writeup in Ars Technica, which was reposted to Slashdot and OSNews, and prompted #seed on Gnome IRC to become slightly busier than usual!
• I got Seed working reasonably reliably on Mac OS X, and am working on MacPorts packages (waiting on a new gir-repository release), and wrote a Seed/Clutter Pong, though it’s really rough and useless at the moment!
• WebKit passed revision number 40,000. This would not be notable except for the fact that Matt has spent most of his waking hours attempting to create Arch binary packages for every single revision of WebKit.
• New pictures! Not much, just of all of us (and of Matt’s RMS-signed laptop), but still cute!

Just after Thanksgiving, I ordered an Asus Eee PC 901 from Amazon. I had a few reasons for this rather large purchase: first and foremost, I want to work on Wayland with Robb, but need an Intel graphics card (we’re planning on making this our RCOS project for next semester); it’s fun to tell people I bought a new computer just to obtain a crappy graphics card; in addition, Kaylee’s starting to show signs of age (being a year and a half old, and stuffed in my backpack and banged around daily… college life is not easy on a laptop, just ask Robb’s, or Anthony’s…), so I thought I should take a little stress off that machine; also, a little tiny laptop makes more sense in the classroom, gets out of the way more, and it’s just plain adorable.

The machine I got is the Linux version, of course (more about that later). Intel Atom at 1.6 GHz, 1024×600, 9″ matte display, keyboard about the size of my fingers, 20 GB SSD, 6-cell battery (lasts about 5 hours, though without wireless it’s more like 8, and without X, 9), 802.11n, bluetooth, etc.

So! What have I found?

I love the keyboard. I wasn’t expecting to so quickly adapt, but it’s just fine for me! I’m writing this post on it, I write code on it, typing is no problem whatsoever. The small screen is no problem, either – it’s led to me thinking a bit about how I use a computer, and I’ll show you what’s come of that later… it’s plenty bright, too. The wireless card is extremely strong (comparable to, or perhaps better than the Thinkpad T61, worlds better than my MacBook Pro)… the camera is acceptable but I really don’t care about little integrated webcams. The build quality is perfectly acceptable, it’s no aluminum MBP, but it’s not as flimsy as, say, the poor parts of the T61 (everyone I know with a T61 has parts flaking off… unsurprisingly, if you play with it for a minute). The design is … poor, but not as poor as your run-of-the-mill laptop. To be honest, the Dell Mini 9 design is far superior, just in terms of jutting bits and the overall material consistency. For some reason, Carol prefers the Eee’s design over the Mini, but she also has a sunshine-yellow, cursive-font Amarok… (just teasing!)… here’s what it looks like, and it’s a reasonably adequate explanation of the feel of the design of the Eee, if the Mini 9 is iTunes: (and mind you, we still love Carol, just like we still love the Eee!)

The SSD is awesome, though it could have been significantly more awesome. It turns out Asus ships different SSDs in Europe vs. America; Europeans get transfer speeds of ~80MB/s, which is only slightly slower than Jayne’s epic hard drives. However, my Eee (and many of the other American Eees) only gets  ~30MB/s, which is closer to the speed of the T61’s hard drive. Nothing horrible, but certainly nothing to write home about, either. None of these speeds compare at all to the >200MB/s that people are getting with the new Intel SSDs, but those cost twice as much as an Eee by themselves! (someday, someday, I keep promising myself… two years, perhaps, with my Nehalem laptop ) In any case, it’s really really nice to be able to swing the machine around without worrying about moving disks, especially with it being so small and light! (it’s really too bad that there’s still fans… and more unfortunate yet that the Atom runs warm…)

The trackpad is no problem, though I of course have the same problems with it as I do on my MacBook Pro: I cannot obtain an acceleration that I can deal with. I wish there were a magical “match OS X’s mouse acceleration” button, but there’s not… perhaps there will be in Wayland’s input system. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.

The Xandros install that ships with the machine is a piece of crap. Whoever thought that shipping Xandros was a good idea… needs to talk to whoever wrote the epic Ubuntu-based launcher that ships on the Mini 9. Anyway… after taking ten minutes to determine whether I had accidentally ordered a Windows XP Eee, Robb and I spent a few more minutes laughing quite hard on the floor in our room before grabbing an external CD drive and installing Ubuntu.

I’ve since hacked up my Ubuntu install quite a much: instead of a full GNOME, I’m using awesome, a tiling window manager, scriptable with Lua. This way, windows take up the full size of my display, always… I have nine “tags”, which I currently use purely as virtual desktops, but which actually carry a bit more recombinational power that I have yet to learn to make use of. I keep Pidgin on the last tag, Thunderbird on the second-to-last, Firefox on the middle one, and tend to work on the beginning tags, heading right. This has worked well for me so far, though I think it’s rather unconventionally simple compared to the crazy flexible way most awesome users work.

I’ve constructed a tiny kernel that has just what I need, and massively edited boot and shutdown scripts. Boot is between ten and fifteen seconds now. Halt/reboot is like three, as it’s basically just a sync and power down. I’d be able to do five second boot if I had one of the 80MB/s SSDs, but … I don’t!

There’s a bunch of buttons built into this silver line between the keyboard and the hinge – I’ve got them set up to a) play the Jayne song, from Firefly b) xkill c&d) turn on and off the VGA port, auto-detect its resolution, and (if turning it on), set the background to a plain color, for “presentation mode”. They’re pretty cool, even if I don’t usually like extra buttons. I use GNOME-Do for most other launching tasks…

The new hostname is Simon, of course, what with the Eee being a PC (so it must be male), but rather effeminate, and fitting in with my recent Firefly naming scheme…