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Live From Austin

Posted on October 12, 2006 | Filed Under Nerding Out, Vacation, Drama

The flight down was long. I arrived at YVR an hour and a half early, only to have my flight delayed by an hour due to thunderstorms in Dallas. Fortunately, my connecting flight to Austin was also moved an hour, otherwise i would have missed it. I made the connection OK thanks to this light rail system they have at the airport. I’m more worried about my connecting flight home; I probably have 15 minutes or less to go between gates.

On the long flight, i wrote a C program to solve “medium” sudoku puzzles using heuristic scanning and counting — which made the flight seem a little shorter. “Hard” puzzles, according to Wikipedia, requires bifurcation/guess-and-check. I digress…

The Coastal and Rocky moutains were amazing from above; it’s the first time i’ve been over them. The air above was so clear it was shaded blackish-blue instead of whiteish-blue that we’re used to. Would have been able to see Great Salt Lake too if not for cloud cover. Approaching Dallas, there was this neat diffusion/defraction effect around the shadow of the airplane which looked like a circular rainbow. Laura was bugging me to take the camera, and now i wish i had for that stuff =).

Austin itself seems fairly “normal”. By that, i mean it looks a lot like Victoria but in a hot climate where lots of people speak Spanish. There’s lots of old “heritage” buildings, brick crosswalks and roads, and slummy-but-nice suburbs that remind me of Langford. It’s really, really, humid here. The temperature outside the hotel has been hovering around 25C. At night, you can see the moonlight towers clearly in the distance from my hotel room. They give off this lime-green-ish light, which makes them look very UFO like.

The most noticeable thing, IMHO, about Austin is that the water tastes and smells like mud (which i can taste in the food). It’s probably due to the Colorado river being the main source (either that, or it’s aquifer water; i’m not certain, but both could result in heavy mineralization).

The opening Keynote talk was this crazy physicist guy that showed the crowd how to measure the speed of light. If you can imagine a crazy scientist, this guy is that archetype. He has this strange quirk: he’d randomly pause to complain that he’d run out of chocolate milk (when he wasn’t busy running around the room). As for the content, it was really interesting — especially since it has absolutely no relevance to the conference itself.

As for the reason i’m here (my talk)… i’m not happy with how it went, especially since the events leading up to it were rough.

For dinner the night before, i had a “fancy” steak with a big glass of red wine. The steak was good, but the wine was a big mistake — it hit me like a brick, probably from being tired from the long trip. I spent the next few hours trying desperately to sober up without resorting to caffiene (which keeps me up all night, regardless of offsetting alcohol consumption). I was up until 3AM CDT going over the slides and had to wake up at 6:30AM. Ugh.

After getting up and registering, I had to run to a store a few blocks away to buy a cheap watch so i could time myself. I then spent an hour before lunch talking-out the slides in my room, which made my voice hoarse. Fortunately that cleared before i had to give the actual talk, but it just added to the overall stress.

45 minutes before the talk, the room was free so i started hooking up the laptop to the projector. No matter what I did, i couldn’t get Linux/Xorg to work with the dammed projector! It would show my desktop colors, but it was totally garbage and you couldn’t read anything. I had expected this, so i said to myself “no problem! i’ve got the PDF on my fancy new laser-pointer-USB-key here, i’ll just boot into windows!” Windows worked fine with the projector, but i had neglected to install Acrobat Reader. Furthermore, the wireless card refused to associate with the access point in the same room. Argh! I ended up having to borrow the chairperson’s macbook (chairperson = person from the ASF that introduces me and, i think, rates the talk). The PDF loaded fine,but then we notice there’s only a DVI port on the macbook! Fortunately, Gozer (ActiveState mod_perl guy) had a DVI-to-VGA adapter, and i was able to talk.

The talk went too fast; I wasn’t feeling nervous, but I didn’t manage the pace very well (skipped over too much detail when I didn’t need to). There was fairly low attendance; I counted about 25 people at the start, but only 2 people left during the talk (including one developer that I was hoping would ask questions at the end). Overall, i feel that i did a substandard job. All of the other talks that i’ve been to were definitely better content-wise, but there’s been at least one other speaker down at my level. Anyway, i’m not letting it get me down too much… i know now that i need more practice and need to dedicate more time to the process of creating a talk.

After the talk, i went to a few more sessions, had a few beer at this social event, then went to bed early =). I woke up today feeling good and i’ve been able to enjoy some really good talks.

Tomorrow is pretty “light” on stuff I want to see, so I may attempt to book an earlier flight home (or, at least, go to the airport early). I hope to get a bit of tourist-ing done tonight and/or tomorrow.

I’ve rambled on for long enough, i think. I hope you enjoyed reading =).

Blog Spam

Posted on September 13, 2006 | Filed Under Nerding Out

Hrm… over 50 comments since this morning from just as many IP addresses.

Damn you blog spammers!

I’ve turned on comment moderation until I can get a
captcha plugin installed. Sorry about that.

~j

ApacheCon Presentation Accepted!

Posted on July 17, 2006 | Filed Under Nerding Out

I submitted a proposal for a presentation at the 2006 US ApacheCon back in June. I got an e-mail today saying it was accepted! ApacheCon is in Austin, TX and the presentation days are on October 11-13th.

I’m going to be presenting on the Apache-centric aspects of the product we’re building at work. In a nutshell, it’s about how we plugged into and used Apache, and how others could do the same thing.

There’s a Toastmasters club here at work, which i’ve decided i’ll start going to once it starts up again after a summer hiatus. That way, i can get some good practice at public speaking. I also want to try out the presentation at a lunchtime (a “brownbag” session, as we call it) for other devs to comment on.

This is the first time i’ll be presenting at a conferece! I’m really excited. Woot!!

~j

New Laptop and Bellingham

Posted on May 22, 2006 | Filed Under Friends, Nerding Out, Vacation

Woo! On Thursday i finally got my new work laptop! Fortunately, it seems to be working just fine. Unfortunately, I didn’t get it working until just now.

On Thursday, I came down with what I think was a mild flu. At 2PM, I had to go home and spend 24 hours in that trance-like state that only dry-heaves and a fever seem to bring on :/. To pass the time, I got Windows XP going (it was pre-installed) and spent five-or-so hours repartitioning the hard-drive so i could install linux. Near the end of those five-or-so hours I realized that the Ubuntu 5.10 CD came with ntfsresize, which lets you resize those crafty NTFS volumes before resizing the partition. I shrunk the Windows XP partition from 55GB to just under 10GB, which should give me plenty of room for now. Windows continues to boot just fine from this new partition after a forced run of chkdsk (think ‘fsck’ for windows) to verify that everything’s OK. This is a big improvement over the last time that I attempted to do a dual-booting system with XP about 2 years ago; resizing NTFS volumes was basically impossible with FLOSS programs. To finish off, I tried installing Ubuntu 5.10, but various things didn’t seem to work, especially X.

On Friday I was on the upswing and decided to go to BJF after a bit of convincing by Luke. I left the laptop here and got a ride from Luke along with jen, Loranda (Luke’s sister), and Orlando (Loranda’s fiance). I wouldn’t have had any time or network connectivity anyway, it turns out. Overall, it was a great trip. Lots of juggling, some good shows (a renegade show on Friday night and the public show on Saturday), and lots of fun people to meet and hang out with. Sleeping in a rigged-together barn in the middle of a swamp is quite the experience ;). I think that maybe Luke cought whatever I had on Thursday, though; we had to leave a little early on Sunday because he wasn’t feeling well. Luke, if you’re reading this: I’m sorry if i got you sick, but you’re the one who dragged me with you :P. Either way, I’m really glad I went. I started doing 4-ball and won in a raffle these really neat micro-suede “G-Ballz” beanbag-style juggling balls — they’ve inspired me to try to learn a 5-ball pattern as soon as possible ;).

Got back home on Sunday at around 4 or 5-ish. Had some real food (after an “interesting” breakfast at the farm) and settled in. Made four CD coasters trying to burn the latest Ubuntu 6.x beta release, then decided that the whole stack of blanks I’ve got are total crap after realizing that i’ve never successfully burnt one with this new burner. I found a 12x CDRW disk and it burnt just fine. In the process, I found out that there’s a command-line cd burning program for windows (I forget the name just now, but it’s actually made by Microsoft). In the meantime, I found a really helpful page by someone who got Slackware installed on the Dell D620. Aparently, you have to actually “soft-patch” part of the video BIOS to get full 1440×900 resolution under X.

Anyway, got Ubuntu “Dapper Beta” installed, but X still didn’t work. Downloaded 300MB of updates from the APT repository while watching the first half Lord of the Rings: Return of the King with Laura. Followed the instructions on the afformentioned page, and voila: a Gnome desktop. Looks really nice with anti-aliased fonts and the widescreen ;). CPU auto-scaling works, but I haven’t tried an SMP kernel yet (it’s a dual-core CPU). Something keeps accessing the hard-drive all the time, which clicks every few seconds (maybe i need to mount everything ‘noatime’?). Sound works OK, but is crappy quality — speaking of which, i can’t find the speakers on this thing — and the PC speaker is so blaringly loud i’m sure the neighbours can hear it every time i try to use tab completion in bash :).

Anyway, i’m quite happy to have this thing up and working. This whole post is just an excuse to try out the keyboard. The verdict: it is fairly spacious compared to some i’ve tried. My wrists aren’t incredibly sore, but then again, that could be from not typing for 2 days. I’ll take the MS Natural Ergo 4000 over this any day.

Just in case there was any doubt

Posted on February 20, 2006 | Filed Under Nerding Out

You must be mistaken…

Posted on January 28, 2006 | Filed Under Randomness, Friends, Nerding Out

Testing TextDrive… 1… 2… 3…

If you read this, if your eyes are passing over this right now, even if we don’t speak often (or ever, for that matter), please post a comment with a COMPLETELY MADE UP AND FICTIONAL MEMORY OF YOU AND ME.

It can be anything you want—good or bad—BUT IT HAS TO BE FAKE.

And now you can consider yourself tagged, so go post this meme on your blog.

I got tagged by Neil’s blog entry.

In other news… the MySQL import of the blog data somehow thought I was Sweedish — and aparently the Sweedes don’t use auto_increment on their tables (all of the auto-increment fields got turned into normal fields).

aedion.net - hotter than the average website

Posted on January 28, 2006 | Filed Under Nerding Out

My web-server/router had 4-5 lock-ups over the past four days. Cracked it open to take a look and pretty much everything is covered in dust. I looked in the BIOS and installed lm-sensors to check on the CPU temperature, and it was sitting at around 60-65 degrees Celsius. This is about 20-30 degrees over what it should normally be running at, dangerously close to frying entirely.

I vacuumed out the CPU fan and heatsink, declogged the power supply (also full of dust & hair), and things seemed to work for a while. CPU was at 45 degrees, motherboard at 35… hot, but not too hot.

But, it crashed after 4 hours. Rebooted, crashed after 3… then 2-ish… eventually it would only stay on for 30 minutes at a time. I think the CPU’s melted =(. Capacitors on the motherboard look fine, so it’s not that… memtest86 doesn’t show any memory errors (while it’s not entirely hung, that is)… don’t know for sure.

Anyway, “enough of this crap,” I said. Bought a TextDrive hosting plan and i’m going to pick up a cheap D-Link gateway on the way to Chris’ this evening.

If you’re reading this, then setting things up on TextDrive went well.