Life is so good, it gets better every day

Help at GUADEC!

GUADEC needs you!

There’s been 6 GUADECs so far. How many have you been to? How many times have you helped out at GUADEC. GUADEC is all about the community, all about family, all about you. But we really need you to help pull it off this year to make it an action packed and fun conference. If you have some spare time, please help out. Join guadec-list@gnome.org, introduce yourself and volunteer for one of our GUADEC Teams.

This is a perfect opportunity for people who use and love GNOME to help out, and great way to meet some of the stars that are helping to create your desktop. Helping to organize a conference is a wonderful experience too, trust me.

I’m with John

I completely agree with John, which is why I set up the GNOME love wall and took part in the brainstorming during the GNOME miniconf. We totally need to do more of this, and start creating awareness of what needs to be fixed – I’m with anyone with similar goals. We should probably do something similar at GUADEC.

OpenSolaris on VMware

Here’s a draft of an excellent article by Bill, installing OpenSolaris on VMware.

Dropping Like Flies

LCA was good in general. I wasn’t super impressed by the quality of talks I attended, but at least there was a broad mix of topics. Left Dunedin early on Saturday morning for a cricket match which we won by 9 wickets, sweet!

Went to bed early Saturday night, but had a pretty restless night. That was the beginning of possibly the worst 24 hours of my life that I can remember being sick. Seemingly I, along with many other delegates, picked up a bug/food poisoning which meant that most of Sunday was spent worshiping a toilet bowl. Was getting pretty worried because I was losing a serious amount of water from my body, and couldn’t get much fluid down. On top of that was achy joints, a headache and a temperature. It’s now a couple of hours since I’ve had a puke so at least one half of my body wants to keep in the water [grin].

Isn’t it strange though that when your body needs sleep, it’s the last thing you can do? I keep having this recurring dream and waking up every 30 minutes. After a week of activity at LCA, I could kill for a good sleep.

Update: Apparently this could be the norovirus, and mentioned in this article.

Profiling

Federico, any of the examples I’ve been posting to my blog really only touch the surface of what’s possible – even with the best tools, you still have to analyse the data to see what’s going on, and I personally have other projects that I need to be spending my time on. FWIW, I’d still prefer not having to recompile my kernel to get this data.

As an exercise, I wrote another script that shows what files are being opened, and started it before GDM [since I’m not too interested in boot time]. You can see the output here, which basically ticks through each second telling me what programs have been started, what files they’re opening, and a count at the end of how many times the file was opened.

From The Tact Department

Let’s stop beating around the bush. I’ve finally uploaded my OpenSolaris flickr tshirt image.

Opening Up GNOME

One of the DTrace examples that I gave during my talk at the GNOME mini conf was something that Bryan showed us in the recent Solaris Desktop summit. A simple script showing what files were being opened –

#!/usr/sbin/dtrace -s

syscall::open*:entry {
    /* Store the first argument of the open()
     * call in a thread local variable
     */
    self->filename = arg0;
}

syscall::open*:return
/self->filename != NULL/ {
    /* Get the filename string and put it into
     * a clause local variable
     */
    this->filename = copyinstr(self->filename);
    self->filename = NULL;
    /* Aggregate on the number of times this filename is opened */
    @[this->filename == NULL ? "" : this->filename] = count();
}

Pretty simple, huh? Now we need to run the script – let’s see what zenity does by simply opening up the about dialog, and then closing it –

 /usr/sbin/dtrace -Z -s fileopen.d -c 'zenity --about' 

Let’s not forget what this dialog looks like – a simple window with a couple of buttons, and a couple of icons –

and DTrace gives us the following output –

  /.pangorc                                                         1
  /etc/fonts/fonts.conf                                             1
  /etc/gtk-2.0/gdk-pixbuf.loaders                                   1
  /etc/pango/pango.modules                                          1
  /etc/pango/pangorc                                                1
  /export/home/gman/.Xauthority                                     1
  /export/home/gman/.Xdefaults-rampage                              1
  /export/home/gman/.fonts.cache-1                                  1
....
  /proc/14473/psinfo                                                2
  /usr/lib/iconv/alias                                              2
  /usr/openwin/lib/locale/locale.dir                                2
  /usr/share/zenity/zenity.png                                      2
  /usr/openwin/lib/locale/locale.alias                              3
  /proc/14473/auxv                                                 19
  /proc/14473/map                                                  19

Pretty neat in many respects. Alarming in others considering the simplicity of the screenshot above.

Roadtrip Photos

And now the roadtrip photos are live!.

New Zealand vs Rest of the World

We had the linux.conf.au cricket match tonight – a really close knit affair. Lots of fun out underneath the beautiful evening sun on Logan park as the Kiwis [or token Kiwis as the case may be] take on the might of the Aussies, Indians and god only knows who else. Great fun, and really wonderful to get to know a bunch of delegates on a social basis. New Zealand won by 4 runs over 20 or so overs. There’s talk of a rematch already!

Aussie, Aussie, Aussie. Sh*te, sh*te, sh*te!

Linux Conf Australia ^W ^W ^W New Zealand

It’s been a fun, but utterly manic couple of days. Collected Jeff and Pia from the airport and pretty much headed on a roadtrip around New Zealand. Because they arrived quite late in the week, I had pretty much decided that we had to skip the hot pools, and instead, we headed towards the west coast through Arthur’s Pass and the Energy Center of the Universe, Castle Hill, which many people will have seen in the recent Narnia film. Finally ended up staying in Hokitika that night, a town famous for the Wild Foods Festival each year, but also for an amazingly unimpressive collection of glow worms.

The next day we headed down the coast to catch the Franz-Joseph glacier in less than impressive weather. We didn’t even see Fox or Mount Cook from the usual Lake Matheson view which was disappointing too, but ended our day in the wonderful Wanaka, watching the Worlds Fastest Indian in the homely cinema there – after driving a couple of hundred kilometers, we obviously had to spend the evening in the morris minor that was parked towards the front.

Sunday was entirely more energetic, with the morning spent in Puzzling World [wonderful maze, but slightly Pukey in the weird angle room], shooting targets in a nearby archery range [embarassing photo withheld….seriously], and then river surfing with the Frogz river company near Queenstown – photos to follow.

And LCA hasn’t been too bad either. We had the GNOME mini-conf today and it was wonderful to meet Callum and John for the first time, along with many, many others. My DTrace talked kinda sucked, but hopefully everyone got the gist of it. Anyone who wants a personal demo feel free to ask me – it’ll be a lot less relaxed and informative. We did a rad little brainstorming session of all the things that sucked and rocked in GNOME, so we’ll blog about those things a little later.