Life is so good, it gets better every day

The Roadtrip

Hooray, it’s Friday and I’m about to pick Jeff and Pia from the airport, the first stepping stone towards a monster road trip on the way down to Dunners for LCA.nz. We’re planning on hitting the hotpools, the pancake rocks, the glaciers, the wonders of Queenstown and just about anything else that passes our fancy. But YES, THERE WILL BE PIES!

Anyone know what crack Jeff was smoking this morning? Maybe it’s a subtle reference to our roadtrip, which is going to be BATSHIT INSANE!

John Saves My Ass

When upgrading to a newer version of Nevada b31, I forgot to backup my xorg configuration file. Normally this hasn’t been a problem because it’s generates a file in /etc/X11/.xorg.conf which I can copy over, and tweak where necessary. But it hasn’t this time, and power management regularly hoses the xserver to the extent that I have to do a hard reset.

Occasionally things go wrong when you hard reset, which is rather understandable really, and on consecutive booting into Nevada it would just reboot the moment I left the grub screen. This time I couldn’t figure out what I had to do and anything I did try was failing miserably. The horror stories of your machine going down before a major conference were becoming true. Fortunately John came in to save my ass with the following incantations –

 touch /a/platform/i86pc/kernel/unix bootadm update-archive -R /a 

Apparently updating the boot archive should take some time. Useful stuff to know.

I Need a Build Machine

I think I need a faster build machine, especially for building our conglomerate SUNWgnome-base-libs package, which is a collection of glib, cairo, atk, pango, gtk+, libglade, libart_lgpl and libgnomecanvas. That’s probably cause for concern enough, but what’s really worrying is the time it takes to build all the API documentation [yeah, I should use –disable-gtk-doc, but that’s not the point]. With a simple script –

#!/usr/sbin/dtrace -s
pid22909:libxml2.so::entry {
    @[probefunc] = count();
}

tick-1sec {
    printa(@);  cleara();
} 

it basically aggregates how many times functions in libxml2.so are called for the process id that corresponds to the xsltproc which does the doc generation. It then prints the totals out each second. Some sample output is here, and here for functions in libxslt.so. At one point, it was doing a staggering 15,000 xmlXPathCompOpEval calls a second while building the index pages.

DTrace is nice to be able to waste away the hours rather than looking at the build output….and of course I have absolutely no idea how to interpret these numbers – unfortunately DTrace can’t really help there, or whether this is anyway significant. I just wanted to see what was going on and you’d probably need to start looking at how long you spend in each function with the following script –

#!/usr/sbin/dtrace -s

pid6562:libxml2.so::entry {
    self->ts = timestamp; 
}

pid6562:libxml2.so::return
/self->ts !=0/ {
    @cnt[probefunc] = count();
    @time[probefunc] = sum(timestamp - self->ts);
}

tick-1sec {
    printf("%30s %15s %15s\n", "FUNC", "TIMES RAN", "TOTAL TIME");
    setopt("aggsortpos", "2");
    printa("%30s %15@d %15@d\n", @cnt, @time);
    printf("\n");
}   

Unfortunately I haven’t got a new enough build on my laptop to be able to run the script above. Next time.

LCA Hackfest and Schedule

This years hackfest at LCA should be pretty interesting. It looks like it will be a series of questions to prove your hacking [and typing] skills. What’s really good, is the fact that the hacks will likely to be contributing towards existing open source projects, rather than writing silly game algorithms in previous years.

It’s also really nice to see the schedule being separated into seminars, tutorials and keynotes. I wonder if all the speakers this year have been asked to focus in on their topic some more, rather than the usual ‘Here’s what I’ve done since the last time I gave this presentation’ format that I really hate.

Good job LCA! Only 7 days to go!

Kinetic Chain

I happened to turn onto Top Gear yesterday afternoon on NZ TV, and they were showing a short piece on the making of Cog, a wonderful Honda ad based on a kinetic chain of car parts ending with a “Isn’t it nice when things just work?” voice over. When I googled the car ad, I came across the wikipedia site, which directed me to a competition hosted by Sportscafe which a NZer Nick Yates won for a similar feat involving sports equipment. A weird set of connections to take me back to NZ again.

Brendan’s DTrace Troubleshooting

Brendan Greg just pointed out his trouble shooting findings using DTrace on SMC. Useful for anyone looking at starting to write some DTrace scripts.

New Year’s Resolution

I’ve been meaning to get back to swimming for a long time. When I was real young I had a couple of lessons, but then my parents shifted house and I stopped them. I had only just barely made it into the deep end too, and was a complete wuss at being able to pick up objects from the bottom of the pool. It’s a real sob story. It’s not that I can’t swim, it’s just that I swim pretty badly.

Well, all that’s about to change. I’ve bought goggles. I look darn sexy in them, and I’m going to get this breathing thing right even if it drowns me.

It’s Only Rock’n Roll

Fancy working for Sun in the JDS group? There’s an open opportunity. Not only do you get to liase with local engineering groups and engineering groups in China, Germany, India and the US, but you also get to listen to me constantly moan at our weekly team meetings. Bonus! Send me your resumes/CVs if you’re interested.

Nokia 770

It’s like a gmail account, and I’m probably one of the last few to get one. A nice little machine, although the clock doesn’t seem to recognize New Zealand as being a place you can live – oops! Looking forward to playing with it over the next while, although I guess I’m going to have to install Linux on one of these boxes first.

Dogfooding GNOME

For the first time since 2.0 days, I’m finally dogfooding GNOME 2.13.x on Solaris. There’s lots of small issues, but for the most part it looks real sweet. The next part is just getting our build environment out onto a public source code management repository, but hopefully we’re not too far away from that. Rock on!