Life is so good, it gets better every day

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.

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.