Life is so good, it gets better every day

Travelling Again

Sydney, Australia here I come! At some point I’ll actually be in NZ for longer than a week.

Solaris Desktop Summit Photos

Cool, Alo put up pics of the Solaris Desktop Performance and Usability Summit here. FWIW, I don’t usually drink light beer, but hey, it was morning, give me a break!

Even though that was a pretty stressful two weeks for everyone, I had a ton of fun catching up with my team – it was real nice seeing them again.

Time Stands Still

I never really got a chance to blog about the wonderful trip to Thailand a couple of weeks ago. If you don’t want to read this blog entry, the summary is ‘Wow, Thailand is a fantastic place, with wonderful food, great people and a super chilled out atmosphere’. The reality is that summary doesn’t really do justice to the amazing time I had there, which was probably a reflection of the lovely group of people I shared my time with – Patrick, Mhairi, Dave, Warrick, Steve, Yvonne, Michelle, and Phil. We were staying in Tonsai, a little bay down south on the west coast of Thailand, not far from Krabi.

By stark contrast to the resorts of Rai Lay, Tonsai hasn’t developed to the traditional sun seeker holiday and instead caters for predominently climbers. It’s a very chilled out atmosphere. No one is in a hurry, and there’s a party going on almost every night in one of the bars – I’m pretty sure they take it in turns. There’s almost nothing to spend your money on, except of course for massages – both Thai and oil costing about $10 NZD for a good hour. Thai massage seems to focus more on manipulation and digging their fingers into your muscles. Oil massage was a much nicer experience, more so because of the candle lit and soft noise of the gentle breeze blowing through the chains of shells that hung from the sides of the hut. Bliss.

From the very start, we all experienced great food, visiting many of the restaurants Tonsai had to offer – both down by the shore with great views through to Thaiwand wall and those higher up tucked away in the jungle. Out of the many restaurants we all seemed to favour a place called Tina’s, that did a mean seafood Phad Thai and fish with sweet chilli. Most of the main courses typically costed about $2 NZD so it was great to stack on a couple of them after a hard days climbing. We stumbled across Chang beer, a strong brew of 6.2% alcohol early on in the trip. After a long day out in the sun, it’s hard to know whether you can be a ‘double-chang-man’ or a ‘triple-chang-man’ [difficult to say while drunk]. Dave tested the limit being a ‘quadruple-chang-man’, and was soon floating around during an impromptu nudie swim yelling out ‘DO WANNA SEE MY GOODIES??!’.

Of course we weren’t there to enjoy ourselves, there was climbing to do. Phil mentioned that most of the top world climbers don’t go to Thailand because of the heat, and after the first days or two battling with the sweat I can appreciate that. The routes are amazing though, and as long as you stick away from the easy to get to and low grade routes you’ll avoid much of the polish. Dave was my climbing partner for the 2 weeks I spent there, and it was really wonderful to see his technique improve day by day. We started off relatively slowly although tackled a 6b by mistake on the first day that deflated our egos a little. By the end we were mostly solid on 6b and 6b+. On one of the scarier routes we climbed up through a whole bunch of stalagtites into relatively unknown territory with Dave taking the lead on an amazingly exposed traverse with *huge* drops below. Lots of climbing to do – we only just touched the surface while I was there. Too bad I didn’t get to climb Humanality, it sounded like a blast!

On one of our rest days, we took a long boat out to one of the islands out from across our bay called ‘Chicken Island’ aptly named because one of the towers looks like a chicken head. We hired some masks, fins and snorkles and dived overboard. I’ve never been snorkling before [sheltered life] but it was the most incredible experience I’ve had, and it’s totally motivated me to go for a scuba course at some stage. It didn’t appear like the tsunami had a big effect on the reefs because it was teeming with life. At one stage Steve handed me a bag of rice crispies and when you put it under the water you’re suddenly surrounded by literally 100’s of little fish. Everywhere you look you only see fish – it’s actually kind scarey in many respects. Another day Dave, Warrick and I took the opportunity to head out for a nudie snorkel [there’s a bit of a theme running] – although most of us swam holding our crotch just in case. Dave took me under his wing [not while nude] and showed me a few basic techniques for diving down, and equalizing and stuff, and towards the end I was finally feeling like I was making some progress of feeling comfortable instead of choking full of seawater. Definitely one of the highlights of the trip for me.

For another rest day, we headed over to Ko Phi Phi an island heavily effected by the tsunami. I never really got a chance to see any of the photos in their tsunami center, but judging on the amount of building work going on, it must have left the place in a pretty terrible state. Very much alive and kicking though a year later, and packed with 100’s of tourists coming in on the ferries each day. We only spent about 24 hours there, but packed a huge amount in including a big night in the Apache club, with Phil chatting up the ladymen, and Dave dancing on the pole. They even serve drinks in buckets. Hangovers the next morning pretty much wiped us out – for Warrick it seemed to be a rather awful bug or food poisoning, and knocked him out for a few days later. Definitely a party town.

We got talking to an American electrician one night about the Tonsai electricity problem that he was attempting to fix. Seemingly it’s a mess, and that the circuits are blown on a regular basis causing half of bay to plunge into darkness – the community there have started to rely on candles, cooking with gas, and generally preserving the electricity supply they create with big generators back in the jungle. I like this approach. It fitted in with the general laid back atmosphere of the place. Americans always ruin everything [kidding].

What was I thinking when I bought peach coloured pants? They’ve since been dyed grey.

DTracing Linux

With the introduction of BrandZ, the DTrace boys pull off another top trump. Wow, that’s fricken cool.

Back in NZ

After another long haul flight under my belt, I am once again back in NZ. The flight was reasonably uneventful, and managed to get a good bit of sleep along the way. I must have looked a little shifty arriving in Auckland since I was ushered off to the Bio-hazard area for a full search and swab of my suitcase after I collected it off the conveyor belt. Fortunately my story seemed to check out and the swabs were clear of cocaine, and was soon let through to catch the flight down to Christchurch. One week to settle in here before I head over to Sydney for Christmas.

The trip was mostly a success, although I would have liked to have had more time to catch up with people during the 2 weeks I spent there. Nice to catch up with Steve and head for a climbing session in the Planet Granite and a Mexican afterwards. Nice to catch up with Jim too and chat about all sorts of community related talk. We totally need a master plan for getting more people involved in OpenSolaris.

Had a great day catching up with Suz and Pat on Saturday just before I left, drinking a few pints of Guinness in the Irish Bank. Just a pity I couldn’t hang out for longer really. Man, how the weeks are flying.

Using Time Where You Have It

It’s probably a basic principle of performance work. Use time where you have it, take time away where you don’t. No brainer. The approach is probably slightly less trivial, but some of the stuff we did today was pretty obvious. During the week we were experimenting with a whole bunch of pre-loading work testing out a series of cold and warm start scenarios.

And suddenly it was like, duh, why don’t we try and page in the libraries during the login experience? But doesn’t that use up time during the login? Well, no, because there’s a time slice between when the login screen pops up and when the user has entered their username and password. It’s all about making use of time cleverly. Doing a preload in the /etc/X11/gdm/Init/Default script of a whole bunch of libraries seems to shave off about 3 or 4 seconds from the login time. A simple win with no visible regressions, and there’s probably wins where that came from.

WTF are applets doing? Part 2.

Day 3 of the performance summit, and Alan gave an excellent presentation on the state of X, and what his team were up to. During the presentation, he mentioned a nice little utility called xrestop, which is a ‘top’ like utility that is able to trace what is happening in terms of resource usage in the X server that I had no idea about. Consequently, I created a package for Solaris [you’ll need the JDS build environment to build it though]. Thanks Alan for pointing it out, and thanks to Matthew for writing it.

Which brings me on to the title of this blog – which the screenshot below seems to highlight.

HP Get’s It!

Alan did a nice reply to HP’s real story about Niagara.

But one line caught my attention – “Be careful — there is a waterfall of change lurking around the bend”. HP get’s it! Sun is changing….and it’s just wonderful! I can only attempt to describe the change that’s happening inside Sun. There’s a whole heap of people wandering around with smiles on their faces – and if that isn’t reflected in all our recent announcements and communities we’ve built up, then you probably need to take off the blinkers.

Braindead Applets

It’s amazing how a 15 line script shows out the incredibly embarassing things we’re doing. That’s what Bryan wrote yesterday. Unfortunately GNOME applets are the DTrace whipping boy yet again, and I suspect Bryan’s talk at LISA is going to focus on the stock ticker applet [again].

The plan of attack was basically the following –

• Understand the architecture of the panel applets
• Try to identify the main CPU applet hogs
• For each panel applet
  • Understand what each panel applet does
  • Determine the CPU useage during idle
  • Define a set of typical user tasks and determine the typical CPU useage for each task
• Identify the typical startup for a given panel applet
  • Define whether that startup time is different for in and out of process applets

#!/usr/sbin/dtrace -s

#pragma D option quiet

syscall:::entry
/pid != $pid && strstr(curpsinfo->pr_psargs, "Applet") != NULL/ {
    @[execname] = count();
}

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

We created a number of panels, and added all the applets that were available and ran the script. The script basically searches for the string ‘Applet’ which appears in the –oaf-activate-iid exec line, and does a count of all the syscalls. Then for every second, it prints out a count like follows –

  mixer_applet2                                                    46
  gweather-applet-                                                 49

  gweather-applet-                                                 11
  mixer_applet2                                                    39

  gweather-applet-                                                 43
  mixer_applet2                                                    44
...

Fortunately it doesn’t take much work to figure out what those applets are doing on an idle desktop, without any interaction with the applets. What are they doing? Polling generally, lots of polling. Over the next day or two, we’ll be looking at creating patches to help this.

Other breakout sessions included Startup Time, GTK+ libraries, Java applications, GNOME Terminal and Firefox, and I’m sure a whole heap of people will blog their results.

The positives were that Bryan liked our lime green Sun branded wallpaper, and thought the PDF viewer [evince] was just peachy.

A Blink of Yosemite

John and I headed off to Yosemite for a quick trip on Saturday. We left at the crack of dawn and got back late that evening. I’ve been to Yosemite a bunch of times, but never in the winter, so it was nice to see the place looking like a ghost town. There wasn’t a huge amount of snow there, so we got a good hike up the John Muir trail towards Little Yosemite past Vernal and Nevada falls which had big flows. Lots of amazing ice formations, and wonderfully crisp cold air. Unsuprisingly, didn’t see too many climbers hanging around, but really got the tingling feeling in my fingers and toes as we walked around the huge boulders littered around the valley floor and along the trail up past the waterfalls. We were both absolutely wrecked on the trip home, but highlights include an excellent meal in a diner just outside the valley, and a quick run through with the local highway police. Really nice to get out and about though, since most of the rest of the weekend was dedicated to work.

One of the other highlights of the weekend was heading up to Alameda with Stephen to a Jazz club to see Suzanna sing. She has a pretty amazing voice, and you could really see that she was having a whole heap of fun. Great to catch up with her again, even though we didn’t have much time to chat. Hopefully we’ll catch up with her during the week too.