Muli Ben-Yehuda's journal

Spent most of the day studying Algorithmics, my summer course at the openu. I think I have a pretty good grasp of the material I missed while we were in Canada now. Too bad I have to study it in a hurry (my fault, bad time management), as this is fascinating material, NP, NPC, co-NP, decidability and computability.

For lunch, I had plans to cook something experimental, but ended up eating at my parents. After lunch, I continued on the never ending quest to set up Dafna’s (my little sister) computer, barcelona, to her heart’s desire and to teach Dafna to work with my favorite OS in the process. barcelona runs debian unstable. Today we continued installing mldonkey, gabber, gaim, flash in mozilla and other stuff. I spent an hour scourging google since gaim complained that the system doesn’t support the he_IL locale (hebrew), and eventually found the correct incantation for adding locales: dpkg-reconfigure locales.

In the evening, I met Haim in the Technion and helped him with his Linux kernel project. I showed him how to compile a kernel with a distribution .config, build an initial ramdisk and boot the new kernel. There was a snag with the first kernel we built, an oops in ext3’s journal code, but I jotted it down to a bad SMP compilation (make -j3 bzImage modules is *supposed* to be safe on 2.4). A conservative recompilation later, everything worked.

When I got back home, I figured out that the simple solution to the trident problem is to just add the missing spin_unlock_irqrestore on the good path in ali_ac97_get(). Mailed to patches to both Linus and Marcelo. Had to resist cleaning up the code in this patch, but added a trident cleanup to my TODO list. Watch this space for the patch.

While compiling various trident versions, ran accross Shawn Star on #kernelnewbies. Shawn pointed me to this great picture of yours truly he took at the OLS 2003 party at the black thorn cafe:

More of Shawn’s OLS pictures here.