Muli Ben-Yehuda's journal

[Tuesday evening]

Even though I usually enjoy Algorithmics lessons, this one is rather boring so far, covering material I’m already familiar with. I printed out at work ESR’s and Rob Landley’s analysis and rebuttal of the amended SCO complaint, and for some masochistic reason I can’t wait to read it. Yet the break is so far away…

One of the good things about algorithmics lectures is that Dudu oftens delves into interesting stories that have a bearing on the subject at hand. A case of in point is the story he just told of the founding of RSA corporation, and how Rivest, Shamir and Adelman came up with the idea of RSA. Unfortunately, whenever he tells such a story, he invariably gets at least one small detail wrong. I don’t know if it’s carelessness, lack of attention to detail, or maybe simplification for the audience’s sake, but the mistakes grate on my nerves. So far I have resisted the temptation the correct him, because it’s always an irrelevant triviality that’s not worth disturbing the flow of the lesson for. Also, I don’t like arguing about details without a reference at hand. Instead of correcting him, I rant to my livejournal and you, gentle reader, get to read…

[Tuesday evening]

Had a good lunch today at Spargo with Yaniv Altshuler and Inon. Yaniv and I have been meaning to meet for a while now, and today it finally happened. Yaniv is getting married in a couple of weeks, and wanted to deliver the invitation personally.

The invitatation was delivered. We talked about many things, and much fun was had. Army jokes flowed freely. The nice (expensive) bottle of wine I ordered contributed to the congenial mood, and I returned to the office nicely plastered.

[Tuesday evening]

On Saturday, David and Lior from eddiea’s Linux Development Workshop came by and we talked about syscalltrack for a few hours. I explained in excruciating details the details of syscall hijacking in kernel 2.4, and they asked many good questions. This week they are writing a design document on their project, porting syscalltrack to kernel 2.6, and next week work should actually begin.

In the evening, I spent a few hours hacking on the code, fixing various issues that showed up when we went over the code in the morning. I think I fixed a long standing SMP race, where the actual syscall hijack was not being done atomically (plain assignment, as opposed to xchg()). Need to get a hold of an SMP machine to test, but theoretically, I’m happy.