Muli Ben-Yehuda's journal

After the holiday’s heaps of excellent food, it’s time to step back into the breach and DIET. I just had a small lunch, so small, in fact, that it hasn’t actually registered that I ate anything and I’m still hungry. Oy.

After shaving yaks[1] for a while[2], I figured out how to best solve the problem[3] I had with battery.el. Fixed it, and put it online for your perusal pleasure[4].

[1] Update the kernel to 2.6.0-t6 -> sound isn’t working -> go back to -test4 -> sound works -> rebuild -test6 trident.ko -> sound works -> update xemacs from CVS -> hopelessly broken, go back to stable 21.4.14 -> figure out how to get packages to work -> packages work. Etc, etc, ad infinitum.
[2] but hey, it was fun.
[3] if the output of (shell-command) is one line, it is displayed in the echo area. WTF?
[4] FSVO, of course.

I gave in, and bought three books from Amazon. I know, I’m weak. But they’re such good stories…

Coredlia’s Honor, by Lois McMaster Bujold, an omnibus edition of the first two books in the barrayar series. I’m currently reading the fourth book, after having finished the third.

The Colonels, book four in W. E. B.’s Griffin’s Army series. I have the first three, and can’t wait to find out how the story develops.

The last book is one I’ve been thinking of getting for quite some time. Considering I have my first workout at the new IBM gym on Wednesday, it seems rather appropriate. The Official United States Navy SEAL Workout, Revised Edition.

Haven’t done much in the last couple of days, due to the Rosh Hashana (Jewish new year) vacation. On Friday evening, festive dinner at my parents. On Saturday noon, festive lunch at Orna’s parents. Today (Sunday), festive lunch at my grandparents. So much food, so little time…

So what have I been doing? on Thursday, I sank my teeth into a book that turned out to be far better than I expected. “The Young Miles”, by Lois McMaster Bujold. This is space opera in the grand tradition of Heinlein, detailing the escapades of the young Miles Vorkosigan. I’ve barely been able to put it down, and fully anticipate finishing it before the holiday vacation will be over. Seems like there’s an entire series, which I shall have to get.

Not much else happened… the aforementioned whatsup interview got published, and the comments were not nearly quite as bad as I expected. As a matter of fact, they were very nice!

The whatsup interview is finally published. In Hebrew. I particularly like my picture, from the OLS 2003 end of conference pub party 😉

We have several cases in syscalltrack, where due to bad design or circumstances, when you change one file (e.g. the syscall stub code template files) you have to change accordingly another file (e.g. the “special syscalls” files). I’m reading an interview with Rusty Russell on kerneltrap, where Rusty describes how he implemented a MODULE_VERSION macro:

“JA: What will the MODULE_VERSION macro do?

Rusty Russell: Oh, that reminds me, I have to test that. Thanks.

OK, it’s sent. The patch allows a module author to add a version tag to their module, which the modern modinfo can extract. This is a one-liner. But I wanted to catch the (common) case where a change has been made to a driver by someone else, and the version number not modified. So I added a step to the build where every module with a version would have a checksum of the source file contents appended. It’s not perfect, but it gives *some* simple protection, and driver authors can always ignore it.

Patch can be found in my patch collection, or once it’s applied, in you will be able to find it here.”

I wonder if we can use something similar in syscalltrack. Even better would be to remove those nasty dependencies.

Shiny!.

“Does your neck hurt from turning between previewer windows and the source too often? This Elisp/LaTeX package will render your displayed LaTeX equations right into the editing window where they belong [in Emacs or XEmacs -ed].”

Reading my email at work, I discovered that Wes Felter of Hack the Planet fame works for IBM, at Austin. I wonder which other IBM bloggers exist out there?

Disclaimer: while I could be construed as an “IBM blogger” in the sense that I work for IBM Research and have a blog (where? you’re reading it!), my words are my own only. I don’t get paid enough to speak for IBM.

If I feel sufficiently bored, I might make a list of IBM bloggers. google is probably a good start.

I just commited a patch to remove support for floating point parameters from the rule engine in syscalltrack. Floating point support was never actually used, and remained there as an artefact of guy’s original vision of sct_rules being useful for other projects besides syscalltrack. I left it in so far, but since no such uses have materialized, and dead code is dangerous code (you try to use it and it blows up in your face due to having bitrotted), it was time to finally remove it. I hope guy won’t mind…

Me, yesterday, in an email to friends and colleagues:

FYI,

My "Design and Implementation of syscalltrack"[0] paper was accepted
to Linux.Conf.Au[1], one of the two top Linux (kernel) conferences in
the world. A victory 'happy happy joy joy' dance will take part as
soon as I finish telling the entire world :-)

[0] http://syscalltrack.sf.net
[1] http://lca2004.linux.org.au/

Cheers,
Muli

----- Forwarded message from lindy (AT) netcraft.com.au -----

Date: Tue, 23 Sep 2003 18:00:10 +0930
From: lindy (AT) netcraft.com.au
User-Agent: Mutt/1.4.1i
To: mulix@mulix.org
Subject: Response to LCA2004 CFP Submission

Hello Muli

Firstly let me thank you once again for your CFP submission for
LCA2004 titled "Design and Implementation of syscalltrack" (paper).

After completing a review of all CFP submissions, the CFP Selection
Team are pleased to be able to offer you an invitation to present at
LCA2004.

[snipped]

----- End forwarded message -----

More on this later.