Muli Ben-Yehuda's journal

Amnon Barak, of MOSIX fame, will give a seminar at HRL next Tuesday, on Management Systems for Clusters and Grids. The abstract is also attached below for your convenience. I can hardly wait…

abstract

Erez Hadad, a Ph.D. candidate in the Technion and all around good guy, will give a talk on the O(1) scheduler at the next Linux Study Group meeting at HRL. Do I have a talent for recruiting interesting speakers or what? 😉

Went out jogging again this morning. Yay! I have a couple of things to post about here, let’s see if I remember…

Wondering down the hall, trying to clear my head of the fugly code I’m rewriting at the moment, I happened to enter the library. Behold the treasures I found:

– One copy of Rochkind’s Advanced Unix Programming.
– One copy of Kernighan’s and Pike’s The Unix Programming Environment.
– One copy of the IBM Systems Journal issue on Storage Systems.

First, a package was waiting at the post office: Joe Haldeman’s Forever Free, courtesy of shapirac and omerm. Then, I stopped for a hitchhiker on the way to work and during the ride she flirted with me. Amusing.

The last part of my morning workout (based on The Hacker’s Diet) is running in place. Running in place is boring. Today I went out jogging in the neighborhood instead, for the first time. I’ve been terrified of doing this and seeing just how much out of shape I am. I survived, and *I* *want* *more*!

Mental note: reading[1] about superstar hackers[2] who flunked classes[3] and couldn’t care less[4] during a break in class[5] does NOT contribute to one’s productivity in said class.

[1] Steven Levy’s Hackers, which I have both in book form and electronic form and read over and over the way some people read the bible.
[2] Ricky Greenblatt.
[3] At MIT, no less.
[4] “He was placed on academic probation, and his mother came to Massachusetts to confer with the dean. There was some explaining to do. “His mom was concerned,” his roommate Beeler would later say. “Her idea was that he was here to get a degree. But the things he was doing on the computer were completely state-of-the-art no one was doing them yet. He saw additional things to be done. It was very difficult to get excited about classes.” To Greenblatt, it wasn’t really important that he was in danger of flunking out of college. Hacking was paramount: it was what he did best and what made him happiest. His worst moment came when he was so “out of phase” that he slept past a final exam[6]. It only hastened his exit from the student body of MIT.”
[5] Algorithms. Today’s lesson – Dynamic Algorithms and Minimal Spanning Trees.
[6] Been there, done that.

adb of Scary Devil Monastery fame has his notes from OLS 2003 up. In the entire conference, we only attended the same talk once.

Although reading selected documentation from 2.6’s Documentation/* is not exactly the best thing for one’s digestion. Also, there were chocolate thingies I crave for desert. I had a banana instead.

The program I was going to use to debug the hardware uses the exact same mechanism that’s broken and needs debugging. Royal suckage.