Yesterday, while refreshing the lj friends page constantly (which I use as my “rss aggregator”), I thought how nice it would be if I could just get new entries on rss feeds I watch to my email. Today, liw mentions rss2email, which does exactly that. This post, is in fact my rss2email test. Good luck, rss2email!
March 22, 2004
March 21, 2004
I have an awful writer’s block at work right now. Can’t concentrate on anything, can’t write even one more design document sentence, can’t come up with any nifty ideas. If I wrote hello world right now, it would crash the entire system. That bad. Thank goodness the gym is open, and I can go sweat it out of my system!
Oh, and the sb_mixer.c patch is in 2.6.5-rc2-mm1. Yummy!
Did a bit of kernel
work yesterday night, aided by some fine Glenmorangie
(Thanks, Rani!). Two patches, one
to remove %n support from printk (Nimrod, this should sound
familiar…), and the other to add
bounds checking to sb_mixer.c. I also tried reproducing a trident
ALSA bug (Bug
#2157), but didn’t get far with it yet.
March 20, 2004
Orna thinks this comment is sig worthy, but I don’t know. lj worthy, definitely.
– how do you know a Lisp book is any good? – it has bits of assembler in it.
It has both M68K and a Lisp Machine assembler code, in chapter 10, Low Level Efficiency issues. Highly recommended.
I need your recommendation, gentle readers, for an excellent, even sublime, alcoholic beverage. Money is of no account. Suggestions?
Yesterday, ladypine and me attended a baby shower, which was a lot more fun than I expected. During the course of the conversation, Orna mentioned that my good friend Oleg Goldshmidt has a link to a pagan site from his homepage. Knowing Oleg as I do, I expressed disbelief at this, we agreed to check when we’ll get home, and continued talking about other matters.
Later, when we got home, Orna went to check. Before she fired up mozilla, however, we made a bet. The loser will buy the winner a bottle of the alcoholic beverage of their choice. Needless to say, I won, and now I need your help to decide!
My current runner up is Chivas Regal, but I’m open to ideas.
I see gby and company have moved into the new office, in Netanya. I’m giving a talk to Eddie A.‘s Linux Development Workshop on Tuesday, in Tel Aviv University. I live in Haifa. Netanya, for those of you who are not well versed in .il geography, is right in the middle between Haifa and Tel Aviv. Maybe I’ll have time to stop by on the way? work has been insane lately, not sure I can afford the time off.
Congratulations on your semi-anniversary, Gilad and Limor!
meta blogging
-
I’ve been somewhat quiet on the blog front lately. This is not
because I no longer have anything to say; I’m still as wordy as
ever. -
One reason I’ve grown quiet is that posting to both livejournal and advogato (via
ljablog) was
making me question the suitability of whatever it was that I
wanted to post to both. Too often, I decided that it
wasn’t. -
Another reason is having been syndicated by both kerneltrap
and planetdebian. Same
thing, are my entries really suitable? guess not. -
Now, however, this blog is no longer syndicated on either
kerneltrap (technical
difficulties that could not be surmounted), or planet
debian (I asked to be removed). -
Therefore, as of now, I will post to advogato only when
appropriate. The “heavy stuff”, so to speak. I will post to lj
when feeling like it – the “fluffy stuff”, so to speak. Anyone
who wants to syndicate
this is more than welcome to, but I give no warranty. - It’s good to be back!
March 17, 2004
Kernel Workshop post mortem
Great lecture, I had a lot of fun. The exercise was totally cool – I
didn’t imagine you’d give us something this nifty. — Nimrod
Priell.
It went quite well, if I may so myself. We started with a slight
delay (my fault, traffic), and then a longer delay (not my
fault, InFocus projector
that would only eventually work with hydra the Linux laptop at
640×480 resolution). I started with the
agenda, including introducing myself (always embarrassing),
and then moved into the
Kernel Overview talk. I had a great audience, knowledgeable
and interested, and the discussion flowed. After the Kernel
Overview talk (which needs updating when I give it again, mental
note), I gave the
Introduction to Writing Linux Device Drivers talk. I had to
fairly rush through that one because we were behind schedule. We
braked in the middle for lunch, which was about as good as one would
expect, considering the location, but the conversation more than made
up for it.
After lunch, I went through the mmap and timer interrupt code
for klife, and then gave the “10 Things Every
Linux Programmer Should Know” talk. I was a bit apprehensive about
that one, thinking it might be too contentious, but the audience
took it very well and we had a great discussion. Then I gave the
“Syscalls for the Discerning Programmer” talk, which I didn’t
deliver too well, since I had a splitting headache. Now that I
think of it, I forgot to talk about sysenter and
vsyscalls, too. I’ll have to remember that next time.
Then I decided to skip the Kernel
Oopsing talk (schedule constraints) and gave them the
exercise, or rather, both of the exercises. I had one team
design and implement a way to subvert the unlink syscall
(syscall hijacking by any other name…), and the other team
design and implement a way of detecting when unlink had been
subverted. In the end two teams worked on hijacking, and one on
detecting. Much fun was had, even though no one got either
actually working, due to b0rkeness of the gcc we were using when
combined with Mandrake’s kernel sources that took too long to
figure out. One of the hijacking team subverted may_delete(),
and the other team hijacked ext2’s inode_operations unlink
function pointer. The detecting team hashed the sys_call_table’s
entries, which is the rather obvious thing to do, but I did tell
them to get something working first, and then build upon
that. All in all, as can be seen from the quote at the top of
the entry, I guess it went rather well…
March 15, 2004
OLS 2004
The call
for papers ends today. I have decided not to submit a paper
this year. I need to be spending more time writing code and less
time talking about it.
Kernel Workshop
.. and with that in mind, I’m going to be giving a one day Linux
Kernel workshop today. The slides and code are available on my
talks page. I
didn’t have nearly enough time to prepare it, but I hope it will
turn out well.
Life
Last night, before I went to sleep, I felt myself sliding into
depression. Is it possible to slide out of depression?
March 14, 2004
Beauty Incarnate
Knuth’s The Art of Computer Programming has arrived. So
beautiful! I must now decide whether it belongs at home or
at work. Maybe I’ll just carry it with me wherever I go? The
superhero
of tomorrow, armed with a Linux laptop and Knuth…
Muli Ben-Yehuda's journal 