Muli Ben-Yehuda's journal

So, we bought a digital camera, a Minolta DIMAGE Z1, to be precise. We went walking on the sea shore yesterday afternoon, and I practiced taking photos of various things, alas, I deleted all of them accidentally when we got home. “Delete all frames” does not mean “delete all frames in this movie”, but rather delete all pictures from the flash. Oh well.

So the camera works, and quite well. It’s lots of fun, too. The next step is offloading pictures off of it to hydra, the faithful Linux laptop, and that is what I’ll do right now.

evan has an interesting entry here, wherein he quotes Ullman (yes, *that* Ullman) saying that he “urged the company to acquire or team up with a Linux desktop company so Google can extend search to information stored on the computer”. googling your computer makes a lot of sense – I rarely bother to keep local copies of anything I got off the web – it’s easier to remember the keywords I used to find it on google than remember which local machine I stored it on, and where.

Linus
lays in on the Linuxant “GPL” thread, in his usual eloquent
style:

A kernel module is _not_ a separate work, and can in _no_ way be seen as
“part of the hardware”. It’s very much a part of the _kernel_. And the
kernel developers require that such code be GPL’d so that it can be fixed,
or if there’s a valid argument that it’s not a derived work and not GPL’d,
then the kernel developers who have to support the end result mess most
definitely do need to know about the taint.

You are not the first (and sadly, you likely won’t be the last) person to
equate binary kernel modules with binary firmware. And I tell you that
such a comparison is ABSOLUTE CRAPOLA. There’s a damn big difference
between running firmware on another chip behind a PCI bus, and linking
into the kernel directly.

And if you don’t see that difference, then you are either terminally
stupid, or you have some ulterior reason to claim that they are the same
case even though they clearly are NOT.

I should save this stuff for the next time this stupid argument comes
up at work.

So, in about 15 minutes, I’ll lead a brainstorming session among my colleagues on “measuring innovations”. Don’t ask.

update: went quite well, if I may say so myself. Sometimes working in research is fun.

I’m drowning in “urgent! must be done as soon as possible! preferably yesterday” work crap[0], albeit of the interesting[1] kind. Metallica is playing now, keeping me suitably pissed off. Pissed off is FUN!

[0] why do I have time to blog, then, you ask? because I’m waiting for Yet Another Kernel Compile.

[1] making initrd go places no initrd has gone before.

Rather than spend the day at home coding, I’m going to two different BBQ’s. One is my uncle’s; the other one is Orna’s boss’s. On the scale of things I’d like to be doing today, BBQs are ranking pretty damned low right now.

Then again, yesterday was a half day vacation day too, which I did spend at home, and I did nothing at all[0].

[0] watched Kill Bill, read Hacking the XBox, ate pizza. Nothing *productive*.

It’s always a pleasure to stop by the post office and pick up new
books. Today’s loot is:

• Hacking the Xbox: An Introduction to Reverse Engineering, by Andrew “Bunny” Huang.
• The
  Coming of Conan the Cimmerian (Conan of Cimmeria, Book 1), by
  Robert E. Howard.

I also snarfed “Kill Bill, Vol. I” (which I haven’t seen yet!) at the
DVD place. I foresee a fun Independence Day vacation ahead…

Orna went for a trip, and I’m now home alone doing various chores. In between washing the dishes and hanging the laundry, I’m compiling 2.6.6-rc2-mm1, which has lots of goodies (ChangeLog). I downloaded it using Matt Mackall‘s ketchup script, which needed this simple patch to work on my Fedora Core 1 system with python 2.2.

Had a grueling week, first preparing and then teaching the classes on
operating systems and C programming. I’m baaaack now.

Some eclectic catching up:

• Shachar Shemesh, proprietor
  of Lingnu, has a blog now! It’s in Hebrew,
  though.

• I snarfed Dan Simmons’s Illium
  in paperback. I wonder what I’ve gotten myself into.

• HTML-TEMPLATE is
  a lisp library for generating HTML easily. Looks useful for my latest
  (and as of now, vaporware) project.

• I have ~180 unread emails in my work inbox. All of them need to be
  read, and some need to be responded to. I do not look forward
  to dealing with them.

• My diet has taken a turn for the worse (to put it mildly) this
  week. I’m back on the horse now, though!

• Things are not looking good in
  SCO land. Reminds me of a certain quip about revenge being a dish best
  eaten cold…

• Interesting
  thread on brad‘s journal with regards to being
  robust in the face of random things assuming fd 0 is stdin, 1 is
  stdout, and 2 stderr and writing to them.

There were other things I wanted to write about, but I can’t remember
what. Oh well, till we meet again!

I wasn’t supposed to work today. I was supposed to prepare the afore-mentioned one day C programming class, and a one day Operating Systems class, but we had a design review at work that needed to be done as soon as possible. The design review went fine, and afterward Orna and me went out for dinner. Somehow we ended up arguing whether our work qualifies as research or not, about the utility of Differential Equations to Operating Systems Design, and whether the Polynomials are a field, or a ring, or something else altogether (for the record, apparently depends on the kind of polynomial – according to this, Q[x] is the field of rational polynomials).

As for the preparations for the class – it’s almost ready, and it’s not even morning yet.