Muli Ben-Yehuda's journal

Mon, July 22nd, 17:57

The rooms in Les Suites are actually apartments. A fully stocked kitchen, living room, bedroom, rest room and a utility room, with washing machine and drier. Living in style, indeed…

When we got to the hotel, the person at the front desk gave us a room on the third floor. Upon opening the door, we reeled back from the stench of cigarette smoke. Once we stepped inside, we were deafened by the noise from the street. Orna immediately put on her assertive hat, went back to the front desk, and got us a non smoking room on the 17th floor instead. Yay!

While the new room was pretty good, it didn’t have any broadband available. We asked, but all of the broadband rooms were either taken or reserved, and we settled into our room. We learned that there’s free wireless coverage in the hotel, and I decided to buy a wireless card, unless one will be provided at OLS, like in previous years.

We slept for a few hours in the afternoon after checking in, for which Orna blames me. I blame the jet lag.

In preparation for OLS, I compiled and installed kernel 2.6.0-test1 on hydra. Can’t go to a kernel convention without running the latest kernel. Went smoothly, except for the new module init tools I had no way to download. Since I build mostly monolithic kernels, no big deal… I’ll download them when I get on the network.

Next: how we spent the first evening in Ottawa.

This is the first in a series of notes I took / am taking during OLS.

Mon, July 22nd, 07:00 AM

Sitting in Toronto’s pearson airport and waiting for the flight to Ottawa. I took out the laptop to do something productive, although I can’t remember what it was anymore, and instead spent an hour chasing the init scripts to set a low timeout on dhcp, debugging a weird apm problem and figuring out the internal IBM client modifications to a custom RH7.3. There’s a lovely expression for this sort of thing, coined at MIT (where else?) but I can’t remember what it is now. Shaving yaks, perhaps. Will check when I get back online. [checked, it’s Yak Shaving].

The flight from Israel was rather uneventful, and thankfully we spent most of it asleep. Due to booking the flight pretty late, Orna and I had separate seats, both window seats on aisle 14. Once we boarded the plane, we asked a nice UN soldier to switch with one of us, and he did. The in flight entertainment was one of the X-men movies, the god awful “About Schmidt” with Jack Nicholson and something else we missed since we slept. When we went to see “About Schmidt” in the cinema, we walked out of it in the middle, it was so bad. This time Orna seemed to enjoy it, and I couldn’t walk out of a plane cruising at 39,000 feet.

Next, The Les Suites hotel.

That’s it. At 20:30, the ride to the airport, courtesy of IBM, should be here and we will be on our merry way. Reading material packed:

– Understading the Linux Kernel, 2nd Ed, by Bovet and Cesati. It only seems fitting, considering I’m travelling to a Linux kernel conference 😉

– John Keegan’s A History of Warfare

– Greg Eagan’s Diaspora, which ladypine bought me for my birthday and arrived from amazon today. Talk about good timing!

Time to turn hydra off and browse the duty free’s shopping deals. Cheers!

Jack Edmonds – Paths, Trees and Flowers:

Click to access 140-144.pdf

Chudnovsky on the Strong Perfect Graph Theorem:
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/StrongPerfectGraphTheorem.html

Number Field Sieve:
http://ace.ulyssis.student.kuleuven.ac.be/~triade/Nfs/bin/nfspaper.zip

I am sitting now at the new office, L23B. Previously, I shared a room with two consultants, each of whom was here for one day a week. Consequently, I had a large room to myself most of the time. Now I share an office the size of a matchbox with someone I haven’t even met yet. Needless to say, I’m less than thrilled. Where’s the daily dilbert strip to remind me that things could be worse? I could be in a cubicle *shudder*

Things to take care of in the new office: – shelves, at least three of them – elerian’s network is down, looks like a port problem (fixed temporarily by switching with roomie’s machine’s port, hee hee) (fixed permanently by getting an 8 port switch from system) – gofannon’s account is locked out (fixed) – we have no wastebasket, get one

Spent the last few hours setting up my new laptop from work, hydra, in preparation for OLS. hydra is a T21 stinkpad craptop, and I already like it much better than tea, my old R30 stinkpad. Setting hydra up includes configuring xemacs to behave properly, finding a suitable wallpaper, installing BitchX, copying everything important over from tea and synching my kernel trees.

I think I’ll download mozilla-firebird now (done while writing), compile a 2.5 kernel (will wait for the morning…) and hit the sack. Cheers!

28 hours until the flight, and I’m starting to get nervous. Too many things to take care of tomorrow, too many rough edges left undone. It’s always like this before a long trip, so I’m not *too* nervous.

37 hours and counting until we fly up up and away to the 2003 Ottawa Linux Symposium. Now back to packing. Watch this space for updates!

By the way, join #ols on irc.oftc.net if you’re going to OLS.

Yesterday Eran Tromer gave a colloqium talk at IBM HRL on Hardware Based Implementations of Factoring Algorithms. Eran’s talk dealt with the improvements leading up to the TWIRL device, which cleverly exploits the inherent parallelism of the Number Field Sieve algorithm via hardware design. The bottom line is that factoring 1024 bit RSA keys in reasonable time, using the hypothetical TWIRL device, will only cost approximately 10,000,000$. Previous estimates were in the trillions of dollars. For perspective, 1024 bit is the recommended RSA key size, and $10e6 is peanuts for a certain Fort Meade agency…. More details are available in the papers on Eran’s Weizmann home page.

After the talk Eran, Oleg, myself and another coworker whose name I don’t recall had lunch at the IBM cafeteria. Topics of discussion during lunch were suitably geeky for the company involved, and much fun was had. Earlier, Eran explained that parameters to one of algorithm’s steps are chosen so that a memory write will always occur to the memory cell preceding a cell we just read (which means a cache hit, which is a good thing). During lunch, I told Eran that it reminded me of the techniques used by Mel, a Real Programmer, and Eran said that he concurs, and must have internalized the story to use the same trick. Inspiration comes from unlikely places…

Written yesterday (Tuesday) morning, and left forgotten in an emacs buffer somewhere…

Sitting in my parents living room, waiting for the phone company technician to come by and replace their ADSL modem, I happened to read the newpaper.

– The single parents struggle for the reinstatements of their welfare is understandable, but Binyamin Netanyahu, the finance minister, is 100% right in my opinion. There should not be incentives for anyone to stay home and not work. Especially when those incentives come directly out of my hard earned tax money. Simplistic? maybe. Cold and unfeeling? maybe. As Heinlein once put it so aptly, There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. If one wants money, one should work for it.

It’s interesting to note that the paper (Ma’ariv, page 3) had a chart that showed that a one-parent family with two children, where the mother works part time, actually makes more than a married couple with two children, where the husband works full time, even after the recent cut in the single parent welfare allotments.

– The business supplement had an interview with an Israeli VP at Microsoft, who’s running their foray into the storage area. Now imagine the blue screen of death on your enterprise storage system…