alex chiang: web 6.0

I’ve recently discovered the Linux hater’s blog and think it’s brilliant. It’s like Fake Steve Jobs, but I actually care this time.

In the most recent installment, the Linux hater makes fun of the Foxconn conspiracy that wasn’t. I read the original thread and thought to myself, “what a wanker”. Look, I even said so on internal irc:

#hplu.25.log:25-07-2008 13:32:08 > achiang: what a wanker

The Linux hater says:

You may think that it’s totally lame that HP has to work around a Vista bug like this, but at least they can. They can count on “Windows 2006 SP1″ always meaning the same thing, and so they can fix problems for their users. The Linux kernel community has failed to provide stable targets for the rest of the industry to design around. They’ve made it extremely backwards and difficult for hardware vendors to fix things for Linux specifically, even if they wanted to.

As someone with a passing knowledge of ACPI, I see this simply as a pragmatic approach to the realization that Linux isn’t the market leader, and rather than fighting an impossible fight of begging resource-constrained hardware vendors to test with Linux, it’s better to simply assume the Windows code path is tested, and draft behind all that validation effort.

This approach is clever in at least one sense — Microsoft has to spend resources on their WHQL infrastructure, hardware vendors do QA against it, and then Linux gets to benefit. Of course, it’s a sub-optimal approach because Linux has to waste time figuring out how to be bug-for-bug compatible, but the important thing to keep in mind is that the world isn’t static. As lenb says:

Linux will continue to claim OSI compatibility with Windows until the day when the majority of Linux systems have passed a Linux compatibility test rather than a Windows compatibility test.

My prediction is that this future isn’t a complete pipe-dream, as hardware vendors attempt to squeeze more and more cost out of the system, the cost of WHQL certification increases as a percentage of the R&D. If the Linux market becomes big enough, it’s conceivable that a vendor decides to validate against a standard Linux test suite.

And while it’s madness to think of all the kernel/userspace/distro combinations out there, I note that the actual ACPICA in Linux doesn’t change very rapidly, so the vendor could test against a given ACPICA release, rather than any given Linus or distro kernel.

best wedding gift I lost, Issaquah, WA

After having been to… [does quick count] roughly 15 or so weddings in the past 3 years, Chad and Danielle’s had one of the best structural setups I’ve ever experienced.

Guests showed up at 5pm on Friday to cocktail hour. Chad and Dani mingled with the guests as we got to know each other. At 6, we all sat down in the lawn area, and Chad and Dani walked out. No bridesmaids or groomsmen that I could remember. Blissfully short, sweet, secular ceremony; Chad and Dani walked down the aisle and immediately formed a receiving line. We filed past, congratulated them, and walked into the reception hall, where the bar was immediately open. No assigned seats.

A few moments later, the veggie buffet opened up, and it was first come, first serve. Dancing and further partying ensued quickly after, and a good time was had by all.

All class, no pomp; just hanging out with friends and family in a beautiful, but low-key manner. What every wedding should strive for.

• Chad and Danielle’s wedding photoset

A few days ago, Fort Collins got nailed by a seeming monsoon. I had the misfortune of bike commuting home from the time the rain started, continuing into the time the rain converted into hail, and finishing my commute as the storm finally petered out. It wasn’t terribly bad, except for a minor freakout during the extreme flash-BOOM!s exploding overhead as I stupidly rode underneath the very exposed Powerline Trail. That was scary.

Worse, though, was my wide open window near my computer desk at home. Where my computer sits. With an open, exposed chassis.

I walked in and saw the Mac mini pulsating sadly and making sick noises. Sigh. Unplug it, and turn it upside-down and the inch of standing water in the case poured onto my desk. As a computer professional, I happen to know that dumping out that much water is probably a Bad Thing^TM.

Let’s check my other system downstairs, to see the last time I did a backup of the Mac. February? Crap.

Stuff dries out kinda quick in Colorado, but I gave it an extra day or two before plugging everything back in. The external hard drive that I boot off of is having a really hard time spinning back up and I make a frowny face. On a whim, I decide to see if I can reinstall to the mini’s internal drive. Minor success for our hero.

Ok, so booting back up on the internal drive… woop woop, I can see the external drive again! Disk Repair finds some bad beeble-bops and fixes them up, so I think I’m set. Attempt a reboot and…. uh oh. Sad pulsating light, sick drive noises, and a frowny face from me again.

Boot back to internal drive, reconnect external drive and all is well. Buh? Run Disk Repair again and notice something very odd — it’s telling me that it’s connected via USB2.0, but I told the external drive to prefer firewire (both ports are hooked up). Now that’s a little weird.

Let’s think about this… Ok, theory formed, time to experiment.

Reboot with only firewire hooked up. Frowny faces all around. Reboot again with only USB hooked up. Happy face. Reboot one last time with both hooked up. Frown and gnash teeth.

Conclusion: the rain fried the firewire chip either on my mac or on the external enclosure. Most likely the enclosure. This kinda sucks because you can only boot off an external firewire drive, can’t boot off external USB. On the plus side, I have all my data back… which is nice and only minorly inconvenient.

Lesson learned. Computron moved away from window. Backup scripts dusted off and added to cron. Burn incense peace offering to the computer gods. Disaster averted.

Life has its own synchronocity — New Belgium and Elysian breweries to cross-brew beer at each other’s breweries.

I just visited Elysian last week, and sampled some of their jasmine infused IPA. It was deliciously quirky, and a good second place to my most favourite of all beers, Odell’s IPA.

As a fan of New Belgium’s business practices (but not so much their beers), I’m hoping Elysian can make improvements on the taste of NBB beers. But in any case, it’s nice to see good things happening in the micro/craft brewing scene.

hanging peppers, Pike Place fish market, Seattle, WA

Pike Place photoset

Some insights into what I find interesting.

An essay on Chinglish says:

An estimated 300 million Chinese — roughly equivalent to the total US population — read and write English but don’t get enough quality spoken practice. The likely consequence of all this? In the future, more and more spoken English will sound increasingly like Chinese.

Speaking of bon mots, a slide deck from Toshiharu Harada on the trials and tribulations of merging TOMOYO linux into mainline had me in stitches. His good-natured humility is absolutely refreshing, and captures the emotions of my job and how I felt when I made my first major kernel submit. Some favorite quotes:

• It was a meeting of the Hell
• What You Need to Join the kernel development — COURAGE
• AppArmor and SELinux guys began fighting (complete with ASCII art!)
• Beware I don’t have long legs as HE has

And finally, I’m glad I haven’t gotten attitude at any of the coffee shops I’ve visited like this guy did. It took some reading between the lines, wondering “they really care that much about iced espresso?” But it turns out that no, the murky coffee owner is just trying to prevent people from doing a ghetto latte — ordering a cheaper iced espresso and then filling the remaining 3/4 of the cup with expensive cream. Hiding your fear of thieves behind some arrogant claims of coffee perfectionism seems… douchey.

fishing rod, Millers’ boat, Shilshole Bay, Seattle

Another excellent weekend in Seattle. The Millers were kind enough to take us for a sail on Friday around Shilshole Bay. Great way to wind down a hectic week.

Saturday was non-descript. Grilling at the house, catching some of the local flavour in Wedgewood.

Today saw some pitch n’ putt and then Pike’s Place Fish Market for some people watching and fish eating. Tomorrow, I’ll be exploring the U district and Wallingford.

Life doesn’t get much better than this.

• seattle sailing set on flickr

In other news, this Ask /. thread on how to show code samples made me supremely appreciative of my current job. I do as much stuff as I can in the open, and any future employers can base their hiring decisions off known behaviour, rather than guessing about me.

Finally, if you’re wondering about the British spelling in this post, it’s because somehow, Firefox 3 decided it should be using the en-gb dictionary for spellchecking the text fields, and it adds annoying red squigglies on my natural Americanized spelling. So today, I did it this way to stop the computron from yelling at me. Huzzah technology.

I’ve finally been able to get out to some coffee shops out here. Yesterday was Cloud City. Tasty espresso, nice low-latency internet connection. I don’t particularly care about bandwidth, so I have no idea how that was. Cloud City is in the Maple Leaf district, which was a pretty easy ride from Mickey/Annie/Styles’ place.

Today, I’m at Herkimer Coffee. Getting there was hard on a bike, as I had to cross I-5, which was a bit sketch. Was it worth it? 1/2, maybe. The espresso is absolutely delicious, but the connection is noticeably laggy:

--- free.linux.hp.com ping statistics ---
10 packets transmitted, 9 received, 10% packet loss, time 9402ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 573.672/693.063/842.483/76.493 ms

Oh well.

This week has been great for productivity. I’ve got a long patch series in the works that aims to expose disabled CPUs to userspace, and actually gives us a sane way to poke at them without crashing your box. I’ve noticed that the ACPI processor driver is somewhat of a mess, and I’m adding its cleanup to my TODO list. It would be great to unify MADT parsing, for example. But that’s off in the future.

Mickey downs his eggermeister¹ while Brett works on his.

That face is about how I feel after a weekend of… fun. I got my first real night’s sleep last night after 4 hazy days, and it felt great.

Now, I’m in Seattle for a few weeks, working remotely. The idea is to try and see some of the city while I’m here, but I’ve been rather busy as of late. We’ll see.

potlatch 2008 photo set — I notice there aren’t too many actual frisbee pictures in there, but I assure you, we did play.

^1: shot of Jaeger served in half of a hard-boiled egg

I broke my old camera lens about a month ago. It was only 6 months old. I was very sad.

I bought a new lens. I was sad to spend so much money on something so frivolous, but I realized that life’s frivolities are worth it. So now I am very happy.