Victoria came out to the City this weekend. On Friday night after work, we went and saw her mentor Katherine, who is going to be performing our wedding ceremony. Wow, I now have an appreciation for how much stuff variability the actual ceremony can have. Pacing, readings, vows, declarations of consent, language. Walked out with a ton of homework in terms of figuring out how we want this to go.

On Saturday, we had brunch at Tablespoon (sitting next to Lucy Liu), and then went down to Union Square and picked up Victoria's new glasses. Later that evening, Amy came over and we had Patsy's for dinner and chatted for most of the evening.

Today Victoria's aunt and grandmother came into the City. We showed them the apartment, got some lunch at Heartland Brewery, and went to the top of the Empire State Building. Despite my apartment being in the shadow of the building, I had not been to the top since 1998, and Victoria had never been at all. 15 miles of visibility, so we could see quite a bit. Will post some pictures I took later.

While staying with Victoria's aunt last weekend, we saw Jeff in a commercial. He's the one screaming "It's a mouth full of awesome!" at the end.



Too funny.

From: http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/linux/kernel/1154608#1154608

> Implementing strict ordering shouldn't be too difficult but
> I can't help but feeling that such assumption is abuse of
> implementation detail.

Hmmm, does not the "queue" in workqueue mean "FIFO"?

Fricking Awesome. This is yet another reason I like Andy Walls.

Had a nice weekend. Went to Philadelphia Friday night after work. On Saturday, Victoria and I had dinner with Annie and Frank and played Cranium, and then went to Jeremy and Jamie's for Jeremy's birthday party (photos to follow).

Today we went to the movies and saw 2012, which was *ok*, but not terrific. We had a nice dinner at a vegetarian Chinese restaurant on South Street and then I hopped the bus back to New York. Been working on code, trying to get caught up.

With Victoria's classmates staying at the apartment from Friday to Sunday for the ABCT Conference (and the required preparations, cleaning, etc), and the board meeting for my building on Tuesday, it's going to be a busy week. Combined with two different driver projects I am working on, it's going to be extra busy.

Annie made me really delicious brownies with chocolate and peanut butter, and I just know I'm going to make myself sick at least one night this week due to my lack of self-control.

Took the day off from work today so I could finally install the moulding I bought when I had the floor redone. Rented a mitre saw from Home Depot. Here's something that many of you in New Jersey don't often consider: if you rent a tool from Home Depot and you do not own a car, how do you get it home? Here's a constructive suggestion from personal experience: don't take the subway.

Anyway, that's done. Also picked up the appliance extension cord I need for the oven. Working on some Linux driver work tonight.

An article I wrote called "How Tuners Work" made the the front page of GeekTonic:


(Click to enlarge)

And here's the original article I wrote:

How Tuners Work…

Kind of a shame the spelled "KernelLabs" wrong though...

Victoria and I dressed up as zombie prom queen/king:



Here is the full album:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2026848&id=1199470342&l=752881998b

Don't worry, you don't need to be on Facebook to review. I've switched to using Facebook for my photos because the photo uploader in Livejournal is such a piece of crap, even after all these years. You hear that LiveJournal? If you're going to provide a "Scrapbook" feature, how about making it easy to upload photos in bulk?

It's not everyday that I find my article being referenced on the front page of hackaday.com!


(click the image above to see the screenshot [and click it again to maximize])

Here's the post:

http://hackaday.com/2009/10/27/digital-tuner-reverse-engineering/

And here's the original article I wrote:

http://www.kernellabs.com/blog/?p=1003

I thought this little photo tour was interesting primarily because we had a very similar setup where I used to work at the Lucent Global Product Compliance Lab (GPCL):

Inside a Cellphone Radiation Testing Lab

If you ever wondered how they tested exposure to cell phones, this is how they do it...

I love Joel on Software. If you're into software development methodology, check out the following:

The Duct Tape Programmer

I especially like this paragraph:

Here is why I like duct tape programmers. Sometimes, you’re on a team, and you’re busy banging out the code, and somebody comes up to your desk, coffee mug in hand, and starts rattling on about how if you use multi-threaded COM apartments, your app will be 34% sparklier, and it’s not even that hard, because he’s written a bunch of templates, and all you have to do is multiply-inherit from 17 of his templates, each taking an average of 4 arguments, and you barely even have to write the body of the function. It’s just a gigantic list of multiple-inheritance from different classes and hey, presto, multi-apartment threaded COM. And your eyes are swimming, and you have no friggin’ idea what this frigtard is talking about, but he just won’t go away, and even if he does go away, he’s just going back into his office to write more of his clever classes constructed entirely from multiple inheritance from templates, without a single implementation body at all, and it’s going to crash like crazy and you’re going to get paged at night to come in and try to figure it out because he’ll be at some goddamn “Design Patterns” meetup.

And the duct-tape programmer is not afraid to say, “multiple inheritance sucks. Stop it. Just stop.”

I like how this man thinks...

The following article came up in my Google reader feed about Linux desktop:

Linux-Windows gap to remain for five years
http://www.zdnetasia.com/news/software/0,39044164,62058636,00.htm

This article had a link to an article from August about the Linux Driver Project:

http://www.zdnetasia.com/news/software/0,39044164,62056924,00.htm

The article says the following

Back in 2007, Kroah-Hartman requested for help finding more hardware for which to write device drivers. Some reports online suggested that this was because businesses were holding back from opening their drivers up to the community.

Today, this "problem" has been "solved quite thoroughly", he said.

"All of the major hardware manufacturers told me that there is no problem that needs to be solved in relation to device support on Linux.

"Everything they ship worked just fine with Linux back then, and continues to do so today," he said.

Solved quite thoroughly? Are you frigging kidding me? Sure, you're likely to be able to to install Linux without it crashing and it will find your hard drive controller and video card, but suggesting that hardware support is "solved quite thoroughly" is kind of ridiculous. Being someone who spends his evenings working on LinuxTV drivers, I can cite a whole host of examples: A large percentage of devices are not supported at all. Often if they do get supported, it's months (sometimes years) after the product was released for Windows. Almost every card has only a subset of the functionality working. Cards that "work" often just "work barely well enough" to be able to claim they work - riddled with bugs and edge cases.

NDAs to be used for GPL'd drivers continue to be a problem. Fear among chipset vendors of "disclosing trade secrets" and "competitive interests" is still a problem. Getting vendors to provide sample hardware and information about their board layout is still a problem.

Video cards? TV tuners cards? Printers? Scanners? Hell, I've got a laptop with Intel audio (among the most common) and I have to roll the dice everytime I upgrade as to whether the headphone jack is going to work.

Things are certainly better in terms of the Enterprise market, but the desktop market is a mess. Progress has been made and the situation continues to improve slowly, but let's not think that we're anywhere near "thoroughly solved"

I'm not sure if he's delusional or just trying to paint a rosy picture on a bad situation in an attempt to combat people's claims that Linux isn't ready for the mainstream.