Did you see the game last night? Yeah, we were there! Did you see us on TV? Huh, what half-time show? Ohhh…. you are talking about that other game, what is it called, footsball? Nah, didn’t watch that one. But we did see Ovechkin get his second hat trick of the year in a 7-4 rout of the Senators yesterday. So be sure to get your 14 free toppings on your pizza this week.
Post-(or is it peri?)-bama
We’re back from the inauguration, which was a surprisingly easy affair. Ange & I got up at the crack of 7am, a blustery morning with temps in the mid-teens. We walked across the street to our nearby Metro station, where we quickly snagged a train with a few empty seats. It took about 40 minutes to get to Farragut North, where we disembarked and walked west a couple of blocks, then south on 19th street. After a 30 minute walk we reached the throngs on the Mall. We set up camp against barricades near the World War II memorial, where the crowd wasn’t too bad and where there were three jumbotrons re-broadcasting the Lincoln Memorial service from Sunday. So we waited 3 hours, sang along with Garth Brooks, bid the feeling in our toes farewell, and reflected upon the amusing signage of the ever-present nutjobs until the main event.
The service went down just like on TV, so you have seen that much already. The only bonus we got was the crowd response in surround sound, and the occasional slip-ups of the A/V people running the live feed, such as the occasional mic-ing of random people who were invariably carrying on conversations that had nothing to do with the festivities.
On leaving, we retraced our steps but just continued up 19th to Dupont, where we again got seats on the first train. We’ve had much worse train rides before and after hockey games, so either we were lucky or Metro was handling the situation well. We got back about 1:45pm.
Anyway, frozen toes notwithstanding, it was very cool to be at the epicenter, moreso since we had the day off anyway. Insert stuff about once in a lifetime historical moments here.
Prebama
So it’s inauguration eve in DC. You can tell because all of the subway ads have some ‘Welcome to DC’ theme, and there are portable toilets spread all throughout the city. However, the most obvious sign of the new administration is all the utter crap you can buy with the First Family’s picture on it: key chains, mugs, postcards, buttons, playing cards, shirts, hats, knit caps, underwear and neckties. Radio Shack is even advertising: “Get your inauguration supplies here!” (you know, in case you need some speaker wire for the weekend). I hope he gets royalties somehow. Angeline and I are planning on braving the crowds tomorrow to hang with the groundlings in the non-ticketed section. We’ll see how that goes.
In hacking news, I have the following patches queued so far for 2.6.29:
Bob Copeland (12): mac80211: fix a few typos in mac80211 kernel doc ath9k: remove useless conditional ath5k: fix keytable type buglet in ath5k_hw_reset_key ath5k: enable hardware encryption for WEP ath5k: update keycache to support TKIP handling ath5k: set mac address in add_interface ath5k: preserve higher order bits when setting mac address ath5k: clean up ath5k_hw_set_key ath5k: enable combined michael mic in key cache ath5k: fix endianness of bitwise ops when installing mic ath5k: correct packet length in tx descriptors ath5k: fix return values from ath5k_tx
Basically, hardware crypto support, nothing else notable. In my unbaked tree, I have the mac80211 suspend/resume support patches (pushed today), some fixes for mixed b/g networking, and some silly LED patches. Most of that is 2.6.30 material.
In other news, glibc finally has endianness functions. I can’t say that I’m crazy about the names, and it has a bit of unnecessary Not Invented Here, but at least it gives an alternative to always using my own or using glib.
Pointless calendar increment
Another year has passed, so it’s time to take stock, and make soup from it.
In 2008, we downsized by selling my house, gave away lots of stuff, drove less, and called Angeline’s 700 sq ft apartment home. I’d like to continue the trend of reducing even while we try to find a slightly larger place.
Angeline landed her first real job after 14 years of training, receiving offers from every place she interviewed. She’ll begin at a private practice in Rockville in the middle of this year (if you have diabetes, I know a great endocrinologist!). We’re very excited and hope this practice will be a great place to work.
Meanwhile, I came into the year hating my job, resolved to leave by April. I did interview and receive a couple of job offers, but nothing too exciting. Instead, I decided to stop caring so much about work, and to wait and see what happens.
In 2008, I continued my hobbies. I cooked a lot, taking cooking classes on bread-making and sauces. I also messed around with electronics as usual, built a theme kite for the Smithsonian kite festival, and read a ton of books. Angeline and I completed hundreds of crossword puzzles together, and watched a lot of hockey games.
Most of my spare time, as boringly detailed on this blog, was spent focusing on kernel hacking, with OMFS being included and my becoming a maintainer of the ath5k wireless driver. In 2009, I hope to have my 100th patch included in the kernel (currently at around #35). I’d also like to make systems software a focus of my future career. To that end, I’ve applied for jobs with a couple of embedded device manufacturers, and applied to masters degree programs at nearby schools.
All in all, it was a good year. Our families are all reasonably healthy. Many were affected by the economic downturn but no one we know is suffering hardship. We look forward to spending more time with friends and family this year. 2009 holds lots of promise and all that other optimistic crap.
Breakout
You haven’t played breakout until you’ve played it in all its low-resolution glory on the side of a building. Which is exactly what my wife, my brother-in-law, and I did in Toronto while we were visiting for Canadian Thanksgiving. The installation was part of project blinkenlights by the Chaos Computer Club. Every window in the city hall building had a lamp that would turn on or off to form a giant pixelated screen. You would call a number on a cell phone to start a game, then use the keypad to move the paddle around. Each game would last a minute, or in my case, the 10 secs it took to lose. Very neat!
(I think in this image, the ball is in the lower left corner and the dot above the paddle on the right is just an artifact. But I could be wrong — it could just be me losing, again.)
Divested
As of last Thursday, I’m no longer a land owner, so you guys are on your own with that whole voting thing.
Buy my stuff
If you’ve always wanted to own a piece of history, now’s your chance. Since I’m just over two weeks away from having to vacate my house for good, I’m selling all my crap. Oh, it’s wonderful crap, such as my couch, beds, bookshelves, small kitchen appliances, propane tanks, lawn mowers, chainsaws[1], and various electronics. Actually, assuming I get it all in order in the next day or two, you can drop by my house on Saturday to paw through the meaningful effects of a great living legend[2].
[1] Only one lawn mower, propane tank, and chainsaw. Two broken leaf blowers though.
[2] Great and legend not guaranteed. Living hoped for.
Mainlandy
Ange & I are back from our brief tour of the Carribean. PR was nice: wonderful weather and warm ocean water. We somehow lucked out and missed all three hurricanes that went through the area during our stay. The local cuisine left a lot to be desired, and the area just outside of the resorts was pretty sketch, but otherwise it’s a decent little island.
I did find time during the traveling downtime to complete my Gstreamer FS. I’m rather proud of the fruits of that two-day hack, though I’ve yet to see if it works well enough to trick iTunes.
Islandy
Angeline and I are Puerto Rico bound on Sunday! Here’s hoping for an absence of hurricanes. We’re also in ATL for two days next weekend.
I have a new FUSE filesystem in the prototype stage: gstfs. The idea is to mirror a directory of music files and automatically transcode them at read() time using a gstreamer pipeline. This is so my lovingly cultivated ogg collection is friendly with Angeline’s iPod. It seems to work so far but is still a dirty hack.
I can do 1000 now
In addition to doing as little cardio as I can get away with, Angeline and I have been following the 100 pushups training program for the last 4 weeks. That’s almost 1800 pushups between us so far. Ow, my arms.