Planet Tacobeam

Scott Perry: Old-Fashioned Fool

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 12:28:09 +0000

Around 2004 I bought my first car while I was working for Treyarch. It was a 1994 Honda Accord, and I used it almost exclusively for visiting my then-girlfriend in Marin County, in the northern part of the San Francisco Bay area while I was living in Santa Monica (LA area) that summer, and San Diego the rest of the time. I put around 44,000 miles on that car in the year I owned it. The mileage was almost exclusively made up of these trips.

I always did them at night (for various reasons, especially traffic), and I always got very tired during the drive. After a few different flight plans, I managed to pick out the Lost Hills exit of I-5 as my one pit stop. It was in the very middle of the San Diego - Marin route (to less than a mile), and it had many gas stations and food choices to refuel myself and the car.

After a trip or few, I stopped in at the Denny’s, which was more appealing than the fast food joints in that I could sit down in a fairly nice area and eat, and it had a bar so I could chat with the staff, waking up my brain for the next leg. I ordered a Meat Lover’s Skillet. Eggs easy over, sourdough toast. As long as my water glass stayed full, I tipped handsomely.

And I repeated this a few times over the next month.

The waitstaff eventually got to recognize me, but they had a very high turnover, I don’t think I’ve ever been served by the same person more than 4 times there. The only constant seemed to be the cook that worked from 10pm - 6am on every day except days I didn’t drive (or so it seemed). She was thorough and always seemed to enjoy what she was doing, an instantly likeable sort of character. One day she came out from behind the kitchen window and had coffee at the bar, and we chatted.

She’d been recognizing me as well, and from then on, my food (Meat Lover’s Skillet, eggs easy over, sourdough toast) would be cooking before I’d finished parking, and we’d have a good chat while I ate.

A few years have happened since. I went through the Accord and a del Sol, long hair, short hair, and a mohawk, as well as the relationship that was the cause of my very frequent journeys. I went from making the trip almost every week, to only once every month or few. The food I ate eventually came off the menu, but I still got a Meat Lover’s Skillet, eggs easy over, sourdough toast every time, and whoever was waiting the bar that night would try to figure out some way to ring it up.

Of all the acquaintances I have, I think I’ve valued Chila (pronouced like Sheila) the most. There’s something fulfilling if not old fashioned about using business as a means to fill social needs rather than the other way around. I guess I’m just an old fashioned fool.

Tonight I showed up at the Denny’s, and I hadn’t been there in a spell. At least 5 months. Walking in, everything was wrong. The bar was gone, the brushed stainless wall behind the bar was replaced with trendy tile. The food surfaces and prep areas were unchanged, but partially hidden behind a wall of booths that had replaced my precious counter.

Chila was there though, and again somehow managed to immediately recognize me despite my new beard, glasses, and hair. I sat at the only table with a view of the kitchen window, and she took a break to chat, her over coffee, me with my water. They’d been closed for a week for the remodel a few months ago, and we agreed it wasn’t really an improvement at all. The Lost Hills exit is a truck stop sort of area, and bar seating made a ton of sense for hungry, lone travellers. It just wasn’t the same.

In some way, the spell was broken. I’ll be back again, but it really feels like an important chapter in my life has ended with the remodel of a Denny’s out in the middle of nowhere.

I ordered a sandwich. To go.

CIA: Filtering Google

Sat, 15 Nov 2008 10:39:45 +0000

Oh no, another post within the same month! Horsemen spotted in the sky, flying pigs imminent!

Anyway, where was I...

Right, there's now a way to get commits from Google Code into CIA.vc that doesn't go through the hackish SVN poller. Read on for details.

SVN and hooks

As we all know, there's a new player on the block of public open-source hosting: Google Code. Apparently, as a whole bunch of people are using it, they do their stuff fair enough: SVN, wiki, bugtracking, downloads, the works.

Wait, no CIA.vc hooks? Nope. Back in the day with sourceforge and CVS, you could install your own hooks, so things worked. When sourceforge added SVN, people couldn't add their own hooks, but I gather the web config interface has a "CIA.vc hook" checkbox. But without hosting provider support, SVN users are out of luck when it comes to custom hooks.

The SVN poller

That's why we added the SVN repository poller. It wakes up a few times an hour (or whenever any mail arrives on a special address) and scans the configured repository, checking if there were any new revisions since it last looked. If there are, it enters a new commit with the right data into the system. So usually you'll set it up with the default poll delay of 15 minutes (anything below what it can make, roughly a poll every 20-30 minutes with our load, gets silently upped to that interval) or, even better, subscribe the ping email address to your commit mailing list.

That works well enough, and produces excellent XML commit data, but it's a bit hackish - the polling is horridly inefficient, and I need to run yet another service on our poor machine. Also, it's sometimes a tad slow.

Parsing E-Mail to XML

So I figured "If we already get the commit data from the mailing list, can't we use that somehow?" and resurrected an old set of scripts. What we can do now is pick up mail sent out by Google Code (via the "Activity Notifications/all subversion commits" field on the "project summary" pane of the "administration" tab) and try to parse the commit.

The results are not as fancy as the repository polling, those mails were meant for humans to read, not machines, after all. So I can't always figure out filenames, and since there's no unambiguous "end of Log message" tag I currently cut log messages at the first empty line.

But I think it's slightly faster than the polling method, and it's certainly more elegant. It's still not instantaneous, mostly because it seems Google's email machinery takes a minute or two. But if you want, use it! Simply change the mail settings (or mailing list) to send to "cia+googlecode@" instead of "ping+whatever@". (And turn off periodic polling, if you have it enabled, or you'll end up getting your commits twice)

Feedback is always welcome! (the nick I sign my posts with, at this domain; or just comment on the blog) We'll probably have a few corner cases I didn't catch, but with some work we should be able to turn this into yet another Good Way to get commits into CIA.vc!

You're with google?

Note to any google employee (especially the google code folks) reading this: I'm sure that when we work together, we can do better. Drop me an E-mail and I'll work something out. I'm a geek, so pretty much any method you come up with to pipe commits, I can handle. It's always nice to see your commit show up on IRC while your finger is still hanging over the enter key, and we should be able to make that happen.

So Far,: Karsten "BearPerson" Behrmann

J. Paul Reed: A Product Review I Can Identify With

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 04:00:27 +0000

CNet recently reviewed the upcoming Songbird 1.0 release, with a title I can certainly identify with.

([Possibly?] obviously, the 1.0-era is a stressful time for everyone, including your resident release engineer; as such, I haven't had a chance to write about the many unique experiences a one-dot-oh release of a product entails¹. Despite this, I'm still intending to loop back around and discuss some interesting bits...)

Anyway, I thought calling it out appropriate, especially since I noticed it on GREEADER while I was tallying up my logbook so I could file the paperwork for my high performance endorsement.

Makes me wonder what Songbird's future clearances will be...

_________________________________
¹ Which [also possibly?] surprisingly is my first...

CIA: Reporting in

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 15:08:12 +0000

Umm, yeah, that's right, I'm still here.

Instabili... segmentation fault (core dumped)

Sorry if we've seemed a bit unstable lately - we've had a couple of unexpected (and partly unexplainable) problems crop up, and while I take care of things whenever I see them come up, that seeing part could be improved somewhat 8)

Things should be looking better soon, though. I've worked a bit on infrastructure that'll allow me to notice problems earlier and better, as well as made sure I get (and read) information from all the pieces of the system when stuff goes boom.

On the hosting side, we have a very interesting lead that may see significant improvements to our system. I don't want to give out any details as long as I don't have anything solid, so I don't make anyone look bad by accident, but stay tuned to this channel for more information when we have it.

Recent Changes

What else have I been up to?

I've gone and scrubbed our blog comment spam. I already disabled links in comments a while ago, to cut down on all those people who saw "cool, a blog with open comments" but didn't see the rel="nofollow" we put on all comment links. We still got a lot of idiotic comments, though, which I can only guess must be some kind of "Hey guys, here's a blog with open comments" magic strings in the spam community. Or something. Well, gone now.

So I'll just have to periodically scrub the comments. I don't want to take direct steps against automated comments just yet - if you've got an RSS reader that allows you to directly post comments, I applaud your ingenuity.

On the subject of spam, it seems someone got the idea to use the project pages for spamming. Let's hope that trend doesn't continue. I'd hate to have to set up a wikipedia-like army of "recent changes" monitors.

In what's probably our most important component, the IRC bots, I've tuned the freenode settings - they should connect much faster now when stuff is restarted, and fixed a bug that prevented them from properly connecting to EFnet. I hope I've also increased the general connect speed to any network, but we'll have to see how that goes next time it needs a restart.

Open issues

What will I be working on?

Obviously, the hosting change I've hinted at above is going to take some working-out.

Also, we've had some interesting bugs with unicode / UTF-8 in commits. I muchly hope we're at the point where commits get through, no matter the charset, but I'm afraid we currently replace all 8bit characters with '?'. Pieces of the core don't work happily with unicode, we'll need to fix that.

The advent of distributed SCM's like git have seen an (almost) entirely new problem: Currently, most hooks take each commit pushed into the central repository and send out a notification about it. Normally, that's exactly what you want.

Things get a bit interesting if someone checked in from his vacation to deliver the 100 commits he wrote while away, and they take a machine-gun-march through the system. Or occasionally I see someone merging branches, and the hook script sending a commit for every merged commit. We'll have to change the hook scripts to detect this kind of thing and just say "push of 100 commits" or something. Stay posted, when I get such a script I'll put it up and tell everyone to use it ;)

I guess an alternative that might work for some people would be this: Instead of putting an on-push hook on the central repository, put an on-commit on each developer's repository - that way, you'll get instant notification what everyone is working on, and can ask him/her to push it up when it looks interesting.

Oh whee, that got much longer than I intended. I'd better stop and get some actual work done again now ;-)

So Far,: Karsten "BearPerson" Behrmann

Scott Perry: Quick Story: How The Past Can Haunt You

Mon, 10 Nov 2008 19:18:28 +0000

Sometime last year I was at Lolita’s, alone, eating Carne Asada fries. For those of you not in the San Diego crew, this means that I was really hung over, I’d been awake for no more than an hour, and it was around 1:30 in the afternoon. You know, early.

As I’m eating, this huge black man walks toward my table. After a few steps, it’s pretty clear that I’m his target, so I look up from my engrossing task and see the world’s biggest smile…

“I LOVE THAT GAME!”

So let’s not forget how hung over I am. I have no idea what he’s talking about. I totally forgot that I was wearing an Ultimate Spidey shirt from when I worked at Treyarch — it was just the top garment on my clean pile when I rolled out of bed. So naturally there were a few moments of confusion. “Pardon? Do I know you? Game?”

Once it became clear that he was talking about my shirt (”oh! of course! silly me.”), I found out that it was his favourite game on the planet, saved his marriage, all that stuff. My brain was not really ready for this so early in the morning, but I did my best to be pleasant and nod a lot.

It was totally surreal. Kinda neat though. Huge bear of a man. Gave me a hug. Very strange.

Not sure what the moral of the story is, but if he’d been closer to my size I would have given him my shirt. He was pretty cool.

Rock on, man. Now that I think about it, it was a good game. Glad it did some good out there.

Scott Perry: Why You Should Minimize Your Program’s Memory Usage

Sat, 08 Nov 2008 19:42:12 +0000

Because one day, one of your users will have a problem where their motherboard’s memory controller quietly corrupts their memory, but only for certain addresses.

I’m not going to be very active online for a while.

Micah Dowty: Speaking at USENIX WIOV 2008

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 23:44:28 +0000

Well, this Monday I submitted the final copy of my paper, and yesterday everything was approved. Jeremy Sugerman and I wrote a paper for the USENIX Workshop on I/O Virtualization's Industrial Practice session: GPU Virtualization on VMware's Hosted I/O Architecture. We're on the program for a 15-minute talk at the workshop in San Diego this December.

The paper is a detailed (or as detailed as will fit in 8 pages) description of the GPU virtualization work my team has been doing at VMware for the past couple years. This is the technology that makes it possible to run DirectX 9 applications and games inside your VMware Fusion VM. The paper includes a lot of background information about graphics virtualization, a detailed description of our virtual GPU architecture, and various benchmarks.

Thanks to everyone who helped me by reviewing drafts of the paper. Your feedback has been invaluable.

Micah Dowty

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 19:13:24 +0000

I've never been so proud of my country, or so disappointed in the people of California. Obama is someone who can lead this country with intelligence, unity, and diplomacy, rather than the fear and greed that motivated our country to elect the Bush administration.

All things considered, the presidential election was more important than Propostion 8. The future of this nation is bigger than my rights as a human being. I was just hoping that the people of California, the most progressive state in the nation, would hate me a little less than they do.

Scott Perry: Breaking News: Church and State Hopelessly Intertwined

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 16:40:34 +0000

some memorable quotes from last night.

nothe: California: I am FUCKING ASHAMED OF YOU. Good fucking riddance.

nothe: for what it’s worth, I’m also ashamed of Arkansas for passing a ban on gay couples adopting, florida, arizona, for banning gay marriage.

rands: Back in California, we’re putting the rights of animals ahead of the rights of people.

sanguish: Hey Sarah, I can see the end of your political career from my apt.

preed: So, to summarize across the nation: YES WE CAN… (unless you’re a dirty faggot.)

sdsasuke: proud to be an american, ashamed to be californian. as we elect a black president we further the persecution of a minority.

shawnmorel: ironic that the prop 8 wording will be in article 1 between equal protection clause and nondiscrimination in business. totally fubared!

So you already know what this is going to be about. Yay Obama won, but there were heavy downticket losses.

Prop 8 has been passed, the only counties left uncounted voted 2/3 in favour of the amendment thus far, 96% reporting. Prop 8 did much worse than previous propositions trying to accomplish the same thing (as laws which were later overturned by the supreme court as unconstitutional, not amendments), but it still managed to carry a majority vote.

What’s worse, minority voters largely voted in favour of the proposition, so what we also have is minorities discriminating against another minority.

Correlations in voting include religious ties (more religious, more in favour), educational ties (more educated, less in favour), and race (although I’m almost certain this is an artifact of the religious factor). Education measured in degrees per capita.

The institution of marriage is worth even less to me than ever before. As a government construction it’s only good for tax breaks and visitation rights in medical emergencies. As a religious construction it’s only useful for excluding minorities. As a social construction it’s a once-in-a-lifetime party. The purposeful exclusion of some of the most stable and loving couples I’ve ever met, the knowing removal of a citizen’s rights for the first time in the state’s history, marks one of the most public and galling acts of discrimination ever perpetrated by its citizens.

This initiative, amending the most important document in the state, should not be allowed by a simple majority, that’s perhaps the most astonishing part to me, that there have been so many amendments that did not belong. Astonishment only topped by following the results of last night.

Hat tip to Florida, Arizona, and Arkansas who, unsurprisingly, also voted highly discriminatory amendments/propositions into law. You guys enjoy your intolerant, hateful states. You earned it, with clear majorities in the 60%s.

What a backwards fucking country. I’m about ready to scrap my plans for marriage. If it’s not good enough for my friends, how is it good enough for me?

As a footnote, I wish this could be as simple as vocabulary. If “Marriage” was just a religious construct, then I’d say great, fuck ‘em. Unfortunately a civil union is not directly equivalent. Try going through a medical emergency with your partner as a civil union. At best, it’s “separate but equal”, and we all know how that’s worked in the past. I wonder if at least 3% of the electorate voted yes because they thought it was just an issue of terminology.

Second footnote: apparently there are a few million uncounted absentee ballots, this could be good news. but I’m still very ashamed of the people that live in this state.

Christian Hammond: Racism, Sexism, and now Prop 8

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 07:40:30 +0000

I found out this evening, to my dismay, that my site was littered with “Yes On Prop 8″ banners. Now, for those who live outside California and haven’t been following this, Prop 8 is a measure designed to introduce an amendment to the California constitution to ban gay marriage, basically ensuring that certain people would never have the same rights as others in this state.

Now I normally try to stay away from politics on my blog, but I want to talk about two points.

First, I don’t mind banners on my site that are designed to sell a product. People generally understand that an ad for an online web service or a product of some sort is not necessarily endorsed by the site it’s running on. Ads are everywhere and most people generally get that it’s provided by an ad service, and just ignore them.

What bothered me about the Yes On Prop 8 ads is that it felt as if I’m endorsing Prop 8. Somehow, it feels wrong to me. I’m not morally outraged about Sun Microsystems wanting to sell a server system or Microsoft wanting to sell an office suite. I am outraged about Prop 8. Products are fine to advertise on my site. Controversial freedom-limiting propositions I’m completely against are not.

I look back in our history and see that by and large, our generation is regretful of how we’ve mistreated people in the past. Shooting Native Americans used to be fine. Stripping away their rights and making them unequal was socially accepted. It was completely understood that if you’re black, you’re property. If you’re a women, you had no rights to vote and your opinion didn’t matter.

I like to think we’ve come a long way from that. People pride themselves on how we’re more mature now. Black, white, red, men, women. It doesn’t matter. This is the land of the free, the land of equality. So why is it that it’s still okay to discriminate against someone because their love of someone makes you feel uncomfortable?

It’s okay to not feel comfortable with gay marriage. A lot of people don’t. But do you feel more comfortable being part of a group of people that knowingly discriminated against another group, stripped them of certain rights that you yourself enjoy, simply because something you don’t have to deal with on a daily basis makes you feel uncomfortable to think about? Are you going to be okay with the thought of your grandkids or your great-grandkids feeling embarrassed because of how you voted, like how you feel about your great-grandparents’ racism? How much is preventing marriage for two people who love each other, in order to feel less uncomfortable, worth to you?

The Yes On Prop 8 advertisements often show the clip with the mayor of San Francisco saying “It’s going to happen, whether you like it or not!” It’s a good strategic clip for them to have chosen, as it can be interpreted as him saying “you have no say, we’re forcing gay marriage on all of you.”

I see it another way. I see gay marriage being inevitable not as an attack, but as the inevitable rise in tolerance that, over time, we’ve come to develop in this country. As a country, we don’t have the best track record of tolerance to new things, but we always mature in the end. This is not the last time we’ll face such mass intolerance and the limiting of rights of a group of people, just as this will not be the first time that we as a people will overcome our fears and begin to see us all as being equal.

So this is important. It’s not just about your level of comfort with those who live a different lifestyle. It’s about equality. It’s about overcoming personal fears. It’s about making an effort to keep this country on a path of freedom. Because if we start going back to our old ways of discrimination and fear, all we’re doing is regressing and limiting the rights of others out of some fear of the world spiraling into chaos. We’ve worked to abolish racism. We’ve worked to abolish sexism. The world is still here. We can do this again.

Vote no on Prop 8.