Hitting the Wall

May 032013
 

After running faster than I’m able for a long while now, I’ve finally hit the wall. No, this is not a running post, this is me hitting that point in my career where I am involved in far more things than I can possibly keep up on entirely on my own. As my colleague, Sarah Sharp, has recently expressed (more eloquently than me), HALP! Darren doesn’t scale! To help unblock those of you waiting on things from me as well as to restore some semblance of normalcy to my life, I have created the start of a halp list. It will likely change format and location, but for now, it’s available here:

http://dvhart.com/darren/files/halp.txt

If you, or someone you know, is looking to get involved with the MinnowBoard, the Yocto Project, the Linux Kernel, or Real-Time Linux, there is something here for them. Just have them contact me and I’ll gladly help them get started.

Looking to simplify personal finances

Jan 102013
 

For over a decade or so we have been using GNU Cash to keep track of our personal finances. We, and by “we” I mean Mary Lou, have been meticulously recording every expenditure from mortgage payments to sodas from the gas station and reconciling them with our bank statements. As we tend to use credit cards for the points, each purchase involves 4 entries in the ledgers (debit from the credit card, payment to expenses, debit from the checking account, payment to the bills envelope (virtual account within checking)). As life gets more and more hectic, this is becoming less and less appealing. We have also struggled with the granularity of our envelopes and expense categories, continually tweaking them to balance between simple entry and detailed reports.

A friend recently reported using Mint.com and being a fan of their automated expense categories. They have a number of appealing features – like mobile access, email notifications, and lots of useful reports. These are things I either can’t do or take too much time with our current system. However, the aggregated financial service scares me from a security perspective.

Mint claims no money can be moved around from within Mint. OK good. Let’s assume for a moment that they have reasonable encryption and security processes in place to prevent a hacker from mining my passwords to my financial institutions. There is still the risk of exposing our financial information to anyone who manages to acquire our Mint.com password. Single point of failure. I’m not sure exactly how much damage someone could do with the read-only access, but I’m sure someone more clever than me can come up with some way to do something devious with it.

To address the common defense of “Mint.com is far more secure than the average laptop.” Undoubtedly true. They aren’t more secure than MY laptop though, at least not by much. They are also a much MUCH bigger target than the average laptop since there is so much bigger a reward waiting for a would be hacker than pictures of grand kids and a few weeks worth of CPU cycles for the latest bot net.

Now stepping back and not making the assumption of good security practices at Mint.com. Let’s assume they have every intent of having good security protocols in place, that doesn’t guarantee successful implementation of said protocols. So if some new guy, or even their senior security gal who had a late night, introduced a bug which caused the plain text password to be stored in an identifiable memory address for a short period of time and some creative villain noticed and managed to glean a few of these passwords, the results could obviously be catastrophic for those users.

So to all of those of you who are more security savvy than I am on a deeply technical level, please weigh in here and let me know your thoughts. I’d like to use the service, but I need to be convinced the risk is a reasonable one first.

Real Estate Priority Inversion

Jan 312012
 

As we’ve poured over listing after listing, looking for that ideal next home, I believe I have recognized a trend that once again places us in the minority. No surprise there. Unfortunately, this trend not only makes it harder to find a place we like, it also makes it harder for us to secure funding. Here’s why.

According to Susanka in “The Not so Big House“, there are three key components to designing a home: Quantity, Quality, and Cost. You can fix any two of them, but the third must be allowed to adjust. It appears to me that the U.S. housing market prefers to focus on Quantity and Cost, and to maximize those, Quality suffers. This appears to be the case on through about 3500 sqft and $500k, after which there are options where Quality and Quantity are fixed, and the cost increases. Unfortunately for us, we would prefer to sacrifice Quantity for Quality, and, as is the case for most people, we have access to a limited quantity of dollars. Finding a well built home with quality design, fixtures, mechanicals, cabinetry, and finish carpentry in our price range has proven difficult – not because such a house couldn’t be built for the price, but rather because the market is flooded with larger lower quality homes.

The second fallout of this priority inversion is that securing a loan to expand our own home or fix-up a new one is made more challenging. These loans, such as the 203k, are based on the future appraisal value of the home after the renovations. Just as quantity trumps quality in the available inventory, it also wins out in the appraisal (no surprise again). Adding on to a house achieves a higher appraisal-increase-per-dollar-spent ratio than does improving the quality of the home.

So where does that leave house-snobs like us? Well, I suppose it leaves us in the position of needing to save even longer to be able to renovate an existing home (either ours or another of suitable size and location) so that we can bring more capital to the table. Save more? Borrow less? That’s down right un-american. So… the minority… again… still.

House Hunting 2.0

Jan 152012
 

Dear LazyWeb,

We’re exploring ways to gain some added space for our growing family. We’re considering adding on (or digging under) our existing house, as we like the area, the schools, and are comfortable here. We’re currently in the 26 Corridor and we like it, but I’m finding our money goes further if we look in south Beaverton (for example). Now is a great time to buy and we’re exploring the real-estate market. Finding an appropriate neighbourhood is such a chore, and I’m hoping you all can help us here, LazyWeb style. We’re looking for someplace with (in order of priority) good schools, young-family-friendly (high households-with-kids ratio, easy access to parks, bike/pedestrian/dog friendly). We’re hoping for something from 2500 to 3000 sqft with 3+ bedrooms, a den, and a large bonus/play room. Space for my woodshop is a huge plus. We’d prefer not to be on a postage stamp lot (8k sqft lot would be ideal) and would love Craftsman/Bungalow architecture (even if a modern interpretation thereof).

If you have ideas of areas we should explore, please share. Add a comment here, to Facebook, or to Google Plus and let us know what you like about the area.

Geeking out in Prague

Oct 282011
 

Today concludes my eleventh day in Prague attending three conferences and enjoying a few quick days of vacation with my wife.

Carsten Emde of OSADL was kind enough to invite me to speak on the Yocto Project at the Realtime Linux Workshop. I thoroughly enjoy hearing from members of industry, academia, and the Linux development community all at the same conference. I received a lot of positive feedback regarding the Yocto Project and collected my fair share of “todos”. Spending time with the leading Linux kernel developers is always inspirational for me, I invariably return with renewed commitment to improving my technical skills. After so many of these events, I consider these people my friends, and I so enjoy the trips that they feel more like a social event than a professional one. That, in my opinion, is how it should be.

Mary Lou joined me here in Prague while Grandma and Grandpa Mickelson braved our two children so she could get away for the needed break. She joined us on an OSADL sponsored walking tour of Prague covering the caste, lesser town, old town, and new town. We enjoyed the sights, the food was great, and some quiet time alone in a place where we had no responsibilities was wonderful. Her visit was long enough that she got to relax and enjoy her vacation, as well as look forward to getting home to our kids, our home, and our life.

Following our break, the Linux Foundation events began. The Embedded Linux Conference Europe (ELCE) and LinuxCon were held in parallel here at the Clarion Congress Hotel Prague. I spent a good deal of time at the Yocto Project booth, talking with attendees and catching up with team members. People were still trying to figure out how to spell Yocto a year ago when the project was announced. Now that the message has gotten out, there was a surge of interest – largely from people tired of maintaining their own frankenstein OS and looking for a solution. Others came by to be mesmerized by the Yocto Project 1.1 contributions visualization video rendered with the excellent gource project.

I attended excellent talks from Jonathan Corbet of LWN fame, Mathieu Desnoyers (EfficiOS), Grant Likely (Secret Lab), Stephen Rostedt (Red Hat), Frank Rowand (Sony), and Koen Kooi (beagleboard). The hallway track was also excellent. I met with developers and friends whom I only see online, including someone I had never met in person and hadn’t heard from in nearly 10 years when we hacked on some opensource projects together.

I wrapped it up with my presentation on tuning Yocto Project built images for tiny systems. Despite an imposing stack of 48 slides, I delivered the talk in the allotted time with room for questions without sending my audience into a speed-talk-stupor. I received some valuable feedback and made some useful contacts.

I am now exhausted mentally and physically. While I’m rather dreading the travel home, I’m very excited to be home with my family again.

My brain is the bottleneck?

May 282011
 

As many of you are aware, I have been thoroughly enjoying working at Intel since September 2010. It provides me numerous opportunities to learn new things and advance my existing skills. It is also a very high performance culture with numerous incredible people to model. Coming to Intel as Kernel developer has its challenges. As a kernel guy, people expect you know the low level architecture – but compared to 10+ year Intel veterans (kernel or not) I find I have some catch up to do! Besides just Intel architecture, there are countless other things I want to learn and skills I want to develop.

  • Improve my git fu
  • Follow LKML,oe-core,poky
  • Contribute to PREEMPT_RT Linux
  • Master perf and lttng, in addition to ftrace
  • Internalize the nitty gritty details of the hardware boot process
  • Learn to use Eclipse (mostly so I can understand how others work)
  • Sort out GUI application architecture abstraction (for braindump)
  • Master the programming problems in texts like Hacker’s Delight
  • Read all the Linux kernel books ever written… or maybe just the ones on my shelves currently
  • And that’s just the mostly professional stuff…

I find I can make it partway into a small subset of these, but before I can truly master any of them, I’m pulled away onto some other high priority thing which brings an entire new set of things I need learn more about. I need to be able to assimilate information faster! My eyes and my brain just don’t seem to have the required bandwidth.

What are some ways you have found to master new skills and make deep technical information your own while keeping up with a dynamic work environment?

Peter Thiel on the Causality of Success

May 282011
 

I listened to another great story on OPB radio on the drive in to work today. Peter Thiel has offered 100k grants for a select group of students to drop out and try their hands running a technological startup. He made a couple of points that I found to be worthy of repeating and pondering. As I value education I’ve never stopped to question its impact on my successes in life; I’ve always taken for granted that my education played a significant role. That is where I was introduced to programming, where I stumbled onto internships, from which sprouted my budding career as an enthusiastic Linux kernel developer.

Peter raises the should-be-obvious question about causality, that I’ve been known to raise myself regarding numerous other topics. Do college grads succeed because of their education? Or did they get accepted into college because they have what it takes to succeed anyway? Indeed, college admittance criteria has risen, and desirable universities are harder and harder to get into. If these persons would succeed regardless, then the seemingly universal acceptance that a college education is a virtual prerequisite for success comes into question. If it isn’t, then this incredible demand for education, and the equally incredible cost of education may stand on shaky ground.

While I still hold to the believe that a college education is a very good thing, I think there are many people in this world who could lead more successful lives if we as a people placed more value on vocational skills. Craftsmanship in this country has to be at all time low, and our shop-by-price-alone culture is largely to blame for this in my opinion. Some organizations fight to revitalize skilled trades. This Old House has run internship programs for this purpose. Peter is doing a similar thing, but with a skill that is traditionally accepted as coming from college educated professionals.

Peter also claims that college can sometimes be used as a crutch to avoid making some of those hard life decisions. If you don’t know what you want to do when you graduate high school, don’t worry about it, go to college, you’ll sort it out there. I can see some truth in that from my experience with the university. It can be difficult to see through the academia to what lies beyond. For some, study for studies sake is enough, but I think for most of us, it needs to lead to something more tangible. If I were to take what I’ve gleaned from this news story back with me 15 years, I hope I would have been able to adjust my focus away from the grade to retaining applicable knowledge, and discovering how I could do something with that knowledge – before I graduated and had to decide between the real world, or maybe putting that off while I pursued another degree…

Call for regulation and consumer empowerment

Mar 132011
 

We are being harassed by collections agencies looking for individuals we do not know and do not live here. We recently changed our number for a similar problem with agencies looking for individuals with the same initials (m. hart) as our previous public number. We now have a private number, but that number has been associated with persons with unpaid debts in the past. I am extremely frustrated that the primary use for my phone service is for collections agencies to try and reach people I do not know. Phone service providers need to provide their customers with a means to prevent this. For example, a blocked number list that I can add numbers to from the web interface. The caller should just hear the phone ring and never be directed to voicemail or receive any kind of message. If something doesn’t change soon, I am considering canceling my voip service since I strongly object to paying for a service which provides more rights to collections agencies than to me.

For now, I’ve filed complaints against GE Money with anyone who will listen and will be canceling every account I have with them. Good-bye GAP card. If you object to being called repeatedly at inconvenient times, having your child woken up early, and being lied to over the phone – consider doing the same.

Experiments with Potatoes

Oct 102010
 

I’ve been craving potatoes lately for some reason – maybe because I’ve been sick and salty starches are more appealing than anything else.

German Potato Salad

Nobody does potato salad like Gustav’s, but I thought I’d try. I sliced 2 russets into 1/4″ slices and boiled them until tender. I sauteed half a red onion in butter then added 1.5 T of olive oil, 1 T of good dijon mustard, 2 T of vinegar, mixed in the potatoes and added some salt and pepper. The flavor was about right, but could have used some more mustard. The potatoes were a bit overdone, I think baking would be a better option.

Steak Fries

After perusing “The Joy of Cooking”, I decided to try using my remaining russet to make a small batch of steak fries. I sliced it into 3/8″ slices, soaked it in cold water for 10 minutes, dried them, tossed with 1 T of olive oil, and baked on a cookie sheet for 40 minutes @ 450F. I sprinkled them with a pinch of salt and some paprika. Devon gobbled up half of them, I split the rest with Mary Lou and Abi. The only thing I’ll change next time is quantity – 4 potatoes, not 1.

Roasted Mixed Potatoes

Devon picked up some yellow and red potatoes from our trip to the pumpkin patch on Friday. We diced two of each, and soaked them like we did the fries. While they soaked, we sauteed a small yellow onion with a diced smoked sausage from the farmer’s market and then added them to the drained and dried potatoes to an 8×8 baking dish with some olive oil, salt, and freshly ground pepper. I nuked the dish for 3 minutes to preheat the potatoes and try to reduce the baking time (in retrospect I should have nuked the potatoes prior to adding the onions and sausage). Finally, I added a couple T of butter (it was looking dry) and baked for 40 minutes at 450. The results were good, albeit a little plain – which suited this sick wannabe-chef just fine. I tried them with some malt vinegar (maybe a little too strong), Mary Lou tried some ketchup (which turned them into home fries), but all on their own they made for a decent side dish (or main course if you’re down with a nasty cold).

Commuting by Bike: Day 2

Apr 262010
 

Made my second commute in on my Jamis Commuter 3 today, this time in the rain! Some lessons learned:

  • Clear glasses are a must for riding in the rain.
  • Changing routes spontaneously is more fun in a car.
  • Hills still suck.
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