So what is this bizarre plot to the left here you ask. Some highly technical computer modeling of some fringe science? Perhaps one of those new-fangled computer thingies we know dvhart is always going on about. Maybe some nostalgic artifact from his days studying electrical engineering? Well... no. In fact it is simply the beam plots of an over the air antenna I am looking at installing in my attic. Yeah... just trying to watch TV. Turns out that there is a lot that goes into picking up a TV signal - an awful lot. I'm a week into my search for the right antenna (or antennas as the case may be - VHF-HI an UHF bands you know), and so far I've determined that despite living within 3 miles of the two transmission towers I care about, and even though those towers are within 10 degrees of each other, I appear to be dealing with skyline multipath and some other issues resulting from living in a valley and being surrounded by lots of very large trees. Oh, and the foil backed insulation in my house really doesn't like radio waves. It's been fun, but I don't know how anyone without 5 years of intense math and electrical engineering coursework behind them would dare attempt a less than trivial antenna installation. Sheesh. No wonder nearly everyone I know pays for cable! So in case you're interested in what it would take to setup OTA DTV (over the air digital television) at your house, check out the following links. Happy Hacking.

• TV Fool
• Antenna Web
• AVS Forum
• HDTV Primer (the source of the image above)

After a few weeks of disillusionment with my progress on BrainDump, John S. pumped me up with noise about casting a broad net and all that. You know, the percentage of people interested in BrainDump may be small, tiny even, but if I notify the entire planet about it, I may just get a handful of interested and talented people to participate in its development. So this weekend I spent some time and finished up the web presence of BrainDump.

I generally have glorious visions of productivity for my weekends. I invariably (on Friday anyway) see them as an opportunity to get just a little bit ahead of where I am at the time. Saturday often presents itself with a few extras I hadn't considered on Friday, that make it difficult to get those couple of step forward I so long for, but I can usually manage at least one. This morning, dvh3 had other plans for me... he woke up at his usual hour (about 6:45) and Mary Lou stuck him in front of the digital babysitter so we could sleep in a little. At 8:00 his show was rolling credits and he needed his "muck", so I rolled out of bed to tend to his urgent demands. Too late it seems. He managed to get his hands on a red permanent marker and proceeded to furiously color the floor, the two new leather ottomans, the new leather chair, and the new area rug...

I'm a hopelessly slow reader, and it continually frustrates me, and later shames me in front of my friends. I just can't read the information fast enough to keep up with the world! I blame elementary school who had me read a grand total of I think 2 books by the time I was 12 (both involving dying dogs [1]... what the hell is wrong with you people?). I've been reading some things on how to improve my reading speed while maintaining comprehension, and also looking into how technology might be able to help. A colleague pointed me to SpreedNews which turns out to be awesome, and I top out at just under 500 words per minute before I simply don't remember anything about what I read. Now if the Amazon Kindel could incorporate this technology and allow me to read anything on the Kindel with this fancy rate adjustable phrase flashing awesomeness, I'd buy two... today. Unfortunately, one of the core technologies of the Kindel is their fancy pants epaper screen, which while it is great to look at and easy on the batteries, its refresh rate wouldn't allow for 20 words per minute, let alone 500. Ah well, maybe when Devon is my age he can get me a nice ereader that solves all my problems, without killing any dogs.

1. "Old Yeller" and "Where the Red Fern Grows" - both belong on the banned books shelf at my local library.

I spent the latter half of last week at the Linux Plumbers Conference in downtown Portland. And despite being a new conference, I found it to be one of the best conferences I've attended. I think this might be in part to its small size, there was a much better average developer to community leader ratio than at other conferences, indeed some of the key leaders don't even attend some of the larger conferences. The fact that LPC piggy-backed on Kernel Summit had a lot to do with the turnout. So what was exciting?

"If you want to do it right, do what IBM does, do what Intel does. -- Greg KH"
Well, maybe that was only funny to me...

While there was a lot of great content, the things that stood out to me were:

From Naught to Sixty in 5 Seconds

Arjam van de Ven and Auke Kok shared their work on getting Fedora and Ubuntu to boot in under 5 seconds on a netbook. While the SSD drives were key here, they still could do 10 seconds with rotating platters. Key bits including Super Read Ahead, disabling everthing you don't use, and picking on everyone that wasted boot time :-) Canonical took another hit here for GDM taking 3 seconds to start (60% of their total schedule!) due to storing massive pngs that it scaled down at each run to fit the current resolution. Definitely plan to look at my boot process and see if I can knock a few 10s of seconds off.

Git Tutorial

So was this cool only because it was Linus presenting? Yes and no. Linus is actually a great presenter. He is bright (duh) but also witty and engaging. He had no slides and simply walked the room through some git usage. While most everyone in the room had used git before, no-one seemed ruffled by it. It was nice to hear first-hand why git is the way it is. Did I come away from it loving git - uh... no. But it did clear up some of the issues I had with it - mostly by correcting my perspective on how it should be used.

Graphics Drivers in the Kernel: 20 Years Late

Dave Ailie and Jesse Barnes (among others) discussed the work being done to move video drivers into the kernel (from xorg userspace where they are now). Specifically memory management and mode setting. There was some good debate between the speakers and Linus, which ended with three of the speakers simultaneously stating "Well, you're wrong!" to the chief penguin. There was a good chuckle from the crowd, things usually go the other way. The presenters knew their work, they knew the interactions of the various pieces, and they were able to defend their approach which Linus didn't accept at first. His pragmatism was very apparent during the discussion and his drive toward simplicity made very clear. An excellent discussion. So what does this mean for users? hopefully those of us with the right chipsets will not have to watch our screens struggle through resolution changes 3 times during a single boot :-)

Hallway Dialog

While the formal talks and discussions were great, the best part of any conference is the one on one time with the people you work with over email and irc the rest of the year. For me this was a lunch with Thomas Gleixner, Steven Rostedt, and Gregory Haskins. We discussed the problems pthread condition variables have with priority inheritance, and formed a game plan to get the solution moving forward. It's a tough problem, and largely logistical in nature rather than technical. Changing APIs (and ABIs) at the glibc level is a painful process (for good reason).

All in all, it was a great conference. A lot of good discussion between the developers of various systems was had (which was of course the intent). Thanks to IBM for letting me attend, and thanks to the organizers who donated so much of their time to the event.

We've been spending time on and off over the last several years trying to transform our front room into something nice. It's an awkward little space with traffic flow problems, lack of natural light, odd architectural relationships, etc. Over the last several weeks we've really been trying hard to nail down some decisions, and we've done pretty well. We've chosen some furniture: the chair and ottamans are visible in the picture, the new couch has been ordered, and wall color is final (the patch closest to the leather chair - 50% tint of Miller Devine Filbert). Color selection has been particularly painful due to the lack of natural light, the very red floors, and our limited choices for couch fabric and area rug colors. After several iterations, it's been finalized and we're just waiting for things to arrive.

OK, so while all my co-workers took a half-day to check their systems for each of the openssh and dns exploits earlier this year, I foolishly let it slide, thinking I had more important things to do. So while I didn't procrastinate so long as to get hacked/phished/etc. I did wait until tonight. So after a few hours research (and a couple educational jems, I've finally regenerated all my system's host keys and have deleted all my .ssh keys and regenerated them on systems where I have console access, relying on ssh agent forwarding everywhere else (thanks Josh). As for DNS, I've redirected my router to opendns which is looking to be an excellent service (thanks John). So I should be all buttoned up again...

It's a very novel concept I know, but the guys at wicd have managed to write a wifi network manager that does things like remember your WPA key (unlike some other more common NetworkManagers). I still need to see if it can do really complicated things like save a config for a hidden network (ooooooh!) and handle enterprise authentication (LEAP), but for now I am very happy to have replaced NetworkManager with something that appears to just work. Check it out: http://wicd.sourceforge.net/. Now, how 'bout it Ubuntu, can we ditch NM already - isn't two broken release cycles enough?