My test? Google for “Paul McKenney Parallel Programming”, click on the LWN link and download the 358-page PDF. Then open it and test legibility in portrait and landscape mode.

I opted for the 10.1″ Samsung Galaxy Tab. I think the 8.9″ would have worked every bit as well and I preferred the slightly smaller size (with the same 1280×800 screen resolution). Unfortunately, they didn’t have it in stock at any of the Oregon locations and it didn’t come with the $50 gift card, eliminating the 10% savings.

I’ve only dabbled with the device so far and allowed a small gaggle of children to verify that the critical Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja “benchmarks” run beautifully. I will update once I’ve had some time with it.

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.

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.

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.

Since then though, things have been sluggish at best. GNOME put a lot of work into the nuts and bolts which is a good thing, but didn’t do much to improve the user experience. KDE continued to blaze ahead with new technologies like Plasma and their white-screen-of-death… errr, maybe that wasn’t a feature. So GNOME 2 grew stale, while KDE became shiny and unusable.

While this was going on the GNOME Shell sprang into existence with lots of radical paradigm shifts in the desktop usage model. Not to be outdone, well not without trying anyway, Mark Shuttleworth began pushing Unity onto unsuspecting faithful Ubuntu users. Both of these have been met with significant resistance. While GNOME’s new desktop appears to have lovers and haters, Unity had haters and… well… sheep, but no lovers.

So no that Fedora 15 is out and ships with GNOME3 by default, I figured it’s time I gave it a fair shake as I did unity some time back. I grabbed the x86_64 Fedora 15 live installer and stuck it on a USB key using unetbootin.

So, first things first. Before evaluating GNOME3 I had to make some modifications so that I could do something other than complain about the defaults:

1. Edit /usr/share/themes/Adwaita/metacity-1/metacity-theme-3.xml and replace all title_vertical_pad values with “0″ (from the absolutely nucking futs default of 13).
2. Alt-tab between “different windows” is broken by Gnome3′s window grouping. To switch back and forth between two windows of the same application (say two consoles for instance) use alt+~ instead of alt-tab. There are extensions to restore the by-window behavior, but this is simple enough and provides some added functionality.
3. Install gnome-tweak-tool to be able to setup some decent fonts and font sizes, or alternatively just use the gnome-shell profile editor to select a console font manually. The rest of the fonts seem relatively sane.

This is just what I did to be able to tolerate the live-image from Fedora.

The Good:

• The death of the folders and files on the Desktop. I hate them – and yet I am simply not diciplined enough not to put them there. In this one case, I appreciate the system forcing better behavior on me :-)
• Better use of the Desktop. I like the full screen menu, especially with groups and a search function. It’s easy, intuitive, and attractive. Having the panel and the workspace switcher all integrated into that view works well for my workflow.

The Bad:

• Constant Accessibility icon. If I don’t need this now, I probably am not going to need it tomorrow (crossing my fingers).
• The panel calendar opens evolution, and only evolution. Evolution sucks (and so does Coke, Casio algebraic calculators, the Chrome browser, and Emacs), we need a calendar service that other applications can provide. Having the address book, mail, and calendar all assumed to be evolution is annoying.
• The current window icon in the panel… wtf is that all about? It serves no useful purpose that I can determine.
• The categories list in the Activities->Applications view is very small in relation to the application icons, detracting from the very easy course mouse control required to select applications when you have to revert to careful precise control to select a category.

All the said, Gnome 3 is hands-down a much better integrated and implemented desktop environment than unity. Someone needs to take the developers rose colored shades away, and then I think we’ll have a nice Desktop solution.

Brandon Sanderson does an admirable job working to complete the Wheel of Time as laid out by Robert Jordan. While Jordan began to get off on academic tangents and new subplots with excessive detail on new characters way to late in the series for a reader to care to become invested in them, Sanderson has kept to the existing story very well. The story moves along much more quickly, which is a good thing.

Sanderson continues to present the world of the Wheel of Time in much the same way Jordan did, and during action sequences or other less intimate scenes, it still feel like Jordan. Things start to come apart where dialog or character musings dominate the page. The dialog is jarringly modern, in a David Eddings he-said-she-said kind of way. The metaphors just don’t seem to emphasize and support the alternate world, but instead set it at odds. Still, it seems a small price to pay to get to see the story continue to unfold and, one can hope, come to a close.



View all my reviews

I understand that most users probably don’t use 6 point font. They probably don’t care if they can only read three Facebook wall posts before having to scroll down. But isn’t there still a market for people that want a high-end screen with their high-end laptop? I’d pay another $100 for 1440×900, and I’m confident nearly every other software developer would as well. I find it a bit amusing that one of the images on the Lenovo web site shows a 3D modeling program on the X1 – not likely people, not with that resolution.

So how about it Lenovo, can we get an optional high resolution screen (as are made available on so many other ThinkPads, past and present) for software developers and other not-blind people?

1. Finding commands in the terminal scrollback is difficult.
2. Long working directories cause awkward wrapping.
3. I find myself using “git branch” and “git status” far too often.
4. With so many terminals open, it can be difficult to distinguish between them.

I didn’t want fourteen colors, a clock, the date, and my ascii art gravatar in my prompt, so I’ve tried to keep it simple. To address #1 above, I’ve made my prompt green. This makes finding it in the noisy scrollback much easier. This uses escape pres, which are admittedly a bit nasty, but they get the job done:

\[\e[32;1m\]$PROMPT\[\e[0m\]

For #2, I used to show only the leaf of the path, but for *some* projects even this became problematic with pathnames like:

linux-yocto-2.6.37+git1+79669230fd82a3e7e254cf8b596a2388a4333e62_1+e53debfc6896bb89174ebb74154ed9b3bc72b59c-r18

So I took a page out of Joshua Lock‘s book and just ensure my prompt ends with “\n$ ” so my commands start on a new line and in the same column every time.

PROMPT="\u@\h:\w\n\$ "

For #3, also inspired by Mr. Lock, I did some digging and found a ridiculous number of heavy handed implementations, included some running ruby scripts to determine the current git branch. Ruby? Really? Turns out any modern distribution provides the very handy __git_ps1 bash autocompletion feature, so simply adding:

\$(__git_ps1 ' [%s]')

to my PS1 gets me the current branch in square brackets. To show the current state of the repository, including modified files, staged files, and things like being in the middle of a bisection, I export GIT_PS1_SHOWDIRTYSTATE=1 and add bash.showDirtyState=true to my ~/.gitconfig. This adds a * for modified, + for staged (*+ for both), and things like “|BISECTING” when in the middle of a git bisect command. Very handy!

Finally, for #4, I’ve found that setting the working dir in the titlebar of the terminal does a fair job at distinguishing between them. I don’t use many terminal applications (mutt, mc, etc) so the directory is usually adequate. I set a variable and then include that in PS1:

TITLEBAR="\[\e]2;\w\a\]"

In summary, the setup of my prompt in .bashrc is as follows:

if [ $TERM != "linux" ]; then
    TITLEBAR="\[\e]2;\w\a\]"
fi
GIT_PS1_SHOWDIRTYSTATE=1
PROMPT="\u@\h:\w\$(__git_ps1 ' [%s]')\n\$ "
PS1="$TITLEBAR\[\e[32;1m\]$PROMPT\[\e[0m\]"

This results in a prompt that looks something like this:

dvhart@doubt:~ [master]
$ touch test

dvhart@doubt:~ [master]
$ git add test

dvhart@doubt:~ [master +]
$ echo " " >> ~/.bashrc

dvhart@doubt:~ [master *+]
$ git reset --hard HEAD
HEAD is now at 8def692 bitbake TEMPLATECONF

dvhart@doubt:~ [master]
$ git bisect start HEAD HEAD~2
Bisecting: 0 revisions left to test after this (roughly 0 steps)
[e82b229ca456cb77f1da310f7a6f966a4d5e2c95] use __git_ps1 in bash prompt

dvhart@doubt:~ [(e82b229...)|BISECTING]
$ git checkout master
Previous HEAD position was e82b229... use __git_ps1 in bash prompt
Switched to branch 'master'

dvhart@doubt:~ [master]
$

Update (7-Jun-2011): If you happen to use git to track your home directory config files, such as .bashrc and ~/bin you likely want to avoid using __git_ps1 in your prompt as it will show up pretty much all the time, and lose its effectiveness while working in your actual development project repositories. To address this, I’ve updated my prompt to only display __git_ps1 when the git top-level directory is not $HOME:

# Print the __git_ps1 string unless the git directory is $HOME.
function git_ps1() {
    GD="$(git rev-parse --show-toplevel 2>/dev/null)"
    if [ "$GD" != "$HOME" ]; then
        __git_ps1 ' [%s]'
    fi
}

if [ $TERM != "linux" ]; then
    TITLEBAR="\[\e]2;\w\a\]"
fi
GIT_PS1_SHOWDIRTYSTATE=1
PROMPT="\u@\h:\w\$(git_ps1)\n\$ "
PS1="$TITLEBAR\[\e[32;1m\]$PROMPT\[\e[0m\]"

• 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?