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.

Since I have joined Intel and been working on the Yocto Project, I have had to branch out quite a bit. From the Linux kernel side, I’ve updated serial drivers, forayed into accelerometers and industrial I/O, debugged x86 early boot errors in the VM, contributed to the start of an upstream modular Linux kernel configuration system, mapped out minimal configurations and tooling for whittling things down, as well as keeping an eye on some of what I used to contribute to and fixing bugs as they arise.

Outside of the Linux kernel, I’ve worked to enable EFI support of some new platforms, re-factored facets of image building and early boot, performed a similar minimal configuration exploration for user-space, fleshed out support for image generation using the ext[234] file-systems, and generally made a nuisance of myself to those who actually know what they’re doing.

While I miss the ability to truly focus on a particular problem and dig deep into brain-bending execution graphs involving multiple threads, atomic variables, and memory barriers, I also appreciate the value of an increased awareness of how all these pieces fit together to form a greater whole. I’ll continue to try and squirrel away some time to work on things I’m most passionate about, but overall, I believe this time spent on the Yocto Project has made me a better developer.

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.

Sometime in 2010 I became concerned about the direction of my particular project, and looking around the LTC I wasn’t seeing much that interested me personally. I had been saddened to see many of our top Linux developers leave over the years, and started to fear for the future of the LTC. Some managerial changes seemed to lead to a very different culture within the LTC, something much more Big Blue than what we had enjoyed previously. Accepting that the LTC had to grow up eventually, I was able to look past this.

Toward the end of my career at IBM, I attempted to persuade management to provide SSDs to their Linux kernel developers who made extensive use of the git source control management tool. Git is fast, but my tests demonstrated that a lot of time could be saved by switching to SSDs over the spinning disks that shipped with our developer laptops. After some time I got agreement to run a pilot in which a handful of SSDs would be handed out to developers and they would report on the benefits. I left IBM before this happened, and I learned later that management planned to scrap the pilot because “Darren was special.” Sorry, no I was not. I left. The developers that stayed were special! After a bit of a battle as I understand it, the pilot finally happened. Six SSDs were purchased. Six. And developers were meant to test with them, and then hand them over to another developer. Really? OK, so clearly being placated.

This was one of many frustrations associated with keeping costs down. A standing joke (based in fact I believe) was of a senior manager buying toilet paper from a local Costco because we couldn’t acquire it via other means. Another site morale meeting generated a ream of requests to help improve morale. The result were new clocks in the meeting rooms. Morale continued to fall within the LTC. There are many more significant stories to share, but many are probably not appropriate in one way or another for me to share.

In the midst of all this, my family grew by one HC, I lost my home office, and I started taking a close look at our finances. While I had been rated as very successful over the last several years and had seen a couple decent raises, I was clearly not going to achieve my financial goals at the rate things were going. So I looked around. I posted my resume around. I could have gone to New York to work on high frequency trading and made stupid amounts of money – but I valued my home life and my family was (is) young and I wanted to have time to enjoy this part of my life. Eventually Intel called and asked me to come work on the Yocto Project (well, they hadn’t announced it yet, so discussions were quite a bit more vague). The project looked interesting. The people were fun. The compensation was competitive. While it seems to be Taboo to discuss compensation, I feel it is rather core to this discussion. I recall receiving an OTAA (Outstanding Technical Achievement Award) for my work on Real-Time Linux at IBM which everyone congratulated me on. The director called me and formally awarded me with a few restricted stock units. I felt honored. It was a big deal. Except it wasn’t. The sums were paltry, and equated to something like a temporary 2% raise hinged on the company’s stock price. Combined with ever decreasing profit sharing bonuses and low raises for top performance ratings, there was clearly something wrong. After a lot of heart-wrenching soul searching, we (my wife and I) decided to make the jump. There were a lot of factors that influenced our decision, but they can all be summed up in two points: I wanted to work on something interesting and I wanted my technical contributions to be valued.

I have been with Intel, working on the Yocto Project in the Open Source Technology Center, for going on two years now. The project is still interesting. The people are still fun. And management has continued to impress me with the value they place on technical talent. The difference is like night and day. Are there frustrations? Of course. But it is A Great Place to Work, a lot like what the LTC was when I started back in 2003, or perhaps a bit earlier.

So I hope Cringely is dead wrong. Unfortunately, I fear that he is not and I am deeply saddened by the prospect. IBM employs some stellar technical talent as well as some excellent senior leadership. I sincerely hope this is all FUD, or that those who remain are able to turn things around.

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.