Watched In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale (2007) the other day. Fucking awful. Only watch while unconcious and wanting to have the remaining life sucked out of you. We took to making up dialog for the people on the screen – and ours was better.

so many interruptions this week – trying to get what should be about 2 days of coding done… i think i’ve gotten about 1. eep… really want to get this stuff out there too – it’s possibly truly awesome.

New Qantas safety scare – National – theage.com.au

This was my flight to LAX the other day. fun.

All useful software is buggy.

So Rusty gave me this idea for simulating crashes in libeatmydata to check durability of application data with stuff hitting the rust in interesting ways. Preserving fsync barriers, but mucking with the data before the last one and crashing. Then, recovery should all work.

Interesting… something to soon hack on…

I wouldn’t yet say “brilliant” but I’d certainly say “less crap”. I haven’t (yet) completely stabbed it for being stupid.

So, for a side project i’m hacking on, i’m wanting to read in Maildirs really fast (and then pump them into something else… for current purposes I’m just putting everything in one file.. getting the read speed up is of current importance).

I’ve done a bit of experimenting and my current method (which seems to be as fast as any):

1. read the directory (cur)
2. sort by inode number
3. foreach 1000 inodes:
   1. sort by start block number
   2. read message

This makes a couple of assumptions:

• sequential inode numbers are close to each other on disk (making stat(2) cheaper)
• mail messages are small… likely to be in 1 extent, so start block is a good metric for locality.

Oh, some of this is specific to XFS… which is what I care about (and it turns out you don’t need to be root to get an extents list for a file on XFS).

Watching an SBS show from whenever… a guy living in the middle of the desert in Oman gets good phone reception. Hrrm… how are we with that here?

Today it was pointed out to me that news of me not being satisfied with my level of organisation for a trip wasn’t news – the fact of me being organised would have been though.

Talk about a total pain to operate. After a reboot, the following is needed:

1. modprobe dm_snapshot (if you don’t do this, you get “device-mapper: reload ioctl failed: Invalid argument” in step 6 – a really helpful error message. no dmesg or verbose things gets you any closer)
2. some magic foo to scan the md array back
3. pvscan
4. vgscan
5. lvscan
6. lvchange -ay FooVG/barLV
7. mount
8. urgh.

Why this doesn’t just all detect itself on boot who knows. I’m surely not the only one doing this….

ffor Whatever reason it Seems to be impossible to
do more than one thing via bluetooth at once. i.e. i cannot fetch a photo from my phone while connected by gprs. the suck

also, the handwriting recognition on the 770 sucks. i totally miss this from the newton. it should, but obviously doesn’t tae into account the wrd you may be trying to write. thelikelyhood of me writing t9 is quite small compared to the probability of writing to.

i guess this could be an interesting thing to hack on though…

maybe i should start a ‘to hack on’ list.’ list.

just made the train, by about 4 seconds :)

but the fun continues, according to the display in the train, it’s been Parkdale station.for the last 5 stops. glad i’m not a tourist.

i’ve brought my camera in for this trip into the cbd – desperately hoping that if needed, the batteries for my flash hold up. i’ve got a few for the camera with me, so i can resort to the inbuilt one.. but it just doesn’t seem as good as the sb800 :)

written on a nokia 770 connected through gprs while listening to an ipod. so geeky geeky

i wonder why i haven’t done this before? anyway, it’s pretty neat and useful.
although i wish there was an easy way to upload a photo that’s already been taken. then it would be really useful.