Updated: Never — Philip's Blog

After getting home in a rather hostile state of mind yesterday morning, I went pretty much straight to bed. I woke up this morning at 04:30 after having slept for about fifteen hours straight. Not bad at all. I hope this put me in the local timezone. Eastbound jetlag always messes me up.

I love my bed. Couchsurfing rules, and I'm extremely grateful for the couch I was able to borrow in Boston, but there is nothing quite like sleeping in one's own bed.

Now for getting to work. I look forward to reacquainting myself with my bike. Much as I like North America, I do like living in a part of the world where I am able to get myself to work without negotiating multi-lane highways and other scary things.

I am in Frankfurt. I am grumpy.

It is amazing how well screaming sounds carry in flying tubes. The flight was almost tolerable for up to about twenty minutes at a time.

I selectively multicasted the idea of drugging children or checking them in like other pets, but clearly that's not a very popular idea. I'm sure that after I get some caffeine into my system and perhaps a couple of hours of sleep behind me, I will understand what's wrong with it.

For now, I'll just be grumpy.

14:58 EST

Blogging from an airport is so me... I'm at Boston Logan now, waiting for my flight to Frankfurt which leaves in two hours. The TSA did not do anything horrible to my body or my carry-on. Here's me hoping they leave my checked bag alone too.

I am not looking forward to jetlag.

I had a great time in Boston. Super food last night. Dredged up some of the monsters from the past. Not all bad. Just somewhat disconcerting how the brain can store the strangest things.

Off home.

Damn the ocean!

18:09 EST

While the owner of the couch I'm borrowing was out to a loud party last night, I did something about wireless internet and got the Coverity nightly builds of the FreeBSD kernel mostly working again. For some reason, the further away I am from my customers, the more productive I am. Not necessarily productive for my customers but productive in general.

There are still a fair number of things I have to do, not least of which is the unbreaking of the signup script and such, but it's good to have the nightly builds back. Fairly high on my list is getting email spam for defects working. Perhaps I'll get around to that tonight.

This Coverity thing is turning into a time-consuming new hobby. I think it's a fantastic tool. It's much less blunt than FlexeLint (which I run on all the code I write for my customers) and it's great at finding its way through largeish codebases like operating system kernels.

I spent most of today strolling around in Boston. While here, I bought a new hat. A fedora for a change. Not exactly suitable for cycling, but it's great for walking around town. Which is what I happen to be doing.

This evening, I'm having dinner with an old friend who happens to live in the city. My love-hate relationship with Facebook soars to new levels again.

11:37 EST

No, I didn't get lost in transit. I found my way to Boston on a cramped Untied 757 on Wednesday. It appears that I am staying at the only place in a university city which does not have open access points. I spent some time trying to do something about that last night but without much success. More work on that this evening perhaps.

Yesterday, I bought the Boston Lonely Planet guide and took Dee for a walk around Cambridge. Much as I chose the right season for cherry blossoms earlier this year in Japan, autumn is possibly the best time to stroll around New England. Very colourful. A bit chilly though. Last week in California, it was around 26C and I was wearing tshirts. Over here, it's around freezing and I'm still wearing tshirts. And a sweater. And a coat.

Last night, on Dru's suggestion, we went for dinner at No Name. The food was excellent. It would probably spoil the fun if I gave precise directions to get there. The route we took was ... circuitous. To put it very politely.

Today, I'm at a customer trying to detangle a twisted mess and catching up with a couple of days of email while waiting for things to compile. Mmm.

21:39 PST

More meetBSD devsummit at Google today. I spent most of the day kicking the Coverity nightly builds back into shape. They've been down for 18 months, mostly waiting for someone to put on the "okay, I'll do it" hat and actually do it. So that's me. I know, I'm a static analysis fanboy.

After the devsummit, I took plosher up on an offer to take a tour of ISC's datarooms in Redwood City. I also took along a todo-list of FreeBSD boxes we've got there to see if I could poke them into doing something more meaningful than suck power and distress airco. The ultimate geek experience!

I saw (part of) the wayback machine. It's red. :-)

Off to Boston very early tomorrow morning. I'm taking Caltrain from Mountain View to SFO at 05:30. That should put me in just the right mood for a six-hour flight with Untied. What fun.

I had a great time at meetBSD and the devsummit again. A very productive time too. As usual, I was very good to see everyone in meatspace again, and add some new face-to-name mappings along the way. Next time, Tokyo I think.

10:24 PST

I was fairly productive at the devsummit yesterday. Catching up on core email and trying to get the Coverity stuff going full steam again. I have a feeling there is still some paperwork between me and getting all the necessary super powers, but I'm happy to go through that.

Dinner last night at Paul's. I finally met the infamous dogs! I have added Robert to my list of people to trust with finding food. Delicious Indian food. Lots of it.

Much merriment when I explained how Linux "oops" worked. It made Peter cry. I still can't believe most Linux people run with "panic on oops" turned off. They must be nuts. Or on very bad drugs.

Today I plan to spend some more time in the socket code. It shouldn't be too difficult to do what we want to do.

14:42 PST

As expected, my talk came out a bit shorter than I expected. I aimed for about forty minutes-ish and I finished in just about 25 minutes. I got about fifteen minutes of very good questions though, so it worked out fairly well in the end.

I've put my slides online here, if anyone is interested. I plan to spend some time perhaps on my next flight fleshing it out with more interesting numbers and such.

09:42 PST

Yesterday was the first day of MeetBSD at Google. Finding the right building was an interesting experience involving many u-turns (a Californian speciality) after that, things went fairly smoothly.

I still need to work on my talk a bit. It turns out I'm talking about crypto acceleration. I wish I had found this out before I got on my plane and not after. I have a feeling my talk is going to be a bit hand-wavy and probably come out a bit short.

Last night, we celebrated the 15th birthday of FreeBSD with cake at the Zen Lounge. Kirk did an excellent job of carving up the cake. Sadly, I didn't bring my camera with me. I'm sure a number of good pictures will find their way to the interwebnets later on.

A number of us left when the music starting getting a bit too loud. We survived a ride from Peter. No christmas trees were encountered.

No hangover this morning. American beer... Though I did find some surprisingly tasty stuff. Completely lacking in alcohol, however.

15:11 PST

The flight was long.

I managed to sleep on the plane. Business class helped. Listening to the ATC channel made me pass out five minutes after being fed, which was around 04:00 local time at my destination, and I slept until 10:00ish local time. Now to convince my body that this is in fact the sort of timescale I wish to maintain for a while...

Weather here is much nicer than in Brussels or in Heathrow.

Need to buy a new hat.

I'm off to the US tomorrow. I called my phone operator earlier today to verify that the tariff plan I'd asked them to change a while back was done successfully (so I would pay slightly less criminal roaming charges while on the other side of that inconvenient ocean). Mysteriously, since that phone call, my phone stopped booting.

Booting the phone without SIM works (offline mode). Booting the phone with someone else's SIM works too (online mode). Putting my SIM in another phone also works fine. So why won't my phone boot work with my SIM?

If my flight tomorrow wasn't at dark o'clock in the morning, I could complain at a shop where they might be able to do something about it... Perhaps lazyweb has some ideas? Maybe there's a SIM pusher at BRU to who can help me?

In the mean time, I trust there's enough GSM 1900 coverage in the places I'm going. The old phone doesn't speak UMTS or GSM 850. mumble standardize mumble.

I was hacking some code for a customer last night. Before I knew it, it was 01:00, and I decided to "quickly" see how the US elections were going before going to bed.

Very soon, it was 02:00. And then 03:00. And then there was no point in going to bed anymore. Congratulations Obama!

Incidentally, I would love to know what the advertising revenue of CNN and others looks like for the last 24 hours or so. :-)

I think everyone is pretty much aware of the fact that I have a strange addiction to tshirts. There is simply no such thing as "enough tshirts".

Sometimes, I fear I may be overdoing it a little though. When I got home this evening, I found six new tshirts waiting for me. I would like to note that not a single one of those is black. I'm slowly but certainly evolving into all kinds of new colours.

I think there are still a couple of tshirts stuck in the mail. :-)