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Ratz and I are at terminals in the conference lobby reading our e-mails,
after an early breakfast.
Thanks to permissions on the machines I have accounts on, I'm ssh'ing to a
machine in San Diego (which doesn't care where I come in from), telneting
to a non-ssh machine in North Carolina from which I ssh to a machine in
Maryland that I use for posting. The telnet link in the middle short
circuits the ssh security of course, but the people running that last
machine in the link would rather I came in from this one known machine
than ssh'ing from just any old machine.
Ottawa is a nice town,eh? Low traffic, nice temperature (low 20's I'd
guess), clean and quiet (the road traffic at peak hour is like Sydney on
sunday afternoon, no bumper to bumper stuff).
Ratz and I are staying in the old jail which was closed in '72 and has
since been reopened as a Youth Hostel. It's 2 blocks from the conference
center and 2 blocks from the markets, pubs and restaurants. Wensong our
leader, as befits his higher status, is staying in one of the salubrious
tourist hotels, but is missing the ambience of the accomodation that the
Canadian govt provided at no charge for their citizens for 100yrs.
If somehow you've missed out on the chance of spending the night in jail,
this is definitely for you. I'm sure that my son would like it. Ratz and I
are sharing cell 6 on the 6th floor with a nice view onto the exercise
yard.
The buses have their own roads in some places (like a rail line) and they
move very quickly. Even though the temperature is quite pleasant now,
evidence of winter is everywhere. All doors are double with an intervening
air lock area, and coridors have heaters. The bus stops are completely
enclosed. (winter is -10C average, dropping to -40C sometimes)
The conference schedule is low pressure to say the least. There are 3
streams of 4 1hr talks, starting at 10am, with large breaks, presumalby to
socialise and test the Canadian beer (most of which are good, and which I
don't recognise, and aren't available south of the border).
I went to a talk on embedded linux ("linux for toasters") which was not
particularly technical and whose purpose was to list the devices/companies
doing embedded linux (most of which I'd never heard of). Most are using
2.0.33 kernels on a wide range of chips I'd also never heard of. Porting
to some random new chip is not easy and no-one is interested in upgrading
just to have a new kernel number. Code size, since it has to be put into a
ROM has to be small and has stopped people going to 2.2.x. libc has been
cut to 200k, and "hello world" is about 2k. This along with the better
security in the 2.0.x kernels, has meant that embedded linux is 2.0.33.
Another talk was by one of the Transmeta people (Dave Taylor, one of the
Doom and Quake coders), talking about the interpreter used in their code
morphing and how to write your code for it (or put another way, how they
can handle anything you can throw at it). They have to be able to trap
everything (eg what do they do with a pointer value who's value won't be
known till run time). The debuggers run at 2 levels, one on the original
x86 code and another on their code. The people who run the debuggers are
"real men". They have a completely automated test suite (written mostly in
perl) which he thinks is amazing, which every build is put through and
everyone gets a report of what did and did not work every morning.
Another talk was on GFS. We heard an hour list of things they needed to
think about and code up, so that it wouldn't break when they discovered
the next problem. E.g what do you do when one machine dies with a dirty
write buffer, and later the machine comes back alive and thinks it still
owns its locks. Some of you may know the answer, but they had to code it
and get it to work and make it compatible with the other code. There's 5
levels of locks (they still haven't sorted out the deadlock problems).
The package is enormous. I thought you installed it somewhat like you
installed ext2 on an IDE disk, but the installation looks like it would
take weeks. I hope there's some test suite to check that it's all working.
It's all fibre channel scsi. Not for the feint hearted or people with
shallow pockets. I didn't see any redundancy (maybe it's there and I
missed it) beyond the RAID on each of the servers. When your RAID
controller dies I assume you're hosed. Maybe that will come later. There
looks to be many man years of coding in the project to get this far.
At 6pm we went beer and snacks sponsored by Corel at one of the local
pubs. Ratz and I stopped on our way to listen to a sidewalk band playing
New Orleans type dancing music. They had quite a crowd listening. I was
surprised not to see a hat on the ground full of coins - maybe they're not
allowed to do that here. Ratz tells me that the people who delighted me
20yrs ago in Europe's towns doing the same thing, are no longer allowed to
do it.
It still being light I was looking over the city and down onto the people
sitting in the sidewalk restaurants, from the pub's balcony. I was amazed
to see a flight of brightly coloured hot air baloons pass overhead. One of
the locals brushed it off without looking up, "oh they do that every
night". With a mild and predicable breeze most nights, they launch from
one side of the city and can reliably land on the other an hour or 2
later.
I found that the Canadian 1$ coin, which has a loon on it, is called a
"looney". The 2$ coin is called a "two-ney" :-)
I left at 10pm and on the way back, was surprised to walk past the offices
of Linuxcare.
Ratz left after me and was intercepted by 4 females who wanted to take him
around the town. 3 pubs and an exchange of e-mail addresses later Ratz
arrived back at 2am. (I assume he'll be sending in the addresses for the
HOWTO and we may have to change one of the answers for the next trivia
quiz).
I spent the night in jail.
Joe
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Joseph Mack mack@xxxxxxxxxxx
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