Contents
- 31st January 2000
- 30th January 2000
- 29th January 2000
- 27th January 2000
- 26th January 2000
- 25th January 2000
- 24th January 2000
- 22nd January 2000
- 19th January 2000
- 18th January 2000
- 17th January 2000
31st January 2000
Day 1 of writing up the survey results. Not much code cut at
all.
30th January 2000
More work on the configuration code. I'd gotten most of it to
work when I realised that there was a problem with handing --enable-X
and --disable-X type parameters :( Spent the evening picking at
the code, but it all sort of fizzled out in the end.
29th January 2000
Today was a day of house hunting, time warps (somehow lost an entire
hour inside a book store - oops ;-) and an evening in the pub with
friends.
27th January 2000
The fog lifted this morning when I wasn't looking. It was
definitely there half an hour ago! I wonder if it's hiding round
the corner, and will jump out at me this evening when I head off for
T'ai Chi? ;-)
Well, I did plan on taking the day off (this guitar amp has a lot
of knobs to twiddle with ;-) but I seem to be on a roll with GNQS and
(even worse) bitten by the hacking bug. I wonder if I can knock up
a 'configure' replacement today?
I had great fun late last night. What started as a RPM update
fest turned into a kernel upgrade fest. I moved to 2.2.14 (yes!
sound support for my laptop at last!), and added in the software suspend
patch. It doesn't like PCMCIA, but if you suspend the network card
(using cardctl) before you suspend the machine, it works fine.
Even works with X11. I can't stress how neat this feature is,
especially if you own a PC that doesn't suspend properly under Linux
(like my laptop!).
And it's time to recommend another CD. Kristi bought me T'ai
Chi, by Sunrise for my birthday. It's certainly nice
to play T'ai Chi whilst listening to the CD, but this CD is well worth
listening to on its own.
26th January 2000
Did I ever mention that I hate job hunting?
Anyway, today has been divided between more work on the new
installation software for GNQS in the morning, and playing with my new
guitar amp this afternoon.
I haven't owned a guitar amp in years. Main reason for getting
one is that I've given up on using speaker simulators for recording
with. The sound quality just isn't there - the speaker simulators
simply do not emulate speakers very well, unless you're willing to risk
a major investment in kit. It's much easier just to mike up the
amp instead.
Picking it up was fun too. We've had plenty of fog down here
this week, only today the fog didn't lift once. If anything, it
got worse today. Reminds me of when I was a kid, when it got foggy
we'd all rush down to the Town Moor (big open space where the fog would
always be thicker).
On the GNQS front, I've finished writing the makefiles. All I
need to do now is add in the configuration support, and theoretically
GNQS_Devel will compile once again. Oh, and I must check this lot
into Perforce!
25th January 2000
Unless the job agency ring me back, today is dedicated to studying
the "jobs stuck in arriving state" bug.
This bug seems to occur only when a job is routed from the
scheduler back to the machine it originally came from. And, to
make matters worse, it doesn't happen all the time. This leads
me to suspect that what happens is that the scheduler turns the job
around and sends it back faster than the original machine can
cope with.
Update: yup, that's the cause alright. I've updated
pipeclient to release its resources sooner, to make this problem unlikely
to happen. Unfortunately, it will take a complete rewrite
of the IPC code (and probably an update to the networking code too) to
prevent this problem happening in the future.
24th January 2000
Bit of a mixture today. Time was divided between job hunting
during the day, and finishing off the Makefiles for GNQS_Devel in the
evening.
22nd January 2000
No GNQS work today. My birthday tomorrow, so I'm taking
the weekend off!
19th January 2000
Still away in Sheffield. I'll be back this evening, but I don't
know if I'll be able to work on GNQS at all.
18th January 2000
I'm off back to Sheffield, visiting my friends and colleagues at the
University. I'll have my laptop with me, but I don't know if I'll
get the chance to work on GNQS at all.
17th January 2000
Okay, that's the Christmas break over and done with.
If anyone is wondering where I've been for the last couple of
weeks, I've been busy on the day job. I had to do an audit of
one of my companies, and the results suggested that a change of
direction was required. So I've been busy working on non-code
matters, tearing my hair out, and looking around for a job.
Anyway, on the GNQS front, I put out a new user survey today - our
first full survey for years. Already had 25 responses - about
10% - back by 6pm. Not too bad at all. Some very
interesting comments so far - my favourite is the one about the coffee
machine ;-)
I'm currently catching up with the changes Michael and Roman have
kindly made to GNQS over the last few weeks, and then it's back into
the fray.
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