Today was princessdammitt 's surprise birthday party. damiondead rented a caboose on a steam train for a whole group of us, after which there was a picnic. Somehow he managed to keep the whole thing secret from her, which apparently is an impressive feat as Damion is not known as the king of surprises. Everyone was dressed up in victorian/steampunk attire, much the amusement of the other passengers and the railroad staff.

This past week, I finally conquered the P4080. This is the multicore network accelerator doohickey that I've been pounding on at work for the past couple of months. Originally all the work was being on using a simulator as real silicon wasn't available yet, but we finally got a couple of actual boards about 10 days ago. Naturally, the same code that worked on the simulator didn't work on the real hardware. It took a few days of poking around to figure out why, but it's finally done. There are a few minor issues left to smooth out, but all the really hard stuff is behind me. This is probably the most complicated device I've had to program so far in my career, and I'm kind of surprised I ever managed to make it work. (The reference manual is over 3000 pages long, and it isn't even the final version.)

The saga of the guy with the radio next door continues. After a couple of days of quiet, it started up again. Although it was coming from the same room, I'm not certain that it's the same guy: I went over there on Friday after I got home from work (and heard the radio blaring again) to ask one more time if he would keep it down. The guy I saw didn't look like the same one I'd seen previously (the haircut was different). His neighbor from across the hall tried to tell me he was a paranoid schizophrenic, and his arms shook a lot and his speech seemed a little slurred. I told him how he had the radio on all night the previous night, and he tried to tell me to just let him know when it was too loud and he'd turn it down. (This of course does me no good; I can't go over there every time, especially if it's in the middle of the night, and if I yell out my window it'll just wake other people up.)

So I finally decided to go for the nuclear option. I ordered one of these:

http://shop.christmasincruces.com/product.sc?productId=2&categoryId=2

It's a very low power transmitter (25 milliwatts), but given his close proximity, I think it ought to be strong enough to overwhelm whatever station he's listening to. And if not, I can probably build a amplifier to boost the signal a couple of watts. If I wanted to be really evil, I could hook a microphone to it and do the whole "Kent, this is god speaking" routine, but that probably wouldn't help his schizophrenia much.

I've been toying with this idea for a while. I'd prefer not to do it, lack of sleep turns me into an ever bigger stress monkey than I am normally, and that's just not good for business. Anyway, the thing should be here in a couple of days. We'll see how it goes.

This morning, slashdot posted a link to this:

http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2009/Sep/0039.html

No, this is not a repeat from Windows 95. Well, ok, maybe it is. In any case, the exploit code is in Python. I don't like Python (or Perl), so I rewrote it in C:

http://people.freebsd.org/~wpaul/w00t/smb-bsod.c

Compile with:

% cc -o smb-bsod smb-bsod.c

Run with:

% ./smb-bsod [IP address of machine to clobber]

Supposedly this will clobber Win7, Vista, and possibly Win Server 2008. Have fun, at least until next Patch Tuesday.

There's a new apartment building at 1 Polk, about two blocks from me, called the Argenta (http://argenta.riverstoneres.com/). Originally it was supposed to be all condos, but that plan apparently didn't work out, so they're now all rentals. I figured at the very least it would be worth a look, so I signed up for a tour.

Sadly, the prices they're asking are higher than anticipated. For whatever the reason, units are more expensive the higher up you go, and the least expensive unit in the layout I was interested in was on the 10th floor. On the plus side, it's a high-rise (I can look down from on high, etc...), it's bigger than my current place, it's quiet, it comes with a washer/dryer in the unit, the view is pretty nice (it faces Civic Center) and there's a 24-hour fitness center. On the minus side, they're asking $2431/month. Add to that about $40/month more for water/sewer/trash. Also, they want you to take out at least $50,000 in renter's insurance. The only incentives they're offering are about two week's free rent.

Oh, and all of that isn't counting whatever money it costs me to actually move.

I also noticed a couple of strange things. One was that I could not seem to get cell phone reception on my Blackberry anywhere in the building. Another was a strange water dripping sound in the washer/dryer unit.

So basically, I'd be looking at an increase of about $1200/month in expenses (guessing, dunno how much renter's insurance is at this point). I was hoping for maybe $700-$800 at most. It's not beyond my ability to afford, but it's enough to dull my excitement about the idea. I am conflicted. There's still some temptation there, but my fiscal responsibility subroutines are sending out strong warnings.

Blah.

...I've actually been able to sleep. Either the guy next door with the radio finally got the point, or he moved out, because the last two nights have been blissfully quiet. Not only that, I've actually slept the whole night through. It's glorious.

In other news, I ordered, and just received, one of these:

http://www.soekris.com/net4826.htm

It's an upgrade for this one that I already have:

http://www.soekris.com/net4521.htm

I've been using the 1000mW 802.11b/g card with the existing one, and by itself it works fine: I have a rock solid signal to the "Free the Net" node one block over. But I also want to run a second wireless interface that I can use to create a wifi network in my apartment. That part has issues: I have an atheros-based cardbus card (Linksys) that I can plug into one of the cardbus slots, and it works, but if I load the thing down with a lot of traffic, the board will spontaneously reboot. No warning from the OS, no nothing: just *pewf*, restart.

I suspect a power supply issue as the same setup works if I use one of my older, lower power cards in place of the 1000mW one. I don't know for sure if it will work any better in the new board, but I think it's worth a try. In nothing else, having a faster processor won't hurt. (The old board runs at 133Mhz. Yes, 133Mhz.)

I also ordered some new antenna cabling. I got a replacement 'pigtail' connector to attach directly to the 1000mW card, via MMCX port instead of the teeny, tiny U.FL port. The new cable also has a different panel-mount connector at the other end which fits exactly into the pre-drilled holes in the case of the Soekris board. This helped to reduce the insertion loss I was getting with the old setup. I probably only gailed a couple dB worth of signal, but the new setup is much sturdier.

Although I've tried to conceal it, for the benefit of those around me who are not at fault, I've been a seething little ball of angry lately. It bubbles beneath the surface, this angry does, just waiting for a chance at release.

I came home tonight (at around 12:30) to find that once again, someone in the SRO next door has the radio on. I can't fall asleep with a radio or TV on. The sound of passing cars I can stand, but voices and music drive me bonkers when I'm trying to doze off. I just can't tune them out, and my brain keeps focused on them, which makes next to impossible for me to fall asleep.

In this case, the radio was sitting on the sill of an open window, about 5 feet away from my window. Even with my window shut, I could still hear it. I looked over and saw the lights were out.

Luckily, the people who run the place seem to be sympathetic to my plight. I went over and walked upstairs to the offending room, and could hear the music out in the hallway. I knocked repeatedly, but there was no answer. The manager came up with the key, and we discovered that the room's occupant was not even home. Apparently he'd just turned the radio on and left.

I unplugged the radio and stormed back to my apartment.

These days, about the only good things I have to look forward to are spending time with friends, eating food that's not good for me, and getting a good night's sleep. Apparently that's too much to ask, which is a shame, because not sleeping is only going to make me even more irritable than I already am, which frankly I don't need.

I'm starting to feel like my life is just a giant cluster-fuck, infrequently interrupted by all too brief moments of sensibility, instead of the other way around. When I see how I've ended up, all I can think is that I don't want to be here. I'm not just talking about where I live, either, though I think that's a big part of it. I would like to live somewhere where it's quiet at night. Where I'm not constantly assaulted by the smell of pot in the hallways, or worse, outside my own window. Where they don't dump trash outside my building. Where water doesn't sometime leak through the ceiling from my upstairs neighbor's bathroom when he takes a shower. Where the garbage men don't leave a trail of smelly trash in the basement when they take out the garbage at night.

None of that crap really matters though. I could find the perfect home for the perfect price, and it would still suck, because at the end of the day, it would be just me living in it. Some days, coming home to an empty apartment just kills me. So by the time I discover that some schmuck has decided to keep me awake with his radio all night, I'm already plenty aggravated. The noise is just icing on the cake. A rage cake with violence frosting. And I'm just dying to serve it up.

I just realized that the Marquis Fetish Ball is happening next Saturday in SF, and of course I have no date.

*grump*

I discovered recently that a "Free the Net" wifi node had appeared within range of my building in SF. This was fortunate as the access point that I had previously been leeching from now was no longer unsecured. (Took them long enough...) The "Free the Net" network is a basically the closest thing to free community wifi in SF. There's info about it here:

http://sf.meraki.com

It took a bit of fiddling with my cantenna, but I finally found the right direction (straight out the window) and polarization (horizontal) to get a reasonably stable connection to the access point. It was still a little marginal though, so started looking into various options to improve the situation, hopefully in a way that would not require me to mount an antenna on the roof of the building. (I can get the roof, but I'm on the second floor of a four story building, and at 2.4Ghz, a cable run that long would probably introduce unacceptable signal attenuation.) My first thought was a higher gain antenna, though most of good ones seemed to be quite large and unwieldy. But then someone showed me this:

http://www.metrix.net/valemount-networks-kxs30sg-p-438.html

An 802.11b/g wifi card with 1 watt of TX power. I didn't think they made such things, or that you can buy one in the US, but apparently they do and you can. I ordered one and it arrived today. According to the client survey tool on the remote node, my signal strength more than doubled. (I had been using an Intel 2200BG card previously.) Unscientific web tests show I'm getting about 1.2Mbps download speed, which ain't bad for free.

Oh, and it's based on the Atheros 5414 chipset. It works with FreeBSD out of the box, and since it's Atheros there are all sorts of funky things you can do with it.

I am suitably impressed.

I'm off from work this week, taking my 3rd and final furlough week of the year. Technically, I'm taking advantage of a loophole in the furlough process: we're required to take a complete week off, but this Friday counts as a paid holiday, since the 4th of July falls on a Saturday this year. That means they're really only allowed to charge me for 4 vacation days rather than 5. A bunch of other WR people are taking this week off as well (though some are taking next week off too, in some cases because of pre-existing vacation plans).

The only problem with having the time off is that while it gives me the chance to catch up on lost sleep, it also means I get to spend a lot of time doing nothing, which is bad because when I have nothing to do, I think, and when I think, I get depressed.

The same day that the Intel acquisition of Wind River was announced, right before the start of my previous furlough week, things thoroughly fell apart with Tabby. I don't feel like going into detail: it just didn't work out. (I'm starting to think that will be my epitaph.) Since then, I've been stuck partway between angry and sad. There are times when I feel as if I could launch into a long, drawn out and overwrought introspective of the whole thing, but nothing much ever comes of that feeling because I know it would just be a waste of perfectly good time and electrons. And besides, that's been done to death.

That said, I am, quite frankly, at a loss. I keep thinking there's something I'm supposed to do next, but I can't get a handle on what it is. There is an overwhelming sense of malaise that I just can't quite see past. I don't have the answers, and I hate that.

Most of the day at work was occupied by various discussions related to the sudden death of Michael Jackson today. For some, it's practically a national day of mourning. For others, it's an excuse to trot out every internet meme that's ever existed.

By the time I headed out of my office to meet up with the carpool group, I thought I'd seen it all. Then, as I get in the car, the following conversation with one of my decidedly mundane cow-orkers ensues:

Cow-orker: "You heard about Michael Jackson right?"
Me: "Yeah, I've been hearing about it all day."
Cow-orker: "Well I heard a rumor that Harrison Ford and Jeff Goldblum died too."
Me: *brief pause, followed by peals of maniacal laughter*

I had to explain the joke to her. I still don't think she quite got it.

The trip home took a little longer than usual due to some kind of traffic accident in the Posey Tube in Almeda, which required us to take the long way off the island. When I arrived home, I found a noticed posted outside main entrance to my building. It was a notice of violation from the city, citing the building owners for failing to provide heat in the building. I had actually noticed the lack of heat after I returned from my trip to LA, but I didn't really mind it because it happened to coincide with pretty nice weather here in the city. The problem with the heat is that when it's on, it's impossible to avoid: the steam radiators in the apartments can only be controlled by a shutoff valve, but the valves are so old that they've been ground down to practically nothing, making it impossible to really halt the flow of steam. I also suspect that the boiler only has a timer on it rather than a thermostat, given that it seems to come on at the same time every day, even during the summer.

According to the notice, a follow-up inspection is scheduled for next week, and each failed inspection will cost the landlord $170. This doesn't strike me as a terribly stiff penalty.

I noticed that Pidgin started having trouble with Y! Messenger again recently. It seems that Yahoo has once again jiggered their authentication servers, possibly in an attempt to force people to upgrade their clients. Luckily, there's already a new version of Pidgin available to fix this. I upgraded my setup at work an it's happy now, but I'm going to have to rebuild it on my home machine and my laptop too. Joy.

Last weekend was Gothnic 2009. Much fun, food and sun (booooo! hisssssss!) was had by all. I saw many people that I hadn't seen in a long while, which was nice even though it made me feel even more like an old fart. I even managed to drag Ceren out of her hermitage. Damion should consider this an organizational success, even though he may insist that he has all the organization skills of a pack of retarded gerbils. Luckily, with a group like us, who basically _are_ a pack of retarded gerbils, you don't really need much more.

Work has been eating my brains more vigorously than usual. The Intel merger/acquisition hasn't been finalized yet, so things are still mostly business as usual, though there's definitely an undercurrent of anxiety. I've been too busy to really think about it, but I know that in other departments there's been no shortage of gossip. For one thing, since we will now be part of Intel's accounting process, there's some question as to what will happen to our own finance and accounting people. As for me, I had just enough time after getting back from my first furlough week to finish up my latest project before having to take another one next week. I'm still not sure what I'm going to do with the time, but I did decide that I don't want to go to to Toorcamp. (Hey, Graziela, are you doing anything next week? *poke* *poke*)

My trip to LA was fairly relaxing. I stayed with Pixel again, and he hosted a party for his friend Amber the Saturday after I arrived. There were balloons, toys and snacks (the latter of which produced a photo labeled "two girls, one cupcake"). I also met this really cute girl who does some kind of database programming who, given my luck, I'll probably never see again. (And if I do, I'm sure she'll introduce me to her boyfriend.) I also got a chance to futz around with Pixel's brand new HP 2140 Netbook. Since he was going to trash the factory Windows install put Linux on it, he let me try it out with FreeBSD 7.2, since I happened to have the CD with me. The 2140 has Broadcom wifi and Marvell ethernet. Neither one worked exactly out of the box, but did work eventually with some coercion. The Broadcom wireless required Project Evil. For the ethernet, I had to grab the latest msk(4) driver from FreeBSD-current. It has Intel graphics, which did work out of the box with Xorg. So did the sound and bluetooth. I didn't do anything with the built-in camera. Unfortunately, video is one of FreeBSD's perennial weaknesses: Linux has a framework for it, but FreeBSD doesn't, so all camera drivers are pretty much ad-hoc.

The one thing I was really curious about was whether or not the Intel Atom processor in the 2140 is actually faster than the Celeron M in my existing laptop. The Atom has a higher clock speed, but from my experiments there didn't seem to be a huge difference in response and performance.

Oh, we also ran into some of HP's stupidity. Pixel wanted to replace the internal Broadcom wifi adapter with an Atheros one, for various sundry reasons. First of all, HP designed the laptop so that you have to take it completely apart in order to remove the wifi module. And I mean _completely_. Second, after going to all that trouble and reassembling the whole thing, we turned it on only to be greeted by a BIOS error telling us that an unsupported piece of hardware was installed, and that we had to remove the offending device in order to successfully boot. It turns out HP rigged the BIOS to check the PCI vendor/device ID on the wifi card, and it won't start the system up if you don't have a "supported" one. So we had to disassemble the laptop all over again to put it back the way it was.

I hope a lot of people complain to HP about this, though something tells me they probably won't, which is a shame. I'm still on the fence about getting an Atom-based netbook. I kinda want one, but can't really justify it while my existing laptop is still fully functional. Ah well, they'll still be out there if I change my mind.

Intel accidentally my whole company.

http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/reuters/MTFH42071_2009-06-04_16-03-37_BNG177267.htm

I wonder if they'll change the sign out front again.