...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.

I had Memorial Day off from work, so I went to see Terminator: Salvation with damiondead . The reviews that I'd read beforehand were pretty much correct: lots of special effects, lots of action, very little plot. The one high point in the movie for me was the appearance of a computer-generated Ah-nuld, who, ironically, seemed to be capable of the same emotional range as the real one.

Before heading to the movie, damiondead dropped off his iMac at the SF Apple store. He's apparently been having a lot of strange problems with it which the "geniuses" at the other Apple stores have been unable to fix. (The last time they apparently returned the machine with a diagnostic routine of some kind still installed on it.) The problems he describes (the machine sometimes freezes after an iPod is plugged into a USB port, sometimes it freezes during heavy graphics activity (i.e. playing WoW), sometimes audio will stutter and then it will freeze) all sound like classic Heisenbugs. Given the non-deterministic nature of the failures, I'm not inclined to think it's a software problem, especially since he upgraded the OS to 10.5.7 just recently, and that didn't help. The RAM has been replaced, but the problems occured both before and after the RAM upgrade, so faulty RAM itself is probably not the issue either. Trying to think of potential sources of trouble, I came up with the following:

- Machines fear Damion (though, clearly, they don't fear him enough)
- Cat fur-induced thermal problems
- Dante feeding the computer a ham sandwich while Damion's back was turned
- A transient system board fault (bad solder joint?)
- Some bizarre form of electromagnetic interference
- A problem with the power supply in the computer
- A problem with the electrical system at Casa Dammitt itself
- Canada

Normally I'd be totally in favor of just blaming Canada, but that won't help Damion, and I kinda want to. Evidence suggests that the last batch of Apple geniuses couldn't find anything wrong with the machine, though that could be because they're all a bunch of hipster douchebags. But if it really didn't fail for them, and if the tests they ran were really worth a damn, then that means the problem is situational. I'm really tempted to say that the problem is not the computer, but something at Casa Dammitt itself. The only trouble with that theory is that there's a bunch of other electronic doodads there which work fine (including Tina's computer, which is also a Mac).

I guess it is possible for this particular machine to be especially picky about input voltage variations or line noise. Finding a way to prove this though is the tricky part. One possible test would be for Damion to bring the machine into work and run it there for a while, though a) I'm not sure how picky his boss(es) would be about him bringing a non-work system into the office and b) I get the feeling that these days the only thing he wants to bring to work with him is a club with a spike in it. I guess we'll have to see what the geniuses from the SF Apple store have to say.

I finally decided to upgrade the OS on my laptop. I've been running FreeBSD 6.0 on it for a few years now, and while it still works ok, putting newer software packages has become a bit of a chore, and there are a few bugs which have long since been fixed in newer versions. Since FreeBSD 7.2 was just released, I thought I'd give it a try.

Most things worked ok out of the box, with two exceptions: wifi and accelerated graphics. Actually, that's a bit of a fib: FreeBSD has a native driver for RaLink wifi, and it did work out of the box with my wifi card. But I wanted to use the Windows NDIS driver with Project Evil (the NDIS emulator) so that I could use WPA2 Enterprise security (which I need for work). That gave me a lot of trouble: the Windows driver would crash my laptop. It turns out that this was not a FreeBSD problem though: it was a bug in the Windows driver. The same buggy driver would cause Windows XP to blue-screen too. Fortunately I was able to find a slightly newer version that works correctly. Everything including WPA2 Enterprise security worked great after that.

The graphics problems were not so easy to resolve. The main problem here is that the bulk of the Xorg development is being done on Linux these days, and some of the Xorg drivers need to work in conjunction with additional drivers in the kernel, at least if you want accelerated graphics. But all of the latest Xorg code expects all of the latest Linux driver features, which haven't yet been ported to FreeBSD. My laptop has Intel graphics, and the Intel driver has been modified to use some special kernel feature called "GEM" which FreeBSD doesn't have. That makes life interesting.

I could go on for several pages about what I had to do to sort all this out, but to make a long story short, I had to patch the Intel i810 AGP driver a little and install an older version of the Intel xorg video driver that wasn't quite so insistent about using GEM before I finally got everything to work the way I wanted. Now that I have, it's actually pretty spiffy.

I also decided to give KDE4 a try. It's shiny, but it's a CPU hog by default, which is less than desireable on my laptop's 1Ghz celeron M processor. For one thing, the "DirWatch" feature in kded4 scans your files every couple of seconds. You have to edit a configuration file to increase the polling interval to something more reasonable. Also, KDE4 comes with something called "nepomuk services" enabled by default:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEPOMUK_(framework)

According to that web page, it cost 17 million euros to develop. I'm not sure what it does other than chew up valuable CPU cycles, so one of the first things I did was to turn it off.

While it was more trouble to get graphics support set up that it really should have been, everything else seems to be working pretty well. The wifi works nicely with wpa_supplicant, and I was able to get tethering to work with my Blackberry via bluetooth very easily. And DPMS suspend works on my laptop now, which it never did before (the backlight wouldn't shut off). Sadly, ACPI suspend doesn't work, but then it never did.

I can't wait to find out what horrors await me in FreeBSD 8.

Today has been more than a little strange, even for me.

As I walked out of my building this morning and headed up the block towards Oak street for ye olde carpool pick-up, I was confronted by the sight of a what I'm forced to assume was a homeless man walking towards me, urinating on the sidewalk. Now, I don't mean he was standing on the sidewalk peeing against a wall or something: I mean he was walking along, pretty as you please, with his dick out, as if he was watering the lawn. This was just too outrageous to ignore. I charged at him, firmly intent on drop kicking him into next week, but thought better of it when I decided I didn't want pee all over me. I screamed at him and threatened to call the cops. He was unperturbed by this, but I kept on yelling at him and berating him for behaving like a miserable excuse for a human being. I must have made an impression because he apologized. Whether he meant it or not I can't say.

Later on, I was working in my office when I heard a hissing sound, and I suddenly felt moisture spraying onto my arm. I looked behind me and the only culprit that caught my eye eight away was the fire sprinkler in the ceiling. I stuck my chair against the desk behind me and climbed up to get a closer look, and that's when I realized what had really happened.

Before coming to Wind River, I worked for BSDi. Actually, I worked for what used to be Walnut Creek CD-ROM, which had been bought by BSDi. When Wind River acquired BSDi and we left the old WC CD-ROM offices, I ended up inheriting various unclaimed office tchotchkes that nobody really wanted, but nobody had the heart to throw away either. (Sadly, my favorite of these, a tangled bundle of magtape with a post-it on it that read "FREEBSD BACKUP ARCHIVE," has disappeared.) One of these items was a can of Dole pineapple chunks. Supposedly this can once belonged to Mike Smith, and there was a story of some kind associated with it which I can no longer remember. The can has been sitting on top of a wall-mounted storage cabinet in my office ever since I started working at Wind River. It's been there so long I pretty much phased it out of my conscious mind.

Today, it burst.

When I climbed up on the chair, I saw that the can had bulged and sprung a leak at the bottom. Luckily, most of the fluid that came out ended up on one of the open cabinet doors rather than on the various target boards sitting on the table below it. Some time was spent cleaning up the mess and tossing the now-defunct artifact in the trash. (The "best if used by" date on the can was in 2002.)

In the afternoon, everyone received an e-mail from our illustrious CEO. Apparently the forced one-week furlough last quarter, a cost-cutting measure designed to force people to burn up vacation time, worked so well that they want to do it again next quarter. It seems to me there's something fundamentally wrong somewhere when a company can make money by not having its employees work.

So how was _your_ day?