odd links of the day:

Alton Brown on
slashdot

How to cook chicken in lava

earthships in the uk

So far, haven’t accomplished anything this weekend. Which sucks, because
I really needed to. Suppose I should at least buy some groceries and what
not.

Picked up a copy of Guitar Player magazine yesterday with the
cover story of “The 50 Coolest Stompboxes Ever”. I seem to
only own one item on the list. Oddly enough, the Snarling
Dogs Wah/Ring Mod made it.

Hmm, closed a couple of dozen bug reports, and updated about
60 bug reports in total. And got “up2date –undo” working
to some degree. Not a bad day productivity-wise.

Browsing the web isnt showing me any interesting shows
coming up this weekend. 2/3 of Morphine at Cat’s Cradle
could be interesting. And my friends The Finks and
Wafer Thin are playing ps211
saturday. But not much else. Probably all the better since
I have a lot of work to get done.

Plodding though bugs. After lots of profiling, I’ve mostly decided that up2date
isn’t actually all that slow. Turns out it was averaging just under a
second for each package, and just about two and a half second
for each package that was repackaged. Of course, that looks
really slow when your updating 1500 packages. The numbers look
even better without “dev” or “glibc-common” or “kernel-source”
throwing the curve (15-25% of the files on an average system
are in those three packages…)

Left work somewhat early (9:00pm ish…) to head over to
Durham to catch a show at Ringside with badger.
Just your typical tuba/cello/bass/guitar/bass clarinet/moog
improvisation group ;->

Got home and actually played a bit since I was in a
“make (hopefully)interesting improvised noises” mood. Of course,
thats pretty much all I ever do.

I need a good “Reply-To flamewars considered harmful” url.

While attempting to profile this stuff, I managed to create
a profile data file that includes a time delta of “-1” which
of course, breaks the stat generation modules.

Awesome, I cant even profile correctly!

testers are complaining that dist upgrades with up2date are slow.
And they are.

Part of this is new rpm stuff. Enough of it that its
hard to see what is and isnt.

But other than that, I need to make it fast.
Considering it:

– downloads about a gig of data
– downloads that data over ssl
– stats basically every file on the system
– performs somewhere on the order of half a million md5sums
– runs gnupg on about 1000 packages (about a gigs worth)
– gunzip/bunzip2’s about a gig of data
– performs lots and lots of DSA verification of headers
from the db (most of this is turned off, but still)
– cp just about every file on the system about 3 times
(once to a backup, once to put it on the filesystem, once to
build the repackage rpms)
– rebuilds about 1000 packages (this a completely
new unoptimized code path by the way…)
– gzip/bzips about 1000 packages (about a gig)
– solves a dep graph that can consist of about
1500 nodes and somewhere about 30,000 edges

That should just fly by!

The good/bad news is that all my profiling so far points
to rpm just being slow for the bits that don’t fall into
the above. Grumble.

I think I need someone to remind me to do stuff once in a while.
Not because I live a busy live or anything. Just because I’m
lazy and forgetful and occasional forget to do things, like oh,
renew my license plate, or pay bills, etc. You know, details.
I’m pretty bad about picking those things up myself without
any reminders.

Went to the show at Kings.

On the way there, I got pulled over. Apparently my tag
has expired, and I have no insurance. Awesome. Now
I just need to figure out why my insurance company
continues to extract money from my account every
month and get a new tag and all that fun. Oh,
and a traffic court appointment. Awesome.

The fist band up had guitar/based that appeared
to be milled out of aluminum. The speaker enclosures
were aluminum as well. But aside from that, they
weren’t very exciting.

The second band up was “Volta Del Mar”. They
were very very good. A 4 piece, with the drummer
setup front center stage backwards. And the guitarist
and two bass players surrounding him. Both bassists
played six strings and spent most of the time in the
upper registers. It was very mathy, about the closest
comparison would be some of the newer Don Cabalerro
but with two bassist instead of two guitarists. Picked
up their cd.

Utah was pretty cool as well.

Ran into none other than Josh Bradley. Apparently
he is now married with a kid. Talked a bit about
the old days, and exchanged email address and
such. Hadn’t seen Josh in probably three maybe
four years.

On the way home, got pulled over _again_. Awesome.

I am so not an adult.

hmm, got a headache, but the lineup at kings tonight
sounds really interesting. decisions…

Apparently one of the bands playing builds
their instruments from aluminum. Or at least,
they claim to.