Yesterday was the last day of href=”http://linuxsymposium.org/”>Ottawa Linux Symposium, and I can’t help comparing it with the href=”http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/usenix04/”>Usenix Annual Technical Conference, which was only a few weeks earlier. The difference in the quality and relevance (at least as far as my interests are concerned) of the papers, the energy of the attendees, and the overall atmosphere of the two conferences were distinctly different. A look at this year’s href=”http://www.finux.org/proceedings”>conference proceedings for

This report of George W. Bush giving two PA boys the finger amused me greatly. Now that’s the way to win the hearts and minds of those swing states voters!

On the 4th of July, Stacey and I took a Boston harbor dinner cruise on Odyssey cruises. We had a lovely, romantic dinner together, followed by the fireworks as seen from the Charles River basin. Oh, and she said yes.

I’m currently at the Marriott Copley Place hotel, giving a kernel tutorial for Usenix, and for the first time ever, the video projector dealt with a 1400×1050 VGA output without my having to doing any futzing. In the past, I’ve always had to adjust down to 1024×768. Hopefully this is a sign of things to come….

I recently got a copy of the Abba Gold DVD. It’s the equivalent of musical cotton candy — lots of very bouncy, catching tunes, with lots of rich, albeit simple harmonies. It was a certain sense of horror thatI found out how much I enjoyed listening to 45 minutes of nothing but 70’s pop music. After listening to the whole DVD a couple of times (I was using it as background music while working), I noticed something interesting about the topics of many of the songs on their Gold album.

A friend recently complained about how it took a full hour to cook (and clean, afterward) a fairly simple dinner consisting of spaghetti, sauce, and meatballs. So it caused me to pay attention to how much time it took to cook meals for myself this weekend. The results were interesting, and reminded me of the time estimates in a how-to plumbing book for a particular job (such as removing an old

After looking at some of the recent debacles in the Debian project, from the revisions in the social contract being interpreted that everything in the Debian distribution has to meet the DFSG guidelines, to the flameage about a non-functioning treasurer for Software in the Public Interest (the legal home of Debian), to the continuing delay in getting Sarge released, I started to wonder if Debian is completely dysfunctional and cannot be saved.

The HIP folks requested that Tero generate a 384-bit DH group for PDA’s with lame CPU’s for which it would take too long to use a 512-bit DH modulus. Oh, when will they ever learn? Heck, a 512-bit modulus was considered a bad idea thirteen years ago in Brian Lamacchia’s Paper.

I finally got around to replacing my battery in my 1990 Toyota Corolla. Sometime a month or two ago, I had noticed that the battery had died, but since that I had recently gotten a new young vixen in my life (a 2004 Lexus ES 330), I had been neglecting my faithful companion for the past 14 years. Anyway, $39.95 and a battery from Cosco later, my Corolla is working again, and for the first time in about five months, I took my poor neglected Corolla out for a spin.

Whee! I’m going to be flying off to San Jose this afternoon!! And I’m going to be there for a whole week, so I should have time to catch up with all of my Bay Area friends that I haven’t seen in far too long.

I’m thinking about going to the Napa Valley this coming weekend, and see if Stirling Winery has more of that really yummy wine that introduced me to.