10/6

After my last post, i’m not starting to wonder why we don’t just f*cking pack it in.

A bug with mono has gotten me so depressed about the state of things that i’m seriously considering selling my thinkpad and going to live in some hippy commune somewhere.

There seems to be a problem with an NPTL enabled glibc on gentoo that makes all versions of mono after Beta1 freak. The garbage collector sh*ts a break, and brings whatever app is running to a halt. When i first experienced this, i posted to the mono-devel-list here. Although good intentioned, this generated not much more than “find a simple test case” and “get a backtrace”. My foo with glibc threading and garbace collection is not exactly…. existant (like most people’s) so being able to devise a test case for this is pretty out of my league without some hints. As for backtraces, we eventually had a gentoo bug opened and a corresponding ximian bug with plenty of back traces. The ximian bug has seemingly gotten no attention. none.

Now, understandably the bug deals only with a “hobby distro” that we know isn’t well loved by some ximian folks. Why bother when it only affects all those silly script kiddies that bother using a silly thing like gentoo?

The fact of the matter is this is a result of basically one thing: glibc folks deciding that releases aren’t worth while and that distros should just take snapshots at their leisure. People talk about linux not being a good target becomes it’s hard to target, compared to win32, and they couldn’t be more right. We can’t even get a LIBC that is f*cking standard across each distros because the glibc authors can’t be bothered to do releases. I’ve heard that they will be back to making releases again soon. I can only hope this is the case. Regardless the big guys are gonna have a patched to h*ll glibc, so it’s not like it’s gonna matter.

Regradless of this, the likelyhood is gentoo is using a newer glibc/NPTL snapshot than redhat, fedora, suse, whatever. When these guys DO update their glibc/NPTL stuff, they may very well run into the same d*mn problem with the garbage collector. Maybe then this bug will get fixed. I don’t see it happening before then, and that makes me really depressed.

The idealist in me wants to say that the bug will get attention because the mono guys want their project working every where possible, but that idealist is gonna be disappointed.

Mood: pondering why i bother.

Well, it seems that some would have us to believe that gentoo is a wild, uncontrollable distro “without any package management system”.

His *general* point about gentoo being ready for the corporate environment i can partially agree with. we’ve been discussing the issue of stable trees for each release, etc a lot recently on -core to try to make the “moving target” not as moving for server/corporate use. That i can agree with.

But the majority of his post seems to be aimed at slamming Gentoo as “a distribution without a packaging system” and “a horrible distribution as far as maintainability, deployment, security auditing, etc.” For some uses, sure, gentoo is a horrible choice, but it is *not* just a hobby OS. At LWE in NY this spring, we heard from:
1) Microway telling us all their engineers were pushing to use Gentoo instead of their current setup. Engineers working on massive clusters. Not people sitting in basements tinkering.
2) A guy from the Sun Linux division telling us he was using Gentoo on anything he was allowed to.
3) Someone claiming he was using Gentoo as anonymous nodes in a cluster doing NASDAQ sales of some sort.

Maybe my next blog should be what a waste of time Mono is, because java was there before. Stop wasting your time with Mono and start working on the gnome java bindings! (WARNING: don’t you dare try to turn this into a java/mono argument, i was just making a point)

Finally got a ghetto website up for Lago. Fear my bad HTML/CSS skills! I realized that I’d forgotten to plan for a pass button in the GUI, so i’ve been working recently on adding a toolbar with new game, undo, redo, pass, and lord knows what else on it.

Looks like i may (crossing my fingers, knocking on wood, sacrificing a cat) manage to land a full-time job at Stern after all. I’d be really happy, as the job is neat, and it’d let me learn a lot of cool things, as well as get some good experience under my belt.

My roommate mike last night just kinda… made curry. Whenever anybody cooks things around me, it makes me realize how little i know how to cook… take away my waffle iron, and i’m down to about 3 things i really know how to make. depressing.

so last night from 12AM - 9AM, i accumulated 6780 messages in my spam box. i can’t take it any more. the problem is that the spammers have been hitting @peterjohanson.com, that all goes right into my box. what used to be such a nice feature is now torture.

spain is still spain… tomorrow will have been 3 weeks. i can’t wait til august 15th. i may just pee my pants from happiness that day. i mean a real soaker.

With that mental image, i leave you.

so, i was up for the weekend to help my dad with the house. went to my friend noah’s house and was there til 3:30AM playing the new “Thief” game. i only really game whenver i’m hanging out with him, but when i do, i thoroughly enjoy it. anyway, that very morning at 7AM my dad woke me up so we could start working sheetrocking. did doing that for 8 1/2 hours, showered, then immediately left to go eat and then watch a movie from my laptop with my friend amy, who has just now randomly decided that we should not let our old friendship die. i’m pretty happy with this, as she’s a cool chick, none the less there were a few awkward moments when the whole “we haven’t really talked in over a year” thing hit both of us.

I got to stress test my new battery my dad gave me for graduation, which i finally got from him this weekend. WOW. i’d forgotten what it was like to be able to program for a whole 2 hour train ride. on my old battery, i got at most 10 minutes of time. i’m in heaven. was working on backend stuff for GoSharp. i’m still not hot on that name, and i have to come up with something soon, as i’m going to start using CVS for this soon, and have an “updated after any commits” tarball up for people to download and test on.

stacey, not-so-surprisingly, is still in spain. sigh. happy birthday to her, her b’day was on thursday. no need to re-iterate how much i miss her. kinda scary, in a good sort of way.

so it seems my mother is still alive, even though i’ve not talked to her in at least a month, and i can’t seem to call her since her cellphone service seems to have been terminated (due to her not paying for it is my guess). she called my dad to try to get a copy of their old marriage license since she lost her wallet a while ago, and needs to try to get a new green card (she’s a canadian citizen). which reminds me that i still need to try to get the dual citizen stuff going, so i can jump ship if the whole scary draft thing actually turns into a reality. i would be *very* mad to have to leave NYC because of that. very mad.

** Update **: After confering on IRC with some folks i know, the decision is that “GoSharp” is henceforth renamed to “lago” (Or “Lago” or “LaGo”). It is short for “Latexer’s Go” (latexer is the “nick” i use on IRC/for gentoo stuff for those who don’t know) and/or is spanish/italian for “lake”. (not sure how that second part particularly matters, although opello (the guy on IRC who proposed the name) reasoned that ” mono is spanish for monkey, LaGo (latexer’s go) is spanish for lake”). anyway, i really dig the name, so like it or not, it’s here to stay.

So I actually got some work going on GoSharp (suggestions for better names are more than welcome). Mainly just working on the GUI for the board, the rest of the GUI and then the backend are to come soon (hopefully).

So i’ve always loved Quaker Oat’s “Oh’s” cereal, and when digging for info online, i found that Oh’s are a hard to find cereal. Maybe i should be collecting and saving the boxes.

Beware, i’ve been practicing my peach moves.