Thu, 09 Aug 2007

With my college career at RIT coming to an end, I had to say goodbye to Rochester NY last week. My last day in Rochester consisted of open face for lunch, and a tasty Mark's Sloppy Plate for dinner -- with an abundance of ruckus in between.

So last week I moved into a sweet apartment in Watertown, MA. The place is right on Arlington street, and is in a pretty amazing neighborhood. I'm 1 block from a basketball court, 2 blocks from a 24/7 711 (my girlfriend and I have already made multiple 4am slurpee & nacho runs), and a 10 minute bus ride to harvard square.

One of my favorite parts about Watertown is that it is really not chainy at all. Every corner has a ton of mom&pop shops, and I haven't seen a single McDonalds yet. But by far the best part about living here -- RUSSOS!!1.

One of the kids who lived in my last apartment left me with a pretty badass server rack, which I gladly accepted. I still need to order some more shelving and such, but it's great to finally have a central place for all of my puters.


The Office v4.0



posted at: 21:48 | link | Tags: , , | 0 comments

Wed, 06 Jun 2007

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So, long story short, last week I:

  • "Graduated" from RIT with a BS in Computer Science and a minor in Philosophy
  • Moved into a house in downtown ROC
  • Deployed bodhi, the new Fedora Update System that is used to push out updates for Fedora 7. More details on that when I come up for air.
This week I will,
  • Start summer classes.. my last quarter @ RIT. Taking AI and ancient philosophy, along with a couple of online classes.
  • Slay bitches with Python.
  • Rock the fuck out.
  • Unpack.
  • Sleep.



posted at: 04:15 | link | Tags: , , | 0 comments

Wed, 14 Feb 2007

break

So my Thanksgiving break was far from a break. I spent a couple of days last week at Red Hat's westford office before heading back up to RIT to start a new quarter. In my two days in the office I was able to touch base with a bunch of people, and get a bunch of stuff done as well. I had a long discussion with dmalcom about integrating the Fedora Updates System with Beaker/TableCloth. He also gave me a quick rundown on a bunch of the Red Hat QA infrastructure that is currently being used. Ideally we'd like to be able to crunch all package updates through an automated test system before pushing them out to the world. Involvement needed: FedoraTesting.

Later that day I met with jrb and jkeating about getting a package updating system in place for a new Red Hat product that is going out the door very soon. This means that much work will be going into the new UpdatesSystem in the near future, which means I get to dig deeper into the world of TurboGears :)

On thursday I cranked a bunch of code out, but was fairly distracted most of the time by the OLPC laptops that were lying around the office. I must say, it is an absolutely incredible machine. The screen is gorgeous, and it's camera is very impressive. I hung around later at the office for an OLPC hackfest that was going down.

I was busy working on the updates system most of the time, but then later on I started looking into some Python start-up issues, which can be seen by doing: 

	strace python 2>&1 | grep ENOENT
You'll notice a ton of syscalls like the following, which try to open/stat modules in locations that do not exist: 
stat64("/usr/lib/python24.zip/posixpath", 0xbfdb5094) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
PrivoxyWindowOpen("/usr/lib/python24.zip/posixpath.so", O_RDONLY|O_LARGEFILE) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
PrivoxyWindowOpen("/usr/lib/python24.zip/posixpathmodule.so", O_RDONLY|O_LARGEFILE) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
PrivoxyWindowOpen("/usr/lib/python24.zip/posixpath.py", O_RDONLY|O_LARGEFILE) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
PrivoxyWindowOpen("/usr/lib/python24.zip/posixpath.pyc", O_RDONLY|O_LARGEFILE) = -1 ENOENT (N o such file or directory)
stat64("/usr/lib/python2.4/posixpath", 0xbfdb5094) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
PrivoxyWindowOpen("/usr/lib/python2.4/posixpath.so", O_RDONLY|O_LARGEFILE) = -1 ENOENT (No su ch file or directory)
PrivoxyWindowOpen("/usr/lib/python2.4/posixpathmodule.so", O_RDONLY|O_LARGEFILE) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
PrivoxyWindowOpen("/usr/lib/python2.4/posixpath.py", O_RDONLY|O_LARGEFILE) = 5

So it's obvious that modules could exist in multiple locations, but if you are repeatedly going to check a series of directories, such as /usr/lib/python24.zip, wouldn't it be a *bit* smarter to check if they exists first, and then avoid checking there in the future? Doing so would help cut down from the 233+ syscalls python makes while starting up looking for modules. I really don't have any free cycles to try and add some sense into Python, so I really hope someone can beat me to a patch.


TurboGears 1.0b2


I came back home to find the new TurboGears book in my mailbox, which has been extremely informative, aside from the fact that the project has awesome online docs as well. I pushed out the latest TurboGears release, 1.0b2, for FC6 and rawhide yesterday as well.



posted at: 21:12 | link | Tags: , , , , | 0 comments

Mon, 14 Aug 2006

A presidential encounter

So last week, on my way to grab a sandwich before class, I ended up shaking hands with our former president, Bill Clinton. Turns out he was invited by Tom Golisano to check out our new GCCIS building, and to give an invite-only presentation (which I was not fortunate enough to attend).

Aside from the fact that the responses from everyone I told pretty much consisted of "...go wash your hands... now.", it was definitely a great experience.



posted at: 01:08 | link | Tags: | 0 comments