Author: Paul Tomblin

Another sleepless night

I was having trouble sleeping. I thought it was because I have a sort of “rubbed raw” feeling in my arm pit. I got the same thing last time – because I can’t lift the arm, my arm pit doesn’t dry out properly and so it rubs painfully. But then I realized there was a lot of light coming from my office. And so I went to have a look, and sure enough my Linux box had crashed, frozen on boot, and so therefore the screen saver wasn’t shutting down the monitors properly.

A few days ago I got a little overzealous in removing old kernels, and since then every time the update process has installed new stuff it’s given me a failure message about running lilo. (Yes, I still use lilo rather than grub because when I first installed this system you couldn’t use grub with a software raid and lvm2 – one of these days I’m going to have to reinstall just to correct that and a few other nagging problems)

I realized that if that was the cause of the problem, I was going to have to boot with a live or rescue CD and remount everything, chroot to it, and fix the lilo problems and run the lilo installer command. So the first thing I tried was downloading the “Ubuntu Rescue Remix”, burning a CD with it, and booting with it. I discovered the hard way that the “Rescue Remix” is a i686 kernel, which means I can’t chroot to my amd64 install and expect to run commands. Oops.

Next I started to download the latest Ubuntu CD. Chrome said I had 27 minutes remaining, so while I waited I dug out the previous Ubuntu CD, and booted with that. I had to “apt-get install lvm2” and “apt-get install mdadm”, but afterwards I was able to “mdadm –assemble” both software RAIDs, and mount the lvm2 partitions under /mnt. I chrooted to /mnt, and ran “lilo”. First problem was that the boot drive was specified using /dev/disk/by-id/…., which it didn’t like in the chroot environment, so I changed that to /dev/sda. Then it complained about the “Linux.old”, so I commented that out. With both of those changes made, lilo installed without any further errors, and when I rebooted everything came up fine.

I’m just manually restarting all my nightly backups which normally happen during the time the computer was down, and then I’m going to try to get an hour or two sleep.

Forth? Why Forth?

Had a dream last night, in which the programming language Forth played a big role. Which is a bit of a puzzlement because I’ve never learned to program in Forth. There was a time when Forth was tagged as the next big thing and every computer magazine had articles about it, but that was around the time when commercial software started advertising “written in C for speed” and an interpreted language like Forth didn’t have a chance. I believe Forth became the core of PostScript.

The first thing I remember from the dream is seeing two small computers with a wire connecting their ‘pin 1’s. Somebody asked the Forth guru why they were connected, and I said “I know that, it’s so their clocks are in sync” and I said something about events on rising edges. I have no idea what that’s about – I’ve never done anything that low level. Evidently my dream self has been taking electrical engineering courses.

Later I was talking to the guru in front of three real train tracks, and every time a train went by a single alphanumeric letter above the track lit up. I wonder if that is some dream reference to the famous Tech Model Railway Club, but I really only know about them from the Jargon File. I wonder if they used Forth?

Later the guru was showing me about ports to respond to external events and control things like lights and heat in a house. I distinctly remember a panel showing four room mates and an indicator of whether they were using Forth to control their thermostats or not.

Anyway, it seems odd to me to be dreaming about a programming language I’ve never used, and low level hardware stuff I’ve never done. Not sure if that’s a subconscious reflection of my recent surgery, or trying to do object oriented programming in Perl.

Perl and IDEs

From about 1987 to about 4 or 5 years ago, I did all my software development using vi (and later gvim), ctags, and all the Unix command line tools. But towards the end of my time at Kodak, I got the Eclipse religion, at least as far as doing Java. Sure, I dislike having to move my hands away from the keys to move the cursor around all the time, but the code completion, integrated debugging and all that other good stuff won me over. The ability to click on an existing method call and see the javadoc for the method and to hit F3 and be taken to the actual code was a game changer for me. So much better than ctags. But for non-Java, whether shell scripts at work or perl at home, I still relied on gvim and the other command line tools.

But I’m about to start a huge and long term perl project, a large part of which is trying to learn all I can about an existing open source code base. So I wanted to see if an IDE would give me an advantage in terms of moving around the code I’m trying to learn. I installed the EPIC plugin for Eclipse, and also a dedicated perl IDE called “Padre”, and noodled around on both, and so far I’m forced to conclude that neither of them are as useful in perl as Eclipse is in Java. The biggest missing feature seems to be that F3 gets me the wrong function or method declaration most of the time. I don’t know why, possibly the typing system in perl is too weak for the sort of analysis and introspection that Eclipse does in Java.

So I think I’m going to be back to doing gvim and ctags and find and grep and perldoc and all the other fun stuff.

Moving on, moving up…

I was a little bit annoyed at work this week – they had me rush rush rush to finish something, and when I did they didn’t seem to have anything more for me to do. Ok, if I’m honest with myself, this new subproject they put me on has annoyed me because nobody seemed to want to communicate, and so maybe I wasn’t making the effort I should have to go find something to work on when they didn’t give me something. But still, I was mildly annoyed.

And then out of the blue, an on-line friend popped up on Facebook and said “hey, do you know any perl programmers looking for a job?” Well, I’ve done a fair amount of perl coding for my navaid.com site as well as scripts here and there at Global Crossing and Kodak, although I’m not one what you’d call a “perlmonger” or “perl monk”. As a matter of fact, I’ve been seriously telling people on StackOverflow that if I weren’t so proficient in perl already and didn’t have so much working code written in perl, I would seriously be trying to forget everything I knew about it and learning python instead. So I asked him for more details. But he quoted me an hourly rate that was more than double what I’m currently making. I suddenly remembered that I’m a perl God.

The contract involves learning all there is to know about their business process, and all there is to know about an open source project called “Request Tracker” (aka RT), and seeing how much of their business process I can shoe-horn into RT (using its built in customization hooks and APIs) and how much would require custom coding of separate apps that maybe talk to RT for some parts, and doing the customizing of RT and the custom app coding.

In some ways this job looks like enormous fun and quite a growth experience, but “growth experience” also means “opportunity to fail” so I’m also somewhat scared of this. Not only do I have to become proficient in RT and in corners of the perl world that I’ve never touched before (Mason, anybody), but I’ve got to do my own requirements gathering, project plan, and every other aspect. I’ve got nobody else to blame if things don’t go right. But looking at the sunny side, if I do this right, I’ve got a major successful project on my resume and a happy customer to vouch for me for the next thing that comes along. It’s going to be great!

Anyway, long story short, I just turned in my notice at my current job. No more 3.5 hour return drives to Ithaca every week or two. (I just spent over $1000 on flights, hotels and rental car for a week down at their site for the project kick-off one week info dump, though.)

No good news on the medical front

I had a talk with my shoulder surgeon yesterday. He said my MRI didn’t show any “smoking gun”. There was a little damage where the acromium meets the collar bone. There is also evidence of bone bruising, but I’m not sure how that could have happened or how it could be causing a problem that started 3 months ago. He said that might be the problem, or there might even be referred pain from the neck. He basically said that we need to try a few things to help diagnose the problem, so he injected some cortisone into the AC joint. A few hours later, when the numbing agent wore off, I was treated to some of the worst pain of my life.

I slept on a chair last night because I knew that if I slept on a bed, I’d roll onto that side and make it even worse. It’s still pretty bad this morning, but I’m trying to keep it propped on my chair arm and not move it much. I’m back to using my old Bamboo trackpad instead of a mouse because I use that with my other hand, but it registers things as clicks when I don’t mean to click and doesn’t register when I do want to click, so I don’t like it much.

Anyway, if this cortisone shot is anything like the one I got last summer, I’m hoping to start feeling some relief tomorrow or the next day.

Meanwhile I spent half the night wondering what I’m going to do for fun when I can’t paddle any more.