Thursday October 28, 2004

Congratulations, 2004 Boston Red Sox!

You did it! And the entire New England region is so proud of you. Thank you!

Thursday October 21, 2004

Congratulations, 2004 Boston Red Sox!

As a season ticket holder, I was fortunate enough to see you play at home at Fenway in Games 3, 4, and 5. And while Game 3 was probably the 2nd most painful loss I've been witness to in my lifetime (second only to last year's Game 7, *ugh*), I was there till the finish, in the frigid cold. (After all, no matter how painful... how many playoff games does one get to go to in one's lifetime?)

In the bleachers, I found myself able to stretch out... all the while hoping, praying that you would come back from an over-10-run deficit. Alas, it did not happen and Fenway park emptied in relative silence.

But I can honestly say that I consider myself truly blessed for the opportunity I had to share the drama of Games 4 and 5 with you men and the thousands that turned out at Fenway that night.

Game 4, postponed one day because of rain, was miraclulous. On the verge of being swept in four games by your hated rival, the New York Yankees, you came to the ballpark ready to play. I came consoling myself with a single thought... "any reason they can't win tonight? no" And down to your last three outs, you pulled it together and scratched across a run a against arguably history's best closer: a walk, a stolen base, a base hit. Tie ball game! Then three more incredibly intense innings stretched into the next day's cold early hours before Papi's heroics. Incredible!

Then Game 5, starting in the evening on the same day Game 4 had ended. "Any reason they can't win this game tonight?", I said, "no". We came to the ballpark so very tired from the previous evening's ballgame. But you game us another game for the ages!

After Derek Jeter hit that killer triple down the right field line, giving them a two run lead, we were silent, stunned, all of us. But your pitching and defense prevailed and after an inning of so all 35,000+ of us were right back in it. But you didn't blink, you didn't doubt yourselves for a second. A blast by Papi and another manufactured run on a sacrifice fly by Varitek, and we were headed to extra innings again. Stand up, sit down, stand up, sit down, Go Sox! Into the 14th inning it went....

Then Papi came to the plate with Damon in scoring position and put on THE BEST at-bat I have ever seen. And this I will remember for a VERY long time. Foul ball after foul ball sprayed off, more foul balls, more foul balls, a LONG drive down the right field line... could it be? no, another foul, another foul. And then... a flare, dropped into center field, Damon comes across... and pandemonium in Boston. High-fives and hugs with complete strangers, we all couldn't care less. We felt what I felt... blessed.

So you went back to New York and you did it. Game 6, Bellhorn, Schilling... amazing. And then, last night, Game 7... I'm still stunned. You did it, and now we're going to a World Series at Fenway Park!

It's not over yet. Not by any means. You still have four more games to win. But we'll be there, all 35,000+ of us, cheering. We do believe, and we wish you all the strength and wisdom in the world to keep believing in yourselves.

Thanks, guys.

Monday October 11, 2004

OK, so I got gtkpod working. Pretty good app. Nice and easy to use.

It wasn't too hard to build on Solaris 10, actually, but it didn't exactly work right out of the box either (i.e. not just 'configure; make; make install'). No big deal though. It just needed to be hacked up a little to get it running.

I started by downloading the latest release gtkpod-0.80-2 and found that I also needed to download and build libid3tag. So I grabbed libid3tag-0.15.1b and it built without any changes. Then I started to build gtkpod-0.80-2 and found that I needed to make a few changes, mostly minor.

A couple of the files ('clientserver.c' and 'file.c') make calls to flock() that really oughta be calls to fcntl() for Solaris. And in 'info.c' there's a call to 'df -k -P', where '-P' is supposedly POSIX output format. That extra argument causes problems (and is unnecessary) for Solaris, so I took it out. And in 'misc.c' the function called which() seemed to be causing me some problems (but this could just be a problem with my environment.) Not sure though, so... when in doubt, hack it out.

The only other things I had to do were also probably related to my environment. Couple minor changes in the makefiles: invalid compiler flag, some issues with duplicate/conflicting header files, and needing to add 'libnsl' and 'libsocket' in with the final link. No biggie. After all that was done, I was ready to play.

As I said above, this is a pretty good app. I didn't build it with any AAC support yet (see libmp4v2 though), so I can't listen to my handful of iTunes songs. (Plus there's that whole DRM issue, which I won't go into here.) But I am able to listen to all my MP3's (all ripped from CD's I own.)

Thursday October 07, 2004

Got my iPod working with my Solaris desktop. Very cool.

Sometime around the end of July, the support for 1394 mass storage devices (CD-ROMs, DVD-ROMs, Zipdisks, and devices like the iPod - which is just a 1394 hard drive) was integrated into Solaris 10. I run the latest S10 build on my desktop, of course, so I've got the new Solaris 1394 Mass Storage driver, but most of you will have to wait for the next Solaris Express release (any day now).

The new 'scsa1394' driver implements the Serial Bus Protocol 2 (SBP-2) specification, which allows 1394 mass storages devices, like the iPod, to look and act like any other disk that you're used to using. This driver joins the existing collection of drivers know collectively as the Solaris 1394 Software Framework. The framework provides support for FireWire on SPARC and x86 systems and supports both 1394 digital video (DV) camera devices and 1394 conferencing camera ("webcam") devices, in addition to the new 1394 mass storage devices.

So, anyway, I plug my iPod into one of the FireWire ports on my system (it's immediately recognized after the hotplug), mount the drive, 'cd' and/or 'ls' to see the music files (and all the other hidden tidbits in there) and run xmms to listen to my tunes while I'm in my office at work.

Next step, I figure, is to try to get something like gtkpod working on Solaris 10 so that I can add/remove files from the iPod's database, use my playlists, and have a nicer GUI interface. But it's actually pretty cool as it is. I'll post again, though, when I get it working.

In short though, if you use Solaris and you love your iPod, stay tuned for some really cool new stuff coming to your desktop.

Wednesday October 06, 2004

I can't say enough about how proud I am of my Mom! And now she's published.

The book, called "They Change Their Sky: The Irish in Maine", is a collection of ten essays that present a story of the experiences of Maine's Irish from their first arrival in Maine, through the hey-day of Irish immigration in the mid-19th and early-20th centuries, and concluding with the modern experience. My Mom's essay is called "The Irish Experience in Lewiston, Maine 1850-1880". It is thoroughly researched and a very interesting read. (And if you don't believe me, check this out)

The majority of the material for her essay is based on research she had done as an undergad at Bates College (in Lewiston, ME) and as a grad student at University of Virginia. She actually grew up in Maine, but she's not Irish. She was a history major, though, and (if I do say so myself) she's pretty smart.

The book is being published by the University of Maine Press, so don't expect to rush out and buy the book on amazon.com just yet. But, if you're interested, you can order a copy here. Proceeds from the sale of the book help support the Maine Irish Heritage Center, located in Portland, ME.

Saturday October 02, 2004

I've been a software engineer in the Platform I/O Software group on the East coast for 6+ years. Generally speaking, we do Solaris device drivers and device driver frameworks for mid-sized and (lately) blade servers. It's always interesting work and stressful schedules, but at the same time we're always getting to work on the "bleeding edge" with some of the newest, hottest technologies. Some examples of things I've worked on in my time at Sun:

• Solaris 1394 Software Framework (available since Solaris 8 Update 2)
• PCI Express
  • Jbus-to-PCIE
• InfiniBand
  • Safari-to-InfiniBand HCA driver (will not ship)
  • PCI-over-IB tunneling (will not ship - but demo'd at IB Solutions Conference, Spring 2002)
  • "Gamla" - Mellanox InfiniBridge MT21108 (will not ship)
  • "Tavor" - Mellanox InfiniHost MT23108 (coming soon to Solaris 10!)
  • "Arbel" - Mellanox InfiniHost III Ex MT25208 (stay tuned!)

These days I'm keeping myself pretty busy here at work doing bringup on prototype hardware. There's always something new and exciting to learn about (e.g. AMD64 hardware, PCI-Express, HyperTransport, InfiniBand, etc.)

I came to Sun pretty much directly out of school (M.S. in Computer Science - University of Maryland at College Park & B.S. in Computer and Systems Engineering, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute). And, yes, Sun has had it's ups and downs over the last six years... but I have an excellent manager (ooh! brownie points!) and I can honestly say that I love being able to come in every morning to work on this stuff.

So, with any luck, my blog will give a little taste of what it is that I enjoy so much about my work.