Tuesday July 08, 2008

A Wee Bit O' Celebration

It all started when a friend offered me a spare ticket to the San Francisco Opera. Being a jazz dude, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to hear something new. Last time I went to opera, I was in Moscow and Yeltsin was ruling the country. And last time I wore a sports jacket, I was 40 lbs larger, so I had to buy a new one.

Driving to SF was out of the question due to the Pride Celebration that day. Took the Caltrain. I should have taken the bus from the Caltrain station and not walk, because, as it turned out, loud disco music and uncovered genitalia do not mix well with 17th century costumes and classical singing. I had to reset my brain, the way a perfume shopper resets her nose with a whiff of coffee beans between two different fragrances.

We saw Donizetti's "Lucia di Lammermoor" and Natalie Dessay took my breath away. I had tears in my eyes, like that time I heard Billy Harper play "Priestess" live. Magical.

Celebrations continued with grilled meats and fermented drinks and climaxed with July 4th fireworks in Bellevue, WA, where I was visiting my old friends from college. It was great to see that some folks are not yet affected by the economic downturn. Redmond inhabitants are still keeping up with their Joneses, not letting them have bigger TVs, longer camera lenses, etc. And hey, after a few beers, I, too, felt like there was no tomorrow.

(2008-07-08 10:24:48.0) Permalink

Friday October 26, 2007

HD at home: maybe not yet

In 2002, I visited Microsoft campus for the IEEE 1394 developer conference. It was great to see engineers from Apple, Microsoft, consumer electronics companies share pure passion for technology, with no bias or self-promotion. A hippyish dude from Mitsubishi demoed his baby: a rear-projection HDTV with FireWire I/O and Java-based GUI. Returning back to California, I bought a similar Mitsubishi set and built a decent home theater around it. I also planned to extend my av1394 driver to support video streams in this format, which is slightly different from DV.

Years passed, I minimized my material possessions, the home theater is also gone (it did not turn bad movies into good movies - shocking). Yet I'd like to try out the latest HD technology without spending too much money on outdated-in-one-year crap.

I already have a widescreen Dell 2407 with HDCP support. My computer is not up to the task though: old Athlon 64, weak video card. With Socket 754 on the mobo, I can't even upgrade to a faster single core, let alone a dual core, which is pretty much a must for smooth hi-def experience. That means I need to build a new system. I used newegg.com to estimate the cost:

Gigabyte P35-based m/b	$100
Intel Core 2 Duo E6750	$200
2GB DDR2 SDRAM	$65
ASUS GeForce 8500GT 512MB HDCP Ready	$80
500GB SATA disk	$120
Case, power supply, etc	$170
Pioneer BDC-2202 Blu-ray/DVD/CD drive	$300
CyberLink PowerDVD software	$70

Plus tax and shipping, comes down to a grand total of about $1200. Quite a bit of dough, just for wows. I will have to upgrade eventually, but my old box still has some steam. Standalone Blu-ray player is about $400, but I'm hesitant to go down that road again.

I also suspect that once hooked on HD, I will want to upgrade my cable subscription, too, and that's more money down the drain. I guess for now, I'll just buy $10 worth of beer and pay a visit to a less parsimonious friend.

(2007-10-26 08:46:17.0) Permalink Comments [0]

Sunday October 21, 2007

Too much code review?

Reportedly, gangs of geeks, disguised in bifocals and armed with sharp pencils, are breaking into various properties and furiously inspect code, sometimes all night long. I'm speculating here, but it could be those Google dudes getting out of control... Stuff like this just makes me sick. And angry. Then sick again.

Seen on Rengstorff Ave, Mountain View, CA

(2007-10-21 17:26:02.0) Permalink Comments [2]

Monday September 24, 2007

CPUs and Power Savings

Last week I went to San Francisco to have my fingerprints taken. The government office at 250 Broadway is a hole in the wall on the outside, and a remodeled warehouse on the inside, about 10000 sq ft. There are eight stations equipped with inkless fingerprint scanners, Samsung LCDs and what seem like generic PCs. Each finger is scanned at least once, its image appears on the screen and, before proceeding to next finger, the worker has to wait several seconds while the computer analyzes it.

My mind wandered about how much energy it takes to run an office like this and what role computers play in it. CPU vendors like to brag about performance per watt, but things might look different in the bigger scheme. In this case, if CPUs were to analyze images faster, the office performance measured in "people per day" would increase. Even if faster CPUs were more power-hungry, their contribution into the total office power consumption would be negligible.

Say, 50 watts per CPU increase is: 8 PCs * 50 W * 8 hours = 3200 Wh
30 * 50W fluorescent bulbs to light the office * 8 hours = 12000 Wh

Add air conditioning and you get the picture. The "people per watt" metric would still improve. Though this is hugely simplified, it illustrates the importance of the holistic approach.

Anyway, this silly stuff kept me occupied while waiting in line, in addition to reverse engineering fellow immigrants' life stories from their looks (and sometimes smells). As of last week, I'm in The System and, what, I have to wear gloves now? Darn.

(2007-09-24 16:20:38.0) Permalink

Wednesday July 18, 2007

Bug Clicker 0.1

"... and even if he's a lazy man,
and the Dude was most certainly that,
quite possibly the laziest in Los Angeles County,
which would place him high in the running for laziest worldwide ..."

I have to frequently copy bug IDs from plain text emails to the Bugster web interface. Really wears me down. I even think my wrist is growing one of those tunnels named after military personnel. So I decided to sit down and do something about it. Because I was already sitting, half of the job had been accomplished, and that gave me strength.

I wrote a Firefox+Thunderbird extension that allows the following:

- double-click on a bug ID opens its web page
- select text and open all bug IDs from that selection
- open external bug pages (opensolaris.org) and internal (monaco)
- do all the above with ARC cases as well

If you want to give it a try, save the below file and install it via Tools>Extensions/Addons dialog (or just click in Firefox). Compatible with Thunderbird and Firefox versions 1.5 - 2.0.0.*.

Install Bug Clicker 0.1

Screenshots:

(2007-07-18 22:13:03.0) Permalink

Monday June 13, 2005

AT&C0

My name is Artem Kachitchkine², I'm an engineer in the Operating Platforms Group. Since I joined Sun a few years ago (virtually straight out of college) I've been working on a number of I/O related projects. I started by fixing bugs in Solaris serial and parallel port drivers, then participated in the bringup of the Sun Blade workstation series. After that, I moved into the USB land and later took ownership of the 1394 (FireWire) framework in Solaris, during which I wrote av1394(7D) and scsa1394(7D) drivers and introduced framework extensions to support new drivers. I was also part of the team that ported Solaris Fibre Channel stack aka Leadville to x64 platforms. Lately I've been busy working on various aspects of mass storage and removable media management in Solaris.
Update Oct 2007: After finishing Tamarack and starting WWAN OpenSolaris projects, I joined the networking group and now contributing to Brussels.

¹AT&C0 is the Hayes modem command that means "assume data carrier is present". I often feel that way during blogging, i.e. assuming someone is listening.
² Do not attempt to pronounce or memorize my last name, it will hurt and I don't want to be liable.

(2005-06-13 16:33:46.0) Permalink Comments [8]