Travels with FatCatAir

Hawk!

The house I live in is a passive solar house and so it has a lot of glass on the south side. It is quite common for birds to smack into the windows. So common in fact that our cats have been trained to the the sound. The cats will be laying around sleeping inside and suddenly there is a "wham" on the glass. The cats are immediately awake and running to the basement to zip out the cat door so the can get the bird on the rebound. It is somewhat amazing they figured this out in their little cat brains. Anyway the birds are usually LBB's or LGB's with a cardianl once in a while.

Last night we were sitting at dinner and all of the sudden I sig a big streak of white and wham! I don't know what it was but it was much bigger than the usual bird. My wife runs outside to try and stop the cats and my niece looks out the window and see that the bird is clinging to the rose bush below the window with our cat Sweeny just below her. At this point my wife see the bird and says "It's a hawk!". Just then the bird regains it senses enough to fly about 50 feet to a low branch. Sweeny chases after sure that she is going to be famous as the first cat to catch a hawk instead of vice versa.

I went and saw that the hawk (a little one about the size of a dove) is sitting on this branch breathing real hard. It's left wing looks kind of weird and I'm thinking maybe it broke it. I'm hoping that isn't the case since we'd have to catch it for the wildlife rehabilitators and it maybe little but that beak and those talons look pretty nasty. My wife brings the camera and gets a couple of photos.
 
Unfortunately is was getting dark so the photos aren't the greatest. In this one you can almost see how hard the hawk was breathing.


Here you can see how it was holding the left wing kind of funny so I thought maybe it broke it.

After another few minutes the hawk pulled its wing in normally and sat there for a bit longer. The it flew off  30 feet or so to a much higher tree, safely away from the cats, much to Sweeny's disappointment.

Apr 04 2006, 09:05:30 AM EDT Permalink

Gazillion!

So this past weekend I finally finished work on an outdoor project. If you happened to read my About entry you'd know that my wife and I have a big party every year. Since I built my hangar back in 2001 it has been held in the hangar. One of the problems is that even though the hangar is pretty large (60x40) the band we have can overpower the room. So I wanted to build a stage outside for them to play on. My wife didn't want it to be gazebo like so during the planning stages I'd been calling it a pavillion. However it wasn't long before I combined the names and crowned it the "Gazillion".

For this years party I only managed to get the base structure done and the eight main roof rafters. It was good enough for the band. Since then I'd been working on it occasionally but I made a big push the last two weeks. You can see the results here



and here. The base of the building is 24x24 with a 4x24 cantilevered platform on the pond side. It still needs to be stained but I'm pretty pleased with it.



Oct 28 2005, 12:24:27 PM EDT Permalink

Cream - better late than never

I just got back from an extravagence, a day trip to NYC in order to see a reunion concert of Cream. They had played four concerts back in May at the Albert Hall and the DVD of those shows came out recently. I got a copy of the DVD in early October and found that they were now going to do three shows at Madison Square Garden on October 24-26. I've seen Clapton quite a few times (including the infamous West Palm Beach rainout) but I never expected I'd get a chance to see a Cream reunion.

Naturally the shows were all sold out. So I was forced to go to a "ticket broker".  I have often bought tickets the day of the show from people stuck with extra tickets or amateur scalpers but this didn't seem like a good show to expect this to work out. ( A friend of mine and I usually rate shows as 5 dollar shows or 10 dollar shows, etc. based on what we hope we can get in for. When the Stones played in Raleigh in around '95 we rated it as a $5 show. I was happy to get in for that until I found that Mark managed to get someone to give him a ticket).

So I investigated the online brokers and the tickets and prices they had available. For only $4000 I could have a second row seat! I think not. After much debating and looking at seating charts ( the Garden has a great chart that lets you see the view from the section you are in based on how the event is set up) my wife and I decided on section 310. Now the only worry was if the tickets showed up and if they were legitimate. I was talking with my younger brother Dave about how much we had to pay for these seat and he reminded me of when he went to the Masters and bought a scalped practice round ticket for $175 and then the day was cancelled because of rain and he had a useless ticket. Even though the tickets we were getting were more expensive I was feeling better about it.

We flew into NYC around noon and expected to spend the afternoon at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. When we got there we found that it was closed on Mondays! So much for that plan. So we mostly just wandered around. We stopped by the Garden to see where exactly we had to go in and found that they were already selling programs and other paraphrenalia. So we got our stuff then instead of having to carry it around later. If the tickets turned out to be fake we could at least pretend we got in.

Show  time was 8pm. In order to make it seem like the old days it didn't start on time. However it wasn't as bad as it used to be, where you might have the concert start an hour or more late and have interminable stage changes, they only kept us waiting for half an hour.  They started out with "I'm so Glad". As soon as the lights went out the smells of the '60s filled the place. Unlike the 60's it only lasted a couple of songs. Apparently the potency is strong enough now that you don't need to keep them burning all concert long. Either that or it's too expensive. One thing that was funny was the guy sitting just in front of me lit up and the guy two seats over leaned over and told him to stop or he'd call security. The 60's are surely dead. :-)

I had been saying to my wife before the concert that I hoped that they added "Tales of Brave Ulysses" to the set list. Sure enough they played it! After it was over Clapton noted that it was the first time it have ever been played live. I'm (so) glad they picked up on my mental vibrations.

The show was just great.  Except for the addition of "Tales ..." the set list was identical to that on the DVD, down to Ginger Baker's joke about Pressed Rat and Warthog re-opening their shop, so you can get a good idea of what it was like by checking it out.

Oct 26 2005, 04:30:31 PM EDT Permalink

Blogging Add-On for StarOffice

Oct 13 2005, 10:38:12 AM EDT Permalink

Obviously...

So I was catching up on reading the copies of New Scientist that piled up while I was away in Russia and I came across this snippet that just killed me.

"It has been established beyond doubt that the placebo-controlled, randomised controlled trial is not a fitting research tool with which to test homeopathy."  A spokesman for The Society of Homeopaths on a study in The Lancet.

I guess it should have been obvious all along that if  water is intelligent enough to remember what it has been diluted with that it would be devious enough to forget if someone is watching.
Sep 30 2005, 12:10:46 PM EDT Permalink

Russia - the trip home

Well I got up plenty early for the trip to the airport. The driver showed up on time at 6:30 and the traffic was a breeze. We got there in less than a 1/2 an hour. We had to go thru security in order to get into the lobby. At this time of the day it was pretty quick. Then I went to the Pulkovo ticket agent. Was I surprised to find out I didn't have a ticket? All they could show me was that the ticket was cancelled. Couldn't tell me why, couldn't tell if my e-tickets for the next 2 legs (British Airways and American) were ok either. I had to buy a new ticket. This is going to quite an interesting expense report.

They won't let me in to customs and check-in until 2 hours before the flight so I have to wait in the lobby for 15 minutes. Customs was a breeze and I went to the checkin where I hoped to check my suitcase all the way to Raleigh. For some reason they couldn't do it. They acted like that they needed a paper ticket to do it. So I'm going to have to re-check the bag in Hanover. I have a 65 minute layover in Germany so it seems like it will be ok.

We get to Hanover a little late. So now I have 60 minutes. Then they do something I've never seen. They make the people in the front of the plane sit while they let the people at the back of the plane off first, of course I'm in the front. I finally get off and then we are stuck standing in the jetway. After 15 minutes I finally get out of the jetway to see that we are in a long line to have passports checked. By the time I get thru the line I'm down to 25 minutes. I'm already wondering if I'll be staying in Hanover tonight or London. I race downstairs to get my bag. At least after waiting in the line the bag is right there. I grab it to go to the BA checkin. Oh no I have to go thru customs. The must realize I'm in a hurry so they decide to search my luggage. I've never had my luggage searched before. I have to go into another room and empty the bag out while the look at the stuff. This actually doesn't take long and I'm off to upstairs to try and check in. I find a BA agent that finds me reservation and calls ahead to the gate. I get to the gate and the agent already has me checked in and both boarding passes. The suitcase gets checked and I'm off to the real gate. I get there with minutes to spare. A big sigh of relief when I'm on this plane. It was all downhill from there. It's nice to be back home. Sep 18 2005, 09:26:55 PM EDT Permalink

Russia - Day 13

Well the trip is coming to and end. Today will be the last day at the office. I go in early because I want to change the time of m ride tomorrow and I want to double check that the flights are ok. I find the my flight on Pulkovo from here to Hanover I have no real ticket and no mention of an E-ticket. This makes me nervous. After a couple of hours one of the admins here get thru to the airline and they say no problem just get to the airport a little early and a ticket will be issued. I sure hope these are famous last words. I'm leaving for the airport 3 hours early so hopefully that is early enough for the ticket and customs.

Philip and I make some good progress on the 1.4.2 port of the JVM to Windows amd64. We find several bugs, one that was in Tiger (5.0) and was fixed in Mustang (6.0). I've to check to see if it got missed on the backport or if we just we're looking at FCS sources of Tiger. The last bug we found was Windows C++ compiler bug. The particular code on Tiger was re-organized and so the bug doesn't show up, at least not that we've found.

One last trip on the metro and the final walk back to the apartment. It was really getting cold tonight and it started to rain again. I think I'm getting out of town just before the weather get colder than I want to see.

It has been an interesting adventure. If I get the chance to come back I'd definitely do it. I think I'd like to study a little Russian before I did though. If I knew as much Russian as I know Spanish things would have been easier. Also I'd figure out how to get in a side trip to Moscow for a few days. Overall it was great to meet all the people working on Java here I hope they got something out of the trip too. Sep 18 2005, 02:49:27 PM EDT Permalink

Russia - Day 12

Well I'm in a much better mood today. I guess I'm over the great camera debacle. Today I get to be tourist again and visit Pushkin and the Summer Palace. It probably doesn't hurt that I'll be going home soon too.

I spent the most of the morning making notes for giving a talk about the new client compiler's register allocator tomorrow. It'll probably be ok. The register allocator is a linear scan allocator. I really don't see what makes this style something new (circa 1998) it seems very much like what I remember the Bliss-11 compiler did and what my copy of that allocator did for a Pascal compiler I worked on in the early 80's.  My memory could be faulty though (ok no doubt there) so it made me want to see if I could find a copy of the book on the Bliss-11 compiler, "The Design of an Optimizing Compiler". The book has been out of print for ages. Looking on Amazon brings a surprise, people want around $80 for it! Apparently it is a collectors item now. I think I'll have to check the library at NC State. I realize that in the client compiler the way the intervals are computed is much different than the Bliss-11 compiler as the client compiler requires a data flow pass and the Bliss-11 compiler took advantage of the language which generated control flow graphs with very simple shapes, but I don't think interval calculation is really the heart of the register allocation algorithm though.

At 1pm I leave to go for the tour. I tried another 2nd hand camera store on the way, still no luck, oh well. I'm way too early at the pickup point so I have to hang out watching the crowds on Nevsky until the bus shows up. It starts to rain (the weather is cool and sucky today). The bus is there so I go and wait inside it. There are two women, a mother and daughter from Boston already there. The daughter is going to school in Siberia and the mother is visiting.

The time to leave finally arrives and Olga our tour guide arrives and we're off to Pushkin. We actually end up leaving the city the same way I came in from the airport and I actually recognize parts of it. We actually drive across the bridge I cross every day going to the metro and Olga explains that it used to be a drawbridge and that the chains are now decoration. I've been wondering about that for days. I really should have gotten a picture of this bridge. Actually I might have if I still had my camera working. Maybe tomorrow on the way to work.

It takes quite a while to get to Pushkin even though it isn't really that far, maybe 20-25km. The traffic is pretty awful. We go by the airport and it takes at least 45 minutes from where I'm staying. I think I ought to get picked up earlier on Saturday just to be safe. On the drive Olga never stops talking for a minute. I remember why Gretchen and I don't do tours often and usually go on our own. We might not learn as much but this was too much for me.

We finally get to the palace. There is no mistaking it for a palace. From the entrance it is just huge.



 Back in NC is the Biltmore House. According to the propaganda back home it is the largest private residence in the U.S. It really shows the difference between the house of a robber baron and an emperor. I'm going to have to think of it as the Biltmore Shack from now on.

Olga takes us into the palace and  the first stop is the obligatory gift shop. Then we have to dawn these slippers to go over our shoes. They look pretty silly. Another picture I should have taken but didn't. The slippers are to protect the floors upstairs. The floors upstairs are inlaid hardwood. With these slippers we can certainly go slip sliding away on the polished floors. I'm sure it would be frowned upon.

Not surprisingly Olga continues the constant historical saga. I tell my tour-mates that there is going to be a test at the end of this so they better be paying attention.  The daughter isn't scared but the mother is. We go thru a lot of very impressive rooms. We can take pictures in any of them until we reach the Amber Room. The main reason I'm here is that my wife says I have to see this room. Actually I think it is kind of ugly.

It clearly took a lot of work to make the panels but for all the fuss you'd think it'd knock your socks of and my slippers didn't even get loose. I think it is one of those things where it is hard to live up to the reputation. The room is famous in part because the Nazi's stole the panels during the war and the Soviets spent years trying to find them and recover them. They gave up in the 70's and decided to replicate them instead. The replication was finished 2 years ago. It seems to me that the history of the room is a big part of the reputation.

We finished the tour of the inside (which was actually quite short). We go outside and we are told was can explore the garden area on our own. [ Yeah no narration! ]
Since the weather is kind of cold and threatening rain Olga figures that a half an hour will do. I can say after the fact that this was way too short. I wish I had maybe 2 hours to wander around the grounds. The landscaping and the other building are pretty spectacular.  The weather does suck though and it rains pretty hard. Since I don't have rain-gear I have to hide out under trees and only get a little wet.

Not too surprisingly I get back to the pre-arranged meeting place last. I'm greeted by Olga saying "Now that we're all here we can go back to the coach". I don't feel slightly guilty at all. The normal tour runs 6 hours and at this rate we'll be back in 4.

The trip back is the same way we went in. Fortunately there is no narrative [or test :-) ]. The traffic is even worse though. When we get back into the city we get in this line of traffic that is going just nowhere. The driver decides to turn left into a side street to avoid the line of traffic. He just turns left right in front of the oncoming traffic and makes them come to a halt so we can take the side street. I say "If that isn't Boston driving I've never seen it!". The two women get a good laugh out of that.

Taking the side street helped some but the traffic really just is horrendous. We eventually get to a street west of where we need to be on Nevsky and are waiting in this huge line of traffic trying to get on Nevsky. It is just going nowhere. After 5-10 minutes we abandon Olga and the driver. They might still be there... Sep 16 2005, 02:30:38 PM EDT Permalink

Russia - Day 11

It's cold today, probably in the high 40's. My plan to stay in last night and give my hip a rest seemed like it worked when I first got up but halfway to the metro station I knew I should have taken an ibuprofen. I'm sure once I get to the office it'll be fine. The ride on the metro is uneventful, I'm not complaining.

Today will be the last presentation I had prepared before I got here. Nikolay wants me to do one last one on the client compiler. I haven't really worked on the client compiler at all. The client compiler is getting a new register allocator and the work is derived from a collaboration with the University of Linz and Sun. The allocator was done as part of a Master's Thesis. I read the thesis over the weekend so I now know a lot more about c1 than I ever did so I probably could come up with something summarizing what I read. We'll see.

Today I got to participate in two interviews. One with a guy who already works for Sun, Igor, and the other an outside candidate. One thing that is very different from what I'm used to is that it seems common here to give the interviewee a problem to solve and write some small amount of code. I know sometimes that happens back home but I've never done it and its never happened to me. One of the things about all the candidates, in fact everyone I've met so far, they are all very smart. I think everyone has a phD. I kind of feel out of place with only a MS. Anyway both interviews go ok. The outside candidate doesn't speak the best english but we don't have much trouble communicating. A question I like to ask is "what is the hardest bug you've ever found?". His answer was pretty interesting and involved a real time scheduler on a submarine. The bug of course only showed up on the sub and never back at the lab. Nothing out of the ordinary there. It was a good answer to the question and was certainly a difficult bug to find. Runtime bugs in the JVM are often very similar in their subtlety.

Philip and I work on the amd64 port of 1.4.2 to windows. We actually made some progress today. My debugging and programming experience on windows is pretty limited so things go far slower than if we were working on a platform I'm comforatble with. We finally figure out that the problem is that implicit NULL handling isn't working.

The JVM, the compilers at least, typically don't bother to check Java object pointers for NULL before using them. Since NPE are rare doing an actual check is basically a waste of time. Instead since memory access to the first page of memory are not allowed we just let the reference fault. Then in the signal/exception handler we cause the NPE to be generated.

For some reason when we get the fault the exception handler isn't being invoked and the program just terminates. Eventually we discover that some code wasn't ported correctly and the wrong kind of handler is installed. Once we fix that things work a bit better. The test program, Java 2D Demo, runs a whole lot better. Still not perfect but the next problem looks like it might be in native awt code and not our fault. I think we should run some other tests like specJVM98 which will give a better idea of how well the JVM itself is working.

I leave the office for the metro pretty late, about 9:45. At least the metro will probably be not so crowded and I'll get a seat the whole trip. At the platform it looks like I'm going to get another exciting time. There are two guys arguing quite loudly. I, of course, have know idea what is going on but the people around me seem to think it is kind of funny. At first it looks like the one guy doing most of the yelling is trying to leave like he's afraid of the other one but when the other guy turns away and it seems that it's over that the loud guy decides maybe that guy isn't so tough and comes back. By the time the train pulls up and the rest of us get on they're fighting. People get off the train to see what the commotion is. I'm happy when the train pulls out and we get away from it.

I don't get back to the apartment until close till past 10:30 so I don't think I'm going out for dinner today. Looks like another night working on the food in the fridge.

Sep 16 2005, 04:11:29 AM EDT Permalink

Russia - Day 10

Well I spent an hour and half today walking up and down Nevsky investigating photo shops. No sign of my lens in the 2nd hand shops and no real replacement either. Oh well I'll get a replacement when I get home.

I've decided to take Thursday off and go on the tour of Pushkin and the Summer Palace. I've come to far and not see it. Even though I'm paranoid of borrowing Nikolay's camera I'm going to take him up on his offer.

Today at the office is another presentation. This time it is on exception handling in the JVM. This is the shortest set of slides I prepared only 19 of them. The conference room gets scheduled for two hours. I don't have quite the audience as before as it is scheduled for much earlier.

I think the material today is actually a lot simpler than yesterday's deoptimization talk. The processing of exceptions is sort of arcane and somewhat convoluted but it isn't that difficult and I think at some level it is much more familiar territory than deoptimization.

There are lots more questions today. So each slide takes longer than I would have guessed. We actually spend almost 3 hours in the room.  I think this was probably the best received on of the bunch. Only one more presentation to do.

So today on the metro was interesting. Up until this point the metro is a lot different than my impression of American subways. Now my viewpoint of our subways is mostly from TV/movies because living in where I do in North Carolina mass transit would be driving your car to Catholic church, except most people are Baptists.

 Anyway for the first time today on both the ride to and from work there were people selling things on the train. In the morning a woman was selling pens and a guy was selling CDs or DVDs it was hard to tell. Tonight a woman got on and started to sell magazines.

Also on tonight's ride, to make it even more convergent,  there was a drunk passed-out/sleeping on one of the benches. At one of the stops some men got on that pushed him mostly off the bench. I had the impression they just wanted him to do something so they could beat the crap out of him. Fortunately nothing came of it. All that seemed to be missing was a roving band of teenage punks and I might have thought I was in an episode of NYPD Blue or something. [Actually the cars are far cleaner and virtually no graffiti so the comparison isn't really fair. ]

I got home kind of late today and I've been doing a lot of walking and my left hip has started to act up. I broke my hip 14 years ago and when it gets annoyed now it makes my foot hurt. So rather than go out walking again for dinner I've decided to eat in and just read (and write this).

This is actually probably a good thing for another reason. The apartment I'm staying in is a serviced apartment so they are bringing food in every so often. I think there must be a pre-determined schedule and I'm obviously not holding up my end of the bargain (except for the diet coke). If I don't eat more of the food they might run out of places to put it. So tonight I'll put a very small dent in it... Sep 14 2005, 06:58:20 AM EDT Permalink

Russia - Day 8

I was in a pretty good mood last night and really looking forward to more great things. Well what a difference 24 hours makes.

Today one a**hole really ruined the day and didn't do much for the rest of the trip.
I went back to the Spilt Blood  cathedral again because the little tourist shops set up nearby  were the only place I found that had an english version of a Russian cookbook. My wife made it clear I needed to come back with one. A pickpocket there cost me the lens on my Digital Rebel. I know just where it happened too, right as I left the cathedral and was making my way back to Nevsky.

 It makes me angry that I didn't realize it immediately because it was the first time any one has come up and bothered me. In this case this guy grabbed my arm and tried to get me to buy the free english newspaper St. Petersburg Times. He kept it up for a bit before he quit. I'm sure once he had the lens that was good enough for him and off he went.

I realized the lens was missing by the time I got to Nevsky. I knew it was a waste to see if I could find him and it was. It is especially bad since I don't have another lens with me but I don't have the cover for the camera body either. I've fashioned one out of a piece of black plastic garbage bag for now. I sure hope the sensor doesn't get damaged. I might try and see if I can get another lens while I'm here otherwise my picture taking is over and done with.

With the loss of my camera lens all the rest of the sight seeing I had planned for today just sort of evaporated. I had to get the camera back to the apartment for fear of damaging it and now all the fun I've been having has pretty much gone too. I guess I'll spend the rest of the day reading and hopefully I'll be in a better mood tomorrow.  Sep 12 2005, 01:09:51 PM EDT Permalink

Russia - Day 7 (Weekend as tourist)

Well today is Saturday and I'm on my own. I'm hoping to figure out how to visit the Summer Palace and the Amber Room but today the goal is to see the Winter Palace and he Hermitage. I mapped out a big circular route that will take me past Michael's Castle, the Cathedral of Our Saviour of the Spilt Blood and the Eternal Flame before heading to the Hermitage and the Winter Palace.

Michael's Palace was ok. The cathedral though is one of the reasons to come to Russia. Nothing like this back home!  A really beautiful and ornate building.


A little further on and I get to the grounds of the Hermitage and the palace. I started with the Hermitage. This was just tremendous. When I first went to enter I got turned back because I had my backpack. So I had to check it. Because I didn't see anyone else with cameras entering and my earlier experience I leave my camera in the backpack. After about 45 minutes on the first floor I see that camera are allowed so I decide to go back for mine. The downside is that check room is on the wrong side of the ticket takers. If I was back home I'd have just begged to go get my camera and come right back in. With the language problem no such luck here. So I have to buy a second ticket (350 rbl). It is still well worth it. Way worth it. I can see that I'm going to figure out how to come back again so my wife can come see this place.

I spent 5 hours walking thru the museum. I just can't emphasize enough what a great place it is. I'm really sorry Gretchen isn't here too since she's the artist and can appreciate it way more than me.

After I leave the museum I have to decide what to do. I don't have enough time to visit the Palace next door so I decide to walk across the bridge of the Neva and see the Egyptian sphinxes they have on the far side. They were brought back from Thebes in the early 1800's. I was kind of disappointed in them when I saw them. I guess I was expecting them to be a lot larger.



By now it is getting kind of late and I'm getting cold. I didn't bring a jacket with me today as when I left it was kind of cool but considering it was 9:30 and it was sunny I expected it to warm up. It never really got much warmer and it was kind of windy so it was definitely cool. Not intolerable or anything but it certainly would have been nice to have a jacket. The funny thing is I'm like the only one in a t-shirt all day. It's kind of odd for the North Carolina guy to be wearing a t-shirt and all the Russians have on a jacket or sweater.  Sep 12 2005, 09:48:54 AM EDT Permalink

Russia - Day 6

Things have definitely settled into a routine. I actually met some other Sun engineers at breakfast this morning. They work on NetBeans and have been here for a while but today is their last day so they're taking the day to be tourist. I'm looking forward to doing that tomorrow.

The office is settling into a regular routine. The big improvement is that my iButton finally works for the office I'm sharing with Nikolay and the rest. I feel like I'm really part of the crowd if only I knew the language. Oh well, maybe next time.

The oddest thing was that James Gosling was touring the office today so I actually met him for the first time. I certainly never would have expected to have it happen in Russia. They're going to have an all hands meeting today. I don't know if I'll make it or not. I expect it'll mostly be in Russian so I'm not sure there will be much point.

I got to continue working on problems in the backport of 1.4.2 to the amd64 platform. I took advantge of that to show the other engineers in the office some of my debugging techniques. It was kind of limitied since the problem was relatively simple so it didn't take much debugging. I did get to explain some more VM internals though so it was a little more beneficial.

The all hands gets going and it is somewhere nearby and real loud. It sort of makes me miss the broken air conditioner. I never talked about that air conditioner. The room we're in has it's own air conditioner. Sort of like a window unit but not in a window. Well every so often it makes this awful buzzing racket. At which point we'd have to turn it off for a bit. Then after a while it gets too hot so it gets turned back on. Then in 20 minutes or so the buzz comes back and the cycle repeat. They had already worked on at least once this week but it still did the noise. Well this morning they worked on it again and seemed to really fix it. Now with the noise from the all hands I sort of miss it...

Sep 12 2005, 03:46:11 AM EDT Permalink

Russia - Day 5

Well as predicted it was very quiet at the office today. Everyone is off at the Java Developer's conference. Nikolay is giving a presentation of JVM scalability and what the Java programmer can do to help out. I'm back to my usual looking at bugs. I'm helping fix some problems in the backport of the 1.4.2 JVM to solaris amd64.

This actually keeps me so busy I don't leave the office until almost 9:30. Now I'm so late that I go straight home because I'm expecting a call from my wife at around 11pm. She never calls. Oh well, I go to bed.

At about 1:30am I'm awakened by what seems to be a phone ringing. Some people are light sleepers and other heavy sleepers. Me, I'm a comatose sleeper. I can sleep thru almost anything, I slept thru Hurricane Fran. Who knows how long the phone was ringing. I get up and answer the phone. No one there. Hmm it's still ringing it must be the phone for the door. Now I'm seriously thinking maybe it wasn't such a good idea to post that picture after all. :-)  I answer the phone and no one seems to be there or if they are I can't make it out.

I hang it up and start to go back to bed. It rings again. This time there is someone on the line. They say in a low (possibly drunk) voice "It's Dmitri and I'm lost". I momentarily think I should answer "Dmitiri? Dmitri's not here", but I'm sure he won't get the joke. Instead I tell him "Come back tomorrow" and leave the phone off the hook.

It takes forever to get back to sleep. Sep 12 2005, 03:44:13 AM EDT Permalink

Russia - Day 4

Well things are getting a little routine today. I still haven't been doing so well at the restaurants (pectopah) but I'm getting there. I've been studying my old college russian textbook just to practice reading I don't expect to be able to learn much of significance but I'd like to be able to read most anything without having to sound it out in my head before I go. I noticed on the metro today and on the walk home that there has been a marked improvement so maybe this is doable.

Today I gave another presentation on the JVM. This time it was one I had prepared on stack walking. So at least I wouldn't have to wing it. The funny part was the room that Nikolay reserved was one he didn't know where was located. So we had this whole line of people going from floor to floor trying various conference rooms to see if it was the right one. We are finally told where it was and get there only to find that no one has a key that will  open the door. (They are real big on those little iButtons as keys around here).  Fortunately someone across the hall lets us in.  The only hiccup then is that there is no projector for my laptop. Fortunately the room and table is small enough everyone can read my laptop screen.

Tomorrow is some Java Developer conference in town. James Gosling is going to be here. Well not here at the office here, St. Petersburg here. I'm not sure if I going to be going or not but I know Nikolay is. It might be kind of quiet at the office. Sep 09 2005, 06:14:05 AM EDT Permalink