It is 8am. Funny thing... I have been living here for over 15 months and today will be the first time I venture into LA alone and I am travelling by train.

UPS delivery drivers here are complete and utter MORONS! Actually, thats insuling to the common moron. Look at the box: Three large symbols, first one means "this way up", the second one means "fragile", the third means "keep dry". Yet this delivery man throws the box from his cab onto the front door step - a clear 15ft that the box, which contains a replacement hard drive from Seagate, is airborne! That does not fit my definition of careful handling. And UPS has no easy way to lodge a complaint about mishandled packages on their web site - as if they hope that no one will complain. Wankers, the whole lot of them!

This device looks like a nifty toy. Pity I don't have much time for toys.

Seems as if there is a bug going around ... Not the computer kind... It seems as if I have caught it and I am not feeling so great.

The car did have a defective bearing. It has been replaced for no charge. Thank goodness for warranties! And while on the topic of warranties: The faulty hard drive was sent to Seagate today. Sad to note that if I buy a Maxtor drive now, it will be the third time I have purchased a Seagate drive. The first was an ST-225 and the second was something like a ST-364A...

Chaos reigns supreme! For the second time in as many months our car, a 2006 Saturn Ion Coupe, is in for repair except that this time, not only is the power steering dodgy but it appears that the front left drive wheel bearing is failing! Less than 20,000 miles and only 16 months old.
Renting a car at Enterprise Rent a Car...

Time to plan my New Year's Resolutions... All kind of things I'd like to have there but I think I should limit myself to a few achieveable objectives.
I would like to see Katie and myself move into an apartment...
I would like to get the WarpBSD/Nemesys project off the ground (now that would be something! It's been in planning stage for 10 years now.)
and many many more,,
And while I am here... How come I can visualise a product I would like to buy for Katie - and such a product not exist? I'm referring to the bluetooth/ipod car adaptor I have been looking for about 6 months now. It's simple really... It plugs into the car cigarette lighter, it charges the iPod, it plugs into car's aux audio input, it has a microphone, when a cell call comes in, it pauses the music and uses the car's stereo and its own mic as a hands free car phone solution. The technology certainly exists. Why is it not available?

A hard drive failed in the evening. Fortunately it's in a RAID set so nothing was lost. Funny that it was the very drive I expected to fail first and I have already purchased a spare. I guess that I should make some effort to erase the old drive before I return it to Fry's for a repacement.

It has been a very long time since the last blog posting. Must try to post reguarly.

Time flies when you're busy... I haven't been doing well to keep up a diary or a blog.
I plan to do better - I should make it a daily occurance, as part of a routine.

Nostalgia... I am sure that a lot of people who have used computers at least as long as myself experience it often. Today, I was introduced to Oprofile. It looks like it will satisfy my search for a code profiling tool... However, it made me remember using Turbo Profiler 386 for DOS in the very early 1990's... I remember being sad having to give it up when I went to use OS/2.

Oh well, Oprofile is not as user friendly as Turbo Profiler, I shall just have to put up with that and get work done.

Start of a new week. Didn't do any programming last night, instead went to sleep pretty early (for me, anyways). Going to make a fresh start on the current patch - I know what is needed and I still have the previous ?almost? patch to compare with... Actually, that patch runs the failing test case perfectly but I found a more serious flaw which will if fixed will make life easier.

Making multi-process code into multi-threaded is not easy... The synchronization needs to be examined and the locking redone as the assumptions are different.

No sleep for me, I guess.

Something different, trying out plogit...
Perhaps if I could add entries from the convience of the palm with no PC attached, I would write more and keep this up to date. Nice theory anyways.
...its cold this morning but I am wearing a T-shirt.

New start

Decided I should dedicate a blog to my programming ... mostly for myself but maybe it may have something interesting for someone.