wingologA mostly dorky weblog by Andy Wingo2008-11-25T22:03:08Ztekutihttps://wingolog.org/feed/atomAndy Wingohttps://wingolog.org/another (turkey) bites the dusthttps://wingolog.org/2008/11/25/another-turkey-bites-the-dust2008-11-25T22:03:08Z2008-11-25T22:03:08Z

recent past

Miyamoto sensei came to town to last weekend to teach an aikido seminar, as he has for the past four years or so. I found a nice article on him chez Takezo, which captures much of the spirit of such events, in text and video.

Between sessions on Saturday, I zipped by the BoquerĂ­a to pick up the 5.6-kilo turkey. Hoo boy. We cooked and ate it on Sunday, which was a most delightful dress rehearsal. I made a stuffing with leeks, almonds, and figs -- and eggplant instead of old bread. It turned out great, much better than I thought it would. Who knew?

Though, what the hell is up with my friends? I told people that food would be ready between 3 and 4, and the first people (out of 15) show up at 4:30. Being in Spain only explains so much.

near future

Tomorrow I catch a plane to the states for the real deal -- my first Thanksgiving in the states since 2001. Yay for winter cooking, in which every pot contributes to the condensation on the inside of the windows.

(Not that I'm going to turn this thing into a confession booth, but I do admit a bit of ill feeling towards eating animals. But turkey smells so magical...)

Andy Wingohttps://wingolog.org/looking at the working weekhttps://wingolog.org/2007/11/18/looking-at-the-working-week2007-11-19T03:41:35Z2007-11-19T03:41:35Z

readings

Responsibility and War Guilt, one of Chomsky's more pleasing reads of late, especially relevant to those of us that work as technologists. The interview format's outside prompting makes him expound in a slightly different orbit. Found via the print Z magazine.

A book I'd like to check out some time: Disciplined Minds by Jeff Schmidt. Read the intro, or some other excerpts. Stumbled upon via MediaLens. Oh, for a proper English-language library...

weekend

Miyamoto sensei came this weekend to teach a seminar, hosted by my aikido school. The play between him and others is very flexible and dynamic -- hard to describe, I find my word-hoard lacking.

I took a nap after this morning's class and dreamt of some of his techniques; now, once more, to sleep the clock around til morning. Good night internet.

Andy Wingohttps://wingolog.org/autumn sweaterhttps://wingolog.org/2006/11/20/autumn-sweater2006-11-20T19:30:01Z2006-11-20T19:30:01Z

politics

Another hungover sunday, down to the street to buy a paper, sit in a cafe, watch people until the headache either goes away or sends me back to bed. Two years of this routine, on and off, and I think I from the papers I finally understand the political configuration in Catalunya.

It's considerably more complicated than the US, with six or or eight parties in parliament, depending on how you count. The basic divides are left vs right and nationalist versus spanish. No one has an absolute majority, meaning that to govern, groups have to make compromises and trades to form a numerical majority, which then becomes the government.

This year, the party with the most votes was a rightist nationalist party (CiU). Their goal was to return to the government at any cost. They could form a government with the socialists, a pseudo-spanish party affiliated with the ruling socialists in Madrid, but as far as I can see the socialists wanted to avoid any association, in the minds of the voters, with the right. This was especially important to them given the upcoming spanish parliamentary elections. The other option for the right nationalists was a coalition with the left nationalists, but there is so much bad blood there that the leftists just used the rightists to increase their desirability with the socialists.

In the end the arithmetic led Catalunya to the same situation as the before, with a left coalition between the socialists (PSC), the left nationalists (ERC), and the greens (EUA-ICV). The rightist spanish party affiliated with Madrid (PP) loves this situation, squeezing every internal disagreement in the ruling coalition into attack ads on the "inefficiency" of the government. Their motto in the last election was "Be decisive". But with only 11% of the vote, the PP isn't taken too seriously.

I have to say that I like the parliamentary model much better than the winner-take-all system in the US. I like the idea of compromise, and that smaller parties can exercise some degree of power in the government. The possibility that other parties can actually make it to parliament helps of course; back in 2000, the green candidate for president didn't even make it on the ballot in North Carolina.

turkey

Another year, another thanksgiving in "hostile territory". This year promises to be larger than the last -- I might end up doing two turkeys. The scare quotes mean it's a joke, dudes and ladies

hack

Not much to speak of -- the hacks of my last writing product on guile-lib were the work of a couple weeks' labor, fighting entropy. But for the moment, I've put it in a situation that's reasonably resistent to time's arrow. Time to move up the stack again.

aikido

Last weekend was most excellent, with an instructor coming from Tokyo's Hombu Dojo to give a course. For some reason Japanese instructors are called only by their last names. Miyamoto sensei is impressive in any case, and at 58 years old is really quite young to have a 7th degree black belt. He manages to be very technical yet humorous on the mat. Outside he dresses like a mafioso. Good times.

In two weeks there's another seminar coming up in Mallorca, with New York's Yamada sensei. I'm going to see about heading there, taking one of the boats that I see out of my window at work, sleeping on the floor in the school. It's a bit perverse that I find joint locks to be relaxing, but so it is.

Andy Wingohttps://wingolog.org/post-harvest moonhttps://wingolog.org/2005/11/13/post-harvest-moon2005-11-13T23:42:58Z2005-11-13T23:42:58Z

harvest time on maggie's farm

Finally got a Flumotion release out last week. Hounding us until the end was a terrible bug manifesting itself as random connection loss between the different processes in the server, and 100% CPU usage that couldn't be traced to anything. None of the profilers I tried (or wrote!) gave any clue as to what was up.

The problems were solved when we switched away from forking out job processes to doing fork+exec, which is a more supported model in Twisted. It could be that we weren't correctly cleaning out all of the file descriptors in the child's main loops implementing the reactor in Twisted, causing processes to wake up all the time. It is difficult to analyze exactly what is the state that needs cleaning up in a program like that, instead of analyzing exactly what state to keep for the new process. Also, exarkun in #twisted had an interesting observation, which was that with python's refcounting gc, just about every time you access a variable you modify its refcount, which requires that the child have its own copy of that memory page. Really takes away the copy-on-write advantages of forking processes.

The moral of the story would be that usually you don't want to fork in Python. Changing this to execute separate processes took about 4 hours one afternoon, and took away just about all of the bugs we had been seeing. Thank Jesus!

Also those four hours were krazy 4G1L3. Only thing was it was on my machine, and I have focus-follows-mouse, a different keyboard from Thomas, swapped caps and control, and I use emacs and he uses vi. But somehow we limped along. Agile limping.

very crucially serious notes

A perspicacious analysis of the advantages of being a nice person.

Also this is the crucial phrase of this sentence. I think this convention is so great I'm going find a professional typographer to ask what they think about it. It's about time that some of the popular exponents of this writing style get their well-deserved recognition!

Other things I should write about at some point: more notes on using baz and arch-pqm, my very pleasant impressions of SLIME and SBCL, a recent Aikido seminar with Miyamoto sensei (coming all the way from Hombu dojo), an upcoming trip to the states.