I have, though, done various updates to twitter and identi.ca if you have some obsessive need to know what I’ve been doing.  It hasn’t been that exciting, though.  Basically boils down to the following relatively short list

• Went cross-country skiing a couple of times.  With the very wintry weather we’ve had thus far this winter, it’s been something good to be able to get outside and do as it hasn’t exactly been ideal biking weather
• FUDCon F11 was held in Cambridge at MIT.  Since it was in E51 and I knew where things were, I spent a fair bit of time running around.  I had some good conversations, but didn’t give any presentations and didn’t really get any hacking done with the hackfest
• The SDM 09s have started and I helped some with their first design challenge.  Was fun to watch and they seem a good bunch
• Have been trying to read a fair bit and so made good progress on my book backlog.  Still hoping to finish that before classes start back up
• Some poking and prodding in the hopes of getting Fedora 11 alpha out the door in a semi-decent shape
• More work on the new initramfs tooling, although it’s making slower progress than I’d really like
• Getting extra sleep

In those cases, I'm realizing that NetFlix is a very good thing and especially the instant watch functionality coupled with a TiVo. Some movies are better than others for riding to and I don't yet have it down to a science. But action movies seem pretty good generally – today's selection was The Fugitive which was a pretty good choice.

Another thing that's helpful is going somewhere warmer for a week. We spent last week at my parents' house in western NC and I took my bike along. Unfortunately there weren't enough great weather days but there were one or two. And I noticed a few things while there and riding

• While maybe not significantly more vertical gain on a given ride, you are more often going up or down as there is signicosmtlu less flat present
• Everything is further apart distance wise even if car place to place times aren't significantly different than around here.
• A dog chasing you can make you ride very fast
• My base training plan seems to at least be somewhat working. I went out with the A group of hickory velo club on Saturday and had no problems keeping ip through the hills and fast straights even though I haven't ridden hard or fast in two months now
• Defeet is based in western NC and I rode with the founders of the company; very nice and cool people. Shane – thanks for letting me suck your wheel much of the ride
• Not many cyclists on the roads in Hickory but cars give a much wider berth; they fully go into the other lane instead of eying to see how little space they can give you

As far as overall cycling for the year, I didn't do nearly as good of a job of tracking as I did last year and I also had some frustration with my Garmin Edge 305 dying until I found the trick to stop it from doing so, but it looks like I did about 2500 miles on my Redline 9-2-5 and 3500 or so miles on my Merlin. Given how busy the year was, getting 6000 miles is a pretty big accomplishment in my view.

Anyway that's what I've got for today. I'm off until next Monday and then back to work and also going to be helping out with the initiation rites for the SDM 09s . Classes don't start back until the first of February although I'm going to do a couple of IAP offerings I think. And I still owe a fall semester wrap up post soon. But for now, Happy New Years and if you make resolutions, best of luck with them.

For the first part, Kara and I headed down to my parents' for Christmas.  Since flight prices were out of control when we started looking, we decided that we were going to drive down (… flight prices eventually reached more reasonable levels).  This came with a few advantages — one, we can go places in Hickory and two, I could bring my bike without paying exorbitant fees    So on Monday morning, we dug out from the weekend's snow storm and got on the road.  We planned to head west across New York and then get on I-81 to get a somewhat prettier drive and avoid some of the worst traffic.  Unfortunately, the directions we got from google left out an important point for where two roads diverged leading us to go a fair bit out of our way.  We got back on track, though, and then, just outside of Scranton, PA, we got to drive through an unexpected ice or sleet storm and see a couple of cars off the side of the road.  After most of the day on the road, not what you really want to see.  But we kept onwards and stopped for the night after finally reaching Virginia.  Tuesday, we woke up early and hit the road to make it to my parents' house by about lunch time. 

Since we got here, it's been a pretty straight-forward and relaxed time.  We've eaten a lot, I've gotten out for a bike ride each day, we've played some board games, and we've read a bit.  I really have little room at all to complain.  We also got a visit from the incomparable
 today and are catching up with more people the rest of our time here.  Hopefully I'll also continue to get out for some more nice rides.  If the weather could be like today (sunny, low 60s), I would have no complaints at all

Then, once we get back home, it's going to be more relaxing although also trying to do some things around the house like cleaning out some of the cruft that has accumulated in the basement, etc.  And I'll probably eventually get to catching up with my email, although right now, I'm happily ignoring anything that's not directly to me.  And even that is only being looked at infrequently. 

And now, I think I'm going to read a little bit more and then head to bed.

The majority of the ideas behind the code are that we want to use the same tools and utilities that exist on the booted system (so regular bash, regular udev, no nash, no statically linked nonsense, no klibc) and also that we want to not have the initramfs as a slow-down. The latter means that we run pretty much everything off of udev rules right now so that as soon as the devices are available, we mount and switch into the rootfs.

So go ahead 'git clone git://fedorapeople.org/~katzj/dracut.git' and read the README, HACKING and TODO files. Also sent to lkml to get the mailing list started. More hands more than welcome…

Overall, it's been a good semester. The workload ended up being a bit higher than I expected, but it was probably what I should have thought. I knew that System Architecture was going to be time-consuming, but it was still more so than I thought. Similarly, Project Management ended up requiring more time both for the homeworks and the project than I really expected from the outset.

Those along with working to get all of the Fedora 10 bits working on the OLPC meant that it was just a very busy semester. But, now it's actually the time when I get nearly two monhs to relax and “just” work. Well, and I also am hoping to try to get some progress underway for my thesis so that I don't have to do it all while juggling classes also. It should still be a good sort of break, though. And then, it's on to the spring semester. Which I still need to figure out what I'm going to take — suggestions welcome

Friday was spent with quite a bit of work being done for school (although Fedora 10 was done, so not much there). Last opportunity set for system architecture is due on Wednesday, so we tried to make some headway on that. Then, I headed home and worked for a while longer. Eventually, Kara and I headed to dinner and then it was a pretty slow evening.

Yesterday morning, woke up to a very cold morning — was just over 20° F and windy. I bundled up and headed down to go out on the Quad ride. It was a cold morning, but there was still a healthy number of people all things considered. Most turned around from Concord Center, but I had one person to continue on with me to get in a good 3 hours of base miles. With the new gloves (Pearl Izumi amphibs), I was able to keep warm except for my toes.

After the ride, came home, grabbed some lunch and then got some work done. Then, headed to poker night with some SDM folks. I had a great time and it was good to see everyone who made it out. Need to be sure that we also arrange some sort of end of semester thing, perhaps for after the last System Architecture class in a couple of weeks. I suspect even more people can be convinced to go for that once there's not a lot of work waiting to be done. Kara and I headed out from there a bit early to meet up with some friends of ours for a bit. Finally headed home about midnight and crashed.

This morning, woke up again to the cold and went out for another healthy set of base miles. Only about ten people, although more continued on for more than 20 miles. Got in about 3 hours again and still only had problems with my feet. After the ride, headed down to MIT for some time in the MIT wind tunnel — one of the perks of being on the MIT team is that we get to have a little bit of time in the wind tunnel to see the impacts of position, etc. It was a pretty cool experience and we made some slight tweaks to my position to improve aerodynamics.

Now trying to catch up on some things to get a head start on the short week beginning tomorrow. Into the final stretch of the semester for real now. And then, I'm halfway done with SDM. Hard to believe — time flies when you're having fun.

So if the updates from me seem sparse, that's why. And then of course, to make things even more fun, I came down with something the end of last week which I haven't quite managed to completely shake. Although at this point, it might just be my usual congestion for this time of year.

Wanda!
(Click the link for the movie)

Not what I intended to work on today. But it was fun and gave me a chance to try out writing a tiny bit of code using both Javascript and Clutter, neither of which I'd used before. The takeaway is that it's really simple to do simple things with what is being worked on. Still not sure about anything more complicated at this point

Option “MigrationHeuristic” “greedy”

below the EXA line.

While most of the talks were generally good, there were a few that really stuck out.

Peter Senge's talk on how sustainability can improve profitability got things off to a really good start. He started out with a bit of an overview of his views on organizational learning, one of which is around understanding complexity. His major premise for the talk was that a lack of the systems thinking needed to understand complexity is the fundamental cause of basically all sustainability problems. A couple of things that he said really jumped out at me. One of the biggest was when he asked what the purpose of a business was — most of the audience responded with “make money” or “profit”. But the thing is that profit isn't the purpose of the business… “profit for a company is like oxygen for a person; yes, you need it but you don't exist to breathe”. A second thing that really resonated was that to really improve sustainability, you need to make the shift from trying to be “less bad” to thinking about being “really good”. And it's really true in many/most areas (see Arjan's discussion of five-second Linux boot for a similar case)

He also had a number of cases illustrating his ideas which were pretty compelling. And he also used system dynamics a few times to make his point which was a nice touch

Oli de Weck teaches the System Project Management course but his talk on applying Darwinian principles to System Design ended up being an interesting and somewhat divergent talk from the areas we discuss in class. The most important take-away is that changeability is something which, while considered, is not considered enough when designing a system. Per the quote from Darwin, “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is more adaptable to change”. And when you start looking into it, this is just as true with systems as is it is with the evolution of species. Thus, there are changes need from some of the more “traditional” systems engineering which presumes that all of these sorts of things are set in stone. Instead, he proposes something called strategic engineering to help deal with the uncertainty which is actually present for most projects. This lets you pick along the axes of robustness and rigidity to help get better outcomes.

The final speaker on the second day of the conference was Dharmesh Shah speaking on applying agile software techniques to startups. The material being presented was good. But even better was the actual presentation of the material. Dharmesh clearly has a lot of passion for what he was talking about and he manages to pull off the blend of humor and information very well. Also, even though he had slides, I was glad that his slides were very sparse and very much not the bulk of the talk.

The other talks were pretty interesting too. There was a talk from Paul Murray at Herman Miller (yes, the Aeron people) about how they've made it a goal to reduce their environmental impact and what they've done and what impacts that has had. Valerie Casey from IDEO also spoke on sustainability and was giving an overview of the Designer's Accord is looking to accomplish. There was a talk that was better than I expected about how eClinicalWorks has managed to get a significant penetration into physician offices with their software by using very non-traditional methods for selling software. And there was a talk from a Microsoft guy about their Software+Services pitch, but this was very abstract and without any real details other than the impression that Microsoft is going to be very seriously going after the Cloud.

All in all, quite good. Plus, there was free food (always a plus) and a lot of cool people to hang around and talk with.

That down, I sent in my request to move up to a Cat4 for next season which was approved. And while I'm looking forward to next season and races that start a little bit later in the day, I'm also glad that it's now to sort of the down time. Over the weekend, I rode with Quad on Saturday and did a bit of sweeping and just taking it easy. Then, on Sunday I went out with some of the MIT team to catch some of the 'cross race in Canton and also to just get some riding in. Both days, I rode without my heart rate monitor and just had fun. Especially when we climbed to the weather observatory in Blue Hills

Probably will do a few more weeks of just taking it easy and just making sure I have fun. And then, I'll probably be starting to do some actual base training and get a reasonable overall training plan to maximize how well I do next season, especially given how early the collegiate season starts.

This week is the business trip for this semester and it's good to have (mostly) everyone around on campus. And it's also nice to have lots of meals provided Unlike the prior business trips, in some ways, this one is fairly sparsely populated. On the other hand, that's likely due to the fact that it's also the week of what used to be the alumni conference and is now the Systems Thinking Conference. In any case, Monday didn't have much going on out of the ordinary although I spent the day on campus instead of my usual day in Westford. Yesterday we had a lunch and then in the evening was the final information session for the year for those interested in applying for SDM. I again helped out by mingling with some of the prospective students to answer questions and then being on the panel as well. One of the really interesting things to me about being on the panel and answering questions is the differences in questions between groups of prospective students; while there are some common themes, each night seems to have its own sort of theme or direction. Also, it's fairly obvious that some people come in and are comfortable asking a bunch of questions in front of a group while others are not so comfortable. But even those who don't ask questions during the panel tend to have them in the smaller mingling around time. What that says, I'm not entirely sure.

Today was the SDM Open House for students that have been accepted to start in January of 2009. So lunch was spent trying to talk with a few of them and helping to answer any lingering questions they had about the program as well as making sure that they have the appropriate level of respect for January and the amount of time that it requires. This afternoon, I had intended to spend some time trying to get at least some of the basics of the OLPC power management code merged into a Fedora kernel, but I instead ended up spending it spread between email and finishing up my project management homework. And there's enough meat on the subject of project management and some of the tools from the class for another post at another time, so I'll leave that out there for now

This evening was a “networking event”, organized by Yoav. As has been the norm there was a pretty good turn-out of SDM08s, the usual cadre of SDM07s and with the alumni conference, some alumni and also some of the SDM09s. Always good to just get a chance to hang out with people and talk about annoyances and good things with classes.

Notable quote of the evening from a discussion that Linda and I were having with Yoav: “there's the class for entrepreneurship and the one for innovation” with regards to the Sloan business law class. But given that they're very overlapping (~60% of the content is probably the same), it's less bad than it sounds. The differences seem to mostly be what the guest speakers are focusing on as opposed to anything more fundamental with regards to the material.

Tomorrow and Friday are the conference and I'm going to make an effort to try to attend a fair bit of it while also trying to get some groundwork laid to do some testing in the evenings/over the weekend.

Again if you ensure that you have the latest livecd-iso-to-disk script, there are a few changes and improvements with Snap2

• If you pass –swap-size-mb to the script, you'll get a swap file set up which gets automatically activated on boot. As mentioned by others, having some swap makes a huge difference.
• We set up the inernal nand (flash) to be used for /home. We don't reuse the homedir from the main XO OS but the data is written there so you can update images without losing changes
• Related to that, we now reset the overlay on every boot. This means the only saved bits are the things in /home. But this lets us worry (less) about filling the overlay and causing things to crash.

On the other hand, from my quick reading of mailing lists so far, there may also be some other performance regressions vs Snap1. Testing and details from people appreciated as always.

On Friday, the first of these post-beta snapshots was released. This includes a set of live images which can run without modifications on the OLPC. This is nice as it will make me not have to do builds of images and host them on fedorapeople anymore

With this image plus the updated livecd-iso-to-disk, the performance of the image on the XO is much better. How is this achieved? The single biggest thing that helps is changing to putting the ext3fs on the SD card as opposed to the squashfs. This means we're not paying the penalty of decompression. The downside is that this requires a 4 GB (or more) SD card as opposed to a 2 GB one.

A second thing which helps (significantly) is not using a RAM based overlay and instead putting the overlay on the SD card. There are some upsides and some downsides to doing this, but at this point, the upsides seem to outweigh the downsides. This will even more be the case for this week's snapshot with a few of the things I'm planning to have ready for that (more details below…).

So that said, what is the invocation of livecd-iso-to-disk that I'm using (and thus would recommend to testers)? Presently, it's

~/src/fedora/livecd-tools/tools/livecd-iso-to-disk.sh –force –xo –overlay-size-mb 512 – ~/Desktop/Live/F10-Snap1-i686-Live.iso /dev/mmcblk0p1

This sets up a 512 MB (persistent) overlay on the SD card and with –xo, we set up a boot/olpc.fth as well as moving over the embedded ext3fs instead of the squashfs.

So the obvious question is what's next/on my plate to make sure is in better shape for this week's snapshot?

• Fix up handling so that we can easily set up having some swap on the SD card. This again feels like a situation where we're better off doing than not. Most of the mechanism should be present in Snap1, but for some reason, I'm not seeing /mnt/live being properly mounted from the live initscript. This should be a pretty straight-forward thing if someone wanted to take a look and send me a patch The live initscript itself lives in the spin-kickstarts repo
• Non-persistent, disk-based overlay. The “persistence” is kind of kludgey in that it can pretty easily fill up and cause problems. Unfortunately, with dm-snapshot, there's not a lot we can do about that. Hopefully we'll get some form of unionfs in the future, but that definitely won't land for F10. This should just be a matter of changing the initrd to recognize a flag and recreate the snapshot store on the SD card when requested. The initrd is created from mkliveinitrd in the mkinitrd package.
• Persistent /home on the internal nand (mtd0). Again, this should be mostly ready to go with Snap1, but was acting weird the end of last week for me. Should get mounted within the live initscript
• Start making a dent in some of the reported bugs
• Investigate the question which was asked of just sticking the ext3fs on the SD card directly and not doing the “normal” live image bits for the overlay. While this is interesting to explore, I have a sinking suspicion that it's not something that's really doable in the timeframe of Fedora 10, although it is certainly one that bears looking at more for Fedora 11.

So if you've sent an email and expected to see a response from me, hopefully I'll get to it tomorrow. Direct mail looks quiet, but I see there are some 800 messages on various Fedora related lists for me to get through…

For those chomping at the bit about Fedora on OLPC, the new snapshot images that went up on Friday should work better on the XO and integrate everything that's needed without requiring a special OLPC build. You'll also want the updated http://velohacker.com/2008/10/more-fedora-on-xo/ Continue reading →]]> So, you just got your XO to do some testing of Fedora on OLPC. You update the software that was on there, get a developer key, wait a day, and then get all ready to boot your Fedora image off of the SD card ….

And it boots. But it's slow. Very very slow. Some slowness is to be expected… this isn't a fast machine. But it should probably be a little bit speedier than it is. So want to try out a few experiments to try to help pin down the cause of the slowness? Then read on, pick a case and leave comments about your results.

1. Try using a persistent overlay instead of the in-memory one. Add –overlay-size-mb to your livecd-iso-to-disk invocation. Amount should be relative to the size of your SD card.
2. See if/how much having swap available helps. You can create a file on the SD card with dd, run mkswap against the file and then enable it on the XO. The best test for this would probably be to boot the XO single-user and run swapon from there and then do telinit 5.
3. Try disabling some services from the live image. Again boot to single-user, chkconfig some services and then telinit 5
4. … your idea here. Hopefully other people have some ideas of things to try as well. Try them out and let us know how it goes.

Yesterday's clinic was focused on improving cornering skills. This is something which, especially after going through it, is incredibly useful and an area where I really had no clue what I was doing technique-wise. Sure, you can turn the bike and go around a corner, but being able to do so in a way that's both fast and safe is an entirely different story. There's quite a bit of technique to it. But it's cool to have a better idea of how the pros manage to severely tilt their bikes when going through corners of a crit at speed. It's an area where I'll want to spend some time practicing the technique to really get it down to where I don't have to think about it. After that, we followed up with another rousing game of Death Bike. Which was, again, a good time.

Today was focused on sprinting and riding in a pack. Again, a little bit of being told a “good” way of doing things seems like it will go a long way. But sprinting form feels like it's going to be a lot more difficult for me to get “right” just due to having to break bad habits. Luckily, sprint intervals are a pretty easy thing to do and a good way to work on the form. For riding in a pack, there was a bit of focus on moving up and how to do so quickly and efficiently. The fact that we were doing this at Wells Ave was interesting; I've raced there enough times that I know how various things feel and so it was interesting to do things in a different way. In the past I've mostly moved up by going to the outside, applying some power and getting to the front. While this does work, it's pretty inefficient as it ends up meaning I leave the draft. I've now got a much better idea on how to move up through the pack and save energy. Which should end up helping at the end for the sprint. We finished out the day with a game of Bike Capture the Flag which ended up being pretty fun as well.

All in all, a good two days of work. And although my distances were lower than my normal for a weekend, I feel like I got quite a bit out of both days and am pretty tired from both as well. This week will be an easy-ish week on the riding side so that I can be in good shape for racing at Jamestown next Monday. But that's okay, as it's a busy week on pretty much every other front. Especially since I didn't do any homework this weekend. So, it'll be a bit of a scramble to get that taken care of, but it doesn't look like it'll be too bad.

• Wireless: First thing to check was the wireless to see if it worked. And it does, the driver gets loaded, we have the firmware and it managed to find the access point at my house and associate without problems. Haven't really looked at mesh at all, and also haven't dived into making sure wpa works, but at least for the basics, it seems okay.
• Camera: From the quick test of “does the driver load” and “does the driver give data”, this looks okay too. Doing cat < /dev/video0 as a user turns on the LED for the camera and prints garbage to the screen.
• Sound: Driver loads and the mixer shows elements, but playing sound isn't looking like it's working. Needs more investigation
• Internal Flash (NAND): Driver seems to load and with a couple of pointers from dwmw2, is mountable without having to do any more module loads. Went ahead and did the next obvious step and changed things so that we can use that for the persistent /home.
• Special keys: Most of the keys on the keyboard seem to be appropriately mapped, but there are some that will need mapping via hal. Should be straight-forward to sit down and do as it's just writing some fdi file bits (hint: if someone wants to volunteer to do this, I can point you in the right direction
• Power management: Suspend to RAM isn't showing up as available at all right now. I suspect some kernel bits that haven't been upstreamed need to be pulled out. Will probably look closer at this tomorrow

And now, I think it is time to go watch some tv

Changes and improvements in this image…:

• Updated packages to match those that are included in the Fedora 10 beta that was released yesterday
• Slightly newer kernel (the one that davej built last night) which has debugging disabled. Sadly, this wasn't the help I hoped it would be.

Booting to runlevel 3 is okay for at least some testing, though. So be sure to add –extra-kernel-args 3 to your invocation of livecd-iso-to-disk in addition to passing –xo. And hopefully we'll have a new image up shortly that fixes some of the slowness and makes things more reasonable for general use “soon”

Today brought the actual beginning of autumn and waking up to it being kind of dull, gray and cool was not the way I had hoped to start the morning. But I dragged myself out of bed and headed to the office for a day that I had somewhat booked already with meetings.

Between them, managed to get the serial cable hooked up to the OLPC in the office and started with trying to track down kernel things again. And finally started getting somewhere. After a week (plus) of dead ends, I happened upon the right avenue and was able to confirm that the problem was OpenFirmware loading the initrd into RAM where it shouldn't have been. Wrote up a good description of what was going wrong, sent it off, and Mitch Bradley (aka OFW Ninja) had me a fix in about an hour. I didn't see it for a while longer due to other meetings, but it was in my inbox.

So, after getting home and having dinner, I tried it out and was greeted with success. So modulo fixing some more “normal” kernel problems, it looks like we should be well on our way to having the XO able to boot with the regular Fedora kernel. And this means that having an XO run just any old Fedora live image is now a very big step closer to reality…