Chris's Random Ramblings
Lucy has mentioned that living in the US is kind of like living in a TV show. Well, the other night I went to Pleasantville for dinner. All in colour though. Since the hotel is about a 15 minute drive from the office I've hired a car. Driving on the other side of the road always feels rather strange for a few days - but I've only driven on the wrong side once, and that was in a car park so I don't think that really counts.
At the office we're meant to use a cable lock to secure our laptops when we leave the room. There isn't always something suitably solid to attach the cable to, so in those cases I normally use something like a chair, as it would look fairly suspicious to walk away with a laptop connected to an office chair. I did this on Friday, but unfortunately someone came in and decided to move the chair, not realising it was attached to the laptop. The laptop, with lid closed, fell a couple of feet onto not very soft carpet, and amazingly even though it was Friday the 13th it seems to have survived with no damage at all. Overall it has actually survived really well for something that is 3.5 years old, and its only recently that little bits of (unimportant) plastic have begun to break off.
Had lunch with Jimi, Andrea, Dilma and Amos on Saturday at the Cheescake Restaurant at White Plains. Its a chain restaurant and I'd seen one when hunting for dinner in Austin, but skipped it assuming it just sold dessert. In fact they have a huge menu ranging from salads to hamburgers to pasta and of course cheesecake, and serve equally huge meals. One of the salads must have been 20-30cms high. Given the name of the restaurant I really couldn't skip dessert. Had the Oreo Chocolate mudslide cheesecake which was very nice, but so rich even I couldn't finish it.
The remnants of a couple of hurricanes are working their way up the coast so it has been rather wet and overcast. But I did get some time to go on a short hike on Saturday afternoon at the Westmoreland Sanctuary. I managed to get a glimpse of a couple of deer but they were too far away to photograph, and too shy to let me get closer. Lots of little birds, very cute chipmunks, and way too many insects in the humid weather. The forest area is a welcome change from the Australian bush. There is a pretty thick canopy, but the ground itself was fairly bare in most places so visibility was really good.
Spent a couple of days in the FSG booth at Linux World Expo SF. Its
getting increasingly business oriented these days, and very few cool
giveaways. BMC had these rather cute, but heavy ceramic penguin
bobble-head things, but by the end of the show I think they were
rather sick of people just turning up to get a free toy.
We had two half day LSB meeting on Thursday/Friday at the IBM office. They gave us a really nice meeting room with a view of one of the bay and one of the bridges. A much better turnout at the meeting than normal with the major distributions represented, as well as a major ISV. Happily I think we've managed to work out the details for the LSB 2.0 release which should be out in the next couple of weeks and include support for C++. We also mapped out the plan for LSB 3.0.
Support for C++ was getting very controversial and was the lead story at LWN. Part of the problem is that the LSB includes content from many open source projects and it is impossible to synchronise our release schedule to make all of them happy. And of course everyone wants us to include the latest version of their software. In practice, it often has to be a compromise between performance, stability, and the level of deployment and testing. I think we've managed to work out a compromise that doesn't annoy anyone too much. Increased levels of pragmatism would definitely help in the future. I was impresed by how enthusiastic ISVs are getting about good C++ standardisation on Linux.
On Saturday I hired a bike and rode from Fisherman's Wharf to Sausalito across the other side of the bay. The trail was significantly hillier than I'd expected, but the views made it well worthwhile. I went back to the very nice hamburger joint I went to last year during the Muir Woods tour. It was very foggy on the way back across the Golden Gate Bridge, but this made it a refreshingly cool ride.
I was browsing through REI, a very cool hiking/camping store of which there is no equivalent in Australia, and noticed some new special "TSA approved" locks for sale. They're much like an ordinary key or combination lock, except there is a little slot for a "master key" which the security screeners can use to open your bag if they need to, and then lock it back up again. It even has a rather cool marker that indicates if the master key has been used. I've bought one in the vague hope that they'll stop cutting my locks. Not that I really expect a bag lock to stop a determined, thief, just discourage casual browsing.
Spent the afternoon at the Texas State History Museum which was quite interesting (and airconditioned). So far I've managed to keep to my goal of never eating dinner at the same place twice whilst in Austin, but I am running out of places within walking distance of the hotel.
