Enrico writes about putting a live CD on a removable disk. I
added the support in casper for doing this almost a year ago and it
has saved me lots of debugging time. Booting the live CD that way is
almost as fast as booting an installed system. If you couple this with
using the persistent storage support in casper, you can get the
configure-on-boot support together with persistency.
In a later update, slh is quited saying that xresprobe doesn't work on
AMD64. This is wrong, I wrote that support based on code by Matthew
Garret a little more than nine months ago. I wouldn't recommend
incorporating it in new-written code, but rather use libx86.
I just sent a mail to friends and family informing them that Karianne
and I won't be giving presents to anybody this year. We are going to
donate money to some worthy cause (we haven't decided on which yet)
instead and send people christmas cards or similar. Likewise, we have
asked people to do the same to us; give money to a good cause rather
than giving us even more stuff.
It's a tiny drop in the huge ocean of consumerism, but it's at least
more than nothing.
For the last two weeks, I have been in the US, first at the Ubuntu
Developer Summit which Google was kind enough to host, then at the
Canonical Allhands meeting in San Francisco proper. I was quite
reluctant about going to the US due to the sheer amount of silly laws as
well as their foreign policy. In the end, I decided to go.
The developer summit was good and the hosting was excellent. The food
was top-notch and quite varied. However, it's good it was just one week
so my clothes still fit. Meeting old friends and making new ones, as
is usual for those summits. As usual, we didn't get to see much of the
surrounding area (but then, neither Sunnyvale nor Mountain View are very
exciting towns/areas, or at least didn't seem so to me).
The second week was at the Hilton on Fisherman's Wharf in downtown San
Francisco. We worked long days here too, but I did at least manage one
long trek through a fair bit of the city. San Francisco seems to be a
very nice city -- it is clean, the drivers usually don't try to run you
over even though you're a silly tourist and the people are friendly.
Prices aren't too bad either.
I didn't get to really see the Golden gate bridge, nor did we go to
Alcatraz, but I don't mind that much. I was also quite tired in the end
and am now really, really looking forward to getting home to Karianne
and our menagerie of pets.
Some observations from the two weeks:
- Showering is not optional when you interact with other people.
Seriously, some people didn't just smell a bit, they stunk. Eww.
- US teambuilding practices and Canonical does not go well along. No, I
don't want to get pumped using brainwash-like techniques,
thankyouverymuch.
- The Ubuntu crowd is a fantastic gang to hang out with.
- Two weeks is a very long time to be away from Karianne.
Adrian von Bidder writes about retty, a tool to make processes
reattach to your terminal. While useful, it seems mostly like a
limited version of cryopid which seems even more insane and
crackful, but quite cool nevertheless. I have not had a chance to
actually try cryopid yet though, so if any of you have,
please blog about your experiences with it. Oh, and please package it,
somebody.
