procrastination diagram - November 2003

I had a root oops at work the other day. Nothing that can't be recovered; it was an unintended consequence of a feature of pbuilder that our build process uses to get at a bunch of "static" data that gets incorporated into the product. It can thus all be recovered, if nothing else from the finished builds. What was particularly annoying was that it occurred about fifteen minutes before I was planning to leave work and not come back for a week of badly needed decompression. (and turkey. Mmmm, turkey.)

The failure mode was an interesting example of what happens when you add shiny new semantics to a well established system. pbuilder is a program that builds debian packages with their specified build dependencies in a chroot environment. At various points it will clean this up. The new feature of pbuilder (which is enormously useful to us, because it means we can minimize the number of times we copy a few gigabytes of data at build time) that eventually bit us was a flag to use a linux bind mount to cause our datasets to "appear" in the build environment. Of course, when the time came to run the cleanup utility on a build that had been interrupted and thus not unmounted the directory structure, the important stuff got removed along with the trash.

Now, of course, the people who implemented this feature thought of this problem, and did something slightly clever involving the -xdev option to find to attempt to prevent the removal from wandering into bind-mounted territory. However, this appears to work by checking the st_dev member returned by the stat system call, which gives you the device number of the filesystem that a file is on... except of course, that we're building on the same filesystem that the datasets are mounted from, and the numbers are preserved across bind mounts.

oops.

Part of the reason I feel the need to write about this, interestingly enough, was my reaction to the cleanup, which is to say, reconstructing enough of this stuff so our builds could go through. I had a powerful urge to fix what I (however innocently) broke, and an equally powerful urge to lie in bed and stare at the ceiling for a week. Result: It took me two days to get around to doing two hours (or so) worth of work.

It was thinking about this which led me to the current name of this 'blog. What really struck me though, was the pure irony of the situation: my procrastination held off for a couple of days my ability to nothing without guilt! The work I was holding off wasn't particularly onerous, and even afforded a couple of opportunities to be slightly clever (since I was dealing with debian packages, all the relevant files had already been md5sum'd, and I could take advantage of that.)

I'm sure there's some deep insight into the nature of procrastination and it's relationship to actually getting things done, but I haven't gotten around to figuring it yet. When I do, you'll be the first to know.

This isn't staying named "elder brother also speaks". For one thing, my little sister doesn't have a blog. For another thing, the Feynman reference is terribly pretentious.

I don't want to just label it with my full name, or something trite like "Karl's Weblog". Perhaps I don't want to give away how unimaginative I really am. :-)

On the other hand, I think I'm going to be derivative, and steal a notion from Jesse, and call it "procrastination diagram". I was reminded of this because my next entry will likely touch on procrastination. Actually, I would expect many future entries to be about procrastination.

I've been looking for a new car recently; actually, it would be clearer to say that I've been looking for an old car. My '98 GTI and I seem to have a slight impedance mismatch in terms of what I expect out of handling, and what it provides. I think I just don't like front wheel drive. (Why? Example: I was driving down the road one day last year when my front wheels lost traction. Road conditions were far from ideal (it had rained recently) and my tires were somewhat worn (but still had a reasonable tread depth). Regardless, once the front wheels break lose in a front wheel drive car, unless you have the presence of mind to take a hand off the wheel and pull carefully on the emergency break you don't have many options other than easing up on the gas and hoping that when the drive wheels bite again, you haven't already hit someone. In a rear-wheel drive car, when you ease up on the gas you end up engine breaking and transferring weight forward, which has fair hope of causing your steering wheels to become reacquainted with static friction.

Enough ranting about drive wheels.

I've been looking for rear-wheel drive four door sedans with fully independent suspensions and manual transmissions, which these days means a luxury sedan. Actually, that set of attributes has always meant a luxury sedan, since people buying more pedestrian vehicles tend not to care so much about ride and road holding.

The above, the funny spelling of my name, and my familial automotive habits (you can find four Mercedes-Benzes parked around my parent's home, although only two of them are registered and only one of the ones that aren't is likely to be able to move under its own power without some preemptive TLC) has led me to look at Benzes and BMWs... which leads me to what I actually wanted to mention.

I found this example of a flavor of BMW that I was previously only vaguely aware of. I went and looked at it, and although this particular example ended up too expensive for the amount of time/money I have to put into it, the model is a beautiful design, and has some interesting history behind it. Although you wouldn't know it today, BMW is a comparatively recent entry into the world of luxury cars. The E3 models (often referred to collectively as "Bavarias" although that may have only referred to specific models) were their first challenge to the "established" luxury car manufacturers of the late sixties. The contrast with a Mercedes of the era (the immobile Mercedes I alluded to earlier is a 1971 250 that I drove for several years and have a considerable sentimental attachment to) is especially interesting; details like cloth straps that keep the door opening too far point to a far humbler car. The engineering seems simpler, some how; which is not a bad thing by any stretch of the imagination. Interestingly, it's probably more collectable than the Mercedes.

All in all, an interesting addition to the list of cars I want to own someday.

After digging around in the free weblog systems, I concluded that none of smell right, so I set out to write my own. It's called bleat. It's not nearly done yet. However, it's managing this quite adequately. The really glaring thing it's lacking right now is comments, which I expect to magically appear in a week or so. Then comes a management interface that doesn't involve a command line. Eventually, multiple users and blogs, attachments, auto-thumbnailing, and all that neat stuff.

Somewhere in all that I may package it all up nicely and share.

Maybe.