shaver

I slept like a thing that sleeps really soundly. Madhava’s couch is quite comfy, though as long as it was roughly horizontal and not on fire, I was going to get some quality sleep.

It seems that some people are upset about the townhouse/condo infill proposed by our landlords for the space behind our new apartment. Aven, Mark, Madhava, and I had a pretty good conversation about the issue while we wandered over to the new place, full of the sort of balanced and reasonable discussion that I fear we’ll never see in the press or activisty web sites and pamphlets. (The other infill development in the area, in which my landlord actually lives, looks to be quite nicely done, and completely in character for the area. Dunno what that means, exactly, but it’s an interesting datapoint.)

Madhava has a really interesting idea for a company, and I think when I’m done with this Lustre thing in 2005 I might well see if he still wants to pursue it. (It’s not my place to divulge the details here, of course.)

For a big chunk of today, the Lustre tree was broken like a drunken promise, so I tried to get some voice-over-IP stuff working. (My office phone might end up being such a system, once the Pope coughs up a spare line.) What a mess. I can’t use the provided binaries, because they want a version of libstdc++ that you can’t get for Red Hat, trying to build the binaries against the packaged versions of the libraries — which I rebuilt, sooooo sloooooowly — pukes all over itself, so I’m now rebuilding the whole mess again. If this isn’t smoother than buttered silk when I get it all built, I think I’m going to stick to good old POTS for a while. (Not that I’m totally unexcited by some of the stuff that a good VoIP setup would let me do, such as answer my office phone from home or the road, and poke at my voice mail over the web, and so forth. But really, there’s only so much guinea pigging I’m willing to do with my office phone.)

Andreas has fixed the Lustre tree, so I’m going to run some tests before I take off to µPowered for some drinks with the rest of the geeks in this office. I’ll probably head home a little early to see my wife, father-in-law, and cat, but it’ll be fun to see everyone. As long as Justin and I don’t start yelling at each other about software licenses again, that is. I just know that these people are going to ask hard questions about Lustre, so I’ll have to get used to referring them to the documentation. Some day, I hope soon, I’ll understand this beast better.

Madhava and I talked a fair bit about government funding of various projects and whatnot, and today I ran into an interesting take on student loans. I’ll try to remember to write more tomorrow about the funding stuff, because I think we came up with some interesting ideas, but for now I must test and hack and then drink.