Some people see visions of the virgin mary. Some other people see visions of other things.
Are you a believer?

I wuv you.
You are currently browsing the monthly archive for January 2006.
Some people see visions of the virgin mary. Some other people see visions of other things.
Are you a believer?
Last thursday I traded in the Miata I bought last year and purchased a new car. After driving the Miata back from the west coast and spending a full year with it I finally decided that it wasn’t the right car for how I was using it. Turns out I never put the top down and spent a lot of time lamenting that I couldn’t take more than one friend at a time in it. And that one friend in the passenger seat would often be pretty uncomfortable.
The Miata was designed for one person: the driver. And in that purpose it was perfect. I suspect I will never own a car that was quite as nice to drive as the Miata. Light, perfectly balanced with fun power and a great road feel I have yet to find a car that made the driver-car connection as well as that one. Hats off to Mazda for making such a wonderful little car, and for continuing to keep to the tradition. In 2006 they are still making them with the same focus.
Enter stage left.
I replaced it with a 2006 Mazdaspeed6. When I was looking for cars I had a few parameters. I knew I was looking for an all wheel drive 4-door sporty sedan that had a nice interior. It also had to go when you stepped on the pedal on the right. It turns out that if you use that as your box there are only a few cars that make the cut. Those include the Audi A4, the Subaru Legacy GT and the car above.
The Audi was a few thousand dollars more than the Mazda, and I don’t think that you get as much for that premium – except of course for the Audi name. True, they are great cars and I have long lusted after the Audis that my friends have purchased, but I just decided it wasn’t worth the markup. So it came down to the Subaru and the Mazda. I drove the Subaru and I liked it, but in the end I went with the Mazda because I was more impressed with the driving experience and interior of the Mazda.
I tell people this car is a rocket ship. It ships with a 2.3 Liter turbocharged direct injection engine that racks up approximately 270hp. As a result, it’s been reported that the car can do 0-60 in around 6 seconds (6.5 officially, I’ve seen reports in the 5.5 range.) I haven’t had the chance to really open it up yet – it’s still in its break-in period – but I have been been mighty impressed with the little that I have seen. It’s very easy to find yourself doing 85mph without even thinking about it. This is a car that likes to pass.
The rest of the drive train is made up of a very smooth 6-speed manual transmission coupled to an all wheel drive system that includes a torque distribution system. This system can vary the distribution of power, front to back from 100/0 to 50/50, depending on the road status. It also has a limited slip rear differential which will help considerably in many conditions. I drove it in pretty heavy snow the day after I brought it home and I really liked the performance of the AWD system, even climbing up some pretty large hills.
Braking was another matter. The car slid often, even under pretty light braking conditions and it was very easy to get the rear of the car sliding sideways. However, I blame this largely on the tires of the car. They are still summer sport tires. I’ll have to get a set of good snow tires on the car and see how it performs.
I sprung for the “Grand Touring” version of the car, which means it came equipped with a bunch of nice interior features. Leather, heated seats, keyless entry, a nice moon roof and nice Bose sound system round out the inside of the car. It’s very comfortable to drive and doesn’t have a huge amount of road or engine noise. Or I should say just enough of both for it to still feel like a sports car.
The only thing that worries me about the car is that the engine, transmission, and AWD system – many of the systems in the car – are apparently new and will possibly be only be used in this model. This means that down the road when it comes time to fix problems in the car, how hard is it going to be to find parts? And how reliable will the systems be in the meantime? Only time will tell, I guess. Hopefully Mazda will be able to back up the car with the service it deserves.
One of our internal kernel hackers at Red Hat, Dave Jones, recently did some profiling of what’s called through the kernel during startup. He traced stat()s, open()s, and commands exec()ed. There were some pretty amazing results. Some of the highlights include:
There’s a lot more than that, but those are the highlights.
I’m out in california right now visting the Mozilla folks and was joking about these pretty bad performance problems and Brendan overheard me. Paraphrased: “We made this mistake at SGI! Don’t repeat the past!” He pointed me at this awesome post from Tom Davis at SGI that was posted a long time ago in comp.risks. It’s worth the time to read.
The stories that are told in that post sound hauntingly familiar in our open source community, especially in the desktop community. Features over performance, getting ahead instead of getting things right. Not that I don’t think that we shouldn’t have priorities – we certainly should. But I think that sometimes performance and reliability have taken a back seat to other work when it probably shouldn’t.
Going back to my specific cases that Dave outlined at the top of this post, one of the most common complaints we hear in our desktop group from customers is about boot time. We know that some huge percentage of boot time could be solved by reading in a bunch of common blocks all at once at the beginning of startup (either by using block reordering or some other method, but that’s not important here) but I suspect that the problem isn’t so much that we have to speed up the I/O as it is we just have to be smarter about when we do need to do I/O. I suspect that we could make a huge difference in our startup time if we took a two-pronged approach:
These are really two different projects that need to get done.
You guys need to learn how to take a joke. Seriously.
I don’t think I’ve posted anything on our upstairs renovations since February of 2004, but we have been trucking along on it, slowly but surely. The bathroom is nearly complete. There are only four things left to do: paint, install the bath fixtures that have been collecting dust for the last two years, install the final electrical fixtures and throw a door on. It feels like we’ve made real progress.
It looks like a real room.
Red Hat has an opening for an evolution hacker in our desktop group. Does working with active directory and exchange make you green and angry, turning you into a programmer that can throw cars? Does the intersection of opinionated open source hackers, email and thousands of lines of barely maintainable C code sound like your personal nirvana? Does mud wrestling with Michael Meeks to settle arguments over the value of bonobo sound like a great way to spend an evening? Then this is the job for you. Get your ass on over to our web site and apply.

It’s awesome to see people finally getting serious about fixing printing in Gtk+. It’s long been a huge sore spot in Gtk+ and on Linux in general. Alex’s excellent post lays out a lot of the issues. I’m hoping that we can get some real focus in the gnome community to fix this long-standing problem. We have most of the pieces required to make it awesome – cairo was the real missing piece here – now we just have to put them all together.
I realized after seeing responses to my post yesterday that I mis-named my post. It should have been titled “beagle, f-spot and tomboy in fc5.” It’s the apps that matter and they could have been written in any language. Mono just came along for the ride.
Tonight Mono lands in rawhide, and will be included in FC5. We’re happy to enable another convenient method to use our core desktop platform. In this sense it joins all of the other enabling tools we have, including pygtk and java-gnome for Java. It’s already been used to build some pretty neat apps, including beagle, f-spot, and tomboy. We’ve been the longest holdout in shipping mono. This was for a variety of reasons; Some were business-related and others were strategic in nature but those don’t really matter right now. In the end we came to the conclusion that it should be part of our offerings. And we’re happy that we’re able to help heal the rift that was slowly growing in the GNOME community.