Et tu, Cthulhu

It’s that time of year again, which means I have to renew my Mexican FM2 visa. Everything was going smoothly until the immigrations clerk asked for the “founding declaration” of Novell and a list of all its employees (!). I provided the former document last year, so it should have already been in their files, and the latter document is not on the official list of required paperwork that I was given.

To top it off, these are confidential documents that Novell de Mexico cannot release to me, so the immigrations office has to make an official letter requesting it. Hopefully the added potential for screwups resulting from this process won’t be realized.

<Willoch> "Norwegian foreign minister hiding in basement”
* You cluck to yourself.
* Rad chuckles.
* Nixon gives a thumbs-up.
<Rad> Way to make us all look like pussies.

The case for Norway as an ascendant superpower.

Hmmm. Moi?

Today, most Mexicans celebrate the “Día de los Reyes Magos”, which loosely translates to “Three Kings Day“. Kids get their “Christmas” gifts today, in line with the Bible’s tale of the baby Jésus and the Three Kings. More importantly (for the grown-up atheists among us), there’s also delicious cake to be had - it’s called rosca and is a kind of sweet bread with dried fruit and a little bit of rum in it.

Maru’s mom makes this cake every year, and this year Maru decided for the first time to try her hand at making her own. She turned out five totally awesome roscas, of which we’ve only managed to consume two so far - with a little help from our friends.

In the year that went:

• My old blog went south. Which is just as well, I guess, since the hosting was pretty shitty. I now have a shiny new blog hosted with a more reliable provider. Maybe I’ll even be able to rescue the old content…
• Our cat, Tina, died.
• The trees in our garden were infested with an assortment of parasitic organisms, and had to be completely cut back. They’re already sprouting new growth, though.
• I turned 30 on a hot day in Havana.

The openSUSE GNOME team will be holding its first meeting tailored to asia-pacific time zones on Thursday 12:00 UTC, in #opensuse-gnome on irc.freenode.net. If you’ve been left out because of your time zone previously, this is your chance to participate.

I’m at the GNOME Summit. Right now watching the Hotwire talk.

Oh, and since my blog was broken when it mattered, I’m late to the party - but what the hell: openSUSE 10.3 is out! And it’s actually not too shabby, with GNOME 2.20 and all.

Spent last week in Stockholm working on GVFS with Alex. We made great strides - pretty much all of the file system operations are now implemented in gvfs-daemon, gvfs-fuse-daemon and the SMB backend. Plenty of work remaining, though.

For Novell’s hack week, I wrote some benchmarking code for GVFS. It may not sound that exciting, but performance interests me, and it needed to be done. So far, the results are much better than I feared - for remote URIs, requests are proxied through a daemon over a D-Bus bus, and that had me worried.

In my particular setup, creating a file on a remote SMB share, filling it with 50MB data and reading it back took 16% longer using GVFS calls compared to bare POSIX and a kernel mount, and about twice as much CPU. As expected, for local FS operations the performance is pretty much equal.

There’s also a many-small-files test, in which I suspect GVFS will fare a lot worse, but I haven’t been able to make a good comparison due to some incomplete code paths in GVFS.

The code is on my GVFS branch in the new ‘test’ directory.

We bought a used car. Ford Fiesta 2003 (American cars are cheaper), gray. Four wheels. Now all I need to do is learn how to drive.