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Google, food, food, more food, stuff 2006 June 27 22:17

Posted by diamond in : Random, Skynet, Cycling , 1 comment so far

I have a phone interview google on friday @ 10:30. I am filled with fear and wonder.

Went out on friday night with folks to celebrate sith’s birthday. We ate in Moll Darby’s (wow what an annoying website). The food, oh the food. Let me illustrate: molc ordered a fillet steak with pepper sauce. After a few bites, he decided that this was the best steak he’d ever had, and he’s quite a steak fan. Me, i ordered some roast lamb. I offered to swap molc some of my lamb for my steak. He refused saying he was too busy enjoying his. Later however he changed his mind. When he took a bite of the lamb, he turned back to me and announced that he had ordered the wrong dish.

And while the lamb was good, it wasn’t the best part of the dish. It came with what the menu described as ‘a wild Mushroom Croute’, whatever that means. In reality, it was a pastry item containing mushrooms and sauce. Best thing i’ve ever eaten. It was so good i was close to tears. Ask anyone else who was there. Just.. wow. Conal ordered a penne dish with mixed seafood in sauce. Next time i’ll be ordering that. It was also just that good. *drool*. It’s a pricey enough place, ~€38 for a starter and main course, but i’ll definetely be returning a few times before i flee this city -)

On saturday, my last day in the Wild Onion, noirin came down and joined me for lunch in the WO (followed by her joining donal and sonia for lunch 2.0 in the WO -). When i was leaving work ruth gave me my usual wages, and said “That’s not all you’re getting, but you won’t find that out till later”. I had no idea what that meant, decided that i was unlikely to figure out whatever scheme ruth had planned anyway. That evening myself and noirin went out for food in San Lorenzo, which though not as good as Moll Darby’s, was very tasty. I did manage to spill a glass of water over an unfortunate fellow customer, but they were very gracious about it (anyone else reminded of this?). At the end of the meal noirin revealed that ruth was in fact paying for the dinner. How very cunning and sweet of her -)

On sunday i went up to dublin to visit diane who was over on buisness. We ended up sitting in st stephen’s green (yes, the actual green. no, not the shopping centre.) chatting for about 4-5 hours. I’m very surprised i escaped un-sunburnt. It was really good to see her. There was some kind of crossword/treasure hunt event going on, we had multiple groups of young people running up to our bench asking if we’d mind moving so they could search the inscription for certain words. I was tempted to try insert some disinformation into the game, but i ran out of motivation. Maybe next time -)

Afterwards we met up with niall and maeve whom i went with for sushi in aya. I made a rather big miscalculation however. Niall and maeve had to leave in 45 mins, as she was catching a train back to galway. I therefore decided there was no point in going for sushi 55 (all-you-can-eat sushi for 55 minutes). The alternative was to pay-per-plate. That was fine, i wasn’t planning on eating that much anyway. Mistake. Sushi 55 costs €27.50. On the other hand, this much sushi at these prices adds up to €44. Doh.

Other photos uploaded today are:

On the subject of photos, my post about spiders got some truly terrifying stories in response.

It turns out i was wrong about having broken my record on thursday. I spent some time on friday noting down all the information from here on my cycles and graphed the result. Yes, i know it’s not very pretty, haven’t been able to figure out a useful way of displaying the data yet. In the process i found this which shows the max i’ve managed is actually 27.9kmph. Annoyingly, i went out tonight to try and beat that, and with about 1km to go i was averaging about 28.06, and then i got a major cramp in my left calf and had to pull back to walking speed -/ Even so i managed 25km @ 27.69kmph, which is pretty good, just not high enough for my goals. Next time.

Over the last 3-4 weeks, the irc daemon for skynet has been having many ‘issues’. There’s been a long-running file descriptor leak, which meant we had to restart it every few months. It’s a pain in the ass, but not the end of the world. However, recently the ircd started crashing, randomly. Strace and gdb turned up nothing useful. Eventually i spotted debian bug #300638. The description didn’t quite match up with our situation (the bug only talks about ppc and amd64), but it was the same area of the code that our ircd was crashing in, so i decided to apply the patch and see.

Patch applied, updated package rolled, .deb installed. The crashing stopped, so it looks fairly clear that the patch fixed that (though we still have no idea why it worked without crashing for 6-8 months before starting to crash every few hours). However, the file descriptor leak became much much worse. Before the patch, it could take a few months for the process to run out of fds. After the patch, it would lose one fd per connection. At that rate it could fall over in days, if not hours.

I spent a fair chunk of thursday night trying to debug the fd leak. Looked through the relevant parts of openssl, the pam auth patch we’ve applied to the ircd, some of the pam libraries that were handling the auth etc. Disabling pam auth stopped the fd leak completely, so it was clear that the issue was being caused by that patch. Having gone over the patch with a fine-tooth comb multiple times, i came to the conclusion that it was actually a pam bug we were triggering due to the way the auth patch worked. So, i re-wrote the pam invocation code so that it would only call pam_start()/pam_end() once, and have the original handle persist, and voila, fd leak is no longer triggered. It’s such a relief to have a reliable service again after so many weeks of random outages.

New record 2006 June 22 19:21

Posted by diamond in : Cycling , 1 comment so far

20.3km @ 27.42kmph, substantially faster average than i’ve ever managed before. Happy.

Photo cycling 2006 June 21 23:24

Posted by diamond in : Random, Cycling , 5 comments

Well, ok, the 2 words in the title aren’t actually related. I went for another cycle yesterday, did 21.4km @ 26.84kmph, which i was very pleased with. I suspect the weight-loss is responsible for most of the increases as i’m only just getting back into shape yet again. I’m now up to 847km on the kelly since i got it.

On to the photos.

Suspicious activity 2006 June 19 23:09

Posted by diamond in : Random , add a comment

Tonight myself and zoney and molc went along to luisa’s 25th birthday party. It was a very international affair -) There were people there from such far away places as northern ireland, mayo, india, portugal, france and nigeria. The food was slightly less varied, dwelling on portuguese fare, which suited me fine. I managed to eat most of the tuna-tomato-biscuit things which seemed to cause much delight. Fine by me.

The suspicious activity however was molc-centred. As bruce and luisa are getting married in just over a month, the conversation naturally came around to discussing the wedding. At this point molc suddenly perked up and got involved. There was much talk about the suit (and shirt sown together from other shirt, made out of some strange material. *shrug*) that bruce will be wearing, and what sort of music will herald the groom into the church etc. I turned to molc and mentioned that he seemed very interested in this wedding all of a sudden, and he quickly got embarrassed and went quiet. It makes you wonder if he’s planning something of his own. I guess time will tell shortly enough.

Short and sweet 2006 June 18 19:36

Posted by diamond in : Cycling , add a comment

16km @ 26.5kmph. A good cycle, car crash and moronic motorist swerving onto my side of the road while on the phone aside.