evan.musing << current

Hi everyone. Been too long since the last update, so wanted to get everyone up to speed.

Rubinius

Things have been a little quiet on the Rubinius front, as I’m sure a lot of you have noticed. We’re still hard at work, currently getting the new C++ VM into shape.
This new C++ VM fixes a lot of fundamental problems the shotgun VM had (type safety, expression ordering, etc), which is a major reason we’re migrating our work to it.

Things have been a little quieter, commit wise, as the rest of the team gets up to speed on the new VM that I’ve been working on. Shotgun has been put into maintenance mode, with updates to the current main coming mainly in the form of bug fixes to the kernel.

I know that the advances we’re making in the new VM everyone will love, from more performance to less crashes to better code organization.

Comic-Con

I’ve just returned from Comic-Con, having spend 4 days in the sun down in San Diego with the rest of nerdom.
It was quite a fun con though quite tiring. We managed to get into some good panels, but didn’t make it into the Hero’s and Lost panels. Seems you had to arrive at 6am to even attempt to get a seat. The line to get in was literally a mile long (no really, I’m not kidding.)

Conferences

Since we’ve been hard at work trying to get Rubinius to 1.0, I haven’t done too many conferences this summer. The next one I’ll be at is Lone Star Ruby Conf down in Austin. Should be fun, I’ve never been to Austin before and people seem to like the city.

Oh how I love, to stand in line
I stood here so long, I came up with this rhyme

We curse and we shuffle, from left to right
Seems like we’ll be here all damn night

The problem is hard, it’s NP complete
But after seven years, you’d think it’d be beat

I’m finally through, waiting here at the gate
When I arrive, I won’t know the date.

I missed that yesterday was Tsar Bomba day.

The fact that humanity created 1% of the suns output for 39 nanoseconds is.. scary and interesting at the same time. Now if we could only use something like that for good rather than killing the planet (humans are included under that), we’d be set.

It’s really too bad that the Cold War was about who could have the biggest, baddest weapons arsenal and not which country had the highest standard of living. What a bizarre and wonderful world that would have been.

That concludes today’s science/humanity lesson today, now back to your regularly scheduled quagmire.

It’s again been too long since the last update. If anyone has a good way to keep yourself disciplined on writing regular posts, please comment and let me know the secret.

I’m going to keep this one personal, then write another with tech stuff. Abby and I are adjusting to life in LA nicely. Lots of restaurants to explore as always, and our new favorite game: Spot the celebrity! I’m ahead in the standings due to an uncanny ability to pick up the subtle clues they give off.

Most recently, I spotted Jane Lynch (40 Year Old Virgin) at Urth Caffe with courtney. Abby has recently started to do well, spotting Cassidy Lehrman (Sarah Gold, Entourage) at the Santa Monica pier, and Ben McKenzie (Ryan Atwood, The OC) at Stardust last night.

Hopefully we don’t seem vapid and fame-obsessed, but this is LA, where this happens quite a bit. Think of it like a post-modern Slug Bug.

As always, Fog, our muse around the house, has provided much entertainment. Since I’ve begun working at home, we’ve started to get on a routine: Feed her, play a little, she sleeps for 4 hours, we play more, watch some TV, sleep a bit more, feed again, repeat. It’s tough being a Felis domesticus.

Update: I have evidence

Abby, Fog and I have finally arrived in LA.

• We arrived on Sunday in the car with Fog, to find that I’d forgotten to have the power company turn the power on. So our first night was in the dark (kind of fun actually).
• Monday we unpacked the car, ran some errands, not much
• Tuesday, the furniture arrived! Movers were awesome. As Abby has been saying, “The best $3k we’ve ever spent.” Took them about 2.5 hours to move everything from the trunk in. Only thing broken so far is one drinking glass.
• Since then we’ve been unpacking A LOT. We’ve got a ton of stuff and probably wont be fully unpacked for another week. We’ve got to get some more organizational units to put stuff in too. We downsized our stuff on the Seattle side, but we’ve still got a ton.
• Finally today, Time Warner installed the cable. Got the HD DVR (which is pretty sweet so far), and the fastest internet (10 Mb/s down, 1 Mb/s up!)

We’ve been walking a lot, which is a little strange for LA, but is exactly what we’d hoped we’d be doing. The neighborhood is great, lots of kids and people out and about. Walking down the the side streets, it almost seems like you’re in an idyllic suburb. Birds chirping, kids playing in the yard, sunny and 76 degrees.

Abby has posted photos of the move. The ones at the beginning or in seattle, then the drive down, finally, in LA.

Since I’m with working for EY (Engine Yard) there is no office, I’ll be working from home solely. Problem with working from home is that you’re home all the time, and I tend to go a bit crazy if I stay home all day. So I ponyed up and got a new Sprint EVDO account, so I can work from where ever!

The device I got is the Sierra Wireless AC 595U, which is USB. It’s pretty nice because the connector is at a 90 angle from the rest of the device, so it stands straight up, rather than straight out like a lot of them. Straight out is a pain because the footprint of your laptop grows by like 6 inches by having it in. This one barely sticks out any more than the Powerbook power connector, which is great.

Performance

The speed isn’t awesome (saw it at 100kb/s burst upload though), but from what I’ve seen, it’s faster in LA (which is where I’ll be using it from mostly). I’ll be sure to run the speedtest again when I get there.

OS X Compatible:

This turned out way better than I’d hoped for. Sierra Wireless has ported their connection manager to OS X in total, so I could actually activate and provision the card under OS X. Most reports of using EVDO on OS X talks about needing a Windows machine to provision and activate, so I was pleasantly surprised to hear that wasn’t the case here.
It just shows up as a modem to OS X, but Sierra’s software reports extra stats like what speed networks are available (1xRRT, EVDOr0, or EVDOrA). Right now, sitting just north of Lake Union in Seattle, I’ve got 3 bars of strength and EVDOrA (the fastest).

To play with:

The box says that it’s got some kind of GPS capability too. I’m suspecting it’s the newish ground based GPS (same thing Helio uses), so I’ll have to see how I can query the modem for coordinates or something.

As some have heard, my wife Abby and I are leaving Seattle for sunny and 74 degrees Los Angeles, CA.

The move has been in the works for a while (about 6 months) and the time has finally come. The movers have already picked up everything this morning, and Abby, Fog (our cat), and I are driving down to LA starting Saturday morning.

Why? is a pretty common question. Here’s a few reasons:

1. We both went to USC, so we’ve lived in LA before. We’ve still got a lot of friends there, so it will be fun to be able to hang out with them again.
2. My recent employment by Engine Yard allows me to work from anywhere, so I’m untethered in that regard. Abby is going into TV production, and LA is the place for that. So our professional lives has facilitated this move.
3. Unlike a lot of people, we actually like LA. Probably because we both lived there during our formative years, the culture and pace of life is a lot of fun. We’ve huge movie buffs, and LA is a great town for that. Being able to go sit on the beach and actually swim in the ocean is a plus too.

On a generic moving note, I’m so ready to be done moving. Having movers has made it SO much easier, but it’s still a major pain. I wonder how much it is to just have people show up at your house, pack and move everything while you go on vacation… As bourgeois that sounds, I can really see the appeal.

A note to all my seattle friends: You’ve been amazing friends, and you are all welcome down in LA anytime (but call first).