Downtime
May 28th, 2006 by erb
pretty uneventful memorial day.
malaika and monica went to victoria for a night, and i drove there and back again. but this is cool:
the honda civic has typically gotten around 30-40 mpg around bainbridge, so obviously it likes the highway better — even when going over a few mild hills and foothills of the olympics, to port angeles. we filled up the tank that morning, at around $2.13 i think, so that’s 133 miles, 49.5 mpg, 2.7 gallons, or approximately $5.72 for the round trip. supposing we had a (decent) 30 mpg: it would have been $9.44. and a gas guzzling SUV 20 mpg (and many are worse): $14.16. wow.
[Edit: 30may2006: Ok, clearly i don’t drive much. it wasn’t $2.13 — it was actually $3.13. Which means $8.41 round trip ($13.88 @ 30 mpg, and $20.82 @ 20 mpg).]
so after picking up m&m today, i’m going to see ministry tonight in seattle. interesting; i haven’t bought an album since filth pig, which i only think i listened to about 3 times. i hope they’re good, and i hope they play old stuff.
this week at work: busy as usual. new stuff: by necessity i’m learning how to wrap C code in python module wrappers, but i think i’m taking longer by trying to follow existing company examples to do what i need, rather than starting at the documentation first. sigh. at any rate: i’m surprised what i needed wasn’t already there, but it wasn’t. i just need PCI device access (byte,half,word reads and writes to bus/dev/funcs). sheesh. seems pretty fundamental to me. existing code was using a python wrapper that itself proc (child fork) called pciconf. and, making matters worse, the info dump i needed (uh, vfd i think, special internal device stuff) is only accessible via indirect (write vfd address offset at LOC+0, then read vfd result at LOC+2). NO CONSECUTIVE PCICONF READS OR WRITES ARE POSSIBLE. so a full dump results in 1000+ pciconf calls, each wrapped in child forks, each called via python module. yikes. so, i just needed to take exisitng pci_utils.c code and make it available via wrapper python extension module, so we can skip the forking at least. shoulda taken half a day, but because i’ve not done this before, and it’s not a simple task like other wrappers (multiple pci bus/dev/func devices, needing device /dev/pci open/close, parameters, trying to make this efficient, etc etc), and i didnt read the doc first, it’s taking longer.
oh, and of course, more of the same (no time to do what i’m scheduled to do, because of all the critical unplanned top priority interruptions).
i didn’t get much done this weekend like i wanted to (yet - there’s always monday, if i don’t stay out too late). specifically, i wanted to work on chezbrodeur CSS in general, and more importantly ChezWiki (add help pages; add genealogy stuff from Genealogy.Wikia; read help pages in general), and also read user doc for WordPress.
Fave quote of the weekend: from SciFi channel made-for-tv movie “Mammoth” (no, it wasn’t very good, but it was fun to watch on a dead saturday night with laptop in hand): when govt goons are talking to the main character (who’s daughter is missing), and his father behind him, in their doorway, telling them they have to question them now, and his daughter isn’t their concern: “We take orders directly from the Whitehouse. We don’t deal with domestic matters.” — his father pipes up, “Neither does the Whitehouse…”
Leave a Reply
-
My Visitors
-
My Calendar
