when I stopped updating This is Not a Dank Journal -- Investigations of a Mind Afflicted, I mentioned a purely technical blog I might start. That blog is now a reality.

Money. Cache. Hoes.

GO TO IT.

btw: the semester is over, and I think I maintained my 4.0. Hot holy shit w00t.

One more sip of that sweet TabPower ...go ahead and listen to the Jay-Z with me, if you would.

O bitter is the knowledge that one draws from the voyage!
The monotonous and tiny world, today
Yesterday, tomorrow, always, shows us our reflections,
An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom!

Must we depart? If you can do so, remain;
Depart, if you must. Someone runs, another crouches,
To deceive that vigilant and fatal enemy,
Time! Ah, there are some runners who know no respite
- Baudelaire, of whose posse i am a part

from my facebook group on systems, networking and deez high-performance nuts, aka Our Cachelines go to 0x11:

( systems geek wankeryCollapse )

on a closing note, it's been an outstanding fucking five years allowing y'all intimate views into this mind afflicted (less afflicted these days, I think -- work's a soothing balm indeed, and grad school more so), a chance to look backwards from behind mine own eyes, but frankly:

• it got to the point back in early 2007 where i would be like, "ooooh, i need to blog that when i get home!" i can think of few traits more repulsive -- or prone to timesinkery
• forthright discussion of la vida dank is, sadly, no longer compatible with my lifeplan (i have, of course, no intention of cleaning things up (save errors of grammar or spelling, which will be ruthlessly annihilated as always))
• etc

and thus, http://dankamongmen.livejournal.com will see no further posting. I've learned a tremendous amount about myself, all of you, the world external and the world interpersonal in this lustrum. I've made wonderful friends, spat any number of TaBs in wet coughs of laughter trailing into hours of giggles, and known exactly what to expect once interviews all started opening with "so, we read your LiveJournal" (omfg aren't you the intrepid HR manager! it has my name on it! (I've said it once and I'll say it one more time: the side-trait most valuable to the Master Programmer is mystique)). My childlike, ultra-absorbent ego has fairly wallowed in the attention paid, and thanks you with merry gurgles (humming softly to itself while tabulating comments and friendpairs (ugh, more repulsiveness)). The kind words of encouragement and appreciation were touching, and made me dance inside; when y'all told me to shut the fuck up, that too was grandmotherly kindness, and I appreciate the instruction. It's all meat.

More than anything else, we've developed our vocabularies, every one of us (I'm pretty confident saying this). Our lives will be better for it!

I met a girl who sang the blues
And I asked her for some happy news,
But she just smiled and turned away.
I went down to the sacred store
Where I'd heard the music years before,
But the man there said the music wouldn't play.
- Don McLean, American Pie

I wanna exchange this CD!
The Pimp-Trick-Gangsta-Clique CD? Why?
It won't play right!
- Outkast, Aquemini

I'm thinking about starting a semi-serious blog, with a post or two a month, one of those things that reads like a 50-page resume and is a 50-page resume, a portfolio of preening for employers and guilds and one hundred million eager engineers from the East (no, further east, the east that's to the west). I love to teach, love to talk about computer, science and computer science, and think I, from time to time, have things worth sharing...

ONE LAST CLICHE POETRY BLOCKQUOTE? OH YES. This is the last one, folks, but it's an old favorite and I bet some of you can recite it with me...

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and
saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes
hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear,
burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall...
battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo,
who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's floated out and sat through the stale beer after
noon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to
pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,
lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping
down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon,
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts
and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks
and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days
and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement,
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a
trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall,
suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grind-ings and
migraines of China under junk-with-drawal in Newark's bleak furnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the
railroad yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts...
who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned
with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology,
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty
incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish,
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot
for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique
stores where they thought they were growing
old, and cried...

> From: Anthony McCoy <amccoy@cc.gatech.edu>
> To: cocms-list@cc.gatech.edu
> Date: Fri, 7 Nov 2008 09:53:53 -0500
> Subject: [Cocms-list] FW: (KACB) Sleeping in common areas prohibited
>
> The presence of individuals sleeping around Klaus in common areas and
> conference rooms, especially in the early mornings, has initiated some
> concerns from a security and liability standpoint. To decrease
> opportunities for trespassers who take advantage of access to the
> building, we respectfully request that individuals NOT ENGAGE IN SLEEP
> ACTVITY in open common areas and conference rooms. While it is recognized
> that intense or extended study may result in napping/dosing, however, the

Napping/dosing? LOL -- Freudian slip, or grim acceptance? You make the call.

"Accept the challenges so that you can feel the exhilaration of victory." - George S. Patton

Student Detail Schedule Spring 2009: Nov 01, 2008 09:50 pm
Total Credit Hours: 18.000

Compiler Design - CS 6241 - A Associated Term: Spring 2009
Level: Graduate Semester
Class 4:35 pm - 5:55 pm MW ES&T L1105 Jan 05, 2009 - May 02, 2009 Lecture* Santosh Pande (P)

Plasma Physics - NRE 6102 - A Associated Term: Spring 2009
Level: Graduate Semester
Class 3:05 pm - 4:25 pm TR Neely Nuclear Research 118 Jan 05, 2009 - May 02, 2009 Lecture* Weston M. Stacey (P)

Computational Transport - NRE 6103 - A Associated Term: Spring 2009
Level: Graduate Semester
Class 4:35 pm - 5:55 pm TR MRDC 2404 Jan 05, 2009 - May 02, 2009 Lecture* Dingkang Zhang (P)

Computational Complexity - CS 6520 - A Associated Term: Spring 2009
Level: Graduate Semester
Class 12:05 pm - 1:25 pm TR Bunger-Henry 311 Jan 05, 2009 - May 02, 2009 Lecture* Yan Z. Ding (P)

Randomized Algorithms - CS 7530 - A Associated Term: Spring 2009
Level: Graduate Semester
Class 9:35 am - 10:55 am TR Klaus 1447 Jan 05, 2009 - May 02, 2009 Lecture* Richard Lipton (P)

Special Topics - CS 8803 - MCA Associated Term: Spring 2009
Level: Graduate Semester
Class 1:05 pm - 1:55 pm MWF Coll of Computing 102 Jan 05, 2009 - May 02, 2009 Lecture* T. Conti (P)

Men, all this stuff you've heard about America not wanting to fight, wanting to stay out of the war, is a lot of horse dung. Americans, traditionally, love to fight. All real Americans love the sting of battle. When you were kids, you all admired the champion marble shooter, the fastest runner, the big league ball players, the toughest boxers. Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser. Americans play to win all the time. Now, I wouldn't give a hoot in hell for a man who lost and laughed. That's why Americans have never lost and will never lose a war. Because the very thought of losing is hateful to Americans...You know, by God, I actually pity those poor bastards we're going up against. By God, I do. We're not just going to shoot the bastards. We're going to cut out their living guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks. We're going to murder those lousy Hun bastards by the bushel.

Midtown last night was pretty freakin' awesome. Upon the Obama announcement, everything went nuts.

someone on the research list asked me to explain/decode/annotate a mail i'd sent. Replying was sufficiently interesting that I was moved to post here. You can really pull something out of nothing when you're freely allowed to correlate. Whether one ought is another thing entirely.

( click me if you've time to wasteCollapse )

i'm around; grad school + work is even less wise a lifeplan than it sounds and i have no idea what i was thinking. if anyone's still alive when i emerge, holla.

(06:48:33 PM) ***: hey, how do i go back and forth between sessions?
(06:48:37 PM) dankamongmen-gtalk: sessions?
(06:49:02 PM) ***: i want to be able to see my work computer and my home computer desktops at the same time.
(06:49:28 PM) ***: i just went in there and couldn't do alt tab to get back over to this side, i had to log off
(06:49:41 PM) dankamongmen-gtalk: i've no idea what ill-begotten windows chicanery you're talking about
(06:49:52 PM) ***: i forgot you were unix
(06:51:29 PM) *** i guess i have to open my windows i want over to use over on that side then. how the hell do you get to the internet from unix i wonder?
(06:51:46 PM) dankamongmen-gtalk: dude, on unix the internet comes to you
(06:52:06 PM) dankamongmen-gtalk: it's like, "girl, i just want to get next to you"
(06:52:06 PM) dankamongmen-gtalk: or, "girl, you without me is like harold melvin without the blue notes; you'll never go platinum!"
(06:52:14 PM) dankamongmen-gtalk: and i'm like, "don't call me girl, internet. i'm not your whore"
(06:52:15 PM) ***: Holy shit! that's a lot to think about.

While walking to the Highlander tonight around 0100, I suddenly realized what seems my first Great Insight (which likely means it was realized by Dijkstra in 1965 or so, scribbled down in inscrutable EWD Dutchlangtechnik and forgotten, until Knuth came upon it, corrected a minor flaw, and deemed it insufficiently notable to include in TAOCP's small I/O section):

The great advantage (as device speeds increase and multicore pervades, asymptotically the only advantage) of edge-triggered event polling interfaces is NOT the reduction of system calls, but the idempotency -- and thus parallelism -- to which it gives rise.

Event queue logic capable of rigorously and robustly driving edge-triggered event notification must be independent of queueing nondeterminism. This is not true for systems with level-triggered cores, and gives rise to many difficulties when attempting true multi-instance parallelism; such designs parallelize via functional decomposition into large chunks of asynchronous code with small critical sections, as opposed to iterative parallelism. Only the latter, of course, can be made to arbitrarily scale.

I've recently reimplemented my ICAP server snare using the edge-triggered interfaces provided by Linux and FreeBSD, and with that alone reduced latency across a broad testing pattern to <%50 of our closest competitor (I annihilate my reference implementation making use of libev, and I'd argue my core is just as generic for sd's, though it does not possess certain other properties (mainly signal- and timer-related genericness, due to optimizing assumptions I made of the underlying kernel -- ahhh, 2.6.23 was a good time)). Currently, snare takes advantage of multiple execution units only via process replication + client/network-based load balancing, allowing for gross asymmetries in the small (and god bless Dr. Kleinrock's execellent Queueing Systems texts, without which I could never model any of this shite, although I did amuse myself by attempting to apply turbulent flow/Rayleigh-Taylor methods to such problems over a long weekend months ago. Results included: fatigue, eye strain, reminder to self that I'm not a physicist). This weekend I've begun experimenting with parallelizing the core in toto, take no prisoners, damn-the-feedbacks-full-speed-ahead, and the results are awe-inspiring.

I ought be able to begin using kernel splicebufs (see tee(2), splice(2) and vmsplice(2) [3]) in an optimization orthogonal to all of this, achieving true zero-softcopy (ie just two DMAs) transaction processing. When 10Gb starts DCA'ing directly into L2 cache, I want to be ready to soar with it. Single pass, baby, nothin' but net; girl, let me touch you there, I wanna feel you.

Should I pull this off, I think snare might replace tako as the code of which I'm most proud -- I never got to take tako the places I wanted to. Reflex was too small; I had too much to do and too little time for experimentation; the mysteries and incantations were yet unknown to me; the techniques were nascent and nebulous in my mind. Had I have remained there another year, or had justben or stnuke or sstrickl backing me up for a year longer...sigh, dashed hopes and idle dreams. But this, this is huge -- go shove map reduce up your asses; I've got truly scalable I/O with negligible contention and minimal thread overhead, capable of running like code possessed on anything from a 1024-node Inifiniband cluster [0] to a 32-CPU eServer to that old PII in your basement.

It already eats less CPU, serving several hundred connections at a time on a UP P4, than the freakin' SNMP daemon [1]...with an RSS of less than 30MB. lol. f'n awesome.

countdown to grad school: 28 days omfg!!!!! zounds i can't wait!!!

Sorry that I never post here anymore, sigh. I'm not sure why; I'd like to think I've grown out of an attention-starved phase (phase? life), but it's more likely that I've just become boring. Worry not: I still hold down my side of the ATL, collectin' so much grass po-po's thinkin' I mow lawns, getting burned by the Great Game in the Sky and every now and then taking a point for the home team. I just can't anymore seem to imagine that people're interested in the little musings that float to my heap's root...also, the NAME REDACTED has firmly seized our common google share [2], which I guess provides less incentives to keep the Word Horde flowing. Beyond that, I've started spending much more free time reading and preparing for the Road to Ph-dizzlehood; I fully intend to compete for primacy among my fellow grad students, and must be tanned, rested, and ready.

[0] not that there'd be any reason to do this
[1] admittedly, this is net-snmpd (not the native bsnmpd(8)) on freebsd. but still.
[2] I know this sounds paranoid and nuts, but I think they're blacklisting me or something. Check this shit out, for instance -- reddit links to the actual text are found, but not a one of the entry (which certainly used to show up). wtf? information wants to be free yo!
[3] FreeBSD's zero_copy(9) is like a satire. I've scraped more sensible API's off the dark side of my nutsack.

Ahhh, the joy of debugging network issues under cover of Atlanta darkness! To hack -- to live!
( this is why they pay me the phat cashCollapse )
boom, motherfuckers!

A triplet of animadversions!

1. 1. I cannot think of any reason why MARTA police need a Mobile Command Unit. RIOT IN NORTH SPRINGS STATION THIS CHRISTMAS EVE; PASS IT ON.
2. 2. Watching C-SPAN, I can't help but think: "fuck home-owning Americans! I need their values to continue plummeting, allowing me to become a homeowner with economic panache and elan, PLUMMET damn you PLUMMET!"
3. every once in awhile, one's surprised by a software update's unheralded new capabilities: OpenSSH's "-D" option, OpenVPN's "--redirect-gateway", that kind of thing. Normally one must read the apt-listchanges news or peruse the new man page, but subversion 1.5.0's new functionality caught me totally off-guard:
   [prometheus](0) $ svn up
Conflict discovered in 'GNUmakefile'.
Select: (p) postpone, (df) diff-full, (e) edit,
(h) help for more options: df
--- .svn/text-base/GNUmakefile.svn-base Tue Jul 1 02:27:38 2008
+++ .svn/tmp/tempfile.5.tmp Tue Jul 1 13:13:46 2008
@@ -326,19 +326,20 @@
ln -vfs ../../$^ $@

TEST_DATA:=testing
-FULLTEST:=$(TEST_DATA)/$(BINDIR)/shittytester
+SHITTYTESTER:=$(TEST_DATA)/$(BINDIR)/shittytester
fulltest: test $(FULLTEST) sfiltertest
- $(FULLTEST) $(TEST_DATA)/fulltest
+ $(SHITTYTESTER) http://svn.research.sys/index.html -

-SHITTYTESTER:=$(TEST_DATA)/$(BINDIR)/shittytester
TESTAUX:=$(TEST_DATA)/$(SNARECONF) $(TEST_DATA)/$(BASSDRUMCONF)
-SHITTYTESTER:=$(TEST_DATA)/$(BINDIR)/shittytester
test: build $(TEST_DEPDOTFILE) $(TESTAUX) $(SNARERNG) $(SHITTYTESTER)
$(XMLBIN) val -e -r $(BASSDRUMRNG) $(TEST_DATA)/$(BASSDRUMCONF)
$(XMLBIN) val -e -r $(SNARERNG) $(TEST_DATA)/$(SNARECONF)
$(BINOUT)/$(POLTEST) $(TEST_DATA)/$(BASSDRUMCONF)
export MALLOC_CHECK_=2 CROSIER=$(BINOUT)/$(CROSIER) SNARE=$(BINOUT)/$(SNARE) && . $(CROSIERCONF) && $(BINOUT)/$(CUNIT) -c $(TEST_DATA) -a
- $(SHITTYTESTER) http://svn.research.sys/index.html -
+<<<<<<< .mine
+ $(SHITTYTESTER) http://dank.qemfd.net/index.html -
+=======
+>>>>>>> .r1370
$(BINOUT)/$(BONWARE)

sfiltertest: $(SFILTER)/test/control_test/run_self_tests.sh
Select: (p) postpone, (df) diff-full, (e) edit, (r) resolved,
(h) help for more options: h
(p) postpone - mark the conflict to be resolved later
(df) diff-full - show all changes made to merged file
(e) edit - change merged file in an editor
(r) resolved - accept merged version of file
(mf) mine-full - accept my version of entire file (ignore their changes)
(tf) theirs-full - accept their version of entire file (lose my changes)
(l) launch - launch external tool to resolve conflict
(h) help - show this list

Select: (p) postpone, (df) diff-full, (e) edit, (r) resolved,
(h) help for more options:
   f'n b-a!

and a bonus observation:

obloquy is one fine fucking word. How'd I never heard of it until now?

the one where dank goes to eat steak with atlanta FBI?

Please see the attachment regarding the Steak-Out to commemorate the
Centennial Anniversary of the FBI. It will be held on Wednesday, July
23, 2008 beginning at 11:30 a.m.

Please RSVP NO LATER THAN MONDAY JULY 7, 2008

Now this is an unexpected invitation from the Atlanta Field Office. I smell a trap =].