Except I’m not quite that close to leaving, yet. Most things I do, I’ll do a few more times. It’s only The Last Time I’ll do some pretty obscure things.

Yesterday was The Last Time I’ll be held up at the train crossing… by two trains going opposite directions. Today was The Last Time I’ll fuel up at the Chevron by my house… when I was already going east… in the morning. Tomorrow will be The Last Time I go to my research meeting… to the Friday meeting… on my bike.

It feels like a suburban kindergarten version of the detachment process: Everyone’s drawing gets a gold star, whether or not they even picked up a crayon; every dumb mundane thing I do gets promoted to the ‘Last’ that dumb mundane thing.

Oh, I think I forgot to say in previous posts. I’m moving to San Francisco. Excellent location, vicinity of 15th and Market, near public transit, walking distance from Haight and Castro and Mission and their scads of wonderful bars. Come visit, we’ll test that theory, just to make sure it still holds, like they do in science. Yes of course you can crash on the couch.

College has been a long, fun trip. I’m sad to leave, even as I’m eager for the next chapter to begin.

I’m very thankful for everyone who helped me in ways large and small during my job hunt-I couldn’t have done it without you. Especial thanks to P.K. and A.P. I am in your debt.

Peculiarly, there are a few engineers on my team who also worked with my dad more than a decade ago. I hope he left a good impression ;)

I’m looking for a full-time engineering job, starting in January 2012, in San Francisco (or reachable from there with shuttle/pubtrans). ¹

I work on low-level software and high-level hardware. I make the inside guts ugly so the outside product can be pretty. Then I make the inside pretty too. I’m allergic to bad design and to development cultures that don’t discourage it.

I don’t believe that “done is better than right”. I believe that doing it the right way is a worthwhile goal in itself, and anyway it’s usually the easiest and fastest way in the long run. Nobody ever lined up at 6am to buy the cheap 50% solution.

Here is my resume.

You should hire me:
… If you need someone to look simultaneously at several layers of your stack (hardware, firmware, bus, driver, application) and look for inefficiencies (“opportunities”),
… or to look simultaneously at several layers of your stack and tell you why they’re not working together.
… If a well-meaning director handed you a two-page project plan lacking details and illustrated only with a few comically simple box-and-arrow diagrams, then asked you to please “Build this. It’s just a couple of processors and an FPGA, it shouldn’t take too long, right?”
… and the hardware group laughed when you asked if they could spare an engineer this month.
… If sometimes the kernel panics with some message about skb buffer underrun and you think it’s a bug in your driver but you can’t quite track it down.
… If you’ve heard dark whispers that the C preprocessor can do ever so much more than simple inline functions, and you want a guide into the mysterious realm of generated code.
… If the local security wizard walked by your office last week, paused, scrutinized your whiteboard diagram, pointed at one ordinary-looking box, muttered “Yeah, you could get 0wned through there” to herself, and walked away. You don’t know what to do now.

Update 19:05 12 Sep: Resume and contact info added.

• Left the house on my motorcycle, carrying my laptop and a good book in my backpack.
• Got a haircut.
• Went to Infusions of Tea and had a cup and read a couple of chapters of the book.
• Went to Gamestop and bought Portal 2.
• Went to Sears and bought a socket driver, a small assortment of sockets, and one of those magnetic bowls to keep hold of screws.
• Went to Ace Hardware and got a couple of the awesome Progrip Stretch Lock bungee cords that I use to tie down/tie together bulky cargo. These things rule.
• Went to Michael’s and got some velcro strips (for my orange vest) and denim patches (I don’t recommend American Eagle jeans)
• Went to my storage unit and picked up my Xbox. You know. So I can play Portal.
• Went home.

Only the first, second, and third steps were planned ahead of time. At no time did I feel I needed a larger vehicle. My motorcycle is not just an utterly viable mode of transportation… it is a fantastic mode of transportation.

Yet again, it is the solemn duty ;) of those who took care to inform themselves as best they could, to reassure people: “It’s fine. Things aren’t going right, but it’s not going to be the end of the world. It’s not that big a deal.” The refrain is as old as technology and technologists.

Sidebar: Sometimes this backfires. Sometimes calm is advised in actual emergencies that require immediate response. Sometimes the original sentiment cools and lithifies into reactionaryism. The ongoing debate over climate change comes to mind.

Just some thoughts. I’m reading Anathem, so my mental and philosophical models of Technology are being violently spun around and shaken.

On a lighter note:

Unit 1 at Fukushima Daiichi was originally scheduled for shutdown this week (before a Feb extension for another decade). Like the cop’s partner in a crime drama’s first act: “Why did it have to be Simmons who took that bullet tonight, Chief? He was two weeks away from retirement.”

To be honest, I don’t understand why someone would try porting ZFS now. What Apple offered wasn’t just a new filesystem. Users don’t care about filesystems: they are a technical detail. Instead, Apple would change Mac OS X, across the whole system, to take the best advantage of the new capabilities and guarantees ZFS offers.

“Time Machine 2″ with ZFS’s cheap easy snapshots. A new default policy to set copies=2 on important folders like ~/Documents and ~/Library/Mail – better protection for users’ data, with zero effort. Every FireWire or USB hard disk would become as smart as a Drobo. And so on. Apple would do what they always do with new technology: turn an uninteresting detail into a series of small and large fixes and features that directly improve the Mac OS X experience for all users.

Instead, this new port will be just another entry in a list of filesystems most people don’t use. The system at large won’t do anything differently to take advantage of ZFS. To get any real benefit, users will have to study ZFS and figure out how to apply it to their system. That limits it to users technically competent enough to just use Solaris or Linux.

The worst news is that this port will become a support nightmare. 10.7 will come out soon. Apple puts zero effort into maintaining compatibility for low-level system modifications. So, 10.7 will probably break ZFS. The developers will scramble to fix it. Some users will lose data in the confusion. Two years later, 10.8 will come out. It will probably break ZFS. And so on.

For those who choose ZFS on Mac OS X, the question remains: What problem are you solving? What data do you have that’s so important that you want the durability guarantees and administration capabilities of ZFS, but so unimportant that you don’t mind the unreliability and future integration worries of a filesystem your OS vendor already decided they don’t want to support?

Thanks to my Dad for the Question.

A: listened to this waiting for a girl at midnight at Minneapolis’ airport. She never showed up. Me and a custodian were the only ones there. It was snowing. This was perfect. I will always remember that.

B: sounds like a perfect night, your girl ditched you and you were hanging out with a custodian. Sweet.

A: Son, it’s all a part of life.

The first YouTube comments I’ve ever seen conveying any meaningful human emotion.

Thanks Stella and Keaton for leading me to the music without knowing it.

Last night and today I went out walking around Allston to explore this new world of low-density crystalline water. I walked, stepped, kicked, and jumped through all kinds of snow. Still-falling light powder, week-old crunchy crystals, blobs of ice, snow with salt, snow with dirt, slippery snow, rock-hard snow, dry snow, clean snow. Most of all that clear slippery wet mush that seems endemic to well-traveled sidewalks.

The snow I most enjoyed stepping through was a four inch thick composite of dried leaves and powder.
The snow I thought most beautiful was the paper-smooth dusting on an open field. I felt shameful and profane for tramping through it, marring it with my ridiculous dirty footsteps.
The snow that hurt the most was the one millimeter of powder concealing wet ice. Classic pratfall.

I put a couple of pictures in my Flickr album for Boston. I think a more talented photographer could make something pretty with that blue house.

A Makefile from one project should never recurse to a Makefile from a different project, unless using a subshell with a clean environment.

In other words, if you must automatically build another project, you should do it in a way indistinguishable from the way it would be built directly by a user.

This post was brought to you by uClinux-dist and Buildroot, two complicated script systems to turn code into system images.