Renata

As seen from High Park

Please ignore it. Thanks.

Now some cat to make your day better:

And just because I am testing twitter’s API, I get a Failwhale. Nice.

Ok, now it seems to be working. Thanks, whale. I like you.

One week ago, we noticed that one of Björk’s canine was looking weird. She didn’t seem to give a damn about it and was eating and playing. Last Monday I took her to her first visit to the vet here in Canada, and it was quite upsetting: she was diagnosed with a root abscess and given antibiotics for two weeks (now talk about giving pills to a cat for two weeks…) and will have the tooth removed tomorrow morning. Poor kitty!

Other than hating taking pills, she looks fine, and loves the prescribed “paté-only” diet. She has absolutely no idea on what’s going to happen tomorrow. As for me, I can’t fall asleep tonight, I am feeling terribly nervous and insecure. Tomorrow will be an awful day for me. She’s expected to stay overnight at the animal hospital and only come back home the day after, but I really hope they call me to bring her back home before that.

UPDATE: It happened! She is doing great and I will be able to pick her up tonight!

UPDATE: She looks good the next morning. They’ve prescribed painkillers, it will be another week of catsitting. But she’s alright!

A couple of months ago I posted the winter weather forecast of minus twelve, feels like minus twenty. To compensate the blizzards and snowstorms, we’re having a helluva summer and the picture I’m posting can be easily mistaken by a brazilian summer week. Don’t let it fool you: it’s summer in Tronno and yesterday I melted under 35 degrees. Just like Rio.

I had the most bizarre bike accident yesterday. I was biking in this calm, bucolic neighbourhood, smiling to everybody, thinking about having dinner at a nice place. THEN, all of a sudden, a crazy weirdo crosses my path in his bike, shows me the finger, yells something, hits me. I fall. He keeps going.

While I am wondering what happened, if someone has set me up the bomb, where that blood is coming from, and all those crazy things that cross your mind while you are laying on the ground after an accident, a woman appears and takes me to the sidewalk. A few moments later, guess who appears? The same guy who hit me! He asks if it was his fault. DUH, OF COURSE. And then an ambulance is called.

Now, a quick background story here: last week I found a cat wandering around my condo lobby. I thought it might have escaped from one of the apartments, so I brought it home and tried to find the owner. Long story short, a couple down the street found the same cat a few weeks ago, because the owner left him alone in an abandoned house. The couple talked with the owner and decided to adopt the cat and give him a real family. A happy ending.

Back to the bike accident, there I was with the weirdo, the woman, bleeding, and scared – I really dislike anything involving blood. The weirdo was becoming weirder and wouldn’t let me call Fabio and almost screaming “CALM DOWN! EVERYTHING IS UNDER CONTROL!” – yeah, right. Finally, the full service arrived, ambulance and fire truck. I really don’t know why the firemen came, but fire trucks are awesome and I am always happy to see them. When the paramedics came to see me, guess what? The guy who adopted the cat last week was my paramedic! I couldn’t have been luckier in this situation! So he just told the weirdo to go away and told me cat tales while he took care of me :)

Turns out I have a cut in my chin and in my foot (got a few stitches, will most likely get a scar) a few bruises and scratches, and I needed a booster tetanus vaccine. Experience with the hospital couldn’t be better. No line, waited just a little bit because Fabio saw somebody badly, badly hurt arriving at the ER while I was there. Great, friendly staff, even with an adult afraid of needles. I was back home earlier than expected (especially considering my experience with brazilian healthcare, including private & expensive & top top ones).

You brazilians, know how much do I pay for Canadian Healthcare? NOT EVEN A PENNY.

I was going to bed, because it’s getting late and tomorrow is Monday, Monday, so good to me. But did you guys see that? Linus Torvalds himself just tagged Linux 3.0-rc1. I THOUGHT THE WORLD WAS COMING TO A COLOURFUL EXPLOSION before we would be seeing that. But it’s true, you all non believers. I went to kernel.org, and I saw with my own eyes.

For your pleasure, I will reproduce the full announcement

Yay! Let the bikeshed painting discussions about version numbering begin (or at least re-start).

I decided to just bite the bullet, and call the next version 3.0. It will get released close enough to the 20-year mark, which is excuse enough for me, although honestly, the real reason is just that I can no longer comfortably count as high as 40.

The whole renumbering was discussed at last years Kernel Summit, and there was a plan to take it up this year too. But let’s face it – what’s the point of being in charge if you can’t pick the bike shed color without holding a referendum on it? So I’m just going all alpha-male, and just renumbering it. You’ll like it.

Now, my alpha-maleness sadly does not actually extend to all the scripts and Makefile rules, so the kernel is fighting back, and is calling itself 3.0.0-rc1. We’ll have the usual 6-7 weeks to wrestle it into submission, and get scripts etc cleaned up, and the final release should be just “3.0″. The -stable team can use the third number for their versioning.

So what are the big changes?

NOTHING. Absolutely nothing. Sure, we have the usual two thirds driver changes, and a lot of random fixes, but the point is that 3.0 is *just* about renumbering, we are very much *not* doing a KDE-4 or a Gnome-3 here. No breakage, no special scary new features, nothing at all like that. We’ve been doing time-based releases for many years now, this is in no way about features. If you want an excuse for the renumbering, you really should look at the time-based one (“20 years”) instead.

So no ABI changes, no API changes, no magical new features – just steady plodding progress. In addition to the driver changes (and the bulk really is driver updates), we’ve had some nice VFS cleanups, various VM fixes, some nice initial ARM consolidation (yay!) and in general this is supposed to be a fairly normal release cycle. The merge window was a few days shorter than usual, but if that ends up meaning a smaller release and a nice stable 3.0 release, that is all
good. There’s absolutely no reason to aim for the traditional “.0″ problems that so many projects have.

In fact, I think that in addition to the shorter merge window, I’m also considering make this one of my “Linus is being a difficult ^&^hole” releases, where I really want to be pretty strict about what I pull during the stabilization window. Part of that is that I’m going to be travelling next week with a slow atom laptop, so you had better convince me I *really* want to pull from you, because that thing really is not the most impressive piece of hardware ever built. It does the “git” workflow quite well, but let’s just say that compiling the kernel is not quite the user experience I’ve gotten used to.

So be nice to me, and send me only really important fixes. And let’s make sure we really make the next release not just an all new shiny number, but a good kernel too.

Ok?

Go forth and test,

Linus

Need a new challenge for the new week? Now you know what to do.