sync ; sync ; sync

I managed to get a picture of me in the blogger.com profile, so if you want to scare small children you know where to look :-).

I should decide to what conference I try to go this summer. There is debconf 5 in Helsinki (note the title "See you in hel") which is July 10 to 17. Or I could go to LSM 2005 which is in Dijon (much closer) and from July 5 to 9 and is in general a hotbed of Common Lisp activity. I'll wait a little more until the programms pan out, but after the Danish disaster of last year I doubt I can convice my wife to go to Helsinki. She wants Calabria :-).

I made almost no progress with the lazy memory allocation in sbcl. I think I know where the problem is, but I don't have enough time to check it out :-(. Also I wonder why nobody seems to care about this problem. What do you do on a 64 bit machine, do you start by allocating 2**41 bytes? Does the OS permit this? What does root think of this? Or do you want to have to select at startup how large your image might become? If not, you need lazy allocation.

Found the USB problem

I've been having USB problems with my own kernels recently. Now I found why. If you cannot use your USB memory stick, in my case my Iomega stick with 2.6.* and you get the message "uba: device 9 capacity nsec 0 bsize 512". It could be because you enabled BLK_DEV_UB. If you do the ub driver kicks in and it seems to dislike memory sticks with avengence. The debian images have this disabled already.

Now I only need to find out why my configuration causes the transfer to the PL3507-based 1394 bridge doesn't work my my kernel and does with the debian image. Sigh.