Rusty's Bleeding Edge Page

In a moment of idle curiosity, I wondered whether there was really a "golden age" for cinema. Maybe the IMDB Top 250 could shed some light, despite an obvious preference for recent films?

I broke the stats into 5 year segments: 1920 means 1920 thru 1924 inclusive. For the 2005-2009 segment, I extrapolated by 1.4, since we're only 3 1/2 years through that.

First I looked at raw numbers. How many movies from each 5 year segment feature in the IMDB top 250? This tops with the 2005-2009 section (extrapolated to 42 movies):

But that makes #250 count the same as #1. So if we weight each one, such that #1 gets 250 points, #2 gets 249 points, and #250 gets 1 point:

So clearly, the 50s (eg. 1957's 12 Angry Men at #10) was one peak, around 1980 (eg. Star Wars trilogy in 1977, 1980 and 1983 at #12, #9 and #109), and another may have just passed us in 2000 (eg. Lord of the Rings trilogy in 2001, 2002 and 2003 at #20, #31 and #14).

[/self] permanent link

[/self] permanent link

OK, so Dave Miller's pending deletion I can understand; if you didn't know how key he was, the article itself lacks references and is lacks detail (compare it with Andrew Tridgell's page. (At least he noticed; when I was deleted last time I didn't know).

But then I find out that the article on OLS was deleted back in February. Huh? This is the major Linux conference in the world. Some would argue that it's a bit faded at the edged these days, but none of the crop of contenders can genuinely claim that crown. I know conferences don't generally get pages as sexy as humans do, but still...

[/tech] permanent link

Sure, linux-next is a useful way of early-detecting patch conflicts with random developers. But the second order effect has been more useful to me: forcing me to get my shit together. Now I regularly publish my patchqueue in a form which applies and compiles, and has clear "production" vs "alpha" demarcation.

Obviously, this is good for people trying to follow various patches (and there are quite a few independent efforts at the moment, including typesafe patches, virtio, lguest, module, tun/tap, stop_machine, kmod-removal and down_trylock removal), but it also makes the arrival of the merge window far less stressful.

In theory, I could have been this organized before. But just like the concept of doing homework long before the deadline, it was never going to happen. So thanks Stephen!

[/tech] permanent link

UNSW School of Computer Science and Engineering are having "Employer of the Week" experiment: September 1st is IBM's week. I'll be spruking for OzLabs, so if you know anyone at UNSW who worth talking to, drag them there (I don't know which room, I'm guessing the signs in CS will be pretty clear).

I'm going to try to talk about the stuff people in the office are hacking on, to give an idea what it's like being in what AFAICT is Australia's largest bunch of Free and Open Source Software hackers.

[/tech] permanent link

Following on from my previous graphs of stop_machine latency, I have new results with my stop_machine simplification patch.

Again, it's the 18-way Power4 box; the simplied stop_machine creates all the threads and moves them into the correct CPUs before starting them. They then step through the state machine themselves, rather than having a central controller.

It's actually marginally worse than the previous:

Since these are different kernel versions, I looked at the baseline latency for both kernels:

Now I need to go back and compare the exact same kernel version, to make sure something else isn't interfering...

[/tech] permanent link

Someone noted that I didn't sign the LF "proprietary modules are bad" statement. This is entirely due to my slackness and not any lack of support.

As kernel module maintainer I feel obliged to maintain the status quo with proprietary modules, but I have noticed many colleagues becoming more annoyed about them.

[/tech] permanent link