Pim van Pelt
7b80a0bf0e
8.5 KiB
title, date
| title | date |
|---|---|
| Week 7, Monday: A Huge Zucchini | 2024-09-09T21:55:00+02:00 |
{{< image frame="true" width="17em" float="right" src="/img/headline/fluidified-04.png" alt="Credit: Fluidified, YouTube" >}}
I got up pretty early today, after a tremendously fine sleep. Marina was off to her water coloring class, and Quinn was off to work. At 08:15 I walked downstairs to do my morning ritual (ie. inhale caffeine). Marina pre-empted me there, putting a sticky note on the coffee machine, saying that she'd love to go out to lunch with me (she suggested it yesterday!) but seeing as we're going to travel to the Netherlands on Wednesday and we have lots of stuff still in the fridge, she was feeling a little bit more of a Carpe Diem. I made my coffee and approved the eating at home request.
Speaking of eating at home - the other day when Liv came to visit, she brought a rather ginormous zucchini with her. I took a picture of it - with a full sized tomato for scale. But somehow that picture didn't really show the truly massive nature of this vegetabohemoth. So I decided to make a soup out of it -- and I cut it over length wise with a large pairing knife (this kitchen knife is 33.5cm). It looked a bit more like a green pumpkin! After removing the seeds, I chopped 'er up into itty bitty pieces, and boiled for a good 35 minutes, added some spices (finely milled black pepper, salt, vegetable bouillon, and cayenne pepper). It'll be a nice dinner soup for tonight!
In the morning, I finish all of my loadtests and publish the [IPng Article] about sFlow, and I'm really looking forward to my meeting with Neil tonight. I have lots of questions and thoughts on how we might proceed and make the plugin more efficient (and: lockless). I spend most of the morning listening to music, and doing an editorial pass over the article, fixing a few typo's and rearranging the flow (no pun intended!) a little bit. With this Sabbatical website, I'm kind of just writing using free word association, but the IPng articles take considerably more time (this one took about 3 days).
At 11:00 I call my parents - on Wednesday we'll be driving over to them and spending a few days with them before shipping off to Fryslan. We discuss the timing, the plans and if there's anything I should bring. I'll be making dinner for them on Thursday, and they will feature on this blog! Incidentally, I also told them about my writing, as I owe the discipline of journalling to my Mom who used to always write really nice logs of our vacations; sitting in the caravan or tent in the evening, very low tech with a pad and pencil. But, it's a habit I picked up from her, for sure!
Then around noon Marina tells me her ETA, which will be 12:15. I make my way upstairs and together we have a spot of lunch. I'm eating the smoked salmon that I had originally bought for yesterday's Brunch-Which-I-Never-Had, and to make up for it, I make some soft boiled eggs, njam.
After lunch, Marina needs to run some errands, and being the needy boyfriend I am, I chain myself to her and go with. I don't think she minded that much. We go to Glatt Zentrum first, and visit Douglas for some perfume and sunscreen, then the Qualipet for some wormiedealies for our reptilian friends Heli and Sticky, and finally we make our way to the Coop for a few more nights of dinner for us, and a longer grocery list of shopping for Quinn, who will be home alone, hopefully not like [the movie]. In the Coop we are now greeted by a large array of wines. We chuckle as we recount having every red wine except for one, in our cellar. We are not fans of white wines (sorry, we're a bit racist that way).
Back home at 14:00, I hang out online and read some e-mail. Speaking of which, my buddy Sebas from IRC somehow feels the need to e-mail me on corp, so I humor him and grab the laptop. Whoops, battery is completely empty! Teun says: you know you are having a successful sabbatical if your battery is dead. And I agree with him totally. But, I charge the laptop, so that I can respond to this e-mail.
Meanwhile on IRC, the topic of the FrysIX website comes up. It was running off of an old webserver of Arend's, without SSL, and with a Hurricane Electric IPv6 tunnel -- brrr. As an Internet Exchange Point, I think we cao do better. On Telegram, a bright eyed Arend says: "Can we use this theme?", and shows me what he wants, what he really raelly wants.
"OK, Gast, als jij dat wilt!", and with a zigazig ah, I present to you: the new FrysIX website. The 80s called, they want their 80x25 ASCII art back! We have a littl bit of fun about the look and feel on IRC, but honestly: I think the choice is pretty cool :) Tell me what you think about it!
Then comes for me a hilight of the day. 18:00 rolls around and Peter Phaal and Neil McKee from inMon join me for a video call on the sFlow plugin. Neil has read my article, and we bounce questions back and forth. In discussing this, we think of a few ways to make the PSAMPLE approach scale, by using a worker queue to consume a multi-writer single reader lockless queue, or ring-buffer of sufficient size. We do a few loadtests live and toy around with the setup a little bit.
{{< image src="/img/brain.png" width="7em" float="left" alt="brain" >}}
Somehow, we arrive at the topic of SPAN and mirror ports, and Peter mentions that there is an
ethertype for sFlow, which triggers the big-idea: what if we created a TAP from within VPP, calling
it in Linux, say, sflow0, and leveraged the fact that virtio already has multiple TX queues? Now
we could simply write the samples (and counters!) as ethernet packets into the TAP and read them
from hsflowd. That would be so slick!
Anyway, at 19:30 Marina is about to kick down the door to my room because I'm waaaay late for dinner. Whoops, sorry! I scurry upstairs and make myself a cheese melt. Tonight, we're eating zucchini vegetabohemoth soup and toasties, and that will do just fine!
After dinner, we watch a two episodes of Black Mirror on TV, and I play around with the performance of TUN/TAP in VPP a bit. I really get excited about this idea, because I manage to easily push 7Mpps through a single tuntap device, coming from eight different interfaces, and each worker thread is completely independent of others, no locks, no RPCs to main. You can expect a second article in a few weeks as we noodle on this design a bit.
After Black Mirror, I go downstairs to write my journal for the day, while listening to very relaxing, slow [Fluidified] on YouTube. This was a fun day, especially as a juxtaposition with yesterday's write-off due to the headache.
Pictures of the Day
{{< gallery-category >}} {{< gallery-photo fn="2024-09-07/IMG_1143.JPG" caption="The gift Liv brought - a giant zucchini, or as the Swiss say: Zucchetti" >}} {{< gallery-photo fn="2024-09-09/IMG_1165.JPG" caption="I've sliced this zucchini length wise, and it's about 2kg or so. Lots of it has to be disposed of though - it looks a bit like a pumpkin in here!" >}} {{< gallery-photo fn="2024-09-09/IMG_1166.JPG" caption="Marina thinks that maybe the atmospheric pressure differential is what gave my sinuses the heebie-jeebies. She may be right, there was a 10mBar dip the day before... hmmm." >}} {{< gallery-photo fn="2024-09-09/IMG_1167.JPG" caption="The Douglas is full of powders, potions, Eyes of Newt, Gillyweed, and so on. All Marina bought was some sunscreen and parfume, though :(" >}} {{< gallery-photo fn="2024-09-09/IMG_1169.JPG" caption="The Coop however is full of wine. And I like wine. And baking bread. And computers." >}} {{< gallery-photo fn="2024-09-09/IMG_1172.JPG" caption="I write a default piss-off post-it note to PostFinance AG who are vulgar spammers. One Franc well spent!" >}} {{< gallery-photo fn="2024-09-09/IMG_1173.JPG" caption="The corp laptop is completely dead. Also, its screen is gross, so I clean it up while it charges. I then send Phreak an e-mail." >}} {{< gallery-photo fn="2024-09-09/frysix.png" caption="May I present to you: the all new and improved Frys-IX website!" >}} {{< gallery-photo fn="2024-09-09/IMG_1174.JPG" caption="Simple cheese melt toastie and zucchini soup (with balls!)" >}} {{< gallery-photo fn="2024-09-09/IMG_1176.JPG" caption="The singing that 'freed' this character Abi in Black Mirror. But because it's Black Mirror, she was not freed but got entirely messed up. No spoilers here :)" >}} {{< /gallery-category >}}
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