Chris's Random Ramblings
One month ago, Kelly and I were off in the Cook Islands getting hitched. We got married on One Foot Island in Aitutaki.
One foot island
We stayed at Etu Moana in a beautiful beachfront villa.Etu Moana Sunset
Aitutaki is a coral atoll and is absolutely amazing for snorkelling. Its like a giant swimming pool!
Lagoon Cruise
Hitched!
Both Kelly and I really needed a break, and given this is the time of the year it starts getting pretty cold in Canberra we decided to head to somewhere tropical. So the week before last we went off to Aitutaki, a small island in the Cook Islands. Kelly has a great write up about our holiday here.
While we were there we ended up talking to a guy who is an IT teacher on the island. He'd recently seen a CNN program about Open Source and Linux and he was quite interested in find out more about it. Until he moved to the island about a decade ago, the school didn't have any computing courses, nor computers for the students to use. Now they're able to run computing classes, mostly on using Windows and Microsoft applications. But he also thought it would be good for students to get exposure to other software like Linux, and seemed especially interested in them being able to look at source code to programs.
Internet access there is both very expensive and slow so I said I'd post him some Linux CD's. I'll burn some Ubuntu CDs for him, maybe Edubuntu as well. Given the lack of good access to the outside world, I thought a DVD snapshot Wikipedia would be great, but that doesn't seem easy to do. I'd welcome any other suggestions that people may have for useful things to send.
Had a long drive back to Adelaide from Canberra for Christmas to visit my parents and brother and his family. Then a few days later we headed off to Melbourne to spend New Years with Kelly's parents and then drove back to Canberra on New Years day. Lots of driving, but Kelly needs the kms for her car.
I setup some backup stuff for my Dad's linux box. We bought him a 1Gb memory stick to use to store backups instead of CD-RWs. Ubuntu has made life much easier for my Dad, but he still runs into errors that are very confusing for inexperienced users and/or require using command line tools. Ended up reformatting the memory stick to ext3 (instead of FAT) so he can just rsync important directories to the memory stick. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Ubuntu automatically mounts USB keys with the sync option.
Also went to Groggy's annual Hacker bbq on boxing day. We worked out that we've been to all of them except for the first, and this time I took Kelly along. Had a great time, though there seemed to be record numbers of flies around. Had a look at all of the horses staying at Groggy's, including one very cool horse who can wave a front hoof on command, as well as walk across a small see-saw.
I have finally put up the photos of the cottage we stayed in at the Blue Mountains in early December. Kelly took me to Clarivaux cottage which is in Blackheath and has beautiful views over cliffs into a valley. We were even lucky enough to see a lightning storm come in over the valley from the comfort of the lounge room.
Ended up coming back from Nepal about 5 days earlier than expected. Saw some amazingly beautiful scenery, especially in the Everest region. Unfortunately due to altitude sickness I didn't make it all of the way to Everest Base Camp, but what I did see was stunning. Photographs can't describe what it feels like to walk along a valley with mountains 2000 metres higher nearby.
Mount Everest (left) and Lhotse
Dingboche (altitude 4400m) by moonlight
Unfortunately our group had our trip cut short and we were helicoptered out (not due to altitude sickness) from Periche. Many thanks to the friendly and helpful people at the hospital at Pheriche (highest hospital in the world) who helped us with using their satellite phone.
Lots more photos of my trip here.
I'm headed off tomorrow to fly to Kathmandu to hike up to Everest Base Camp. I'm also going on a short safari at Chitwan National Park afterwards, and will be away for almost four weeks. Unfortunately Kelly and the kits won't be able to make it so I'll be missing them a lot. I wonder if there'll be any internet cafes up there?
We headed off on Friday to Melbourne for a weekend of food (actually Kelly's 30th birthday). On Saturday for lunch we went to the Flower Drum with her parents. It has a reputation as one of the best restaurants in Melbourne, in the top 50 around the world, and I definitely enjoyed the experience. The service was excellent, we had the best Peking Duck I've ever tasted, and the rest of the dishes were also very good.
For dinner we went to the Banana Palm, a great Malaysian restaurant. I had Bumbu Ikan, a whole flounder deep fried with five spice, ginger and chillies - a very yummy dish with surprisingly few bones which I normally find annoying when eating fish.
On Sunday, since I've never been to a Gold Class cinema, Kelly took me to see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory at the cinemas at Crown Casino. Although not cheap, it was a great experience with comfy reclining chairs and food delivered during the movie. Unfortunately there aren't any Gold Class cinemas in Canberra, rather strange given that even Ballarat has one. We spent some time walking around the casino (Vegas-lite) area before flying back to Canberra in the evening.
If Canberra is the capital Australia why do I always end up sending my passport to Sydney to get a visa for a foreign country?
I've put up all the photos from our recent trip to Canada and the US. I'm especially happy with the ones of the Grand Canyon region. I can definitely recommend taking the effort to travel to the North Rim instead of the more popular South Rim. The views are just as spectacular, if not more so as you're at a higher altitude looking down on the South Rim, but importantly its not nearly as crowded. There were quite a few places where we had the lookout to ourselves. Also you get to visit Zion National Park along the way which was also very impressive.
Been pretty busy here in Mt Kisco both spending time at the office working with the part of the K42 research team here (lots of really interesting things going on here) as well as sampling lots of the local restaurants. On Sunday Jeremy and I headed down into NYC with Jimi and Hollis. Had an interesting time walking around the SOHO region.
Have been missing Kelly as she's in Austin at the moment, but had a wonderful surprise from her waiting for me when I got back to the hotel room last night.
Left Canberra a couple of weeks ago to attend the Ottawa Linux Symposium. Given the increased amount of operating system development/research I'm doing these days, I found many of the talks very interesting. There were also a lot of talks on virtualisation, mainly on Xen. Virtualisation is definitely the trendy thing to play with these days.
With support for hot plug memory and devices that need larger contiguous regions of physical memory, fragmentation of physical memory is becoming much more of an issue for Linux. Had some really interesting discussions with some kernel developers about the research we're doing in K42 to avoid fragmentation.
Afterwards I spent a couple of days with Kelly and Jeremy doing touristy things in and around Toronto, including the compulsory trip to Niagara falls. Its the second time for me, but last time was in winter so it was different. Very very busy, but I guess that was to be expected.
Later, Jeremy and I visited a few graduate students at the University of Toronto that we have been working with on research involving K42. They're doing some very interesting work with respect to paging and I'm looking forward to seeing how it develops. A lot of the work they are doing fits in neatly with the memory management research Jeremy and I are looking at.
We flew out on Thursday to New York before driving up to the IBM TJ Watson Research Center where we're working with the rest of the K42 team for a couple of weeks.
As usual when travelling, I've been watching a bit of cable TV. One of the weirdest shows I've seen is the "2005 Alka Seltzer US Open of Competitive Eating", and being a sport, showing on ESPN of course. Events seem to include, hot dog eating and potato skins.