Joshua Allen paid me a very nice compliment tonight. I guess that's what happens when you take a (lousy) picture of someone.

One of the reasons that I took the a job at OSAF was the chance to work with some people who are smarter than me. There's quite a few of them floating around at OSAF. I hope that Joshua will be pleasantly surprised with what we're doing.

Today's adventures centered around getting Chandler to build on my Debian Linux box. It seems that there's a known bug with bsddb not building in certain situations on Debian. It also appears that the Debian built Python 2.3.2 also suffers from a non functional bsddb. I was able to work around this and get a working Chandler build, but someone (maybe me) is going to have to dig around and figure out how to cleanly build this...

Emery Berger is an alum of UT Austin's systems program. UT Austin and UMass Amherst have been among the leaders in memory allocation and deallocation (garbage collection) research since I was a grad student. Berger's recent work includes a new allocator abstraction called a reap (OOPLSA paper), which is build on his group's Heap Layers toolkit for memory allocators. I'm glad to see this work being done, and even gladder to see that they are distributing it under an open source license. They only thing that they could to do make me totally ecstatic would be to license it under the LGPL, so that it doesn't infect whatever it's linked against.