overdose

On Saturday we had exceedingly large amounts of family in town for the holidays, including all four of my sisters. It was also Anna's birthday, and the day of the solstice party (a bit early this year). Unfortunatly I'd gotten 4 hours or so of sleep the night before, so I had limited energy to deal with houseguests and 12 family members all in one place. I ended up bailing on the solstice party which is a shame, but was the right decision.

Somehow I ended up in the right frame of mind for mildly scary C code so I ended up rereading all of anna (the program), and refactoring most of it to be easier to follow, as well as removing some large appendixes that are no longer used in current d-i. Now it's in a state where I understand it well again (except for peices of two functions that hook deep into the inscrutable libd-i), and I'm ready to begin some further development on it.

Probably I'll add the "anna install udeb" idea to it; this has the potential to lower d-i's memory reqirements by letting later-running parts of the installer load up support udebs only if they need them, or on demand, after swap is turned on, instead of loading up masses of udebs all at once as it does now. Doing this robustly and with a good UI could be interesting.

It snowed a little today, which always a big deal here in the South. I went out to find The Rooster and froze my face in the icy wind off the lake on the half hour walk back. Also got to hang out with a subset of the family, which was saner than everyone en banc.