fix: typos, language

1 files changed, 44 insertions, 41 deletions

diff --git a/devsetup.mdwn b/devsetup.mdwn
index aff80fd..5e7c231 100644
--- a/devsetup.mdwn
+++ b/devsetup.mdwn
@@ -14,11 +14,11 @@ means that Andy and Bert work blind.
 
 We like our own office. It's actually an apartment near the
 city centre, in a building from 1905, which we rent. There's
-private rooms for everyone, except Andy and Bert prefer to
+private rooms for everyone, except Andy and Bert, who prefer to
 share a room. What was meant to be a living room is the
 meeting room. The kitchen remains as a kitchen, and there's
 even a small room we use as a server room. We've spent a
-fair bit of effort on making the apartment into a good
+fair bit of effort turning the apartment into a good
 office for us. There's privacy for everyone, extremely
 comfortable sofas, good networking and electricity
 everywhere, good heating, a real bathroom (both shower and
@@ -90,13 +90,13 @@ around. It is her sanctum, the rest of us aren't supposed to
 enter without asking for permission.
 
 The lab is filled with furniture and bits and pieces of
-electronics. The walls are all covered by bookcases, Lundia
+electronics. The walls are all covered by bookcases, wooden Lundia
 shelves, cupboards, chests of drawers, and other storage.
-Part of one wall is covered by a board with hooks for tools.
+Part of one wall is covered by a peg board with hooks for tools.
 There are a lot of tools hung on the board: every
-conceivable sort of screwdriver, hammer, pliers, knives,
+conceivable sort of screwdriver, hammer, pliers, knife,
 even an axe and, most curiously of all, a half-meter long
-rubber baton, and a 20-pound sledgehammer. Near the door are
+rubber baton, and a huge sledgehammer. Near the door are
 several large garbage bins, labelled for recycling: WEEE,
 metal, toxic, and misc.
 
@@ -112,12 +112,12 @@ table have large lamps hanging over them from the ceiling.
 
 Nick does not know he's entering a special place. He follows
 Nina into the room, and promptly collides with a table,
-causing a spar desktop machine fall to the floor. There is a
+causing a spare desktop machine fall to the floor. There is a
 terrible noise, and parts fly across the floor to all
 corners of the room.
 
 "You! Sit!" Nina points her finger at Nick, and uses her
-loud voice. Nick is startles, but luckily doesn't cause any
+loud voice. Nick is startled, but luckily doesn't cause any
 more havoc. He looks around for a chair.
 
 "Sit! Now! NOW! On the floor!" Nick drops to the floor, with
@@ -141,7 +141,7 @@ extra backup server. Don't worry about it."
 
 Nina takes one SmartHome cardboard box, puts it in the
 middle of the big table, and stacks the rest on an empty
-shelf on the wall. Carefully, with slow hand movements, the
+shelf on the wall. Carefully, with slow hand movements, she
 unpacks the gadget from the box, then takes her phone and
 takes a photograph of all the contents.
 
@@ -155,15 +155,15 @@ you being sarcastic?"
 
 "No, Miss Nina. I don't want to anger you any further."
 
-"Good boy." Nick smiles.
+"Good boy. But just Nina is enough." Nick nods.
 
 "To open the case, I need to open these four screws" - Nina
 points at them - "And then use a bit of force to get the
 cover apart, right?"
 
-"Yes, Miss Nina. Would you like me to do it for you?"
+"Yes, Nina. Would you like me to do it for you?"
 
-"No, thanks, I need to know how to do this." Nina goes to
+"No, thanks, I need to learn how to do this." Nina goes to
 the wall, where a ton of tools are hanging, and chooses an
 electric screwdriver, and returns to the table. Deftly, she
 opens the four screws. She then goes back to the walls,
@@ -187,7 +187,8 @@ desk. The desk, and the room, is bathed in a bright, cold
 white light. She bows down and looks at the now-exposed
 mainboard of the opened hub. She raises her glasses and puts
 them on top of her head, picks up the mainboard, and squints
-at it quite closely.
+at it quite closely. After a moment, she shakes her head and fetches a
+magnifier from a drawer.
 
 "I should have suitable connector, somewhere, let me see."
 She goes to rummage in a cupboard. She pulls out a cable
@@ -210,7 +211,7 @@ in the lab." is Nina's curt answer.
 
 "May I go have coffee in the kitchen?"
 
-"Sure, go ahead."
+"Sure, that's fine."
 
 Nick gets up from the floor, and goes to the kitchen. Robin
 is there, sipping a cup of tea. "If you'd like tea, there's
@@ -225,8 +226,8 @@ into the lab."
 then I was clumsy and a computer fell on the floor and
 broke."
 
-"Oh dear. You should probably be told that the lab is Nina's
-special place. She's spent months of work time setting it
+"Oh dear. I should've told you that the lab is Nina's
+special place. She's spent months setting it
 up, and it's where she spends almost all of her time. The rest
 of us do not enter without an explicit invitation each time.
 She doesn't usually tolerate other people there, lest they
@@ -254,7 +255,7 @@ I didn't mean romantically. I don't want there to be any
 misunderstanding."
 
 Nick gets to the lab door, which is standing open. He
-politely knocks on the door frame. "Miss Nina, may I enter?"
+politely knocks on the door frame. "Nina, may I enter?"
 
 Nina looks up from the laptop, and nods. "Pull up that chair
 and get seated next to me so you can see the laptop.
@@ -292,7 +293,7 @@ until now."
 specific to our hardware. Perhaps a device driver?"
 
 "Perhaps. I better go get Andy to look at this. He'll be
-thrilled."
+so thrilled."
 
 ------------------------------------------------------------
 
@@ -311,13 +312,13 @@ everything working now?"
 
 Nina shakes her head, while holding her tea mug between her
 hands, as if to warm them . "No, not at all. We haven't got
-a working kernel build yet."
+a working build of the kernel yet."
 
 "Oh? Andy?"
 
 Andy looks like he'd be vexed, if he wasn't his usual
 perpetually calm self. "Yeah. We've set up a cross-building
-environment, but the kernel image we build doesn't boot
+environment, but the kernel image we built doesn't boot
 correctly. We spent some time debugging that yesterday with
 Nick from SmartHome, but he wasn't all that much help. I
 don't think he does this kind of thing usually."
@@ -327,7 +328,7 @@ don't think he does this kind of thing usually."
 "Not yet. It looks like the normal embedded Linux vendor
 inability to provide complete and corresponding source code
 for their kernel. Getting their kernel to build, install,
-and run shouldn't be this hard."
+and run shouldn't be hard, but it always is."
 
 "I agree. What can we do to solve it this time?"
 
@@ -350,7 +351,7 @@ the mini-rack build?"
 
 Nina takes a gulp of tea, and nods. "Yeah, it's going well.
 I've unpacked all the devices, and extracted the boards from
-the cases. That's great fun. The cases are now waste, but we
+the cases. That's great crunchy fun. The cases are now waste, but we
 don't need them anyway. I'll need to go pick up some
 hardware bits for the rack so that we can install all the
 boards, but that's no problem."
@@ -367,7 +368,7 @@ they can together unlock the mysteries of the kernel that
 wouldn't boot. I'm not worried about that. We've had this
 situation before, where an embedded Linux vendor doesn't
 share the actual kernel source code they use, or are missing
-some build step from their documentation, or do something
+some build step from their documentation, or does something
 else stupid. We know it's possible to get Linux booting, and
 we have access to the people who made it happen. I'm not
 worried, but I am irritated that this particular problem
@@ -415,7 +416,7 @@ them to be left alone, so I don't go and introduce myself
 and tell them they're welcome.
 
 Three hours later, they exit the Andy and Bert room, and
-shake hands and say goodbyes. They're gone before I get out of
+shake hands and say goodbye. They're gone before I get out of
 my room. "Good morning, Andy and Bert. I guess those were
 the SmartHome kernel engineers leaving? How are things?"
 
@@ -438,11 +439,11 @@ drivers ourselves."
 any time. They have busy-waits and arbitrary sleeps all over
 the place. It's no wonder they don't upstream the code.
 Upstream kernel maintainers would laugh in their faces. Linus
-would be sarcastic at them."
+would definitively be sarcastic at them."
 
 To upstream changes means to send your changes to the person
-or project who maintains the code in public, and get them to
-include the changes in their code. It can be a lot of work,
+or project who maintains the code, and talk them into
+including the changes in their code. It can be a lot of work,
 and it opens you up for criticism, but the benefit is much
 less maintenance work for you in the long run. Up-streaming
 is considered to be the mark of a full participant of open
@@ -491,7 +492,9 @@ help his kernel engineers gave us. I don't mention the code
 quality issue, or the lack of SoC documentation. There's no
 point in ruffling feathers at this point. I know people
 around the industry, and I may be able to get someone to
-leak me a copy of the SoC documentation. That's a little
+leak me a copy of the SoC documentation.
+
+That's a little
 unethical, of course. I will first, however, contact the SoC
 vendor directly and see if they'll give me a copy of the
 documentation for a promise that we'll take care of
@@ -504,7 +507,7 @@ during the lull.
 
 We do not see much of Nina for the next two days. She's
 there, when the rest of us arrive in the morning, and still
-there, when everyone else has left. We only see her when she
+there, when everyone else leaves. We only see her when she
 comes to the kitchen to drink or eat, and though she seems
 happy, we do not engage her in conversation. If she needs
 help, she'll tell us, but otherwise she's clearly deep in
@@ -521,12 +524,12 @@ announces that the mini-rack with SmartHome devices is
 ready, and that she'd be happy to give a demonstration and
 tutorial after she's had lunch. She goes out, and returns
 after fifteen minutes with take-out Indian food, and takes
-the food to the kitchen. She takes a carton of milk from a
-cupboard, and sits down at the kitchen table to feast.
+the food to the kitchen. She takes a carton of milk from the
+fridge, and sits down at the kitchen table to feast.
 
 Nina doesn't usually care much what food she eats, but
 when she finishes a build or other project, she celebrates
-with her favourites. It's always the same Vindaloo, from the
+with her favorite food. It's always the same Vindaloo, from the
 same takeout restaurant, and with a liter of cold milk to
 calm her taste buds. Some years ago, the restaurant she had
 been using went out of business, and Nina spent a week to
@@ -566,7 +569,7 @@ Nina pauses to take a breath.
 
 "Our normal development rack now has a continuous integration
 system set up, which uses the three hubs to run tests on.
-The tests are currently very simple: install a newly build
+The tests are currently very simple: install a newly built
 kernel, and reboot, and verify that root can log in via the
 serial port within 60 seconds. We'll expand on that as we
 start development. In addition, the rack has SmartHome
@@ -586,7 +589,7 @@ where we put the SmartHome stuff to the test."
 There is a murmur of approval, and much nodding. Nina looks
 satisfied. She goes to her laptop, opens up Inkscape, and
 quickly makes a drawing with the words "SmartHome Torture
-Chamber" laid out nicely and using a Germanic font. She
+Chamber" laid out nicely and using a the Comic Sans font. She
 punches a key combination, and the printer in a corner of the
 lab spits out a few sheets. Nina gets the sheets, which turn
 out to be A4 size labels, with the Inkscape design now
@@ -613,12 +616,12 @@ The development infrastructure trunk is outwardly similar to
 the SmartHome one that Nina has built, but the contents are
 quite different. The rack contains several 1U servers, on
 which we can run quite computationally intensive tasks, such
-as compilation, automated tests, continuous integration.
+as compilation, automated tests, and continuous integration.
 There's also plenty of storage. We have a git server in
 there, plus space for backups of each of our work laptops.
 This is important so that if we're stuck on a client site
 with bad connectivity, we can have everything we need
-locally in our trunk. There's even a local copy of
+locally in our trunk. There's even local copies of
 Wikipedia, Stack Overflow, and the Debian package archive.
 
 As much as possible, anything we may need while at the
@@ -651,8 +654,8 @@ worked around the clock for two days, is that right?"
 don't worry, I'm going to go home and rest and recover
 next."
 
-"Good, that's what I want to hear. While we do not track
-work hours here, we do not ever want to see someone burn
+"Good, that's what I want to hear. While we don't track
+work hours here, we don't ever want to see someone burn
 out. Me and Robin have both done that at least a couple of
 times each, and we won't let it happen to anyone in the
 Team."
@@ -698,7 +701,7 @@ likes to throw at us."
 of them in the schedule."
 
 "If we don't hit on too many snags, I'm sure we'll have a
-sufficiently working kernel end of next week, and after that
+working kernel end of next week, and after that
 we'll start porting our platform to the SmartHome board."
 
 "Excellent. Tell me at once if you hit a snag, OK?"
@@ -748,7 +751,7 @@ This particular type of snag needs to be stopped early and
 thoroughly. It will need to be handled with careful
 diplomacy so that they walk away from the confrontation
 feeling good about themselves. It'd be easy to just show how
-utterly wrong they are and drag their self esteem through a
+utterly wrong they are and drag their self-esteem through a
 pile of dung and dance a fandango on their ego with high
 heels until they weep, but that would just make it harder to
 finish the project together. Every client project needs the
@@ -768,5 +771,5 @@ for the day on the company IRC channel, shut down my laptop,
 tidy up my desk, and go home.
 
 I too want to see the new season of Agent Carter. Maybe with
-some take-out Indian food, curled up under a blanket on my
+some take-out food, curled up under a blanket on my
 couch, with my cat purring in my lap, or on my shoulder.