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Took the day off to hang out with Fade. Went to Dead Lobster (Cheesy biscuits!) and then to the discount theatre up in Round Rock where we decided to see Wall-E again. (Yes, I am aware I dragged her away from her computer so we could go watch a CGI film about robots.)

Wow that's a good movie. Right from the start, with the CGI disney logo intro, it was like Disney was saying "look, we're relevant again! We have something to be PROUD of!"

Wall-E got a bunch of LITTLE things right. It's got in jokes (the old macintosh startup sound when Wall-E finishes charging, Otto's voice is the mac "speak" command, the mice that wake up Eve in the cargo hold are one-button mice) which you don't need to catch any of to enjoy the movie. The shot where Eve first figures out how to light the zippo and the flame reflects off of Wall-e's eyes is amazingly done. The footage of the president is live action of actor and the blob humans are highly cartoonized to avoid the uncanny valley, but they make it work together by panning past highly realistically rendered machine stuff like the autopilot, so the transition isn't jarring. They do so much without dialog; Wall-E doesn't speak at all until Eve shows up, and then they communicate in single words. The humans speak full sentences to each other (and to Otto) but when Eve says "Directive" to Wall-E and points at her green leaf symbol, or Wall-E says "Earth" and points at his tread and jiggles his eye/camera, you know _exactly_ what they mean.

And the mileage they got out of Wall-E's expressive cameras is still amazing. The bit at the end where he boots the rest of the way back up and his cameras sag down a bit to provide his normal expression is one of those "didn't notice it was wrong until it was fixed" things that's just _masterfully_ done.

I also like the way the movie repeatedly establishes its non-horror, non-drama nature. Right at the start, Wall-E accidentally runs over his cockroach friend with one of his tank treads, the movie pauses for a beat for Wall-E to show dismay, and the cockroach pops right back into shape and continues about its business. This clearly establishes A) it's a _cockroach_, B) the movie could do pathos, but simply doesn't need to. (Leading to the marvelous moment later where the cockroach makes first contact with a trigger-happy Eve, gets blasted point blank by a massive death ray leaving a huge crater, and after a beat crawls right out of the crater to continue to try to make friends. Yup, it's a cockroach. Fed on 700 year old twinkies. It's clearly the most indestructible thing in the film. Wall-E running over it a second time is used to indicate his zombie state. The cockroach is mildly annoyed by this, but more concerned about Wall-E. It establishes this with a _scuttle_ and a _chitter_.)

Fade was happy they didn't anthropomorphize the cockrach. It never breaks character by speaking or anything, it's actually a cockroach. (It's clearly more intelligent than modern cockroaches, but not more than a modern squirrel. That's quite forgiveable considering the context and the amount of time it's had to evolve. Its ancestors spent centuries in a challenging environment, and maybe Wall-E's been breeding them to be good companions.)

I've gushed about this before, so I'll stop now.

Tested the new busybox/vi.c:readit() on qemu's arm emulation, and although it's better now, it didn't _fix_ it. Cursor around enough and it'll still blank the line you're on. I've also seen it blank while cursoring _right_, which seems to imply a different cause for the bug. (I really don't _want_ to go down this tangent, but it's bothering me.)

The busybox vi command is a mess. It needs a massive crapectomy. (There's code to scan for function keys, but no code to _do_ anything with function keys. It's full of #defines and #ifdefs.) And strangely, my cleaned up version of readit() is about 2/3 as much source code, but the resulting x86_64 machine code is six bytes _larger_ according to bloatcheck. Much head scratching about exactly _why_. (Presumably, the optimizer could do some serious magic with all the repetition there used to be. I could look at the assembly output if I cared.) Eventually made my "shrink it by 17 bytes" roll after a half dozen attempts, but that was weird.

Conceptually the new code is cleaner because it never reads more bytes than it needs to see if this is a known escape sequence. Alas, it still needs a readahead buffer because it might _not_ be an escape sequence, and then the extra characters need to be kept and parsed later.

Sigh: once again while not connected to the internet, and I want so do an "svn annotate". Once you get used to distributed source control, it's hard to go back...

Ok, found it, fixed it, checked in the fix, emailed the list about it. (The problem is actually that escape sequences sent over serial consoles get de-blocked and arrive as individual characters, so depending on read granularity or poll always saying there's another character waiting is _not_ a reliable way to detect escape sequences. I added a 1/3 second timeout to the poll, and can't reproduce the problem anymore. That could probably be trimmed down a bit, maybe to 1/10 second, but for now it's fixed and I can move on...)

Now, back to debugging the binutils thing.

So the binutils config problem isn't something config.status is calling, it's that config.status is being generated wrong in the first place. The big "here" document that dumps into $tmp/undefs.sed only has two lines, when it should have a line for each enabled symbol.

The busybox vi command remains deeply screwed up. In raw mode the cursor keys come in as ansi escape sequences (esc, left bracket, and then capital A through D depending on which direction it is), but escape is how vi switches between command mode and insert mode. (Yeah, terminal handling in unix derivatives is horrible, isn't it?)

In theory, the three characters come in as a block. In practice, input can get chopped up, so the capital D of a left arrow gets interpreted as "delete to end of line". Yes, cursoring around in busybox vi can eat your data, at least on a heavily loaded system (or something slow like QEMU's arm emulation).

Wound up rewriting readit() in busybox's editors/vi.c.

I'm having trouble following Bleach episode 17. The protagonist leaves his body behind to battle in astral form. This is a significant plot element in previous episodes. So after a big astral battle, he's lying in bed bandaged and recovering. What? Did they lose track of the context switch, or did I? Or is this one of those Matrix "your mind makes it real, so we don't have to" things occurring for the first time in episode 17 of the series?

I do admire the way Orihime's mystic abilities are all based on the Mythbusters mantra. (Every time she does her power chant, I hear Adam Savage going "I deny your reality, and substitute my own.")

So, the arm building problem works the same on uClibc 0.9.29, so it's not a uClibc-svn issue. Bumping the busybox version to 1.12.1 before trying too hard to debug it...

Nope, that didn't fix it. Sigh. Debugging the hard way. Wheee...

Trying to figure out if I should post FWL notes to the mailing list, here, or both. The thing about putting them here is I can find them again in future, which is the main reason I write this. Posting them there lets other people respond, not that I really expect them to. I suppose I could post in both places, but that seems a bit redundant...

Oh wow, that's screwed up.

I've mentioned the current economic crunch before. I talked about Liar's Poker and the invention of mortgage bonds with trenchards. (These days they've been renamed CDOs, "collateralized debt obligations". Fine.) That book talked about having half a dozen slices. The screwed up part is mentioned in this radio program, which talks about having almost 200 slices, the bottom few of which are pretty much guaranteed to be defaulted on and never paid off, just by simple statistics saying that some predictable percentage of mortgages wind up in foreclosure, and these slices get paid off last. Hence when the pool was thinly sliced like this, these bottom slices were nicknamed "toxic waste", and nobody would buy them.

So what they did was chop the "toxic waste" slices off the bottom of each mortgage-based CDO, create new CDO pools entirely out of this "toxic waste", and then split _that_ into trenchards. And now magically, the rating on each of these new slices is based on where they were in the CDO, not what the CDO was made from. So the top slices are rated as good as treasury bonds (roughly equivalent to cash), and the middle's ok... Despite the _entire_pool_ being constructed of junk expected to wind up in default.

Warren Buffett used the word "insane" to describe this.

This economic crisis is a mix of a bunch of things. It's got elements of the 1929 stock market crash, the stagflation of the 1970's, the first Bush administration's savings and loan crisis, and some unique little bits of its own.

But the fundamental problem is that the regulators were STUPID. Nobody with a brain ever _looked_ at this stuff, because the Shrub administration decided to deregulate everything. No reporting requirements, no oversight. Nobody ever HAD to look at it, other than the people who were getting rich off of it and retiring before it all went south.

If "government is evil" is an article of faith, then deregulators don't care that the regulations embody what we learned from previous problems, such as the big less of 1919, "letting people go 90% on margin is a recipe for disaster". It's just like teaching evolution vs his other articles of faith, rational thought and evidence don't enter into it. Obviously no problem we've ever encountered before could possibly ever hit us again, otherwise we'd have seen it by now. It's some weird kind of economic creationism, abject refusal to pay any attention to history at all. Iraq repeats vietnam, while the economy gets a medly of greatest hits. Idiot.

The only reasons I'm not as worried as Naiomi Wolf, despite Bush now having his own private army deployed domestically are:

• Bush is a moron and the people pulling the strings (his father's posse) are all World War II veterans in their late 70's or early 80's.

• If they rig this election (shooting somebody, declaring martial law, another round of diebold's "popular vote vs electoral vote" shenanigans) I have an up to date passport, cash to leave the country, highly portable job skills, and a willingness to go rather than suffer through the rest of the frog boiling ritual.

The thing is, the US no longer has much influence over the rest of the world. It's spent the past decade growing, while we've stayed in place or even shrunk. If the US agenda threatens china's interests, they'll cut off loans like a bartender with a belligerent drunk. The federal government is so deeply in debt it can't afford to keep the lights on without massive foreign loans, and we no longer have a manufacturing base worth speakign of either. China's not going to stop us from becoming a police state, but they are going to take the lion's share of the world's oil as the supply dries up over the next decade. Not sure how that'll play out, but it does limit the "foreign wars to distract from domestic problems" card a bit...

The driving force behind all this is that the baby boomers continue to have the same disproportionate impact they've always had. They were teenagers in the 1960's and career yuppies in the 80's, and now they're old and grey and scared and collectively yelling at the world to get off their lawn and awaiting death from the front rows of their churches. The polite way to say "old fogey scared of change" is "conservative". Of _course_ the republicans have been benefitting from the increasing senility of the baby boom.

That said, the baby boom's power has to peak soon. The early retirement benefit of social security kicks in at 62, and 1945+62=2007. (Plus a 9 month gestation period, so really this year for the first batch. Possibly one reason to play up this economic crisis thingy is to discourage boomers from retiring just yet; only three more years until the full benefits kick in, not hard to scare 'em enough to convince them they'll really need it.)

The same math says the leading edge of boomers hits 65 in 2010, and if the average life expectancy in the US is 77 years (and it's only gone up 2 years since 1990), meaning half the first wave of boomers should be dead by 2022.

I'm aware that the baby boom actually lasted around a decade (what with the GI bill and everything), which is probably why Woodstock came at the very _end_ of the 60's rather than the middle of it. If the 90's were the decade of saving for retirement, and this was the decade of "the baby boomers being grumpy old farts yelling at the world to get off their lawn", then the 2010s look like "the decade of baby boomers retiring and moving into nursing homes" and the 2020's the decade of baby boomers dying of en masse.

The real question is how much damage will they do on their way down. I'm not talking about social security sucking the economy dry, I'm talking about people who continue to vote after they've lost the ability to drive. The Baby Boomers' nominee is already the oldest non-incumbent presidential candidate in history. This is not a coincidence.

We'll see.

With the new uClibc, the arm native build is going "boing" during binutils because config.h in the subdirectories isn't getting STDC_HEADERS set (except in the "intl" subdirectory, because consistent behavior is anathema to the FSF, and redundant code is how you make your project grow up nice and big).

Wrote up a post for the FWL mailing list instead of posting today's debugging here. I should use the project's mailing lists more often, people can actually reply there...

Ok, getting multiple qemu system-image instances to run in parallel turns out to be slightly more complicated than you'd think.

I want to do this because qemu doesn't take advantage of SMP very well. Emulating multiple processors properly would require the emulator to be multi-threaded internally, plus emulating various IPC things on top of that (memory barriers, anyone?), and the qemu developers just haven't wanted to go there yet.

The FWL compiler toolchain can take advantage of smp on the host via distcc (or even a compute cluster if you want to set it up by hand), but this doesn't help with ./download.sh --extract or the ./configure stage. If I'm running smoke tests on 10 targets, I'd like to be able to do those targets in parallel. (I've got 2 gigs of ram and each emulator's using less than megs, except for x86. It should work.) I fixed up distcc to vary its port numbers based on the PID, so what's left?

Well, for one thing, whatever bash's default terminal type is, it has some newline/linefeed confusion if you redirect the output of /dev/console to a file. I need to set $TERM I suspect. Not a big deal, but annoying and triggering a second problem:

If you kill qemu while it's modifying an ext2 image, it can leave the image in a state that makes the next run _very_ unhappy. (Stale nfs file handle? I didn't build nfs into the thing!)

Oddly, e2fsck refuses to be scripted. It insists it needs a terminal to fix stuff interactively, so 'yes "y" | e2fsck' is gratuitously broken. I'm sure there's a workaround (-a was it?), but at this point I'm too disgusted at the developers' totally artificial limitation to bother, and doubt running e2fsck on the image each time is really a good approach.

What I should probably do is mount hda read only, and have the only writeable space be hdb. This means pregenerating /proc and /sys and /home and all that at the top level, which is a design issue. Right now, I've got a Linux From Scratch style /tools directory and nothing else at the top level, and an _optional_ script that fixes that up into something usable. Unfortunately, that's not amenable to mounting read only.

I could mount a tmpfs in a subdirectory of /tools, --bind mount tools under that, chroot into it, and mount hdb on /home under that. It seems kind of silly and overcomplicated, and also means that run-emulator.sh without run-from-home.sh would be far less useful.

Sigh. The tradeoff here is between "provide something simple the user can extend themselves" and "automate everything to provide the user with more prearranged functionality". The second assumes they want to do the same thing I want to do, which I'm never comfortable with.

Ok, now I'm confused.

I've been banging on the powerpc FWL build, testing the resulting system-image it by building cross-compiler.sh static under it. And I'm getting random hangs.

If I call the emulator script myself (output not piped through less), and disable distcc, the hangs don't happen. It ran overnight that way building more or less to the end (I got tired of it and killed it near the end). But if I use my wrapper that pipes the output to tee and sets up distcc, it hangs.

I think it's in the 2.6.25 powerpc network stack. The most recent hang was during wget, it hadn't even gotten as far as distcc yet. But is it a driver issue, or a qemu issue? Would it be fixed in 2.6.27 if I could get powerpc to work on a newer kernel? Would trying the svn version of qemu help? Can I declare victory since the root filesystem I'm building seems to be working just fine, and this is really an intermittent kernel problem? (Debugging an intermittent 2.6.25 problem is neither fun nor useful, I need to debug on a current kernel, so that means bumping getting a current kernel working for powerpc back up the list.)

Sigh... In any case, I should check in the kernel alt stuff I did, although I need kernel config files so I can _build_ the alt version first...

Poking at putting binutils 2.18 back as an alt package. I have to set five environment variables in order to work around bugs in the binutils build, and it would be nice if I could do that conditionally without polluting the environment or firing off a subshell. Alas, "THINGY=THIS=that; $THINGY command" isn't the same as "THIS=that command". It tries to run a command "THIS=that" instead. Oh well, it was worth a try. (Once again, something that's easy to do but hard to do _cleanly_.)

I guess setting the extra environment variables won't hurt building the old version. (It's not needed, but shouldn't screw anything up.)

Ever want to smack a political campaign?

In response to the second coming of the savings and loan crisis, and John McCain being one of the original "keating five" group of senators caught in that crisis, Obama's campaign produced this unwatachable video. The entire first minute of that video is not just useless, but alienating. Lots of buzzwords flying past the screen at various angles with nothing to back it up sets off everybody's BS detectors. Chop that off, start right at minute one, with the footage from the ethics committee hearing. And then edit out about half the rest, it's INSANELY SLOW... Just give us the facts already.

Contrast with this, which is quick, simple, snappy, comes across with at least a modicum of objectivity, and gets all the info out of the way in the first two minutes with another 3 minutes or so of discussion/analysis. So it's about 1/3 of the length of the official video, but says more, and does it without access to the embarassing historical footage the first one dug up.

What happened to all the hollywood people Obama supposedly has on staff? Why release a video that looks like it was put together by an intern? (No, I haven't forgiven Obama for the FISA thing yet, and it's the reason I'm not giving him a dime, but I'm apparently still capable of being disappointed.)

I don't even want to say "amateur" when condemning Obama's overpolished video. This is totally amateur and yet a huge improvement over what's coming out of the actual campaign.

Poked at FWL a lot. Took advantage of the alt infrastructure to revert the linux kernel to 2.6.25 (with .27 as the alt version), so I can build something I can test PPC with. Tested PPC a lot. Redoing the smoke test infrastructure...

Yesterday's uClibc snapshot builds on all the targets I've tried, which is highly cool. Building binutils natively under arm dies with conflicting types for "psignal" between libiberty/strsignal.c line 553 and include/signal.h line 142, but still: progress!

$ aspell appalling
Error: Unknown Action: appalling
$ [looks at aspell man page]
$ echo appalling | aspell -c
Error: You must specify a file name.
$ echo appalling | aspell -c /dev/stdin
Error: Could not open the file "/dev/stdin" for writing. File not saved.

I'm sorry, this tool is now in my "too stupid to live" category. I don't care what the engine looks like, the UI is pathological.

Anyway, the uClibc snapshot from the day before yesterday (again, no internet access since the night before I got on the plane; yesterday I was just too tired and today The Cable Modem Faileth) built through to completion for exactly three architectures: i586, x86_64, and m68k (which I spent a chunk of last week getting to work so it'd _better_ still be ok).

The i686 regression is because I'd taken LINUXTHREADS_OLD out of the uClibc miniconfig. I've been complaining for a week that uClibc has two pthreads implementations, and is about to get NPTL on top of that so it has _three_. I'd like to remove one of the two old ones before NPTL shows up, but Bernhard is against it and he's de-facto the new maintainer.

So switching i686 threading back to LINUXTHREADS_OLD, that brings the number of functioning targets back up to 4. Some of the others are dying on sizeof saying user_regs struct is an incomplete type, and I thought that was fixed in svn. Did I accidentally re-download an old version? Lemme download this morning's snapshot and try building again. As soon as I get internet access again, anyway.

And the FWL uClibc svn version build is checked in! And there was much rejoicing.

Built all the targets. Only arm, x86, and x86_64 currently work all the way through smoke test. Mips doesn't build with uClibc-svn, powerpc doesn't work with the 2.6.26 kernel, m68k still has an internal compiler error, sparc still fails to boot (but in a new way that I hope to be able to debug), and last I checked sh4 didn't have a working qemu target that emulated real hardware. But that last one I can fiddle with via teaching BUILD_SHORT to do an initramfs, to make at least some progress.

Very much to do, but now it's time to get back to the paper...

My second stage smoke test builds cross-compiler.sh under a target system-image, and that's dying in binutils while trying to link against libgcc_s.so, which implies it's due to the change I made to the gcc wrapper back when I was trying to build perl and glibc for Linux From Scratch. If so, it's not a uClibc problem at all. (Strangely, if I add DEBUG_WRAPPER=1 to the build environment so the wrapper writes the command line it generates to stdout before executing it, the binutils build breaks even _earlier_...)

Ah! It's doing a BUILD_STATIC. Of course it can't link against libgcc_s, it needs libgcc.a instead. Yeah, the wrapper's doing the wrong thing there. Must fix.

Finally figured out what I want the FWL unstable package logic to look like, got most of it implemented, and now I'm fighting wget. (-P and -O didn't want to coexist, but -O can take a path...)

And checked in! (Finally!)

Now, why did I go on this tangent in the first place, again...? Ah right, uClibc.

Trying to make FWL download alternate packages was making my head hurt, so I moved the logic into if statements in download.sh (Should FWL try to download alternate packages from mirrors? Keeping in mind the name it's downloading and the actual name of the package don't necessarily match. Yeah.) This isn't too hard to implement, but looking at the result and calling it "simple"? Not quite.

Inflicted the first David Tenant episode on Eric and Cathy. Eric couldn't stand it (full of cheese and cliches, he thought). He liked Christopher Eccleston but is not, so far, at all impressed with David Tenant. Cathy could at least tolerate the cheese to get through to the good episodes. (I didn't make Eric watch the next one because Cassandra + Technozombies is about at the edge of _my_ tolerance. And "Tooth and Claw" isn't really an improvement, to be honest. But we have School Reunion to look forward to, and that's a darn good episode, I think...)

Knetworkmangler remains reliably stupid, with the collusion of things like Konqueror. I'm not on the net right now, but I run a copy of apache on loopback to do things like look at the mercurial archives of my project using the web interface. Trying to talk to http://127.0.0.1/hg/firmware was telling me it couldn't connect, so I wasted several minutes restarting the apache server and looking at its config files and man page. The problem is, I used knetworkmanager to log onto Eric's linksys last night (it's got a wep key, easiest to use the GUI to fiddle with that), and I forgot to kill it. So it was going "you're not connected to the internet through me, therefore there can't POSSIBLY be a server running on the loopback interface."

Dear knetworkmanager developers: you do not understand your problem space.

So, back to adding ALT functionality to FWL so I can test build unstable versions of packages without forking the build scripts. There are actually layers of stuff here:

• Figure out a syntax to say which packages to test build. I'm leaning twoards "TEST_PACKAGES=uClibc,linux,toybox".

• Teach download.sh about "ALT=url://" so it knows where to get test packages from, and when to download them. (Also not to delete them when playing with the stable version, or to delete the stable version if that's already been downloaded.)

• Teach the extract logic which patches to apply to which version. I thought about labeling each patch with the first version number it applies to, but that doesn't say when to _stop_ applying it. I could have "test-uClibc-blah.patch" and teach extract to look for those when applying patches, and then rename those files when checking them in...

• Teach the build logic how to handle different build needs for different versions of a package. I'd like to find a less ugly way than a big if statement with a big else case for each package duplicating the entire build logic, but I don't want to get too subtle either...

Did my first uClibc checkin in a longish time. Just some menuconfig help entries, but it's a start.

Banging on BUILD_SHORT some more.

Trying to poke at uClibc from Zen. Their wireless is down, so things like "svn log extra/Configs/Config.in" doesn't work. I simultaneously miss A) my bluetooth dongle enabling internet through cellphone, B) projects that use a real (I.E. distributed) source control system.

September 13, 2008

My laptop battery has now deteriorated enough that software suspend doesn't get triggered before the abrupt power off that comes when the battery drops below whatever the threshold voltage is. (Meaning if you plug into an outlet that isn't providing power, and don't notice, you have maybe 20 minutes before you lose your work.) That's Dell for you...

September 12, 2008

My itinerary for my trip to the northeast came in, I head out for HP's legal seminar thingy on the 18th and fly back October 2. So I get to see Eric and Cathy (and maybe some family) for a couple weeks, which is nice.

Tried to watch a movie on hulu.com, but the cable modem's gotten so slow the first 14 seconds of the movie took 3 minutes to display. (And it wasn't even in the "high resolution" option.) So I called time warner tech support and got through to a human after only about twenty minutes on hold (and reciting the gettysburg address into the automated phone system until it gave up trying to "help" me).

Their speed test says we're getting a little under 50k/second each way, which is certainly more than I'm actually seeing although that's to their _local_ server and not trying to go out of their WAN to any actual websites. On the actual web, I'm seeing more like 4k/sec, which is dialup speeds. (My cell phone connection gets about 50k/second to actual websites, but I can't use that until I get a new bluetooth dongle or USB cable. I ordered a USB cable at the tmobile place on the drag, but if it takes the week to come in he estimmates, I'll be in the northeast by then. Sadness...)

I explained to the tech support guy how ever since all the students came back on west campus at the start of the month, the cable modem's connection lights are on solid about 3/4 of the time, and whatever's collating them a hop or two up seems to be totally choking. This was, alas, outside his script. So he's scheduled a technician to physically come out on Friday the 19th to frown at our cable modem and magically fix the problem. (Which is the day after I leave.) Oh well, Fade can let the guy in and at least they'll notice if they can't fix it from here and follow up from where the fix needs to be made. (And maybe they can change which channels the cable modem is using or something, who knows...)

September 11, 2008

My little bluetooth USB dongle seems to oops the kernel a lot. Not a full blown panic, just a stack dump to dmesg and then the bluetooth subsystem is frozen and won't work until I reboot. This makes me sad.

Sometimes it can be fixed by yanking and reinserting the bluetooth dongle. It seems to be software suspend that drives it into an easily confused state. (Specifically, suspend to ram without remembering to yank the bluetooth dongle first. It _really_ doesn't like that.)

I note that suspend to ram now drains the battery a lot faster than it used to, and leaves the USB ports powered during suspend (which seems to eat battery even when nothing's plugged into them). I vaguely recall people talking about trying to leave usb devices mounted across suspends, but that's not a good way to go about it if you ask me...

Still, internet via cell phone otherwise remains highly cool. Fade remains addicted to Spore to the point I've had to go watch her play spore if I want to see her ever since she bought it. (And she estimates another couple weeks of this.)

And now my little bluetooth USB dongle seems to have wandered off. This is sad. I had it around 5am, and I put it in my pocket, went home, slept, biked back to campus... and I don't have it anymore.

It's too bad that the built-in bluetooth in the "everything works with Linux" laptop Dell sold me doesn't work with Linux. The bios insists there's bluetooth, anyway. The kernel simply can't find it, and all Google brings up for this model is other people complaining it doesn't work for them either, no actual solutions. Oh well, that's Dell for you.

I note that btdelconn is still cycling eating an entire CPU, and kill -9 doesn't take it down even though it claims not to be in D state. Sigh. The entire bluetooth subsystem is _fragile_...

September 10, 2008

Offline for a couple days. No particular reason, it's just not much fun using my laptop on the downstairs couch with neither fan quite pointing at me and four cats competing for my attention, and I didn't work up the initiative to get out much. (Went swimming 5 of the past 6 days, though.) Read several Discworld books (going postal, making money, night watch, now working on Thud!). Watched Fade play a lot of Spore.

Of course the travel arrangements for HP's NYC thing would come in right after the last time I checked my email, with a "please confirm in 24 hours". Oops. My Livejournal and twitter friends lists have scrolled. *shrug*

September 9, 2008

Cooked bacon a few days ago. I'm not much of a fan, but Fade likes it, and the internet seems to consider it important, at least when taped to cats. This left me with almost as much grease as finished bacon (I'd forgotten it's big strips of about 90% fat, half of which melts during cooking), and I kept it on the theory there's got to be something useful to do with it.

Today, I used the leftover bacon grease to cook potatoes in. The result tasted remarkably like bacon. What a surprise.

September 6, 2008

Mips is broken in uClibc svn. Wheee. And the 2.6.26.3 kernel didn't fix the powerpc linking thing.

September 5, 2008

Yay internet through the cell phone.

Ok, this amuses me. I suppose that the modern definition of "liberal" might be someone who watches Bill Moyers interview Keith Olbermann for fun. Twenty years ago it would have been the definition of "intellectual", of course. These days republicans are trying hard to be the Party of Stupid. I'm still annoyed at Obama, but it's nice to see somebody get nominated with a brain, who isn't trying to hide it. (My Mensa membership expired in 1999...)

September 4, 2008

Sigh. Chromium is written in C++, not C. Much less interested in it now. (Why bother to do a new web browser written in C++? Konqueror/Safari exists.)

I keep running into people who say "sure C++ is bloated beyond what any one person can cope with, but you can pick a sane subset of the language, just like Perl!". Except that no two people ever have an identical subset, so as soon as you have more than one person working on the project your subset expands, and soon you're using Boost libraries and everything. (And if you go with an anal coding style document dictating the language features your project is allowed to use, you A) present new developers with a higher than average brick wall, B) can't share code with other projects without going out of bounds.)

Mark made the cell phone internet work. Yay!

Ah, Chromium is based on webkit, which is Apple's packed up and exported Safari rendering engine, which is a fork of khtml in Konqueror. So the answer to my "why do another" question is "they didn't". Ok, that makes a minimal amount of sense. I'm still disappointed, though.

September 3, 2008

Whoever packaged mercurial for debian/ubuntu made it depend on rcs. Why did they do that? That's so amazingly, deeply stupid that I'm at a loss for words.

I'm aware that mercurial is capable of converting cvs archives to hg. This is NOT an excuse to make rcs a required dependency for installing mercurial. Attempting to convert from a repository format that isn't installed should simply fail. It's that simple.

Hanging out at the chick-fil-a on Ben White, seriously abusing their wireless. Got in 45 minutes of swimming last night (wow is that exhausting, I'd forgotten how much), and today I biked to south Austin (and need to bike back to go home later). Yay exercise. Yay getting lots of missing packages installed on my laptop.

Ok, google broke down and made its own web browser from scratch, and I'm impressed by their comic book about its design. And there are good developer docs too.

September 2, 2008

According to T-mobile customer service, the $20/month internet service thing wasn't enabled for either phone line (is now, but may take 2 days to actually happen). And getting surf-from-the-phone service (which apparently I need to contact samsung's website for the help pages, or upgrade the firmware) is an extra $6/month, although that part was somewhat confused. (There seems to be some disconnect between Samsung and T-mobile. It's a new model of phone, which they haven't sold for very long. Not much selection in the 3G department yet. They gave me Samsung tech support's direct phone number, maybe I'll call it tomorrow.) But in any case, that's a separate issue.

The part about the phone volume only going up to 7 instead of 10, meaning I can hear it ok inside at home, but not outside near a busy street or in a place with loud background music... That I also have to talk to samsung about, apparently. It can ring loud enough, so it's clearly a software problem...

Spent most of today re-reading Discworld books (still going through the watch series, today I finished The Fifth Elephant and moved on to The Truth, since that comes before Night Watch and it's sort of tangentially a watch book). Right now I'm in the mood to hang outsomewhere with free soda refills and good lighting, an optionally an outlet I can charge my laptop from (since I drained the battery making a half-hour stop on a bus bench walking back from Mark's last night). Considering I'm still sore from last night and the humidity's at "incoming hurricane" levels, I only felt up to going as far as The Donald's.

Unfortunately, this means no internet access (well, Wayport branded lack of internet), and my laptop isn't particularly useful without an internet connection at the moment. I have to install apatche before I can get a copy of my website running on loopback again, I have to install mercurial before I can poke at any of my existing software projects...

I wonder how long it's been since I rsynced my website up to the server? Before I reformatted my laptop, anyway. (I can copy _that_ script back now, though...)

I suppose I can set my email back up now, although there's no way to test sending and receiving at the moment. (I use hand-rolled ssh tunnel things in both directions.) Oh well, I can get it to read the old mbox files... Oh yes, Kontact continues to digest Kmail and make it less and less usable. (I forgot how I deleted the korganizer pop-up reminder daemon... But then again, that sort of detail is at least half the reason I keep this blog, so korgac is once again toast. :)

Sigh. I remember when kmail put the number of unread messages each folder had along the right edge of the display box, so they all lined up and were easily readable. Now it appends them to the folder name so they're all jagged, and considers this a UI improvement. This is made worse by the fact that all my interesting kmail folders are nested subfolders of "inbox", so it's indenting them all and leaving lots of whitespace at the left, then truncating the folder names at the right. That's it, preserve the useless whitespace and truncate the actual data. Who designed this? Is there any way to put the _number_ over there in the whitespace? I should look into thunderbird, at least it's nicely standalone and not part of an increasing hairball interfering with the functions I want out of it. Not that I can install _that_ without internet access, either...)

Huh, I took a gamble and copied my old kmailrc file to .kde/share/config/kmailrc and... it seems ot have worked. Wow. (That kind of thing generally doesn't work for me.) Well, there's half an hour of fiddling saved, I hope...

I'm starting to be creeped out by how much of kubuntu 8.10.1 is actually working out of the box. It's somewhere between "refreshing" and "I'm waiting for the other shoe to explode in a nuclear fireball".

On the other hand, I already fixed vi (ln -sf vimrc /etc/vimrc.tiny) because the Ubuntu default won't let you use the cursor keys in insert mode. And /bin/sh still points to the Defective Annoying SHell. So it's got some persistent built-in breakage baked into the distro at this point. But they didn't break anything _new_, and actually seem to have fixed some of the existing problems...

Ok, software suspend is still horked (the keyboard/mouse don't always come back after a suspend, and of course the defaults have changed to lock the screen when it resumes). That's reassuring me a bit. Now, how did I fix that last time? Made the power button re-suspend... Alas, that I _didn't_ mention in my blog, so I have to work out how I did it again from first principles...

Ah, pressing the power button calls /etc/acpi/powerbtn.sh, and in that directory there's a "sleep.sh" that does the actual suspend to ram, so rename the old script to something innocuous and make a symlink. That bypasses the screen locking logic, too. Exactly what I want. (If they have physical posession of my laptop, there's not a lot I can do about it in software. Well, ok, I could encrypt the home partition and have an initramfs ask for a password to mount it, and if I was really paranoid I could have a USB key with the encryption key for the root filesystem, and have the initramfs asking for the password to decrypt that USB key to get the second key off of it, and in fact the USB key could be something like a nail board programmed to wipe itself if you entered 10 wrong passwords in a row, at which point grabbing my darn terabyte backup drive would be the easy thing... But the point is, I'd still not have my laptop anymore, which would be sad.)

Poking at a python script to go through my /home partition and find runs of zeros it can turn into sparse files. (Several of my filesystem images started out sparse, and got de-sparsed as part of the backup process.) But although a slightly obsolete version of the python documentation was in the backups I dumped into my /home partition, I need to install the man pages before I can look at things like "madvise", which I think is how they finally added the ability to punch holes in existing files. There was a Linux Weekly News article on at one point, anyway...

September 1, 2008

I despise this Sinus infection. Can't get more than two hours of sleep before I wake up with a headache. I despise headaches too.

Incoming calls are finally going to my new phone, so I spent most of the day over at Mark's trying to get internet to work via cell phone. Installing Kubuntu 8.04.1 on my laptop right before doing this didn't help matters. Is bluetooth gone because of 8.10, or did it never work? No idea (it probably never worked, I simply hadn't tried before; the BIOS says it's there and enabled but the Linux kernel is adamantly refusing to find it). After an hour of fiddling with it we drove to Fry's and I spent the $17 to get a USB bluetooth dongle just to get over that part and on to the next bit.

Unfortunately, although we could then associate with the phone, get a serial device pointing at it, and do a lot of ATDT stuff via wvdial (among other things), it point blank refused to actually do a ppp session. Hung up on us instead of connecting each time. Many web pags said this _should_ work, but we tried a couple dozen variants and only managed to get slightly different failures.

Eventually, after more googling on Mark's part than you can possibly imagine (he puts my Google-fu to shame, only have of it actually being Google. The Ubuntu bug tracker has a search engine, who'da thunk?), I noticed that trying to bring up any of the actual phone's help pages says "connection failed". Apparently those are implemented as web pages on the t-mobile website (don't ask me why). So not only is the extra $20/month internet not working, but the phone's built-in internet that you get as part of the basic service isn't working.

Tomorrow: call customer service. (Called 'em today and got a recording about it being labor day, thus tech support is closed. Oh well, at least that means I can expect to talk to humans without having to recite the jabberwocky at a voice response system until it gives up, ala sprint...)

On the "getting 8.10 to work" front, knetworkmangler actually seems to be working again. I'm as surprised as anyone. No obvious way to tell it "rescan for more wireless networks, you missed one I know is there", but other than that... Huh. Cool.

August 31, 2008

New phone works for outgoing calls, but not incoming calls yet. Copied my numbers off the old one to a text file.

Fade and I spent lots of today watching the next round of netflix while I closed more tabs. (Finally finished Veronica Mars season 1, and then made the mistake of watching a highlander disk right afterwards. The difference in acting ability is ENORMOUS. Until Joe and Methos get on the screen, of course. Methos and Joe are great, Duncan's ok, Ritchie's annoying, and their weekly guest redshirts all CANNOT ACT. There's a reason Fade calls Highlander the "Joe and Methos show", they're pretty much what makes it worth watching. (Amanda's somewhere between Duncan and Joe/Methos when she shows up, but she wasn't on this DVD and Methos was only in the third episode.)

Joe had a line in the middle episode of the disk, ala "Sometimes you can't make any sense of it, you just have to see it through" that perfectly summarized the plot of that episode. (His character wasn't _talking_ about the plot, but the actor might have been. Striving mightily to overcome the material...)

Finally finished backing up my files to the terabyte drive, and now to install the new Kubuntu...

August 30, 2008

Bought a new phone. Mark dragged me out to the T-mobile place in the Triangle. I forgot to pick him up from the airport last weekend when my phone switched itself off and the alarm didn't go off, nor could he call me. (Still feel bad about that.) After over a decade as a sprint customer I've now left them, but I don't feel at all bad about that because they _earned_ it.

Sprint's internet plan (for getting internet on my laptop via cell phone) was $70 per person with no discount for having their cell phone service and no family plan. So altogether, with tax, Fade's and my monthly phone bill would have been somewhere over $300 to get our internet through them. That's _actively_ stupid, and they deserve to lose.

T-mobile, meanwhile, offered a two person cell phone plan for less than we were already paying sprint, and then 3G internet at $20/person on top of that.

So I have a phone, and Fade has a phone (a Samsung something-or-other with 3G), and someday they may even work. (Activation was... tricky. Trying to get new phones over a 3 day weekend when the tech support people are mostly away might not have been the best idea, and I break stuff. It's sort of inevitable. This time, their registration computer threw up a weird internal error message, which eventually turned out to be due to signing up for the internet plan while chosing to block their email service to my cell phone. I want to use the internet on my _laptop_ (which Mark made halfway work via bluetooth on his laptop in the store, and I need to buy a cable for to do via USB). I don't want to use their email address, and I don't want to use the cell phone's UI to do anything with the internet, and I don't want to be spammed on my phone. Seemed simple to me, but whoever programmed their computer never thought of this, apparently...

Closing more tabs. I have tabs open from March. This is downright archaeological. (It's a combination of software suspend mostly working now and the KDE desktop saving my open tabs when I shut down. Most of them are "couldn't load blah" because I don't bring the net up until after the desktop has booted, so it's not taking up the gigabytes of ram it would otherwise to _populate_ all these tabs. But each one is a URL I have to either look at or cut and paste to a file to look at later. My file of cut and pasted URLs is 200 entries and growing...

August 29, 2008

Still trying to backup stuff and close tabs so I can format and install Ubuntu 8.10. Boy I have a lot of open Konqueror tabs. (Finding the window full of tabs from tvtropes.com didn't help matters, I've lost most of today to that...)

August 28, 2008

Ok, even youtube is slow now. (Not unplayably slow, but noticeable.)

Filling up the terabyte drive, and preparing to install Ubuntu 8.04.1 on my laptop. Wow I have a lot of crud lying around on this laptop, and many many open windows to close...

August 27, 2008

*blink* *blink*. According to my notification email thingy, "Penguicon" is now following me on twitter. I honestly don't understand why...

August 26, 2008

Alas, UT can't schedule the necessary appointments and process the appropriate paperwork in time. (The faster of my two options involves an appointment on September 15th.) In their defense, the state of Texas decided that anyone who graduates in the top 10% of their high school class gets an automatic admission to UT, which is more than their entire incoming class each year. (That's an undergraduate problem rather than a graduate problem, but their entire admissions process is now geared to finding every possible way to keep people _out_.)

The internet is PAINFULLY slow tonight. I'm guessing it's all the students coming back...? Except that youtube seems unaffected, somehow. The daily show's unusable, livejournal's taking 30 seconds to load each page, my webcomics seem swamped, even Google's a touch sluggish (which for them means 5 second page load times)... but not youtube? Weird.

August 25, 2008

Wandering around the University of Texas at Austin, trying to get readmitted to take a class this semester. (If I pass one class per semester, spring and fall, for six years: that's 36 credits and a master's degree. Hopefully I can do it faster, but for right now I'm trying to finish one class without interruption.

August 24, 2008

Apparently, the US GDP is about $13.8 billion. According to Forbes the richest guy in the world (Warren Buffett) is worth $62 billion. So the richest man in the world essentially owns the entire output of the US for 4 and a half years. Every big mac, every dentist appointment, every new swimming pool... Good to know.

A while back I mentioned that Michael Lewis' book "Liar's Poker" described the roots of the current mortgage crisis, by which I mean the book is about the invention of the mortgage bond back in the 1980's.

Mortgage bonds take thousands of individual mortgages and tie them together into a big pile of money, then sell shares in that pool. In theory this lets statistical averaging even out peculiarities like people who default on their loans, or pay down their debt early. It let things like mutual funds buy shares in mortgages just like they would municipal or treasury bonds, and created a huge demand for more and more mortgages to invest in. Mortgages were now something you could _trade_.

This meant that a mortgage was no longer a 30 year relationship to the lending institution, it was something you could flip. Lendors became much more willing to make loans, it was easy to get out of 'em at any time and Wall Street had billions of dollars looking for good returns.

This meant the people who made the loans were no longer the same people who would collect the checks for the next decade, instead they got a commission for making the sale and sold the mortgage to somebody else within a few months. Make the loans, package them up into big pools, sell them to large institutional investors, cash your commission check, rinse, repeat. The ability of the borrower to pay back the loan faded into the background as a secondary consideration: it would become somebody else's problem before long, the statistical safety of the huge pools of money dampened the sting of individuals defaulting, and wasn't it all insured anyway? Divorced from the reality of individuals, the math would always find a rate at which the loan should (statistically speaking) be profitable, so just tweak the rate until the numbers look good.

Of course Bush came in and deregulated, eliminating the need for pesky things like down payments and equity. When the dot-com bubble burst, investors fleeing from stocks went into bonds for safety. Don't own a percentage of future profits, own debts people are _obligated_ to pay. (Assuming, of course, that they can.) More money than ever flooded into mortgage bonds seeking the safety (yet high returns) of real estate. Two decades had passed since the days of individual savings and loans backing mortgages with the contents of their depositor's savings accounts (ala the Frank Capra movie "It's a Wonderful Life") was the main source of mortgages. Those small lendors were careful, because it was their money. They had to eat the costs of default and foreclosure, and had to be willing to take posession of a property and sell it to maybe eventually get some of their money back. They were careful who they loaned to because the loan was their problems.

But with mortgage bonds, it was all numbers. Every mortgage sold was an instant commission, pack 'em up, flip 'em to large institutional investors, and who cares what happens 5 years down the road. It's all insured, isn't it?

And then the dominoes started falling. Again.

Nothing new...

Hmmm... Looking more closely at binutils 2.18, although the top level directory has both "COPYING" and "COPYING3" files (meaning it's dual licensed under GPLv2 and GPLv3), the subdirectories "bfd" and "gas" has GPLv3 (only) in their COPYING file.

Now since GPLv2 says that if you license any of the code under it, you must license _all_ under it, I'm pretty sure this means that everything in the binutils tarball they're distributing may be used under the terms of GPLv2. On the other hand, they're distributing source rather than binaries. I need to ask the SFLC about this. I may wind up having to revert to binutils 2.17 and working around the powerpc problem another way.

I need to fix PowerPC and I'm not quite sure how to go about it. Easiest way is probably to figure out how to feed a different device tree in for a different platform. Hmmm... The default platform claims to be a power macintosh, maybe arch/powerpc/configs/pmac32_defconfig?

I've gotten sick of this sinus infection, and since 5 rounds of antibiotics haven't knocked it out (including one that lasted for 3 weeks) I'm trying the "spicy foods" approach. I am not a fan of capsasin, but I've ordered ten of the "nuclear teriyaki" wings from the wing place around the corner, in hopes of flushing out my sinuses via a different avenue.

The fumes coming off this stuff are not pleasant.

Ow. Ow ow ow, and ow. Did I mention ow? (Also: OW! It gets worse. Five wings in, I rather want it to stop.)

Dunno if it helped or not. Now I've got a stomachache, though.

Working on FWL documentation. My problem at the moment is that it's repetitive. I've finished updating the README and the new summary page, and now I'm working on about.html and it's all the same stuff. It's the same stuff in more detail, but there's a lot of repetition. When I change things in future, that would make it hard to track