The Drafthouse was showing Groundhog's Day today, which I was seriously
tempted to go to even though A) I bought the DVD a couple months ago,
B) I've watched it ~3 times in the past month.
The consulting "feast or famine" thing continues strange. CELF proposals
are coming in, I just bid on
this
one which I'm pretty sure I can do. Mark also put me in touch with
a friend of his who has a line on a quick consulting trip to California,
might last a month.
You know, if it wasn't for the job hunting I'd love the consulting lifestyle.
If there was just some web page I could pick contracts off of like a menu...
(I'd like two days of enhancing busybox, two days of tweaking a toolchain,
on a couple weeks of board bringup, and for dessert a three month contract
doing a new board support package.)
Alas, consulting is constant job hunting, hence the desire for a permanent
job I can keep doing without any more job hunting.
Happy Birthday To Me. I am officially old.
For my birthday, I would like for either the ongoing flirtation with the
Ireland job (the identity of which is
not
exactly
a secret), or else for the interview
I did last tuesday at IBM,
to turn into real full-time stable employment.
What I _got_ is a gift certificate to Red Lobster from my grandparents
(which was excellent, as always).
Oh, and Eric and Mark called this morning to let me know they'd been sent
forms to fill out as references for me. In month 7 of this process, we've
progressed from getting approval from committees by attending meetings,
to having third parties fill out forms. Outstanding.
I suppose it's my fault that I stopped looking for other work when (I
thought) they got serious at the end of October. As a consultant, if I'm
not constantly looking for work I rapidly become underemployed, and for the
past 3 months I've only taken ultra-short-term jobs that wouldn't interfere
with my availability to move overseas on a week or two notice. (Actually I
just handed off to Mark some of the work I _did_ line up, because I've just
been too stressed out by months of "hurry up and wait" to give it the
attention it deserves, and it makes a nice weekend project for him. My
Firmware Linux project is a bit neglected too, although that requires less
concentration from me than coming up to speed on something new, and poking
listlessly at it is something I do to relieve stress.)
Meaning so far this month I've billed less than one full-time week's worth
of work, and have more or less run through the "liquid cash" portion of my
savings and will soon have to either decide what retirement assets to cash
out or else Get a Real Job (tm). Despite that, I'm not currently sending out
more resumes since the Ireland thing got itself unblocked again. (Yes, I'm a
sap, but I really DO want to work there.) But if the IBM position comes
through first I'm not turning down a bird in the hand to continue waiting
for a job I applied for 7 months ago, no matter how nice that job would have
been or how close it seems to be to finishing.
Yeah yeah, almost there. Oncoming train at the end of the tunnel,
better to light a flamethrower than to curse the darkness, time flies like
an arrow and fruit flies like an apple, any fool can criticize and most do...
But closure would have been a _marvelous_ birthday present.
Anyway, enough whining about that. I'm way overdue for an FWL release.
Went to the hospital shortly after midnight, with dizziness, sweating,
and chest pains. As with the last time this
happened, it wasn't a cardiac thing, but better safe than sorry when
it comes to chest pains. (And hey, I actually had health insurance this
time. Dunno if I still will once they see that I actually went to the
hospital, but oh well.)
Last time it was a sinus infection causing swelling that
pressed on a nerve. (Reeeeeeeally annoying.) It might be something like that
again. (I note the cedar pollen season's starting up
again, count's up around 300 or
so already).
But it could also have been food poisoning, which it started presenting
as _after_ I went to the hospital and sat in the little room hooked up
to all the electrodes for an hour and had a chest x-ray. (This means mild food
poisoning can be more annoying than full blown food poisoning, because it's
harder to diagnose. Sigh.)
All this lasted until around 4am, so I'm on a night schedule again. May
need an energy drink for my in-person job interview tuesday afternoon.
Went to Mr. Notebook and got a new power supply for my laptop. (They
had to check five of them before they found one that works, apparently
Dell power supplies are flaky in general.) This one's 90 watts instead of
65, so it charges the battery reasonably fast even when I'm using the
sucker.
Heard back from a 1-year AIX contract I applied for. Phone interview
today, in-person interview on Tuesday. (Haven't given up on the Ireland
job, I'm just not waiting around for it either.)
And hey, may laptop's power supply died. This is the third one for this
laptop. It still provides _power_ just fine, but Dell's patented "YOU'RE
PIRATING POWER SUPPLIES!!!!11!1!" circuitry is refusing to identify itself,
meaning it won't charge the battery anymore, and the thing has clocked down
to 800 mhz.
I remember my toshiba. The power cord it used was the same power cord
the radio used, and an electric shaver I had, and just about every other
device out there. It did not have any circuitry in it.
Note that it refuses to even charge the battery when the laptop is _off_.
If it's worried about potentially not being able to draw enough power from
the thing, why won't it charge when the laptop is POWERED DOWN? Only
answer: Dell's being greedy and hoping to charge extra for its power
adapters. (And prevent you from using third party ones.)
I'll have to see if Mr. Notebook has anything in the morning. They closed
at 6...
Of course Ubuntu's taking this as an opportunity to act _extra_ nuts.
(It's convinced that one of the processors is at 1.7 mhz and the other is
at 800 mhz. And the iwl3945 network card had firmware errors and aborted
after thirty seconds _twice_, so I'm using my cell phone internet for
the moment. If there was a way to just smack the Dell bios and go NO REALLY,
IT'S A PERFECTLY USABLE AC ADAPTER YOU'VE BEEN USING FOR A YEAR NOW...
Sigh.
So I wrote a git bisect script that rebuilds a given FWL target and runs
the native build under it, and a bisect "bad" is when it doesn't successfully
produce a dropbear binary from the native build. (This catches everything from
patches failing to apply during the source tarball extract all the way through
something subtle going wrong with the native compiler.) Hooking this up to
the nightly cron job build should make that much easier to keep up with.
Right now I'm trying to figure out two things:
1) Is keeping the "git show" and log from the last "bad" build always
going to produce the "first bad commit" the bisect ends with? (Can they
ever be out of order so that the one bisect determines is _not_ the last
build we did that failed?) Logging becomes much easier if this is the case,
and I _think_ it is because this is a weird sort of binary search, but I'm
not actually certain...
2) During the build I'm often reverting the "first bad commit" I find and
then re-running the bisect from that point to find the _real_ problem.
(Especially for messes like the uClibc repository or linux's -rc1 cluster-merge,
the condition of the repository is crappy enough that any given bisect could
hit five different problems along the way.) Should
I teach the bisect script to do this (and just accumulate a stack of reverts)
or should I just have it find the first bad one and wait for human
intervention to figure out what to do about it? The downside is the reverted
patches may be needed by later patches, so the revert stack can get huge (and
can contain the patch that introduced the actual bug of interest). The script
can't tell what bugs are of interest, of course. It can just fine the first
thing that causes breakage, then the next thing that causes breakage, and so
on...
Video interview with the guy in Zurich today, for the Ireland job. (I
was 15 minutes late, couldn't find the building. Sigh. As the song goes,
"Que sadilla, sadilla. It's mexican food, you see. Tortillas and refried
beans, all covered with cheese...")
Since the the six month anniversary of my application for the Ireland job
was last week, I started sending out fresh resumes to positions that look
interesting. (Mark pointed me at indeed.com, which seems to work a bit
better than Dice. I still feel weird about applying for positions advertised
on linkedin, since I don't use that for anything. I only have an account
there people keep trying to link to me. (I have sent out exactly one
link request, which I believe was ignored. And I felt dirty afterwards.)
One recruiter already got back to me about an AIX job. (Well, not the
one advertised but a different one that's still within operational
parameters, as it were. Working on a different Unix variant might make
a nice change, and I'd rather be paid to work on honestly propreitary code
than GPLv3.) Local position, easy commute, Fade could stay in ACC through
her prerequisites for her doctorate and we wouldn't have to try to get this
condo on the market before spring break this time around.
At this point, it's "whoever comes through first with something acceptable".
I'm tired of waiting.
And uClibc 0.9.30.2 dropped! Yay, the project isn't entirely dead.
(I prefer to see this as a Princess Bride "mostly dead" situation rather
than a Monty Python "He says he's not dead" situation.)
It broke Mips, of course. Builds fine, but booting dies trying to
launch init. The static hello world works. I should write the automatic
git bisect stuff to track this down...
Catching up on Doctor Who episodes. Silence in the Library through
Midnight. For some reason, this entire DVD seems to consist of "episodes
that were running short so we needed to insert an extra 15 seconds of
repetition, reaction shots, or random atmospheric stuff", over and over.
Fade says it's intentional. *shrug*
So I'm reading The
MPEG "System" layer standard (ISO 13818-1). The System layer is
essentially an archive format that bundles together "elementary streams".
An elementary stream contains audio, video, or timing information.
Elementary stream data is stored in "PES packets", and a Packetized
Elementary Stream is a trivial system layer that contains a single elementary
stream (with some minimal timestamp and rate data in the Elementary Stream
Clock Reference (ESCR) and Elementary Stream Rate (ES_Rate) fields of the
PES packet headers).
The two main MPEG System layer archive formats are Transport
Streams (TS) and Program Streams (PS), both of which bundle together audio
and video into a single file, and keep them synchronized. These also
contain PES packets, but they can contain several different groups of them
bundled together representing multiple elementary streams. (Or they can
contain just one, you can use a TS or PS stream to store an MP3 if you want
to.)
Transport Streams are more seekable. They're designed to resume from
an arbitrary point in the stream without having seen what came before,
which lets you recover from lost data by skipping the damaged bits,
and also lets you change channels on a television and start playing at
an arbitrary point without having seen the firt half of the program.
The format is implemented as a series of small constant-size packets
(generally 188 bytes), each of which starts with the same byte (0x47).
It's used for HDTV and video camera output and so on.
Program Streams offer better compression that Transport Streams,
but you need access to the whole file in order to interpret it. This is
generally what you find on DVDs and such, and it's common in downloadable
video because the files are smaller.
Other complicationos are that each Transport stream can contain multiple
"programs", meaning not only are you grabbing and synchronizing a video
stream with an audio stream out of the passing data, but there could be more
than one to choose from. Program Streams are designed for just one program
each, although you can have different audio tracks to choose from.
And in both types of system streams you can have other elementary streams than
just audio and video. (Subtitles, for example.) You can convert a program
between TS and PS, it looks a bit like converting between tar and zip.
What I'm trying to do is teach VLC to chop transport streams into
different files every X seconds. The hard part is actually digging through
all the weird VLC layering. (Note: VLC violates its own layering left and
right, this design is kind of ugly. Plus it calls extensively to external
libraries so you have to dig through three or four different projects to
try to follow the control flow.) In theory, specifying the output (display,
write it to a file, send it to a network) is orthogonal to what type of
data is being generated. In practice, this is not the case, except when
it is.
Tempted to just write a dumb little daemon to accept the network output and
have _that_ write to the files, parsing the stream just enough to do the
chopping...
If you log into justin.tv's chat thing with your twitter account,
your chat things are limited to 61 bytes. The reason for this is every
chat comment you make gets posted to your twitter account with an enormous
advertising tag. Yeah. Revoked its access, deleted the spurious posts,
apologized for the noise.
Getting that login to work involved three attempts, and in the middle
of that I had to delete cookies for that site because the site was just
coming up as blank for me, not even any "view source" content. (But it
worked fine via wget.)
I thought "hey, maybe that'll get The Daily Show displaying again",
but alas: no. It still displays an ad, and then hangs waiting for
174.129.6.226. (Leave it there for half an hour, nothing will ever
display.) I notice that all these websites that have problems with
this (Hulu, blip.tv, etc) work just FINE to display the ads, and then
hang before displaying their actual content. It's not displaying video
that has a problem, it's confirming I'm not DOWNLOADING the video. Alas,
this means that untangling the guts of what flash is doing and trying
to download the video myself is the only way to view it. Kind of
self-defeating, eh?)
Alas, it wasn't all these websites that changed. It was letting the
ubuntu update manager apply its updates. It updated firefox, and now it
doesn't work. And I don't have the option to downgrade it back down to the
one that did work. And it's been weeks without a fix. (Last Daily Show
episode I managed to watch was December 15th.) Linux: smell the usability.
Up most of the night playing Sims 3 on Fade's
computer. My little ghost girl is stuck in the floating mode where they're
on their knees hovering a little above the ground whenever they go anywhere,
meaning they move VERY VERY SLOWLY. (Unless they get on a bike or something,
in which case they move at the same speed as anyone else.) Tried several
things to fix it, to no avail. Not sure how to Google for it because I dunno
what keywords to use. Wound up sending her back to the netherworld, hopefully
reviving her again will fix it. (If not, hit the darn sim with ambrosia,
although since she was born a ghost this would just be "surrect" instead of
resurrect. I think.)
Oh, and I was watching The Daily Show in another window, because it plays
just _fine_ on Fade's Mac, but plays only a commercial and then hangs before
displaying actual program on Ubuntu. Same website, same network connect:
Linux's flash support got subtly
broken by one of the Ubuntu upgrades. Again.
(Yes, I spent the night fiddling with a game I broke while taking advantage
of an environment in which a different bug wasn't manifesting. This is my
experience with computers, always.)
What is it with me needing to address schedule slippage
with cake?
I haven't uploaded my blog up to the website recently because of a looming
job interview stressing me out, and thus being all I really wanted to blog
about. I didn't want to comment on it while it was in progress. (This
also means my project repositories haven't been synced up to the website,
since it's the same rsync script. This blog is a file I edit in vi, with
an rss feed generated via python. So I've been writing stuff in it, I
just haven't been sending it anywhere.)
But today is the sixth month anniversary of me applying for the job, which
I went through three phone interviews for before being flown to a full day
in-person interview, and after an entire month of repeatedly rescheduling
the decision resulting from that... I now have a new interview with somebody
else on tuesday, this one via teleconference. Wheee.
Since I can no longer use the word "progress" to describe what this
process is in (not with a straight face, anyway), I might as well get on with
my life and rsync the past week up to the server. (January 6 was the
third deadline for a decision since the in-person interview. I was silly
enough to think it _meant_ something and was holding off posting this until
I had _something_to_say_, one way or the other. Ah, the naievete of
youth...)
The cake comes in because Fade is going back to college for her doctorate
(well, at the moment taking prerequisite courses for the program at the local
community college), and this looming schedule uncertainty has now
caused her to miss
her class registration deadline, because she put off registering until
she knew whether or not we were going to move soon. We still don't, but today
was the last day, and she forgot and missed the deadline by about an hour.
That led to
this,
which of course led to me baking a cake. (I mean, we had the mix and the
pan was clean and everything. I did have to wash a bowl.)
The thing is, I
sent
two cakes to
Erik Andersen to unblock uClibc releases. (I also once arranged for a delivery
of Mangoes to Neil Gaiman's assistant Lorraine for reasons that
require some
context to explain, but that's another story.)
Going by historical precedent, what I might need to do is send a cake to
the guys in Ireland.
In any case, there comes a point where I have to get on with my life,
or at least run the darn rsync script.
Flying back to Austin. Loving the new laptop battery. Recharging (even
though there's over 2/3 of the battery left) in Vegas. Trying to figure
out why the strace build is breaking in the current system images, but
worked fine in the last release.
One fun trick you can do if you have files that differ in two contexts
that make diffing them problematic (such as two qemu instances) is
"head -n filename 80 | sha1sum" on both files, and then vary the number until
you find the first changed line via binary search. In this case, it's that
linux/netlink.h isn't being detected via ./configure. (Insert standard
autoconf-is-horrible rant here.)
The error autoconf is dying on is:
include/linux/netlink.h:35: error: expected specifier-qualifier-list before 'sa_family_t'
The problem turns out to be the linux kernel changed from 2.6.31 to 2.6.32
and that included git 9c501935a3cd. In the one that was working,
linux/netlink.h includes linux/socket.h which defines sa_family_t.
In the one that isn't working, linux/socket.h is largely an empty shell that
had the relevant chunk removed by #unifdef because Ben Hutchings thought
it was only still used by libc5.
Sigh. Email the kernel guys to ask why, patch strace to fix the immediate
problem... If I wasn't on a plane right now I'd check to see if there was
a current strace development project to send patches upstream to. (Last I
checked, it was moribund.)
Still in Idaho, visiting relatives.
Belated christmas present opening yesterday. I got a new laptop battery!
Woot!
Banging on FWL a bit. Alpha has the same missing inhibit_libc guards
that sh4 did, and when you fix those the uClibc build dies with:
libm/e_exp.c: In function '__ieee754_exp':
libm/e_exp.c:144: internal compiler error: in emit_move_insn, at expr.c:3275
Isn't that special?
Also, the m68k and sparc builds were both broken by
my futimes patch, because the last ever release of uClibc didn't include
the INLINE_SYSCALL stuff that the other architectures I was actually testing
did. (Neither of those worked properly under qemu, but they both _built_.
The uneven nature of uClibc's support for them caused a build break on
those architectures.) My resulting patch to fix this is AMAZINGLY
ugly, but A) I'm fixing something that got fixed in the -devel branch months
ago, B) what's the point of pushing things upstream if there's never going
to be another uClibc release?
Since uClibc's so obviously moribund, I'm vaguely pondering poking at
Android's "bionic" project instead, and maybe even their "toolbox" project.
The first is their libc (uClibc replacement) and the second is their
coreutils (busybox replacement). They wrote their own because they decided
they want all the userspace stuff to be BSD licensed, no GPL in userspace.
Before GPLv3 came out I would have objected to this, but now it seems kind
of reasonable. (If the FSF is really _that_crazy_, then you don't want to
get any of it on you.)
Yeah, traditionally BSD-licensed projects fork themselves to death.
And I'm not even talking about free/net/open/dragonfly, I'm talking about
developers being hired to work on propreitary forks. When BSD first
worked up enough momentum to become interesting Sun hired away developers
like Bill Joy to work on a proprietary fork in 1982, over the next decade
it recovered enough for BSDI to hire the next generation of developers away
to work on a different proprietary fork a decade later, and once it recovered
from _that_ Apple hired Jordan Hubbard and friends away to work on MacOS X.
p>But Android is a
corporate
owned project like Darwin, Star Office, Mysql, QT, and so on. (And
like Mozilla was before Netscape/AOL lost interest, and the whole
first few years of the
Fedora project before people stopped pretending it was anything other
than Red Hat Enterprise
Rawhide.) Corporate owned projects seldom get enough external
contributions to be in much danger of forking, and never will. Hobbyists
just aren't all that interested in something they can't affect the direction
of, so just about all the project's developers will continue to work for the
company that owns the copyright on the code. (Maybe it's
only 1/10th as active as a real open source project, but that still puts
it ahead of dying efforts like uClibc.)
Unfortunately, neither of Android's sub-projects have a mailing list.
Instead they have a "google group", which (as I've mentioned before) is not a
substitute for a mailing list. When I go to that Google Group, it starts with
"Read the FAQs", which links to "What is Android", which says:
Android is a software stack for mobile devices that includes an operating
system, middleware and key applications. The Android SDK provides the tools
and APIs necessary to begin developing applications on the Android platform
using the Java programming language.
That in a nutshell is why I've never had any real interest in Android.
Java stopped being interesting as anything other than Cobol's successor back
around 1999. It lost "the language of web browsers" to javascript (and then
that lost about half of its share to flash's activescript). The famous
"212% growth" of Linux in 1998 was all the Java developers LEAVING JAVA, for a
platform that had no real java support (and thanks to Sun screwing over
blackdown didn't for the next 5 years). The vast majority of us are not
going back.
Come on guys, _java_? It's what replaced Cobol during Y2K when all the
old stuff from the 1960's was being forcibly rewritten: it was the flavor of
the month now graven in stone to serve the pointy-haired on their
steam-powered mainframes, and outside of that niche it has all the appeal
of a Pat Boone concert.
Aside from that, every platform in the world "also does java". It's a
programming language. Crippling your platform so it _can't_ run stuff written
in a language like that would be the hard part. Saying "the way to write code
on this platform is to do it in perl" (or in python, or in ruby, or any other
specific language other than C, which all those others are written _in_) means
"this is not a general purpose programming environment", and we _have_
on of those already, it's called the web browser and it uses a totally
unrelated language called javascript (which used to be called iscript but was
renamed during the height of Java's flash-in-the-pan celebrity).
The fact I'm hearing people talk about bionic and toolbox now means
the embedded community is finally starting to pay attention to the ability
to program these devices in _C_, but they don't make it easy finding out
how.
Alright, bite the bullet, just skip their pathological web pages, ignore
the lack of mailing list archive to browse, and google for "android
sdk download", which gets me to here
which lists a linux tgz, right click save as and... it's trying to
download an html file? Darn it, does it have one of those stupid broken
sourceforge mirroring setups?
Nope, worse: it's a license agreement you have to agree to before they let
you download the SDK.
Sigh. This is _so_ not an open source development project. (The result
may be open source, but the development project is considerably _less_
friendly to hobbyists than the "Microsoft Developer Network".)
And numerous sections in the license mean "this SDK ain't open source"
either:
3.3 Except to the extent required by applicable third party licenses, you may not copy (except for backup purposes), modify, adapt, redistribute, decompile, reverse engineer, disassemble, or create derivative works of the SDK or any part of the SDK. Except to the extent required by applicable third party licenses, you may not load any part of the SDK onto a mobile handset or any other hardware device except a personal computer, combine any part of the SDK with other software, or distribute any software or device incorporating a part of the SDK.
See also 4.2, 4.3, 4.4... about half the license really.
The other half of the license is Android treating us like infants or perhaps
merely morons:
4.5 You agree that you are solely responsible for (and that Google has no responsibility to you or to any third party for) any data, content, or resources that you create, transmit or display through the Android platform and/or applications for the Android platform, and for the consequences of your actions (including any loss or damage which Google may suffer) by doing so.
Guys? Could you inform your lawyers that even the GPL is _not_ based on
contract law, and you went OUT OF YOUR WAY to select BSD licensing instead?
You insist on X/MIT-style licensing for your userspace and then you pull the
"you must be 18 years old to press this button but obviously we don't think
you really are" crap. Having a click-through license AT ALL is unnecessary,
but what you put IT it is just _stupid_. (Also, could you inform your lawyers
that if you're not recording WHO agreed to the darn contract then there is no
privity of contract and thus NO CONTRACT UNDER CONTRACT LAW? Last I checked
you couldn't legally HAVE a contract if you DON'T KNOW WHO IT'S WITH.)
A quick search for git repositories for bionic finds
here
and here in the first
screen of hits, and I don't have to agree to anything to download those.
Did the people who did that violate the "contract" terms in putting the
code up online?
Alas, I've lost interest in dealing with android again. So far I've seen
more input from lawyers and marketers than from programmers on this thing,
and apparently I'm not the only one.
I've been paid to work on far worse, but why would I spend my _hobby_ time
messing with this clueless morass of pointy hair, java, and confused legal
boilerplate? I wonder if they actively don't want to be bothered by
developers like me, or if it simply never occurred to them that hobbyists
might have something to contribute? (Obviously the only worthwhile open
source comes from places like IBM. Nobody does this in their spare time,
or at least nobody does anything _interesting_. That's the vibe this project
exudes with a flamethrower. I wonder if it's intentional?)
So I heard back from the Ireland job recruiter again this morning:
Hi Rob,
These discussions are still ongoing. There are differing thoughts on the
interview feedback and if/where we could position your profile.
I should have more early next week once these discussions have taken place.
Apologies for the continued delay but you're still in the mix...
I have no idea how to respond to that. (I have a profile in need of
positioning? There's a mix?) Fade's sister Lisa works in hollywood, and I
asked her if she could translate that for me, but it still boils down to the
fact that hiring me is still an "if", and a decision has not been made.
I'm starting to desire closure more than anything else out of this
process. I've lost count of how many times the actual
decision part has been postponed, and "at least it's not a no" is starting to
lose its appeal as a mantra.
Oh well. One more set of wednesdays...
Flying to Boise today, to visit Fade's parents (who moved there from
California a few years ago) and siblings (who are converging on their parents'
house).
Fade got a spare key made and I dropped it in the mail to Mark so he can
feed the kiggies. (And we left them with five bowls of food and two
bowls of water, so even if they don't get fed again before Tuesday they
should be ok.)
The first leg of the flight was the most unpleasant experience I've had
on Southwest in as long as I can remember. Every seat full: check. Crying
toddler in his father's lap in the seat to my left: check. Guy who somehow
managed to get on the wrong plane (thinking this one's going to El Paso)
so we have to taxi back off the runway and drop him off at the terminal:
check.
Still, it wound up way ahead of either of my recent experiences with
Alaska Airlines. We made our flight and arrived in time to make our connecting
flight (we would have just made it even if said connecting flight hadn't also
been delayed an hour). The flight attendants gave me four snacks and three
drink refills and attempted to placate the baby with cheez-its (which as far
as I can tell were laced with horse tranquilizers), and when we arrived sang
the plane a song apologizing for arriving late.
In Idaho now. Have yet to see any potatoes. Tired.
Still no word on the Ireland job.
Stressed. Today is apparently the day I learn whether or not I get a
really cool job that would involve moving to Ireland.
It's been a six month interview process. I applied back in July, heard
back in October, and got two phone interviews in november. That apparently
convinced the recruiter I was talking to that he wanted to hire me, so then
I had to convince the rest of the company. Thus they flew me to california
for an in-person interview at the start of December. That was just over a
month ago.
While I was there they said they review interview write-ups and make
decisions about them on Wednesdays, but when I was there they said the
results from a friday interview probably wouldn't be in by the following
Wednesday (in this case the 9th), so they'd probably do the review
on the 16th instead. On the 17th, I got email that "the feedback took
a little longer than expected to collate so you have been put into
next Wednesday's review", and it was bumped to the 23rd. Then on
the 22nd I got a phone call that people on the review committee were on
vacation, so they bumped it two weeks to get past the holidays. That would
be today.
In the past few months I've been invited to speak at a conference in
Chicago this spring, and couldn't give 'em a clear answer because I don't
know where they'd be flying me in _from_. Fade's only registered for one
spring class because she doesn't know if we'll be moving. The real
estate market near UT is intensely seasonal, if I'm going to sell the condo
this year I should really have it on the market by spring break...
I'm supposed to be working on a VLC modification for a guy in Florida,
but I'm just too stressed to focus. (And securitybreach went down yesterday,
not sure why. That doesn't help.)
I also haven't been able to focus on FWL, which is having the weirdest
problems with libgcc_s.so, because on arm eabi '__aeabi_ldivmod' is magic and
evil. The more I look at that code the worse idea it was, maybe I should
just hardware libgcc.a and _eh.a all the time...
When the host compiler from Ubuntu is building hello world, it's calling
the linker via (lots of extraneous gorp removed):
ld crt1.o crti.o crtbegin.o hello.o -lgcc --as-needed -lgcc_s --no-as-needed -lc -lgcc --as-needed -lgcc_s --no-as-needed crtend.o crtn.o
The thing is, -lgcc asks for libgcc, and there's only libgcc.a (no .so).
That means that libgcc_s.so can only replace libgcc_eh.a, which seems kind
of pointless. But if I take out that -lgcc, then I get the __aeabi_ldivmod
thing on armv5l, which
is not
straightforward.
I dunno, maybe this is a case where a new gcc release actually simplified
something rather than making it worse. (There's a first time for
everything.) But the new release is still GPLv3, so I still won't touch
it.
I'm poking at toybox again. Added a trivial app (setsid) just to break
the logjam, and also checked in some pending stuff I've had in my tree for...
possibly a year?
I'm not sure what this really means, other than busybox is no fun for me
to work on in its current state. I should look into what would be involved
in porting largeish busybox applications to toybox commands. Bound to be
easier than getting the busybox developers interested in redoing their
infrastructure...
Learning about various things VLC can do. It's actually quite a powerful
package, with documentation Google just can't find. Google finds the
standard useless wiki, and some howtos with big warnings about how obsolete
they are and which have a mixture of quite informative bits
immediately followed by long sections about a windows-only wizard they
apparently never bothered to implement on Linux
But what Google _doesn't_ find is any information on the command line
options.
It turns out, what you do is "vlc -H" (which is not the same as
"vlc --help", or even "vlc --help --advanced"), and that shows you all
the actual options you've got. Apparently not all versions of
vlc have that compiled in, but when it does it's quite informative.
Why it's not online anywhere, I dunno...
Still weird to type 2010.
So I submitted another
twitter help request for the same old problem. (Essentially boiling
down to yet more whinging about Horrible Retweets being an abomination,
but for a specific aspect of it that can be considered an actual bug rather
than merely an epic design failure.)
This week's way to submit a twitter help request is to go to
here and fill out the
form. As far as I can tell, that link is no longer linked from anywhere
on twitter's site, I found it by guesswork. Then when you post the form,
it will go directly to "solved" status. The difference between "solved"
and "closed" is you can still comment on it, and commenting will open
it and put it in the actual queue for a human to look at, so you have to
view your solved
requests and then click on your new request and add a comment.
This post is pretty much to remind me how to do it. I'll have to
update it when they add yet more hoops.
Blundering around like a bull in a china shop in my own code base.
"This is broken, that's broken, that needs to go over there..." I'm back
in "I can fix it!" mode, but I also should break this down into chunks and
check it in in smallish pieces. (Or at least check it in soonish before
it snowballs much more.)
(Several of these things are todo items, such as making ccwrap automatically
detect whether or not gcc_s.so is in the library path instead of hardwiring
that in at compile time.)
BWAHAHAHAH!
It took two weeks of sitting around moping and having writers block,
and either making changes I reverted at the end of the day because it
just wasn't improving anything or else feeling like banging on FWL was just
no fun at all (so I didn't do it)... And then today while randomly poking at
a reduced subset of the problem I'd been wrestling with to try to get SOMETHING
done, I saw how to FIX IT.
And suddenly, it's fun again and I'm getting so much CRAP cleaned out
of root-filesystem.sh.
The trick is to have root-filesystem.sh _never_ build a native toolchain.
It should not be doing that at all. That incestuous breeding tangle of
"this calls that but it's also called from over there AND called from
over there too" that I just couldn't simplify? I don't need to do it
in the first place.
Instead, it should check to see if build/native-toolchain-$ARCH exists, and
if it does copy it verbatim into the new root filesystem. I was already
building one, so just use _that_. (If it doesn't exist, then
use path_search to copy the shared libraries out of the cross compiler
that's building us, and just use those.)
I repeat: root-filesystem.sh should _never_ build its own C library.
It should just use the one out of an existing target compiler. It seems
counter-intuitive that we don't rebuild everything, but we already depend
on the existence of a working binary C library for the target in the
compiler or nothing works. So run with that.
I'll probably grab some variant of my old ldd root filesystem generation
script I wrote for busybox's test suite years ago (see testing/testsuite.sh
in the busybox source, functions mkchroot() and dochroot(). I'd link to
the busybox source control system, but it appears horked at the moment.
Submitted a trouble ticket to osuosl.org). Anyway, the point of using
that is to grab just the shared libraries that are actually used by
something, rather than all the shared libraries the compiler has access
to. But that's an optimization for later.
The new code looks something like this (still debugging):
# If a native compiler exists for this target, use it.
if [ -d "$BUILD/native-compiler-$ARCH" ]
then
cp -a "$BUILD/native-compiler-$ARCH/." "$ROOT_TOPDIR" || dienow
else if [ ! -z "$BUILD_STATIC" ]
then
mkdir -p "$ROOT_TOPDIR/lib" &&
path_search "$("$ARCH-cc" --print-search-dirs | sed 's/^libraries: =*//')" \
"*.so*" 'cp -h "$DIR/$FILE" "$ROOT_TOPDIR/lib/$FILE"' &&
# Since we're not installing a compiler, delete the example source code.
rm -rf "$ROOT_TOPDIR/src/*.c*" || dienow
fi
And that replaces LOTS of old existing crap, _and_ it decouples this
build from the toolchain (look, no more library path redirection, although
we're not entirely out of the woods on that front yet because when the native
toolchain _does_ exist it's supplying the shared libraries for the final
system and there's currently nothing actually enforcing a match between
them, but eh. Worry about that later. Possibly the else goes away and
the cp should only happen if the target file doesn't exist yet, something
like that. The ldd script from busybox above works in here somehow.
But I am unblocked! I am removing complexity! Ok, some of it's migrated
into build.sh and that's bad and I still need to keep chasing it but
PROGRESS. There is still mess but it's FLEXIBLE mess, it moves when I
push on it, so I'll mold it into something reasonable eventually.
Sigh. Happy.
Happy new year. I haven't done anything worth blogging about it a week.
(I've twittered but that's a service
_designed_ for having very little to say. Sort of the point of the thing,
really.)
I have to move the blog file and
start a new one tomorrow.
(Actually what I have to move is the "notes.html" symlink to point to
the new file. And possibly I should start making the suckers so
the date is a link to the individual post...)
Or just use a real blogging service. Can't quite bring myself to make
my old livejournal important
again now that the russian mafia owns it. But the span tags I've been
putting in the entries don't show up in the rss feed, and every time I ponder
doing something about that it always brings up the fact there's no comments
and no individual entry URLs (beyond the hash tags)...
I dunno, what blogging services out there these days are worth using?
Wow, am I an agnostic.
I just added somebody to my spam filter over an argument about a tecnical
topic, and not even because I particularly disagree with him (the approach he
takes works fine for his use case). It's that he was arguing that what he'd
chosen to do was a One True Way, conflating together a half-dozen different
choices that are in reality orthogonal, insisting his personal preferences
were universal truths... and I just don't want to argue with
people like that anymore. It's no fun. Possibly I used up my current stock
of patience in last week's LWN thread, dunno.
Christmas came and went, New Year's approaches, it's the holiday week
between the two and I've been sleeping for 11 hours a night. Not quite
sure why, just tired all the time. (Fade points out the time of year.
If I do wind up in Dublin I'm going to need big flourescent lights, right
next to my desk. Yeah, that's still an if.)
Merry Christmas! Watched a festive holiday movie (Groundhog's Day),
opened presents, cooked an enormous roast...
I have been _massively_ slacking off due to the holidays. Haven't
made any progress on any computer related things since last week.
(In part because my current FWL thingy is trying to cut a gordian knot of
complexity that I'm writing an explanation of for the mailing list, but
mostly because it's christmas and I just want to relax and enjoy it.)
Wrote up a status report on FWL, and then moved it
to the mailing list instead.
Sigh. Back in the 90's I found a marvelous orange bread recipe on
Ye Olde Internet, which was accidentally vegan. (The whole "that carrot has
been murdered, I must go straight edge on you now" aspect was incidental,
I liked that it was actually _good_.) I dug the recipe up out of a box
again years later and it was still marvelous, but alas it seems long lost
since sometime before the move to Pittsburgh.
What I really remember about it is it was trivial to make. The main
ingredients were flour and orange juice, with a bit of salt and baking
powder/soda. (I still can't quite keep those straight. Possibly both.)
Oh, and a teaspoon or so of lemon juice, optional. There might have been
a little sugar, although the orange juice had rather a lot already.
I do remember that the only liquid ingredient was the juice. (No eggs, butter,
oil, shortening, or anything like that.) Also, no yeast. (It was important
not to stir it too much, you just fold the mixture over once or twice
until it's wet and then _stop_stirring_.)
Unfortunately, attempting to google for this recipe keeps bringing up
pages and pages of irrelevant crap. No grated peel, no nuts, no bananas,
no pumpkin, no cranberry. No milk, no chunks of fruit.
By the time I've put in all those filters, I think I broke Google's
brain. I'm now getting a video recipe for "Frog's Eye Salad", a page
about "Catsup Cake Flour" (?), A PDF from a state.tx.us page that
claims to be a tax publication but apparently contains a grocery list,
a recipe for "Orange Roughy Roll-ups with Creamy Dill Sauce" (if that
has any relation to fruit roll-ups, I'm going to pass, thanks),
fondue recipes, "Holiday Baking with Whole Grains", and a page from
the North Dakota Wheat Commission. That's all in the first two pages
of results.
I suspect my best option is to just fiddle around and try to recreate
this stuff by trial and error. Except I don't currently have any orange
juice.
Wow. After I stopped directly replying to His Specialness over on lwn
(because it just wasn't accomplishing anything), and then later stopped posting
to the lwn.net thread at all (well, except for this) when Jonathan Corbet (editor of Linux Weekly News)
asked us to stop. (Then I fell
behind on email and twitter for a couple days because it's christmas and I was
busy, so I'm just catching up now.)
But other people didn't stop posting, and I still get emailed the replies
to replies because I checked the little boxes, and apparenty His Specialness
has decided that anyone who disagrees with him
must really be me in disguise.
I find that hilarious. When have I ever been reluctant to
insult
him to his face?
The only reason I've stopped using His Specialness's name is I think
he's a glory hound on the order of those white house party crashers,
balloon boy's parents, and that toupee that used to govern
Illionis. Getting his name repeated seems to be what he wants, with context in
which it's repeated a very distant secondary consideration. I suspect
the only reason he hasn't done one of those reality television shows where
you eat a bug on camera is they wouldn't take him.
LWN doesn't seem to have user profiles, so out of morbid curiosity I spent
the 30 seconds to type "site:lwn.net syspig" into google, which found
a comment from 2006 on its first
page of hits. His Specialness apparently did not bother to do this.
I repeat my comment from the last big post I made to the thread before the
moratorium: "I'm tired of arguing with
people who don't bother to do their homework". (And I note yesterday's
squirrel analogy on the difference between clever and smart.)
Yesterday at the mall there were tons of banners for this clear.com thing,
and today I clicked on a web ad for 'em, because I'm all for any alternative
to Time Warner (which needs to die on general principles because they keep
trying to retroactively sneak usage limits into their
contracts), and these guys look like they've got reasonable plans with
no usage caps... if you can find them.
Unfortunately, their web site was designed by somebody who thinks that
clicking through five pages to answer a simple question somehow improves
matters, and that all pages should be generated by javascript based on
cookies so that when you finally DO dredge an interesting piece of info out
of their navigational morass, you can never actually get a URL directly to that
page so you can send said URL to someone else. (Oh, and two of the pages I
tried to visit had firefox bring up a "redirect loop detected" page, that was
nice.)
It's a very _pretty_ website. Lovely plumage.
They had a "live chat" service which was answered by a very nice lady
who was very polite, gave prompt replies... and didn't actually have any new
information to give me. (She was looking stuff up on the website for me,
and apparently she couldn't find some of it either.)
Hopefully if I come back in a month their teething troubles will have
worked through, their support people will be more experienced, and maybe
they'll have burned their existing website to the ground and replaced it
with something that doesn't spend all its effort on being clever and none
of it on being smart. (I can hope. When squirrels hide nuts so ingeniously
they can't find them again, they're being clever but not smart. It's
less cute in a large corporation.)
Ok, the FROM_ARCH, FROM_HOST, CROSS_HOST, and CROSS_TARGET stuff is
once again TOO CONFUSING. It works, and it was worked out laboriously
via extensive trial and error, but it's too nasty and tangled for me to
keep it straight in my head, and I wrote it.
Let's see...
if CROSS_HOST is blank, it's $(uname -m)-walrus-linux
if CROSS_TARGET is blank, it's $ARCH-unknown-lilnux
if CROSS_TARGET is set by an arch dir (such as powerpc-440fp),
then FROM_HOST=$CROSS_TARGET
if FROM_ARCH is blank, FROM_ARCH=$ARCH
if FROM_HOST is blank, FROM_HOST=$FROM_ARCH-thingy-linux
Ok, FROM_ARCH defaults equal to $ARCH. (Probably $ARCH should just be
called $TARGET these days.) This is blanked for the binutils/gcc/ccwrap stages
when we're building a simple cross compile. It's set to the host for
static builds (currently hardwired to i686), and then set equal to the target
arch for native builds.
That's overcomplicated because the toolchain build and root filesystem
stuff is glued together. Setting it to the toolchain host for cross and
native builds makes sense, but the "default equal to $ARCH, except when it's
blank" bit is crazy. There should be some way to signal we're building a
simple compiler, but overloading FROM_ARCH seems a bit silly.
FROM_HOST is derived from FROM_ARCH, and overriden by CROSS_TARGET under
magic circumstances. That's a mess, and I believe it's a mess for binutils.
Vaguely recall much pain last time I fiddled with this, and this is just where
I left off because it was SUCH a mess.
CROSS_HOST exists solely to humor the binutils and gcc builds, because the
people who wrote that are crazy. It's always `uname -m`-walrus-linux. It's
proof positive that autoconf is useless because it' can't figure out what
the current system it's running the build on is, and must be told,
and if I can't figure out how to remove it I think I'm going to hardwire it
into the call sites.
Sigh. Attempting to clean up the multi-variable mess while separating the
toolchain build from root-filesystem.sh (and unify it with cross-compiler.sh)
turned into a large mess. I need to do this in stages, but it's all tangled
together. Where to start...
