2008年 5月 5日
Posted in Debian, Linguistics at 9:29 am by TBBle (Visited times)
Holger Levsen wonders what tense people write their changelogs in. Andrew Pollock feels that his tendancy is past-tense.
Looking back over some of mine, FreeRADIUS from a long time ago, and openjpeg more recently, it appears that my preference is to actually write them as untensed fragments. I think I'm answering the question "What does this change do?" from the perspective of the change. This would make sense, mirroring somewhat the comments I put in dpatches (and the overly verbose names that have been known to occur) which are usually the patch talking about itself in the plural. Unless that's the patch _and_ I talking about ourselves in the plural?
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Last modified 2008年 5月 5日 @ 9:30 am
2008年 1月 28日
Posted in Debian, LCA08, Linux at 9:00 pm by TBBle (Visited times)
OK, so I made it to LCA08 in Melbourne, eventually.
However, I managed to have the following happen on the way:
- Got the time of my flight to Melbourne wrong, arrived at 5:30pm for a flight that left at 5pm.
- Caught the wrong tram from Melbourne CBD to uni accomodation, had to walk from Royal Melbourne Hospital back to the university. This was precipitated by me misreading the tram t
imetable thingy.
- Failed to wave at a traim outside the uni, meaning it sailed right on past me.
- Locked myself out of my room, the third time I left it. (They've got those dumb swipe-card locks which are always locked except when you've just swiped from the outside, but are open from the inside.)
- Asked on #linux.conf.au about the URL for Planet LCA 2008 while it was in the topic. (Unlike on #debian, not only was I not mocked for this, no one noticed before I did, a while later)
On the other hand, I caught up with Brad, Evelyn, Bek, Jason, Phil, Naoko, Geoff and Ange, all in the one day. That was fun, we had dinner, I stuck my sore feet in the ocean and felt better, and I manged to catch the right trams from the university _to_ the city. Well, lunch with Naoko, the rest with the others. (Actually, that's in reverse chronological order)
The actual conference first day was interesting. I was at the Debian Mini-conf all day, seeing a neat thing about using git for managing packges sensibly, which is something I was trying to figure out when I was packaging Second Life last year, as well as some cool stuff coming into Debian over the next year or so.
After the Debian Mini-conf all went over to the keysigning (I didn't go again this year, I wasn't organised in time) I went to see a presentation about Ingex which is something the BBC have developed to try and take Digital Betamax out of the video production process (since Digital Betamax only works in real-time, as I understand it) with some success so far, and it's pretty interesting.
Speaking of not being organised in time, I only thought today to look at the Tutorials, and both Wednesday's tutorial about hooking up hardware to Second Life and Thursday's tutorial about hacking on lguest require preperation. I was able to grab Jon Oxer at the Debian Mini-conf and get my name put on the one remaining spare development kit, and so now I'm down in the Junior Common Room of Trinity College (no wireless in the rooms yet) updating my blog instead of trying to get lguest running under qemu. I'll have to go dig up Rusty's and Robert Love's instructions from LCA05 preparing for their kernel hacking tutorial that year. Wow. Archiving the old LCA websites kicks ass!
Edit: I actually was dumb on #linux.conf.au, not #debian. As an aside, I managed to lock myself out of my room again later that week.
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Last modified 2008年 2月 11日 @ 5:04 pm
2008年 1月 24日
Posted in Debian, GDC 2008, LCA08, Linux, Micro Forté at 10:33 pm by TBBle (Visited times)
Good news! Having worked for most of the traditional Christmas break, I'm now going to to linux.conf.au 08 in Melbourne next week, and Game Developers Conference 2008 in San Francisco in late February.
CAPSLOCK CANNOT EXPRESS MY GIRLY DELIGHT
For those of you who don't already realise, my dream job since age six was to be a video games programmer. Having now achieved that, you'd figure I was now in for karmic mortgage payments for a while. And sure enough, having an umbilical hernia become quite painful on Friday night, 28th of December (I was working that day) would certainly seem to be within reach. I'd actually had the hernia for a couple of months, I reckon, but hadn't known what it was or what to do with it. (I thought I was just getting fatter. -_-) Anyway, a mix of mentos, Coca-cola, lifting a heavy TV that week and who knows what else ended up with me spending the night in hospital on morphine. (Well, I dunno if I was on morphine all night. They gave me some) Thankfully, the surgeon registrar was able to push the bits of bowels sticking out back in (before the morphine. -_-) without problem, and no problems appeared overnight, so I'm now waiting for the letter to let me join the waiting list for surgery, and occasionally stopping to push bits of my bowel back through my belly-button.
This means I'm no longer a hospital virgin (not that I really was. I went to hospital when I was three years old or so, to get my forehead stitched up after falling off the wall above our driveway in Oyster Bay, Sydney) but it was a scare that I wouldn't be able to go to LCA this year, having already booked and paid for it, and LCA being my main actual holiday each year.
Also, it was lucky my sister was in town, since when I told her where and how it hurt, her mind went straight to hernia, so she and my mother came over to check me out and took me to hospital, hours earlier than I would have gone myself.
Anyway, early last week I saw the surgeon consultant, and he said I'd be fine to travel, since the surgery was fairly far off in the future anyway ("several months" I believe) and as long as I don't put sustained lateral strain on my abdomen, I'll be fine.
He also said to lose weight, of course.
So yeah, I reckon that the hernia prolly balances out LCA, GDC, my job, and maybe even my paying off of the ATO this year. I hope the universe agrees, 'cause if I'm still in the red for those good things, I'll have to be sure to backup my new laptop before I travel.
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Last modified 2008年 1月 28日 @ 8:27 pm
2007年 3月 1日
Posted in Debian, Linux, Micro Forté at 6:54 pm by TBBle (Visited 113 times)
(Side note: Due to 410549, some kind of PHP4/Apache2 bug in Debian/Stable that WordPress 2.1 has triggered, this site's not loading fully. It's apparently only happening on Debian, and upgrading PHP4 to the Dotdeb 4.4 build fixes it, apparently. >_<)
Anyway, here's an entry in my "Why everything that isn't apt sucks" category.
[root@bookcase ~]# yum info kernel-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6.i686 kernel-devel-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6.i686
Loading "installonlyn" plugin
Setting up repositories
Reading repository metadata in from local files
Available Packages
Name : kernel
Arch : i686
Version: 2.6.19
Release: 1.2911.fc6
Size : 16 M
Repo : updates
Summary: The Linux kernel (the core of the Linux operating system)
Description:
The kernel package contains the Linux kernel (vmlinuz), the core of any
Linux operating system. The kernel handles the basic functions
of the operating system: memory allocation, process allocation, device
input and output, etc.
Name : kernel-devel
Arch : i686
Version: 2.6.19
Release: 1.2911.fc6
Size : 4.7 M
Repo : updates
Summary: Development package for building kernel modules to match the kernel.
Description:
This package provides kernel headers and makefiles sufficient to build modules
against the kernel package.
[root@bookcase ~]# yum install kernel-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6.i686 kernel-devel-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6.i686
Loading "installonlyn" plugin
Setting up Install Process
Setting up repositories
Reading repository metadata in from local files
Parsing package install arguments
Resolving Dependencies
--> Populating transaction set with selected packages. Please wait.
---> Package kernel-devel.i686 0:2.6.19-1.2911.fc6 set to be installed
--> Running transaction check
--> Populating transaction set with selected packages. Please wait.
---> Package kernel-devel.i686 0:2.6.18-1.2798.fc6 set to be erased
--> Running transaction check
Dependencies Resolved
=============================================================================
Package Arch Version Repository Size
=============================================================================
Installing:
kernel-devel i686 2.6.19-1.2911.fc6 updates 4.7 M
Removing:
kernel-devel i686 2.6.18-1.2798.fc6 installed 14 M
Transaction Summary
=============================================================================
Install 1 Package(s)
Update 0 Package(s)
Remove 1 Package(s)
Total download size: 4.7 M
Is this ok [y/N]: Y
Downloading Packages:
(1/1): kernel-devel-2.6.1 100% |=========================| 4.7 MB 00:21
Running Transaction Test
Finished Transaction Test
Transaction Test Succeeded
Running Transaction
Installing: kernel-devel ######################### [1/2]
Cleanup : kernel-devel ######################### [2/2]
Removed: kernel-devel.i686 0:2.6.18-1.2798.fc6
Installed: kernel-devel.i686 0:2.6.19-1.2911.fc6
Complete!
[root@bookcase ~]# yum install kernel-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6.i686
Loading "installonlyn" plugin
Setting up Install Process
Setting up repositories
Reading repository metadata in from local files
Parsing package install arguments
Nothing to do
[root@bookcase ~]# rpm -q kernel-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6.i686
package kernel-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6.i686 is not installed
[root@bookcase ~]# wget http://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/pub/fedora/linux/core/updates/6/i386/kernel-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6.i686.rpm
...
11:36:50 (141 KB/s) - `kernel-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6.i686.rpm' saved [17169362/17169362]
[root@bookcase ~]# rpm -i kernel-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6.i686.rpm
[root@bookcase ~]# rpm -q kernel-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6.i686
kernel-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6
[root@bookcase ~]# yum info kernel-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6.i686 kernel-devel-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6.i686
Loading "installonlyn" plugin
Setting up repositories
Reading repository metadata in from local files
Installed Packages
Name : kernel
Arch : i686
Version: 2.6.19
Release: 1.2911.fc6
Size : 46 M
Repo : installed
Summary: The Linux kernel (the core of the Linux operating system)
Description:
The kernel package contains the Linux kernel (vmlinuz), the core of any
Linux operating system. The kernel handles the basic functions
of the operating system: memory allocation, process allocation, device
input and output, etc.
Name : kernel-devel
Arch : i686
Version: 2.6.19
Release: 1.2911.fc6
Size : 14 M
Repo : installed
Summary: Development package for building kernel modules to match the kernel.
Description:
This package provides kernel headers and makefiles sufficient to build modules
against the kernel package.
This all started when I tried to build a kernel module for the default Fedora Core 6 kernel on a fileserver at MF, only to find that the version magic didn't match, as I had an i586 kernel but i686 headers. No matter the cajoling, I couldn't get it to install an i586 set of headers, or an i686 version of the running kernel. I gave in and figured that due to a security issue, the old 2.6.19 kernel had been retired and the new kernel (2911) was the only one in the repositories.
Which led me to try the above. Clearly, yum agrees there's a kernel image RPM and kernel headers RPM available, both i686, but bizarrely is completely ignoring any requests to install it. And I mean ignoring, no error, no failure, it's as if I haven't listed the pacakge.
Sure enough, grabbing the RPM directly from the mirror and installing it with rpm worked fine.
And just to keep the hate flowing, the default setup of Yum is awful. There's no Australian mirrors in the mirror rotation, so I was getting 20kB/s before thinking to take away its mirror list and force it to use mirror.aarnet and suddenly getting the full effect of our two-megabit-per-second link. And before I did that, if I changed my mind about an operation that was busy fetching things from the network, control-c would kill the fetcher, and yum would then proceed to try the next mirror in the list. The default installation contains a huge list of mirrors (fetched from the Fedora website) which now I look at it, does start with mirror.aarnet, although it also then tells me it couldn't find any mirrors to match AU, despite having just given me one, and lists mirrors all over the shop. And it certainly never seemed to be using one when told to fetch something.
In Yum's defense, I will say that it survived being backgrounded and kill -9d on several occations. ^_^
Speaking of changing mirrors, it doesn't notice when you tell it to use a different mirror, and won't invalidate its cached metadata, meaning it'll reject the downloaded primary.xml.gz. When this happens, it still doesn't clear its metadata, meaning if you try it again, it'll fail again.
I feel better, having vented that. And I can hardly wait until we can whack this server and make it a nice Debian box, like all the rest of the systems in here (bar one FC4 box which only has one task, but happens to be in the DMZ...).
OK, one more thing. The Yum instructions say you can upgrade Fedora Core using Yum, but don't. And it'll only go one version at a time, and the box was an FC4 box in need of serious love. So I loved having to grab a four-gigabyte DVD to upgrade a server which is actually less than four gigabytes of system... It would have been quicker to image everything but our data, and FTP that to someone who already had the DVD. Except that it had to come back too. And it turned out to have, for a server, an incredible amount of crap on it. (I've this afternoon removed kde, gnome, metacity, cups, evolution, firefox...) This machine is Raided, backed up and was never ever going to be someone's desktop machine. (I hope).
Although I now understand why there are people who want to upgrade Sarge to Etch, and start by downloading the 8-CD weekly Etch image. And in fact I had someone two weeks ago who was going to install Sarge, didn't have a good Internet connection, and was asking if there was a better way than grabbing two DVD images.
In case you're wondering, the kernel module I wanted to build was ppscsi, for a HP ScanJet 5100C. I wouldn't have had this problem under Debian. ^_^
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Last modified 2007年 3月 1日 @ 6:54 pm
2007年 1月 16日
Posted in Debian, Japanese at 12:34 am by TBBle (Visited 132 times)
Just a quick note, Reviewing the Kanji uses a little flash applet for testing/reviewing flashcards. I'm pleased to announce that it works fine with Gnash 0.7.2 on my Debian/unstable PowerPC laptop. ^_^
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Last modified 2007年 1月 16日 @ 12:34 am
Posted in CBIT Internet, Debian, Japan, Japanese, LCA07, Programming at 12:27 am by TBBle (Visited 217 times)
Well, now that I'm back on the 'net fairly reliably, I can post on what I've been doing for the past few days.
Firstly, I was off the Internet because I was flat-out busy on Saturday, in transit on Sunday, and wireless did not arrive at International House until about 11pm Monday night. That time I did spend on the 'net today, at the conference, was spent in a combination of processing CBIT emails since Friday, and wrestling with my wireless network card.
My local build of the d80211 version of the bcm43xx driver got signal, would even get traffic through, but when it tried to reassociate to a different AP (all the APs here are running on channel 11... Although I was sitting next to someone who saw one on channel 1, which I'm guessing was rouge... I also saw some IBSS networks on the same SSID....) it would corrupt something nasty, kick the screen brightness up to full and oops with slab errors in short order.
The 2.6.18 (2.6.18-3-powerpc Debian build) bcm43xx softmac driver didn't crash or anything, but generally performed worse, and when the Debian miniconf's theatre (Mathews A) was full, my connection suffered or would completely fail to dhcp. >_<
On the plus side, the presentations were great. AJ gave us a rundown of debian-devel (ie 12 months of flamewars) and other significant Debian going-ons. Keith Packard produced a whole bunch of neat X things slated for X.org 7.3 (input hotplugging, dynamic output selection and modesetting, which is exactly what I need to get the projectors I keep plugging into to work better than 640x480...). Russell Coker talked about the various security gaps still remaining in Linux.
In non-conference goings on, I was talking to someone on IRC who's gotten Second Life Viewer building under Linux/PowerPC (a previously unsupported platform) and I'm going to see if we can get a .deb built. I've already created an ELFIO package, and have the OpenJPEG source to try packaging tomorrow. I've also sent off an email to the person who ITP'd secondlife-client for Debian already, to see if he wants to co-operate, or if I'm just tooling about.
Speaking of tooling about, I decided it'd be a good idea to upgrade my bcm43xx-d80211 build to something more recent than mid December, but it seems the 2.6.20 workqueue changes mean I can't compile it against 2.6.19 anymore. The rt2x00 d80211 stack has backwards compatibility macros for the workqueue stuff, but I don't really feel like hacking those into bcm43xx, it's already a large and unsteady beast.
BTW, cogito's update could handle resuming better. Although it happily detected it was resuming a failed update, it had to keep refetching the packs. I eventually realised it would eventually time-out a fetch if I didn't ^c it and happily try again, presuming I had in the meantime walked outside or reloaded the driver.
Anyway, so I've decided tonight (while I was still off the wireless) that I'd finally bite the bullet and build myself a custom dscape.git kernel, to see if the pain I keep suffering from the bcm43xx-d80211 driver is just my cheap-ass backport. That was still building when the wireless came up, and then barfed because KConfig happily let me include both the PCI and SoC versions of the OHCI USB host driver, which provide the same symbols. I must remember to file a bug report about that, or at least check linus's git tree in case it's already fixed. (Both drivers recommended yes, but are patently incompatible as they require different endianness of the host interface). I've restarted the make-kpkg, hopefully that'll build overnight and I can try it in the morning.
I also put some time into my Remembering the Kanji book. I was going to do an hour, but after about a half-hour (with a break to configure and fire the kernel build off) I was yawning, and figured I'd prolly left the imaginative-memory zone. I was going to watch some Gokusen but thought I'd take a last wander over to the IH whiteboard to see if the wireless was up. Bizarrely, it was.
So I wandered onto the 'net, checked email, volunteered myself to package Thousand Parsec for Debian, added the Kanji I studied to Reviewing the Kanji (a web site for reviewing the stuff you learn in Remembering the Kanji) and updated my blog.
Which funnily enough, is where we came in
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Last modified 2007年 1月 16日 @ 12:27 am
2007年 1月 12日
Posted in CBIT Internet, Clubs, Computers, Debian, LCA07, Micro Forté, Programming at 6:04 pm by TBBle (Visited 170 times)
Well, it's nearly LCA time again. This is just a quick post mainly to see if my syndication at Planet Linux.conf.au 2007 is working yet.
I've been working at MF (Milestones just seem to come at you faster than the calender would otherwise suggest) and particularly in the last couple of weeks getting a good vector-math workout.
I've also been working at picking off RC bugs to try and help Etch along a bit, since kind of hoped to be upgrading to it in the half of January that's just passed.
I've also been looking for a CMS for the ANU Anime Society to try and resolve the fact that our web admins never seem to last as long as we'd like. At the moment, Joomla! is top of my list for trialling, as I'm familiar with PHP and looks to have the relevant modules (forum, calendar, eventing system that'll need modification to work for screening scheduling). However, I'm open to other suggestions, and will see if anyone at LCA has any useful suggestions.
And of course, by adding Planet LCA 2007, I've had to read it. And I came across ThreatNet, which is a distributed compromised computer identification system. It's actually really simple, you do something to identify a certain IP as a threat (the sample code scans postfix logs for "REJECT: noqueue" which usually comes from "no such user" although I noticed it also comes from greylister at CBIT) and sends that IP address to a nominated IRC channel. I dunno what's next, actually. Presumably, sites can block that IP address as they see fit, and if the responsible parties for the machine become aware of it, they can take action. I'll be adding this to my ever-growing list of things I need to consider implementation of at CBIT.
On the plus side, I recently installed Debian on a Slug with a 512MB USB flash stick, and I'm going to see how Nagios performs on it. If it's up to scratch, I'll prolly shoehorn in a wireless card and see if I can monitor two disparate networks effectively.
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Last modified 2007年 1月 12日 @ 6:04 pm
2006年 10月 17日
Posted in Anime, Bandwidth Unlimited Pty Ltd, Clubs, Debian, Japan, Japanese, Linux, Micro Forté, Programming at 12:25 am by TBBle (Visited 1689 times)
Just a quick note, in the aftermath of the vote to decide where Anthony Towns, Debian Project Leader did something good for Debian, bad for Debian or indifferent to Debian with the Dunc-Tank.
I, Paul Hampson, hereby confess that I too earnt money for doing Debian work, specifically packaging FreeRADIUS and getting it sponsored into the archive in time for Sarge to ship.
Mind you, I didn't earn much money, since Bandwidth Unlimited (for it was they) went bust without paying me much, but they did pay me. And you might argue that I'd been looking for a package to help out with in Debian for nearly three years at that point, and I would have worked on it for free, and that when I was being paid serious money to administer an ISP, I didn't do much FreeRADIUS work at all.
To which I'd say that I'd never have picked FreeRADIUS were I not running an ISP, and I would not have been running an ISP had I not planned to become rich and buy the world's largest chocolate bar from the experience. And I didn't get a lot of my job functions done when I was running an ISP, so lower-priority things (like FreeRADIUS, cleaning my desk, a full night's sleep) were often pushed aside.
I have to say that until I recently became a professional, regularly paid, programmer, I was highly envious of people who get paid to work on Open Source stuff, let alone Debian stuff. Now I'm just envious, although that'll prolly upgrade back to highly envious after linux.conf.au 2007 (or as I like to think of it now, clitoris.conf.au)
This whole thing puts me in mind of my experience at the Sydney 2000 Olympics. I was one of the IT volunteers, and we basically picked up the less-interesting jobs the IBM-paid staffers gave us. At the time I felt a bit put out that I was there volunteering, and these guys were being paid to be there doing nothing that I couldn't have handled. Obviously that was decidedly unfair, and from my days of "I'm as good as or better than anyone else at computers" phase. But the unfairness of my attitude isn't actually the issue, the issue was that I really wanted to be paid to do that sort of thing, and didn't see why others should get paid but me not be.
Now of course I want two things: To get paid, and to do the things I love. I've finally reached the point where I can combine them, and I no longer begrudge those who, through luck, skill or otherwise, get paid more to do the same things, or get access to cooler toys to do them on. I'm envious, obviously. How do you not envy someone who gets to bring up Linux on a 128-way Power5 machine on the quiet? But that doesn't make me unhappy, it just makes me want to strive more, and work harder. One day I'll be the one submitting a paper to Linux.conf.au on some stupendously cool thing I've done. ^_^
Anyway, my short-medium term goal is to leverage the experience of the current MicroForté work, plus finishing my Japanese studies, to go work for a games company in Japan, combining my two favorite pipe-dreams into one, and making it reachable in a little as two years. Maybe I'll be lucky and MicroForté will open a Japanese office or something, or I'll luck out and end up working on a Japanese MMORPG with a Linux client and a measurable dose of serious cool. Or somehow end up programming at Nintendo.... Oh, sparkley eyes! *_*
And a by-the-by, it's two and a half months in, and I'm still totally thrilled to be working at a video games company. I mean, seriously, I'm like all, wow. I thought it was cool when I was working at TransACT, and my testing procedure involved firing up a video stream, and watching it on a TV. I had a TV on my desk, for work purposes, and that was the high-point of my career. Now I don't have a TV on my desk, but when I'm hacking on combat-handling code, part of my procedure involves firing up a game server, and playing.
I'm learning to take my time with things a bit more. I'm now much less worried that I won't speak six asian languages, play the piano, have my name someone in the Linux kernel that doesn't share a sentence with "blame", have invented an entirely new way of interacting with computers, master four different styles of martial art, earn my first dan in three different Japanese weapon styles, hold two masters degrees in disparate subject areas, earn infamy in the Debian community or even the admiration of my peers by 30. Or 40. I'll be pushing it to get there by 50. But the advantage of youth is that you get it when you're young, and only lose it if you let it go.
I guess on reflection, my goal has become to be a polymath ronin... For those familiar with anime, I think I want to be Kintaro Oe when I grow up...
Side-note: I'm now the secretary of the ANU Anime Society. Two days before the AGM, I wrote in an email to the then-executive committee that secretary was the one position I'd never take. Time makes fools of us all. ^_^ Congratulations to Cathy Ring on stepping up to the presidency, and to the other executives, old and new, for stepping up to what I expect (knowing Cathy) to be a hard-driven and successful year coming.
Oh, and someone asked this week about getting the GTO Live Action box set. So here's my AmazonJP links...
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Last modified 2006年 10月 17日 @ 12:25 am
2006年 9月 14日
Posted in Debian, General, Japan, Japanese, Linux at 5:52 pm by TBBle (Visited 526 times)
Two things...
Wii.com has gone live, along with a news release from Nintendo Japan announcing ship date and release pricing for the Wii.
For those who don't read Japanese and can't puzzle it out (it's up the top, above “ＷｉｉTM”) it'll ship on 2nd December 2006 for ￥25 000. It also says that schedule and pricing for foreign countries will come in the next few days.
Following some links from wii.com back through the Wii page at Nintendo.co.jp we get to see a video of the Wii software lineup, as follows:
I've highlighted launch titles, and indicated by-the-end-of-the-year titles as per the Wii software lineup page.
- Wii Sports
- Forever Blue
- Mario Strikers Charged
- Excite Truck
- Dragon Quest Swords
- Dynasty Warriors Wave (December 2006)
- Red Steel
- Fire Emblem
- Swing Golf Pangya
- Super Mario Galaxy
- Necro-Nesia
- Super Surgery (Card?) Chaos (Tenative name)
- Sonic and the Secret Ring
- Wing Island
- Pokemon Battle Revolution (December 2006)
- Bleach Wii (December 2006)
- One Piece Unlimited Adventure
- Dragon Ball Z Sparkling Neo
- SD Gundam Revolution (Tenative name)
- Crayon Shin-chan (December 2006)
- Tamagocchi
- Introduction to Wii
- Elebits
- Rayman (December 2006)
- Super Monkey Ball Oook Oook Party Great Gathering
- Fishing Master (December 2006) (Tenative name)
- Festival Master
- Furi Furi (December 2006)
- Harvest Moon Wii
- Twiilight Princess
- Colorinpa
- Metroid Prime 3
- Warioware Dance
- Super Famicon Wars W
- Bomberman Land
- The Dog Island
- Wii Music
- Wii Yawaraka Head Training
- Road Cool Domino
- No-miso connecting puzzle Takoron
- Cooking Mama (December 2006)
- Project H.A.M.M.E.R
- Biohazard Umbrella Chronicles
- Twiilight Princess (so good, they showed it twice!)
I count 43 titles there. ^_^
Also, NES games will be ￥500, SNES games ￥800 and N64 games ￥1000.
The Wii Preview slides are a goldmine, and include videos of the Virtual Console.
Did I mention that Zelda: Twiilight Princess is a launch title?
Along with 15 other launch titles, and another 11 titles by the end of the year.
Oh, dude, yay!
Oh, and the second thing...
17:01 <@usotsuki> Debian's definition of "stable" is different from what most people call "stable"
17:01 <@usotsuki> that's good and bad
17:02 < TBBle> Nope, it's pretty much what everyone except computer users mean by "stable". Think about it in the geological sense, for example. Or the chemical sense.
17:02 <@usotsuki> lol
17:02 < TBBle> ie "If you don't touch it, it won't randomly explode"
Edit: Found the Wii software lineup page, and so fixed my video listing above.
Edit: Forgot the AmazonJP link. ^_^
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Last modified 2006年 9月 14日 @ 7:08 pm
2006年 6月 4日
Posted in Debian, Exercise Diary, Food Diary at 9:26 pm by TBBle (Visited 1963 times)
I'm out of juice
In other news... Finally upgraded the blog to WordPress 2.0.3 and Spam Karma 2.2r3. Also decided to celebrate with a new theme, blog.txt. It's OK so far, apart from the title sizing... Dunno if I'll stick with it yet.
The actual content of this post is twofold... I used CurlFtpFS (A FUSE-based filesystem) to update the site. I chose CurlFtpFS over Fuseftp because the latter consistently failed to handle vimdiff. ^_^
Happily, on Debian, it was easy to set up. m-a a-i fuse gave me the fuse kernel modules, and then grabbing the CurlFtpFS Debian package.
The main disadvantage is that you can't see the FUSE-mounted share from my windows box over Samba... This may just be a permissions thing, as I can follow symlinks across filesystem mounts OK, although I didn't used to be able to.
The other fold is that I finally started my exercise regime. Tonight, about a half-hour on Stepmania, for 14 three-foot songs and a four-foot song. I'm working alphabetically through the list of songs at three-feet, and then my last set of the three for the night is whatever I feel like. And tonight I was in a Bubble Bobble, そばかす and WITCH DOCTOR mood.
Most frustrating song of the night was Beyblade 2000 - Off the Chains, the BPM seemed to be tuned to the rappers, not the actual beats. On the other hand, most frustrating in a good way was Cowboy Bebop - Tank [Para Para mix], 307BPM of surprise steps. Fun. ^_^
Final good news, the author of the Top 10 posts plugins noticed my updates. I was linked from a blog that shows up in the Wordpress Dashboard. ^_^
Meh, a few other things going on, I should be able to blog about them later this week. >_<
Edit: Back to Ocadia. Also, I bought juice. ^_^
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Last modified 2006年 6月 4日 @ 11:05 pm
2006年 4月 18日
Posted in CBIT Internet, Debian, General, Linux at 1:20 am by TBBle (Visited 412 times)
Yup, still not dead.
The blog and my other site've just moved to a new server. Let me know if you see anything weird. It's supposed to be the same software configuration as the old server but whackloads faster... The joys of Debian/stable. (bzr.tbble.net's hgwebdir.cgi isn't running... No python or bzr on the new server yet, as it's the CBIT Internet shared webhosting server. I'm still weighing up whether to install it or if I can keep it all in the webtree somehow.
I'm now syndicated at planet.linux.org.au.
Oh, one more thing: were-virgin
.
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Last modified 2006年 4月 18日 @ 1:20 am
2006年 2月 12日
Posted in Debian, LCA06, Programming at 5:20 am by TBBle (Visited 582 times)
Still on a bit of a Perl6 high from LCA06, I went looking for something to apply Quantum::Superpositions to. I think I've blogged about these before, and the fact that they're in Perl 6 (as "Junctions"). Today I was looking for a use for them, and realise that the Sudoku booklet I was holding was perfect.
Upon actually reading the CPAN entry for Quantum::Superpositions, I realised that it wasn't actually what I wanted. Luckily, Quantum::Entanglement also showed up when I searched CPAN for "Quantum". Quantum::Entanglement is what I want.
The idea of Quantum::Entanglement is that you create an entanglement, which has a certain probability of being in a particular state, and a probability of 1 of being in _a_ state. You then operate upon this, and it collapses as appropriate when you actually learn something about it, producing either a result or more entanglements. I'd read the page for more information. And in fact, that's what I did.
Sudoku on the other hand, is apparently sweeping the world by storm. It's basically a 9x9 grid, in which you must places digits 1-9 such that each digit appears once in each row, column and each of 9 3x3 disjoint squares. You are given a couple of numbers to start, and then it's off. If there was ever a candidate for quantum computing quite as good, I can't imagine what it is. (OK, I can imagine. Breaking cryptography that relies on large primes...)
So the code looks like this:
#! /usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use Quantum::Entanglement;
my $easy = [
[ 0,9,0, 5,2,4, 6,0,0 ],
[ 0,0,0, 0,0,0, 0,5,4 ],
[ 0,0,0, 0,0,3, 0,7,2 ],
[ 0,6,7, 0,0,5, 0,0,0 ],
[ 3,0,4, 7,1,8, 5,9,6 ],
[ 0,0,0, 2,0,0, 3,8,0 ],
[ 5,7,0, 4,0,0, 0,0,0 ],
[ 6,1,0, 0,0,0, 0,0,0 ],
[ 0,0,2, 3,9,7, 0,6,0 ]
];
# Build a board of quantum entanglements.
my $board;
for my $i (0 .. 8) {
for my $j (0 .. 8) {
$board->[$i][$j] =
entangle(1=>1, 1=>2, 1=>3, 1=>4, 1=>5, 1=>6, 1=>7, 1=>8, 1=>9);
print "Initial: ($i,$j) => ",$board->[$i][$j]->show_states();
}
}
# Now entangle the variables together, without collapsing any values
for my $i (0 .. 8) {
for my $j (0 .. 7) {
for my $k (($j+1) .. 8) {
print "($i,$j) != Row ($i,$k)\n";
p_op $board->[$i][$j], '!=', $board->[$i][$k];
print "($j,$i) != Col ($k,$i)\n";
p_op $board->[$j][$i], '!=', $board->[$k][$i];
# We don't need to entangle again a cell that is
# both in the square and shares a row or column
unless ($i-$i%3 + int($j/3) == $i-$i%3 + int($k/3)
or ($i%3)*3 + $j%3 == ($i%3)*3 + $k%3) {
printf "(%d,%d) != Sqr (%d,%d)\n", $i-$i%3 + int($j/3),
($i%3)*3 + $j%3, $i-$i%3 + int($k/3), ($i%3)*3 + $k%3;
p_op $board->[$i-$i%3 + int($j/3)][($i%3)*3 + $j%3], '!=',
$board->[$i-$i%3 + int($k/3)][($i%3)*3 + $k%3];
}
# print $board->[$i][$j]->show_states(),"\n";
}
}
}
for my $i (0 .. 8) {
for my $j (0 .. 8) {
if ($easy->[$i][$j] != 0) {
p_op $board->[$i][$j], '==', $easy->[$i][$j];
}
}
}
# Turn on try-for-truth mode
$Quantum::Entanglement::conform = 1;
# At this point, printing any value from the array should
# collapse the entire entanglement.
for my $i (0 .. 8) {
for my $j (0 .. 8) {
print " ",$board->[$i][$j];
}
print "\n";
}
And how does it work? I have absolutely no idea. My computer has 512Mb of physical RAM, which is filled within the first five p_ops. The sixth takes it to a gigabyte, and suddenly kswapd0 is doing more work than perl...
I asked on #perl, and was told that Quantum::Entanglement (and Quantum::Superpositions) are crap. >_< So I guess this will remain a thought experiment, unless someone has either a Quantum computer lying around, or a machine with multi-mega-petabytes of RAM...
The reason the RAM usage climbs so high is that entangling two things with 9 states produces 72 possible global states (every combination of 1-9 and 1-9 except equality). Each cell added to this entanglement of the first cell is another 8, so the entire entanglement of the first cell (ie the entire $k loop has run) is 9 * 8^20 or 10376293541461622784 states. That's 10x10^18 states. Each successive cell actually removes from consideration some of the earlier states, but the multicative effect completely hides that. Which is good news for people relying on GPG to protect their data. ^_^
Of course, now I'm going to be looking for something practical I can do with Quantum::Entanglement.
For reference, this is puzzle #1 from Lovatts Super Sudoku issue 8, which I actually fell asleep doing on the plane to LCA06, due to the tonsilitis, Panedine, Strepsils, penicilin and 28 hours (including three of highway driving) of continual awakeness preceeding it.
Oh, and apt-get install libquantum-entanglement-perl is the super-final-ultimate-killer proof that Debian is the only way to Linux. ^_^
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Last modified 2006年 2月 21日 @ 12:45 am
2006年 1月 28日
Posted in CBIT Internet, Debian, General, LCA06, Linux at 6:48 pm by TBBle (Visited 1029 times)
My final LCA06 report from the land of Dunedin, where the shadows lie. Although I'm here until Monday, I doubt my Internet will be working for much longer.
Started the morning at the usual time, which gave me an extra hour of bumming around (reading my LPI book...) before the (10am) keynote of the day.
And what a keynote it was. Mark Shuttleworth (The Ubuntu guy for those who're playing along at home) gave a presentation about how collaboration works in successful projects, how it doesn't work in unsuccessful projects, how to get projects to cooperate with each other, and how to get localisation from people who aren't programmers. And he packed it in hard, leaving a fairly long period for questions. There were of course a few fairly long questions asked, so this was all for the best.
Amongst Mark's major points were that the barriers to entry for things like bug tracking systems and translations are too high. Anything that isn't debbugs needs you to register to post a bug, and you lose 50-70% of hits at that stage. Translation systems that aren't Gnome currently require you to email around .po files, requiring the translator to edit them in plain text, and some even muck about with more esoteric tools. Gnome provides a neat program, and apparently so does KDE, to handle all that for you.
Mark's other major point was that distributed revision control systems will turn the language of development from mailling lists to patches. A question from the audience pointed out that mailling-list review of patches (eg. linux-kernel mailling list, and we do this on FreeRADIUS-devel too) would probably suffer if people were just branching things, working on them, and then pushing them back upstream... It's an interesting puzzle, but between this and the translations stuff, I'm the closest I've ever been to looking at contributing to Ubuntu... Scary.
For the one scheduled session of the day I went to a talk from Matthew Garrett about projects dealing with the loss of maintainers or pvioltal people, and how they can deal with it. I can relate, since I am both a sucker (I was kind-of the FreeRADIUS 1.0.0 Release Manager), and soon after moved, changed jobs, and basically stopped posting to (but kept reading what I could of) the FreeRADIUS-devel mailing list. I've been lucky that FreeRADIUS is a good, stable package, and so I don't think my long periods of inattention have caused the Debian package to suffer.
After the barbecue lunch and ceremonial shaving of the luminaries (including Rusty's moustache!), I attended one of the best-of session, about The RepRap, an attempt to produce a low-cost von Neumann Universal Constructor. And not only is this cool as heck stuff, it was heartwarning to see a geek from a different field, and know that much as our interests diverge, we are united in geekness.
It was also good to see that there are good jobs for geeks, doing geeky things for the betterment of humanity. Especially when one of those things is building the world's largest nanobot.
At afternoon tea, I scored some Ubuntu 5.10 i386 CD sets, which I think I'll take back to work and put on a desk with "Free! Try Linux without risking your data." sign on it or something.
This reminded me that I haven't checked WhirlPool in a week and a half, and I haven't yet picked up Omiyage... Still, I will have tomorrow and Monday morning to do so...
Also sitting around the link, reminded again to try WorldForge and Thousand Parsec... Also to find the mesa 6.4 packages and see if the r300 driver's been updated.
And a note about Blender that slipped my mind for yesterday... It's awful without a mouse. In fact, a two-button mouse would be pretty awful, but shift-F11-touchpad is particularly not an easy thing to do with only two hands.
Went to the panel discussion, which was largely focussed on patents, trademarks, and how best to promote linux onto both desktops and SMEs.
Finally, was the conference close, where prizes were awarded for the programs for drawing the raffle, then the raffle was drawn, and during demonstrations of some of the other programs submitted, my ticket was drawn. >_<. Although I dunno if I really wanted one of the shirts, it looked like someone'd scribbled all over it, and it'd need some heavy-duty washing...
The total money raised for the John Lyons Chair was just over AU$48k, which is a sterline effort. We also raised NZ$1800 or so from the raffle for the NZ version of Kid's Help line, which is an excellent cause. Hack fest winners were announced, much thanking of those who have sacrificed so much to get this going, including Mike Beattie's second standing ovation (The only presenter I saw get a standing ovation was Van Jacobsen), which was well deserved.
Mike mentioned afterwards that the photoblog prize had been completely forgotten, so hopefully they'll judge it anyway, and we'll have something pretty to look at on the CD. There's also supposed to be a written-blog prize, but I suspect my abuse of the "Excerpts" box may count against me. Unless the judges share my sense of humour. ^_^
I must say I have had an absolutly brilliant time. I've been rushed off my feet, exhausted, tired, I sat my second LPI exam tonight without having read the last three chapters of the Exam Cram book (It still only took twenty-two minutes by the wall clock... I hope I passed!) and on top of all that I've been coughy and snuffly when I wasn't writing in pain from my throat. And I'd do the whole thing again at the drop of a hat. Or preferably a spiral.
Of course, like anime.au (with which I've been involved on the other side a couple of times, but which is only one day, rather than six) these things take so much time and effort to prepare, that managing one every year is quite impressive, even though it's a new team each year. It's been suggested that 2008's LCA location be selected more than twelve months out to give them more time to prepare, but for me, my eyes are firmly fixed on LCA07, Sydney. (Their site's not up yet as of this writing, but yesterday it wasn't even in DNS. ^_^)
Unless I'm in Japan, of course. I was actually looking around yesterday afternoon in the link, at all these people, these luminaries of my industry and my passion, and wondering if Japan is the right choice... I mean, there's CBIT now, and I'd hate to leave that. But it's not what I want to do... And there's the other project I may have mentioned, which I will be having a meeting about next week, with luck... And yet, having come this far, how can I not go further? Maybe I should be searching harder for Open-Source jobs in Japan, and combine my interests. Sure, I love teaching, and I love teaching languages... But it's so scary!
I guess it comes down to Feel the fear and do it anyway
. And I suspect if I do get to go on JET, as long as I have an Internet connection, I'll be able to spend more time on my hobbies than I do now. Or maybe not.
A final thought on LCA06... I hope everyone realised the sense of humour it must have take to aware LCA06 to a New Zealand team... ^_^
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Last modified 2006年 1月 28日 @ 6:48 pm
2006年 1月 27日
Posted in Debian, LCA06, Linux at 5:05 pm by TBBle (Visited 723 times)
Well, the good news is that I got my wireless working with the latest dscape stack...
Up until now, any dscape stack more recent than the 060102 drop would bug when bcm43xx tried to send a packet. The stacktrace looked something like this:
Vector: 300 pc=e2157440: iee80211_master_start_xmit + 0x6c/0x4bc [80211]
lr=e2157400: iee80211_master_start_xmit + 0x2c/0x4bc [80211]
msr 9032 sp df853d70 [df853cc0] dar -08 dsisr = 40000000
current=c1a8f240 pid = 1365 comm=udevd
[df853ab4] 00000008
[df853ab4] c01c449c qdisc_reestrt +0x100/0x1f0
[df853ab4] c01b2ddc dev_queue_xmit +0x160/0x2b0
[df853ab4] e27da328 mld_sendpack +0x2d4/0x3ec [ipv6]
[df853ab4] e27daa74 mld_ifc_timer_expire +0x21c/0x278 [ipv6]
[df853ab4] c0033507 run_timer_softirq +0x14c/0x1d0
[df853ab4] c002ea50 __do_softirq +0x68/0xf4
[df853ab4] c002eb24 do_softirq +0x48/0x60
[df853ab4] c00068dc timer_interrupt +0x1e0/0x1f4
[df853ab4] c0004584 ret_from_excet +0x0/0x1c
exception 901 [df853ab4] fedb9f0
[df853ab4] 1002000
[df853ab4] 10004474
[df853ab4] 0fe848ac
[df853ab4] 0fe849f4
[df853ab4] 00000000
Anyway, today I decided to actually track this down. Must be all the PowerPC presentations I keep going to...
First try was that low-hanging fruit, Ipv6. It gets dragged in somewhere during the boot process, despite not being listed in /etc/modules. Luckily, the easy solution is the rename the module, so modprobe can't find it. ^_^
And lo and behold, the dang thing worked!
So I finished off the dscape-based packages I based on rene's softmac-based packages and uploaded it to http://www.tbble.net/dscape/
So LCA report for today will be late, since I'm currently at the Perl BOF and will have to dash off to the Penguin Dinner after.
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Last modified 2006年 1月 27日 @ 5:05 pm
2006年 1月 26日
Posted in CBIT Internet, Debian, Japan, LCA06, Linux, Programming at 8:31 pm by TBBle (Visited 915 times)
Lunch: Spent so much time editing the morning's post, didn't get to eat, and then went to two wrong theatres and missed the start of the 32/64 comparison with x86 and Power by Olof Johansson. And they were out of pies so I bought sushi instead...
The 32/64 bit presentation was interesting. I'd seen discussion on Debian-Devel along the lines that PPC64 is slower than PPC, and therefore a pure 64-bit Debian port (ala. AMD64 port) was a poor idea (as opposed to AMD64). Olof presented benchmarks (which supported this) as well as a discussion of the way the both x86 and PPC's ABI's differ between 32 and 64 bits. It seems that the PPC64 ABI has actually added more overhead to function calls, and hasn't taken advantage of an ABI change to improve existing issues, while x86_64 has actually used the ABI change to make more use of CPU registers to improve function calls significantly.
An audience member mentioned that newer toolchains than those tested use a different function-call structure or something and should be more efficient. So maybe PPC64's problems aren't insurmountable. Mind you, PPC64 does seem to be mainly targetted at specific applications, rather than overall system support ala x86_64... I wonder how MacOS X on G5 does it? I presume its a 32-bit userland from this...
Following on neatly there's a PPC presentation on next from Paul Mackerras... I wonder if this issue will be addressed then too?
Either way, it was a quick session, and happily I was _just_ able to follow the stuff that was going on and the following audience discussion... ^_^
And the short session meant I got to eat my sushi before the next presentation
Paul Mackerras (Paulus)'s presentation on Recent Developments in PowerPC
Merging 32-bit ppc and 64-bit ppc64 architectures in the Linux kernel: Lots of duplicate code, ensures both architectures benefit from features, cleanups, bugfixes and drivers etc. So instead, there's one architecture powerpc which is now the default arch.
This explains why recently building kernel modules on my PowerBook G4 failed, unless I prefixed the make with ARCH=ppc... >_< I noticed rene's bcm43xx packages did the same thing in debian/rules, so it's not just me.
Interestingly, Paul said that powermacs are no longer supported in ARCH=ppc as of 10th January. So 2.6.16 I guess...
It's been a fairly fast project, having been agreed to last July, first hit the tree on 29th August, and by 19th November the PPC64 stuff was completely gone.
During a question from Dave Miller about the PPC handing of OpenFirmware VS Sparc64's handling I was passed a card to sign for Paul Mackerras's birthday. I can't imagine how the people sitting directly in front of him signed it without him seeing...
Further discussion of memory layouts (64kb hardware page support means lots and lots of addressable memory!) followed by a quick round of Happy Birthday rounded out the rather technical session nicely.
I spent the interlude before the PHP5 presentation (ie while everyone else was off getting afternoon tea) finishing the morning's posting, and jealously guarding my powerpoint.
Rasmus Lerdorfs's PHP5 talk was quite technical, fast and codery in nature, so I'll just be noting the cool points I wasn't previously aware of. The version posted on his site right now is slightly older (marked 2006-01-25) than the one he's displaying on the screen (marked 2006-01-26).
PHP's main aspects: Fail Fast, Fail Cheap, Be Lazy. The greatest efficiencies come from solving problems you will never have
.
Rasmus said that PHP has the unix philosophy of solving one small problem and solving it well. It's not a framework, or the complete solution, but it does what it does very well.
AJAX makes this even better because the layout stuff gets moved to the local browser side, meaning that PHP only really needs to serve up the data in a format like JSON or XML, and the client-side UI code is actually run on the client site.
AJAX appears (now that I've seen it on the code-side) to simply be javascript in the web browser sending requests to the server with updates and whatnot and dynamically changing the UI without refreshing the entire page. This is good stuff, and I probably would have understood it earlier if I had actually listened to anyone whom I'd talked to about it before now. I wonder if we'll be talking about this at the Perl BOF tomorrow...
I now also know what MVC means, and why it's not actually sensible for web applications. But we use AJAX to do something similar, seperating presentation and data (oooh, like XHTML!).
Oooh! A very very useful thing in PHP is the <<< construct. Like the << shell function, and it expands PHP variables that appear inline.
Coming soon from Yahoo!, some kind of useful library thing for AJAX and stuff. ^_^
Hmm. JSON is apparently a Javascript self-extracting object. Neat. And I didn't even know Javascript had an eval() function...
Man, the CBIT Internet customer manager interface is gonna be sooo cool when I'm done with it. ^_^
PDO is a new PECL extension for PHP5, and part of PHP5.1 which looks a lot like Perl's DBI. It lets you bind parameters which will also save a whackload of crappy coding on my part... Mind you, I didn't use the binding stuff in Perl5, but I should be doing so.
Things in PHP5 that make it good for AJAX stuff: XML uses libxml2 and dom now. This gets us XPath and XSL... and SimpleXML! This gives a PHP native object from the XML file....
<?php
$url = 'http://wiki.lca2006.linux.org.au/RecentChanges?format=rss';
foreach(simplexml_load_file($url)->item as $it)
echo "<a href='{$it->link}'>{$it->title}</a> {$it->description}<br />\n";
?>
Huzzah. Two instruction RSS aggregator... I can't imagine why Planet takes so much code... ^_^
And with the demonstration of http://buzz.progphp.com/ and unsafe search (I wasn't quick enough on the URL, and the only thing Google will find is an old version of it, Rasmus's one had images. Images!) it was obvious that this is the future of the web.
OMG! I'm a Web 2.0 convert. CAPS LOCK CANNOT EXPRESS MY FANGIRLY JOY.
Boy've I've been looking for a place to use that last one. I can't find the website I saw it on, but as soon as I saw it, I know I had to write it somewhere. ^_^
And then just to finish off (and whet our appetites for tomorrow's "Fast and Secure websites" presentation) Rasmus pointed us to APC, a PHP Opcode Cache which Yahoo! is happily running on their servers. One server he pulled up has taken 87 million hits in the past few hours, with 20k cache misses. O_O
And then there's the XHTML problem which I really need to sit down and unblithe my pages about...
BOFs... VoIP. I visited PowerPC, but on consideration this one's actually more important to me.
VoIP BOF links for my own reference: MacOS X softphone, Platronics nice USB headset which can be bought from Harris Technology.
Interesting things pulled off Planet LCA2006: Gumstix - Small, small small computers; CryoPID - Freezes processes so they can be migrated across ttys and even machines. CryoPID was actually described at the lightning talks at LCA05, and received many oohs and aahs at the time at the idea of screening processes after they'd been started.
After the BOF, went to do my LPI 101 exam. As mentioned, I've been studying from LPIC 1 Exam Cram 2, which the LPI's Books page describes as ...the most up-to-date publication reflecting recent changes in LPI exam objectives.
. Mind you, it fails to mention that they've since (as of October 1st 2005) merged the DEB and RPM exams... Mind you, I hadn't checked the errata since I was actually only going along to ask a question about the exam proceedure. Having since checked the errata, there's six pages of corrections, and there's still some whoppers missing. The above change to the exams, and the fact that Linux doesn't have an "Archive" bit...
Either way, it took 20 minutes of the 90 allotted, and I feel really good about it. Still worried about the second exam, will prolly put that off until Saturday and push hard to finish the book first.
And another episode of S.O.S watched, as this site was being slow for some reason... It's so wrenchingly painful to watch, but I can't possibly stop until I know what happens...
Either way, an excellent day topped off with way too much Japanese food. ^_^
Oh yes. If I get a chance, I must ask Dave Miller at the presenter's panel about the IEEE 802.11 stacks...
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Last modified 2006年 1月 28日 @ 7:46 pm
2006年 1月 25日
Posted in Debian, LCA06, Linux at 5:15 pm by TBBle (Visited 655 times)
Samba4 status presented by Andrew Tridgell, Andrew Bartlett, and Jelmer Vernooij.
Samba 4 Tech Preview 1 has been released. In the tradition of named released, it's known as "Rigged Demo". ^_^ It's been packaged in Debian experimental for months, but you of course knew that...
The list of cool cool things is kinda long, but here's some very quick notes: Javascript-based scripting API. Finally, actually scriptable remote AD administration. In fact, there's Javascript embedded in the server-side of the new, AJAJ-enabled SWAT allowing remote web users to remotely administer other machines in the AD domain...
Which of course leads to the fact that Samba4 TP1 can already function as a AD Domain Controller. Tridge gave a live demo of Active Directory Vampire! Point it at a Win2k3 AD DC, and hit "exsanguinate". Less than a minute later, a windows XP machine which was on the domain with the old DC can login without missing a beat.
Andrew B? was telling me on Friday night that Samba4 is a monolithic server, but is completely non-threaded... When a part needs to wait for a response, it runs the event loop again. If a message comes in for another part of the system, that part gets to run, simply growing the stack of paused subsystems. This follows on sensibly from Tridge's talk last year about how bad multithreading is, how bad IPC is, and why can't the various Samba4 components all just get along in one address space...
The Samba4 core team took a brief vacation earlier in the year to look at the new Windows Vista tech-preview, specifically to pull apart the new and completely undocumented SMB2 protocol MS has slipped underneath. Consistent with their drive to make everything a database, it apparently has some kind of support for database-like transactions and rollbacks. The good news is that Samba4 has client-side support for it, and will probably release a full SMB2 product before Microsoft does. Just another way in which Open Source stifles innovation™, I guess.
Also this afternoon, a presentation on L2TPNS by Brenden O'Dea, who presented the same software at LCA05... I don't remember much about the presentation last year, but I had at the time just started playing with it for IPSec over 802.11, since I didn't have any WPA-capable hardware and was sick of cables running along the roof at Shane's place.
Since then, I've moved, I've got WPA-supported gear, and I'd forgotten who Brenden worked for. I told someone "a small ISP in Mildura" a couple of weeks ago. As it happens, he's from Optus, and his software is supporting about 170k concurrent ADSL connections. So it's good good stuff. As it happens, I'm back in the L2TP market just now, for both ADSL and hopefully a VPN solution, so I was glad this particular presentation was very very featureful, and talked frankly about the challenges involved. Also, Optus's ISP serverside is totally Linux-based, and as other departments hand servers over to them to operate, they get Linuxed too. It's a wonderful thing... Sounds like a great place to work.
Linux Australia AGM... Nothing to see here, move along people.
Keysigning... Not really entertaining, although I am equal 11th in the MSD, for those registered this year. This puts me out at the end of the unfashionable western spiral of the central cluster.
Well, it was faster than last year. Done in about 45 minutes. ^_^
So, dinner hunting time. Wordpress 2.0 upgrade to do tonight. And LPI study. And more S.O.S to watch... And gotta get more sleep than last night. (No last-minute libmysqlclient15 bug hunting this time...)
(Edit: &tm; is not the HTML entity for the tradmark symbol. ™ is)
Permalink
Last modified 2006年 1月 25日 @ 9:28 pm
2006年 1月 24日
Posted in Debian, LCA06, Linux at 2:28 pm by TBBle (Visited 504 times)
Horm's followup talk on Debian kernel packaging from LCA2005 was great. At LCA2005, Horms gave us a rundown on the new kernel-team plan they had developed and not yet implemented (as they were waiting for the Sarge release, amongst other challenges). Since then, Sarge has released, they started the process with 2.6.12, and they've brought all 11 Linux architectures' kernel packages together as of 2.6.15. Which is a hell of an achievement.
They're using a SVN directory to track the security and sarge-affecting patches, to prevent losing track of problems in either people's inboxes or the security team's enormous pile of issues.
A brief interruption due to a firealarm put us somewhat behind schedule... Turned out to be faulty equipment overheating in the roof.
Horms mentioned that he spent a year doing bug responding for the linux kernel, and burnt out... I must remember to talk to him about that, I like answering bugs. ^_^
