Older blog entries for RoUS (starting at number 57)

post-meridian, EDT

ApacheCon news
Still trying to wrap up the final technical details of data transmission for the registration system; should be up this week.

autoresponder
Whew! Finally got a few minutes to put the last fixes in and release version 1.16.7 of autoresponder. Freshmeat announcement should appear soon.

ante-meridian, EDT

ApacheCon news
Well, we don't have registration going yet, but the schedule has been finalised. In addition to the stuff on the Web site (<URL:http://ApacheCon.Com/>), there's an #apachecon channel at IRC.OpenProjects.Net and an open discussion list (send an empty message to discuss-subscribe@ApacheCon.Com). The IRC channel has an infobot, faqtoid, which will answer questions about ApacheCon and the schedule in particular. Try 'faqtoid: sessions about xml?' or 'faqtoid: sessions by schlossnagle?'.

Watch out, CPAN! :-)
Woo-hoo! Got my CPAN account a couple of days ago. Now, what were those modules I wanted to submit..?

post-meridian, EST

obOpen
Heh. Got the Podium page on SourceForge working, thanks to the spicy goodness of PHP's variables-scoped-at-the-function-level architecture. So now the Podium documentation is there and online, using Podium itself. Whee.

Now off to write/update more presentations using it..

ante-meridian, EST

ApacheCon news
We have a new management/production company for the ApacheCon event, and we're working on the plan to have a conference sometime later this year.

obOpen stuff
I tried to use PHP's pres package to handle my slides for the NordU2002 presentation, but I couldn't get it to work -- so I've started working in a presentation system loosely based on it that I can get to work. The project is Podium, and it's still pre-alpha. The Web page isn't even entirely working yet (mainly because SourceForge is still using PHP 4.0.6). But it's getting there..

I've been working on some other open stuff as well, but I can't remember the details right now. Must.. eat.. lunch..

post-meridian, EDT

hardware
Well, I upgraded my kernel to the latest RH 7.2 RPMs, X likewise, downloaded and installed the 1.1.20t Savage S3 driver, and added an 'Option "NoAccel"' line to my XF86Config-4 file, and my laptop has managed to stay up without hanging now for almost 72 hours. Fingers crossed..

Linux
Even with the hardware problems I've been having I still have two systems that have been up since the last millenium. :-)

autoresponder
Brian Behlendorf pointed out another no-op situation for autoresponder: it shouldn't bother trying to do anything if there's no address to which a reply can be sent.. Updated to 1.15.2, but no release announcement made yet.

Spackle
Last week I went to add Spackle to Freshmeat, and found that Jeremy Weatherford had created a project there with the same name a couple of weeks ago. We worked it out; he changed his project's name to 'SpackleStats', and we each reference the other's project on our various pages.

post-meridian, EDT

Apache
jhermann, putenv() will certainly do the trick, but it's generally not thread-safe nor terribly modular.. You're working around the API rather than within it. :-/ I'm not even sure it will work on Windows and other non-Unixish platforms.

ante-meridian, EDT

dandt
dandt is a 'download and test' script I wrote for putting the Apache 2.0 package through its paces with the Perl regression test framework. It's getting more and more involved, and AFAIK no-one else uses it but me, but it produces results like those at the Source-Zone site. It still needs a wee bit of work to handle test failures and harness failures differently, and it would be nice if it handled Apache 1.3, but at the moment I'm making what changes are necessary to use it at work (you know, the place that pays me ;-).

Apache
One of the things that has continually come up on the apache-modules mailing list is the fact that Apache 1.[23] calls module init handlers twice, once before daemonising and once after, and it's difficult to tell the difference. D'oh! {sound of manipulative member smacking anteriour cephalic surface} Why didn't anyone think of adding an API routine so modules could find out? I'm adding that for 1.3.next; 1.3 is a 'stable' and 'robust' stream, and not a lot of development energy is being devoted to it, but I think it's going to be around for years yet and this may make life easier for at least some module writers out there..

Athlon CPU problems
Bryce, have you seen this?

ThinkPad woes
Upgraded my ThinkPad T21 from Red Hat 7.1 to 7.2 a couple of days ago, in part to see if it would make the hanging problems I've been seeing go away. No joy. Added the 'Option "ShadowStatus"' line to my XF86Config-4 file, but the display still hangs on a daily basis. The last few haven't really been hangs but X looping intensely -- so much so that I can't even switch to a different virtual console. Thank goodness I can ssh in and kill X (unless it was a hard hang) and do a clean reboot if needed, but this display problem is making the box essentially unusable. :-(

post-meridian, EDT

SourceForge rant
Heh. It's interesting, the number of people who apparently didn't "get" the point of the article. Yes, SF is free, and use of its services are a privilege and not a right. However, once a project has been hosted there, getting it off again is a major hassle, so the 'vote with your feet' solution is of limited utility. They're arguably the most visible host of open software on the 'net; if they 'get away' with jerking around the developers, it sends a signal that's bad for the entire community. And it's hardly in their best interest to alienate the users.

So what's the point of the article? I suppose a notice to developers who use SF but may not have been aware of this change, and that by extension they shouldn't expect any guaranty of service in this or any other areas; in other words, 'beware! this could happen to some facility you care about!'. And that SF is in the service of VA, and not the community. And a twit to SF so that perhaps they'll either answer problems reported to them, or (gasp!) address them. :-)

As for cmiller's remarks.. well, just because he doesn't believe in a cause doesn't make it unworthwhile to others. :-)

ante-meridian, EDT

SourceForge rant
Well, SourceForge closing one of my problem reports without resolution kicked me into posting an Advogato article about the issue. Bah..

B5
Taped the new Babylon 5 movie ('Legend of the Rangers', I think) for a friend last night. I always programme the VCR to start five minutes before air-time, and stop at least five minutes after the published end-time. I was taping at SP quality, and this would be the first time I've found a tape with less than 130 minutes on it.. It ran out of tape and shut off about two minutes before the end of the programme. Fortunately SciFi ran it again immediately, so I was able to scramble another tape in and record it (at EP this time -- quality be buggered). So I'll give him two tapes to-day, and tell him, "Watch this one up to the first advert, and then pop it out and pop this one in to watch the rest." Buggrit! Millenium hand and shrimp!

ante-meridian (quite), EDT

on capitalism
nymia wrote:

This is the thing I like about capitalism, it simply works.

I suspect there are some people in Argentina with differing opinions. :-(

on hardware
I'm finally shifting most of my laptop operations over to the new ThinkPad T21 I bought in September 2001. It has shown a troubling tendency to hang, however -- first the display (magic sysrq seems to get out of that), then a really hard hang that requires power cycling. Right now I'm trying a workaround with a 'Option ShadowStatus' line in my XF86Config file. The 600E that belongs to the company has been running continuously for months; I'd likewise prefer not to be forced to reboot the new one at random intervals. Just added the option yesterday, so it's too soon to tell if it has fixed the problem.

on VMware
I've got VMware installed on my Linux laptop, with a Win2K guest OS. It simply rocks. It doesn't rock perfectly (The Sims can't access the CD/DVD at the low level it wants in order to 'validate' me as a registered user, and the LEGO(tm) Mindstorms 1.5 system can't seem to properly download the RCX through the VMware->Linux->serial port pathway), but it's excellent natheless. At least it's good enough for my main purposes, which is parallel building of Apache on Linux and Windows so I can do the research for my books.

testing, testing.. 1, 2, 3..
Another thing that rocks is the Apache Perl regression test framework. It's excellent for Apache module development, though it's more than a little difficult to wrap your mind around the how-to aspect unless you're a Perl guru or have futzed with the CPAN testing stuff in the past. But if you can express a module's desired behaviour through tests for correctness, you can verify the code progress quickly and automagically. I'm adding sections about it, and sample tests, to my Apache modules book.