Older blog entries for claudio (starting at number 62)

Following a holy war thread in a local linux mailing list, I realized that the religious issues about operating systems are quite complex:

Orthodox unixers follow the tradition, sync three times before rebooting, and use green or amber xterms running Korn or C shell. Ultra-orthodox believe that any software written in the last ten years is worthless, the mouse is an abomination and run Bourne shell in serial consoles. All good software comes in tar.Z packages. To Reformist unixers, any design more than a couple of years old is obsolete. They run bash2 in the latest fancy terminal emulator with the latest fancy window manager. All good software come in RPM packages.

The Libertarians won't allow any piece of non-free software in their disks, including Netscape, pine and mpg123. The radical faction won't allow anything that isn't GPLd. Earn money with software is a deadly sin. Mercantilists see free software as low-quality, bug-infested ugly crocks with no value at all, including Netscape, pine and mpg123.

The Obscurantists want the OS to be as cryptic and hard to use as possible. Anything that is easy to use is, of course, worthless. They don't trust anything they can actually understand. Documentation is evil, anyone who needs documentation is an idiot. And the Pragmatists want everything to be done at a click of the mouse, and end users who don't remember their own names should be able to get everything the system can offer. Documentation is evil, anything that actually needs documentation is non-intuitive and ill-designed.

The "real programmer" stereotype is an Ultra-Orthodox Obscurantist, while the clueless luser is a Reformist Pragmatist. Plotting these three scales in a 3D graph and normalizing them to a cubic space, any point near the faces are dangerous. Edges are even more dangerous, and is advisable to stay away from the vertexes.

Still no DSL. lalala.

The new xmp is going quite nicely, and minor flaws in the design are being fixed in the player prototype. Hipolito is currently working on the mixer engine and driver components, and we'll put it in sourceforge after merging his patches.

Some thoughts:

• Initrds are interesting.
• Installing a system from scratch with the root filesystem in LVM is even more fun than installing debian on the iMac.
• My Quantum disk is coughing again. I hate Quantum disks.
• Will anyone write a gimp-equivalent for sound?
• latex2html is cool! But it doesn't understand verbatimtab.
• Should I buy a Palm?
• The (new) lkml finally accepted my subscription.
• I'm receiving the Time magazine every week, and I'm not a subscriber. I don't complain.
• Renewed my Scientific American subscription.
• The MasterCard people are bugging me. They want me to upgrade my poor man's card to a mega-ultra-card-pro gold I can't afford (and even if I could, I don't want to upgrade! Leave me alone!).

I like the linked list helper functions from the Linux kernel so much I used them in my robot dynamics simulator. And in the new xmp too.

Also enjoyed Roxen Challenger's excellent configuration interface to set up my personal debian mirror built with apt-move. No doubt apache has better performance and memory footprint, but sometimes painless administration is more important than performance. And administration interface is where Roxen really shines!

Sent a couple of patches to the XRally maintainer, adding sound, a new radar mode and a new tileset. XRally is a cool clone of Namco's classic Rally-X. Hmm. A PalmOS port would be cool!

Interesting stuff being prepared for the upcoming release of Conectiva Linux.

Bought a Zip drive and a Matrox card. Oh boy, I'll finally get rid of this horrid 89 Hz interlaced video mode and 80 MHz dot clock limit in 16 bpp of the ATI Mach64 card I'm using.

I hate Loki. They released a 200 turn demo version of SMAC. Now I'm trying to actually win a match within the 200 turn limit.

Still no DSL. This sucks.

[root@mrnutty:/] cat /etc/debian_version
2.2
[root@mrnutty:/] cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor       : 0
cpu             : 750
temperature     : 0 C
clock           : 350MHz
revision        : 2.2
bogomips        : 697.96
zero pages      : total 0 (0Kb) current: 0 (0Kb) hits: 0/759
(0%)
machine         : PowerMac2,1
motherboard     : PowerMac2,1 MacRISC Power Macintosh
L2 cache        : 512K unified
memory          : 64MB
pmac-generation : NewWorld

Sweet.

Installing Debian in a blueberry iMac DV is a highly enjoyable experience everyone should try. If you're a clueless newbie (like me) it may take a few hours, but it may be fun even for more experienced users or for people that played with an iMac before.

First of all, BootX won't work in the DV (after a few frustrated attempts, you come to that conclusion), so you'll have to use yaboot. The installation procedure is simple: just get the installation kit of LinuxPPC and the Debian base system tarball, boot using the provided ramdisk image, create some files in /dev, make the partitions and filesystems, open the tarball, do some minor configuration and presto!, you're running Debian!

Except that the LinuxPPC installation disk doesn't include tar. It can't mount NFS volumes read-write. But that's a minor hassle because you can repackage the tarball with cpio, no problem.The boot partition must be HFS. fstab must be created by hand. And the worst part, you must know that, after entering Open Firmware pressing apple+option+o+f, the command to boot yaboot is boot hd:X,yaboot.tbxi where X is your partition number.

BTW the reset button if the iMac is concealed in its side, disguised as a "play" button.

I wish I had the user's manual.

I'm trying to install Debian in a blueberry iMac. Wow, that's an interesting experience. Everyone who complain about how difficult it is to install Linux should be forc^H^H^H^Hencouraged to try an iMac. >:)

I also realized that Conectiva is a terribly bad name for spoofs. Think of "Red Hat", and you immediately envision dozens of funny names: Red Rat. Mad Rat. Mad Hatter. Pinky Rat. Red Herring, whatever. Basically anything with a color and an article of clothing would work. Now Conectiva doesn't sound like anything that would inspire a joke. I've made a spoof of the old Conectiva Linux box but in that case I just replaced the word "Conectiva" for "South Park" and the Conectiva spoofing was in the box design and typefaces. Too bad these Conectiva boxes have such a distinctive, easily spoofable design, but a name that can't be distorted into something recognizable :\

I'm now working in the same room of Alfredo Kojima of WindowMaker fame. Wow, when I see all those women around him, the shiny cars and everything, I finally decided that I must write a window manager!

Ohmygod, the guys/gals at Brasil Telecom are hopeless idiots who deserve to burn in hell for the eternity. They delayed the deployment of the Cisco ADSL routers (overpriced, but the only alternative to the 3Com PCI cards) for one more month, with no apparent reason. My ADSL line is enabled and they already have the routers, they just want to make sure they'll piss everyone off, users and ISPs.

There's only one company authorized to install the ANTs. You're not allowed to install the equipment yourself, because you're a stupid luser and may damage the delicate equipment. I can bet my right arm that when they finally deploy the Ciscos the geniuses at the installation company will set the router to operate in bridge only mode, or better yet, they'll have it already configured to operate as a bridge, put it on your desk, plug it in the wall, say how stupid you are, collect the money and that's all folks. No way. I'll want them to set up IPv6, exotic NAT configurations, virtual WANs and will bug them with I stupid questions to death.

I should have the right to install my own equipment. I'm already paying too much for it, and I hate when they delay the deployment just because they don't know how to install and operate it. Timmy would learn how to do it in a few minutes reading the manual (available on-line from Cisco). Blah.

Ok, so I got the flu again. I thought it wouldn't happen twice in the same winter but anyway.

This Saturday I coded a small mod player to add sound support to XRally, an X11 clone of the classic arcade Rally X. Wow, it's amazing how easy it was, my first attempt to write a mod player a few years ago took me a few weeks and it wasn't half as good as this new version. Yay!

Also played a bit with the Gimp (dodging the frequent crashes of the unstable version) to create a parody of the Conectiva Linux 5.0 box. The original box cover has a b&w photo of kids playing, a quite unusual design for a software product. I'll probably do something similar for the latest release, Conectiva 5.1 :)

Finally added some more code to the star wars Xscreensaver hack. Wow. I think this week I'll finally have time to work on some postponed tasks in xmp, sarien and all the rest.

A long time ago I watched a really bad movie called Armaggedon. It was so bad I puked in disgust for several weeks, so it's easy to understand why I was so reluctant to watch Deep Impact. Oh boy, this movie is great! No, in fact it's just average, but it's the best movie ever made if compared to Armaggedon. Even with stupid characters like Leo Biederman or the fact that nobody noticed that huge comet after the astronomer got killed.

Also rechristened my test machine at home "mrhankey", because it's a piece of crap. Also replaced a lot of system daemons -- let's try with smail, proftpd and roxen.

The guys at Brasil Telecom are not bright. Call them stupid would be an offense to the stupid people. They offer ADSL and you can choose between a crap^H^H^H^Haffordable 3Com PCI modem or an expensive, overpriced Cisco router (677, I guess). The router price is so obscene they thought nobody would want one. The company that installs the modems charge absurd setup fees, and sells external 3Com HomeConnect ADSL bridges for almost the price of the Cisco router. Blah.

Someone buy linus an UP box, otherwise he'll keep releasing SMP-only kernels. Perhaps I should donate mrhankey.

Sent the Colour Quickcam mmap patch to lklm. Next week we'll have a BW Quickcam to play with. Sweet.

Watched Disney's Dinosaur. Wow. I'm impressed. It makes Jurassic Park look like stop motion. I thought the talking dinos would look silly but the result is very very good. I think I'll see it again next week.

Added a real configure script and some chrome to aacam, even received a patch. I think I'll announce it in freshmeat :)

South Park's Timmy rocks. I watched a few season 4 episodes, and the female voices seem perfect. They did a great job finding a substitute for Mary Kay Bergman.