Advogato: Personal info for davej

davej is currently certified at Master level.

Name: Dave Jones
Member since: 2000-03-23 09:44:32
Last Login: 2008-03-15 06:06:54

Homepage: http://www.codemonkey.org.uk

Notes: Look here instead for blog stuff.

Projects

Lead Developer on Powertweak-Linux
Lead Developer on Sourcery
Lead Developer on x86info
Developer on Linux Kernel Janitor
Developer on Linux
Developer on Evangelism
Lead Developer on BIOS Explorer
Developer on OProfile
Contributor on Spamfilter
Developer on pciids
Developer on PCI Utilities
Developer on Linuxperf
Developer on CPUFreq
Helper on The XFree86 Project
Contributor on Direct Rendering Infrastructur
Developer on Red Hat
Developer on Fedora Project

Recent blog entries by davej

Syndication: RSS 2.0

27 Jan 2009 »

comments on old entries.

lj Lazyweb.
How do I disable new comments on all my old entries?
I know I can do by disabling them one by one on every single post, but that would take forever, and my k-rad scripting skills fall short. (I'm also extremely busy^Wlazy).

Wordpress has a nice 'disable comments on posts after 30 days' feature, but I can't find anything similar in lj. Am I overlooking it ? Or am I destined to a lifetime of notifications of spam on my old entries?

Syndicated 2009-01-27 15:35:35 from Dave Jones recollection of stuff that happened.

23 Dec 2008 »

Trying something new.

I decided to move my blog again. It's now a self-hosted wordpress instance at my homepage. Wordpress was deceptively easy to set up. I had imagined it to be a lot more involved. There are many knobs to tweak though, so I'll likely be fiddling with it for months to come. I've still not found a 'theme' I'm happy with, but what's there now will do for the time being. (anyone sensible will read it with an rss reader anyway).

At the same time, I've decided to start blogging about my noise-making habit on a separate site. The separation of Linux nerdery from my modular synth nerdery should appease those who couldn't care less about one or the other. (And for those oddballs that are interested in both, there's this neat thing called RSS).

Why the move? I've been toying with the idea of doing this for a long time, and procrastination was the only real reason I didn't get to it. My web site was looking a little neglected, so it felt like the right time for an overhaul.
Additionally, my livejournal account runs out sometime next year, and I don't think I'll bother renewing it. (It's not like I ever used any of the paidmembers features anyway).

I'll let it revert to a free account, and will still use it to comment on other peoples blogs etc, but I'll likely not post here again after this.

Syndicated 2008-12-23 21:58:13 from Dave Jones recollection of stuff that happened.

19 Dec 2008 »

codec nightmares.

I've been thinking about just how much a nightmare video codecs are lately. The usual case that everyone complains about is the inability for Linux distros to ship various patented codecs. But when I thought about it, the problem is much bigger than Linux.

There's not a single operating system, or media playback device that will reliably play every single format that could be thrown at it. Not even close.

My OSX box gets kinda close thanks to perian, but still fails with many of the wmv variants amongst others. Windows also requires a bunch of apps & codecs installed. It's not just a Linux problem, and in honesty, never has been.

A few nights ago, I rigged up ushare, to see how the PS3 coped with its built-in media player. It failed pretty spectacularly. Other than MPEGs, almost nothing worked.

I've been toying with the idea of getting a PMP for a while, but it's the same story. I'm not particularly interested in re-encoding all my music again, and even more disillusioned at the thought of not being able to actually play most of the videos I have.

Free, open standards like vorbis should make all of this a non-issue. Yet hardware manufacturers seem reluctant to implement them. The workarounds of taking codecs from other OS's and running them in Linux seems to have become 'the norm' for playing back a lot of formats in Linux. This of course works great for x86, but all the embedded variants of Linux I've seen so far in media playback devices are running ARM, or MIPS, which means of course.. no playback of those formats.

I'd like to believe it's a problem that will eventually go away, but each seems to get worse, with yet another format we're unable to play back universally.

Syndicated 2008-12-19 20:03:52 from Dave Jones recollection of stuff that happened.

16 Dec 2008 »

new mailing list.

initramfs@vger dot kernel dot org now exists. As usual 'subscribe initramfs' in the body to majordomo @ vger.

This list will be for discussing the cross-distro initramfs support I've been suggesting at for the past few months.

Syndicated 2008-12-16 21:38:02 from Dave Jones recollection of stuff that happened.

16 Dec 2008 »

uberbugs.

Every release, there's at least one bug that affects a significant number of users. Most of the time, we get lucky, and the users can get the system installed, and we can fix the problem in an update. The worse-case scenario however is the case where a bug prevents installation, or prevents booting post-install.

F10 had a bug just like this.

It manifested in several different ways.
For some people, it result in a 10 second pause during boot up. For others, it failed to find the root filesystem, even after waiting.

What happened here?

The initrd has code to wait for the kernel to finish enumerating devices. This is an important thing to do so we don't try anything silly like trying to mount the root filesystem before the driver for the disk controller has found the disks plugged into it.

In F9 and earlier, we would emit this code when the initrd included the scsi_mod module.

Late in the F10 development, we moved a bunch of things to be built-ins, to tweak the boot-up speed.
This turned out to be a really bad idea, as it meant the 'stabilization' code didn't get emitted. Ouch.

How come it didn't affect everyone? Different controllers behave differently. Some initialise so quickly that there's no reason to wait any longer.

Why didn't it get caught during testing? We did have a large number of reports, but the correlation wasn't made until post-release.

Should it have held up the release? Possibly, if we knew it would affect so many people.

FTR: None of the hardware I personally tested was affected by this problem, which made it a real pain to track down.

The good news is that in the hopefully not to distant future, all this code is going the way of the dodo anyway.

Syndicated 2008-12-16 20:15:18 from Dave Jones recollection of stuff that happened.

496 older entries...

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