Advogato blog for davej

Upstream participation. (or a failing thereof)

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 16:06:31 GMT

"Look for example at the fact that Ubuntu has usually better hardware support, if we all were on the same kernel the others could take the drivers we put in there and have hardware support that is just as good as Ubuntu."

Does no-one else see the hypocrisy in this statement ? Here's how it reads to me... "It would be great if everyone just shipped the Ubuntu kernel and debugged the random crap we merge that we don't have the resources to do ourselves".

If only there were some kind of process of getting drivers merged upstream to kernel.org. Perhaps then we COULD be on the same kernel. Oh wait, there is a process. Ubuntu just chooses to ignore it.

This idea makes absolutely no sense whatsoever when a distro is patching the kernel to hell.

Having distros ship the same version of major components is utterly pointless unless everyone is on the same page, and stops making moronic decisions like "lets replace a major piece of security functionality with something else because the one upstream is complicated".

Creative commons

Tue, 1 Jul 2008 23:04:26 GMT

One of the awesome things about licensing stuff under the Creative Commons licenses is that you're never quite sure what will become of it. For the bulk of it, perhaps nothing, but every now and again something cool happens. So far, I've had people use the occasional picture from my flickr photostream as clip art on web sites, but today I got mail from someone who did something really neat with one (or more, it's hard to tell) of my photos from my trip to LCA Sydney. He made this video out of many many pictures of the same thing, and did a really awesome animation. It must have taken forever to get everything lined up.

Trifonic.

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 22:08:02 GMT

Every so often, I stumble across some new music that just blows me away, and I can't stop listening to it.

Today's musical discovery: Trifonic.

Independent artist - check.
Free try-before-you-buy - check.
FLAC - check.
Bonus goodies for the for-pay version - check.
Damn cool tunes - check.

Also interesting to note they started out releasing stuff on ccmixter.

Worth checking out if you like ambient droney noises, guitars and synth bloops. Mostly instrumental, but some tracks have vocals too.

For an independent release though, the one thing that wows me is the outstanding production on this release.

Interested SanFran readers could be fortunate enough to even see them play live in a few hours. I wish I wasn't half a world away right now.

!!

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 16:09:26 GMT

Maybe I'm just weird, but every time I come across the !! operator in code, I get brain freeze. The plus side of it being more compact than its expanded form far outweighs the 'eh?' factor I get every time I come across it.

I also have an irrational hatred of the ternary operator for no particular reason.

sometimes the obvious ideas are the hardest to find.

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 16:08:32 GMT

Something that's great about conferences, is that they often cause discussion which leads to thinking out loud, and suddenly, an idea comes up that seems to obvious it smacks of "why hasn't anyone done this yet?".

During my talk at fudcon (yes, I said I wasn't going to do one, but it ended up being just a Q&A instead of a 'state of the union' kind of talk), there was quite a bit of talk about the forthcoming kernel modesetting feature, and how awesome it's going to be to be able to capture oopses when we've locked up in X. This led to "I don't know how many times I've seen a kernel panic scroll off the top of the screen, and I didn't have a serial console hooked up".

I boot all my boxes with appropriate grub lines to make it spew out the serial port, but I don't have enough serial cables to keep every box permanently rigged up to a console (I know there are multiplexer type things, I don't have, nor want one of those either). A lot of the time, the box I run minicom on isn't necessarily powered up either. So a lot of the time, that serial output goes nowhere.

After we panic, we just sit there in a for (;;); loop forever.

The 'duhhh' moment that came up on the weekend was..

Why not make that infinite loop do something like:
for (;;) { wait for a minute send the dmesg ring buffer out again

As well as this giving you some time to find/hook up a serial cable/start minicom, it would also have the advantage that it would print out the whole dmesg buffer, which may contain additional useful clues as well as the oops.

kernel talk at fudcon?

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 21:05:35 GMT

Like many other Fedora contributors, I'll be at Fudcon this coming weekend. (And the Red Hat summit on Wednesday).
Trying to decide whether or not to do the usual 'state of the union' kernel talk that I do at every fudcon. Whilst there's thousands and thousands of changes each release, and usually two upstream kernel point releases between each Fedora release, the number of user-visible changes for people to get excited about is dramatically less. For the most part, the majority of the changes that happen are, well.. dull. We have a lot of churn just cleaning up crufty old code, hundreds of trivial bug fixes (and many not-so-trivial ones), but feature wise.. I can't recall anything recently that users would be excited about since the addition of things like kvm & tickless support, which was several releases back now.

Cribbing from slide 21 of Greg's recent talk, which shows a brief list of what went into 2.6.26 so far, nothing really jumps out as something that users are clamoring for. Kgdb is something that will likely prove useful for us to get more debug info out of people seeing problems if they're a) set up for using kgdb, and b) have a bug which allows kgdb type poking (ie, no use in lockup situations). The addition of PAT will surely make the Xorg developers happy, and maybe some other folks too, but everything else is just 'more of the same'. More new drivers. More fixes. Incremental improvements.

Perhaps it's not coincidental that the 2.6.25 feels like a pretty solid release. Shipping F9 with that kernel was definitely a good idea, and early indications seem to show that .26 will be a decent update for it in a few weeks time. 2.6.25 wasn't flawless, but a lot of the really silly things seem to be getting fixed up quickly by the -stable process. Some of the more obscure bugs (like some awkwardness with timers on some chipsets, notably ATI ones) will hopefully be fixed when we rebase to 26.

With F10 still being many moons away, moving forward to whatever .27 brings looks likely.

We'll likely be adding in some bits and pieces that don't make the merge window for .27 too. The usual wireless breakage^Wupdates du jour, probably the DRM modesetting stuff again, nouveau update etc.

That's about all I'd have to say in a slot at Fudcon, so now that I've said it, perhaps I'll pass on speaking this time around, so people won't have to choose between the dull kernel talk or something more interesting. (Additionally, I'll get to sit in on one extra talk).

side effects.

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 06:07:27 GMT

From the allergy medicine I've been taking..

"Side effects include: somnolence, headache, nausea, insomnia, malaise, fatigue."

This last week, I've gone through the above checklist. I think the only side-effect listed I didn't have yet is "abdominal pain".
(The irony of somnolence and insomnia both being side-effects, and having them both is not lost on me).

"Patients studied exhibited greater irritability/fussiness than patients on placebo"

Great. That explains why I've been a miserable bastard all week.

Looks like I'm back to suffering from allergies next week unless I find alternative chemicals which agree with me.

+1

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 02:08:12 GMT

Dear people who post to mailing lists quoting a mail in its entirety, only to add..

> blah blah blah
> blah

+1

FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY, KNOCK THAT SHIT OFF.

seriously.

What is the thought process that makes people do this? "Oh, someone will be tallying up votes when this thread ends, best I get my vote in". Tired of (what little) signal (remains on the internet) being polluted with this crap.

Also, even if the above were remotely a useful contribution to any thread anywhere, you do not get to write..

+1000

Unless you have some personality disorder. You are one person. One voice. One vote.

Hrmph. Reading email makes me grumpy.

news fail.

Mon, 9 Jun 2008 23:09:01 GMT

I randomly turned on the TV to check the news at lunchtime. The first thing I heard was "Barack Obama. Is he black, white, or both?" By bringing us this important breaking news, CNN had confirmed my suspicions that there was nothing going on in the world worth knowing about. The news stations in this country are like additional comedy channels.

A little later, I followed some of the non-announcements happening at Apples WWDC event.
Associated Press pimped their 'app' for the iphone which they had developed. "We encourage you to get involved with the news you see -- you can send news to us immediately from your iPhone."

Yes. This is clearly going to improve the situation.

musical metadata

Sat, 7 Jun 2008 19:09:04 GMT

Whilst I like having physical copies of music I bought, sometimes I really think the day can't come soon enough when music distribution on physical media is dead. The number one reason being "so that 'services' like cddb, musicbrainz, freedb etc become obsolete".

I hate them all.

They fail so hard, due to the fact that they rely on data imported by people. The problem with 'anyone can contribute' projects, is exactly that. *Anyone* can. Including people without basic skills like 'reading a list of tracks of the back of the CD and typing them in verbatim'. Why do people have to get creative, and miss words out, or add words?

The lack of uniformity across these databases also irritates the hell out of me.

"The band"
"(The) band"
"band (the)"
"band"

are all likely candidates for an artist name it seems when importing a CD (also with various case differences for added fun). And don't get me started on the unholy disaster that is multi-artist CDs.

The last.fm people have been hitting the same problem with 'bad metadata'. They have a neat tool to show just how brain damaged some peoples ID3 tags are. Read and weep, and then realise these same people have the power to submit their idiocy to databases everyone else uses.

Perhaps I'm overly anal about this, but I like having every album by a particular artist show up in ONE PLACE. Others it seems are happy to have their music scattered randomly in various sub-directories.

I'm re-ripping a bunch of CDs (about 100 or so left to go), and the number of times I have to adjust something in the lists that gets brought up is so high, it's painful.

At least when it comes to artists releasing zip files of their music, I'll know the spelling & case of each song is exactly the way that artist intended. Not the way some illiterate with an internet connection decided on a whim.