Older blog entries for will (starting at number 15)

Ok, it's been almost a week since my last diary entry. Allow me to summarize that week. First, I had a big EE 201: Linear Circuit Analysis exam on Thursday. I spent a large portion of my week studying for that exam. And at some point I also called Sun and managed to get a case number for my IDPROM problem. Thing is, they still haven't gotten back to me to sort out this issue. :\

The laptop router.. after a few days, I gave up trying to debug the USB ethernet problem. I realized on Thursday night I could install FreeBSD -stable on my formerly-Windows partition and use that to do the routing, as a stopgap for my machines' lack of internet. So I did that last night and the laptop router is happily humming away... Now I can get back to work. :-) I took the opportunity after a long hard week to play Counterstrike again. That's such a great way to get rid of stress.

Tonight I also worked on getting the various patches reported by KDE/FreeBSD 3.0 packages users. I merged a fix for kdeprint's configure.in, a fix for KDM, and a fix for the missing emptydir stuff. In a few hours we should know if these bugs are fixed for sure.

Time for sleep...

Well I just spent a weekend trying to get my nice new hardware working. Thanks to a FreeBSD user, I received a 40GB ATA100 Maxtor drive which I am using in my new Sun Blade 100, which also got an infusion of 512MB additional ECC PC133 SDRAM for a total of 640MB. But after all that trouble I went to, I discover some time later that the IDPROM contents became invalid. Great. So I scampered all over the net looking for how to rewrite the ether & hostid info into the IDPROM. Doesn't seem like there's any way, even though the machine is brand spanking new directly from Sun. So it seems I'll have to call them tomorrow and get a new IDPROM shipped to me, probably. Ethernet device *seems* ok, as I config'd the ethernet address in solaris and was able to get pinging and stuff.

Then the laptop router I'm trying to setup. I got the USB ethernet device (D-Link DSB-650TX which works with FreeBSD's aue(4) driver) last Tuesday. I'd been putting off trying to actually get it working due to lack of time. Finally, on Friday I go to try it, and what do I find out? The kernel panics if I try to ifconfig it, with the March 31 -current. So I updated to the latest kernel only to find out that it panics as soon as aue0 tries to attach.. before the kernel can even call init(8). So I talk to Joe Karthauser, the guy who's been doing the recent merges from NetBSD and OpenBSD and find out the scoop. Seems neither of us atm can figure out how to get useful dumps when this happens. I guess I'll have to leave this for later.

Due to all that, I think it will be at least a few more days before I commit the KDE 3.0 ports for FreeBSD. I'm not really getting very much useful feedback on those anyway. It would be nice if more people tested the packages. Sigh. Oh well. Time to get lunch now...

5 Apr 2002 (updated 5 Apr 2002 at 12:18 UTC) »

Ok from initial field reports, it seems the I18N packages I produced on April 3 are good to go. I'm currently uploading them to master.kde.org for international testing. 49 languages.. with Svensk being the largest of them all. I think that we can thank KrazyKiwi for that. ;-)

Oh by the way, I will NOT commit ports for these packages until at least the weekend.. I need to fix some issues with them before I let the rest of the world try to build them and send me bogus build problems. Thanks for your understanding.

I keep forgetting to say this, but: most of the certifications made below are about 2 years old... I've learned a lot in that time, needless to say.

KrazyKiwi and frerich pointed out to me that the KDE I18N packages really oughta be done too. So I'm doing them now. My build system seems to have finished 26 of the 49 that we're gonna ship for FreeBSD for KDE 3.0, with more on the way... I also intend to get KOffice 1.1.1 (KDE3 API port) done this weekend sometime. Then maybe commit the ports, but I might save that for next week or weekend... need to avoid compile problems.. :)

Waldo Bastian also told me to feel free to update the master copy of the FreeBSD packages on master.kde.org myself, so I'll probably use that route and keep the packages there up-to-date. Good thing too.. they'll probably have a slew of bugfixes after a week or two...

Whee, KDE 3.0 looks to rock the world. Too bad the packages I'm currently uploading to master.kde.org aren't totally awesome... mainly my fault since I never could find enough time to work on them. So umm, they're kinda rushed. Of course, now that they'll be in the release announcement I'll be able to fix the bugs in them faster. At this time, though, the release hasn't been announced by KDE yet.

I wonder when imp is gonna have HostAP code ready for FreeBSD, 'cause I'm dying to test it on my laptop router. :)

Hmm.. it's almost 1am and I have an 8:30am class.. better get some sleep now. 'Night.

Oh yeah, and one more thing.. NO MORE APRIL FOOL'S DAY PLEASE!! :(

The Slashdot stories are so obvious it's taken the fun out of the day, at least for me. ;\

Well today I managed to dodge sleepiness to get through an exam. *sigh*

I've been charged with getting the XFree86 4.2.0 packages for FreeBSD in line for the upcoming 5.0-DP1, for which the final package build is supposed to start in about 4 hours from now. Sigh. Just a few more issues to take care of and it'd be all ready. Now if only KDE would build. Silly binutils... 8)

Speaking of KDE.. I've also been charged with getting 3.0 packages ready for FreeBSD for tomorrow's release. I finally fixed a few more bugs in the build system and it's now doing kdelibs... properly, I think. We'll see how far it gets after this round.

I've finally updated my entry on Advogato at Leimy's badgering. Things have changed quite a lot since I last posted here, so I'll just let the summary speak for itself. Suffice it to say there's way too much to go over so I'm not gonna bother, and will just post more stuff here for now.

I'm still Vice President at the Purdue IEEE Computer Society, which hosts my KDE/FreeBSD Project homepage and its mailing lists.

Well, it's been a few days since my last diary entry, so I thought I'd give it another shot. We had a Purdue University IEEE Computer Society meeting in Purdue University Materials Science and Electrical Engineering building room B012 on Thursday where a few guys (and one woman :-) from IBM's S/390 Server group came and gave a presentation on their new server series. It was pretty interesting: their "Z Series" servers are supposed to have "zero downtime" (which is why it's called "Z Series"). They showed a typical IBM server of today with 12 CPUs being slightly redesigned to do real-time intimate server upgrades to the OS, BIOS, microcode, and other things. It was pretty cool, and I got free pizza out of the deal too.

Oh, that reminds me. I'm now one of the Vice Presidents of the Computer Society at Purdue University as well. Woot. ;)

I did some more work on OpenPackages' make(1) and sent a diff to Marc Espie. Still waiting for a reply. :)

I had a very bad week last week mostly because most nights I couldn't get to bed until 3 or 4am, and when you consider that on two mornings I had 7:30am classes... well, they both got skipped. And because I usually went to work right after these classes.. well, I skipped work too. :(

So I ended up sleeping a good portion of my weekend. I went to bed around 4am on Saturday morning and didn't get up until 1pm, and a few hours later took a short nap. Then I didn't get back to sleep until 6am today. :-(

Woke up at 3pm, did laundry & homework, and hacked some more. Then I went and bought 14" meat pizza, 7up, hawaiian punch, and 3/4 lb of sour candy. I think I've already been suffering from "Freshman 15" for a few months now, so... I really need to get back in shape. :-)

Later, freaks. Go wank off at amihotornot.com. :D

Whee.. another day goes by. I went to an interview with a company that designs and builds aviation equipment as well as a host of other cool stuff (like GPS's and embedded systems). I think it went well. :)

Tried to work some more on OpenPackages (OP for short) make(1). What I'm trying to do now involves porting the ODE make modifiers that NetBSD put into their make(1) implementation. Marc Espie did a significant rewrite of OpenBSD's make(1) that involves huge amounts of code breakup and simplification. He also did a lot of work towards making make(1) more standards-compliant. Now I'll be specific about what exactly I'm trying to implement in this make(1): a concept coined by Marc called "personalities". Basically, what we would do is this: if we encounter differences in traditional BSD make's behavior regarding certain things (for OpenPackages' purpose, variable modifiers), we will interpret it differently based on whether a certain personality switch was turned on or not. This allows us great flexibility in what kind of behaviors OP make(1) can emulate. It also comes fairly cheap in terms of lines of code and binary data.

Other things this "personality" idea could be used for are GNU make compatibility bits. For OP's purpose, this would allow fewer pkgsrc bits to need GNU make in order to build. The logic behind this is that a significant number of Makefiles use only small bits of code that are specific to GNU make.

By the way, it would be really nice if some more people could start participating in OpenPackages discussions, because the idea has a lot of merit to it. There just needs to be more eyes looking and more hands typing comments. :-)

Oh yes, and more coders would be nice. :>

That should do it for today, I'm tired and I have to get up early. sigh.

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