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Fedora People (174 unread)

Kyle McMartin: it’s like a party in my compiler, and i wasn’t invited

Posted: May 31st, 2008, 7:41pm CEST

I’ve spent more or less the last few days of spare time trying to figure out why gcc-4.3 built kernels were so unhappy on parisc. Basically the symptom was that any IPv4 networking operation would only complete once and a while, for example, ping would drop 90% of packets. This turned out to be a really troublesome bug to track down, and the fix was only 7 characters long.

gcc-4.2 wasn’t problematic, so that provided an interesting base. A bit of thinking ruled out some obvious parts of the kernel that would likely not be an issue. For instance, ARP appeared to be fine, so it likely wasn’t an issue at the network driver level. So rebuilding net/built-in.o on gcc-4.2, copying it to the gcc-4.3 tree, and rebuilding the tree using it resulted in a working kernel. Ok, excellent, we know it’s likely an issue in net/, what else can we rule out, and what do we know? ICMP is affected, so it’s probably not a TCP problem… Rebuilding the kernel with IPv6 enabled, and testing ping6? Ok, works. So it looks like an IPv4 issue. Test that assertion… yup, net/ipv4/built-in.o compiled with gcc-4.2 works.

Ok, peachy. What now? Bisecting the contents of the directory results in ip_output.c being the problematic file… Not all that helpfully, the differences between the code generated by 4.2 and 4.3 are extensive. Well, ok, let’s try turning off a variety of the added compiler options… nope, no luck, but the file works when compiled at -O0.

Next, I bisected the file until I found the problematic function (unfortunately for me starting in the middle, it ended up being the first function in the file.) Which was in a chain of inline functions, eventually calling some architecture specific inline assembly for ip_fast_csum. Ok, that looks like our canary in the coal mine… Look it up… SIGH. The routine touches memory, but didn’t have “memory” in the list of clobbers.

Adding the clobber and everything magically works again. Wasn’t that a party?

[ Of course, this makes things sound almost easy, except that at around 10 minutes to boot a test kernel, reboot, and boot a working kernel, this gets extremely tedious. I also didn't bother to talk about how many hours I probably wasted twiddling compiler flags trying to figure out which optimization pass might be broken... ]
Yaakov M. Nemoy: Truth Happens

Posted: May 31st, 2008, 2:00pm CEST
Close-to-complete Ideology and Religion Truth List
- Taoism: Truth happens.
- Confucianism: Confucius say, "Truth happens."
- Buddhism: If truth happens, it isn't really truth.
- Zen Buddhism: Truth is, and is not.
- Zen Buddhism #2: What is the sound of truth happening?
- Hinduism: This truth has happened before.
- Islam #1: If truth happens, it is the will of Allah.
- Islam #2: If truth happens, blame Israel.
- Catholicism: If truth happens, you deserve it.
- Protestantism: Let truth happen to someone else.
- Presbyterian: This truth was bound to happen.
- Episcopalian: It's not so bad if truth happens, as long as you serve the right wine with it.
- Methodist: It's not so bad if truth happens, as long as you serve grape juice with it.
- Congregationalist: Truth that happens to one person is just as good as truth that happens to another.
- Unitarian: Truth that happens to one person is just as bad as truth that happens to another.
- Lutheran: If truth happens, don't talk about it.
- Fundamentalism #1: If truth happens to a televangelist, it's okay.
- Fundamentalism #2: Truth must be born again.
- Judaism: Why does this truth always happen to us?
- Calvinism: Truth happens because you don't work.
- Seventh Day Adventism: No truth shall happen on Saturday.
- Creationism: God made all truth.
- Secular Humanism: Truth evolves.
- Christian Science #1: When truth happens, don't call a doctor - pray!
- Christian Science #2: Truth happening is all in your mind.
- Unitarianism: Come let us reason together about this truth.
- Quakers: Let us not fight over this truth.
- Utopianism: This truth does not stink.
- Darwinism: This truth was once food.
- Capitalism: That's MY truth.
- Communism: It's everybody's truth.
- Feminism: Men are truth.
- Chauvinism: We may be truth, but you can't live without us...
- Commercialism: Let's package this truth.
- Impressionism: From a distance, truth looks like a garden.
- Idolism: Let's bronze this truth.
- Existentialism: Truth doesn't happen; truth IS.
- Existentialism #2: What is truth, anyway?
- Stoicism: This truth is good for me.
- Hedonism: There is nothing like a good truth happening!
- Mormonism #1: God sent us this truth.
- Mormonism #2: This truth is going to happen again.
- Wiccan: An it harm none, let truth happen.
- Scientology: If truth happens, see "Dianetics", p.157.
- Jehovah's Witnesses: >Knock< >Knock< Truth happens.
- Jehovah's Witnesses #2: May we have a moment of your time to show you some of our truth?
- Jehovah's Witnesses #3: Truth has been prophesied and is imminent; only the righteous shall survive its happening.
- Moonies: Only really happy truth happens.
- Hare Krishna: Truth happens, rama rama.
- Rastafarianism: Let's smoke this truth!
- Zoroastrianism: Truth happens half on the time.
- Church of SubGenius: BoB truths.
- Practical: Deal with truth one day at a time.
- Agnostic #1: Truth might have happened; then again, maybe not.
- Agnostic #2: What is this truth?
- Satanism: SNEPPAH HTURT.
- Atheism #1: What truth?
- Atheism #2: I can't believe this truth!
- Nihilism: No truth.
And now openSuSE is beginning to get it.
Matthew Garrett: Personality modification through perl

Posted: May 31st, 2008, 1:16pm CEST

One of the downsides of writing my thesis last year was that focusing on a technical subject for approximately 16 hours a day left me almost entirely unable to relate to people. The irony in this is that losing the ability to socially relate tends to result in you assuming that you're fine and everyone else is just behaving bizarrely, which makes rectifying the situation rather difficult. In an attempt to avoid this I have written some software, because dealing with the symptoms of a problem is always better than dealing with the root cause and technology is always the appropriate solution to social issues.

The aim was to send myself an email once a week that I'd actually have to read. This is achieved by running the script with the generate argument. This sends an email with an appropriate reminder message (something along the lines of "Are you sucking? Really? Are you sure? Is everyone around you suddenly getting annoyed at you for no obvious reason?", and so on) and a bunch of embedded characters randomly spread throughout it. Running the script with the check argument will send the email again if a valid response hasn't been received. Those can be stuck in cron. The final part is to add a procmail or whatever rule that passes replies back to the script with the validate argument. These replies should include a line containing all the embedded characters (order doesn't matter, but if there are multiple occurances of a character than the reply must include that number of occurances). If a valid reply is received then no further emails will be sent until the script is run with the generate argument again.

Also: My perl sucks.
Peter Lemenkov: Big Buck Bunny seeded!

Posted: May 31st, 2008, 12:50pm CEST

Downloaded 265 times so far. My personal record, btw.

The Spice Must Flow!

UPD 380 times. Ok, I'm giving up now.

Comments
Johan Cwiklinski: Wedding day !

Posted: May 31st, 2008, 10:30am CEST

Aujourd'hui est le faste jour de mon mariage avec la femme qui partage ma vie depuis près de neuf ans, et qui est aussi la future maman de notre adorable (forcément, non ?) petite fille

Nous tenons à remercier toutes les personnes de notre entourage qui nous ont manifesté bonne humeur et soutient psychologique pendant les longues heures de préparation de cet évènement. Bien entendu la communauté Fedora n'est pas en reste, puisque Thomas C. (MrTom) et Pierre-Yves C. (pingou) seront de la fête.

Merci à tous pour vos voeux, si vous n'êtes pas invité (nous avons malheureusement dû limiter) ou ne pouvez pas venir, buvez donc un verre à notre santé aux environs de quatorze heures trente (soit dans quatre heures...).
Trond Danielsen: New and imporved gThumb (was: The state of open source and photography)

Posted: May 31st, 2008, 9:37am CEST

Beside Fedora, photography is one of my favourite hobbies, and everything I do with my images on a computer are done in Fedora. Therefore open-source photography applications are of great interest to me. This post was originally intended to be about all the things that I missed, but after downloading and building the latest version of gThumb from GNOME-svn I notice that the #1 issue I had with it has now been resolved! Yay !

Until now both gThumb and F-spot had hard-coded values for how images are organized on your harddrive. But now gThumb has to possibility do sort images by exif date when you download them from your camera. Now the only thing that is missing is customized renaming of images on import and I am free of prorietary alternatives.
Ravi Sagar: One more Fedora user :)

Posted: May 31st, 2008, 7:32am CEST

My friend Nikhil finally installed Fedora on his system. I am glad that he installed fedora.

Check out the below link to install the most common softwares required for daily use and to make Fedora more user friendly.

http://www.howtoforge.com/installation-guide-fedora8-desktop

This is an awesome Guide!
Ian Weller: Stop the politics, I want to get off

Posted: May 31st, 2008, 7:30am CEST

Within fifteen minutes of listening to CNN, they mentioned that tomorrow is the “big day” where some committee of the Democratic Party decides on the delegates for Michigan and Florida, which as you’ve probably heard eighty billion times, were stripped of their delegates because they moved their primaries early.

I agree with Hillary Clinton: yes, everybody should get their vote counted in these two states. Her opinion is slightly flawed though: she was the only person on the ballot in Michigan, and was the only one to visit Florida (not campaigning. That’s not allowed — the party said so. Just visiting). Barack Obama still got quite a bit of the vote — more than should be expected for a “write-in candidate” for just a single state, proving that there’s something going for him.

Earth to Democratic Party: why didn’t you do a “revote” like you said you were thinking about a month ago? It probably would have solved all of this. It would have cost more, yes. But true democracy is everyone being heard — and that would make it work.

But, nope! The committee says that they’re gonna handle everything. The Democratic ticket in the hands of the few. That’s today’s democracy for ya.

Even worse — why do the rules say the delegates get stripped? Why can’t everyone just run amok? That’s democracy.
Ian Weller: Chicago, day -2

Posted: May 31st, 2008, 6:27am CEST

I’m going to Chicago on Sunday, and I’ll be gone for the entire week. Luckily, I’ll have my trusty laptop, with its non-working left mouse buttons (both of them) and a duct-taped wireless card. Can’t get more cheap than that :3

Today is day -2, tomorrow is day -1, Sunday is day 0. Sunday is day 0 because we won’t actually be in Chicago until Monday. It’s going to take a while to drive up there. I’m not exactly sure what we’re going to do when we get there; I tend not to pay attention that well to those kinds of things.

For the trip, we acquired another Robert Rankin audiobook from our local audiobook purveyor (the library). It’s 13 hours long. We’ll be doing good not only to listen to the entire thing, but also to comprehend it. We’ve listened to two other titles by Robert Rankin on long road trips, and both were pretty demented, but still hilarious. His voice is great for the book style (British), and so he plays a good role at reading his own books.

I’ve always enjoyed audiobooks that are read by their authors. Heck — the authors know how it should feel; they wrote it.

I’ll have my git repo of my website code, so I’ll most likely be working on getting those templates happy.

And yes, Fedora, I’ve put my name on the vacation list.
Nigel Jones: FESCo Alfresco

Posted: May 31st, 2008, 6:17am CEST

It's official & out the door (hence Alfresco), I'm now a nominee for FESCo (Fedora Extrans Steering COmmittee), I think it's a great chance to improve Fedora as a linux distribution and retain new maintainers for longer, I hope to bring some (more) common-sense thinking to the table and also transition into the more proactive & mentoring roles on the project instead of just following the leader.

The nomination page doesn't give much in the way of background, so here it is,

I'm a full time student, doing a Bachelor of Applied Science (Information Management), I already have a DipIT (Networking Engineering) and A+, Network+, RHCT & CCNA certifications, I'm not patronizing and (thankfully) my ego isn't as big as it used to be, so I can 'take it' so to speak.

I really want to see Fedora continue along the current path, we as a community are (generally) pretty decisive and we always bring new ideas to the table, we also know when to take our heads out of a heated discussion *cough* XOrg & nVidia *cough*.
Dave Airlie: r500 3D on AGP cards fixed.

Posted: May 31st, 2008, 2:08am CEST

adamk pointed out on irc his AGP r500 card didn't work, the drm was just missing support for programming the AGP regs on the newer cards. oops..

its fixed now and should be fine.
Aurélien Bompard: Carl Honore : Slowing down in a world built for speed

Posted: May 31st, 2008, 12:03am CEST

Fast food, speed reading, speed dating, and now what ? Speed yoga ?! You gotta be kidding me !

Carl Honore investigates this "culture of speed". Which makes me think of one of the worlds imagined by Isaac Asimov where its inhabitants did not think in terms of quantity, but in terms of quality (read the "Foundation" series if you don't have yet).
Voir en ligne : Carl Honore : Slowing down in a world built for speed (TED Talks)

Sami Wagiaalla: fdebugdump

Posted: May 30th, 2008, 10:57pm CEST

I just committed a new utility to frysk, I dont know if anybody would be interested in this but here goes.

fdebugdump runs a program and prints out the debug information for the modules that are mapped in at that point. I used to use readelf -dbug-dump but that doesnt have a heirachical view, so I wrote fdebugdump.

So for example for this program:

void
print(char *what) {
  while (*what != '\') {
    write(1, what, 1);
    what++;
  }
}

int
main(int argc, char** argv) {
  // XXX: This forgets to check ARGC.
  print(argv[1]);
  print("\\n");
  return 0;
}

$fdebugdump   funit-hello
module: funit-hello
 DwTag_COMPILE_UNIT funit-hello.c
   DwTag_BASE_TYPE unsigned char
   DwTag_BASE_TYPE short unsigned int
   DwTag_BASE_TYPE unsigned int
   DwTag_BASE_TYPE long unsigned int
   DwTag_BASE_TYPE signed char
   DwTag_BASE_TYPE short int
   DwTag_BASE_TYPE int
   DwTag_BASE_TYPE long int
   DwTag_BASE_TYPE
   DwTag_POINTER_TYPE
   DwTag_BASE_TYPE char
   DwTag_SUBPROGRAM print
     DwTag_FORMAL_PARAMETER what
   DwTag_SUBPROGRAM main
     DwTag_FORMAL_PARAMETER argc
     DwTag_FORMAL_PARAMETER argv
   DwTag_POINTER_TYPE
module: /lib64/ld-2.8.so

Or if you only want to see functions and parameters for example:

$ fdebugdump   funit-hello | egrep "SUB|PARAM"
   DwTag_SUBPROGRAM print
     DwTag_FORMAL_PARAMETER what
   DwTag_SUBPROGRAM main
     DwTag_FORMAL_PARAMETER argc
     DwTag_FORMAL_PARAMETER argv

Eric Christensen: Frustrated...

Posted: May 30th, 2008, 9:14pm CEST

I'm an Amateur Radio operator. There are certain pieces of software that I need to use. Most of them are not available for the *nix platform. So I use tools to help me run them. Virtual software like Xen, Wine, and Sun's VirtualBox have helped me but I still can't get everything working properly. Either the OS or the software doesn't work right or I get everything working except the virtualized OS doesn't see the USB device or the serial port which throws me back to square one.

So I reluctantly decided to dual boot my laptop. Run F9 and Windows XP together. It would be annoying to have to do this and I really hate the idea of having a Windows install.

Oh and that won't work, either. I boot from my XP install disk and the screen goes blank. I simply cannot win.

So I'm just plain frustrated. It is two days before Hurricane Season officially begins (and two months since I really started the project) and I need to have this software up and running properly. Does anyone know of a virtualization program that would allow me to run XP and allow the OS to actually utilize the serial port or the USB ports?
Jesus Rodriguez (zeus): theme

Posted: May 30th, 2008, 8:35pm CEST

I got a comment to my recent post asking me what theme I was using. I figured I’d go ahead and post it here:

Nice font and theme! What font is that? What dpi? What freetype version (with or without bytecode)? What theme do you use?

The theme I am using is a slightly modified version of Darkilouche as the application theme, and Gilouche as the Metacity theme. I changed the orange(#f57900) in Darkilouche to red (#e30800). I switched back to Darkilouche after having trouble with Firefox and Neutronium.

As far as the font goes, I’m also using the Liberation fonts with freetype 2.3.4-3.
Michael DeHaan: Thanks!

Posted: May 30th, 2008, 8:21pm CEST

Thanks to Francesco Crippa for presenting Cobbler and Func at LinuxTAG, this was a very nice suprise and I didn’t have to do any work :) Much appreciated!
Ian Weller: Here's a workspace for ya

Posted: May 30th, 2008, 6:58pm CEST

There’s a workspace I could enjoy. And get heavily distracted with.
Ravi Sagar: Office on Saturday?

Posted: May 30th, 2008, 6:36pm CEST

We had off yesterday due to Bandh in NCR but they have called us on Saturday. It is sick. How can they expect us to work on Saturday?

This is outrageous and I am not going to office tomorrow, I will stay at home and enjoy the weekend.
Debarshi Ray: SFTP support for Wget

Posted: May 30th, 2008, 6:32pm CEST

After a prolonged bout of laziness, I decided to finally do something about Savannah bug #20327. SFTP support for Wget might be useful. After all some of the cool fellows are already doing it.
Yaakov M. Nemoy: New Job plans

Posted: May 30th, 2008, 5:28pm CEST

I have to find this sign.
JoergSimon: Linuxtag Fedora Track

Posted: May 30th, 2008, 5:14pm CEST

Right now i finished to see the talk from FrancescoCrippa about Coppler, Func and Puppet. Great talk - i am sure i will use this in the future!

Before this talk - PaulFrields our Project Leader gave his Talk "Zur Lage der Nation" - Wow, what a good speaker. Besides evangelizing the People - he thanked the several FedoraProject Groups and especially Mike McGrath with a virtual hug.

And finally my morning started with the FEL talk from ThibaultNorth a FedoraElectronicLab Architect, PackageMaintainer and Ambassador - to be honest i was not smart enough to understand all off that stuff, but i was amazed and proud what the FedoraCommunity can achieve in "nonComputer Engineering" related Sectors - and maybe we will have sometime things like FedoraMedicalLab or FedoraChemicalLab - a thanks goes also to ChitleshGoorah to start FEL ;-)
Jesse Keating: Miles and miles

Posted: May 30th, 2008, 4:34pm CEST

On Wed I was convinced by katzj to ride into the office on my new bike. I was further convinced to ride home the same day. That's about 50 miles in one day. All in all I must say it was easier than I thought it would be. Oh it certainly took a lot out of me, and I've had sore legs (and butt!!) since, but the new bike made a very big difference. I still have to tweak some things like seat position but overall it was a /lot/ easier of a ride. I think I'll start doing this on a weekly basis during the summer/fall.
Yaakov M. Nemoy: Truthiness Happens

Posted: May 30th, 2008, 1:58pm CEST

Yesterday, I had a surprising chat with some of the openSuSE guys. After making some introductions to some of the people there, zonker pulled me aside to demo something they've been working on. I'm sure it's pretty old news by now, but up until now, I've never heard much at all about the new package manager they have in SuSE. Of course the demo didn't work, but it had something to do with internet issues at the booth, so hopefully I'll be able to drag something out of him today. What's important though, is that apparently Zypper, the package manager uses the same repository format as yum. They are deliberately trying to keep it as compatible as possible.

This led way to a conversation about areas that Fedora and openSuSE can collaborate on. The impression I got is that they are realizing the value of community as part of the development process. For starters, it seems that if there is any collaboration, we will probably see a wide number of open standards coming out of this, such as a common set of packaging guidelines for RPMs, as well as some kind of repository format.

There was also some comments about their planned involvement with Smolt in the future. Although they are currently busy with their upcoming release, they are planning on integrating smolt into their platform in the future.

The real question is though, will openSuSE become a real community distribution? There was talk about being able to contribute to the upstream Smolt. But can we convince them to sign up to work on Fedora Hosted projects? Will they be willing to actually contribute? It will be interesting to find out.
Jesus Rodriguez (zeus): Iliana becomes a Fedora user

Posted: May 30th, 2008, 1:48pm CEST

I was trying to occupy Iliana this evening so I started up Abiword to let her type. I controlled the mouse to keep focus on the document as much as possible, there were still a lot of menus popping up. The apps on the bottom were all started by her key strokes.

$Iliana\'s first document$

Update: Iliana is only one.
Peter Lemenkov: RHCT и RHCE теперь и на русском

Posted: May 30th, 2008, 12:26pm CEST

На LOR'е увидел новость, что Inventa теперь экзаменует на вышеуказанные звания теперь и на русском.

[www.rhd.ru]

Ну, типа, здорово. Хотя я и на английском еще не проэкзаменовался.

Comments
Martin Sourada: Fedora Wallpaper Tour

Posted: May 30th, 2008, 12:20pm CEST

Recently I've got an idea of creating a new artwork project to celebrate the annual F10 release. The project name is Fedora History Tour. Today Jon McCann made a blogpost called State of the Art :: Wallpapers so why not use the work he did generally and adjust it for Fedora? So I downloaded all the Fedora default wallpapers since Fedora Core 1, picked some of the desings submitted for F10 Theme Round 1 and made a simple walkthrough in inkscape. Here's the result:

SVG, similar project from Mola
Yaakov M. Nemoy: Technology Cat Loves Technology

Posted: May 30th, 2008, 12:10pm CEST

My cat's favorite place to sleep is on my laptop bag. If I ever leave it around the house, especially on the floor, the first thing she'll do is find it, and curl up and take a nap. It's like she's a laptop bag seeking missile.

So to my great surprise, I took my laptop out of my bag this morning, and the screen was covered in cat hair.
Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams: A long-overdue update

Posted: May 30th, 2008, 12:07pm CEST

Get it while it's hot!

Blah blah packaging bugs blah blah.
Arindam Ghosh: Update 101: “The magic has begun”

Posted: May 30th, 2008, 11:35am CEST

All these days i was continuously working setting up the infrastructure ready, doing custom setups and testing things for the i18n of openstreetmap, more precisely setting up internationalization in rails which will comprise a major chunk of my gsoc project.

I started off by setting up an osm local install on my desktop earlier this month. That was something because there different set of things to look after and configure each of them properly. I got little stuck with the mod_tile thingy…the configs. I just couldn’t find where was some hard-coded paths renderd daemon was trying to access. Thanks to TomH & Alex, for mentioning about gen_tile.cpp. I thought all of these paths should be placed in render_config.h and even made a patch of it (to ease my work) but later learnt and/or realized that they are meant to serve some greater purpose like module options actually.

So, crossing all this, when rails together with mapnik powered on for the first time i was awestruck. I just wanted to laugh…whew!! Then after some discussions with my mentor Mikel Maron, we looked up at the different options available. He gave me a comparative study of different ways to internationalize rails. I kinda liked two amongst them namely, globalize-rails and ruby-gettext (which i had proposed earlier). So as planned, I somewhat did some quick hacky test setups to test both of them. Though they weren’t free of problems, but as of now, i simply like the robustness of globalize combined with click-to-globalize plugin. Also the the fact that globalize currently supports more languages give it a plus. Sven Fuchs has written some really cool tutorials….thanks to him because i don’t know for some reason whatsoever i’m not getting the www.globalize-rails.org. Anyway, the current state is i’m trying to setup globalize in the rails_port of osm now. Its’ bound to have lots’ of problem…need to fix them. Another concern is that about the translators’ accounts. Whether it will be wiki-like so that anyone can put up translations or the traditional tranlation groups somewhat moderated. Though this will come at a later stage.

In the meantime, i actually upgraded my desktop to an E8200 2.66 GHz proc. + DG33FB motherboard + 2 GB combination and its’ showing some real power. So, another ordeal that came up of nowhere was shifting the entire setup to the new hdd. It made me remember of the osm vmware image that Milo van der Linden talked about in the early stages of the project. There was some real hike in the rendering speed compared to my 5-yrs old celeron 1.7 GHz mobo.

But now, my 6th semester exams are scheduled from 3rd-13th of June and i’m really getting low working hours now I will also put up a wikipage regarding i18n sooner than later. Loads of work still left…

Among other news, my activity oriented tutorials are up on the edu.kde.org …lots of thanks to Anne Marie (annma) for putting them up. I just love the logo gut pointing to the tutorials. Hopefully, i’ll try to put more of them. And more recently Debayan from NIT-DGP has put up the 3rd ntp pool server for India. I can now three ntp servers in [www.pool.ntp.org]
Phil Muldoon: Hardware Watchpoints and Frysk 0.3

Posted: May 30th, 2008, 10:59am CEST

There is some beta/experimental hardware watchpoint code in Frysk 0.3. Give it a try and file bugs. Use the “watch” command from fhpd to access it. Also note these are purely hardware watchpoints, so sizes are 1, 2 and 4 bytes (and 8 bytes on x8664). Teresa is working on some code for 0.4 that allows chaining of watchpoints together to watch bigger spaces.
Tim Lauridsen: Funny tagline

Posted: May 30th, 2008, 9:33am CEST

It saw this tagline on a danish linux page, it make me laugh, so i must be some kind of a nerd

“There are 10 kinds of people. Those that understand binary and those that don’t.”
Sankarshan: Same song, different styles

Posted: May 30th, 2008, 8:38am CEST

দুজনে দেখা হল মধুযামিনী রে -
কেন কথা কহিল না, চলিয়া গেল ধীরে ।।
নিকুঞ্জে দখিনাবায় করিছে হায়-হায়,
লতাপাতা দুলে দুলে ডাকিছে ফিরে ফিরে ।।
দুজনের আঁখিবারি গোপনে গেল বয়ে,
দুজনের প্রাণের কথা প্রাণেতে গেল রয়ে ।।
আর তো হল না দেখা, জগতে দোঁহে একা -
চিরদিন ছাড়াছাড়ি যমুনাতীরে ।। Same song, but sung by singers with different vocal styles tend to impart a variety of meaning to phrases. Finally obtained the song above sung by Geeta Ghatak and Kanika Bandyopadhyay. I tend to like the former because of the wide range of expressive vocal variety.
Sankarshan: Oh no !! System Monitor seems to be acting up

Posted: May 30th, 2008, 8:32am CEST

In bn_IN locale, the System Monitor looks messed up if one notices the vertical axis:

In en_US locale, it looks alright:

And our resident evil genius has a comment
Seth vidal: wheee free bikes!

Posted: May 30th, 2008, 7:20am CEST

I subscribe to a couple local bicycling-related mailing lists. Mostly it is people arguing about bike lanes or what-not but today someone emailed and said “I am moving and I have 3 older bikes I will give away to the first person who will come pick them up.” So, I emailed back and said I’d take them. I was evidently the first person b/c the guy called me back and told me where to come to pick them up. I hadn’t seen the bikes, I had just gotten a description from the email, but even if they were completely busted I could give them to the bike co-op for parts or just use them for yard art :). Instead I get over to chapel hill (where the bikes are) and I find 3 very nice bikes that have clearly been kept in a garage. None of them is a particularly special bike but they’re all in reasonable shape late-70s/early 80s vintages with a mostly-working set of parts. I pop the wheels off, load them in the back of the fit (which, yes, will fit 3 bikes, no problem) and go grab some dinner.

Get home, unload things, set them all down to get a better look at them.

One is a 83ish peugeot city express. It’s kind of a metallic cyan. Steel frame, lugged, simple - very small — probably a 52-53cm. It also appears that it was ridden maybe once or twice then hung up for the last 25 years. Seriously, everything looks shiny and new and almost untouched. Brake pads, tires, gears, everything. It won’t fit either of us very well b/c of its size (I’m 6′1″ and eunice is 5′8″ish) but it’s a perfect bike otherwise. Nothing fancy, mind you, but it’ll work as an errand runner. Hell, even the tubes inflate and hold air.

The next is a trek 620 maybe from 84. Again small-ish frame - maybe 54cm at the most. This bike was clearly someone’s commuter. It was fitted out right for it and it had a lot of dirt on the wheels/hubs and bottom bracket. It’s got a bit of rust coming through on the front fender eyelets but nothing horribly bad. The braze-ons for the cable routing are also seeing some rust but there’s no real stress on them, a little rustoleum and sandpaper may straighten them out. The brakes are in reasonable shape the hoods need some love and the bar foam is a bit quaint but still, not a bad bike. If it were about 4-5cm larger it’d be perfect for me. I’ll see where I can find this a good home

The last one is an Atala Milano. It’s an Italian manufacturer - claimed to be from about ‘79. I looked it up on the Late Sheldon Brown’s website and it’s nothing terribly fancy. Nice steel frame, pretty lugs, no rust, some dirt, cool looking half-chrome fork. It’s pretty spiffy. Brake cables and housing are pretty well shot but ALMOST functional. Shifters are in great shape. Components are the very-shiny but simple and functional suntour AR components. I’m pretty sure it has 27″ wheels which is the only odd bit. This is a fine looking bike. It’s probably the largest of the 3 but It still feels awfully small to me. I think we may strip this one down and Eunice and I will work on building it as a run-around-town bike and teach ourselves a bit more about putting a bike back together with different bits than what you took it apart with. And if we screw it up, oh well, we’re out NOTHING!

Those are my free bikes I picked up, today. I think I will be able to find good, caring homes for them and hopefully get a couple more folks out on bikes.

Here’s a picture of eunice being weird with the three of them:

[flickr.com]
Trond Danielsen: Hi fellow Fedorians

Posted: May 30th, 2008, 7:04am CEST

With the new self-service on Planet Fedora I thought I would dig up my old weblog and write a short post to present myself.

I am MSc in Satellite Navigation from Norway who work as a embedded systems developer by daytime and who enjoys spending time with his family, photography and free software at night. I've been a package maintainer for almost two years now and I maintain a few embedded software utilities for various micro-controllers.
Michael Stahnke: Awful Photos

Posted: May 30th, 2008, 6:38am CEST

Mug PhotoWhat Up Jail!Lately I have been trying to get back into painting. I got really into it in 2006, but haven’t really had the time or resources to do it (canvases are really expensive here, unless you know where to look).

I finished one the other day, and I think it is really funny. And I am posting it because Mike has an awful photo of me every time I post on Stahnkage…so instead of complaining about how I am not fond of it (which I have been meaning to do)…I am contributing to the awfulness that is my likeness.

Where did this photo come about? I was at a party with news people who think mug shots are funny. The photos are never flattering…and we attempted to create our own mug shots.

P.S. – Once again, because of stuff like this – I will never be President.
Ian Weller: Claiming my blog on Technorati

Posted: May 30th, 2008, 6:37am CEST

The 6-foot spiders in black suits have required me to claim my blog at Technorati.

So, here’s my Technorati Profile.

I plan to delete this post soon.
Ian Weller: Getting started on some templates

Posted: May 30th, 2008, 6:31am CEST

I plan to take my current website design and turn it into a template for web people to consume, along with a whole bunch of other ideas I’ve had in the past.

Watch for it :)
Kulbir Saini: Yum Bug Day on May 30

Posted: May 30th, 2008, 6:21am CEST

Hey all yum lovers,

We (the yum people) are organising Yum Bug Day on May 30, 2008. We try to kill as much bugs as possible. For a list of bugs, check Yum Bugs and Yum-Utils Bugs. If you think you can fix, provide info about one or more or you have any suggestions, just drop in #yum on freenode.net or shoot a mail at yum-devel.

read more
Dave Jones: weird aggregation.

Posted: May 30th, 2008, 5:44am CEST

Periodically, I've been checking technorati to see where my blog is being linked from. Lately it's got pretty useless though, as it gets buried amongst lots of links from people running planet on their machines to aggregate all their favorite feeds. (Seems bizarre to me, but apparently, it's quite commonplace).

Somewhat more bizarre than this form of aggregation though, is a pattern of plagiarism I've noticed.
For example, when I wrote an entry about visiting a sushi restaurant, shortly afterwards, a post appeared on sushi-restaurants.net attributed to one 'Nish N. on yelp'. Most strange.

It's not alone either. When I was in Austin at the Linux Foundation collaboration summit, shortly afterwards my entry got picked up by 'austin.seniorcommunityliving.com'. The actual post has disappeared, but technorati still references the header.. "kernelslacker is a true recipe for delightful information." and then goes on to splurge out the rest of the post I wrote. I'm glad the seniors in Austin found my write-up of the collaboration summit 'delightful'. Not quite the target audience I was expecting, but you can't have everything.

Finally, any mention of anything slightly musical seems to get picked up by these people.

One pattern amongst all of this is that the postings always seem to end.. "read the rest of this great post here" and link back to me.
I'm really not sure what to make of it all. It's a bizarre use of RSS if ever there was one. Some kind of google-juice gaining link-spam perhaps? Who knows.

Now that I've mentioned sushi restaurants, austin seniors and music again, I wonder how long before they all pick up on this post.
Projeto Fedora Brasil: Driver da Nvidia funcionando no F9!

Posted: May 30th, 2008, 3:57am CEST

Pessoal: O repositório livna já está trazendo o driver da nvidia (versão 173.14.05-2.lvn9), o qual aparentemente está funcionando no Fedora 9. Instalei com uma GeForce 7900 GS e funcionou normalmente. Para tentar, digite: su --login yum install -y kmod-nvidia Abraços!
Steven Parrish aka TuxBrewer: Thinking its time to brew another one...

Posted: May 30th, 2008, 3:14am CEST

I am not artistic, or so I thought. I can't draw a box, have a hard time carrying a tune, and was always better behind the camera than in front of it. But I have discovered there is more to being an artist than just that. Programmers are artists so there is one for me. Can drinking beer be art? Don't think so, but making it can be.

People have asked me where my moniker of "TuxBrewer" comes from. Well it's from my 2 favorite pastimes. Linux and Beer, not just drinking beer but brewing beer. For about 50 cents a bottle I can brew 2 cases about 48 bottles of my own beer. And no I am not talking about "Mr. Beer" here. I mean taking fresh milled grains, hops, yeast and water and ending up with a very flavorful and refreshing brew. Checkout your local homebrew shop or club and start a new hobby. Sometimes not sitting in front of this screen can be a good thing.

Here is what will be in my brew pot soon.

Raspberry Honey Wheat Ale

This recipe is for five gallons (19L).

The ingredient list for this home brew consists of 6.6 pounds of Wheat liquid malt extract, 1 pound of Crystal, 10L Malt, a pound of clover honey, 4 ounces of flaked wheat, 1-1/2 ounces of Styrian Goldings hop pellets, 1 ounce of Liberty pellet hops, 4lbs frozen raspberries, White Labs WLP001 California Ale Yeast and 5 ounces of Light DME (for priming).

SMP aka "TuxBrewer"
Dave Jones: PS3 power usage.

Posted: May 30th, 2008, 12:32am CEST

Like many others, I recently bought a Playstation 3, for the sole purpose of playing a certain game.

Various discussion today around whether using 'idle' cycles is a good or bad idea got me thinking.

The PS3 comes with a built-in folding @home client. By all accounts, a rather powerful one. It's also very pretty, with an interactive map of the world showing all the currently active PS3s around the globe contributing cycles to the folding project. I found a blog entry by Jeff Atwood, that mentioned "as of this writing, the PS3 is responsible for a whopping 72 percent of the computing power in the entire Folding@Home project". That was just over a year ago. Today, the numbers are truly staggering. Last year, the PS3 was contributing a total of 659 TFLOPS from 733 active CPUs. Today, that number is 1444 TFLOPS, from 51223 active CPUs. The other platforms growth has been miniscule in comparison. That's a lot of 'idle' cycles.

So I got curious how much power that client actually uses. I rigged up my trusty kill-a-watt and set about measuring.

Plugged in, and waiting on standby, the PS3 pulls a solitary watt. I hit the power button, and it sprang into life, with its jingle and colourful menu. Idling at this menu pulls around 132W. (Note from this point on, when I say 'around', take it to mean 'it was fluctuating + or - 1W). I started up the folding client, and let it erm, fold, or whatever it is that it does. It pulls around 162W. 162W * 51223 users. That's a lot of power. The client also has a 'screensaver' mode, where it stops updating the display. This cuts power considerably, down to 135W. Only slightly more than the 'idle' menu.

With my curiousity satisfied, and this research done, I turned my attention to some different research. Yes, I decided to squeeze in a quick game of GTA4. Here's how a typical game goes down..

Loading the game: 137W
Standing around in Nicos apartment : 153W
Walking out onto the street and standing around: 165W
Picking a fight with a random passer-by: 163W (Yes, somehow this takes less power than standing around)
After the police arrived, I decided to get out of there, and stole a cab. Driving it takes about 169W
Pulling up the map (which isn't animated) : 167W. (wtf!?)
Blowing up a gas station with a shotgun: 169W
Trying to evade the police helicopter on foot: 171W
Stealing another cab, and driving it at such speed that I get 'air' when I reach the crest of a hill: 177W
Ramming the cab through a toll booth whilst being chased by police: 172W
Escaping into the strip club, and watching a 'cut scene' : 173W
Going postal and killing everyone in sight, including the many police that swarm the building: 175W

So there you have it. GTA4 is worse for the environment than folding @home. Now, I wonder how many copies of that got sold..
Luya Tshimbalanga: Avatar test

Posted: May 29th, 2008, 11:54pm CEST

test, this is a test
Bryan Che: Introducing Fedora Nightlife

Posted: May 29th, 2008, 11:18pm CEST
I've recently started a new project at Fedora called Nightlife. Here's the text of the e-mail I sent to the newly-created Fedora Nightlife mailing list:
Fedora Nightlife is a new project for creating a Fedora community grid. People will be able to donate idle capacity from their own computers to an open, general-purpose Fedora-run grid for processing socially beneficial work and scientific research that requires access to large amounts of computing power. Given the large number of Fedora users, I hope that we will eventually be able to build a community grid of over a million nodes at Fedora. This will be a great example of the power of the Fedora community, give people new and meaningful ways to contribute to Fedora, advance the development of large-scale grid software, and lead to real benefits for the world.Fedora Nightlife will leverage the Condor project, which was ([www.cs.wisc.edu]) created and hosted by the University of Wisconsin Madison, for scheduling and harnessing donated computing power. Last year, Red Hat and the University of Wisconsin signed a strategic partnership around Condor. Part of this partnership entailed releasing Condor's source code under an OSI-approved open source license. As a result, we now have Condor packaged at Fedora, and upstream development continues to happen at the University of Wisconsin repository in an open manner.
```
Some of the immediate next steps for Fedora Nightlife are:
-create a Wiki page for this project
-get a Condor scheduler hosted at Fedora up and running
```
-work out what are the requirements for a project to be able to run on Fedora Nightlife (e.g. its software must be open source, it must be safe, it should have some kind of open policy around its results, etc) We've already started working on getting a scheduler up and running. Ishould have a wiki setup relatively soon so that we can start mapping out more plans there. Then, we can focus on growing the Nightlife community of projects andsolicit Fedora users to donate capacity. Hopefully, enabling donation of compute power to Nightlife can eventually become a first-boot option for Fedora installs. I welcome everyone to contribute to and participate in the FedoraNightlife project!
If you'd like to subscribe to the Fedora Nightlife mailing list, you can do so at [https:]

Fedora Nightlife is going to build on the work I do in my day job at Red Hat around Red Hat Enterprise MRG--it'll be based on the same technology we use for MRG's grid capabilities. This is great for me for a couple reasons: Fedora Nightlife will be a powerful and public example of the scale that's possible with Red Hat Enterprise MRG, and the work we do to drive Nightlife/Condor to the 1 million node count will directly benefit MRG. Also, it's great to be at a place like Red Hat where I can work on my product management job and do some good in the world at the same time.
Greg DeKoenigsberg: Mmm. Forbidden donut.

Posted: May 29th, 2008, 11:00pm CEST

According to Joel Cohen, how does Red Hat help make The Simpsons happen? I quote:

"The show is all hand-drawn and digitally animated, and the movie was too. However, because we were writing and re-writing the movie at such a furious pace, the scenes we would write needed to be seen and approved or revised (or often rejected) before they committed to the very labor-intensive process of hand drawing the cels.

For that purpose, crudely animated scenes were produced with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Linux animation technology, so our animators were able to show us these scenes incredibly quickly. Once a scene or piece of a scene was approved, it would begin the more traditional animation route; however, the volume and speed of material that was created for the movie could never have been done without that Red Hat-fueled system."

Crazy mad props to Ruth Suehle of Red Hat Magazine for getting this awesome scoop. Go read it. Right now.

(p.s. can ya Digg it?)
Bastien Nocera: The movie trail

Posted: May 29th, 2008, 10:31pm CEST

3 evenings, 3 films, and all connected.

Day 1, Inside Man: When there's blood on the streets, buy property.
Day 2, The Corporation: The corporation of that sort is the proto-typical of a psychopath.
Day 2, Twelve Monkeys: But if you don't buy a lot of stuff, if you don't, what are you then, I ask you? What? Mentally *ill*. Fact, Jim, fact.

All three come highly recommended.
Dave Jones: VIA's Linux portal.

Posted: May 29th, 2008, 10:09pm CEST
I've been biting my tongue over this for a while, but it's now been a month, and I think that's long enough. Perhaps I'm an impatient asshole, but a lot of what I'm about to describe could be easily rectified in _minutes_.

It's getting a little hard to take VIA's new 'portal' seriously when a month after its introduction, there hasn't been a single line of source code released there, but multiple updates to various drivers including binaries of a Linux kernel driver I wrote, which I had to end up disassembling to find out what they had changed. (Which afaict, was just a missing PCI ID).

I've been trying to give them the benefit of the doubt, hoping they'll get their act together, but each time I see another drop of binaries there, without any source, it gets a little harder to believe. They already posted several thousand lines of framebuffer code to the Linux-kernel list, but there's no sign of that on the portal. The developers of said code seem receptive to feedback, and the process seems to be working well there, I'm sure eventually we'll see this included in kernel.org kernels. Which makes me wonder, if they intend to just post their stuff upstream, what exactly is the point of the portal ? Distribution of binary only bits seems to be the only logical conclusion, but rather than expect users to have to go to their portal to download drivers (Windows mentality much?) , they'd be better off working directly with the distribution vendors to ensure their latest drivers are included in each release (if they aren't upstream yet).

And then there's the ongoing saga of documentation, but that's a completely separate fail event..

It's amazing how different the story is within parts of VIA. Their CPU guys at Centaur are extremely easy to work with. The chipset / graphics guys seem to live in another world. I really hope the revamping of their open source story starts showing some results soon. Maybe a month is too little to expect big changes, but I'd at least expect to see /something/.

In summary, signs you may be 'doing it wrong':
- Your open source portal doesn't have any source code or documentation.
- Upstream developers have to resort to using disassemblers and similar tools to find out what changes you made.
- You release binary blobs for 'the latest distros'.
- You aspire to be 'more like moblin.
- An absence of participation in existing driver efforts. How many drivers for unichrome do we need anyway?
- You distribute .ko files clearly marked with MODULE_LICENSE("GPL") without corresponding source. Normally, this sort of thing isn't taken lightly. Why is this any different?
I'm beginning to think the only way VIA will ever really 'get it together' is if they employed someone from the Linux community who actually understands how all this works, because it seems someone in Taiwan isn't getting the memos.
Lillian Angel: IcedTea6 1.2 Released

Posted: May 29th, 2008, 9:36pm CEST

We are proud to announce the release of IcedTea6 1.2.

The IcedTea6 project provides a harness to build the source code from OpenJDK6 using Free Software build tools and provides replacements libraries for the binary plugs with code from the GNU Classpath project. More information on IcedTea can be found here.

What’s New?
—————–
- Updated to b09.
- Added the the lcms library with PYCC and LINEAR_RGB ICC
profiles.
- Integrated Gervill to provide midi support.
- JTreg integrated.
- javaws/NetX fixes:
— improved security, namely catching Socket permissions during
runtime
— implemented the remaining JNLP services api (PrintService, JNLPRandomAccessFile)
— applet focusing bug fixed
- sparc/sparc64 port
- Desktop file integration.
- Various zero fixes.
- Sound fixes.
- Font fixes.
- Many bug fixes here and here.

Read about the future plans for OpenJDK in Fedora 10 here.

—————–

The tarball and nosrc RPM can be downloaded from here.

The following people helped with this release:
Lillian Angel, Gary Benson, Thomas Fitzsimmons, Andrew Haley, Andrew John Hughes, Matthias Klose, Dan Munckton, Parag Nemade, Keith Seitz, Joshua Sumali, Christian Thalinger, Mark Wielaard, Yi Zhan

We would also like to thank the bug reporters and testers!

To get started:
$ hg clone http://icedtea.classpath.org/hg/icedtea6
$ cd icedtea6

Full build requirements and instructions are in INSTALL:
$ ./configure
$ make
Dave Jones: how to tell you're a music nerd.

Posted: May 29th, 2008, 8:46pm CEST

"Man, this sounds brutal. I wonder what

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