A clear announcement went out in plenty of time and the meeting agenda is already posted for Wednesday s SPI board IRC meeting which will be at 2100 UTC (an hour later than recently).
As I write this, it s a pretty lean meeting, though I guess that s understandable when the run-up included holidays for most people.
What do you think SPI s new year resolutions should be?
That looks exactly like what I used to do in SimCity. I'd
use the F-U-N-D-S cheat at the start to max out my money, then build
my little empire with neat roads and school and harbours and whatnot
they've even got an airport! Then I'd press "go" and people
would slowly move in to the residential areas, one house on one block
at a time.
I guess poor old Salton City never made it past "turtle speed"!
I have to admit, I was a bit lazy in my RC bug squashing efforts during the
last two weeks. anyway, a short summary:
.
However, I managed to get a reasonable first release out the door this evening. Grab it from launchpad or pypi.
Testrepository has a few deps all listed in INSTALL.txt. Folk on Ubuntu Lucid should be able to just apt-get them all (sudo apt-get install subunit will be enough to run testrepository). If you re not on Lucid you can grab the debs manually, or use the subunit ppa (sudo add-apt-repository ppa:subunit), though I ve noticed just today that that karmic subunit build there only works with python 2.5, not the default of 2.6 I will fix that at some point.
Using Testrepository is easy if you are developing python code:
$ testr init $ python -m subunit.run project.tests.test_suite testr load id: 0 tests: 114This will report any failures that occur. To see them again:
$ testr last id: 0 tests: 114The actual subunit streams are stored in .testrepository in sequentially numbered files (for now at least). So its very easy to get at them (for instance, subunit-stats < .testrepository/12). If you are not using python, you can still use subunit easily if you are using shunit, check or cppunit . subunit ships with bindings for shunit and cppunit, and check uses libsubunit with the CK_SUBUNIT output mode. TAP users can use tap2subunit to get a subunit stream from a TAP based testsuite. It s still early days but I m finding this much nicer than the adhoc subunit management I was doing before.
There s been a fair deal of talk on the intertubes lately about prettifying the boot process. The first I saw was a post from Lasse Havelund regarding a proposal for Ubuntu Lucid, and the second was regarding a forked version of GRUB2 called BURG, which adds some theming abilities. A tiny bit of research revealed that despite the existence of BURG, the regular upstream GRUB2 project already has graphical theme support, courtesy of a Google Summer of Code project by Colin Bennett (albeit with a few less features at time of writing). Since Lasse had gone to the hard work of actual design, I decided to try my hand at chopping his design up into a usable GRUB2 theme, and the result can be seen here.
I ended up speaking with the upstream GRUB2 team (which has certainly lead to a strange alliance in one case) about Colin s GSOC themes, and as it turns out, the main reason there s no theme supplied with GRUB2 is that Colin s themes use non-Free elements (proprietary fonts like Helvetica are used heavily). Since I had learnt the theme format to a basic degree in doing my Ubuntu theme, I proposed making a genuinely Free theme starting with a Debian theme, and moving on to a generic GRUB2 theme afterwards.
As I went along, I found a handful of bugs and feature oddities, which have almost all been fixed with incredible turnaround by Vladimir Serbinenko, the current maintainer of the gfxmenu code (there remain some questions regarding RTL support in themes, and how to gracefully deal with different aspect ratios) and I want to extend my thanks to him for his help. However, at this point in time, I m pleased to announce a theme I d consider ready for public consumption.
It s obviously not perfect, and it uses the old visual style from Debian Lenny, but it s a fully Free starting point, which hopefully can be deconstructed by others seeking to make their own themes. It ought to scale fully to any 4:3 resolution. And it may explode and eat your disk on any version of GRUB2 Experimental other than r1499. Generally, the README is a good starting point.
Oh yes, an URL. Try http://retro.apebox.org/grubthemes/
I ve been speaking with some folks on deviantART regarding using their Debian-themed wallpaper in future releases of my themes package, but for now, this should be enough for gfxmenu to get a little more exposure and a little more testing. And, hopefully, shift artist focus back from the theme-incompatible BURG fork to the real GRUB2 project.
It's quite some time since I gave news about my running junkiness. So
here they are. Apparently, my last blog entry was about my
worries about which marathon(s) to run next year.
At least one is scheduled, of course Paris. The highest probability as
of now if Berlin in September (probable enough for me to register as
soon as it becomes possible)...which would also leave a possibility to
run Donostia in late November if I manage to convince Elisabeth that
running 3 marathons in a year is not entirely crazy. I'll also try
again to run a solo marathon in late May in for t de
Rambouillet (: I
still have to see some wallabies that are said to be living here).
Other planned runs include the Semi de Paris
(Paris half-marathon), which is twinned with the Paris marathon, 5
weeks before, as well as a much smaller one, the semi-marathon
des Lions in Bullion, in the Rambouillet forest, where I had a memorable
run on Dec 17th on a snowy day. That will make 3 mass runs in a
row, one per month, culminating to Paris marathon. Sounds like a good plan.
So, since I ran the Cologne marathon, my plans were mostly to stay
trained enough. For this, I went back to me regular schedule of one short
10km run on Saturday morning, then a longer one on Sunday morning,
plus hopefully small runs with colleagues, or alone, at lunch break.
The most interesting things to notice during this October-December
timeframe were then:
Since I released forked-daapd, I ve got a couple of emails about porting it to FreeBSD. Apart from isolating and reimplementing the parts of the code using signalfd and inotify, there isn t much work to do beside taking care of the usual libc/platform issues. However, when you don t know the codebase and don t know the APIs you re replacing, it makes it a bigger job.
So, I ve just spent a day going through FreeBSD documentation, installing FreeBSD 8.0 in qemu (because it wouldn t install on my spare machine due to a bootloader issue that s at least 5 years old ), and started porting the codebase.
A dozen or so commits later, forked-daapd builds and runs on FreeBSD.
With one caveat: the filescanner doesn t update the database on the fly when the library directory is modified. While I ve put in support for kqueue/kevent to replace inotify, it s only a stub for now. Someone will have to write the code to actually act on the events and trigger the rescans/database updates.
kqueue/kevent delivers a lot less information compared to inotify, which means there s a lot of work needed to track renames and moves. And I didn t feel like doing it.
So, FreeBSD users: send patches! :)
We're not huge users of Caltrain,
because frankly, it sucks. It's way slower than driving to San Francisco,
and by the time you've paid for two return tickets, you might as well have
driven and paid for parking.
That said, we do use it from time to time. One of the things I noticed when
we first moved over here was this intriguing box on a pole, to the side of
the normal ticket vending machine. It looked all battered and faded, kind of
like a deprecated form of ticketing that had been phased out years ago.
Except it looked too high-tech to be phased out.
Fast forward to four years later, and we're using Caltrain to get back from
SFO after returning from Atlanta for Christmas, and there's this "Don't
forget to tag off" TransLink poster inside the carriage. I'm now officially
intrigued.
I did some browsing of their website on the journey home. How could this be?
Hong Kong's MTR has the Octopus
Card. London's Tube has the Oyster Card, and
the Bay Area has TransLink? Why the
hell isn't this thing being pimped out more? It's awesome! I mentioned it to
a co-worker the other day, who's been in the Bay Area for 7 years, and he'd
never heard of it.
So I signed up for it for myself and Sarah, and two cards promptly arrived.
If you sign up with an autoload of $20 or more, there's no cost for cards
at all.
So from now on, whenever we need to ride Caltrain (or BART or Muni, which
are the public transport networks we're ever likely to use) we can just wave
these cards at something and never have to worry about a ticket ever again.
It's awesome. Apparently VTA is coming on
board with it later this year, so that'll round things out nicely.
It sounds like it's been an epic implementation, starting back in 1999, and
still rolling out ten years later. Better late than never.
The added bonus will be for our visitors. When they come, we can just give
them these cards, and they won't have to deal with BART's utterly confusing
(for casual riders) fare system.
One of my favourite things about Hong Kong was the MTR and the Octopus Card.
Now we just need awesome mass transit for the Bay Area. Somehow, I think
that's going to take even longer than TransLink.
I was driving home from a late night at work recently, and I was
almost home, when the car behind me lit up like a Christmas tree.
My immediate reaction was, "Oh crap, I'm tired and I wasn't paying attention
to my speed". So I pulled over.
To my relief, it wasn't my speed that was the problem, my left-hand tail
light was out. The officer was very nice about the whole thing, but he gave
me a fix-it
ticket.
He told me I had until I think some time in February to fix the problem,
then I had to get a police officer to sign off that it had been fixed. I
thought that was the end of it, and continued on my way home.
The other day, I got this official looking letter in the mail the Superior
Court of California, County of Santa Clara. My initial thought was, "ha, the
fools have issued me a jury summons like they did for Sarah. Can't they tell
I'm an alien? Nanoo
Nanoo."
So I open the letter and start scanning it. It's a courtesy notice. The
first actual sentences I run into start with "Failure to respond to this
notice by the due date may result in your bail being increased...". Huh?
Bail? What?
It turns out that there's a bit more to the fix-it ticket story. Not only do
I have to get a police officer to sign off that I've had the tail light
fixed, to avoid going to court, I have to pay a $25 "dismissal
fee" (also
known as California is broke and needs every dollar it can get).
Today was the first day that either of us have had any time to scratch
ourselves, so we trekked off to Toyota. The guy yanked off the cover inside
the boot, and was poking around to show us where to change the bulb, when lo
and behold, it started working again. So it was just a loose connector.
Dammit.
So now I have to track down a police officer. Preferably under the cover of
darkness, as we've tinted the front windows of the Prius, which is
apparently cause for another fix-it ticket. Although I'm struggling
to find the wording that
specifically says that.
v 1: restore to a previous or better condition 2: make brighter and prettier
v 1: do over, as of (part of) a house 2: cast or model anew
The Tool Factory closed its doors on 31st December 2009.
As you may remember, our co-op is one of few LLP co-ops and we mentioned 2amase LLP in our case study as one of the others. 2amase were closely linked to The Tool Factory LLP.
Their goodbye message lists multiple reasons for the closure, but a key part seems to be a dispute between members about the copyright of their proprietary Business Plan Writer tool. I think there s a strong resonance between cooperative principles and free and open source software, so I m not suprised that proprietary software development has contributed to failure of a co-op, but it s still a shame. Goodbye and best wishes for the future to The Tool Factory workers.
I hope to promote links between cooperatives and free software more in 2010. New Co-operatives UK head Ed Mayo mentioned it in his first speech, so the time seems right. If you d like to help put on some co-op FOSS events, leave a comment here or get involved in this open co-op discussion, please.
# lsof grep syslogd grep messages syslogd 1376 root 15w REG 3,1 99851 4605625 /var/log/messages
# cd /var/log/ # vi messages (and save the file)
root@jj:/var/log# lsof grep syslogd grep messages syslogd 1376 root 15w REG 3,1 99851 4605625 /var/log/messages~ (deleted)
unstable, a few tips might help
xserver-xorg-video-intel s users.
Current issues involve screen turning to black from time to time,
including while typing, or after a few seconds of inactivity, or after
a few minutes. Depending on the applied tips, it s sometimes possible
to switch back to a console, trigger a suspend to RAM, and then get
back to an un-black screen. (The funny think being that using s2ram
may break the Intel wireless driver, which can be fixed by then using
s2disk )
Restarting the X server is usually insufficient. Logs (be it X.Org s
or kernel s) don t show anything. Given those issues showed up with
the previous X.Org stack too, with recent kernels, it might just be a
bug there.
Various stuff that can be tried:
i915.powersave=0 on the kernel
command-line. grub2 users can add it to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX in
/etc/default/grub, and run update-grub2. Once the system is
started, it can be checked by checking the contents of the
/sys/module/i915/parameters/powersave file./etc/X11/xorg.conf: Specify
Option "DPMS" "False" in the Monitor section. DPMS enabled or
so should vanish from /var/log/Xorg.0.log.-vo flags to MPlayer, like -vo x11, doesn t seem
to help.
Have to try with some 2.6.33-rcX before reporting this bug, just
wanted to let others know about current findings
Further to my previous entry of putting the house on the market, it's now definite that I'm relocating to Cambridge to work as a self-employed application developer with Toby!Churchill.
Over the holidays I investigated how to cross-compile GTK applications for Windows, and managed to port screen-message. I also created an Inno Setup based installer for it that includes the necessary GTK DLLs. You can grab it from the screen-message homepage. The installer optionally binds screen-messages to the key combination Alt-Ctrl-S.The application failed to initialize properly (0xc000007b). Click on OK to terminate the application.on Windows, while it worked fine under WINE. It took me a while to find the cause, as there seems to be only one mention of it in the internet: One must not use MinGW s strip.exe utility on DLLs not created with MinGW, it seems. I added a make installer target to the Makefile to create the installer. If you are curious about how that works, have a look at the source.
The shiny new 0.2.1 release of
RInside, a set
of convenience classes to facilitate embedding of R
inside of C++ applications, just went out to CRAN;
sources are also at my RInside page
This is a maintenance release building on the recent
0.2.0 release
which added Windows support (provided you use the Rtools toolchain for
Windows). In this release, we changed the startup initialization so that
interactive() comes out FALSE (just as we had done for
littler just yesterday)
and with that no longer call Rf_KillAllDevices() from the destructor as we may not have
had devices in the first place. A few minor things were tweaked around the
code organisation and build process, see the ChangeLog for details.
The new release should hit CRAN mirrors tomorrow, and is (as always) available
from my machine too.
I love unicode. You should too. For the unicode-lover out there,
Joachim Breitner recently
created an xscreensaver hack called unicode and
uploaded it to debian.
[1] I didn't like the default colourscheme of black text on a white background,
so I hacked it to support colour configurability. The patches are in the
Debian package as of version 0.2-1.
If you're using xscreensaver, you can configure it using the xscreensaver
configuration dialog for a subset of the
available colours. If you
want different colours, you can edit ~/.xscreensaver by hand.
Gnome screensaver, however, does not have a configuration UI, opting
instead to present a simpler interface and also allow administrators to
lock down the screensaver configuration if desired. You can still configure
the screensaver on unlocked systems without a GUI. Here's how to do it. [2]
At a terminal:
mkdir -p .local/share/applications/screensavers
cp /usr/share/applications/screensavers/unicode.desktop .local/share/applications/screensavers
editor .local/share/applications/screensavers
Exec=/usr/lib/xscreensaver/unicode -root
Exec=/usr/lib/xscreensaver/unicode -root -background <bgcolor> -foreground <fontcolor>
Lastly, leave your laptop strategically with the screensaver on to geek out
all your friends with your unicode prowess.
[1] Thanks Joachim!
[2] There is actually another way to do it, if you prefer to interact
graphically. For the other method, get
/usr/share/applications/screensavers/unicode.desktop, edit it to your taste,
and then drag-and-drop it onto gnome-screensaver-preferences, which will
automatically put it in the right place in .local. You may need
to restart gnome-screensaver preferences in order to see the new screensaver
in the selection box. The feedback isn't very good.
Next.