Last week ended in a rather annoying way. Apparently my car had developed a flat tire overnight one night, and I left while it was still dark the next morning, and didn't notice it. I had driven on it all the way to work with it fairly flat, which damaged the tire (but not the wheel). So that needed to be replaced, and it was still under warranty from the place I bought them, which is 45 minutes away. We had a family gathering on Saturday, but couldn't be there all that long because we had to get to this place before it closed.

After we got home, there was a bit of work to do out in the yard. Jacob was tired of being indoors, so I took him out with me. He came with me as I put air in our 5-gallon air tank, and watched as I used the tank to do the monthly tire inflation on our pickup. (When you paid $75 for the vehicle, fixing a tire that only has to be inflated once a month doesn't seem all that cost-effective)

And then he got his first ride in the pickup. We were just moving around trash on the yard, and he enjoyed it. We hopped in and out several times to load or unload things. Though he was very annoyed that I didn't let him use the stick shift while I was driving. My parents said that he sounds like his dad.

We have a bedtime routine for Jacob, and I read a book to him right before putting him to bed every night. This morning, Terah got out the book that I read to Jacob last night. I was in a different room, but Terah is quite sure she heard him say "dada read this!" That's his first sentence (that one of us heard, anyway)

Some of you may have read that my relative Venita had a brain aneurism recently, and remarkably, seems to be recovering from it. Today in church, our pastor said, "I'm happy to report that this morning, Venita called me, asked me to thank everyone for all the prayers, and to ask the choir to sing up to heaven -- and they have." She's still very weak, and just sitting up to eat is a struggle, but she is improving.

Terah and I had invited my two aunts that grew up in what is now our house over to help decorate for Christmas. They were here today, and we spent all afternoon decorating, and we had spent the last couple of days finding decorations. It was a fun time, and the house looks great and feels more like home. We're happy to have had the help thinking about where to put everything, and actually putting things there. The tree isn't up yet, but it will be soon. We're thinking that it will be nice to be decorated early this year, rather than our usual just-before-Christmas decoration event!

It was neat to hear a few stories about how my grandma decorated the place; she died when I was young, and I don't remember her. Jacob, of course, was in on all the action. He watched, played, and threatened to make the nativity scene quite unpeaceful, but more interesting to a 13-month-old.

The Goerzen Christmas will be here this year. The last time Goerzens celebrated Christmas in this house was 7 years ago -- a month or so before I met Terah, as it happens. It seems so long ago in some ways. The house has changed; the 1970s yellow wallpaper is gone, as is the drop-ceiling tile that grandpa had installed to save on the heating bills, as is his wood stove and the metal tractors that he had in his closet that I used to play with when I was little.

But as I sit here typing this post, I'm looking at the spot where I used to play air hockey on grandpa's table during family gatherings -- and whenever else I could convince grandpa to get out his air hockey table for a game. Over in the corner is where he always had his Christmas tree, with the woven wheat ornaments my grandma had made. Terah decided that corner would be perfect for the tree, before she ever knew where it used to be.

Here's a picture I took at that Christmas 7 years ago:



Sitting here right now, looking at all that has changed, and all that hasn't... 7 years wasn't that long ago after all. I'm sure this year will be the first of many happy Christmases to be celebrated in this place.

Recently, GozRita unveiled the names of our two Falleretes majors for 2008's Falles festivities. All the free newspapers did some extensive coverage, with reports on who they are and what they do. Qu Valencia interviewed the little Fallera major, and then posted this:

Little Victoria learns Valencian So, Victoria Bl zquez speaks English and Valencian "nearly perfectly". Great! I think having newspapers treat Valencian as if it were just another foreign language that students are forced to learn is a great example of the dark future our language will face in just a few generations.

What a week. Most notably, I am still in a state of partial disbelief that my case with Blue Cross Blue Shield is now on a path toward resolution and I don t have do battle with them, or at least in the same vigorous, soul-crushing way I have been engaged in since May (they still have not paid all the bills but at least part of them are resolved). But the very same day that I received the good news about BCBS, I received not so good news from my dermatologist about the black-blue mole that lies right under my left eye. He wants it gone, removed. So my whole fight with BCBS concerned claims over pre-existing conditions related to my moles. My claim was that I never had a problem with them until I had BCBS insurance and that is indeed the case. Soon after I first started having problems, I went on mole patrol and found a suspicious mole on my sister, which turned out to be melanoma. Now whenever I see a dermatologist, they all say, given my family history, given I grew up in the tropics, and given the odd size and very dark color of my mole, that it has to go. In fact the last dermatologist said with the firmest of tones: there is no doubt in my mind that it must be removed. The words stung because, well, I am pretty attached to the mole. I have lived with it for my whole life and it is fundamentally, even if somewhat mysteriously, linked to my sense of self. If it goes, I would feel like a very important part of me would also vanish. On more prosaic grounds, I can t help think that part of the drive to remove such a spot is just part of somewhat unhealthy social trend toward measuring most everything in finer and finder gradations of risk. Given that this mole is on my face and I see my face at least 2x a day in the mirror, I would probably catch anything if it started to change but given our risk society it is unsurprising that every American dermatologist keeps saying it is time to bid adieu to it. Given my background in medical anthropology I can t help conceptualize all this advice within these much larger social trends and then I go back and forth endlessly in my head as to whether I should remove it because it is safe and right and sound or whether I am caving in to somewhat irrational trend toward the risk management of everything. Finally I fear my insurance company again. Though I have a good job and decent insurance, I may not have good enough insurance for what this procedure entails.
Because of the size and location of the mole (large and close to my eye), if removed it must be done by a plastic surgeon. And plastic surgery in the US and plastic surgery in NYC costs a very pretty penny. While I would plan on getting pre-approval for the surgery, I somehow have the feeling that they will not pay the full cost and I am going to be left with another bill. And I am trying to stop the unnecessary onslaught of bills. So should it stay or should it go? I bet that I will lean toward the latter but not without a lot more thoughts, internal cries of resistance, and sense that even if I decide it is the best thing, I will lose a small piece of myself once removed

flickr page

A few days after the Chicago Marathon in record-heat, I was wondering just how much more I had been slowing down, and exactly when during the course of the race this occurred. Bigger races like Chicago provide the so-called 'splits' for every five kilometer segment. Helpfully, they also keep these with the archived results which are all accessible via the web. So it was easy enough to collect a sequence of time such as '0:22:34', '0:45:30', ... and so on. And thanks to R, my data slicing and dicing and visualizing tool of choice, it was just a handful of lines to produce the chart below. The chart covers my four Chicago marathons (2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007) as well as Boston (2007) --- the infamous '27.2 mile marathon' seems to have dropped off the net, and the smaller Sunburst does not have 5k split times. The chart shows a few things quite nicely:

• The first marathon (dark blue squares) shows a marked slowdown after km 25.
• The following year (medium blue circles) a similar yet more moderate slowdown appeared 5 km later.
• The next year (blue triangles) the pace was remarkably stable without noticeable slowdowsn -- yielding the 'BQ' time.
• The Boston race (smaller green circles) was more prudent due to weather conditions, and a lingering cold, and I managed to finish much stronger than I ran the middle part.
• Chicago this year (orange circles) was a different story: too fast at the beginning, a cautious middle similar to the Boston race but two fairly significant slowdowns after 25 and 35 km, followed by some acceleration right before the finish.

While it was a tough race, I clearly ran a lot slower than previously, in particular between 25 km and 40 km. So there.

Hmm. Quick update of life: Last weekend Leif pushed out a third tooth. This weekend, I fed him for the first time. So far it's been Angie actually putting things in his mouth, but on a visit to Cha Ya, I fed him some miso soup. Totally fun. Our current experiment with him is to get him to sleep at night without nursing to sleep. It used to be that I could get him to sleep just by lying next to him in a dark room, and lately I haven't been able to. So, he's now nursing just before and then switching to cuddling to sleep. It's not ideal but it at least moves us from something only Angie can do to something both of us or a babysitter can do.

That's right, we're starting to think about babysitters. We don't know people here well enough that we can leave him with, but when we do, baby, there's a bottle of port with our name on it. (Yes, it's the same bottle of port I got for my 30th birthday. I didn't want to pass a sip for each of the 100 people that were there at the time, and the next major event that came along was Angie getting pregnant)

A quick geek moment: current Ubuntu Gutsy now suspends and resumes on both of my laptops with reasonable consistency. For a long time, I could suspend my Toshiba once, and the second time, it would lose keyboard but that seems to be fixed. My work laptop has suspended and resumed generally fine all along, but Network Manager still occasionally forgets the settings. This is really annoying when there's a pile of 802.1x stuff to key in. I can't reliably reproduce it, but maybe during the next Gnome cycle, I'll try to figure out why it does that. Other than that it's working really well. The wine that's in Gutsy claims to support iTunes, but it doesn't. Even if it did, it probably wouldn't work with the iPhone, but I'm sure that'll get fixed sometime. Or perhaps the lawsuit will yield something useful and make hacking it safe. Given that it's pretty trivial to get the browser into a state where it's worth power cycling the phone, I'm not willing to forgo updates in the meantime. Assuming I could do one, that is.

Lastly a happy Thanksgiving to everyone! We were attempting to meet a pile of people this weekend, but amazingly enough 4 different people ran into trouble getting here. It'll be a cozy event then.

Thanks, Adrian, for recommending Dark City, I really enjoyed it. Of the films I’ve watched lately, I enjoyed Bound the most.

On the bus yesterday I noticed a graffiti etching clearly left by someone employed by IBM. In fact the guy in the row in front had an IBM tee-shirt on, and I suspect he is the culprit, or possibly one of the OzLabs people. The photo is crap (it's hard to take a photo of a blukhead in the dark from the middle of the back seat on a crowded bus with a phone camera without arousing suspicion) but it clearly says

   I
(heart)
 POWER5

Check out my CSI style image enhancement: If you're ever on Sydney Buses bus number 2660 it can probably still be seen on the driver side window on the back seat. Maybe what Itanium needs isn't higher clock speeds, lower power, faster FSB, etc., but a concerted tagging effort on public transport around the world!

Since the closure of SoFlow and adding myself to LinkedIn, I've been thinking a bit about Professional Associations and using Social Networks (SNs) for business. I've not worked out my answers, so this is a "dear lazyweb, what pieces of this jigsaw am I missing?" post. Much of the recent mainstream news has been about the legal problems of SNs - for example, see BBC: Web networkers 'at risk of fraud' (which was also in items on a recent Click show on BBC World and News24) and BBC: Facebook site faces fraud claim - or about how they could Save The World, like BBC: Social net offers new perspective I think there's a bigger problem which will stop SNs making a deep-change to online activity. Each time a SN like SoFlow closes, it wastes some resources of its members. I'm starting to side with other developers in being tired of seeing my input turn to bitrot, through buggy software or buggy business models. I'm not alone: see Gunnar Wolf: On social networks for example. A good idea seems to be on Slashdot: It's Time for Social Networks to Open Up but how? Each SN seems to guard its dark corners as vital elements of its business model. Should we look to our Professional Associations to create new Open Social Networks (OSNs)? After all, SNs aren't the core money-makers for professional associations. But, the biggest problem with Professional Associations is picking a trustworthy one - one which will do what it says on the tin, instead of taking your subscription, then undermining you. Consider the British Computer Society and its OSSG License: how many of its members really wanted another software copyright licence? Fortunately, it was spotted - Volunteer brickbat thrower needed in London (Tuesday 24th 6pm) - and the Report from BCS OSSG meeting on a new FS license suggests the negative feedback was loud and clear, so hopefully we won't see that again. If I was a BCS member, I'd probably not renew after helping to fund that harmful activity. librarian.net: choosing your battles and choosing your professional associations talks a little about some library associations as a sort of case study which many will recognise as familiar, but there's an interesting comment from Blake there:

"I think there's an association out there for everyone."

Is there? What association is out there for liberal hackers and webmasters? I don't think I've found it yet. So, should we be looking at ourselves, rather than existing professional associations? Can we do Open Social Networks peer-to-peer in a meaningful way? Are we already doing it with blog feeds? How should we expand on that? Although I disagree with the conclusion that using another Social Network site with an uncertain business model is How to succeed with social networking, the article also mentions that

"social networking is in its infancy and that it will not really get underway until we have portable profiles and interconnectivity"

In other words, it's our revolution - let's steal it back. (Update: 2007-09-27: 1 comment)

Unfortunately I will have to disconnect my FONera and buy a real WiFi router to replace it because that small box is a glitchy piece of crap compared to every other WiFi router out there. The killer: if the LaFonera can not connect the FON authentication servers, then it thinks that there is no network available and does not let me use my Internet. There is even no way to force it to pass connections to outside which is required in many cases such as partial network failures (when you can not get to FON servers for some reason, but rest of the Internet works just fine) and for web signup pages that some ISP’s use to login users to their network. And you can not use another PC for that, because it records the MAC address. The box frequently freezes and the DNS server stops responding. I can continue working by editing my local DNS server settings to the DNS of my ISP, but that is no way to work! The damn thing has no idea about uPNP which is a must nowadays for peer-to-peer transactions. And lastly there is absolutely no way for me to fix any of this because the FON keeps a tight lock on the firmware. In the time when all good software and community projects go to the open side, the FON moves further and further to the dark side and that is disturbing. I consider this a permanent failure on FON’s part that negates my ability to hold my side of the Fonera promise. It would be so much easier if I could ssh into the thing - ping stuff, traceroute stuff, put some kind of flag file to say that network in fact is there, release or refresh the DHCP lease or even restart the damn thing remotely. Nothing of this is available.

Russell Coker, commenting on my last blog, and apparently after exploring some of the links stemming from the SFWA kerfuflle, apparently stumbled on a post from former SFWA VP Howard V. Hendrix, where he took the amazing position (for a SF writer) that he hated the using the internet, and that people who posted their stories on the web for free download were web-scabs, has taken the position that since such comments were an attack on our (Open Source Developer’s) community, that he would resolve “to not buy any more Sci-Fi books until I have read all the freely available books that I want to read”. Obviously, that’s his choice, but while I don’t have much respect for SFWA the organization, and certainly not for their choice in past and current vice presidents, there’s another side of the story here. First of all, Dr. Hendrix comments are not the official position of the SFWA, and there are many others who are SFWA members who would very strongly disagree with both the attitudes of Dr. Hendrix as well as the ham-handed DMCA pseudo-invocation by Dr. Burt. In addition, to quote Rick Cook:

The first thing you ve got to understand about the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America is that it isn t. Like the Holy Roman Empire, which in Voltaire s phrase was neither holy, Roman nor an empire, SFWA is not an organization of science fiction and fantasy writers. While some of the leading SF and Fantasy writers belong, the vast majority of the members are people who barely meet SFWA s extremely lax publication requirements. They are not professional SF or Fantasy writers in any meaningful sense of the term and many of them haven t published a word of either science fiction or fantasy in years.

Secondly, there are plenty of Science Fiction writers that do really understand this issue quite well. In addition Rick Cook, whom I recommended in my last post, another example of a Science Function writer who has penned a very cogent series of articles about copyright, science fiction, and the business issues of being a SFF writer is Eric Flint. I strongly recommend his series, “Salvos Against Big Brother”,which includes a back-to-the basics examination of copyright quoting and reprinting two speeches by British Parliamentarian Thomas McCauley in 1841. Definitely worth a read, and again a demonstration that there exists Science Fiction authors that aren’t stuck in the dark ages; few (at least it is to be hoped) are like Dr. Hendrix. Eric Flint is also a senior editor for Baen Books (read more about the founder, Jim Baen here). Baen makes all of its titles available in e-book form without DRM, and many of its authors have agreed to make their books available completely free of charge. Eric Flint does so for all or most of his books shortly after they are published in mass-market paperback form; others only make a few of their books available, typically the first or second books in a series (in the hopes you will buy the rest of their books) — a wise strategy, as he explains in one of his Salvos Against Big Brother columns. More importantly, I strongly believe that if we enjoy an artist’s works, we should support the artist. That’s why I’ve directly reached out and given money to musicians, authors, and Debian release engineers. (Yes, that last was controversial, but to me and personal ethics, it’s all of the same piece.) Is patronage the right way to support musicians? Well, it’s one way, and I’ve always been fond of the “distributed patronage” model where we use the Internet to allow a large number of people to each contribute to support an artist’s work. The Big Meow is a good example how it might work. (By the way, to people who are wondering what is happening with The Big Meow — I have very recently pinged Diane, and she’s working on it. Between health and family emergencies, the last 12 months have thrown a lot of delays into her writing schedule.) Are there other models other than patronage that might work? Well, there is the traditional one — just buying the author’s books. But what if we don’t want a dead-tree copy and just want to be able to read it on our Irex Iliad, and the book wasn’t published by Baen Books, or one of the few enlightened publishers who make non-DRM’d eBooks available? That’s a harder question. Personally, I don’t find “Copyright Theft” immoral per se. Illegal, yes, but immoral only if I haven’t done something to materially support the author. If I’ve purchased a new copy of a book, and the eBook version isn’t available via legal means, I don’t believe it is immoral to download it from a site like scribd so I can read it on my laptop. Of course, that brings up other questions, such as what if the book is out of print (because the publisher don’t think it’s commercially viable to reissue the books), the author is dead, and the widow needs money? Lots of hard questions, and no good answers…. But in any case, I think it is the right thing to do to support those authors we care about as we can, and boyotting all SFF books isn’t necessarily appropriate or helpful.

Sarah and finally got around to seeing the latest Harry Potter movie tonight. One of the trailers before it was for The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising. It was spine-tingling to think that my favourite series from Year Eight is going to be a movie. I'm curious as to whether they're going to make individual movies for each book of The Dark Is Rising Sequence, or try and cram it all into the one movie, and how true to the book (or books) it'll end up being. The trailer already raises doubts it's going to be that true to the books, but it'll still be cool to see how it turns out.

Since I've never bloged about movies before, here's the “best of”, in more or less random order and from the top of my head.

• Brazil (Not the Love Conquers All version, though.)
• Kill Bill (Distinctly Vol. 1. Al Hirt is a hero on the soundtrack, too)
• Tron
• Lost Highway
• Twelve Monkeys
• Pulp Fiction
• Dark City
• Chat Noir, Chat Blanc (Pit Bull Terrier! That song alone...)
• Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
• Dune (but only because the book outstanding already.)
• Minority Report
• Dead Man
• A Clockwork Orange (Heavy, though.)
• Iris (one of the very few movies that really got to me)
• The Meaning of Life
• Dogville
• The Great Dictator

Not quite on the list, but still worth mentioning.

• The Matrix
• The Lord of the Rings (impossible to separate them out)
• Snatch
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
• Helvetica

• Coffee's Bitter Mystery
• Slap the Monk, eh?
• Thirteen Blog Clich s
  I'm doing pretty good.
• For Now We See As Through A Glass Darkly

A little mini-meme got started on August 1 when Ben Bolker posted the following code to the r-devel list (and here I substituted the more standard '-' assignment operator for the less standard though-now permitted '='):

x <- readLines("http://developer.r-project.org/R.svnlog.2007")
rx <- x[grep("^r",x)]
who <- gsub(" ","",sapply(strsplit(rx,"\\ "),"[",2))
twho <- table(who)
twho["ripley"]/sum(twho)

In five lines (that could be shortened to three at the expense of some readibility), the SVN log for R is downloaded directly from the website, the revision authors are extraced and then tabulated by submitter. The relative percentage of Brian Ripley is found to be a staggering 74.8% -- or about three times as much as the other fifteen committers combined. Smokes. [ Oh, and for those who don't know him, he's also got a day job which presumably entails looking after his graduate students at Oxford. Who knows, he may even teach. Kidding aside, he's actually one of the nicest persons you'll ever meet in real life. ] Now yesterday, Simon Jackman who had at first simply repeated Ben's analysis on his own blog followed up with a nice analysis (albeit typeset in a way that rendered the code inoperational, which has now been fixes) that creates both a histogram and a dotplot of commits per hour of the day. Omitting Ben's code which Simon reuses, we have the following for histogram and dotchart:

tod <- unlist(sapply(rx,function(x)strsplit(x,split=" ")[[1]][6]))
tod <- tod[who=="ripley"]
tz <- sub(pattern=".*(-[0-9] 4 ).*",replacement="\\1",x=rx)
tz <- tz[who=="ripley"]
tz <- as.numeric(tz)/100
offset <- 3600*tz
z <- strptime(tod,format="%H:%M:%S")
hist(z,"hours",main="Ripley Commit Times in SVN TZ")
h <- z - offset
h <- format(h,format="%H")
h <- factor(as.numeric(h), levels=0:23)
dotchart(table(h), main="Ripley Commit Times, By Hour in GMT",
         labels=paste(0:23,1:24,sep=":"))

This extracts the commit times, subsets to the ones by Prof. Ripley, extracts the timezones component (as strptime seemingly doesn't do that which is a pain), extracts the tz-less time via strptime into a variable 'z' for which the histogram is drawn. He then corrects the times by the tz offset expressed in seconds, formats is as hour of the day and turns it into a 'factor' (an R data type for qualitative variables which may be ordered as is the case here) and draws a dotplot. This results in the following chart: Now, nobody has looked at the time series. So we correct this and add the following:

## rather extract both  date and time
dat <- unlist(sapply(rx, function(x)  
  txt <- strsplit(x,split=" ")[[1]]
  paste(txt[5], txt[6])
 ))
## subset on Prof Ripley
dat <- dat[who == "ripley"]
## and convert to POSIXct, correcting by tz as well
datpt <- as.POSIXct(strptime(dat,format="%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S")) - offset
## turn into zoo -- we use a constant series of ones as each
## committ is taken as a timestamped event
datzoo <- zoo(1, order.by=datpt)
## and use zoo to aggregate into commits per date
daily <- aggregate(datzoo, as.Date(index(datzoo)), sum)
## now plot as grey bars
plot(daily, col='darkgrey', type='h', lwd=2,
     ylab="Nb of SVN commits, three-week median",
     xlab="R release dates 2.5.0 and 2.5.1 shown in orange",
     main="The amazing Prof. Ripley")
## mark the two R releases of 2007
abline(v=c(as.Date("2007-04-24"),as.Date("2007-06-28")),col='orange',lwd=1.5)
## and do a quick centered rolling median
lines(rollmedian(daily, 21, align="center"), lwd=3)

This extracts both date and time, creates a proper R time object (a so-called POSIXct type) from it, fills a zoo ('the' magic class for time series) object with it, uses zoo to aggregate commits per day and plots those in a barchart-alike (I know, I know, ...) plot to which we add the two releases as well as a rolling and centered three-week median (as a real quick hack rather than a proper smooth). This shows that Prof Ripley averaged about ten commits a day before and after the release of R 2.5.0, and that he has slowed down ever so slightly since then to end up at around a mere seven commits a day. Every day. For the seven-plus months we looked at. So, anyone for analysing his r-help posting frequencies ?

As people who have seen my laptop know, I use the wonder Darkilouche theme by Jakub. To complement it I'm after some decent black and white (ideally #F5F5F5 as the primary colour) icons for Network Manager, seahorse-agent and so on. I just tried redrawing the NM status icons in Inkscape, and basically it's obvious that I should never attempt to draw an icon ever again. I thought that the High Contrast icon theme would have what I want, but it doens't cover Network Manager yet. Does anyone know any suitable icons? NP: Backup 01, TRS-80

Christer Edwards over at Ubuntu Tutorials has written a short tutorial on Devil's Pie. Thanks Christer! Now if only people would stop using a hack I wrote several years ago and fix the real problems... NP: The Last Flowers from the Darkness, Mark Van Hoen

For a while now, Iceweasel/Firefox comes with built-in phishing protection, which is undoubtedly a good thing given the number of idiots using the Web these days. But the implementation is crap. If you surf to a phishing site, such as this test site, the page loads as you would expect and then the first strange things happen:

• the mouse movement becomes sluggish as the browser increases its virtual memory needs from 466Mb to a measely 912Mb, while the RSS jumps from 134Mb to 423Mb. The entire computer hangs for 2-3 seconds whenever I drag the mouse pointer off the window. I am not saying that my window manager (fluxbox) or Xorg or anything else on this machine is flawless, but this problem only ever appears with Iceweasel/Firefox. Anyway, it's impossible to follow any links on the page, the mouse pointer does not even change.
• suddenly, an icon and a little triangle appear at the right side of the URL bar.
• about 7 seconds later, the rest of the balloon appears, alerting me to the dangers of phishing attacks. Did people think those things are so extraordinarily beautiful that they had to be copied from Windows (or Apple, or whatever)?
• another 5 seconds later, the webpage darkens.
• with an entirely unresponsive browser, I have no other choice but to try to leave the page, which is easier said than done: Hitting Ctrl-W to close the tab does not have any effect for almost 25 seconds; then the page was finally gone and the system restored itself to normal.

I get similar performance problems on the StaTravel website, and on map.search.ch, it almost always crashes. Thank you, Firefox developers, for bringing the joys of the Windows world to Linux! NP: Dream Theater: Metropolis Pt 2: Scenes from a Memory Update: several people have responded that they cannot reproduce the problem. I thus created a new profile, uninstalled all system-wide extensions, removed all plugins such that about:plugins was empty and tried again. The problems persist, although I think the lags are not quite as long as before and the memory consumption is obviously down. Maybe this is amd64-related? Update: It's not amd64-related, as several users have pointed out. Update: still no luck, but James Andrewart pointed me to this bug report, which might improve things a bit:

"The new protocol specifies a single lookup algorithm for all tables, rather than having per-table logic. This lookup logic was moved in to the db service from the javascript. URL canonicalization was moved completely into C++ too. The DB service can now handle a query from a raw URI, which will be needed for malware blocking."

Being a good Debian user

Notes: the bulk of this article was written on the 17th; updates were added in later; this article is really long, you might want to read it in more sessions

Debian's arm port uses hardfloat. This means that apps like rrdtool (graph function) take ages to run because there is no floating point unit. In order to make this faster you'll want to use soft-float emulation. But this support needs to be present in all depended upon libs, including libc, which is an ABI incompatible change which would break all binaries. I can't use the yet-in-development-and-unofficial armel port since the machine has to be up and running almost 24/7 and I can't afford downtime.

So what to do?

Well, obviously use another soft-float enable libc, like uclibc, in parallel withe the hrad-float enabled libc. Debian Sid contains uclibc development libs, but building the whole toolchain is a pain. There is no real support in the distro itself and building on the arm machine is kind of out of the question. I tried a little in a debootstrapped chroot on the native machine, but this was a pain and I was stuck tring to figure out how to disable whitles and bells for rrdtool since I didn't needed any of the perl, tcl or python support. So I stopped, went to bed and decided I'll continue the next day (the day I wrote the biggest part of this article). The future looked dark, trying to build a softfloat uclibc rrdtool on a system that wasn't prepared for that and from which softfloat was pulled away somewhere during etch's development stage....

Deciding to go with the competition - native building

From link to link I found out that gentoo has arm-softfloat-linux-uclibc port, among others, so I decided to use that on the target machine (a NSLU2) in a chroot. Well I stumbled on the low computing power, when I tryed to emerge sync the tree. I gave up un that and tried to use emerge-websync. It looked better, but I didn't got too far with this either since the machine ended up being overloaded, with figures varying from 3 to 8 for the load average (all of them).

Deciding to go with the competition - cross building

It was time to bring in the big guns and I decided I was going to crossbuild those binaries, probably statically since it meant lower risk for things to break on the target machine.


Since I observed that gentoo has a nice tool called crossdev which actually uses emerge (the equivalent of dpkg+apt in Debian world) to make the cross chain tool and saw that they have some really good documentation and a development version of an arm-softfloat-linux-uclibc, I decided I could .

So I went on and downloaded the latest stage3 tarball for x86 (so I can have a gentoo system to start with), made all the necessary things and created a gentoo chroot. I emerge sync-ed, updated portage, installed crossdev (following the nice instructions on the gentoo embedded site about the subject). This took a while, but it went like a breeze. I made the necessary arangements to be able to cross build packages (setting SYSROOT, making that nice xmerge script).

As my goal was to make an arm-softfloat-linux-uclibc binary for rrdtool I tried directly to xmerge rrdtool (of course, first just pretended -p).

Finding bugs in the packages

First bug

All went fine until I found freetype which for some weird reason detected the i486-pc-linux-gnu-gcc compiler as i486-pc-linux-gnu (observe the missing trailing -gcc). I looked over the logs and determined that the CC_BUILD environment variable was not set. So exported CC_BUILD=i486-pc-linux-gnu-gcc and xmerged the library.

(While trying to fix this issue I entered #gentoo-embedded on freenode and actually met Yuri Vasilev, whom I had met in Edinburgh, at DebConf. Look for the video about Ligusk if you are interested about his project to make a Debian like distribution based on Gentoo. It was nice to meet a friendly "face" - as much you can say that online.)


I reported the bug (already there is a patch, I haven't tested, but looks ok) and the workaround in the gentoo bugzilla... after creating an account, since I never used that BTS before.

Second bug

Next pain was libart_lgpl whose upstream, for some comfortability reason chose to detect the target type sizes (and basically ignoring inttypes.h) with a small program which was built with the cross compiler which later was supposed to be ran on the host. I don't think is necessary to say that i failed, of course, since the binary was an ARM binary, while the host was an x86 machine. Yupee! not.

Ok, two bugs, no softfloat rrdtool yet. I reported this second bug and tried to work around the issue. Since I didn't really used too much a gentoo system, I wanted to know details and what possibilities I had. I got some really nice tips from "solar" (aka Ned Ludd) on #gentoo-embedded. He pointed out that while building a package one can press CTRL+z, do some stuff, like altering the Makefile.in file in the build directory and then fg back. Ok, cool.

All I need now is somebody with direct access to an arm machine that can compile and run for me the program in question. seanius on #debian-devel was kind enough to do this for me and, to my surprize, I got the same output header file as I got in the host x86 chroot. But that detail is not important, let's just compile that rrdtool. Well, first libart_lgpl...

Ok, I CTRL+Z-ed the build process just after the configure stage ended, cd-ed into the build directory, I tampered with the Makefile.in file and changed that line from

./gen_art_config > gen_art_config.h

into

cp /gen_art_config.h.arm gen_art_config.h

Haha! In your face! Ok, nasty did was done so I fg-ed and went on confident that I will get my hands on that rrdtool very soon. The package build ended succesfully, without any other suprizes, so I went for the graal!


xmerging rrdtool, the bugs don't stop

xmerge -v rrdtool

Bla, bla, bla.... bla, bla, bla, what do you know, there are a few IEEE math function tests in the configuration script of rrdtool. They failed. I don't know why, but I have a feeling that this should be happening on softfloat or even maybe the rrdtool source is not that cross compile aware. I didn't care that much, so I did what I knew best, tampering with an ongoing build.

This time is was a little bit harder to catch since I had to wait for the source to unpack (well, there is a larger frame, but that is the rough timing) and at that moment CTRL+Z the build.

I didn't had much time to waste, so after looking shortly over the tests I realized I should just ignore the error and look for the "failing command" that was interrupting my beloved build. Muhahah!

Thank God for verbose error messages, I could find the place fast and chaged the two "exit 1" statements into two harmless 'echo "Ignoring IEEE math errors"', sic. I had to do this a few times since I got the timping wrong, at some point I got the syntax wrong (at which point I remembered the cp trick I did earlier and saved the modified file in /configure.rrdtool )...

xmerging rrdtool and the 4th bug

After passing past this stage, I got a compilation error which, judging from the command, meant that the linker tried to link the target (arm) binary against the host (x86) libraries.

Oooook, this is not going to stop me! I look at the Makefile.in to try understand why this happened and then realized it wasn't worth it for me to try to fix it the right way. So I cheated once again! Muhaha, I just ran some useful commands which I'll let you feast your eyes to:

ln -sf /usr/arm-softfloat-linux-uclibc/usr/lib/libart_lgpl_2.so /usr/lib/
ln -sf /usr/arm-softfloat-linux-uclibc/usr/lib/libpng12.a /usr/lib/
ln -sf /usr/arm-softfloat-linux-uclibc/usr/lib/libfreetype.so /usr/lib/

Ok, good to go. Of course, I had to stop again the build to copy the "fixed" configure script that ignored IEEE math errors, but that is already history.

And, believe it or not, actually the build succeded. I had a cross built rrdtool using shared libraries built against softfloat ucllibc. No guarantees about its correctness, but it built!

This is when I decided to start writing this article.

Still there are things to do

I will have to do a few things before being happy about the victory:

• check that all the resulted binaries are indeed ARM ELF files, and not Intel x86. It appears the shared libs are already.
• done, they are (checked the next day)
• figure out qpkg (is a utility from portage-utils which seems to be a way to make binary packages) to package somehow the result of this work or maybe just ignore it and use plain cp
• see how I can fit together both the softfloat uclibc binaries and the native debian binaries on the same filesystem, including ld.so configuration...
• but I fear this will be a nightmare, so I might decide to go with static compilation of rrdtool, which I don't think it will be quite straight forward given the experiences describe above; there could be also the size issue to take into account, and since the NSLU2 has only 32MB of RAM, this could be problematic
• I think I'll have to use a statically linked binary after all (note added late, the second day)
  
• see if the rrdtool binary really works and if all the work payed off, performance wise - it should, taking into account what I have heard from wookey during the debconf7 talk about the armel (warning, 73MB ogg file) port
• be happy with the solution I got or wait for the Debian armel port to catch up and switch to that asap
• if I'll have to do the switch I'll probably think of ways of migrating the whole system from arm to armel, and not to reinstall everything; this might prove useful for the whole debian armel port, when people are working on migration plans, since arm will be deprecated in favour of armel