Since 3 weeks, half of my worktime (but i don't have worked that much, due to another real life occupation) has been dedicated to setting up a meeting for the OCaml community in Paris. This is the first public meeting about OCaml in France. It will be located at ENST (Telecom Paris) on January, the 26th 2008. This should be an occasion for the european OCaml community to meet in the real life and to discuss the hottest current topics of OCaml. I hope that this meeting will help people to begin creating a more consistent community around OCaml. In fact, the community already exists -- but it will be a time to meet several members that has never meet before... More information and subscribtion

After 2 weeks of my new life, i just found time again to write this entry. I think that some people were enjoying the new year when my wife and I were also waiting for our baby. He is born at 3:30 am on 2008/01/01. Happy new year!

I spend quite a long time to fully configure my new Thinkpad X60s laptop. This will be my work computer and i wish to use Debian Etch on it. Since it is for my job, i want to use a stable debian release. The aim of this laptop is to always have something that works -- to keep focus on my job. The configuration was tricky because there is a lot of people reporting that everything works with this laptop, but not a lot of people describing problems they encounter. Here is a list: Sound:

   hda_intel: azx_get_response timeout, switching to polling mode 
   hda_intel: azx_get_response timeout, switching to single_cmd mode 

It prevents to have the sound working. The problem is related to the modem. You need to be sure that the modem is enabled in the BIOS. ipw3945: The WIFI driver of etch doesn't work well. To fix this, you must get the version 1.2.2 of ipw3945-source and rebuild it with module-assistant. I also use firmware-ipw3945 from unstable (v0.7) but I am not sure this is a firmware issue. network-manager disconnects every 10 seconds or so: This bug was pretty annoying. The wifi connection was good with wpasupplicant alone (or at least seems to be OK). With network-manager-gnome i keep getting messages about connection and disconnection every 10 seconds. The solution is to remove everything which is related to bluetooth. This really improves the situation a lot! (i.e. i am not having disconnection messages for at least the time i am writing this blog entry).

 apt-get remove --Purge bluez-utils bluetooth

in file /etc/modprobe.d/myblacklist:

 blacklist bluetooth

and run:

 update-initramfs -u

"linux is an HDD killer": You need to copy /etc/acpi/start.d/90-hdparm.sh from unstable and place it in /etc/acpi/ suspend resume start .d. This prevents an increase of the Load_Cycle_Count. Now the laptop seems stable, the wifi connection is up and running -- let's start working (again).

Yesterday, i decided to activate the so-called RAID 0 support on my P4P800 mainboard, to increase the performance of my 2 Seagate SATA disk -- bought for this purpose. The first unfortunate event was to discover that there is 3 levels of hardware RAID: controller, accelerator and fake. Of course fake RAID is not the better category and it is the one provided by my mainboard. Once, i have understood that i must use the package dmraid to activate my RAID, i fall into a syslog flood of messages concerning "attempt to access beyond end of device". The problem is simple, the partition table are stored on the first disk of the RAID. Linux believes that he can reach the end of the device defined in the partition table of the first disk. But since, the partition table is for the whole RAID, it cannot access the last partition. In fact, the solution is quite simple and described here . You must add files to udev and hal rules to ignore the partition found in the partition table of the first disk: /etc/udev/rules.d/000dmraid.rules

KERNEL=="sda1", OPTIONS+="ignore_device"
KERNEL=="sda2", OPTIONS+="ignore_device"
KERNEL=="sda3", OPTIONS+="ignore_device"

(where sda1/2/3 are the partition stored on my RAID) /etc/hal/fdi/preprobe/000dmraid.fdi <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<deviceinfo version="0.2">
  <device>
    <match key="scsi.model" string="ST3160811AS">
      <merge key="info.ignore" type="bool">true</merge>
    </match>
  </device>
</deviceinfo>

(where ST3160811AS is my two Seagate disks) You should not ignore the whole disk in udev -- as i think it is suggested in the spanish web page (i don't speak spanish so i really don't know what it explains). After adding this two files, you must update your initrd:

update-initramfs -u

If you have problem with this configuration (you have ignored too much things), you can go back to the former initrd from grub command line, by editing the menu entry and editing the standard initrd to add ".bak" at the end.

At least, i got what i want:

~$ sudo hdparm -Tt /dev/mapper/isw_dhgabfaiad_RAID_Volume1
/dev/mapper/isw_dhgabfaiad_RAID_Volume1:
 Timing cached reads:   1354 MB in  2.00 seconds = 676.78 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:  426 MB in  3.01 seconds = 141.51 MB/sec

Not that bad for an old P4.

This week-end, i decided to copy a collection of CD-R back to my hard drive, to make new copies. Everyone knows, that a CD-R only live for 10 years. After this date, the data on it are more difficult to read. So it's the time to know what brand of CD-R has the greatest lifetime. I begin to write CD-R sometimes around 1997. From this date, i keep using the same scheme to do this task: use high-end CD recorder (Plextor), good quality disc, always write at the minimum speed (ranging from 4x to 16x for the latest CD-R -- because sometime you cannot go under a defined speed), keep data on a separate partition to prevent buffer underun (10 years ago this was mandatory). The way i do this has almost not changed, expect maybe for the buffer underun, which doesn't happen anymore on modern hardware. They have been in the same place at the same date. They have always been kept out of direct sunlight exposure, in 18-25 C environment (i.e. near my computer). I didn't often use them. None have "scratches" on theirs surface. I have written the name of the CD with a permanent marker (Stabilo). For reading back the data I use a DVD-Recorder (Plextor PX-716UF) that can lower its speed if there are too many errors during the read. The result is somehow what you should think:

• Verbatim CD-R DataLifePlus metalAzo (blue surface): lost something like 5 files on 50 CD-R
• Kodak DS (gold surface): 0 lost on 2 CD-R
• Memorex CD-R (gold surface): 20 files lost on 2 CD-R

The Verbatim and Kodak can be read at full speed. I think the data on this two media are really well conservated. Even, if i have lost some data from the Verbatim medium, i think it is a really good rate for a 10 year old CD-R. The Kodak medium seems also good, but i don't have enough of them to be sure that i won't have the same error rate as Verbatim. Memorex CD-R is by far the worst media. I think all the data i have on these CD-R are lost. It takes me something like 1 hour to conclude that the first disc i try was totally destroyed. At the time i have bought Verbatim medium, it was the best medium around. I gave a try to the Memorex medium to reduce the price per unit. Conclusion: i have lost 15 CD-R with their content because 10 years ago i was thinking that i will save 2-3F (0,5 ) by replacing Verbatim with Memorex...

This past couple of weeks saw a lot of Debian and Ubuntu work from me in (hopefully) equal measure. For Debian, I whipped up new versions of robotour, xshisen, libmemcache, and gtklp; robotour finally installs in /usr/games as it should be; xshisen acks NMUs and finally has a sane source package (well, a little bit tipsy still, but at least it’s now fixes the NMU source b0rkage;) libmemcache’s -dev now installs its headers to the right location; and gtklp bumps to a new upstream, with touch-fu replacing AM_MAINTAINER_MODE for seamless build. Thanks a lot to my wonderful sponsors Margarita Manterola, Sylvain Le Gall, and Andreas Metzler for the uploads! On the other hand, opendchub has migrated to testing, and its initscript failed (not to mention missing a manpage) I’ve fixed the latter, but I still have to figure out how to fix the former; I’ll probably have to consult the reference and add an unprivileged opendchub system user and configure the daemon to use that, or fix the source and allow flexible redefinition of opendchub’s working/configuration directories (currently hardcoded to $HOME/.opendchub). Either way, I have to touch the source and make patches; and I would appreciate it very much if my dearest readers can help out On the lighter (or heavier, depending on your POV) side, I noticed that Steve McIntyre posted an RFH for cvs, and I’ve decided to help out a bit. Seeing the source, I was pleasantly surprised as the age (and design) of this package, and it would be a blast for me to study this (and fix bugs, prepare patches, and release new versions while at it. It would also prepare me better for NM as well. As for my Ubuntu work, I’ve upgraded my Breezy Badger desktop to Dapper Drake last Monday (just in time for Flight 4,) and I’m quite amazed at the new features of this release. Like many folks I just loved xchat-gnome’s notification feature (especially when you’re moving in between workspaces very often) and was very much pleased with the speed of Gnome 2.13.91 (so much so that I’ve departed from my normal Ion3 desktop without regretting it. But of course, since Dapper Drake is the latest development branch, there were some snags that I got to encounter. One particular bug was with masqmail, because the 0.2.21-1ubuntu1 version created a /var/run/masqmail directory, but since /var/run is mounted as a tmpfs in Dapper, masqmail will complain the next time it restarts. Another (probably cosmetic) bug(?) was with tuxpaint, since it placed a couple of launchers in the Gnome Applications menu, one on Education and the other on Graphics. I’ve yet to see if tuxpaint’s is a genuine bug or just a design decision, but I’ve fixed masqmail’s, and 0.2.21-1ubuntu2 should be on Dapper now, thanks to Daniel Holbach. So far I’m loving the new Ubuntu release, and with FeatureFreeze finally here that means I’ll have to drag my desktop box again to the local internet cafe to do yet another aptitude dist-upgrade. Gaah, I need a laptop!

W00T! I am now the official maintainer for robotour! My many thanks to Florian Ragwitz who uploaded my update to Sid. Many thanks to Shaun Jackman (the old maintainer) for allowing me to adopt his package Also, libmemcache has also been uploaded into Debian’s NEW queue by Sylvain Le Gall, and is now just waiting to be ACCEPTED (and hopefully it will be :D) My efforts in learning C (yet again and grokking the Autobook has paid off, especially for gtklp, which has been listed in Steve Langasek’s FreetypeTransition as one of those packages that seem to use Freetype yet do not have an explicit Build-Depends on Freetype. My solution for gtklp was to transform the libgtklp convenience library (aka libtool’s noinst_LTLIBRARIES) into a regular static library, dropping some explicit LDFLAGS, and the result was that I dropped not just only Freetype from the binary’s Depends, but also PNG and zlib. I just hope my sponsor for gktlp will notice this and upload soon

At the start of 2006, I’m adopting a couple of packages:

• Robotour — control mobile robots in this programmer’s game
• Animal — AN IMaging Library written in C

As for my libmemcache packaging, Sylvain Le Gall has offered to sponsor my package, and he’s got some comments too. YAY!!!