[This is the first post in the new “Cornell” Category]
Well, my room looks quite empty and the van is quite full. We weren’t sure if all the stuff we were planning on taking was going to fit, but it did. Now, the question is will it fit in the 10×10 dorm room that is typical of the building I’m in. We’ll soon find out. We are driving up to Ithaca Thursday, and I move in Friday. Now that it’s getting close, I am starting to get more and more excited.
If anyone recently out of college, or still in it (Ari, joshk, and others) wants to offer any advice for a rising freshman, feel free to leave a comment. In other news (those of you who were helping me in #d-d already know), my server was out of commision for a few days. Grub and lilo both refused to boot off the 200 hard drive that I had moved my data to using a live system, and sarge D-I saw it as the wrong size, and did not see the partitions (perhaps why grub and lilo both failed). This was apparently a kernel issue, and so I installed using the etch beta3 netinst. G-I was working fine, but after partitioning got in a loop where it would drop to console and complain about some fatal error then go back to graphics again (somewhere around setting time zone) so I eventually used the old text system, which worked flawlessly. The only thing that I found I forgot to backup was my wordpress theme directory, so not only do I have to find my theme again (whose name I forget), I have to modify it, since I had customized the CSS. Pity.
The last bit of this post is a thank you to Joerg for approving my NM application. Now all that’s left is for elmo to proccess his backlog.

I’ve started my internship at Accenture Techlabs. Good stuff. Some random thoughts. Xfce’s plugin API changed, so I had to revise my cpufreq monitor plugin. An hour or two of tinkering got it working, but I’m sure it’s not bug free. The leak that was present in the previous release might still be there. But if you’re missing having it in your panel since upgrading to 4.4, give it a shot. The makefile is still hardcoded to Debian paths, because I feel really dirty switching to autoconf/automake for a one-source-file project…! Also, you might recall how I broke my T42’s LCD. Well, I received the replacement today, and with the help of a service manual that I found online, I was able to replace it. It was a fairly involved experience, but I came out knowing how to take a ThinkPad apart without looking at the manual. I’ve also “downgraded” my laptop, as the replacement LCD has ‘T41′ written on the LED bar (but of course it was fully compatible with my T42.) This summer is looking up! Edit: Also, it appears that Wordpress is completely retarded, as I discovered when making this post.

It has been a while since I posted, too busy with class and such I suppose. The year is finishing up and it looks like I'll be off to Silverdale, WA for work this summer. Problem is, I don't know anything about the place. I'll be there for 4 months for work, but I have no idea what sort of environment it is in regards to retail available, transportation, etc. If anyone is from around Seattle or the peninsula area and knows, I'd appreciate some info. There must be a few DDs out there at least.

I also have a renewed interest in Openbox. I used it in the past for a long time then somewhat lapsed on it. Perhaps I'll look into playing with that some more these days. I'm also toying with the idea of picking Bugger back up, but I'm not sure if joshk went anywhere with that after I disappeared. Either way, this is looking like a good summer for hacking something out (from the west coast even).

I’ve recently started using mpd for my music needs (and pympd for the client, it’s very nice so far :D). I was surprised to discover that aside from a great big script that can be used to control mpd from irssi, there was no script that could be used to display current song information in irssi from an instance of mpd. So I wrote it. Hopefully someone will find it useful. Just load it up and set the mpd_* variables (host, password, and port), which default to working for a passwordless mpd running on localhost.

Abridged to remove irrelevant conversation…

< Czesiu> Btw, udev recommends at least 2.6.12 kernel, which is not shipped
in Debian.
< Md> so far the upgrade procedure is “upgrade your kernel, reboot,
upgrade udev”
< Md> Czesiu: yeah, nobody had told me this yet, you know?
< dilinger> you can either go the lvm route, and make up some kernel APIs to
match again, or you can go the ndiswrapper route and make some incredibly
strict dependencies so that people are sure to upgrade kernels and udev
in parallel.  both solutions suck.
< Czesiu> Md: you sound quite sarcastic :)
< wildfire> why not just have a udev-compat; which conflicts which newer
kernels; and make udev conflict with older ones
< Md> dilinger: a future udev version will refuse to install on anything
older than 2.6.12, so this will reduce the potential for brokeness
< Md> the /dev/input/mice problem has been unexpected, if it cannot be fixed
I will make the next package require 2.6.12
< dilinger> the best solution, imo, is to have udev 0.5x and 0.62 allowed
to be installed in parallel, and have a wrapper script that determines which
to use when it’s run
< wildfire> hmm, dilinger, that does sound pretty clean
< Md> dilinger: the configuration syntax is subtly different too. this is
not really possible
< Md> wildfire: yes, until you start looking at how to implement it 
< dilinger> Md: sure it is; /etc/udev05x for the old version or something
< dilinger> /etc/udev for the new version
< wildfire> md, but that’s someone else problem ;-)
< Md> dilinger: keeping them in sync is hell
< dilinger> no kidding, but that’s what maintaining stuff like this requires
< Md> so far, it appears to be too much complex to be justified
< Md> if upgrades will happen to be more complex than we currently know then
I will reconsider this
< dilinger> are you kidding?  i think the number of people whose systems
are breaking is pretty good justification
< Md> dilinger: only because the package currently is not refusing to run
on older kernels
< idnar> Md: but if the package fails to run, isn’t that likely to cause
breakage too, since your /dev won’t look like it normally does?
< Md> idnar: it will refuse to be installed or upgraded, like it’s currently
happening if you are using a kernel < 2.6.8
< dilinger> Md: what about doing something insane w/ devfs/
< dilinger> and devfsd
< Md> dilinger: ?
< idnar> Md: ah
< dilinger> depend upon devfsd, if the kernel is older than 2.6.12, have it
mount devfs over /dev and run devfsd instead of runing udev
< Md> different configuration syntax, different semantics, no HAL/hotplug
support. basically, I can’t see why you could think about this
< dilinger> because it would allow things to *work*
< dilinger> even if it doesn’t have the same config syntax
< dilinger> it could spit out a big warning upon startup
< idnar> suddenly switching the user to devfs would likely cause all sorts
of unknown breakage
< Md> if the kernel is older than 2.6.12 people will not be able to install
a newer udev, so this is not relevant
< Md> please try to look at the whole picture
< dilinger> people are going to want to reboot into older kernels and have
their /dev in a sane state
< dilinger> the running kernel isn’t the only one they may be using
< Clint> yeah, i’m not using the running kernel
< Md> dilinger: then udev will automatically disable itself. the current
experience shows that users are not bothered by this
< dilinger> Clint: quiet over there :P
< dilinger> Md: the user experiences around here don’t seem to match what
you’re saying, otherwise i wouldn’t even be mentioning it
< Md> again, this is not how future versions will work
< dilinger> let me put it another way
< dilinger> it would be a very good idea to future proof udev against such
incompatabilities now
< Md> tell greg k-h, now me :-)
< dilinger> because i’m sure things will break again
< Md> anyway, you persuaded me. I will upload right now an updated package
which refuses to be installed with old kernels
< Md>   * Kernels older than 2.6.12 are not supported anymore.
< Md>     If detected, the package will refuse to be installed.
< Md>     If the running kernel is downgraded after the package has been
< Md>     installed udev will disable itself at boot time.
< Sesse> Md: whoa
< joshk> that’s ridiculously stupid if you as me
< Md> this is what was going to happen in a few releases anyway
< Clint> joshk: coredump immediately
< Md> BTW, I suggest that concerned people read this before continuing
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=12236847
< joshk> breaking support for anything but the very latest kernel (which
isn’t even in debian yet!) is dumb. you break everyone’s desktop because
hal stops working
< joshk> (one particular example)
< Md> joshk: people can keep the old udev until the upgrade, nothing breaks
< Sesse> Md: *g*
< joshk> don’t grin at Md, it makes him think we’re in agreement

(Viral meme #1,234.) I was still in Hong Kong, packing up to leave for California due to my mom’s job being relocated. I certainly didn’t know about Debian at all at the time; I had only unsuccessfully attempted to download the Slackware installation media, but had experience with SuSE Linux 6.3 and Caldera OpenLinux 1.2. (I distinctly remember sound never working.) I recall being a lot more immediately interested in anime than anything computer-related. It was only several months later when my laptop failed to boot following an installation of some satanic Service Pack for Windows 2000 that Misha Nasledov, a classmate and Debian developer two years my senior, showed me - from his Google CD jacket - a set of Woody installation media. By evening, I was poking around the system, trying to replicate my Windows environment. A few weeks later, I remember setting the machine up to dist-upgrade to unstable! By February 2003, I had entered the NM queue…

On the advice of one of my Mac-using friends, I read this article on Slashdot. Pretty cool, I thought, and fairly relevant seeing that I am still actively hacking on ify. As one might expect, I concluded that it would be pretty neat if ify were the first tool to be able to simplify conversion between ALAC and other formats like FLAC, MP3, and Ogg Vorbis. At about 1:30AM, I realized that the first hurdle was that the ALAC decoder did not have a facility to access the metadata in ALAC files. At 5:30AM, I was pretty much done. This required me to study the QuickTime container format, I had to understand the ALAC decoder API, then I wrote the code, then debugged it to hell while I continued to familiarize myself with the nature of the QuickTime format. (I don’t know about you, but that hacking session felt like 1 hour. Maybe 30 minutes even.) By that time I had added support to ify to use the new extension to the ALAC decoder. (here’s a patch if you’re interested.) With the help of said Mac-using friend I got some ALAC files (hey, they are actually from albums I own) and tested them this afternoon after 42nd rehearsal. Behold:

darjeeling:~ 0 % alac -i 2-11 Stop.m4a
Available track information:
title: Stop
artist: Pink Floyd
album: The Wall (Disc 2)
disk: 2
date: 1979
tool: iTunes v4.7.1
tracknumber: 11
genre: Rock
darjeeling:~ 0 % flacify 2-11 Stop.m4a
[alac->flac] 2-11 Stop.m4a
darjeeling:~ 0 % ogg123 2-11 Stop.flac 
Audio Device:   OSS audio driver output 
Playing: 2-11 Stop.flac
FLAC stream: 16 bits, 2 channel, 44100 Hz
Track number: 11
Album: The Wall (Disc 2)
Artist: Pink Floyd
Disk: 2
Tool: iTunes v4.7.1
Date: 1979
Title: Stop
Done.

Pretty…

Rosa Parks died today at the age of 92. For those who were asleep in US History, she made waves by refusing to give up her bus seat to a white person on a segregated bus and being arrested for it.

Putting the impact of her actions into perspective, here's Wikipedia:

On August 30, 1994, aged 81, Rosa Parks was attacked and mugged in her Detroit home by Joseph Skipper. She had a total of $53 stolen from her. The incident created outrage throughout America. Parks said she had asked Skipper "Do you know who I am?" Skipper, an African American himself, was reported to have stated he did know who Rosa Parks was when he beat her, but didn't care. Skipper was arrested, and eventually pleaded guilty to charges of assault and robbery before being sentenced to prison.