Kosmokaryote .plan

A Quick Break Point

2009-07-03T21:44:00.000+12:00

Due to issues with the remote work situation and the limitations of my contract, I've left my job which I've had for the last year on positive terms. Now that I'm in New Zealand and with a lot of free time, what will I do? I'm contemplating school. Once upon a time, up until June 9th, 2009, German citizens (yay, me?) qualified for domestic tuition rates for Masters here. That was until June 9th. The government decided that the additional students that might draw were not worth the reduced tuition income, and have opted to cancel. So, I am now contemplating school a little less. Too many options now :)

While working, there's been a lot of fun and important work postponed due to time constraints, so I've started tackling that now. There's a bunch of new bugs in Redhat and GNOME's bugzilla now filed. I've cleared out some reading queues and cleaned up my inbox. A large foreboding mountain of papers to my right has been re-organised and some of it dealt with. Progress!

DJAqua

My Rhythmbox plugin, DJAqua, that announces a track's artist and title before and after play has had an annoying bug for a while: it froze Rhythmbox. I've now narrowed down the cause to Speech Dispatcher's involvement. It's only when functions passed to Speech Dispatcher as callbacks try to adjust Rhythmbox's volume that Rhythmbox freezes. Python threading issues? I'm not quite sure. I've come up with a slightly less ideal solution, though. I still want Rhythmbox's volume to lower when Speech Dispatcher is reading out the text for the track's artist and title, and for it to be restored afterwards. Unable to rely on Speech Dispatcher's callbacks when speech begins (to lower) and ends (to restore the volume), I now lower it when I send the command to speak, and schedule the restoration with an estimate of how long the announcement will take.

Here's part of the neat part. Originally, I was just going to guess it would take 6 or 7 seconds (based on informal timings) to read it out, but that really won't work when the title and artist are longer than usual or shorter than usual. So, I did the intelligent thing. I collected some sample data on how long it took for 11 random samples to be spoken, and how many characters were in those samples. I then analysed the number of characters per second and found that the average was consistently around 15 with a few outliers. So, now it expects the speech to take (# of characters to be spoken / 15) seconds, and it works very well. Yay. This lets me ignore Speech Dispatcher's other race condition which sometimes prevents the callback from being called when speech begins.

I've filed a bug with Redhat for the issue of Begin not being emitted, and a bug with GNOME for Rhythmbox's UI freezing due to the plugin:

I know I need to pursue this better with Speech Dispatcher. I wrote them about the first bug and they are vaguely aware of the problem but didn't have a solution at the time. Then I disappeared due to work business.

So, yah, now DJAqua doesn't freeze. If you want to hear what track is playing and its artist, and you have a working installation of Speech Dispatcher (in Fedora 10, I had a bunch of other issues that don't seem to be problems in Fedora 11, regarding Pulse Audio and stuff), please try it out. I actually have to move the new code to its gitorious repository, ah well.

Phone Number Portability

Having grown up with super-portable e-mail addresses, the fragile connection between a mailing address and a phone number to a person seems utterly ridiculous to me. Clearly, people should specify that mail should go to me and not some building, and that a phone call should to me and not some randomly assigned phone number.

Consequently, I use my father's mailing address all the time. It adds almost a week or two of latency for a lot of mail, but it ensures it will get to me now and in the future. As a co-op student, I moved way too much to keep track of who has what address and to try to update them all. Regarding phone numbers, I've been grateful to have my Vonage phone number for so long. Of course, it fails in being regional to Guelph, but that's alright for me. I end up getting a local number wherever I go, but that's often split with others, so the cost isn't doubled.

The future will be better.

For example, people in the future won't, when moving into a new home, end up with a recycled phone number that once belonged to an automotive shop, who continues to receive daily calls to the number. Internet listings are in part to blame, particularly ones to which you cannot contact to request the now residential number be removed :( Hehe.

Celebration of Freedom

While my work was not slave labour (though the remote work environment, given the time difference, left me feeling isolated as though I lived in a closet), it is always pleasant to celebrate change and free time. Of course, with unemployment comes economy, so homemade cupcakes and half-price arcade fun it was! I have my girlfriend to thank for both. Hurrah for her!

The influx of self-directed time has led me to review all my pending goals and tasks, to reorganise them and to start milling through them. Some are as common as "Clean this room!" or "Pad the doorway to prevent the slamming noise". Others are "save the world" and "figure out what I want to do for the next year, the next three years, where I want to be, the value of people and time with them, etc. I sometimes wish I had a wise sensei like Splinter from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or Enho from The Twelve Kingdoms to offer some advice.

Debugging, problem solving, and mail notification

Mail Notification by Jean-Yves Lefort has a bug. I reported it a couple years ago, but it remains. The CPU seemingly random takes 100% while it continually claims it cannot connect to the IMAP server, which is true, but I don't know why. It is probably triggered when I resume from suspend, or when I am disconnected and reconnect, or when the hour turns. I don't know.

I don't really know how to debug the 100% CPU activity. I'm going between ltrace, sysprof, and gdb and learning a bit about each. I think I'd really like to use Linux Trace Toolkit, but it's not as trivial to setup, it seems, requiring a kernel patch. Or maybe I'm just confused. Anyway, whenever it comes out, I quickly quit what I'm doing and think about how I can figure out what's going on. I am sure victory is within my grasp.

How to remove the close button from your tabs in Firefox

2009-06-23T20:54:00.000+12:00

Do you use Mozilla Firefox?

Do you hate the presence of the close buttons on tabs?

Do you want to hide the close buttons on tabs?

I really do. I use Tree-style view and they waste a bunch of space. Stupid close buttons! So, go to about:config, filter for the property browser.tabs.closeButtons, and change its integer value from 1 to 0. This way, it will only display the close X button on the tab you are on.

Yay!

Xephyr

2009-06-16T21:54:00.000+12:00

Running Fedora 11? Running into an X11 crasher bug that you can reliably reproduce but don't have the hard iron to run all of X in gdb? Perhaps like this one when you click on the Gimp's canvas and see X flash before your eyes?

Backtrace:
0: /usr/bin/Xorg(xorg_backtrace+0x3b) [0x812d07b]
1: /usr/bin/Xorg(xf86SigHandler+0x9e) [0x80c061e]
2: [0xdf0400]

Fatal server error:
Caught signal 11.  Server aborting

Perhaps the bug is equally represented in Xorg and Xephyr. In which case, you can probably run Xephyr from your desktop

Xephyr :1

with :1 to denote which display it should take (:0 should be in use by your session already).

Then, run which apps you need to inside Xephyr to reproduce the bug. (e.g. the Gimp).

You can tell them which X server to appear in by setting the DISPLAY variable like so

DISPLAY=:1 gimp

Now, right before you cause the Xephyr X server to crash, run gdb on it

gdb --pid=`pidof Xephyr`

You might not have the debuginfo files installed, which you'll want to be able to trace through the human-readable source code. gdb should prompt you with a command for any relevant, missing debuginfo. Note that, on Fedora 11, you'll also need librpm.so available for it to do this (provided by rpm-devel).

Once you have the symbols loaded and gdb connected to your Xephyr process, tell gdb to "continue", and now reproduce your crasher. gdb should catch the segfault (or signal SIGSEV or something). Then you can get a backtrace ("bt") from gdb and start finding out where you are.

After that, I tend to restart Xephyr, reconnect gdb, and "break" at the names of functions where the crash happens, and then start "step"ing and "next"ing through, "print"ing the variables whose values I want to see until I find out why I'm crashing.

RH bug 505823 will let me know if this was at all useful.

Unable to open "librpm.so"? Perhaps rpm-devel is missing.

2009-06-16T21:11:00.000+12:00

In Fedora 11, are you getting something like this when using gdb when you're missing some debug info files?

Unable to open "librpm.so" (librpm.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory), missing debuginfos notifications will not be displayed.

I was, and it meant that gdb couldn't suggest which package I had to debuginfo-install to get the
misisng debug information and symbols.

I did a locate for librpm.so and found librpm.so.0 and friends in /usr/lib. Guessing that's where librpm.so was supposed to be, I did "yum whatprovides /usr/lib/librpm.so" and that told me rpm-devel-4.7.0, which I then installed.

After that, I ran gdb on the process I wanted to inspect again, and ta-da, I am finally told the name of the package which I need to install to get my debugging symbols. Copy, paste, yay.

2009-06-03T20:21:00.002+12:00

DJ Aqua

A plugin for Rhythmbox to have Speech Dispatcher announce a track's artist and title before and after play. The code, finally available.

2009-05-31T00:39:00.002+12:00

Blogging Theory

I suppose one reason why I don't blog more often is because I'm not too fond of Blogger's post creation interface. I'm not sure why. My complaint used to be its size, but now the text entry box is resizeable. It used to be how often I'd lose work if I didn't manually save drafts, but now it autosaves. It's rather quite nice. I suppose I long for some sort of ideal, common desktop applet like GNOME Blog. Sadly, it's gone unmaintained for a while. It needs to be updated to use Blogger's Atom API. I wrote a patch doing just that once and submitted it, but the product is neglected. Sigh. I'll note that the interface surely isn't the dominant factor in my blogging frequency though.

I think I'm given to making large multi-part posts, and that this is probably bad. I should probably instead make multiple, more focussed posts. Then, people would be less daunted to read any individual post. Hopefully, their amazing frequency helps keep people sufficiently riveted that they'll gladly afford the time and disinterest for particular topics to trudge through the tired terminology.

Evolution

I used to think more and less about it. I once lived with a good friend with whom it and alternatives could be discussed and debated. I didn't know much about it then, and I don't now, though I know more. Its propositions seem less controversial or questionable now. I don't really wonder about it's plausibility any more: I've had to code simulations of the principles of natural selection, genetic mutation and crossover. I've encountered case studies documenting smaller changes over more visible periods of time. The only thing that I don't expect I'll ever be certain of is whether it's how it all happened. My friend had pointed out at the time an event relayed by a fellow who even came to speak at our University, about a student asking for advice, and the details are gone now, but essentially, while the student thought that perhaps they could avoid explicitly making a decision, they in fact would effectively implicitly make a decision that would be reflected in their daily decisions that require assumptions of how things are. It might have been a story to question agnosticism, but I don't really remember. I still think that not committing to something important but uncertain, even if you have to act as though that something was certain sometimes. Some things are too important to get wrong.

I used to read some popular blogs about evolution and not-evolution and it's really silly. It's as ridiculous as modern politics. Non-physical battles are so ridiculous, I cannot believe we tolerate them. How can we respect people who behave as badly as those who engage in these most ridiculous arguments in government and in science/religion. Presently, though, I am reading a textbook, Evolutionary Analysis by Freeman and Herron. It's quite nice, but they make an effort to defend evolution against alternative theories and this defense feels misplaced. They don't dedicate enough time to properly introduce the alternatives or fully address them. That's alright, because that's certainly not the purpose of the text, but they probably shouldn't try to address controversy that they won't allow themselves enough time for. More importantly, they do spend lots of time on specific case studies, like Grant and Grant's study of medium ground finches on Daphne Major, on HIV, and on bees and flowers. I've only read their first three chapters so far, one of which discusses HIV as a primer, and one of which discusses the theory of evolution, explains it, and occasionally makes mild attempts to justify it.

I don't have a good mind for casual details anymore, it seems. I think I'm just too distracted by "important" things from work and previously school. I don't have time like I did with video games to be as observed. However, information from this textbook seems to be sticking better. So does information from the lectures I attend on campus. I'm quite pleased. I hope that my endeavours to sleep more (enough to wake up naturally on some non-weekend days, even!) are to credit. Anyway, perhaps the next time I get to constructively debate evolution with someone, I'll be better informed and better able to contribute.

Work

I've worked since last May for a company whose product is largely database driven. I left it for a brief time before returning on a contract which will be ending early soon.

One of two reasons include feeling handicapped by the lack of availability of coworkers for work-related tasks (e.g. sometimes I need access to a peer for information on a system, or a business analyst to understand what needs to be done given some development) for which, for half of my day, I have to wait until the next day to do. That's because, while I start at 7-7:30AM NZST, that's in the middle of lunch in Vancouver. There's usually about 3-3¹/₂ hours of overlap when people are back from lunch before they leave in which I can interact, and it often finds me rushing to send of e-mails with questions before my lunch, hoping to catch people before they head out before waiting for tomorrow again. While I almost always have enough work to ensure I can still be busy and productive in the meantime, it means some tasks end up dragging on for far longer than they should (particularly investigation work where I end up with more time-sensitive questions).

It's also stressful a bit trying to ensure that I'm up at 7AM due to the winter season out here and relatively awful climate control in my NZ residence. The story goes that houses were built all over the north island where the climate is tropical, and then the same builders came to the south island and built all the houses the same, despite the fact that it's temperate here. So, sure, it doesn't get as cold as Ontario outside of the house, but it does get as cold inside as it does outside, which is still 3 degrees right now! While I have a portable oil heater in my room, that doesn't help heat the other parts of the house (kitchen, washroom, etc.) I enjoy waking up early in the day, but all the prep work for the day is an early shock to the body, and I've grown use to ... warmth! See my earlier blog entry on it!

The second of the two reasons I'm describing is feeling disconnected and isolated. There's one coworker who's online later than the rest often and who converses with me regularly. He's great and it's fun, but it doesn't prevent me from feeling like a boy who's stuck in a closet and given school work all day to do. I do not think that this is due to the nature of remote work, but that remote work enables it when you don't have a very good culture of interactivity electronically. I feel like if I could be more involved with my coworkers and team on-line, this wouldn't be as much of a problem. If we had effective forums where the administrator actually approved me, if we were all available via instant messenger, or actually used a common chatroom. I don't mean to goof off, either. Sure, there should be some of that, but more liquid communication could help productivity and involvement a lot.

I do hope that my employer doesn't go away from this contract with a negative impression of remote work arrangements. I think they understand some of the issues with the current one well enough not leave with that wrong impression. I hope.

The Brain

So what is a boy to do with his time? Find another job? Nay! say I. Who would hire a visitor for just a year? Someone, perhaps, but that would be such a gamble; I've had a few bad job experiences during my co-ops and I'd like not to repeat them in New Zealand. Instead, a Masters is the object of my eye!

Yes, I had considered getting a masters a while ago, but while in Canada, there wasn't anything that ended up being so compelling, and I was very burnt out of school after my last semester and wanted to escape. However, due to uncertainty of my contract originally, I did investigate options and found a professor here whose work is interesting. I've been attending his lectures, and it appears that he'd be willing to supervise me if I enrol. So, that's what I'm looking forward to now. A single-year research/thesis masters of computer science. It will involve the brain, you see!

I've read a lot of stuff related to the course and the potential Masters topic recently to understand it and whether it's something that I'd like to do. I think it is. The domain itself is exciting and fascinating to me. It's something I felt as though I took some of the wrong courses during my undergraduate to be able to study later on, but I appear to have been mistaken. Give me your basal ganglia now, please.

Employment and Employers

At some point, I want to write about challenges faced at the place where I am most recently working and some facets of employment that I think are important. I'll briefly mention one now though: attention to the development infrastructure and tools internally. It sometimes feels as though the existing infrastructure and the tools are not growing apace with the challenges of a larger code base or with what's available. I think it's useful to have someone specifically tasked (or at least part-time) with identifying all the resistance developers face daily and work to remove or minimise it. Like, improving the product is important, but improving the situation of the developers helps that goal, too.

Clarity, age, and crystals

It's strange, but some ideas have become clearer in my mind over time. I notice a lot of gaps in my memory, but new things are easier to generalise, categorise, manage, understand. Old ideas that were obtuse and always vague in my mind see to crystalise more easily. I'm sure a lot of it has to do with increased experience and a better conceptual framework in which to understand these old and new things. Sadly, there appear to be downsides.

With improved crystalisation and the growth of my interdependent conceptual framework (knowledge), my mind appears to be less malleable, even now, at 25. I wonder whether that puts me at risk for being able to contribute anything particularly novel to the Masters research I now hope to do. I hope that awareness and wariness of this will help me to not fall into traps of stale, stubborn knowledge.

The other downside is the removal of magic from my environment. Natural things in particular are now much easier to understand. I wonder whether someone my age who had avoided science and explanations would still feel a better sense of mystery, or whether it just degrades naturally over time. I've been expending effort recently, looking harder at beautiful scenes to feel their beauty like I feel I once would have. I am heartened that the professor I've mentioned before paused to remark on the glory of a magnolia tree in a courtyard we approached the other day. But then again, the CN Tower wasn't very impressive to me when I was younger, as I had seen greater things in video games, and it wasn't until mid-university that I came to appreciate the sight of it.

Warmth and Humanity

2009-04-21T23:20:00.000+12:00

Warmth is a comfort that is by no means guaranteed or natural to always enjoy. I suppose a relatively small fraction of the Earth's total population can rely on a warm home. For some reason, it seems like something I've taken for granted. I'm not sure why, as the home I have grown up in was generally frigid throughout the winter months, often leading me to Do Nothing except huddle in blankets in front of a computer. I assume it was an influence in me doing very little homework at home, or playing so many video games. Yes, activity will help warm you, but moving leads to contact with the cold air, and staying more or less stationary while insulated in blankets helps create a nice pocket of trapped bodily warmth. Delightful!

However, while at university, I was generally blessed with Very Well insulated or heated accommodations (where the utilities were included), or a room so small my computer would leave things toasty. I suppose I became somewhat used to heated comfort. Visiting home, I would start to remark on the cold. My father is well insulated bodily, but I am scrawny and was not. I am sure all my friends have remarked upon it during the winter season. "It's warmer in the snow," some might say. I should have moved into an igloo.

In 2008, I found the cold to be debilitating while living in a basement. The cold, among other dreary basement factors, infringed upon my happiness and comfort in a way not before recognised. Yikes. Now, though, I'm in a room relatively poorly insulated. On a good note, we have an oil heater that we rely on in our room to allow our digits to move. (A few days spent hiding from the world and with fingers that were growing numb quickly eroded my inhibitions against power consumption.) We have yet to see an electricity bill, and it probably will be ugly. However, half of it is covered by the landlord, and the remaining half is split 4 ways. So, 1/8th of the total usage of the house will hopefully be not very bad. Hopefully we're also won't be the greatest contributor to it. At least there's two of us sharing the heat from one heater in here :)

I wonder whether it would be a worthwhile goal to try and establish comfortable conditions for all, as far as warmth goes, and what that would entail. The alternative, adapt to what's natural, makes sense. But if we can all be comfortable and warm, why not?

I'm not sure that we can. Consistent warmth for everyone who is suffers from the cold will probably require a lot of energy. Enough energy to counter the natural elements plaguing people. In severe winters, all the more energy is required. Sure, we can probably generate enough electricity, but will that affect climate? If carbon and other green house gases are produced while generating all that electricity, it would probably put us in a situation worse than we might now be in. Regardless of climate change, there's regular pollution. China apparently has severe issues with pollution resulting from their coal plants. Besides heat from electricity, we can also popularly get it from natural gas and oil. Allegedly, those will eventually be in short supply. At the very least, the price isn't the most stable, and can become very expensive. Finally, how do we get the heat to many people? What about areas where electricity isn't reliable? Will they be reliant on oil or natural gas?

So, here are some considerations to make it more viable:

Improve structures' insulation to ensure that they can retain as much of the heat they have.
Try to use cleaner forms of energy to prevent pollution and excess carbon.
Have smarter systems to help prevent waste. Like, a house that could detect windows left open and close them or notify someone to close them, would be good.
Try to provide efficient heating systems that don't rely on power mains, oil, or gas. (Try magic.)

So, be more efficient, minimising waste and by-products while maximising availability. Will this require massive production of new heaters to improve coverage or to replace inefficient systems or improve insulation? Production and the requisite consumption of resources might also be undesirable depending on the availability and renewability of the resources, and the by-products of the production.

I suppose this would be helped by some advances in technology. But, I suppose it doesn't really matter. Climate change and oil availability not withstanding, another key requirement that I think is probably lacking is interest. I don't think there's sufficient interest to try to ensure warmth for everyone who wants it. Right now, it seems like it's mostly up to the individual to try to secure warmth for themselves. Yes, there are government programmes to help the disadvantaged improve their homes insulation and organisations that try to ensure the availability of basic necessities. But until it becomes an almost trivial task, or until someone finally decides that the cost no longer outweights the glory of the achievement, I think general availability of heat, providing it for all people who could otherwise not afford it, will remain a dream, and I'll have to take it less for granted.

Peter And Paul Killed the Dragon And He Did It With His Bare Hands

2009-03-29T12:06:00.001+13:00

I disagree with how vampires live but I like vampires. At least, I prefer them to werewolves. There are more explicit properties about them that I could find appealing, like immortality, romance, the night, their elegance, fair skin, Victorian associations, etc.

I'm not a huge fan of drinking blood, but the focus on blood as being fundamental to life is nice. Immortality is somewhat nice, but I generally see vampire immortality as a form of "easy" perverted Christian immortality. You should be a good Christian and receive immortality, but those who are greedy, exploitive, afraid seek something more certain and palpable, more Earthly powerful, something you know (Earthly "life") over the afterlife. A perversion in near-enough direct contradiction to the immortality you're supposed to seek. It leaves you addicted to blood, firmly bound and dependent upon the Earth for survival.

By opposing, by rejecting, the Christian immortality, it seems like you generally surrender it for all time. You're isolated into a world where anything Godly is anathema to even your health. Life-fueling sun, the Holy Cross, Real Life (you hide in a coffin during the day, where only your Earthly remains should have remained, not your mind), Holy Water, garlic (Jesus loved that stuff!), and even Truth (the mirror betrays you).

To compensate, vampires make the most out of what they do have. They exercise their power, they seduce, they refine and manicure themselves. They enjoy their lot. And they pull others into the darkness with them. Of course, not all vampires are like this, but the best are. Some become savage animals, mindlessly feeding. A different species to be sure. Sometimes a story will focus on one, the other, or a mixture (as in Buffy).

For those who see the bastardisation of vampirism and its perversion, their greatest salvation is by running full-tilt into the Hands of God. Often, it's not quite enough. He rarely intervenes directly. Perhaps he rescues your soul right then. Perhaps the soul is only damned if you willingly embrace the darkness. I'm not clear on this point.

Anyway, the aspect of vampires that attracts me is the degree of order. It is weaved into their refinement and elegance. Though immortal, they are not invulnerable, and must take care if they wish to survive. They need to be able to feed without drawing attention to themselves. They need rules and security, security from the day and those who would hunt them. They need order. Power helps them. Many vampires either ascend to a powerful place in the larger world or flock to one who has. Participating in a leveraged position among the humans helps them control their situation. Yes, they expose themselves to some suspicion, but less than were they totally removed yet known of. Wealth and power enables their necessarily eccentric lifestyles.

This degree of order is contrasted in the Underworld series of films against werewolves. Vampires can be feral, easily. They lust for blood as a werewolf does. Many times, a vampire is seen to transform a little when angered, hungry, or intimidated. They cease to inhibit their more feral tendencies and exhibit the extent of their ungodly power. However, like many humans, they spend a great deal of time denying their wilder nature and establish a lifestyle of control and responsibility. Werewolves on the other hand, when turned under the light of the full moon, are reckless walking slaughter houses. They feed on whatever they can, they scrap more madly than any natural beast known to man, endangering their own existence and those of the people around them. Vampires apply their intelligence to their survival, while werewolves apply their teeth. Werewolves are free of constraint, it would seem, a freedom dangerous to themselves as much as others. Savages.

But of course, who wants eternal damnation and the curse of the vampire, to never walk again in the light of the sun, to eat garlic, to love without death? So, three cheers to the vampire hunters, the vampire slayers, to those who dedicate their lives to researching and exterminating the vampire menace, to those who resist the seduction of a promise so sweet in short-sighted eyes. Here's to the Van Helsings, Buffys, and Glenn the frogs of the world!

Oh, the title is a line from a song by Josh Ritter

Food's War On The Mind

2009-03-29T11:28:00.000+13:00

Once upon a time, I would have seen non-sweet peanut better as superior and de factoly enjoyed it. It would have seemed rustic and, more importantly, counter my intuition of what should be popular. I would distinguish between what pure peanut butter really was and what how sweetened peanut butter constituted a fraud. But now, I don't care. I want sweet things. I can no longer resist the call of chocolate. I eat a fruit and I go "I wish I had ice cream on the side."

It seems my experience with food, my reactions to it, are less determined by my philosophy and more by my palette now. Hmm.

2009-03-24T17:24:00.000+13:00

Testing. Ah.

2009-03-23T19:38:00.002+13:00

Google has web master tools. I'm using them to detect broken links here. There were four that are now fixed.

There's also a new Code Poem up:DJ Aqua. It's a plugin for Rhythmbox that uses Speech Dispatcher to speak aloud a track's name and title at its start and its end. 0.1 release.

It still has some issues and isn't the best packaged. But ah well. There's other stuff to do, too.

Lack of Updates

2009-03-21T19:49:00.000+13:00

There is no lack of updates. This is not a "Lack of updates" post. You only post those to audiences. You don't post them to yourself and two friends. "Lack of updates" posts are obliged to claim that there was a special reason for the interruption but that All Good Things Do Not End and things will resume shortly. Then after another half-hearted month, they die. The guilt filling the posters' souls from lying like a parent about dogs' heaven (dogs don't go there, only old dead conservative people do) paralyses them. The wrath liars caught in the act face (and isn't it always severe and spectacular?) ensures that All Good Things Turn Bad And Whimper.

I have microwaveable cake mix. It's a delightful theory. Experimental trials will be conducted this evening.

Migratory Season

2009-03-13T22:48:00.002+13:00

Hello. I've migrated across the world to New Zealand in the last month. I've seen quite a few sites and sights.

I'm now well situated and will hopefully resume employment shortly. Unemployment is nice in that I finally have time to accomplish the myriad goals that accumulate throughout my days. It's bad in that money only goes out and it has a finite supply.

For instance, I now have a workable version of Icarus, a command-line PicasaWeb uploader that I used to upload photos quickly from Nautilus (using Nautilus actions). It's been an important exercise in programming in Vala. I really hope that its bindings get well documented at some point.

I also have improved the oft rewritten GenderGuesser. The current incarnation is written in C with GLib and GTK+. It now also makes good use of GIO and LibXML. I originally disliked the LibXML API. At least, the help files that ship with it are a mess and not easy to follow. I suppose Vala and LibXML both make me miss the wonderful documentation the Java API has.

I've been walking up quite a few hills out here with my girlfriend. There's lots of good exercise to be had. I've also found an ideal electronics store nearby. I was afraid one didn't exist. I'm trying to make a better effort at letting technology make me more, rather than less, productive. I've reorganised my Google Reading habits. I've also removed from the list one of the most prolific feeds: TreeHugger. Its propaganda quotient was also getting a bit high. Slashdot's sensationalist rating is as high as ever, but I'm a pretty good filter, and I'm not aware of an adequate substitute for my needs.

I'm also using an application called Almanah Diary on GNOME for logging my thoughts and activities. I do too much to post it all here on my public blog. I also like keeping data local.

I've been paying Google for additional web space in PicasaWeb for a while now. However, I hadn't gotten around to uploading much because

there isn't an uploading solution that I'm aware of that fits my needs (surprisingly)
there isn't per image privacy settings

Icarus solves the first problem, but the second requires Google. Often, I will have a set of photos, and 90% of them I feel comfortable making public. Sadly, it's all or nothing with PicasaWeb it seems. Temporary solutions that I've explored include:

Making two separate albums, one with both the public and private photos, which I keep private, and a second with just the public photos, which I make public. This sucks, because I end up duplicating that 90% of public photos.
Make two separate albums, one with just the private photos and one with just the public photos. This sucks, because then the private photos are out of context from the public ones.

That reminds me, sometimes context can be difficult to retain because I've had issues trying to sort by both name and date, where date didn't seem to use the EXIF date but rather the files modified date, or something weird. The names were an issue because they weren't named in any particular order.

I like PicasaWeb so much, but there are all these "small" things that prevent me from really embracing it. At least it's much more compatible with my needs than, say, Flickr or facebook.

For now, Cthulhu Arborus:

Simulants

2009-02-07T21:40:00.003+13:00

I suppose we're getting quite close to replacing nature!

2009-01-26T01:13:00.003+13:00

Comfortable Nests

2009-01-26T00:07:00.001+13:00

I often find situations that my father would balk at as being inconvenient and uncomfortable to be quite desirable regardless. Clearly, he and I are valuing different factors for these. A very typical one is going for a walk in the winter. He suggests that it is too cold for such an expedition, but I think it is too beautiful not to adventure out.

I miss snow already.

A Recipe for Reading Success

2009-01-25T23:39:00.001+13:00

I am having a nice weekend. I feel like I am being personally productive.

I've worked extra hours for most days of the last two weeks. I'm on a custom team and we have our core product, and I was asked whether I could complete a couple development items for the core product's quarterly release. I've done it before and I did it again gladly. However, the work should only be done in over time, because custom team already has their hours dedicated to a client. I also have taken on two side projects. One which I think I might have to defer, and one that I'm really excited and happy about, and makes my day job easier and more fulfilling. It is nice the initiatives I feel I can tackle once I'm confident in what I'm doing.

I like to read a lot about current events. I don't usually mean the news, though I have followed that thing that just happened quite a bit. Mostly I enjoy reading interesting or informative posts at a variety of blogs or news blogs. To prevent myself from nickle and diming my time away through the week, I now concentrate my great consumption of textual media to the weekend. The earlier in the weekend, the better, before I drag it out like a weekend-long birthday party where the only reason people don't leave is because I swallow the only key that would let them out of the basement. There are usually about 600 items, most of them a paragraph long, but quite a few a couple pages. Some people go to the trouble of writing full-blown essay length posts, and I usually go to the trouble of ignoring them and hoping I'm not greatly deprived by abstaining from their thought candies. And that's a problem.

I read things under the misguided hope that I will get to rot my brain on these thought candies. That they'll leave impressions like gaping cavities in my once confident understanding of what is and show me what actually is. However, with about 600 items, and many of them very brief and shallow, I end up getting easily saturated by simple, light treats and end up unable to digest or even attempt the large, worthwhile, rich and large bon bons which promise the best experiences. I spoil my appetite. So, I defer. I defer these delicacies until Later, where Later is a mythical time oft spoken of by We Who Lack Time (but we know we'll find it again some day). Of course, that's a crock. What ends up happening is that it ends up at the bottom of the food pile and stagnates and rots there for weeks and, like sweet food-ons that you might delay on eating for a more convenient moment, it gets thrown out after a month.

However, I have revolutionised the way I do my reading now, As Seen On TV. When I read this string of candied beads, I have been doing it in LIFO when I should have been doing it in FIFO! And, there's a real difference as to why. (LIFO is Last In-First Out, where you read the newest stuff first; FIFO is First In-First Out, where you read the oldest stuff first; it's fundamental queuing theory!) When I read the newest things first, I will effectively always have spoiled my appetite by the time I get to the cake from weeks gone by, and I will probably have added additional cakes from this week as my sweet tooth became overwhelmed and my senses dulled, my brain numbed, my mind wandering. So, now my articles are sorted by Oldest First. This way, last weeks cake is still fresh in front of me when I am hungriest! A lot more cake assuredly gets devoured now (unlike before, where I left it all to go stale). After after the cakes, I still have room for all the light, fluffy icing that constitute the majority of the 600 articles. I am full of win and winful mind pastries. Yum!

Now that I'm actually reading more of the French desserts, I ended up spending a bit more time today reading than in previous weekends. About 6 hours. I accredit that in part to having a backup of stale cake to read under my new method; something which should be avoided in future weekends by at least an hour. I'll always leave something over for next week; a lot of the creamily-filled chocolate surprise-thoughts won't appear until I've gorged on quite a few wafers first, and I won't be able to fit it all. But at least they'll be the first ones I'll encounter when my appetite is built back up. Yum!

So much

2009-01-04T13:37:00.003+13:00

There is so much to think, so much to say. I've wanted to write about a lot of things, but I take a lot of time to go about and I lose interest in the words. Hmm.

One issue was that Flesherton this year feels like an echo of my youth. My father's house wasn't decorated for Christmas and dinner wasn't planned. I went about setting up the tree myself and ordering Christmas pizza. The meal went well, there was a lot of food (salad, garlic bread, wings for the omnivores). My brother, his fiancee, and their recently-born daughter made it. Christmas Eve church service and Cliff and Vera were absent. For the first time, really, Christmas celebrations depended in large part on my active participation. I will try to be more prepared for next year.

A lot of my friends have left their homes in search of life, freedom, careers, and school. However, they almost all managed to make it back to Grey County for a Wahoo! I haven't seen Danielle or Emily yet, but Ashley made it over for breakfast, snowballs and Dutch Blitz. Shane visited his family, and I visited them all. They're a good family that is very welcoming. I persuaded them to play Dutch Blitz as well, though Shane's brother's girlfriend had protested. Frank and his first sister came to Flesherton for a few days around New Year's Eve. We visited them twice and had Frank over for a supper once. We got in a lot of conversation, tea, an episode of Get Smart, and a viewing of the anime Origin which I gifted to him. Also, popcorn, chocolate turtles, ice cream, and ice cream bars. Also, two sessions with the twins, with movies, driving, pizza, East Side Marios, and board games.

The case of Frank emphasised the feeling of this Christmas holiday being a faint echo of those that came before. Only he and his first sister were present in a house that hasn't been properly lived in for months, and which has been cleaned largely bare of its former life and activity. It seems somewhat like social states can be establish where annual deviation is relatively small, but only for a certain period, after which breaks need to be made. Over the course of Schwarting-family Christmases starring my father as Dad, there has been a rather great deviation from the first to the last, but between any two Christmases the deviation has seemed smaller. The actual deviation between this one and the previous one doesn't seem great, but it feels great. I'm very grateful that Frank was able to visit Grey County and that we could enjoy New Years with him. I'm glad that Shane was pleasant and Shane-as-usual. I'm glad to be able to toss a snowball in Ash's face. I'm glad that my father, despite having a great deal of complaints recently about pain, has seemed to be as Ox-strong as ever during my visit, willing to drive several times for the same egg-breakfasts in Markdale.

The twins, oddly, seem like they'll never change. Things seem to be improving, rather than deteriorating, as well. They seem to be investing a little more in their home, which makes it all the more pleasant to visit in. At its worst, it's been cold and uncomfortable, but nothing that could really deter me from visiting them. Their media collection seems slightly more organised and consequently more impressive. Their family bond seems a bit tighter than in recent years. We got to play Scattergories with them, and Settles of Catan. Liv won a game of each and I won a game of the former. Liv's quite good :) We also saw with them Yes Man, National Treasure, and the new The Hulk. They have a tradition of funding my entertainment during excursions some times, given their workingness and my education-induced poverty. I am not sure whether that was appropriate this time, given my recent period of payed work :)

So, that about sums up a report on How Life Has Changed. It seems shallow. I'm concerned anew with shallowness, since Liv introduced me to the Daria movie. Sigh :)

Computers

2009-01-04T10:55:00.002+13:00

Liv is now the proud owner of a tablet. An IBM Thinkpad X41, used. General piece of advice for the future: do not acquire 3rd party batteries. Yes, they are less expensive. And they may be equally safe. However, both replacement batteries that I have tried to acquire for this have had their capacities over-advertised and are notably less than Lenovo's replacement. (Though, it more or less matches the price.) Almost more alarming is that they do not fit well. The first replacement battery was Very Difficult and needed to be forced against its will into the laptop. The second didn't enter smoothly but was better. Neither fit in the laptop when using the dock. Which will prove a great inconvenience. The laptop will always have to be hibernated or shutdown to be transferred to the dock which contains the DVD/CD-RW. Sigh. However, the stylus works nicely.

Her acquisition of a tablet got me working on improving the tablet experience for myself as well. I've installed software that does some handwriting recognition (hurrah!). The updated version of the Silicon Motion graphics driver for my tablet is the first that has enabled me to rotate my screen. I've learned a bit about the xsetwacom application that lets me reconfigure what the buttons are for the stylus (I now have a right-click instead of a middle click!) and rotate the stylus for when I've rotated the screen. (Which unfortunately introduces an offset over time, and should be done automatically and correctly anyway.)

I am still waiting to acquire an updated laptop myself at some point. My RAM is at its maximum of 256MB(!), the processor is a PIII at 800MHz. It has no USB 2.0 ports (so any USB devices like external hard drives are 10x slower or worse). It supports 802.11b at best (802.11g is about 5x faster, 802.11n is faster still). Except by ethernet, data moves at about 1MB/s off my computer at best. I'm often better off connecting a USB device to one of Liv's computers and transferring data there via ethernet. It's rather amusing :D It's case is deteriorating somewhat rapidly now. I'm not particulary harsh with it, either, I think.

I suppose I should start creating a list of candidates for Skedge's replacement.

Acer TravelMate C100 in Fedora: Stylus and Tablet, more

2008-12-31T05:31:00.001+13:00

I'm going to document a bit more my trials in getting the Acer TravelMate C100 working tablet working in Fedora. I'll break it up by sections and update just this One post.

X

X changed how they handle PCI and now the Silicon Motion driver is broken for this tablet's Lynx 3DM SM712 card. For this you will need an updated Silicon Motion driver! Here is the source for 1.7.0 which fixes whether to use the BIOS, some initialisation, and acceleration issues. Yay 1.7.0. Francisco Jerez was wonderfully helpful. Bug documenting the issue is on Freedesktop bug 18816.

If you do not feel comfortable building the new driver and its few dependencies, you might want to wait until Fedora releases an updated one! Or, you can bug me and I will package it.

Tablet

The new X tries to use HAL to autoconfigure your devices. It tries to make do without an /etc/X11/xorg.conf configuration file. It did not autoconfigure my tablet. So, as root I let it create a base xorg.conf (once I had X working at all from the step above) using

# X -configure

which created a new xorg.conf in /root/ which I copied to /etc/X11/xorg.conf and added:

Section "InputDevice"
        Driver          "wacom"
        Identifier      "Stylus0" 
        Option          "Device"        "/dev/ttyS0"
        Option          "Type"          "stylus"
        Option          "ForceDevice"   "ISDV4"
#       Option          "Button2"       "3"  # makes side-button right click instead of middle
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
        Driver          "wacom"
        Identifier      "Eraser0"
        Option          "Device"        "/dev/ttyS0"
        Option          "Type"          "eraser"
        Option          "ForceDevice"   "ISDV4"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
        Driver          "wacom"
        Identifier      "Cursor0"
        Option          "Device"        "/dev/ttyS0"
        Option          "Type"          "cursor"
        Option          "ForceDevice"   "ISDV4"
EndSection

I also made this changed the X Server layout section to this:

Section "ServerLayout"
        Identifier     "X.org Configured"
        Screen      0  "Screen0" 0 0
        InputDevice    "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
        InputDevice    "Stylus0" "SendCoreEvents"
        InputDevice    "Cursor0" "SendCoreEvents"
        InputDevice    "Eraser0" "SendCoreEvents"

        InputDevice    "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
EndSection

The next time I started X, the stylus worked :)

Suspend and Sleep

Hibernate worked automatically for me. However, the Acer TravelMate C100 would not come out of suspend to RAM for me. Well, it came out, the video would just be blank and slowly bleed across the screen :( To fix this for me, I have to enable the vbe_post quirk for HAL. To do this for the system, I made two changes to

/usr/share/hal/fdi/information/10freedesktop/20-video-quirk-pm-acer.fdi

which defines the quirks for Acer's video.

First, I changed the 4th line (vendor) from this:

    <match key="system.hardware.vendor" prefix="Acer">

to this

    <match key="system.hardware.vendor" prefix_ncase="Acer">

because this Acer model is reported is lshal as being ACER instead of Acer, and the change lets it match case insensitively.

The second change I made was to enable the vbe_post quirk for the C100 as well as the 6460. So, I changed line 24 (the one that matches 6460) from this:

        <match key="system.hardware.product" contains="6460">

to this

        <match key="system.hardware.product" contains_outof="C100;6460">

This issue with patch is at Redhat bug 478369

Audio

I have to use the

$ alsaunmute

command from the command-line to get the audio correctly initialised often. I haven't really pursued this much as I think my soundcard is having hardware issues anyway.

Wireless

The built-in wireless works out of the box for me. The sad part is, though, the button to switch between the wireless card and the wired ethernet seems to only work at boot (like, when GRUB is up). So, I have to reboot if I want to switch modes.

I'll note that the Acer Hotkeys system (acerhk) mentions code for enabling the wlan_button from Christian Roessner but their link appears to be dead.

Hotkeys

Building and compiling Acer Hotkeys (acerhk) still works for me for enabling volume and suspend Fn keys :)

Other

There are other things that I may have forgotten or not bothered about if they weren't important to me. If you want me to try something or have any questions, please comment or e-mail me. My e-mail address is on the front page.

Acer TravelMate C100, a sleeping beauty

2008-12-29T16:07:00.001+13:00

I own an Acer TravelMate C100 tablet PC. I recently installed Fedora 10 on it. While resuming from suspend worked under Ubuntu, it did not under Fedora 10. Following Richard Hughes' quirks, I discovered that I could resume from suspend when suspending with the vbe_post quirk.

So, from the command-line:

$ pm-suspend --quirk-vbe-post

And from HAL:

hal-set-property --udi /org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/computer --key power_management.quirk.vbe_post --bool true

While I should be able to add an entry to /usr/share/hal/fdi/information/10freedesktop/20-video-quirk-pm-acer.fdi to make this quirk permanent for HAL, that does not appear to be working. Hmm.

Update

So, the casing was wrong. My laptop claims its vendor to be ACER while the section in the HAL file was matching on "Acer". I changed it to match case insensitively, as well as adding the entry for C100 on vbe_post.

I'll mention that I didn't discover this by suddenly clueing in, but by running:

$ pm-suspend --quirk-vbe-post --store-quirks-as-fdi

And viewing the output at /etc/hal/fdi/information/99local-pm-utils-quirks.fdi.

Now HAL reads the quirk entry from the fdi. Yay.

Fedora and Masochism

2008-12-09T21:18:00.003+13:00

So I installed Fedora 10 on my laptop the other day and: what a mess! My first issue was that X wasn't working. I actually helped resolve that the other day with an X developer in Ubuntu, so I applied the same fix, and voila.

Second, I couldn't log in! I would go to GDM, login, and then it would wait interminably. I eventually tried reinstalling GDM and rebooting. That ended up working, somewhat. However, all I got was a blank panel and a few icons. I have now populated that panel. Did something fail to copy over the items? Did they fail to load? This was caused by one of two issues:

dbus-1.2.6. What utter fail. Yes, it is a security risk, but the solution is not to update a fundamental package that will break the desktops of all your users who bother to diligently install security fixes. Yikes. It's still not totally resolved. A relevant Fedora/Redhat bug: 475068; freedesktop bug: 18229
A gstreamer issue. My new user account had ~/.gstreamer-0.10 with permissions that prevented the creation of the file registry.i386.bin, without which gstreamer segfaults. Yikes!

I'll note that the gstreamer issue also took away:

my sound, and
my power management! I don't really understand how that worked, but I didn't have suspend or hibernate, or the battery applet while that gstreamer file couldn't be made. Relevant bug: 475125

The errors I received due to the gstreamer (as reported in /var/log/messages and ~/.xsession-errors) include:

gnome-settings-[8894]: segfault at 4 ip 00fef0f5 sp bffb8020 error 4 in libgstreamer-0.10.so.0.18.0[f6b000+bc000]
gnome-power-man[8893]: segfault at 4 ip 06e320f5 sp bfe37190 error 4 in libgstreamer-0.10.so.0.18.0[6dae000+bc000]
mixer-applet2[9015]: segfault at 4 ip 06e320f5 sp bfd86bd0 error in 4 in libgstreamer-0.10.so.0.18.0[6dae000+bc000]

Finally, my stylus does not work. My configuration expects /dev/input/wacom which is apparently wrong on Fedora. I need to find out which device file it becomes associated with, and then all will be well once more...

If it ain't broke, no one has tried to fix it yet!

2008-11-30T15:18:00.001+13:00

I own an Acer Travelmate C100 tablet PC with the Silicon Motion SM720 Lynx3DM card that came with it. It is currently running Ubuntu 8.10. Or trying to, at least. I had once tried to run Fedora 9 on it, but it experienced issues with its X server. I didn't have time at the moment to sort that out, so I tried Ubuntu 8.04 again and things worked.

Now I've upgraded to Ubuntu 8.10 and I am experiencing the same issues. A laptop that used to work just fine now encounters the following error, and X refuses to start.

AddScreen/ScreenInit failed for driver 0

I initially tried a variety of difference changes to my Xorg.conf file which did not help my situation. So, I did some investigation, some toying with source code, filed bug 18816 at FreeDesktop.org and wrote to the Xorg mailing list. Franscisco Jerez took interest, indicating that the issue with my driver in Ubuntu 8.10 was probably fixed in git. It seems to have been, but other issues continued to exist. I also have to add the following to my /etc/X11/xorg.conf file:

Option "UseBIOS" "off"

After this, my screen displayed, but was out of centre and flickered. He provided another patch for that. Afterward, I could start X after a fresh power cycle or resume and have a fully functional X server again. Yay!

However, now that I'm using 8.10, I notice a bunch of lag. It seems that when some dialogues open, the screen freezes for 3 or 4 seconds and the content of the dialogue frequently remains just white. I tried disabling acceleration in my xorg.conf (using 'Option "NoAccel"') and in a brief session after this, I didn't get the pauses any more (but acceleration was missing in obvious situations, such as moving a translucent terminal window). I'll try to better test whether XAA acceleration is causing the slownes. Hopefully Francisco or another developer might take an interest in that problem too, if XAA seems the likely culprit :D

So, my upgrade to Ubuntu 8.10 has been fairly painful. My tablet's portable CD-ROM isn't very reliable for reading CDs for installation, and the tablet doesn't boot from USB, so I usually install Linux on it over the network. This makes it difficult to try a different distro. Oh, and my wireless doesn't work anymore. I historically use a Netgear prism2 USB wireless adapter. Try to figure that one out to. So, the moral of the story? Don't upgrade ;)

Francisco Jerez is awesome and I (and others) should totally buy him as much non-alcoholic beverage of his choice as he ever wants.

Reading the Internet

2008-11-24T09:27:00.000+13:00

Disclaimer: What I read and my comments on them (as well as my posts on this blog) are not particularly interesting.

There are a number of websites that I like to read. Thanks to the advent of RSS and Atom feeds, I can subscribe to a feed of their latest posts and read them in a single location: an RSS Aggregator of some sort, like Google Reader. You may be reading my blog via such a medium yourself.

A very sad thing about such aggregators is that they usually do not preserve the pretty theme of the page from which the posts are coming from. I really enjoy the aesthetic I've designed for Kosmokaryote, but if you read it from Google Reader, your concept of Kosmokaryote is probably somewhat dissociated from the simple design I've laboured for so long on.

ANYWAY, the point of this post is to note that, for efficiency reasons, I now do all my Internet reading on Friday night/Saturday morning/Saturday afternoon. I usually have accumulated about 600 items to read and it takes several hours to go through them all. At the top of my blog (which you would not see via an RSS Reader!), there is a list of the last 6 items that I have read. At the bottom of the 6-item list is a Read More link which takes you to my actual Shared Items page of mine from Google Reader. It has the actual value, as it features the comments I sometimes put on the things I read. While the things I read might be insignificant to you, sometimes the comments might be :) I generally read technical and open source blogs, a linguistic and a psychology blog, webcomics, a professor at a small Christian college's blog, and some Green propaganda.

In the future, I think I will try to rig up something that takes the shared items and converts the comments into blog posts with a link to their original item. Since my comments are usually short, I'll probably aggregate them into single Weekend Reading entries that have a list of comments with their links. Mwahaha.

So, if you're interested in what I read or my comments on them; go forth. You may also subscribe to a feed of my shared items, and then avoid seeing the pretty theme I selected for the Shared Items page, boo hoo hoo

Self-sufficient Me

2008-11-24T09:19:00.000+13:00

Here is a cut video from the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestries and Fisheries of Japan advocating self-sufficiency in their food industry to increase their food security. Apparently, about 60% of the food they consume is imported, with the oils and meat that has been introduced into their diet increasing in price because of the increased demand on feeds like corn by the biofuel industry. The economics of resources is interesting. Anyway, it looks like the Sims and Sim City a little.

Ultimately, I think I expect higher efficiency food production through genetic engineering of plant crops :) I am also hoping in vitro meat largely displaces meat from live animals. I was linked to the video via a page that I think would take it as advocating buying local as being more environmentally friendly. I think I enjoy exotic, non-local foods too much to practise that all the time, though. Also, I think it's generally believed becoming a vegetarian who doesn't eat local has a much more significant impact than eating local :D, so I'm ahead of the curve.