alphagemini

Updated E17 packages

2009-03-31T03:29:00.001-07:00

Now that I'm on my brand new cable connection, I can upload packages with 1Mbit/s - a vast improvement which allows me to keep the E17 Debian repository up to date more frequently than during the last four months.
The new packages include the E17 NetworkManager client (exalt) and its control module (emodule-exalt). Thanks to exchange the E17 user can now download and install themes right from the desktop shell.

At this point I'd like to thank Daniel (aka Quaker) for updating and adding Debian files in the E17 svn tree.

New E17 packages

2009-02-15T07:12:00.000-08:00

After many weeks I finally updated the i386 and amd64 packages in the E17 Debian repository. The reason behind the delay is first and foremost my slow internet connection on which it took more than 15 hours (at 6Kb/s) to upload the new deb's. With that in mind I made sure that the new packages work prior to uploading them in order to avoid the pain of uploading fixes.

Nonetheless, due to many changes to the E17 source code since the last update, some issues were brought to my attention most of which are caused by outdated configuration directories. The previous packages are too old and its settings are not compatible. Even though purging the config dir is usually not strictly necessary, I recommend it for future updates if errors occur. Furthermore it might be necessary to remove old packages from this repository before installing the new ones because some libraries (i.e. evas) were reduced to less packages.

In general, I recommend the following upgrade procedure:

Backup your configuration directory (~/.e).
Upgrade to new packages.
Check if the configuration works with the new packages. If yes, skip to 13.
Remove the (previously backed-up) configuration directory.
Check if E17 works. If yes, skip to 13.
Remove all packages from this repository.
Run 'apt-get clean' or equivalent.
Reinstall E17 (i.e. by running 'apt-get install e17').
Check if E17 works. If yes, skip to 13.
Please make sure to set up pinning as described in the wiki.
Check if E17 works. If yes, skip to 13.
Please contact me.
Done.

Any feedback is welcome.

KDE 4.2

2009-01-31T01:07:00.000-08:00

I'm usually changing desktop environments on a weekly to monthly basis, depending on their releases. On Gentoo that's a hell lot of fun and could take several hours whereas in Ubuntu it's done in a couple of minutes.
For me the three most usable and interesting desktop environments are KDE, Gnome and - of course - Enlightenment. There are other alternatives, most notably XFCE which offers it's own set of utilities, like file manager, widget set, etc. but I haven't used it intensely in years mostly because it's ~~Qt-based, like KDE~~ GTK-based, like Gnome, and thus isn't as interesting for me.
While Gnome looks most archaic in my opinion but is very well integrated in Ubuntu, KDE is slightly slower but offers a solid framework and a nice default theme. Enlightenment on the other hand offers by far the fasted window manager as well as its own set of graphic and system libraries. I won't go into details regarding Enlightenment, I already wrote enough about it; needless to say, it's my favourite.
Well, back to the main topic. Just a couple of hours after the official release of KDE 4.2 the Kubuntu team already offers updated packages in their experimental PPA repository (a speed which, by the way, reminds me a lot to Gentoo). Unsatisfied as I was about KDE 4.0 and 4.1, I gave it a shot, despite its 'experimental' tag. To my surprise it's a real joy and a huge step towards what I expected of the 4-series of KDE. Until now KDE 4 seemed to be slow and incomplete compared to KDE 3.5, with many feateres missing, such as custom key bindings which I so frequently use to start my most used applications. KDE 4.2 remedied this situation, ships with a brand new theme, a bunch of new desktop widgets (plasmoids), is much faster and I yet have to discover any bugs, not to mention all the bugs and glitches that have disappeared.
I hope the next revision will be as ground breaking.

Back to Ubuntu

2009-01-26T14:58:00.000-08:00

Darn, I miss Gentoo already. But lately I found myself spending more time fixing or configuring my OS than actually using it. While this is usually really fun and greatly helps in understanding how things work under the hood it surely isn't desirable on the long run, especially when I want to get things done. Sure, there's always the option to use Gentoo "stable" but packages are simply too out of date and I usually end up using the ~amd64 keyword and a couple of overlays.

Going back to Ubuntu was a matter of 15 minutes - completely out of the league for Gentoo. In the peak of my Gentoo days I installed and configured a modern system in not less than 20 hours. Including actual "home folder" configuration that usually fills two entire days. I don't even dare to remember my first Gentoo installation...

Although Ubuntu's Gnome Desktop runs a little slower than Gentoo's compiler optimized binaries, it works flawlessly and includes enough optional packages to suit my needs. But what always surprises me anew is that fact that Ubuntu offers this certain "wow" effect due to its out-of-the-box working configuration. This is, of course, only possible because of Ubuntu's impressive community and thus manpower which other distribution simply lack. There's nothing easier than looking for a quick and simple solution in the Ubuntu forums or even the wiki.

New blog

2009-01-25T13:23:00.000-08:00

I've finally started a new blog to feature all my non-IT-related topics. Using Google's blogger on this blog was a real pleasure so far, but I felt it was time to try something new on my second blog. After having read a lot of good things about Wordpress, I'm sure it wasn't be a bad choice.

There isn't really much there yet, but I hope to fill it up from time to time. At least in the near future I plan to write more about random topics such as music, movies, hobbies, etc. than about IT.

Umlauts on the US keyboard with xmodmap

2008-12-25T14:22:00.000-08:00

I'm totally dependent on my US layout keyboards, both on my stationary PC and my laptop because it proved to be my preferable way of coding, mainly because the majority of symbols used in most programming languages are easily accessible, sometimes even without the need for modifier keys (e.g. '{','}','\' and most of all '/'). Once I've tried the British English layout (back when I had the C1 'picture book' of Sony) which wasn't bad either and had some interesting ideas ('"' reachable via SHIFT+2) but it didn't convince me to make a full change.
I actually can even get used to QUERTZ-layouted keyboards (like the German or Swiss one) and other, non-coding-friendly QUERTY-layouts (like the Spanish one) quite fast because I get to use them from time to time when I use (read: fix) a friend's or family members' computer. But still, the US layout is my prefered choice and I wouldn't want to miss it on my own devices which was, by the way, one reason why I imported my last laptop from the states.
Nonetheless, every once in a while I need to use symbols like umlauts or the German eszett (ß) in order to write emails properly. That's why I'm using a couple of xmodmap rules to add that functionality in a convenient way: Umlauts are mapped to the ALT key and the corresponding vowel (e.g. ALT+u=ü), the same applies for the eszett (ALT+s=ß). My old rules stopped working some when because the keycode for the ALT key changed and thus interfered with other keys (in my case with the cursor keys). This is my current script which I'm using on X.org 1.5.2:

keycode 108 = Mode_switch
keycode 20 = minus underscore ssharp
keycode 34 = bracketleft braceleft udiaeresis Udiaeresis
keycode 47 = semicolon colon odiaeresis Odiaeresis
keycode 48 = apostrophe quotedbl adiaeresis Adiaeresis
keycode 26 = e E EuroSign EuroSign e E
keycode 30 = u U udiaeresis Udiaeresis u U
keycode 32 = o O odiaeresis Odiaeresis o O
keycode 38 = a A adiaeresis Adiaeresis a A
keycode 39 = s S ssharp ssharp s S

create packages of E17 themes

2008-12-05T07:29:00.000-08:00

Before the repository revamp there were packages for E17 themes in the repository on debian.alphagemini.org; they were based on a BASH script which fetched the themes listed on get-e.org. Now that get-e.org is gone, E17 themes can be found on exchange.enlightenment.org along with a whole lot of desktop wallpapers, 3rd party applications and modules. That's why I felt it was time for writing a new script, this time in python. It basically does the same, with less BASHish temp files, sed, grep or wget usage. To use it, simply run it in an empty directory as a normal user (no privileges are required) and run dpkg-buildpackage in the resulting folder. It can be downloaded here.

I've uploaded the packages to my repository, including the virtual package e17-themes which installs all available themes.

Currently included themes:

e17-theme-apple-17 - The Apple 17 theme for E17
e17-theme-baroque - The Baroque theme for E17
e17-theme-black-chrome - The Black Chrome theme for E17
e17-theme-blingbling - The BlingBling theme for E17
e17-theme-bloody-imago - The Bloody Imago theme for E17
e17-theme-blue-eyed-theme - The Blue Eyed Theme theme for E17
e17-theme-camou - The Camou theme for E17
e17-theme-cerium - The Cerium theme for E17
e17-theme-chrome - The Chrome theme for E17
e17-theme-clearlooks - The Clearlooks theme for E17
e17-theme-crema - The Crema theme for E17
e17-theme-crude - The Crude theme for E17
e17-theme-cthulhain - The Cthulhain theme for E17
e17-theme-dali - The Dali theme for E17
e17-theme-darkness - The Darkness theme for E17
e17-theme-darkrevolution - The Darkrevolution theme for E17
e17-theme-darkside - The Darkside theme for E17
e17-theme-dukes - The Dukes theme for E17
e17-theme-edjy - The Edjy theme for E17
e17-theme-fireball - The Fireball theme for E17
e17-theme-gant - The Gant theme for E17
e17-theme-grunge - The Grunge theme for E17
e17-theme-iceball - The Iceball theme for E17
e17-theme-imago - The Imago theme for E17
e17-theme-japan2007 - The Japan2007 theme for E17
e17-theme-kor - The Kor theme for E17
e17-theme-night-bling - The Night Bling theme for E17
e17-theme-nyz - The nyz theme for E17
e17-theme-pinkapple - The PinkApple theme for E17
e17-theme-purewm - The PureWM theme for E17
e17-theme-siro - The Siro theme for E17
e17-theme-smoke - The Smoke theme for E17
e17-theme-steampunk - The Steampunk theme for E17
e17-theme-winter - The Winter theme for E17
e17-theme-xliquid - The XLiquid theme for E17

classic template tag cloud

2008-12-01T09:33:00.000-08:00

Since I'm hosting this blog on my own server I'm not able to use the blogger's new "Layouts customization" and thus can't display these fancy tag clouds which usually appear in the sidebar. However, I've found some solutions which add labels functionality to classic blogger templates, the most flexible of which seem to be using a PHP script which can be used in the template. So I've modified the script found on this blog, fixing a minor bug and adding two new features. First, the script now takes care of the actual amount of tagged articles under a certain label which can optionally be displayed next to the label (check the second source code snippet and uncomment the appropriate lines):

if(preg_match("/\/labels\//", $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'])) {
$files[$file] = substr_count(
file_get_contents($file),'');
} else {
$files[$file] = substr_count(
file_get_contents(PREFIX.$file),'');
}

Second, result pages invoked from links in the label cloud now correctly link to other results by conditionally removing the prefix to the label directory:

if(preg_match("/\/labels\//", $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'])) {
$output .= "<a style=\"".
get_style($low_end, $high_end, $size) . "\"".
"href=\"". htmlentities($name)."\">".
# Uncomment the next and comment the following line in order
# to display the number of posts for each given label.
#htmlentities(str_replace('.html','',$name))."(".$size.")</a> ";
htmlentities(str_replace('.html','',$name))."</a> ";
} else {
$output .= "<a style=\"".
get_style($low_end, $high_end, $size) . "\" ".
"href=\"".PREFIX. htmlentities($name)."\">".
# Uncomment the next and comment the following line in order
# to display the number of posts for each given label.
#htmlentities(str_replace('.html','',$name))."(".$size.")</a> ";
htmlentities(str_replace('.html','',$name))."</a> ";
}

The complete file can be downloaded here. Follow these steps to set it up and running:

Copy the script to the root folder of your blog.
Modify the SEARCH_DIR define in line 4 to suit your setup.
Create a directory called cloudtemp in the ./labels directory of your root folder:
# mkdir labels/cloudtemp
Add the directive
AddType application/x-httpd-php .html
to your VirtualHost file, e.g. to the section.
Reload your apache server:
# /etc/init.d/apache2 reload
If you'd like to display the number of related articles in brakets behind the label's name just follow the directives in lines 52 and 60.

Lumix DMC-LX3

2008-11-30T12:44:00.001-08:00

Every once in a while I find myself taking a look around the market regarding gadgets, PC components or alike. Two weeks ago, for example, I was tasked to find a new digital camera for someone. Yep, the term "digital camera" is quite wide and given that I had no restriction on the price nor the brand mark I almost didn't know where to start looking. I searched for prices, specs and reviews on everything from light weight compact toys to full blown SLR behemoths. To make a long story shorter, I ended up buying a camera myself.

My girlfriend and me decided to buy the Konica Minolta DiMAGE Z10 camera about four years ago because it was using some kind of fake SLR view finder. This so called "Switch Finder" allows to project the image on the LCD to the view finder which comes in handy if you're used to shoot photos like that or if the daylight makes the LCD unreadable. The rest of this camera's features were all good but none of them were that important either: 8x optical zoom, fast start up, use of normal AA batteries (we used to have bad experiences with proprietary ones) - all at the cost of quite a bulky device with rather low 3.2Mp. Most of the photos I've taken during the last years, including those found on my picasa gallery, were all shot with this camera.
Actually buying a new camera after all these years was something I really didn't expect because the Z10 worked (and still works) without any issues.

I've looked at plenty of new cameras and could narrow the results down quite well by discarding cameras with CCD chips which contain insane amounts of pixels on a small chip area. Thus I was looking at cameras with a chip size of 1/2.0" or bigger to have decent sensitivity and color saturation. Now I started discarding results of cameras which had still a too high density of pixels on their CCD chips which might result in image quality degrade as described on http://6mpixel.org, like the Ixus 980 IS of Canon with a 14.7Mp sensor on a size of just 1/1.7".

At this point I was left with the Sony Cybershot DSC-W300, the Pentax Optio S12, the Ricoh GX200 and, of course, the Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX3. I discarded the first two quite quickly because of their cheap plastic body and overall medium features.

Next was the optical system. Without doubt there are plenty of opinions out there about lenses and their qualities and I won't go into detail. The Leica F2.0 24mm DC Vario-Summicron lens however was what made me choose the Panasonic over the Sony device. In combination with the high sensitivity CCD chip it allows the user to shoot pictures in dark surrounding with much higher shutter speeds than any camera in that category resulting in sharper pictures with minimal noise. Additionally, its SLR-like wide angle and very constant sharpness allows for compositions not yet seen from compact cameras.

The only catch for me was the lack of a view finder as I was used to from the Z10 but this got resolved when I could try the LX3 in a local shop to see that LCDs evolved greatly during the last four years, especially in regards of brightness. Also, view finders usually bloat the cameras which, at least for me, is a high price to pay - especially if I can get used to live without them. Another slight disadvantage is the reletively small 2.5x optical zoom. This however is understandable considering the wide angle lense and the total size of the camera and zooming in more than 4x with my old camera resulted in blury pictures anyway, at least most of the times.

The LX3 comes up with some supposedly new and fancy user interface, but to be honest I can't comment much on that because nowadays every new camera naturally features far more functions than the Z10. Overall, the LX3 offers technology which is only found in SLR cameras so far - which is probably why it is targeted at the SLR photographer who needs a compact camera but doesn't want to miss out all the manual adjustment posibilities or the high image quality. On top of all the technical details though, I simply fell in love with the design of the LX3. It looks serious, not cheap, useful and without useless eye catching or modern properties - I think this is why I've got a weakness for Thinkpad notebooks, too.

Last but not least Panasonic offers a couple of accessories, like a wide angel converter, an external, optical view finder and various filters.

I did some field tests with the LX3, to see how it performs in low light situations. The results can be found here:

LX3 shots

E17 migrates to subversion

2008-09-21T03:18:00.000-07:00

After the E17 team has been busy converting the version control system from CVS to subversion I saw the need to update my build script to reflect this migration and finally adress a heap of bugs which have been around since the last version got released.
Along with various bugfixes, I've added functionality which further minimizes manual work needed to make packages compile. First of all, since configure.in files in subversion no longer generate Debian/changelog I've added a function which does just that: injecting the line necessary if needed. Furthermore there's now an option which generates a Debian/changelog file based on an adjustable amount of SVN log entries. The first two entries in the changelog.in of the emodules package might look like this:

emodules (@VERSION@-0cvs20080921) unstable; urgency=low

[ mekius ]
Fix history, thanks Sachiel :D

-- Falko Schmidt Thu, 11 Sep 2008 02:06:54 +0000

emodules (@VERSION@-0cvs20080921) unstable; urgency=low

[ kaethorn ]
remove the echo module.

-- Falko Schmidt Sat, 06 Sep 2008 09:46:58 +0000

Last but not least any source package which doesn't contain a Debian directory will automatically be ignored and thus not cause a build failure anymore. Packages either marked as not containing such a directory ("no debian dir") or which are mentioned in the DONTBUILDLIST variable ("skipped") will be marked accordingly in the "Check trunk" summary:

I've updated i386 and amd64 packages successfully and will from now on focus on updating and adding package descriptions in SVN. Downloads and installation instructions can be found here.

E17 sparc packages

2008-05-17T02:45:00.000-07:00

I've compiled some sparc E17/EFL packages on a Sun Blade 1000 and uploaded them to the Debian repository. That means there are packages available for all those who need a fast desktop environment even on some of Sun Microsystem's older, but still very reliable workstations.

Usual installation procedures apply here as well.

E17 amd64 packages

2008-05-12T23:49:00.000-07:00

Just an update to the previous post:

A new set of amd64 packages has been uploaded and should provide the same functionality as their i386 counterparts. Packages for alpha are planned for the following weeks, probably Sparc packages as well.

Big Debian E17 overhaul

2008-05-05T18:15:00.000-07:00

As the PkgE Team is working hard to get E17 into Debian/experimental, I took some time to merge most of their packaging goodness into the debian/ folders of the enlightenment CVS tree. As a result the repository at debian.alphagemini.org now features higher consistency regarding package names and dependencies.
The major change involved renaming of -dev, -dbg and -bin packages of all libraries which now look like libfoo-dev instead of libfoo0-dev. The second change was the package name of enlightenment itself which is now available as e17. Furthermore libe-dbus is now called libedbus. libeet1 is now available from the official Debian repositories as well and should be compatible with the rest of the packages.
Due to all these changes installations will most probably break upon upgrade which can be prevented by uninstalling all previous packages from this repository beforehand. Afterwards a regular

apt-get install e17 emodules-all

should do the rest.

Apart from the above changes there are also some additions, namely three new emodules (execwatch, iiirk and notification) as well as the edje editor.

The AMD64 port will be updated accordingly as soon as the i386 port works flawlessly.

Thanks a lot to Guillaume, Sedat and Vit for reporting bugs and suggestions, and of course to the PkgE-Team for providing the package descriptions.

Further information and instructions can be found here.

ICC vs GCC-4.3

2008-03-10T08:45:00.000-07:00

Since GCC-4.3.0 is about to be released I decided to take a look at its new intel Core 2 tuning and SSSE3 code generation by emerging the package found on Dirtyepic's overlay. I compared the time it would take to re-encode a video with ffmpeg and a WAV sample with oggenc. The video clip I used can be found here (1920x816 MOV, 1:46, 128.3MB) while the WAV file is just the extracted audio track thereof.

I used these four compiler collections and their CFLAGS:

GCC 4.1.2 (-march=nocona -O3 -pipe -msse3)
GCC 4.2.3 (-march=nocona -O3 -pipe -msse3)
GCC 4.3.0-pre20080302 (-march=core2 -O3 -pipe -mssse3)
ICC 10.1 20080112 (-O3 -xT -ipo -gcc)

My system's specs:

Q6600(B3) @ 3.21GHz
400Mhz FSB (266Mhz northbridge strap)
2GB PC3-15000 1603Mhz (8-8-8-24)
kernel 2.6.24-gentoo-r3 (kernel lock preemption and preemptible kernel model, 1000Hz timer freq, see config)

I recompiled the following packages with emerge after changing my environment to the appropriate compiler using gcc-config:

x11-libs/libXau-1.0.3 USE="-debug"
x11-libs/libXdmcp-1.0.2 USE="-debug"
x11-libs/libXext-1.0.4 USE="-debug"
x11-libs/libX11-1.1.3-r1 USE="ipv6 -debug -xcb"
media-libs/libogg-1.1.3
media-libs/faac-1.26-r1
media-sound/lame-3.97-r1 USE="-debug -mp3rtp"
media-libs/xvid-1.1.3-r3 USE="(-altivec) -examples"
media-libs/x264-svn-20080301 USE="threads -debug"
media-libs/a52dec-0.7.4-r5 USE="-djbfft -oss"
media-libs/amrnb-7.0.0.0
media-libs/faad2-2.6.1 USE="-drm"
media-libs/libpng-1.2.25
dev-libs/libxml2-2.6.31 USE="ipv6 python readline -bootstrap -build -debug -doc -examples -test"
media-libs/libvorbis-1.2.0 USE="-doc"
media-libs/speex-1.2_beta3 USE="ogg sse"
media-libs/flac-1.2.1-r2 USE="cxx ogg sse -3dnow (-altivec) -debug -doc"
media-libs/libtheora-1.0_beta2-r1 USE="encode -doc -examples"
media-libs/freetype-2.3.5-r2 USE="X -bindist -debug -doc -utils"
media-libs/giflib-4.1.6 USE="X -rle"
media-sound/vorbis-tools-1.2.0 USE="flac nls ogg123 speex"
media-video/ffmpeg-0.4.9_p20070616-r2 USE="X a52 aac amr doc encode ieee1394 imlib ipv6 mmx ogg sdl theora threads truetype v4l vorbis x264 xvid zlib (-altivec) -debug -network -oss -test"

All remaining system libraries which ffmpeg and oggenc might link to were compiled with gcc 4.3.0 (e.g. glibc).

Note on ICC: Multifile interprocedural optimizations didn't work for lame, flac, a52dec and faad2, where I needed to resort to single file interprocedural optimizations and thus used '-O3 -xT -ip -gcc'. Also, ICC didn't seem to compile ffmpeg. For that reason I needed to recompile libX11, libXau, libXdmcp and libXext with gcc-4.3.0 or else ffmpeg would complain about symbol lookup errors.

I used the following command for re-encoding the video clip:

ffmpeg -y -i 2744_trailer01-en_1920.mov \
-f avi -vcodec mpeg4 -b 800k -g 300 \
-bf 2 -acodec libfaac output.avi

I repeated it 5 times and got these results:

GCC-4.1.2: 437.24 sec
GCC-4.2.3: 436.98 sec
GCC-4.3.0: 436.17 sec
ICC 10.1: 429.72 sec

For ogg encoding I first extracted the audio track of the clip.

ffmpeg -y -i 2744_trailer01-en_1920.mov \
output.wav

and then encoded it with oggenc:

rm -f output.wav; oggenc output.wav

This command was repeated 30 times and resulted in the following times:

GCC-4.1.2: 217.00 sec
GCC-4.2.3: 216.97 sec
GCC-4.3.0: 206.90 sec
ICC 10.1: 191.91 sec

Doing the graphs I decided to truncate the bars and only show the relevant upper parts. Thus these graphs don't represent absolute values but demonstrate the differences in execution time between the code produced by each compiler collection:

It turns out that the GCC 4.3 branch yields quite a noticeable performance boost, probably thanks to its new Core 2 tuning option. ICC's optimizations are still unmatched and show that GCC could still need some improvement. After all ICCs lead in video encoding was most probably just caused by its shared libraries (e.g. flac) because ffmpeg itself was compiled with GCC (see above).

As a conclusion, GCC and especially the upcoming release produces code which is more than fast enough for a normal desktop system. Even with libraries that benefit greatly from ICC's vectorization techniques the advantage of ICC over GCC is negligible and wouldn't justify the time spent in recompilation and porting.

Overclocking the Q6600

2008-03-09T05:23:00.000-07:00

Woot! I'm running a Q6600 at 3.01Ghz. Although it's the old B3 stepping, it seems to run smoothly at around 55°C under full load thanks to water cooling.
I didn't have to increase the core voltage, so it should remain stable and hopefully won't die on me too soon.

To monitor the temperatures I use ksysguard as shown here. It's very powerful in that it allows you to choose a multitude of ways to display system information. I'm mainly using the signal plotter because one can assign several sources to one plotter cell - in this example I'm graphing idle, nice, system and user load of a CPU core in one cell. In the second row ksysguard plots the temperatures in a scale from 0 to 100°C. I could even monitor remote systems running ksysguardd (e.g. via ssh). The latter only depends on some general purpose libraries and tools which is well suited for servers where I don't want to install the complete set of kde packages.

Water cooling

2008-02-25T03:28:00.001-08:00

After a considerable amount of work spent and several weeks of waiting, the water cooling for my PC is finally finished. All parts, except for the pump, are produced by Aqua Computer.

The preparation and modification of the case was finished in December last year.

But unfortunately, while mounting the 120cm radiator, I used screws which were too long, so I penetrated its hull. I mounted the system nonetheless, after all I still had the 240cm radiator.

After filling in the water the system ran perfectly, at least for one day. The second day the pump stopped functioning, probably because of the huge amount of air in the system. Aquacomputer were very friendly and repaired the pump. I also ordered a new 120cm radiator, a cooler for my 8800 GTX and some other accessories which I missed with the first order, e.g. a ball valve. I remounted everything, filled the tubes with water only to notice that the production of bubbles remain.
After some consideration, I decided to mount the equalising reservoir at the highest point of the case so that all bubbles collect there (second half of the following gallery). It was totally worth it because not only did the bubbles disappear. The pump was running much smoother because it used the water as a lubricant and any bit of air has a negative effect on its operation. Also, the temperatures of the CPU and GPU dropped, after all air is rather a heat isolator than a conductor.

The cooling works quite efficient as I've got around 47°C +/- 2°C on each of the four cores under full load (folding@home SMP). I could start overclocking a bit...

Folding@Home screen saver for KDE

2008-01-31T10:07:00.000-08:00

It bugged me that there was no fancy visualization front end around for Folding@Home that yields more than a progress bar and whatever else it could extract from the unitinfo.txt file. Especially the PS3 client looks awesome (I've never seen the Windows client) so I thought it's time to do one myself. It didn't take me too long because I've already written a KDE screen saver for a molecule dynamics framework at University of Stuttgart/HLRS.

So, here it is. FAHss displays the current work unit as an OpenGL model. The configuration dialog is a main part of the application and aims to give the user a choice as to how it should handle rendering. It allows the user to choose to ...

let the camera move (e.g. rotate around the center).
set the speed with which the camera moves.
select a background color.
draw a grid box around the unit and choose its color.
display the models solidly or as a wireframe.
adjust the number of subdivisions on models to increase performance.

Furthermore the user can select which information to display as an OSD, e.g. the progress and the due date. The font type and color and its position can be specified. All changes being made in the dialog are directly reflected in the preview window it contains.

There are several features which aren't implemented yet (such as core status or CPU usage) but it's already usable. Maybe I'll set the project up on Google Code some when, but for now I'm hosting it on my own server. It can be checked out like this:

svn co http://svnro.alphagemini.org/fahss/

I've also set up a WebSVN service to track changes at http://svn.alphagemini.org

HDAPS patch for 2.6.24-rc8

2008-01-24T01:26:00.000-08:00

I've been a Thinkpad fan since the first time I laid hand on one so my next portable companion had to be the model X61 which turned out to be exceptionally reliable (and portable), with all its features running in Linux including the fingerprint sensor and the hard disk Active Protection System (HDAPS). Since I've had reasons to use iwlwifi drivers for my 3945ABG Wifi card I chose to use the in-kernel driver provided by the upcoming 2.6.24 release. This kernel also supports the intel HDA sound card well. I prefer to have all drivers in one place other than having to compile them externally, so this was the way to go.
What's lacking was the HDAPS disk parking kernel patch which isn't yet included in the mainstream kernel. Up until release candidate 6 (don't know about 7) the patch 1077-002.patch found on thinkwiki.org worked after some fiddling with the line numbers. As of rc8 I needed to swap some functions around in order to make it compile, the resulting patch can be found here.

Maybe later I'll take a look at the 'error check fix' mentioned on thinkwiki.org as well.

Christmas holidays

2008-01-15T02:24:00.000-08:00

Now that holidays are over and everything settled down again I found some time to report back. It was relaxing on Christmas and New Year's Eve as this time we weren't bound to go anyway but instead got visitors. My girlfriend's parents decided to stay in Germany for some days so we had an interesting mix of Spanish and German style celebrations, without hurries or obligations and quite the only (European) inhabitants of the dorms around this time of the year.

On Christmas Eve we lighted some kind of brush-wood flares as it's supposed to be customs in Jijona.

We were quite lucky because it snowed from the 25th on.

We've reserved a table in the traditional room of Stuttgart's finest Japanese restaurant for a change - we've had enough of raclette sweets and pizza.

Last but not least we've had a great time on New Year's Eve, not only because we bought a whole bunch of fireworks but mostly because it started snowing heavily just around 11:45pm. So while we watched the fireworks and fired off our own, everything - including ourselves - got covered in snow.

During the celebrations I also spent some time in the workshop to get my PC water cooling system solution to work. As there were some complications and thus it ain't complete yet, I'll rant about it another time.

Excessive GPU heat

2007-12-19T12:49:00.000-08:00

When I bought my VGA card back in April I decided to go with a specially cooled model of the evga ACS³ series. Because this series contains a special heatsink design, it can cope with higher GPU and VRAM clockings. The 8800GTX KO I bought contains a GPU clocked at 625MHz instead of 575MHz while the DDR3 memory is clocked at a juicy 2GHz instead of 1.35Ghz.

Now that it has been loyally pleasuring my visual needs up until now I started experiencing unexplainable crashes, especially while playing S.T.A.L.K.E.R. which is even more weird since Crysis was running smoothly. I basically tried everything: I installed XP, lowered the resolution and texture size, removed the game mods, installed all kinds of stable and beta drivers - all caused the game to freeze after 5 to 10 minutes followed by a BSOD after another 2 minutes which just told me that the graphics card was the root of it. I installed the same game on the PC of my girlfriend which happens to have almost the same VGA card (8800 GTS) and the same mainboard. Of course there it worked like a charm.
I finally found out that the card was massively overheating both while idling and under load (85C and 98C respectively) which is way too high, considering that I cleaned the dust off the fan regularly. Setting the fan manually to 100% didn't help but at least using an 18W/220V industrial fan remedied the situation but was unbearable noise-wise.

Frustrated and already sad about having to send it to RMA I carefully unscrewed the covering metal case of the board in a desperate move. What joyful sight that resulted in: The heatspreader was basically blocked by a wall of dust, making it impossible for the fan to send any air through that part:

Now everything's back to normal - except that my newly ordered mainboard turned out to be defective and waits to get replaced. No meddling with hardware until Christmas is over, sniff.

Espain

2007-12-18T04:08:00.000-08:00

Spain is a country like any other, it has its history and culture, its nice and its ugly spots - and its language. While languages in Europe usually have a lot in common, be it grammar or vocabulary wise, they definitely also have their little problems of alphabet incompatibility to each other.

For example most nations excluding English speaking ones (and maybe the Netherlands) tend to have their problems with the English 'th' and especially the 'r'. The French for all I know might from time to time find it difficult to properly pronounce words starting with or including an 'h' which makes 'Hotel' sound like 'Otel'.
This phenomenon is obviously based on the fact that the mother tongue doesn't contain or doesn't pronounce some bits and pieces of the other language and thus makes it difficult to master them. As many European nations have problems like this, people often just smile when they encounter them, knowing that oneself might sounds equally funny.

As I've got reasons to be in Spain quite regularly, I could explore the nation's culture, lifestyle and language mostly from a non-touristic point of view. This yielded many interesting facts. Like the French, they've got their problem with the 'h' but even more noticeable is one habit which I haven't encountered anywhere yet. This time the source is not unpronounced or non-existent letters in the speaker's native language but the enforcement to add letters where they don't belong.
The letter in question is the 'e' which, for a Spanish speaker, must be prefixed to double consonants like 'sp', 'st' or 'sm'. The first serious encounter I've enjoyed was a cinema advertising the movie 'Espiderman' followed by the famous alcoholic drink 'Esmirnoff'. I've met Spanish persons who, even by trying hard, couldn't possibly emit such words without leaking an 'e' first.
Well, I've just accepted that my sir name doesn't sound like 'Schmidt' but rather like 'Esmit' - which is totally acceptable considering the excessive use of consonants in this name.

Finally, another amusing finding:

As a side note, there are non-European languages which yield a similar behavior. An example is the Japanese way of appending vowels to consonants in foreign words, such that words ending in 'l' or 'r' actually would end in 'ru'. But that's mainly because the alphabet only contains syllables except for the 'n'.

Crysis beauty

2007-11-28T17:08:00.000-08:00

While it was surely not even remotely necessary I actually did buy nVIDIA's 8800GTX board about three months ago with no special title in mind - unlike my hardware-buying rampage back when Oblivion came out.

I was quite impressed trying Bioshock a few weeks ago as it not only ran smoothly, it also looked pretty. Properly drawn fog effects and realistic water ripples are really a neat sensation but that's about it from the DX10 side. So obviously that's not what makes Bioshock exceptional. Fact is that the guys at 2K Boston did a great job at bringing Rapture to life, in all its glory and decay. You constantly get the impression of being in a city under the ocean with water flowing down walls subtly, pressure noise on the structure and humidity everywhere. Of course character animation is stunning as well, not to mention the story-telling.
After sneaking through the countless corridors of Systemshock's universe not even too long ago, I couldn't resist to feel right at home. Sure, Shodan was far more attractive than Atlas/Fontaine and just thinking about her voice still gives me the creeps, but I expected *shock - and that's what I got.

Of course the DX10 hype isn't what many people expected and luckily I'm not one of them. After Bioshock I went out to see what more the market was offering, full of hope that developers might have drained every last bit out of modern hardware to gain even more visual firework. Lost Planet: Extreme Condition surely was there before Bioshock and was meant as a tech demo or at least only get attention for being the first DX10 title for the desperate. Thus I can understand that it just isn't more than a beautifully bloated arcade shooter.

Then Hellgate: London got released which I was reading about every now and then since almost three years. Hearing that it also supports DX10 renderers made the waiting sweeter. But bummer - it was just a large-scale Hack 'n Slash RPG with the collect/upgrade/sell mechanisms that made you love (aka get addicted to) Diablo half a decade ago.

So I sorta didn't have high hopes for Crysis. Luckily I was wrong about that. But why? Because the best possible approach is not expecting much? Or was it just because other First Person Shooters didn't evolve beyond the F.E.A.R - Half Life 2 - S.T.A.L.K.E.R core (with all due respect to these titles)?
I assume it's simply due to the fact that Crysis is good and more bang for the buck than many titles to come, even across several genres. That's what was high time for a potentially endangered PC games market in my opinion. Usually companies are run by money and money is time which in turn lets the world experience some of the most awful console to PC conversions ever (where the hell does my PC happen to have its triangle button?). But it wouldn't matter anyway as the PC version appear weeks or months afterward and some late bad critiques won't scratch the sale numbers on the console market.

For example, I totally adore the Gothic world and never complained about the serious flaws in the latest and last Piranha Bytes (R.I.P) title but I see those as being the reason for frustrated buyers. The need to fix hardware bugs after a release usually is a pure PC phenomenon not to mention the extra work needed to make the engine run on/with all kind of hardware during development.
So why isn't the PC games market not dying out? Or is it actually in the process? The only apparent advantage that I could think of so far is the availability of upgrades which give the PC a technological ledge but in turn makes it difficult to support all the different components. It's clear, just by looking at the numbers, that consoles can never offer such amounts of raw power in respect of CPU/GPU/RAM. For a PC player the only reason to invest into a new console is the release of a [put in your favourite system]-only title (e.g. Final Fantasy, or The Darkness in my case).

With Crysis the PC markets gets a refreshing reference title in all respects. After trying the demo I decided to order the full version and have since not encountered any drawback at all. Even if one might turn up, the good points are simply too overwhelming already. Clearly, DX10 doesn't make a huge difference except for the insane hardware requirements, but they're as nice-to-have as in Bioshock. What really caught my attention is the way the environment is designed to be completely natural and interactive. That starts with the expected vegetation, animals, leafes falling down the trees and sun rays getting lost in the top of trees. You can either pick everything up or alter it's shape in order to be able to:

high quality xvid

When you lob a grenade in one of those shacks they get torn apart while bullets barely scratch them.

high quality xvid

Apart from dozens of surprises, one of the most fascinating details was the way the CryENGINE2 handles filled barrels.

high quality xvid

Crysis demands power and my card can barely catch up. But that's totally fine by me because now it's finally busy, at least during those times when it doesn't have to display my E17 desktop.

Trip to St. Blasien

2007-10-30T14:17:00.000-07:00

Having grown up in an area doesn't necessarily make you have seen it all. After spending the first 20 years of my life in the southern region of the Black Forest I moved to Stuttgart and just happened to have come back today to visit my parents. More out of necessity but out of interest we drove to a remote town in the black forest, called St. Blasien which I regret not having seen earlier.

St. Blaise's Abbey

The St. Blaise's Abbey is, of course, absolutely worth seeing (which doesn't mean that the rest of the town should be left out). It's a pity though that I couldn't hear the organ playing, the acoustics must be awesome. Perhaps another time.

dh_fixperms headaches

2007-10-22T01:57:00.000-07:00

If you ever wondered why lines such as

install/mypackage:
chmod 4511 debian/tmp/usr/bin/my_setuid_binary

in your debian/rules file seem to be magically ignored in the resulting package, then look no further. It took me some time to figure it out, after trying all kind of combinations of post-install, pre-finalize and pre-install routines. In the end it was quite obvious.
By including the standard debhelper rules (/usr/share/cdbs/1/rules/debhelper.mk) there're a whole bunch of scripts being unleashed on your package and one of them is dh_fixperms(1) which "removes the setuid and setgid bits from all files in the package".
That's fine, but we want to override this with a statement in debian/rules

DEB_FIXPERMS_EXCLUDE := regex

where the regex excludes each file which matches. Good to know.

Software RAID on Gentoo and Debian

2007-10-21T07:08:00.000-07:00

Up until now I backed up my hard drive with important files with unison. I did that by regularly plugging in a similar second hard drive into one of my empty drive bays, running unison, waiting for it to finish and finally pulling the new hard drive out again to store it on my shelf. This obviously spares at least one drive from running all the time but is a very tedious task, especially if it's IDE drives which aren't hot-swappable.

So I've recently gone through the very unpleasant course of loosing the data on one of my old IDE hard drives, of course the one which I don't back up with unison but located in the same file server. Rescuing data wasn't possible, even forensic tools like foremost and scalpel couldn't retrieve all the files, e.g. mp3 files were all either 7.2MB or 42MB in size and contained everything but a valid music stream. foremost didn't even finish and segfaulted after carving about 30% of the disk.

To make life easier and to possibly prevent such tragedies from happening in the future, I ordered two identical Seagate SATA hard drives, each 500GB. While Seagate doesn't precisely build silent drives but grants five years of warranty, these seemed to be perfect for the file server which is running in the cellar. But while planning on using RAID1 for the Seagate drives, I decided to do the same with my workstation - but this time not for reasons of redudancy but for the sake of access speed - and bought two Western Digital HDDs of the same size which promised to be less loud and also had 16MB of cache (instead of 8MB on the Seagate disks).

Once they arrived I added a spare PCI SATA RAID controller with a SiliconImage chipset into the file server and defined a RAID1 array in the card's BIOS setup tool. The stock Debian kernel contained all needed modules and after installing the dmraid with apt, I could view the setup

# dmraid -r
/dev/sda: sil, "sil_ahbgafcdfhah", mirror, ok, 976771120 sectors, data@ 0
/dev/sdb: sil, "sil_ahbgafcdfhah", mirror, ok, 976771120 sectors, data@ 0

# dmraid -s sil_ahbgafcdfhah
*** Active Set
name : sil_ahbgafcdfhah
size : 976771120
stride : 0
type : mirror
status : ok
subsets: 0
devs : 2
spares : 0

Mounting worked the usual way but instead of using the raw device node, you'd need to mount the respective mapped device, in my case /dev/mapper/sil_ahbgafcdfhah .

My workstation also has a (fake/software) RAID controller (onboard ICH7) but it wasn't as easy to set up because the RAID1 array acts as the boot drive and the kernel needs to be booted accordingly. Also, grub doesn't recognize RAID setups and thus I needed to create a separate small primary partition at the beginning of the RAID drive which is accessible, no matter if access it as a RAID drive or as its underlying disks. On this partition I store the kernel and its ramdisk, as well as grub's stage files. I did that by booting the Gentoo install CD, setting up dmraid as I did on the Debian box, formatting the RAID drive and copying the old drive's partitions with

# find . | cpio -pdum /mnt/target

The second problem was building a working kernel and its ramdisk. Custom built kernels didn't work because they're unable to initialize the mapping with dmraid. Luckily Gentoo's genkernel package saved my day.

# genkernel --dmraid all --menuconfig

After compiling the kernel in my chrooted target system, I copied the resulting files to my boot partition mentioned above and add the following entry to grub's config file:

title=Gentoo Linux 2.6.23 genkernel
root (hd0,3)
kernel /kernel-genkernel-x86_64-2.6.23-gentoo root=/dev/ram0 init=/linuxrc \
real_root=/dev/mapper/isw_bcaheaacjd_NewSystem2 dodmraid vga=792 ramdisk=8192
initrd (hd0,3)/initramfs-genkernel-x86_64-2.6.23-gentoo

Note that the fact that the root partition is the partition with number four has nothing to do with it being situated at the very beginning of the disk.