rss feed

I'm trying to build a 2.4 kernel with gcc 4.1.2. (Because.) I don't intend to run the result, I'm just trying to get it to build an image. And I'm fixing things. It #includes having done --nostdinc and not adding back the gcc internal header file directory... apparently that was ok back in 3.x. It does (thing, thing)++ which doesn't even _mean_ anything in C, and apparently gcc 3.x accepted that too...? How did this EVER work?

Milton Miller emailed me to point out several things wrong with the "Why do things this way" section of documentation.html. I'm both glad and chagrined, because I thought I'd put enough of a disclaimer at the start that I hadn't gotten a chance to revise that section. But I guess not. (I'm really mad at myself for wasting good developer review: I'm _happy_ Milton's looking at my stuff and pointing out where it needs to be fixed, I'm just annoyed I didn't get the things I knew about fixed before he looked at it so he could point out things I _didn't_ know about. Sigh. Only so many hours in the day. I need a Tardis.)

I tweaked some of the issues Milton pointed out, but what I really need is another day or two free to rewrite everything from the start of that section to the end of the file. Possibly with a flamethrower.

Meanwhile, I poke at openwrt for the California guys. Wow, openwrt is kind of complicated.

The openwrt website had no obvious "here is the most recent version, download it". An old news entry pointed to a release candidate, but the news entries have no date so I have no idea how old that is. The download link pointed me to a bunch of subdirectories, with no top level README or anything, and no obvious "here is what you should download" thing. The docs say I should do an svn checkout of the random version du jour, so I reluctantly did that. (Buildroot all over again.)

Its readme says it requires me to install flex, bison, unzip, libz-dev, and pkg-config. (It also wanted gettext, but there's no way it actually needs that.) Installed 'em, then its "make install" did its own prerequisite test and insisted I add autoconf and gawk. Gawk? I've got an awk, but now it needs the _gnu_ awk, which neither Ubuntu nor Debian provides by default. (That's just _sad_. Not that debian doesn't provide it, that openwrt needs it. Moving from bash to dash was stupid; Ubuntu still installs bash unconditionally on every system so there's no _reason_ to point /bin/sh at something else when bash is _right_there_. Moving from gawk to awk wasn't; they actually got away with not _installing_ gawk, historical Linux distros like Red Hat 6 _used_ to use non-gawk awks, awk isn't nearly as pervasive a tool as your command shell so it doesn't do random things like change the behavior of "make" files that never called it, and the non-gnu implementation of awk wasn't significantly broken to the point where you couldn't easily use it.)

Resisted my normal urge to go "no, you don't need gawk" and try to fix openwrt before I'd actually made it work in the first place. I'm on somebody else's time, make the vanilla version work and complicate it later. Besides, openwrt isn't my build system, I'm not really interested in pushing patches into it. (The design isn't worth spending effort on.)

Ok, it's building. They're building gnu sed instead of using the busybox one. Their build isn't smp aware, so it's using only one of my laptop's processors. I told it not to build LUA and it's building it anyway. (And quilt?) The README said to install bison, then it compiled it as part of the tools before the toolchain. (I'm guessing this is the host tools, it hasn't built the cross compiler toolchain yet. Ah, here it starts doing that.) More granularity would be nice, initially it hung because the network went down and there was no way to tell other than it taking too long to go from "tools/sed compile" to "tools/sed install". (They forced me to install gawk before it would deign to run "make menuconfig", but they compiled "staging_dir/host/sed" from source. Right.)

It's weird, dealing with OpenWRT reminds me of my earlier efforts. I pestered everyone who would listen at Atlanta Linux Showcase in 1999 about "building Linux from source code installing it with a pair of tweezers", looking for documentation on how to do this, but nobody knew how. Then when I found Linux From Scratch I first built it back around 2000, and turned the whole process into a big shell script that ran as root.

A few months later I started scripting automated builds for WebOffice, this time using a series of different scripts to segregate the build process into coherent stages, and extending them to build all sorts of extra stuff (apache and samba and postfix and so on), and turn the result into a zisofs image that would format and install a hard drive.

Then in 2003, I started over from scratch, both because I'd left WebOffice and because I wanted to relaunch based on uClibc and busybox, and made extensive use of User Mode Linux. I dropped about half the complexity, the install CD, most of the "optional" packages you didn't need for the system to rebuild itself under itself... Focused instead on getting the underlying build right and figuring out what I could _remove_ by beating busybox and uClibc into shape or simply figuring out how to do without it. The goal of this version wasn't to make a bigger system with more features, but to make a _smaller_ system with the best ratio of size to functionality. That entire system I was constantly tearing stuff out and re-implementing it.

Then in 2006 I did another from scratch relaunch, based this time on cross compiling and QEMU. That's the one I'm still working on, and from the start I had a fairly clear idea what I wanted the result to look like, and where I wanted to _stop_. This time, I knew where the edges of the project were, the importance of separating the lot into independent layers, reducing environmental dependencies and cross-references, documenting everything I did, clear goals, revision history, reproducibility... The previous iteration had been about figuring out what I could avoid doing, this one was about actually getting away with not doing it.

If you consider Linux From Scratch to be my first build system, the weboffice one to be my second, the 2003 releaunch to be my third, then the current Firmware Linux incarnation is my fourth Linux build system. Each time I started over from scratch, it was because I'd learned enough to question my original assumptions, and now I thought I could do a better job by throwing away what I had and taking a completely different (usually simpler) approach.

If I'd never questioned my assumptions, and continued to develop on the original instead of starting over with fresh ideas, my original script might have incrementally evolved into something like OpenWRT. I recognize a lot of the ideas, and I also know why I either stopped doing that or never went there in the first place. I suppose I should add some of my reasons to documentation.html.

(From the length of this entry, you may hae gathered that the openwrt build is slow.)

Now it's evening, and I'm trying to build a 2.4 kernel with gcc 4.1.2. (Long story.) I don't intend to run the result, I'm just trying to get it to build an image. And I'm fixing things just enough to make the build breaking errors stop. It #includes having done --nostdinc and not adding back the gcc internal header file directory... apparently that was ok back in 3.x. It does (thing, thing)++ which doesn't even _mean_ anything in C, and apparently gcc 3.x accepted that too...? How did this EVER work?

So today's the last day in November. Gotta ship FWL 0.9.5 now.

Pretty much all the work I've done for the past week has been documentation and user interface stuff. I know it seems strange to hold the release up for this, it's easy to see this as optional stuff that could be deferred indefinitely. The thing is, for people other than _me_, effort put into improving user interface and documentation has a bigger payoff than most of the infrastructure work I'm so proud of. Most people will never notice the distcc port auto-selection stuff (so you can run accelerated builds for two different architectures simultaneously), but moving include.sh into the sources directory so all the files at the top level are ones the user is expected to be able to interact with directly? Well, if I do my job right they won't notice that either... :)

I'm watching John Dvorak's "Cranky Geeks" podcast, starting with the first ones from years ago, because I'm vaguely curious about what the Windows zombies think. (Half an hour a week, 52 weeks a year, means 26 hours of video per year. The countdown/maddow podcasts I follow on MSNBC do that much video every 2-3 weeks.)

Wow this Dvorak guy is consistently wrong. It's impressive. Wondering why Red Hat didn't bail out the OpenBSD guys when they alienated Darpa as a funding source ("those open source guys") was merely clueless, but the constant insistence Apple was about to switch to Windows for its Intel boxes was hilariously myopic.

He's a total microsoft fanboy, this could be entertaining when they get up to the Vista release... And they think RFIDs are the greatest things since sliced bread.

Oh wow, now they're having a clueless discussion of nanotechnology, and did the whole "grey goo" thing. Except that evolution's already spent several billion years creating self-reproducing microrganisms that try to eat everything in sight and would be happy to turn the rest of the world into copies of themselves. The problem is, A) there's not a whole lot of energy to be had by digesting rock, or water, so the process stops when it runs out of power, B) if your goo is silicon based water won't provide it silicon, if it's carbon based granite won't provide it carbon, and water provides it with neither, so eating "everything" runs into the problem that it _matters_ what your source material is, C) there are a bunch of existing things out there that are better at eating it than it is at eating them. We have yet to design a microorganism that an amoeba wouldn't tear apart without breaking stride.

Sigh. This is the whole "radiation gives you superpowers, a lightning strike can make any computer superintelligent" thing. Anything you don't understand is magic, and can do anything, even by accident. Once you _do_ understand how it works, you realize that most of the stuff that doesn't happen on a regular basis turns out to be _hard_.

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. This podcast uses polka music for its intro. Unironically. (I'm up to episode 4, and six minutes in they're doing a "kids these days" riff.) Oh well, at least they admit it (same episode, 10 minute mark). Oooh, wow, panicing about bird flu. Yeah, that's a podcast about technology. Now it's "video games bad". For episode 5 they're acting shocked about cyber-porn. (This is actually so bad it's kind of funny. Right before each commercial break it defines obsolete high-tech terms, such as the compression mechanism "ZOO" which was a compression mechanism that died back in the 1980's and "lobe length" which had to do with Token Ring networks.)

Oh wow, episode 7 they're discussing HDTV and plasma vs LCD... and Dvorak's producers just put up a screen shot of an HDTV screen, showing one of the high resolution pictures. In a podcast. UNCLEAR ON THE CONCEPT. Otherwise finally a decent episode, though. His guests know their stuff this time. Well, until they got to the HD-DVD vs Blue-Ray war and some obvious holes opened up.

It's actually kind of impressive: every time one of his guests says something that history has proved right, Dvorak mocks them. (In episode 8, the guy with the black shirt saying that HD vs blu-ray doesn't matter much because we'll be downloading video instead.) It's uncanny, this Dvorak idiot is so _consistently_ wrong that in itself is almost an accurate predictor of the future. I guess that's why people watch him...

Ooh, episode 9 he's found a guest who's even more clueless than he is. (So _that's_ what Rob Enderle looks like. I've never actually cared.)

Up to line 800 of 1600 total. Halfway.

Huh, I notice that there's a logging wrapper and a compiler wrapper, both referred to as "the wrapper". (And I also describe build.sh as a wrapper.) I probably need to distingush those more clearly...

I've tried for a week to be _nice_ about reconfiguring the darn sleep button to _not_ lock the screen and prompt me for my password on resume. I actively do not want it to do this. I disabled this in the "screensaver" options of the configure GUI, which didn't fix it. I looked at the suspend and power management options, but there was nothing for this. I went under /etc/acpi and read through the scripts, finding and removing the LOCK_SCREEN variable from the config, which didn't fix it, and then commenting out anything in the scripts that tested it, which didn't fix it either. So I uninstalled gnome-screensaver, which DIDN'T FIX IT. (I can't uninstall xscreensaver without uninstalling gnome-desktop. Can we say brittle?) Turns out it left a "gnome-screensaver" process running after it was uninstalled, and once I killed it _then_ it suspended without prompting me for my password on resume.

I'm confused about something: the people arguing that you should say #!/bin/sh rather than #!/bin/bash, in the name of "portability", seldom say that perl is an abomination that must be avoided at all costs. And yet there is only one implementation of perl. It's not a standard, it's a program. Just as there's no spec for "Microsoft Word" files other than what Microsoft Word reads and writes, there's no real definition for perl prebuilt binaries to start out... Darn incoherent.

Oh wow boldface sucks on Firefox. Throwing boldface into text to highlight a few phrases makes the result significantly _less_ easy to read. (How do you manage to screw up that badly?) Alas, underlining in HTML means "hotlink", so can't be used merely for emphasis, and italics don't stand out at all. (This is almost certainly a font choice issue, but this is the default font on Ubuntu.)

It occurs to me that I haven't particulary added to my mp3 collection since Napster went away. (The gnutella networks never scaled properly, and I never really got into bittorrent. It's a file transfer protocol, not a search/indexing service. Yeah, ok, I know about a few like animesuki.com that let you search for specific things (although by the time I know what series are worth watching they're long gone from there).)

I even have CDs I haven't ripped. I've got piles of old CDs I bought years ago, plus everybody knows they can get me any new Weird Al release for my birthday, and I even have a few new ones I got at conventions. (I've been carrying around "I can has FUMP" for weeks _meaning_ to rip it, because That Calls for a Wilhelm Scream is inspired despite being a musical genre I don't normally like. But it remains unripped.)

Not quite sure what to do about it. There are lots of songs I like, but dealing with CDs for music seems kind of silly these days, and buying them from the RIAA holds no appeal. I suppose Itunes is the standard here, but I haven't got a Linux client for it and it wouldn't convert the result to a file normal players could use without burning it to CD.

Speaking of "normal players", I notice that Rockbox doesn't move the progress slider as the song plays. There's no way to advance or back up within a song. Another thing I took for granted under KDE for _years_ that the standard Gnome tools apparently just can't do.

My blog tends to get really really long when I'm writing documentation. I've spent almost five hours wrestling with the introduction, which is currently five paragraphs. I've probably rewritten every part of it a dozen times now, and thrown out the vast majority of what I've produced. The point is to be _concise_, to say each thing exactly once but in an order that doesn't assume they already know something before I mention it, and to flow logically from point to point in a coherent order. This is _hard_, and it's an _editing_ job, and it involves reordering several sentences so I can remove three words, over and over again. Being able to splat out huge stream of consciousness blobs of text in my blog is VENTING. (The verbosity's gotta go somewhere. Letting off steam, sort of. (And then I delete half of it anyway because I'm in editing mode, and realize I'm nesting parentheses...))

If you thought the "may be used uninitialized" debacle of gcc 4.1 was bad, I think gcc 4.3 may officially have made -Wall useless. The output of all sorts of programs is now full of sheer noise:

editors/sed.c:839: warning: format not a string literal and no format arguments src/mon-text.c:74: warning: conversion to 'float' from 'double' may alter its value src/trace.c:239: warning: conversion to 'int' from 'size_t' may alter its value popt/popthelp.c:386: warning: conversion to 'long unsigned int' from 'int' may change the sign of the result src/netutil.c:209: warning: ignoring return value of 'asprintf', declared with attribute warn_unused_result

The likelihood of any of that sort of thing finding an actual bug is vanishingly small, and the effort and _bloat_ to shut the compiler up makes the result larger and more brittle. You have to engage in defensive programming just to get GCC to keep quiet about your code.

Letting the FSF continue to maintain such an important tool is punishing the open source community greatly. Dear pcc and llvm developers: hurry up please. :)

It occurs to me that El Shrubbo can't pardon himself for violations of _international_ law, only of US law. If he and Cheney really get egregious about self-pardons, the US can always decide to hand them over to the criminal court in the Hague, where he can be tried for war crimes. (This doesn't have to set a precedent if we don't want it to; the decision to extradite is always made on a case by case basis.)

Writing documentation gives one lots of ideas for user interface improvements. For example, it occurs to me that run-with-home.sh and run-with-distcc.sh would probably be better collapsed together into run-emulator.sh as command line options. If hdb.img exists, it gets mounted on /home inside the image. Use "--make-hdb" to create one, use "--with-hdb" to specify a different name, failing if it can't find it and if --make-hdb wasn't specified. An extra argument is treated as a path to the cross compiler for the distcc trick, with the standard check to make sure it's actually there.

Ok, that's cool.

Fade and I went to see Bolt, which was entertaining. How they managed to actually cast Nybbas as the agent is a mystery for the ages. (Putting the head of Pixar in charge of Disney's existing animation department has been very, very good for them. Of course the guy who _used_ to run it is now the K in Dreamworks SKG. Spielberg, Katzenberg, Geffen. Disney's fault for driving him away in the first place, he's now their main competition.)

The trailer for The Pink Panther 2 also managed to do the impossible, convince Fade and Myself that the movie may actually be worth seeing. (It just _looks_ like a tape recorder, it's actually... a pen!) I never would have expected Steve Martin to find his own interpretation of Clouseau that A) isn't trying to be Peter Sellers and B) actually works.

Oh well, at least Rockbox actually _closes_ when you hit the little X in the upper right corner, instead of minimizing itself unless you do file->quit from the menu like the KDE one. (Oh no, you don't want to quit _my_ app. My app is _special_. Yahoo Messenger's web page thinks this too. It is also wrong.)

Sigh.

I've figured out what's wrong with the FWL about.html and design.html pages. Both of them answer "how" guestions (how do you use it, how is it implemented), but there's what and why material mixed in there as well. I need to untangle all that, and figure out what should go where. Possibly I need three pages, although the "what is it" is a logical introduction to "how do you use it", and the "why did I do it that way" goes with the other one...

Spent most of the day reading the archive of a webcomic (surprisingly entertaining given the premise), which led to another webcomic (which, strangely, is actually well-drawn, although it produced more pages in its first year than the five years since so I'm not sure the story will ever be resolved, which is sad).

I get upset when Linux developers do actively stupid things. For example, the whole "tell dbus/hal there is no network" thing. That's stupid.

I have a webserver running on loopback, with a copy of my website so I can see how pages render (including server side includes for header and footer, and cgi stuff like the mercurial website browser, which you don't get from just going "file:/" to a directory and which won't give you a URL you can trivially translate into a live website URL either. I'm not currently connected to any network (in this case because my wvdial .config for the cell phone got lost in the hard drive crash and I haven't gotten around to reassembling it yet; hey, I only backed up /home, not /etc). Because I'm not connected to an external network, pointing firefox at the internal loopback interface (http://127.0.0.1) gives an error message that "firefox is not currently online", rather than showing the web page.

In the case of Konqueror, I couldn't fix this without killing knetworkmanager. With firefox I can go to file->work_offline and deselect the check box. But the point is, I SHOULDN'T HAVE TO. What it's doing is STUPID. The failure mode for trying to access the network without any active network cards is an immediate "no route to host" error, which translates to an immediate "failed to connect" error message, which is correct for the situation. This entire layer of infrastructure isn't trying to change the behavior, it's trying to change the _error_message_, and the old one is just fine.

So inserting an extra layer of infrastructure here, which I have to manually disable, adds _nothing_. It serves no useful purpose. This is infrastructure that, when working as designed, is a NOP. The only time it makes any difference is when it breaks and screws things up.

I know Debian is in the pocket of the FSF, but it shouldn't adopt the Gnu project's more blatant stupidities. Libtool failing to do nothing correctly was bad enough, but now they're adding more of it. In layers.

And you wonder why I'm an embedded developer, focusing on removing unnecessary complexity and doing more with less?

Gnome continues to suck. The battery indicator has turned orange and has about 1/4 of its pixels left at the bottom, but when I mouse over it the text says it has 44.2% of the battery life left. Does anybody else think those indicators even _remotely_ match up?

Also, splitting the toolbar into one at the top and one at the bottom seems like a nice idea at first, but it eats just as much screen space and it means that icons like the battery wind up being _tiny_. Although the vertical layout of that wastes a lot of the space it does have by drawing the top and the bottom of the battery, which is space it can't use for the bar graph its purpose is to display. That one's just plain badly designed.

Each bar has vital things in it (one has the main launcher menu and the other the taskbar), so hiding just one serves less purpose than you'd think.

Ah, at least I can move them both to the bottom. I can't drag one above the other, but I can abuse the hide buttons to reverse their order (which may actually be a bug, it's hard to tell, but I'll take it). Can't get a hide button on just _one_ side, but oh well. I think I could actually combine the functionality of both panels into one with judicious use of add/remove. Not sure if I'll be using gnome long enough to bother, though. I'm giving it until April, I suppose it might grow on me...

When I unplug my laptop, the processor switches down to 800mhz automatically. In Kubuntu I could right click on the battery icon and select performance, powersave, or dynamic. The battery icon does not control this in Gnome. System->preferences->power management doesn't control it either. System->administration->system monitor isn't it either.

Plugging it back in left it at 800 mhz, with both processors maxed. Sigh. Ok, dig around on the command line, it's:

echo -n "performance" > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor

After doing "killall hald-addon-cpufreq" because that was setting it back to powersave even though the processors are maxed and it's plugged into wall current. Idiots.

That's how you control that, and it should be trivial to write a little widget to do that. But no, they had to invoke hal and dbus and bonobo and 8 gazillion unnecessary glue layers to write 11 bytes to a known location. What is _wrong_ with the Gnome developers?

There is a command line utility to control this: cpufreq-selector. It A) doesn't say what the options to -g are (even the man page doesn't mention dynamic), B) takes upwards of 30 seconds to run, C) launches hald-addon-cpufreq (sometimes, but not always).

Today I had about 10 hours worth of food poisoning. It's been that kind of week.

For future reference, if a frozen pot pie has leaked gravy inside the cardboard box, it froze and rethawed at the store before you bought it. Yeah, I should have spotted that, but after my laptop hard drive dying and needing to be reinstalled from a 5 month old "full backup" and buckets of incrementals, emergency cat trips to the vet, finding out my car needed more than its blue book value in repairs to make it up to my sister's in minnesota for thanksgiving, and having a general stress attack on friday due to what had _already_ happened so far this week... Not fun.

Continuing to try to make Gnome work. Not sure who's winning yet.

Pidgin is really stupid. It doesn't automatically launch a freenode window when I launch the program, instead you have to disable the freenode account and then re-enable it. And you can't cut and paste multiple "join" commands because it concatenates them into one line. Who wrote this?

Gnome-terminal is really stupid. There's no way to set the background color to "dark" with an ansi escape sequence. \e[40m gives me black in konqeror, xfce, and an actual xterm, but gnome terminal makes it grey. My program literally _can't_ request a black background via portable ansi escape sequences.

Asked some of my questions on the ##gnome channel on freenode, and now I remember why I hate gnome. Every time, their answer was "oh, you don't really want to do that, you want to do this other unrelated thing". I mentioned I was still using kmail, and that immediately hijacked the "how do I make your term program do X" to "why aren't you using pop"? Apparently, nobody should ever want to fetch their email through a precommand, they should demand root access on their mail server to install pop. So I explained that I tried imap but lots of clients won't delete messages from the server unless I delete them locally, and I used to _use_ pop and I hated it (downloading 2000 messages through a connection with 1/3 of a second latency, such as my cell phone, sucks). Then they started saying my cell phone "sucks", because it only does 45 kilobytes per second and has 1/3 of a second latency. That's NOT THE ISSUE, it's WHAT I'VE GOT TO WORK WITH. I have a working solution, today. Your software cannot interoperate with that existing solution, because your software is brittle, inflexible, dare we say defective?

But that's gnome for you. Never fix anything, just attack all new use cases you don't already handle. Never admit "we can't do X", instead insist "you shouldn't want what you asked for". Idiots.

I'll probably limp along with Ubuntu until 9.04 comes out, and then try Xubuntu. I'm not going to wipe gnome off my system in a fit of pique, because I have _work_ to do, but I'm not really looking for a future with it either. I left KDE because I lost faith in the developer community. I didn't install pygmy as an email client because I couldn't _find_ a developer community. The gnome developer community is like Debian, and the Ubuntu equivalent in that space (Ximian) trying to make things work for mere mortals turns out to be crazier than the Gnome guys are.

I need a "projects it would be nice if somebody would _do_ page. Will I ever have time to extend dropbear to act like openssl or stunnel? The "hello world" kernel thing is another one; might get to that, but not this week. Mark gave me a patch to get FWL to build under MacOS X once, but I haven't got a MacOS X build environment yet.

Finally ground my way through the rest of "Ella Enchanted". Now I have a strong urge to watch the commentary version to see if they _apologize_. (Or at least how they attempt to rationalize doing that to a fairly nice book.) They had an _amazing_ cast, and totally wasted it.

(Oh dear. They're recycling "true to your heart" from the ending credits of Mulan. I can see why Disney thinks they're the same movie, but this is not actually the case.)

It wouldn't have been so bad if they'd tried to have a "princess bride" vibe, which was a movie that clearly never took itself seriously. (Heck, the had Cary Elwes, he could have shown 'em how.) But where princess bride was self-aware and cheerfully ironic, this one merely had source material it couldn't hide and a checklist of fairy tale conventions to go down.

Interesting phone call with some guys from Cisco.

Fighting with the build. The bug is somewhere in toybox netcat, sending to itself. Found an uninitialized variable, but I think it's an unused structure member. (Memset it anyway.) Eventually figured out that reading 4k from stdin doesn't guarantee it's empty, so handling POLLHUP needs to be an _else_ case on POLLIN. With that, netcat seems to be working properly now.

Firmware Linux no longer uses User Mode Linux for packaging, I dug up James Davidson's patch (from last year) and adapted it to the current code, so we're using genext2fs now instead. This should make literally 2/3 of my bug reports GO AWAY.

I've been using UML since I first got it to work (back around the 2.6.11 kernel, something like five years ago), and it's just as brittle today as it was back then. It only seems to build under a system running the same kernel version as you're trying to build UML for. (A host with a _newer_ kernel breaks it.) QEMU has mostly stolen its thunder, the only reason I was still using it at all is I can't easily get an equivalent of hostfs out of qemu. But I can use gene2fs instead, and bit UML adieu. The allure of running linux as a normal user mode program is cool, but it was also a lie. Normal user mode programs aren't that picky about their build environment, aren't limited to x86 hosts only, might have some eventual chance of being ported to run on things like MacOS X... UML is not and never has been a "normal" user mode program, instead it's now less interesting (and less generally applicable) than the rustyvisor, aka lguest, and shares with xen the status of "technology that once showed promise, but just isn't interesting anymore".

Today's other lesson: "hardened gentoo" makes top useless. It only shows you your user's processes (understandable but limiting), and every process says it's using 0% of the available CPU (inexplicable), so you can't even see which of your _own_ processes are currently active and which are just sitting there. Which is kind of what top had over ps in the first place.

Still, it's a fast quad processor machine the gentoo guys are letting me use, and I'm trying to get "USE_STATIC_HOST=i686 sources/build-all-targets.sh" to create shippable images so I can cut a release without having to do it by hand again. (It was also one of the machines where User Mode Linux wouldn't compile.)

Argh!

firmware-004f9509349b/www/header.html
firmware-004f9509349b/www/history.html
firmware-004f9509349b/www/index.html
tar: short read

It's baaaaaaack. Why is it doing that? If I run it a second time it doesn't do that. It's an intermittent race conditiony thing, which might be a bug in netcat (if so, I can't reproduce it) or might be a bug in busybox tar (likely, since "short read" is not a fatal condition when reading from a _pipe_).

I rsynced the fwl and toybox repositories up to impactlinux.com because the server in Eric's basement is amazingly slow right now. Not quite sure what's up with it, but Mark was reporting 200 bytes/second. The impact site is on a fast server, and I've been meaning to at least mirror stuff there forever, so for the moment it's mirrored (and I added the site to my resync script so it gets updated whenever my website or this blog does). Might point to that as the primary site after the next release.

I'm having a really _annoying_ bug I can't reproduce reliably. When I netcat the output of hg archive into qemu, the tar extracting it inside qemu sometimes complains about a "short read". When it happens it's always at the same place, which is right before the www/index.html symlink, but it doesn't always do it. I tried having netcat -l and netcat pass the data to each other on the server in a loop, and the bug wouldn't manifest. I tried running netcat -L (repeated server) and inside qemu fetching the data in a loop (piping it to "tar tvz" each time), and the bug wouldn't manifest there either.

Darn it. Ubuntu 8.04 added some horrible "security" feature that's preventing gcc-arm from executing anything unless I run it as root. (It's trying to do an mmap() that's denied.) That's just brilliant. Way to go, Ubuntu. Break the BINARIES YOU SHIP.

I succumbed to the temptation to just "ln -s `which gcc` gcc/xgcc", in yet another attempt to make the gcc build _behave_. I wonder if there's some equivalent of the obfuscated C code contest for makefiles? Some kind of "convoluted unintelligble build award". Win it, and your project automatically gets added to the GNU project.

I'm really starting to hate User Mode Linux. The one in 2.6.25.10 (presumably fairly recent kernel) won't build under Ubuntu 7.10, and won't build under Gentoo. How do you MAKE a piece of software that brittle?

Got a server mode into toybox netcat. Need to figure out why -t (allocate a pty) doesn't seem to be working, but other than that it's in. Pondering giving the daemonize thing an expicit command line argument; right now it forks and exits from the parent if you feed it -l and command line arguments, so that if it has to print out the port number you can use it from a script.

The use I have in mind is to feed the source tarballs from the host system into the qemu instance that's building static cross compilers automatically, ala "netcat 10.0.2.2 $(netcat -l tar c sources/packages) | tar xv sources/packages". (Re-downloading tarballs from a nightly cron job is both brittle and impolite.) If the $(blah) part doesn't _exit_, the outer command line never executes. I thought maybe I could do $(blah | head -n 1), but even putting an explicit fflush(stdio) after the printf (the need to do that is kind of evil, by the way; the pipe or socket infrastructure should optimize packing issues like that, not the stdio layer) the pipeline doesn't exit until all processes in it have exited. (I guess this is so you get the stderr stuff?)

I've been meaning to watch "Ella Enchanted" ever since I read the book, but five minutes in I'm already thinking of sending the DVD back. The setup they're doing is just painful to watch. I can't blame Anne Hathaway, she hasn't actually shown up yet... Ah, there she is. And here's Patsy from "Absolutely Fabulous". (I know Joanna Lumley can play other characters, even in little bit parts like the Rowan Atkinson doctor who comedy relief thing, but here she's recycling Patsy.) Actually, this whole thing screams recycling. In the book was "inspired by" ciderella, but the movie adaptation has nothing else in it so far.

Ok, it has one other thing: since the baby was cursed they haven't let a full minute of screen time go by without triggering it (with sound effect).

I'm pausing it every few seconds, because I can only take so much.

Now the evil stepsister's figured out the curse, which the Ella of the book managed to successfully conceal through the first 2/3 of the thing. And now the plot's gone completely off on its own tangent with a transparently evil (hint: the beard was too much) scheming reagent with a talking snake, the prince elevated to secondary protagonist level (because you can't have a movie about a _girl_, now can you?) and some kind of subplot about race relations. Cary Elwes (Wesley from the Princess Brice) as a bad guy is kind of interesting, and he's managing to play enough different of a character it took me almost a full minute to realize who it was, but the sheer unnecessariness of that character detracts from it a bit.

I wonder if there's any way I can watch this thing on fast forward?

Getting netcat to behave properly is kind of annoying, from a sequencing perspective. Removed yesterday's attempt and hit it with a hammer instead, might actually work now.

It occurs to me that with netcat running a shell on the host I could export arbitrary cpu-intensive commands, such as bunzip2 during the decompression phase. Alas, the latency of the network transaction limits this a bit. (Is the sha1sum during ./download.sh slow enough that passing the data over the emulated network would be faster?)

Darn it, either short reads or short writes are happening over netcat. I thought it was this old problem because it's happening at the same place, but it turns out to be intermittent. Either tar's having an uninitialized variable or some such, or it really _is_ a short read which implicates netcat. Or maybe mercurial isn't quite generating the same tarball every time? Too many variables...

Today's question, why don't I do the packaging with fakeroot? Answer: 1) show me how to do a loopback mount with fakeroot, 2) if I'm downloading an extra source package to do packaging, it should be gene2fs.

So I added server mode to toybox netcat so I can run "netcat -s 127.0.0.1 -p 12345 -l tar cz sources/build" and then have qemu do "netcat 10.0.2.2 12345 | tar xvz". I.E. pass in the source tarballs through the network as a normal user, without needing to run a web server on the host.

Ideally I'd like to let it pick a random port, output it to stdout and detach afterwards. Then I can have the here document go "netcat 10.0.2.2 $(netcat -s 127.0.0.1 -l tar cz sources/build) | tar xvz", but for some reason feeding in socket 0 into bind() doesn't seem to work to randomize the local port...? (Possibly it was connect() doing this, and accept() doesn't. I need to frown at it more...)

Still tracking down the sparc thing.

Mark phoned and invited me to see Mr. Sinus tomorrow. They're doing Forest Gump. Looking forward to that. Might try to hijack him to Boomerang's for pie first, depending on how much time we have.

I threw a pair of DVDs into the netflix queue that Fade wouldn't want to watch. "Herbie Fully Loaded" was decent popcorn. It's mindless fun, but that's about what I expected from Howard Tayler's review. Nothing about the movie is particularly inspired, but it was put together with decent workmanship, the actors and director do their things well. Too bad the writing screams "committee, workshopped half to death", but that's Disney for you.

Ok, time to make sparc work.

Last night I patched the uClibc headers so sparc recognized the "extended" 32 bit binaries the compiler was creating. It had the correct number, but was checking an #ifdef non-solaris compilers apparently don't set. Even though there was a config entry for this, it checked the #ifdef anyway. And it has infrastructure to check _two_ magic numbers, but was instead setting only one, based on an #ifdef. Yeah, big hammer: set both numbers, move on.

Which brought the behavior back to the _previous_ bug, from 0.9.29, where static binaries work but dynamically linked binaries hang trying to resolve the shared libraries. Much fruitless debugging of the library loader ensued, and many printfs (ok _dl_printf()s) were inserted. But it's getting to the end, and seems to work.

So why is the static "hello world" working, but the dynamic one not working? It's not some kind of stdio problem, because write(2,"blah\n",5); at the start of hello world doesn't work either, and that boils down to a syscall. Something about the handoff doesn't seem to be working...

The 0.9.30 uClibc release is out! Woot! And busybox 1.13.0 shipped yesterday. Migrated FWL to use the stable versions of both, and checked in a half-dozen small pending things.

I'm trying to decide how much more work to do before I cut a release. Spend a day fighting with powerpc to move Linux to 2.6.27? Cut a new toybox release? Actually, a new toybox release is overdue... Ok, cut 0.0.7. (Cue theme music.)

Solar was nice enough to give me a login on a fast (quad processor, 16 gigs of ram) gentoo server to run builds on, and the first thing I notice is that their filesystem is this re-i-serfs thing I've heard so much about. (Didn't think anybody was still using that.) And of course never got around to adding a workaround in toybox cp -r for the reiserfs bug, because who still uses reiserfs? Sigh... worked around and checked in now.

Grrr... uClibc is modifying its source files. I'm not quite sure how or where, but when I did multiple parallel builds one of 'em died, and doing linear builds it keeps re-extracting uClibc meaning the source directory is failing its checksums after it gets built. (Note, modifying the files don't cause problems if you break hard links, but this is opening the existing file and writing to it, which is generally a nono when building source code.)

Oh dear.

Rob,

You've been summoned back to Azeroth! Your World of Warcraft account has been selected to receive 10 FREE days of game time and a FREE trial of The Burning Crusade expansion pack.

Fade's away for a week, and this comes in my email. How do they know? (No, it's not spam...)

Amused at political lolcatting. There are plenty of good ones. The most amusing part of this one is it was from back in September.

Ok, I need to go back to work on Toybox. Earlier today I was getting worked up about things like "Why does busybox mount -f has its own config option, is that really worth the complexity?" But I think I'm just writing busybox off as bloated into a GNU project, and going back to work on toybox.

Some idiot bombed the bug generator with a couple dozen differences between coreutils and busybox behavior, entering them all as "standards compliance". (Coreutils isn't a standard, SUSv3 is a standard.) One of the ones I looked at was the guy complaining that busybox didn't implement a bug in gnu env (which conflicts with gnu env's own man page's version of what behavior to expect). What does Denys do? Impelement the bug.

It's not the size that bothers me. These days memory and CPU time are cheaper than ever (although I still look forward to disposable computers with 18 month battery life). It's the _complexity_. I want simple and understandable. Here's a behavior that's not just completely unnecessary _and_ undocumented, but conflicts with what the gnu version's own man page says the behavior should be, and which was _explicitly_ implemented in busybox.

There are a few countries I wouldn't mind the US preemptively invading. Alas, El Shrubbo's poisoned that well, so I blame him for this continuing.

Catching up on the last few days of the Rachel Maddow podcasts, watching the day after the election and the argument about whether or not he should "spend his political capital". It doesn't seem to occur to any of them that he should _invest_ his political capital. It's ok to do controversial things as long as you get good returns that give you future permission to do more controversial things.

Poking at the Linux From Scratch build under system-image-i686 with qemu faking a Pentium II, and perl just went "boing":

./miniperl -Ilib configpm --heavy=lib/Config_heavy.pl lib/Config.pm
make: *** [lib/Config.pod] Illegal instruction
make: *** Deleting file `lib/Config.pod'

The bug appears to be that the toolchain spit out a Pentium III instruction when it built mini-perl. The question is, was this a toolchain misconfiguration, or is it inappropriate inline assembly in the perl build?

So, checking the server for reinfection until we agree on what to reinstall it with: "netstat -tunlp" and "ls /proc/*/exe" are useful, and busybox has lsof.

There's a new how to survive poisonous people video. (The old one is still up, of course.)

It'd be really nice to have a chroot and looback mount that work as a normal user. User Mode Linux is verging on useless. QEMU is really slow (I'm not noticing any speed increase from kqemu at _all_) and ether limited (application emulation, doesn't play well with fork()) or too isolated from the host (system emulation) to copy stuff out of the host filesystem. And performing an actual chroot requires root access.

I'm trying to upgrade the cron script to build static toolchains. The easy way to do this is to chroot into an i686 or x86_64 system image and build each cross-compiler.sh in there. And on my laptop, that's no problem. But on the slow spare server I have lying around (which already takes 12 hours just to natively build all targets), this is a problem.

So I plugged in my cell phone via the shiny new USB cable, and it's charging but doesn't seem to be presenting a serial device I can use the modem through. According to dmesg, it loaded:

[ 4448.583450] /build/buildd/linux-2.6.24/drivers/usb/serial/visor.c: USB HandSpring Visor / Palm OS driver

Which is nice, and seems to be a serial driver, but it doesn't tell me what _device_ it wanted to create. I don't see a /dev/ttyUSB0. /dev/rfcomm0 is still there (that's what bluetooth called it, although I yanked the bluetooth key out of the USB port to plug in the cable) but it says no route to host. There's a /dev/ttyAMA0 that's got today's date on it (most of the /dev entries are from October 30, the last time I rebooted the laptop instead of suspending it). But pointing wvdial at that doesn't work, it never responds to ATZ and similar. Poking around in /sys has yet to prove particularly helpful.

Eventually unplugged USB, plugged in bluetooth, associated with bluetooth, plugged in USB again _afterwards_ (and told the now worried phone that it shouldn't disconnect the bluetooth in favor of USB when it asked), did the network transaction I wanted, and yanked the whole thing again.

Now btdelconn is spinning eating CPU, as usual. I should really move my laptop to Ubuntu 6.10 and see if it fixes anything. I'll miss Konqueror...

So looking at the build on Ubuntu 8.10 gives me more todo items. There's a zillion new warnings in gcc 4.3, I need some kind of -Wshutup to get it to stop doing that. Gnome terminals default to a white background (how can you stare at that for hours on end without dying from eyestrain?) and the orange of ./cross-compiler.sh is close to illegible on that. So I need to put the colors in config. The User Mode Linux build breaks with the new glibc, I need to ditch uClibc once and for all, it's just too brittle to use.

Fought with Gnome on the server a bit. It's buggy as a bait store (three major bugs in the network settings GUI alone, but at least I managed to _find_ that GUI, and work around two of them.

But I'm used to bugs, and can cope with that. This at least isn't pathologically misdesigned so that I fundamentally disagree with what they're _trying_ to do.

Went back to the T-mobile store to take another stab at getting the internet-through-cell-phone thing working again. Apparently my phone caches the last access point it talks to, and traveling blanked the cache somewhow. The magic incantation to set the access point is the init string:

AT+cgdcont=1,"IP","internet2.voicestream.com"

And it's fixed! My laptop has an actual battery, my cellular internet is working again, my bike is in good shape, I have bottles of tea... Life is good.

And Lennart Sorensen sent me an updated ppcqemu patch for 2.6.26, which is highly cool except that Bartlomiej Zolierkiewicz hadn't deleted the entire PREP platform back in July. Maybe I can put together a new patch that replaces the deleted stuff (like ide.h) and have this working soon. (That's my main big evil pending TODO item and I think Lennart's patch got me over the hump, so I am excited, just cautious.)

Still need to figure out why the x86-64 uClibc++ build is breaking. (All the other targets work, this one can't find -lgcc_s... Because it got installed in "lib64" rather than lib. Why on _earth_ did that happen? Argh. Yet another pathological corner case of the gcc makefiles...)

The existence of a Google Maps polling place finder is pretty darn cool, if you ask me.

I really really really hope that Bush Fatigue actually has motivated people to the 90% voter turnout they're expecting in some places. I know that when Sarah Palin complains that her first amendment rights are being infringed upon by other people's criticism of what she says... that kind of Complete Failure To Get It is just not noteworthy anymore. We've had eight years of Refuge in Audacity. We forget about old scandals because they're constantly buried by new scandals.

Outing Valerie Plame for political gain was _treason_, a crime they execute people for, and enough of her contacts got killed after she was outed to justify doing so as manslaughter anyway. The whole Alberto Gonzales thing wasn't related to that, nor was the brouhaha about waterboarding, which this administration did _after_ Abu Ghraib caused such an international scandal; how tone deaf can you _be_? I'm still mad at Obama about FISA, but he wasn't the guy who demanded the warantless wiretapping in the first place. And that's all just _recent_ stuff, the no-bid contracts for Haliburton are mere embezzlement and having oil lobbyists draft your first energy policy seems like a rounding error in comparison, but coming up with _bigger_ scandals to distract from the existing ones should not be a successful survival strategy for 8 consecutive years.

These idiots never finish _anything_. Iraq didn't mean Afghanistan was over. The cleanup from Katrina is ongoing; did Hurricane Andrew in Florida back in the 90's still have this kind of lingering damage 3 years later? This banking thing isn't even our first massive economic crisis on this moron's watch; doesn't anybody even remember Worldcom or Enron anymore? (California brownouts? Anyone?) Anybody remember Treasury secretary Paul O'Neil resigning back in 2002 and becoming the first in a long line of ex-insiders publicly lambasting the administration for malignant incompetence, and being proven right?

McCain abandoned his principles during the primary to court the "base" of right-wing religious extremists, and got himself stuck there somehow. (It's like he's a horror movie where he's a hostage, and Palin's his keeper or something.) There's a guy with an actual brain hidden under that campaign, which you can see in old Daily Show appearances, or the speech he gave at that roast thingy a couple weeks back, or his recent Saturday Night Live appearance. Not great, but not run-away-screaming creepy like the guy we've seen campaigning this year. But no matter who McCain himself is, his campaign brings with it the same group of cronies that the first two Bush adminsitrations had, Karl Rove's progeny. And if McCain's a doormat to them all through the campaign, he'd be a doormat to them in office too.

The definition of insanity is endlessly repeating the same actions and expecting different results. The fact that there are still over a dozen states solidly voting for McCain, and _any_ chance he might still win, implies that this country has some seriously hard-core idiots. I mean really. I'm boggling. HOW CAN YOU NOT GET IT? After the past 8 years, what does it take to convince you that there is some seriously bad juju at the heart of the current republican party? Whether or not you agree with the ideals intermittently (and conflictingly) espoused, that the implementation is an unmitigated disaster should be obvious to small children, pets, even some of your more active house plants by now.

They're "conservative", right. What exactly are they conserving? It's obviously not money, our national debt is now over $10 trillion, and the deficit's never been higher (even at the height of the cold war). They're not conserving energy, or water, or any other environmental thing. So what is it then?

(Speaking of money, the whole "tax cuts for the wealthy" thing is rationalized because we can't punish hard-earned success. Didn't John McCain marry a rich wife rather than earning his own millions, and didn't she inherit her money? And these are the spokesbeings put forth to promote this philosophy?)

They're "socially conservative", they believe new social developments are immoral and to counter it the government should control public morals. Legislate morality. And they do so while crying for less government and wiretapping us without a warrant. Send people to the other side of the planet so women can't be forced to wear Burkas, then impose crippling FCC fines when a clearly accidental "wardrobe malfunction" happens at a superbowl halftime for under a second. Federal regulations should specify how long miniskirt lengths can be, with inspectors? (And of course people can't have sex out of wedlock but if they want to get married you throw Proposition 8 at them, but that's state level lunacy.)

And they keep getting _indicted_. The moral crusaders are the people caught having covert homosexual relations with pages or random strangers in airport bathrooms. John McCain keeps going on about this Ayers guy when McCain was a member of the Keating 5. They scream about Acorn but live with Diebold. McCain is of course on his second marriage (having divorced his first wife to marry a younger rich blond woman), just like Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich before him. (Remember the big "Family Values" campaign in 1996, the last election pre-Bush jr?) If you take them at their word and judge them by their own standards, that's when they fail worst of all.

As far as I can tell, rather a lot of religious nuts either fervently avoid thinking (because God works in mysterious ways so it never has to make sense) or are actively trying to hasten The Rapture. They believe God is omniscient and all-powerful and therefore it's vital they take action to micromanage the world around them or else it'll all fall apart. The hypocrisy is built-in at every level.

I'm starting to believe that Sturgeon's Law applies to the population at large. Alas, I believe most of the Republican party would agree with me, which is a strong counter-argument. But it's clear there are determined, dedicated, self-destructive idiots out there who want to take the rest of us with them. And not all of 'em are on Zoloft.

The only way the system has _ever_ worked is if the rest of us work even harder to counter them.

To quote John Adams in the marvelous movie 1776, "Now _vote_, damn you."

You can't make this stuff up. When they say truth is stranger than fiction, this is what they're talking about. (Especially the picture that goes with the story.)

Humans. Weird lot.

On the arm target, gcc had an internal compiler error attempting to build... itself. (The segfault was in the native dwarf2 threading stuff built with the cross compiler.) That's just sad. Ok, try the setjmp longjmp stuff. (I could make this a per-target thing in GCCFLAGS, but that's kind of silly.)

So according to Christian Michon (who says it's a tip he "found somewhere in a Gentoo forum"), I should blank the LDFLAGS in uClibc++'s Rules.mak if my link is failing. The line in question is:

LDFLAGS:=-Wl,--warn-common -Wl,--warn-once -Wl,-z,combreloc -Wl,-z,defs

The first two chunks enable warnings (harmless). According to "man ld", the last two mean:

combreloc
    Combines multiple reloc sections and sorts them to make dynamic
    symbol lookup caching possible.

defs
    Disallows undefined symbols in object files.  Undefined symbols
    in shared libraries are still allowed.

The second of those definitely sounds like what's breaking. I don't know why it's there...

And removing it was the last chunk, and uClibc++ built! Yay! And it's installing wrong. (It insists on inserting a usr/ directory under wherever I tell it to install. Great. Kill that...)

Adjust the wrapper to look where I actually installed the header files. There's no libstdc++.so symlink; fix that. The libraries are installing where the uClibc dynamic linker isn't looking for them at runtime; fix that.

Ha! Ran out of things wrong with it, at least when it comes to building a "hello world" c++ file. C++ support is in the native toolchain.

And WOW is g++ slow. Under qemu, running three times and taking the fastest time, building hello.c takes gcc half a second and hello.cpp takes g++ eight seconds. The difference is a factor of 16! For comparison, doing the same thing under a chroot g++ hello.cpp takes 0.62 seconds and gcc hello.c 0.07 seconds. (Only a factor of 8, but I suspect the time for the C compiler has some timer granularity issues measuring anything that small.)

After the uClibc++ release and the next FWL release, I have to get back to the C++ paper with Eric...

Cross compiling gcc's c++ support doesn't work because even though I'm saying --enable-threads=posix the various subdirectories are trying to run the compiler it built to grep out the "Thread model: " line to set the config entry target_thread_file (which gets used to set glibcxx_thread_h, which is breaking) and you CAN'T RUN IT WHEN WE'RE CROSS COMPILING YOU TWIT!

Yes, ./configure is probing for information I fed it on the command line. I hate autoconf. (Basically anything the FSF ever thought was a good design decision is probably a bad idea when you learn more about it.)

Part of the problem is that libstdc++-v3 doesn't want to build at quite the same location as the other packages, it wants to live in an $ARCH-unknown-linux subdirectory under build-gcc, from which location it apparently can't grab things like the top level "config.cache". (Or if it can, it's not paying _any_ attention to it, because it just tried to build with i686-unknown-linux-c++... Hang on, I'm not overriding that in the environment variables the way I am with the other host toolchain components. And the reason I'm doing that is I'm not building an i686-c++. (But it's got i686-c++filt, whatever that is...)

Right. In order to cross compile libstdc++, the cross compiler needs to support C++. That makes sense. (Ok, back up and attack an earlier layer of plumbing!)

Adding C++ support to the cross compiler means I can teach distcc to farm that stuff out from QEMU to the host system as well, which is nice. It won't have C++ headers and libraries on the host system, so you can't actually use the cross compiler by itself to build C++, and I wonder if I should deal with that. (The idea of attempting to cross-compile C++ is not something I should ponder closely this soon after lunch, not that cross-compiling a C++ compiler is much of an improvement...)

And I have to wrap i686-g++ so it can find stddef.h because the C++ header cstddef includes that. Great. (Building C++ on C was like building Windows on DOS. The earlier technology made sense in context, and may even have continued to be useful by itself, but attempting to extend it without leaving it behind DID NOT WORK.)

Ok, wrapped the darn compiler and a chunk of libstdc++ built! And then:

/home/landley/firmware/firmware/build/temp-i686/build-gcc/i686-unknown-linux/libstdc++-v3/include/i686-unknown-linux/bits/ctype_noninline.h: In constructor 'std::ctype::ctype(int*, const short unsigned int*, bool, size_t)':
/home/landley/firmware/firmware/build/temp-i686/build-gcc/i686-unknown-linux/libstdc++-v3/include/i686-unknown-linux/bits/ctype_noninline.h:85: error: cannot convert 'const __ctype_touplow_t*' to 'const int*' in assignment

This is a C++ error, in a chunk of the library I'm NOT EVEN INTERESTED IN BUILDING. Did the library I need build? Yes, yes it did. (Cool, victory!) Now, can I figure out how to untangle _that_ build from the parts I don't want to build that are randomly erroring out? Yes, yes I can. (Insert either "Barack Obama" or "Bob the Builder" reference here.)

Now I'm imagining Barack Obama surrounded by talking construction equiment, giving the dump truck a motivational speech and organizing the hydralic shovels to into a subcommittee to debate legislation. Right.

And now I've found a "how did that _ever_ work"? Checkin 390 added this to cross-compiler.sh:

+$CC $STATIC_FLAGS -Os -s "${SOURCES}"/toys/gcc-uClibc.c -o "${ARCH}-gcc" \
+  -DGCC_UNWRAPPED_NAME='"$ARCH-rawgcc"'

The problem is the part of the second line in single quotes, which contains a shell variable. Variables within double quotes are expanded, variables within single quotes aren't. I need to #define a string (you may remember me fighting with this last year), so I need the #defined symbol to contain double quotes, so I put them in single quotes. Except that means the shell variable isn't expanded, so when the wrapper tries to call the compiler, it's handing off to the wrong executable name.

Easy enough to fix: -DGCC_UNWRAPPED_NAME='"'"$ARCH-rawgcc"'"'

But the part that makes no sense is that the checkin that broke this was in AUGUST. How's it been working all this time? It's like finding out that the computer you've been using all day wasn't plugged in, but didn't stop working until you _noticed_. *boggle*

Yes, I've heard about this class of bug before, but it's not one I normally encounter. (Now I want to download a snapshot of an earlier version and figure out exactly what it's been doing all this time. Yup, forensic investigation on my _own_code_, to understand a bug I already fixed. That's pretty normal for me.)

Ah, it's because I was creating a here document (fixup-toolchain.sh) and executing it, because back when I was first wrapping the toolchain this took a lot of debugging so I encapsulated that step to make it easier to run by hand. I just removed the here document, and outputting the here document is itself a quoting context that resolved all those variables. So getting the quoting context wrong otherwise was irrelevant at the time.

Back to getting c++ to work.

Up until 4am getting a cron job I'm happy with to build and upload all the FWL targets. It copies stuff into a staging directory as it builds each thing, and then moves it all to the final directory in one go once it's all there. This keeps the README and the tarballs from getting out of sync.

Afternoon now, banging on the build script some more. Updating the README it generates to get more packages and versions in there, which led to investigating my noversion() script to see how to make a getversion(), and I realize that it's been a couple years since I wrote that horrible sed invocation and I don't really quite understand how it works. (How does "bash-2.04b.tar.gz" get the b stripped off? Yeah, there's a ([0-9][A-Za-z]) search in there so a single letter right after a number should be considered part of the version, but it comes _after_ the ([0-9.]) meaning that should have consumed the digit already so the second one wouldn't trigger. And yet it does. I wrote this, but I'm not understanding it.

This must be what Perl programmers must feel like all the time.

The new toolchains are up in the above staging directory, but I haven't replaced the old ones yet because it occurs to me that they're dynamically linked against the old 32-bit version of Ubuntu 7.04 on that server, which is less useful than it sounds.

I can whip up 32 bit versions statically linked against x86 uClibc no problem; chroot into the i686 system-image directory and re-run cross-compiler.sh with BUILD_STATIC. But coming up with 64 bit versions statically linked against x86_64 uClibc is a bit more trouble, because the server's 32 bit (so I'll have to use qemu to do a native build) and it's already an old slow server (hence why I'm not using it for anything else) that takes something like 10 hours to build all the targets all the way through anyway. Adding in a qemu step in there would bump the cycle time for all targets above 24 hours. (No, I'm not setting up more servers to spread the distcc load more, the other ones I have are even slower and I like my electric bill about where it is, thanks. I haven't bought a new desktop system in years, and that last one I _did_ buy had stability problems and I wound up goodwilling it. This box is maybe 5 years old.)

This is easy to do on my laptop, but the point is not to tie up my laptop. (Also, now that I've got a new battery in my laptop I'm reluctant to leave it on overnight because I know the heat shortens the battery life, especially in Dell's "progeria" batteries, and it's all sparkly and new at the moment...)

Evening now. I guess a statically linked i686 toolchain is reasonable, since you can theoretically use it on x86-64 even without /lib32 installed. I should try it on system-image-x86_64, if it works there it's universal. :)

Mostly to a good stopping point with the wrapper script fiddling, now building uClibc++. I really, really, really hate make.

Ok, after much fiddling I got it to build libgcc_eh.sh, but it also needs libsupc++.a and _that_ is part of the libstdc++ build. My current target environment hasn't got one, and in order to get it to build one I seem to need to ./configure libstdc++ to cross compile.

Which is what was breaking earlier.

Ok, so apparently (on i686 anyway), it's _not_ using --enable-sjlj-exceptions. (I vaguely recall that circa 2005 uClibc needed this to work with C++. I think it's no longer the case, but can't point to something specific. In any case, the current configure invocation is _not_ enabling it, although for some reason the ./configure test in the libstdc++-v3 subdirectory isn't figuring this out, but if I explicitly say --disable-sjlj-exceptions on the ./configure line then it does figure it out. (I don't _think_ doing that breaks any non-x86 architecture that would otherwise naturally select sjlj-exceptions, but to be honest I don't know. That's what testing is for, I guess.

Of course the build breaks slightly later in the libstdc++-v3 directory, for no readily apparently reason. I don't actually _want_ to build libstdc++-v3, I want to build uClibc++, but uClibc++ needs to grab libsupc++.a out of the existing glibc libraries, and that only gets built if the libstdc++-v3 directory gets built. I have yet to figure out how to tell the build "just build this one .a file, don't build the whole directory".

I need a bigger hammer...

Ooh, subtle nastiness. The reason uClibc++ isn't building is it needs to suck an object out of libgcc_eh.a. To find it, it calls "i686-gcc -print-file-name libgcc_eh.a", which searches the cross compiler's library directories, not the target's library directories.

Much banging on the wrapper and going "Hmmm...", which leads to much removing of overgrowth in the wrapper code. I'm torn between pushing ahead to just get c++ working (because people are waiting for it) and stepping back and cleaning up this _mess_. Doing a little of each at the moment.

I'm setting UCLIBC_RPATH in mini-native.sh, but nothing in the wrapper is actually checking that variable. That's... weird. I know why I did it, and I'm pretty sure it was working at the time...? Hmmm... That was introduced in checkin 66 which was primarily about the uClibc install patch. I should audit the executables again to make sure none of them _have_ an rpath...

Highly disappointed by the last two disks of Full Metal Panic. They decided to forget about the high school plot and do a pointless mecha anime for something like four consecutive episodes. Ship the male protagonist off to Elbonia (giving the female protagonist less screen time in each episode than she gets in the opening credits, and even that's mostly quick jump cuts to remind you she exists), introduce an entire team of people to torture and kill them one by one, for no readily apparent reason. Why? And of course the bad guy is contractually importal so if we just skipped those episodes commpletely it would have zero impact on the plot.)

Much banging on FWL. Finally set up the server to do nightly builds, and now I need to make it easy to do nightly builds. I have a ./punch.sh script which populates an "andpie" directory with the toolchains and system images (and bzip2'd logs, and README file), and rsyncs it up to the nightly snapshot site. But that script expects the build to already have happened (via ./forkbomb.sh). I've also been updating the uClibc and busybox archive tarballs by hand from my local copies of those svn archives, and ./punch.sh is running svn info against those (at known locations on the local system) so it can grab the version numbers. That's way more manual than is good for a nightly cron job.

Instead I should update ./download.sh to point to the nightly snapshot urls for busybox and uClibc, then run "USE_UNSTABLE= ./download.sh" to clear out the existing alt tarballs (it doesn't cleanup the stable versions of a package when you select a corresponding alt, but it cleans up the alt versions if you aren't currently using them). The ./forkbomb.sh should re-download fresh snapshots normally when it gets them in USE_UNSTABLE again. Change punch.sh to extract those and run svn info against the resulting directory (since the snapshots have all the svn archive info in them, and all I need is the version number; yes busybox and uClibc are currently guaranteed to match, but doing it twice isn't a big deal).

The other bit is making sure the cron job runs at the right time. The uClibc server runs the cronjob to make the nightly snapshots at 20 minutes after midnight (judging by the date stamps on the file), but its midnight is california time and I'm in texas, so I should start mine at around 2:30 am.

incoming: g++ -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -I. -I. -I../../source/headers -I../../source/headers/geos -I../../source/headers -g -O2 -DGEOS_INLINE -Wall -ansi -pedantic -Wno-long-long -MT CGAlgorithms.lo -MD -MP -MF .deps/CGAlgorithms.Tpo -c CGAlgorithms.cpp -fPIC -DPIC -o .libs/CGAlgorithms.o

outgoing: rawg++ -fno-use-cxa-atexit -nostdinc -nostdinc++ -isystem /usr/bin/../include/c++/4.1.1 -isystem /usr/bin/../include/ -isystem /usr/bin/../gcc/include -U__nptl__ -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -I. -I. -I../../source/headers -I../../source/headers/geos -I../../source/headers -g -O2 -DGEOS_INLINE -Wall -ansi -pedantic -Wno-long-long -MT CGAlgorithms.lo -MD -MP -MF .deps/CGAlgorithms.Tpo -c CGAlgorithms.cpp -fPIC -DPIC -o .libs/CGAlgorithms.o

The third -rc of uClibc is up now.

Last night I sat down and actually looked at the uClibc svn 23660 checkin that screwed up malloc on arm. Most of it's locking stuff that NOPs out when you disable threading (which doesn't fix the problem), but I had a theory and it turned out to be right. Before the patch, the heap was tracked by structures that included locks and a pointer to the actual chunk of memory. The patch moved the locks out of those structures, and changed the functions to use pointers directly to the chunks of memory, not to the structures.

This sounds great if you don't understand pointers. If you _do_, you immediately go "but what if they have to change what those pointers point to"? And that was the problem. If a function takes "thingy *a" as an argument, and does an assignment "a = newthing;", and then returns... that assignment is lost. Only a local variable got changed. You need to pass in "thingy **a" and then go "*a = newthing;", and _then_ your upstream variable gets changed.

Bernhard whipped up a patch to fix it, and malloc is working again. It would be so nice if more people understood how pointers work.

Yay, the Rachel Maddow Show on podcast.msnbc.com is now the full show and not just a clip from it. So I can now get countdown _and_ maddow in their entirety as podcasts.

Hmmm... It turns out that Vladimir's pkg-config thing isn't a C++ program. (I have no idea why his build thought it was.) Doing a find on my hard drive trying to find source packages I've got lying around. (some of them years old, I just bumped into a firmware linux tarball from 2003.) I've got udev, lilo, busybox, squashfs, linux, dropbear, m4, automake, bison, nasm, zisofs, cdrtools, flex, make, binutils, bin86, autoconf, e2fsprogs, libtool, less, gzip, bash, diffutils, zlib, klibc, quilt, gcc-core, patch, mercurial, git, bzr...

Ooh, mysql. That's got c++ in it, apparently. (Well, bits of it does.) Huh. And when I go "./configure --help" it says there's a --target option, but when I go "--target=armv4l" it's ignored. Have I mentioned that autoconf is a bit like the security theatre at airports? It does not actually do what it claims, it's just a huge song and dance to convince you that enormous effort has gone into solving a fairly simple problem. Long lines in front of metal detectors so they can confiscate your soda cans don't substitute for air marshalls and locked reinforced cockpit doors, and ./configure doesn't substitute for being able to specify the target C compiler. Argh.

Ah, I still have mingw source in an old backup directory (from back when I was putting together a windows test environment for tinycc) and that's bound to use C++. Found a package (geos) that I don't even need to worry about configuring to make sure it uses C++, the whole thing's written in it. Just build it at all under a target and it either builds or it doesn't.

Banging away on QEMU weekly news. I'm up to the introduction of the Tiny Code Generator. Coolness...

Upgrading busybox to a more recent svn snapshot seems to have fixed whatever was wrong with the binutils build on arm. I'd feel better if I'd found the problem so I could say _specifically_ what got fixed, but I haven't exactly got a shortage of todo items either.

The uClibc arm malloc thing is weird. There are actually three allocators, the default one I'd been using (MALLOC), an ultra-cheesy slow as molasses one for nommu systems (MALLOC_SIMPLE), and an overcompliated copied-from-glibc bells and whistles one (MALLOC_STANDARD). MALLOC is so screwed up the system doesn't even boot to a command line. MALLOC_SIMPLE boots, but apparently leaks memory (it works fine right up until the OOM killer triggers). MALLOC_STANDARD seems to be working fine, and binutils built to the end with that. I'm guessing the big one is the only malloc variant the guy actually bothered to check.

Bernhard asked me to resubmit my old qemu chroot patch, because apparently there's a debian bug requesting the feature. So I did.

I also got the prebuilt binary toolchains and system images built against uClibc-svn updated.

I thought I knew what I'd be doing with the rest of my evening: get the server set up upstairs and teach it to do nightly builds of FWL against the new uClibc and busybox snapshots, look into the bug Jean-Christophe Dubois posted to the FWL list, debug the binutils build issue on arm, look into Vladimir Dronnikov's package wishlist, catch up on qemu weekly news some more, and so on). But instead I got shanghied to work on a thing instead...

And once again, I was offered money and wound up not doing enough work to justify invoicing them. There's a theme here...

So I couldn't reproduce Jean-Christophe's bug, asked for more info.

Ok, now that is juggling.

I can see why the live action Tick series flopped. There's potential there, but it's a bit like the first few episodes of Star Trek where nobody knew their characters yet and everybody's a bit off model. The actor who does The Tick is actually pretty good at it (and Arthur's ok), but the writing is inconsistent and the directing isn't right. But what's really wrong is that the City seems deserted. Each show has maybe three extras in the background. The foley is almost nonexistent, there's usually no background music and when there is it's thin and eminently forgettable. The longest shot they ever do is maybe 20 feet deep, making the whole thing seem claustrophobic. The individual line deliveries are good but the pacing is off, slow and spotty rather than tight and snappy. (Comedy is all about timing, this just doesn't build.)

Sad, really. It _could_ have been great.

Yesterday Fade and I did the early voting thing. She got a sticker. I did not get a sticker. *sniff*

It's amazing that The Onion managed to accurately summarize the entire Bush administration the month he was inaugurated.

Wound up with two more disks of Heroes, since we forgot to bump anything up in the netflix queue before it. So we sat down and watched the second DVD of season 1, and it picked up noticeably. (Ok, the series is still extremely slow when the indian professor guy is on the screen, including narration, but the rest of it's started to get actually entertaining.) Hiro is still far and away the best character of the lot, but the various scattered members of the ensemble cast are starting to intersect a bit, and something that could be called plot (in a good light, with a tailwind) is starting to occur. (On the first disk I thought the cheerleader's father was this Sylar guy, but apparently they're two separate characters, and he _isn't_ waiting for her to grow up enough he can sing a Jonathan Coulton song at her. Right.)

The main pending problem with uClibc-svn is that svn 23660 and 23698 broke arm oabi. I put together an alt-uClibc-revert-malloc.patch to revert 23698 and 23660 (they go on top of each other, no the second didn't fix the problems introduced by the first), but toybox patch fails to apply it! The stock ubuntu patch program does, so when I did a ./download.sh --extract without first running ./host-tools.sh it worked fine, but then when I zapped the build directory and did a "./forkbomb.sh --nofork" to build all targets, it failed setting up the source code. Some boggling occurred until I figured out what was going on.

Working around the problem to build the toolchains I posted was easy enough, just "rm -rf build; ./download.sh --extract; ./forkbomb.sh --nofork" in that order. But that's a workaround, not a fix. Half the point of host-tools is to find exactly this sort of bug, acting as a smoke test for the final build environment. (That's why I make ./forkbomb.sh do a ./download.sh, build ./host-tools.sh, and _then_ do a ./download.sh --extract, so it's using the target tools when extracting most of the source tarballs.

Today I finally got around to debugging it properly, and the bug in toybox patch turns out to be that if you match part of the starting context of a hunk, and then have to flush it partway through due to a mismatch, it won't notice that tne new line that triggered the flush might _also_ be the start of a new match. In theory, any of the intermediate lines seen so far could also be the start of a new match.

Took the day off to hang out with Fade. Went to Dead Lobster (Cheesy biscuits!) and then to the discount theatre up in Round Rock where we decided to see Wall-E again. (Yes, I am aware I dragged her away from her computer so we could go watch a CGI film about robots.)

Wow that's a good movie. Right from the start, with the CGI disney logo intro, it was like Disney was saying "look, we're relevant again! We have something to be PROUD of!"

Wall-E got a bunch of LITTLE things right. It's got in jokes (the old macintosh startup sound when Wall-E finishes charging, Otto's voice is the mac "speak" command, the mice that wake up Eve in the cargo hold are one-button mice) which you don't need to catch any of to enjoy the movie. The shot where Eve first figures out how to light the zippo and the flame reflects off of Wall-e's eyes is amazingly done. The footage of the president is live action of actor and the blob humans are highly cartoonized to avoid the uncanny valley, but they make it work together by panning past highly realistically rendered machine stuff like the autopilot, so the transition isn't jarring. They do so much without dialog; Wall-E doesn't speak at all until Eve shows up, and then they communicate in single words. The humans speak full sentences to each other (and to Otto) but when Eve says "Directive" to Wall-E and points at her green leaf symbol, or Wall-E says "Earth" and points at his tread and jiggles his eye/camera, you know _exactly_ what they mean.

And the mileage they got out of Wall-E's expressive cameras is still amazing. The bit at the end where he boots the rest of the way back up and his cameras sag down a bit to provide his normal expression is one of those "didn't notice it was wrong until it was fixed" things that's just _masterfully_ done.

I also like the way the movie repeatedly establishes its non-horror, non-drama nature. Right at the start, Wall-E accidentally runs over his cockroach friend with one of his tank treads, the movie pauses for a beat for Wall-E to show dismay, and the cockroach pops right back into shape and continues about its business. This clearly establishes A) it's a _cockroach_, B) the movie could do pathos, but simply doesn't need to. (Leading to the marvelous moment later where the cockroach makes first contact with a trigger-happy Eve, gets blasted point blank by a massive death ray leaving a huge crater, and after a beat crawls right out of the crater to continue to try to make friends. Yup, it's a cockroach. Fed on 700 year old twinkies. It's clearly the most indestructible thing in the film. Wall-E running over it a second time is used to indicate his zombie state. The cockroach is mildly annoyed by this, but more concerned about Wall-E. It establishes this with a _scuttle_ and a _chitter_.)

Fade was happy they didn't anthropomorphize the cockrach. It never breaks character by speaking or anything, it's actually a cockroach. (It's clearly more intelligent than modern cockroaches, but not more than a modern squirrel. That's quite forgiveable considering the context and the amount of time it's had to evolve. Its ancestors spent centuries in a challenging environment, and maybe Wall-E's been breeding them to be good companions.)

I've gushed about this before, so I'll stop now.

Tested the new busybox/vi.c:readit() on qemu's arm emulation, and although it's better now, it didn't _fix_ it. Cursor around enough and it'll still blank the line you're on. I've also seen it blank while cursoring _right_, which seems to imply a different cause for the bug. (I really don't _want_ to go down this tangent, but it's bothering me.)

The busybox vi command is a mess. It needs a massive crapectomy. (There's code to scan for function keys, but no code to _do_ anything with function keys. It's full of #defines and #ifdefs.) And strangely, my cleaned up version of readit() is about 2/3 as much source code, but the resulting x86_64 machine code is six bytes _larger_ according to bloatcheck. Much head scratching about exactly _why_. (Presumably, the optimizer could do some serious magic with all the repetition there used to be. I could look at the assembly output if I cared.) Eventually made my "shrink it by 17 bytes" roll after a half dozen attempts, but that was weird.

Conceptually the new code is cleaner because it never reads more bytes than it needs to see if this is a known escape sequence. Alas, it still needs a readahead buffer because it might _not_ be an escape sequence, and then the extra characters need to be kept and parsed later.

Sigh: once again while not connected to the internet, and I want so do an "svn annotate". Once you get used to distributed source control, it's hard to go back...

Ok, found it, fixed it, checked in the fix, emailed the list about it. (The problem is actually that escape sequences sent over serial consoles get de-blocked and arrive as individual characters, so depending on read granularity or poll always saying there's another character waiting is _not_ a reliable way to detect escape sequences. I added a 1/3 second timeout to the poll, and can't reproduce the problem anymore. That could probably be trimmed down a bit, maybe to 1/10 second, but for now it's fixed and I can move on...)

Now, back to debugging the binutils thing.

So the binutils config problem isn't something config.status is calling, it's that config.status is being generated wrong in the first place. The big "here" document that dumps into $tmp/undefs.sed only has two lines, when it should have a line for each enabled symbol.

The busybox vi command remains deeply screwed up. In raw mode the cursor keys come in as ansi escape sequences (esc, left bracket, and then capital A through D depending on which direction it is), but escape is how vi switches between command mode and insert mode. (Yeah, terminal handling in unix derivatives is horrible, isn't it?)

In theory, the three characters come in as a block. In practice, input can get chopped up, so the capital D of a left arrow gets interpreted as "delete to end of line". Yes, cursoring around in busybox vi can eat your data, at least on a heavily loaded system (or something slow like QEMU's arm emulation).

Wound up rewriting readit() in busybox's editors/vi.c.

I'm having trouble following Bleach episode 17. The protagonist leaves his body behind to battle in astral form. This is a significant plot element in previous episodes. So after a big astral battle, he's lying in bed bandaged and recovering. What? Did they lose track of the context switch, or did I? Or is this one of those Matrix "your mind makes it real, so we don't have to" things occurring for the first time in episode 17 of the series?

I do admire the way Orihime's mystic abilities are all based on the Mythbusters mantra. (Every time she does her power chant, I hear Adam Savage going "I deny your reality, and substitute my own.")

So, the arm building problem works the same on uClibc 0.9.29, so it's not a uClibc-svn issue. Bumping the busybox version to 1.12.1 before trying too hard to debug it...

Nope, that didn't fix it. Sigh. Debugging the hard way. Wheee...

Trying to figure out if I should post FWL notes to the mailing list, here, or both. The thing about putting them here is I can find them again in future, which is the main reason I write this. Posting them there lets other people respond, not that I really expect them to. I suppose I could post in both places, but that seems a bit redundant...

Oh wow, that's screwed up.

I've mentioned the current economic crunch before. I talked about Liar's Poker and the invention of mortgage bonds with trenchards. (These days they've been renamed CDOs, "collateralized debt obligations". Fine.) That book talked about having half a dozen slices. The screwed up part is mentioned in this radio program, which talks about having almost 200 slices, the bottom few of which are pretty much guaranteed to be defaulted on and never paid off, just by simple statistics saying that some predictable percentage of mortgages wind up in foreclosure, and these slices get paid off last. Hence when the pool was thinly sliced like this, these bottom slices were nicknamed "toxic waste", and nobody would buy them.

So what they did was chop the "toxic waste" slices off the bottom of each mortgage-based CDO, create new CDO pools entirely out of this "toxic waste", and then split _that_ into trenchards. And now magically, the rating on each of these new slices is based on where they were in the CDO, not what the CDO was made from. So the top slices are rated as good as treasury bonds (roughly equivalent to cash), and the middle's ok... Despite the _entire_pool_ being constructed of junk expected to wind up in default.

Warren Buffett used the word "insane" to describe this.

This economic crisis is a mix of a bunch of things. It's got elements of the 1929 stock market crash, the stagflation of the 1970's, the first Bush administration's savings and loan crisis, and some unique little bits of its own.

But the fundamental problem is that the regulators were STUPID. Nobody with a brain ever _looked_ at this stuff, because the Shrub administration decided to deregulate everything. No reporting requirements, no oversight. Nobody ever HAD to look at it, other than the people who were getting rich off of it and retiring before it all went south.

If "government is evil" is an article of faith, then deregulators don't care that the regulations embody what we learned from previous problems, such as the big less of 1919, "letting people go 90% on margin is a recipe for disaster". It's just like teaching evolution vs his other articles of faith, rational thought and evidence don't enter into it. Obviously no problem we've ever encountered before could possibly ever hit us again, otherwise we'd have seen it by now. It's some weird kind of economic creationism, abject refusal to pay any attention to history at all. Iraq repeats vietnam, while the economy gets a medly of greatest hits. Idiot.

The only reasons I'm not as worried as Naiomi Wolf, despite Bush now having his own private army deployed domestically are:

• Bush is a moron and the people pulling the strings (his father's posse) are all World War II veterans in their late 70's or early 80's.

• If they rig this election (shooting somebody, declaring martial law, another round of diebold's "popular vote vs electoral vote" shenanigans) I have an up to date passport, cash to leave the country, highly portable job skills, and a willingness to go rather than suffer through the rest of the frog boiling ritual.

The thing is, the US no longer has much influence over the rest of the world. It's spent the past decade growing, while we've stayed in place or even shrunk. If the US agenda threatens china's interests, they'll cut off loans like a bartender with a belligerent drunk. The federal government is so deeply in debt it can't afford to keep the lights on without massive foreign loans, and we no longer have a manufacturing base worth speakign of either. China's not going to stop us from becoming a police state, but they are going to take the lion's share of the world's oil as the supply dries up over the next decade. Not sure how that'll play out, but it does limit the "foreign wars to distract from domestic problems" card a bit...

The driving force behind all this is that the baby boomers continue to have the same disproportionate impact they've always had. They were teenagers in the 1960's and career yuppies in the 80's, and now they're old and grey and scared and collectively yelling at the world to get off their lawn and awaiting death from the front rows of their churches. The polite way to say "old fogey scared of change" is "conservative". Of _course_ the republicans have been benefitting from the increasing senility of the baby boom.

That said, the baby boom's power has to peak soon. The early retirement benefit of social security kicks in at 62, and 1945+62=2007. (Plus a 9 month gestation period, so really this year for the first batch. Possibly one reason to play up this economic crisis thingy is to discourage boomers from retiring just yet; only three more years until the full benefits kick in, not hard to scare 'em enough to convince them they'll really need it.)

The same math says the leading edge of boomers hits 65 in 2010, and if the average life expectancy in the US is 77 years (and it's only gone up 2 years since 1990), meaning half the first wave of boomers should be dead by 2022.

I'm aware that the baby boom actually lasted around a decade (what with the GI bill and everything), which is probably why Woodstock came at the very _end_ of the 60's rather than the middle of it. If the 90's were the decade of saving for retirement, and this was the decade of "the baby boomers being grumpy old farts yelling at the world to get off their lawn", then the 2010s look like "the decade of baby boomers retiring and moving into nursing homes" and the 2020's the decade of baby boomers dying of en masse.

The real question is how much damage will they do on their way down. I'm not talking about social security sucking the economy dry, I'm talking about people who continue to vote after they've lost the ability to drive. The Baby Boomers' nominee is already the oldest non-incumbent presidential candidate in history. This is not a coincidence.

We'll see.

With the new uClibc, the arm native build is going "boing" during binutils because config.h in the subdirectories isn't getting STDC_HEADERS set (except in the "intl" subdirectory, because consistent behavior is anathema to the FSF, and redundant code is how you make your project grow up nice and big).

Wrote up a post for the FWL mailing list instead of posting today's debugging here. I should use the project's mailing lists more often, people can actually reply there...

Ok, getting multiple qemu system-image instances to run in parallel turns out to be slightly more complicated than you'd think.

I want to do this because qemu doesn't take advantage of SMP very well. Emulating multiple processors properly would require the emulator to be multi-threaded internally, plus emulating various IPC things on top of that (memory barriers, anyone?), and the qemu developers just haven't wanted to go there yet.

The FWL compiler toolchain can take advantage of smp on the host via distcc (or even a compute cluster if you want to set it up by hand), but this doesn't help with ./download.sh --extract or the ./configure stage. If I'm running smoke tests on 10 targets, I'd like to be able to do those targets in parallel. (I've got 2 gigs of ram and each emulator's using less than megs, except for x86. It should work.) I fixed up distcc to vary its port numbers based on the PID, so what's left?

Well, for one thing, whatever bash's default terminal type is, it has some newline/linefeed confusion if you redirect the output of /dev/console to a file. I need to set $TERM I suspect. Not a big deal, but annoying and triggering a second problem:

If you kill qemu while it's modifying an ext2 image, it can leave the image in a state that makes the next run _very_ unhappy. (Stale nfs file handle? I didn't build nfs into the thing!)

Oddly, e2fsck refuses to be scripted. It insists it needs a terminal to fix stuff interactively, so 'yes "y" | e2fsck' is gratuitously broken. I'm sure there's a workaround (-a was it?), but at this point I'm too disgusted at the developers' totally artificial limitation to bother, and doubt running e2fsck on the image each time is really a good approach.

What I should probably do is mount hda read only, and have the only writeable space be hdb. This means pregenerating /proc and /sys and /home and all that at the top level, which is a design issue. Right now, I've got a Linux From Scratch style /tools directory and nothing else at the top level, and an _optional_ script that fixes that up into something usable. Unfortunately, that's not amenable to mounting read only.

I could mount a tmpfs in a subdirectory of /tools, --bind mount tools under that, chroot into it, and mount hdb on /home under that. It seems kind of silly and overcomplicated, and also means that run-emulator.sh without run-from-home.sh would be far less useful.

Sigh. The tradeoff here is between "provide something simple the user can extend themselves" and "automate everything to provide the user with more prearranged functionality". The second assumes they want to do the same thing I want to do, which I'm never comfortable with.

Ok, now I'm confused.

I've been banging on the powerpc FWL build, testing the resulting system-image it by building cross-compiler.sh static under it. And I'm getting random hangs.

If I call the emulator script myself (output not piped through less), and disable distcc, the hangs don't happen. It ran overnight that way building more or less to the end (I got tired of it and killed it near the end). But if I use my wrapper that pipes the output to tee and sets up distcc, it hangs.

I think it's in the 2.6.25 powerpc network stack. The most recent hang was during wget, it hadn't even gotten as far as distcc yet. But is it a driver issue, or a qemu issue? Would it be fixed in 2.6.27 if I could get powerpc to work on a newer kernel? Would trying the svn version of qemu help? Can I declare victory since the root filesystem I'm building seems to be working just fine, and this is really an intermittent kernel problem? (Debugging an intermittent 2.6.25 problem is neither fun nor useful, I need to debug on a current kernel, so that means bumping getting a current kernel working for powerpc back up the list.)

Sigh... In any case, I should check in the kernel alt stuff I did, although I need kernel config files so I can _build_ the alt version first...

Poking at putting binutils 2.18 back as an alt package. I have to set five environment variables in order to work around bugs in the binutils build, and it would be nice if I could do that conditionally without polluting the environment or firing off a subshell. Alas, "THINGY=THIS=that; $THINGY command" isn't the same as "THIS=that command". It tries to run a command "THIS=that" instead. Oh well, it was worth a try. (Once again, something that's easy to do but hard to do _cleanly_.)

I guess setting the extra environment variables won't hurt building the old version. (It's not needed, but shouldn't screw anything up.)

Ever want to smack a political campaign?

In response to the second coming of the savings and loan crisis, and John McCain being one of the original "keating five" group of senators caught in that crisis, Obama's campaign produced this unwatachable video. The entire first minute of that video is not just useless, but alienating. Lots of buzzwords flying past the screen at various angles with nothing to back it up sets off everybody's BS detectors. Chop that off, start right at minute one, with the footage from the ethics committee hearing. And then edit out about half the rest, it's INSANELY SLOW... Just give us the facts already.

Contrast with this, which is quick, simple, snappy, comes across with at least a modicum of objectivity, and gets all the info out of the way in the first two minutes with another 3 minutes or so of discussion/analysis. So it's about 1/3 of the length of the official video, but says more, and does it without access to the embarassing historical footage the first one dug up.

What happened to all the hollywood people Obama supposedly has on staff? Why release a video that looks like it was put together by an intern? (No, I haven't forgiven Obama for the FISA thing yet, and it's the reason I'm not giving him a dime, but I'm apparently still capable of being disappointed.)

I don't even want to say "amateur" when condemning Obama's overpolished video. This is totally amateur and yet a huge improvement over what's coming out of the actual campaign.

Poked at FWL a lot. Took advantage of the alt infrastructure to revert the linux kernel to 2.6.25 (with .27 as the alt version), so I can build something I can test PPC with. Tested PPC a lot. Redoing the smoke test infrastructure...

Yesterday's uClibc snapshot builds on all the targets I've tried, which is highly cool. Building binutils natively under arm dies with conflicting types for "psignal" between libiberty/strsignal.c line 553 and include/signal.h line 142, but still: progress!

$ aspell appalling
Error: Unknown Action: appalling
$ [looks at aspell man page]
$ echo appalling | aspell -c
Error: You must specify a file name.
$ echo appalling | aspell -c /dev/stdin
Error: Could not open the file "/dev/stdin" for writing. File not saved.

I'm sorry, this tool is now in my "too stupid to live" category. I don't care what the engine looks like, the UI is pathological.

Anyway, the uClibc snapshot from the day before yesterday (again, no internet access since the night before I got on the plane; yesterday I was just too tired and today The Cable Modem Faileth) built through to completion for exactly three architectures: i586, x86_64, and m68k (which I spent a chunk of last week getting to work so it'd _better_ still be ok).

The i686 regression is because I'd taken LINUXTHREADS_OLD out of the uClibc miniconfig. I've been complaining for a week that uClibc has two pthreads implementations, and is about to get NPTL on top of that so it has _three_. I'd like to remove one of the two old ones before NPTL shows up, but Bernhard is against it and he's de-facto the new maintainer.

So switching i686 threading back to LINUXTHREADS_OLD, that brings the number of functioning targets back up to 4. Some of the others are dying on sizeof saying user_regs struct is an incomplete type, and I thought that was fixed in svn. Did I accidentally re-download an old version? Lemme download this morning's snapshot and try building again. As soon as I get internet access again, anyway.

And the FWL uClibc svn version build is checked in! And there was much rejoicing.

Built all the targets. Only arm, x86, and x86_64 currently work all the way through smoke test. Mips doesn't build with uClibc-svn, powerpc doesn't work with the 2.6.26 kernel, m68k still has an internal compiler error, sparc still fails to boot (but in a new way that I hope to be able to debug), and last I checked sh4 didn't have a working qemu target that emulated real hardware. But that last one I can fiddle with via teaching BUILD_SHORT to do an initramfs, to make at least some progress.

Very much to do, but now it's time to get back to the paper...

My second stage smoke test builds cross-compiler.sh under a target system-image, and that's dying in binutils while trying to link against libgcc_s.so, which implies it's due to the change I made to the gcc wrapper back when I was trying to build perl and glibc for Linux From Scratch. If so, it's not a uClibc problem at all. (Strangely, if I add DEBUG_WRAPPER=1 to the build environment so the wrapper writes the command line it generates to stdout before executing it, the binutils build breaks even _earlier_...)

Ah! It's doing a BUILD_STATIC. Of course it can't link against libgcc_s, it needs libgcc.a instead. Yeah, the wrapper's doing the wrong thing there. Must fix.

Finally figured out what I want the FWL unstable package logic to look like, got most of it implemented, and now I'm fighting wget. (-P and -O didn't want to coexist, but -O can take a path...)

And checked in! (Finally!)

Now, why did I go on this tangent in the first place, again...? Ah right, uClibc.

Trying to make FWL download alternate packages was making my head hurt, so I moved the logic into if statements in download.sh (Should FWL try to download alternate packages from mirrors? Keeping in mind the name it's downloading and the actual name of the package don't necessarily match. Yeah.) This isn't too hard to implement, but looking at the result and calling it "simple"? Not quite.

Inflicted the first David Tenant episode on Eric and Cathy. Eric couldn't stand it (full of cheese and cliches, he thought). He liked Christopher Eccleston but is not, so far, at all impressed with David Tenant. Cathy could at least tolerate the cheese to get through to the good episodes. (I didn't make Eric watch the next one because Cassandra + Technozombies is about at the edge of _my_ tolerance. And "Tooth and Claw" isn't really an improvement, to be honest. But we have School Reunion to look forward to, and that's a darn good episode, I think...)

Knetworkmangler remains reliably stupid, with the collusion of things like Konqueror. I'm not on the net right now, but I run a copy of apache on loopback to do things like look at the mercurial archives of my project using the web interface. Trying to talk to http://127.0.0.1/hg/firmware was telling me it couldn't connect, so I wasted several minutes restarting the apache server and looking at its config files and man page. The problem is, I used knetworkmanager to log onto Eric's linksys last night (it's got a wep key, easiest to use the GUI to fiddle with that), and I forgot to kill it. So it was going "you're not connected to the internet through me, therefore there can't POSSIBLY be a server running on the loopback interface."

Dear knetworkmanager developers: you do not understand your problem space.

So, back to adding ALT functionality to FWL so I can test build unstable versions of packages without forking the build scripts. There are actually layers of stuff here:

• Figure out a syntax to say which packages to test build. I'm leaning twoards "TEST_PACKAGES=uClibc,linux,toybox".

• Teach download.sh about "ALT=url://" so it knows where to get test packages from, and when to download them. (Also not to delete them when playing with the stable version, or to delete the stable version if that's already been downloaded.)

• Teach the extract logic which patches to apply to which version. I thought about labeling each patch with the first version number it applies to, but that doesn't say when to _stop_ applying it. I could have "test-uClibc-blah.patch" and teach extract to look for those when applying patches, and then rename those files when checking them in...

• Teach the build logic how to handle different build needs for different versions of a package. I'd like to find a less ugly way than a big if statement with a big else case for each package duplicating the entire build logic, but I don't want to get too subtle either...

Did my first uClibc checkin in a longish time. Just some menuconfig help entries, but it's a start.

Banging on BUILD_SHORT some more.

Trying to poke at uClibc from Zen. Their wireless is down, so things like "svn log extra/Configs/Config.in" doesn't work. I simultaneously miss A) my bluetooth dongle enabling internet through cellphone, B) projects that use a real (I.E. distributed) source control system.

September 13, 2008

My laptop battery has now deteriorated enough that software suspend doesn't get triggered before the abrupt power off that comes when the battery drops below whatever the threshold voltage is. (Meaning if you plug into an outlet that isn't providing power, and don't notice, you have maybe 20 minutes before you lose your work.) That's Dell for you...

September 12, 2008

My itinerary for my trip to the northeast came in, I head out for HP's legal seminar thingy on the 18th and fly back October 2. So I get to see Eric and Cathy (and maybe some family) for a couple weeks, which is nice.

Tried to watch a movie on hulu.com, but the cable modem's gotten so slow the first 14 seconds of the movie took 3 minutes to display. (And it wasn't even in the "high resolution" option.) So I called time warner tech support and got through to a human after only about twenty minutes on hold (and reciting the gettysburg address into the automated phone system until it gave up trying to "help" me).

Their speed test says we're getting a little under 50k/second each way, which is certainly more than I'm actually seeing although that's to their _local_ server and not trying to go out of their WAN to any actual websites. On the actual web, I'm seeing more like 4k/sec, which is dialup speeds. (My cell phone connection gets about 50k/second to actual websites, but I can't use that until I get a new bluetooth dongle or USB cable. I ordered a USB cable at the tmobile place on the drag, but if it takes the week to come in he estimmates, I'll be in the northeast by then. Sadness...)

I explained to the tech support guy how ever since all the students came back on west campus at the start of the month, the cable modem's connection lights are on solid about 3/4 of the time, and whatever's collating them a hop or two up seems to be totally choking. This was, alas, outside his script. So he's scheduled a technician to physically come out on Friday the 19th to frown at our cable modem and magically fix the problem. (Which is the day after I leave.) Oh well, Fade can let the guy in and at least they'll notice if they can't fix it from here and follow up from where the fix needs to be made. (And maybe they can change which channels the cable modem is using or something, who knows...)

September 11, 2008

My little bluetooth USB dongle seems to oops the kernel a lot. Not a full blown panic, just a stack dump to dmesg and then the bluetooth subsystem is frozen and won't work until I reboot. This makes me sad.

Sometimes it can be fixed by yanking and reinserting the bluetooth dongle. It seems to be software suspend that drives it into an easily confused state. (Specifically, suspend to ram without remembering to yank the bluetooth dongle first. It _really_ doesn't like that.)

I note that suspend to ram now drains the battery a lot faster than it used to, and leaves the USB ports powered during suspend (which seems to eat battery even when nothing's plugged into them). I vaguely recall people talking about trying to leave usb devices mounted across suspends, but that's not a good way to go about it if you ask me...

Still, internet via cell phone otherwise remains highly cool. Fade remains addicted to Spore to the point I've had to go watch her play spore if I want to see her ever since she bought it. (And she estimates another couple weeks of this.)

And now my little bluetooth USB dongle seems to have wandered off. This is sad. I had it around 5am, and I put it in my pocket, went home, slept, biked back to campus... and I don't have it anymore.

It's too bad that the built-in bluetooth in the "everything works with Linux" laptop Dell sold me doesn't work with Linux. The bios insists there's bluetooth, anyway. The kernel simply can't find it, and all Google brings up for this model is other people complaining it doesn't work for them either, no actual solutions. Oh well, that's Dell for you.

I note that btdelconn is still cycling eating an entire CPU, and kill -9 doesn't take it down even though it claims not to be in D state. Sigh. The entire bluetooth subsystem is _fragile_...

September 10, 2008

Offline for a couple days. No particular reason, it's just not much fun using my laptop on the downstairs couch with neither fan quite pointing at me and four cats competing for my attention, and I didn't work up the initiative to get out much. (Went swimming 5 of the past 6 days, though.) Read several Discworld books (going postal, making money, night watch, now working on Thud!). Watched Fade play a lot of Spore.

Of course the travel arrangements for HP's NYC thing would come in right after the last time I checked my email, with a "please confirm in 24 hours". Oops. My Livejournal and twitter friends lists have scrolled. *shrug*

September 9, 2008

Cooked bacon a few days ago. I'm not much of a fan, but Fade likes it, and the internet seems to consider it important, at least when taped to cats. This left me with almost as much grease as finished bacon (I'd forgotten it's big strips of about 90% fat, half of which melts during cooking), and I kept it on the theory there's got to be something useful to do with it.

Today, I used the leftover bacon grease to cook potatoes in. The result tasted remarkably like bacon. What a surprise.

September 6, 2008

Mips is broken in uClibc svn. Wheee. And the 2.6.26.3 kernel didn't fix the powerpc linking thing.

September 5, 2008

Yay internet through the cell phone.

Ok, this amuses me. I suppose that the modern definition of "liberal" might be someone who watches Bill Moyers interview Keith Olbermann for fun. Twenty years ago it would have been the definition of "intellectual", of course. These days republicans are trying hard to be the Party of Stupid. I'm still annoyed at Obama, but it's nice to see somebody get nominated with a brain, who isn't trying to hide it. (My Mensa membership expired in 1999...)

September 4, 2008

Sigh. Chromium is written in C++, not C. Much less interested in it now. (Why bother to do a new web browser written in C++? Konqueror/Safari exists.)

I keep running into people who say "sure C++ is bloated beyond what any one person can cope with, but you can pick a sane subset of the language, just like Perl!". Except that no two people ever have an identical subset, so as soon as you have more than one person working on the project your subset expands, and soon you're using Boost libraries and everything. (And if you go with an anal coding style document dictating the language features your project is allowed to use, you A) present new developers with a higher than average brick wall, B) can't share code with other projects without going out of bounds.)

Mark made the cell phone internet work. Yay!

Ah, Chromium is based on webkit, which is Apple's packed up and exported Safari rendering engine, which is a fork of khtml in Konqueror. So the answer to my "why do another" question is "they didn't". Ok, that makes a minimal amount of sense. I'm still disappointed, though.

September 3, 2008

Whoever packaged mercurial for debian/ubuntu made it depend on rcs. Why did they do that? That's so amazingly, deeply stupid that I'm at a loss for words.

I'm aware that mercurial is capable of converting cvs archives to hg. This is NOT an excuse to make rcs a required dependency for installing mercurial. Attempting to convert from a repository format that isn't installed should simply fail. It's that simple.

Hanging out at the chick-fil-a on Ben White, seriously abusing their wireless. Got in 45 minutes of swimming last night (wow is that exhausting, I'd forgotten how much), and today I biked to south Austin (and need to bike back to go home later). Yay exercise. Yay getting lots of missing packages installed on my laptop.

Ok, google broke down and made its own web browser from scratch, and I'm impressed by their comic book about its design. And there are good developer docs too.

September 2, 2008

According to T-mobile customer service, the $20/month internet service thing wasn't enabled for either phone line (is now, but may take 2 days to actually happen). And getting surf-from-the-phone service (which apparently I need to contact samsung's website for the help pages, or upgrade the firmware) is an extra $6/month, although that part was somewhat confused. (There seems to be some disconnect between Samsung and T-mobile. It's a new model of phone, which they haven't sold for very long. Not much selection in the 3G department yet. They gave me Samsung tech support's direct phone number, maybe I'll call it tomorrow.) But in any case, that's a separate issue.

The part about the phone volume only going up to 7 instead of 10, meaning I can hear it ok inside at home, but not outside near a busy street or in a place with loud background music... That I also have to talk to samsung about, apparently. It can ring loud enough, so it's clearly a software problem...

Spent most of today re-reading Discworld books (still going through the watch series, today I finished The Fifth Elephant and moved on to The Truth, since that comes before Night Watch and it's sort of tangentially a watch book). Right now I'm in the mood to hang outsomewhere with free soda refills and good lighting, an optionally an outlet I can charge my laptop from (since I drained the battery making a half-hour stop on a bus bench walking back from Mark's last night). Considering I'm still sore from last night and the humidity's at "incoming hurricane" levels, I only felt up to going as far as The Donald's.

Unfortunately, this means no internet access (well, Wayport branded lack of internet), and my laptop isn't particularly useful without an internet connection at the moment. I have to install apatche before I can get a copy of my website running on loopback again, I have to install mercurial before I can poke at any of my existing software projects...

I wonder how long it's been since I rsynced my website up to the server? Before I reformatted my laptop, anyway. (I can copy _that_ script back now, though...)

I suppose I can set my email back up now, although there's no way to test sending and receiving at the moment. (I use hand-rolled ssh tunnel things in both directions.) Oh well, I can get it to read the old mbox files... Oh yes, Kontact continues to digest Kmail and make it less and less usable. (I forgot how I deleted the korganizer pop-up reminder daemon... But then again, that sort of detail is at least half the reason I keep this blog, so korgac is once again toast. :)

Sigh. I remember when kmail put the number of unread messages each folder had along the right edge of the display box, so they all lined up and were easily readable. Now it appends them to the folder name so they're all jagged, and considers this a UI improvement. This is made worse by the fact that all my interesting kmail folders are nested subfolders of "inbox", so it's indenting them all and leaving lots of whitespace at the left, then truncating the folder names at the right. That's it, preserve the useless whitespace and truncate the actual data. Who designed this? Is there any way to put the _number_ over there in the whitespace? I should look into thunderbird, at least it's nicely standalone and not part of an increasing hairball interfering with the functions I want out of it. Not that I can install _that_ without internet access, either...)

Huh, I took a gamble and copied my old kmailrc file to .kde/share/config/kmailrc and... it seems ot have worked. Wow. (That kind of thing generally doesn't work for me.) Well, there's half an hour of fiddling saved, I hope...

I'm starting to be creeped out by how much of kubuntu 8.10.1 is actually working out of the box. It's somewhere between "refreshing" and "I'm waiting for the other shoe to explode in a nuclear fireball".

On the other hand, I already fixed vi (ln -sf vimrc /etc/vimrc.tiny) because the Ubuntu default won't let you use the cursor keys in insert mode. And /bin/sh still points to the Defective Annoying SHell. So it's got some persistent built-in breakage baked into the distro at this point. But they didn't break anything _new_, and actually seem to have fixed some of the existing problems...

Ok, software suspend is still horked (the keyboard/mouse don't always come back after a suspend, and of course the defaults have changed to lock the screen when it resumes). That's reassuring me a bit. Now, how did I fix that last time? Made the power button re-suspend... Alas, that I _didn't_ mention in my blog, so I have to work out how I did it again from first principles...

Ah, pressing the power button calls /etc/acpi/powerbtn.sh, and in that directory there's a "sleep.sh" that does the actual suspend to ram, so rename the old script to something innocuous and make a symlink. That bypasses the screen locking logic, too. Exactly what I want. (If they have physical posession of my laptop, there's not a lot I can do about it in software. Well, ok, I could encrypt the home partition and have an initramfs ask for a password to mount it, and if I was really paranoid I could have a USB key with the encryption key for the root filesystem, and have the initramfs asking for the password to decrypt that USB key to get the second key off of it, and in fact the USB key could be something like a nail board programmed to wipe itself if you entered 10 wrong passwords in a row, at which point grabbing my darn terabyte backup drive would be the easy thing... But the point is, I'd still not have my laptop anymore, which would be sad.)

Poking at a python script to go through my /home partition and find runs of zeros it can turn into sparse files. (Several of my filesystem images started out sparse, and got de-sparsed as part of the backup process.) But although a slightly obsolete version of the python documentation was in the backups I dumped into my /home partition, I need to install the man pages before I can look at things like "madvise", which I think is how they finally added the ability to punch holes in existing files. There was a Linux Weekly News article on at one point, anyway...

September 1, 2008

I despise this Sinus infection. Can't get more than two hours of sleep before I wake up with a headache. I despise headaches too.

Incoming calls are finally going to my new phone, so I spent most of the day over at Mark's trying to get internet to work via cell phone. Installing Kubuntu 8.04.1 on my laptop right before doing this didn't help matters. Is bluetooth gone because of 8.10, or did it never work? No idea (it probably never worked, I simply hadn't tried before; the BIOS says it's there and enabled but the Linux kernel is adamantly refusing to find it). After an hour of fiddling with it we drove to Fry's and I spent the $17 to get a USB bluetooth dongle just to get over that part and on to the next bit.

Unfortunately, although we could then associate with the phone, get a serial device pointing at it, and do a lot of ATDT stuff via wvdial (among other things), it point blank refused to actually do a ppp session. Hung up on us instead of connecting each time. Many web pags said this _should_ work, but we tried a couple dozen variants and only managed to get slightly different failures.

Eventually, after more googling on Mark's part than you can possibly imagine (he puts my Google-fu to shame, only have of it actually being Google. The Ubuntu bug tracker has a search engine, who'da thunk?), I noticed that trying to bring up any of the actual phone's help pages says "connection failed". Apparently those are implemented as web pages on the t-mobile website (don't ask me why). So not only is the extra $20/month internet not working, but the phone's built-in internet that you get as part of the basic service isn't working.

Tomorrow: call customer service. (Called 'em today and got a recording about it being labor day, thus tech support is closed. Oh well, at least that means I can expect to talk to humans without having to recite the jabberwocky at a voice response system until it gives up, ala sprint...)

On the "getting 8.10 to work" front, knetworkmangler actually seems to be working again. I'm as surprised as anyone. No obvious way to tell it "rescan for more wireless networks, you missed one I know is there", but other than that... Huh. Cool.

August 31, 2008

New phone works for outgoing calls, but not incoming calls yet. Copied my numbers off the old one to a text file.

Fade and I spent lots of today watching the next round of netflix while I closed more tabs. (Finally finished Veronica Mars season 1, and then made the mistake of watching a highlander disk right afterwards. The difference in acting ability is ENORMOUS. Until Joe and Methos get on the screen, of course. Methos and Joe are great, Duncan's ok, Ritchie's annoying, and their weekly guest redshirts all CANNOT ACT. There's a reason Fade calls Highlander the "Joe and Methos show", they're pretty much what makes it worth watching. (Amanda's somewhere between Duncan and Joe/Methos when she shows up, but she wasn't on this DVD and Methos was only in the third episode.)

Joe had a line in the middle episode of the disk, ala "Sometimes you can't make any sense of it, you just have to see it through" that perfectly summarized the plot of that episode. (His character wasn't _talking_ about the plot, but the actor might have been. Striving mightily to overcome the material...)

Finally finished backing up my files to the terabyte drive, and now to install the new Kubuntu...

August 30, 2008

Bought a new phone. Mark dragged me out to the T-mobile place in the Triangle. I forgot to pick him up from the airport last weekend when my phone switched itself off and the alarm didn't go off, nor could he call me. (Still feel bad about that.) After over a decade as a sprint customer I've now left them, but I don't feel at all bad about that because they _earned_ it.

Sprint's internet plan (for getting internet on my laptop via cell phone) was $70 per person with no discount for having their cell phone service and no family plan. So altogether, with tax, Fade's and my monthly phone bill would have been somewhere over $300 to get our internet through them. That's _actively_ stupid, and they deserve to lose.

T-mobile, meanwhile, offered a two person cell phone plan for less than we were already paying sprint, and then 3G internet at $20/person on top of that.

So I have a phone, and Fade has a phone (a Samsung something-or-other with 3G), and someday they may even work. (Activation was... tricky. Trying to get new phones over a 3 day weekend when the tech support people are mostly away might not have been the best idea, and I break stuff. It's sort of inevitable. This time, their registration computer threw up a weird internal error message, which eventually turned out to be due to signing up for the internet plan while chosing to block their email service to my cell phone. I want to use the internet on my _laptop_ (which Mark made halfway work via bluetooth on his laptop in the store, and I need to buy a cable for to do via USB). I don't want to use their email address, and I don't want to use the cell phone's UI to do anything with the internet, and I don't want to be spammed on my phone. Seemed simple to me, but whoever programmed their computer never thought of this, apparently...

Closing more tabs. I have tabs open from March. This is downright archaeological. (It's a combination of software suspend mostly working now and the KDE desktop saving my open tabs when I shut down. Most of them are "couldn't load blah" because I don't bring the net up until after the desktop has booted, so it's not taking up the gigabytes of ram it would otherwise to _populate_ all these tabs. But each one is a URL I have to either look at or cut and paste to a file to look at later. My file of cut and pasted URLs is 200 entries and growing...

August 29, 2008

Still trying to backup stuff and close tabs so I can format and install Ubuntu 8.10. Boy I have a lot of open Konqueror tabs. (Finding the window full of tabs from tvtropes.com didn't help matters, I've lost most of today to that...)

August 28, 2008

Ok, even youtube is slow now. (Not unplayably slow, but noticeable.)

Filling up the terabyte drive, and preparing to install Ubuntu 8.04.1 on my laptop. Wow I have a lot of crud lying around on this laptop, and many many open windows to close...

August 27, 2008

*blink* *blink*. According to my notification email thingy, "Penguicon" is now following me on twitter. I honestly don't understand why...

August 26, 2008

Alas, UT can't schedule the necessary appointments and process the appropriate paperwork in time. (The faster of my two options involves an appointment on September 15th.) In their defense, the state of Texas decided that anyone who graduates in the top 10% of their high school class gets an automatic admission to UT, which is more than their entire incoming class each year. (That's an undergraduate problem rather than a graduate problem, but their entire admissions process is now geared to finding every possible way to keep people _out_.)

The internet is PAINFULLY slow tonight. I'm guessing it's all the students coming back...? Except that youtube seems unaffected, somehow. The daily show's unusable, livejournal's taking 30 seconds to load each page, my webcomics seem swamped, even Google's a touch sluggish (which for them means 5 second page load times)... but not youtube? Weird.

August 25, 2008

Wandering around the University of Texas at Austin, trying to get readmitted to take a class this semester. (If I pass one class per semester, spring and fall, for six years: that's 36 credits and a master's degree. Hopefully I can do it faster, but for right now I'm trying to finish one class without interruption.

August 24, 2008

Apparently, the US GDP is about $13.8 billion. According to Forbes the richest guy in the world (Warren Buffett) is worth $62 billion. So the richest man in the world essentially owns the entire output of the US for 4 and a half years. Every big mac, every dentist appointment, every new swimming pool... Good to know.

A while back I mentioned that Michael Lewis' book "Liar's Poker" described the roots of the current mortgage crisis, by which I mean the book is about the invention of the mortgage bond back in the 1980's.

Mortgage bonds take thousands of individual mortgages and tie them together into a big pile of money, then sell shares in that pool. In theory this lets statistical averaging even out peculiarities like people who default on their loans, or pay down their debt early. It let things like mutual funds buy shares in mortgages just like they would municipal or treasury bonds, and created a huge demand for more and more mortgages to invest in. Mortgages were now something you could _trade_.

This meant that a mortgage was no longer a 30 year relationship to the lending institution, it was something you could flip. Lendors became much more willing to make loans, it was easy to get out of 'em at any time and Wall Street had billions of dollars looking for good returns.

This meant the people who made the loans were no longer the same people who would collect the checks for the next decade, instead they got a commission for making the sale and sold the mortgage to somebody else within a few months. Make the loans, package them up into big pools, sell them to large institutional investors, cash your commission check, rinse, repeat. The ability of the borrower to pay back the loan faded into the background as a secondary consideration: it would become somebody else's problem before long, the statistical safety of the huge pools of money dampened the sting of individuals defaulting, and wasn't it all insured anyway? Divorced from the reality of individuals, the math would always find a rate at which the loan should (statistically speaking) be profitable, so just tweak the rate until the numbers look good.

Of course Bush came in and deregulated, eliminating the need for pesky things like down payments and equity. When the dot-com bubble burst, investors fleeing from stocks went into bonds for safety. Don't own a percentage of future profits, own debts people are _obligated_ to pay. (Assuming, of course, that they can.) More money than ever flooded into mortgage bonds seeking the safety (yet high returns) of real estate. Two decades had passed since the days of individual savings and loans backing mortgages with the contents of their depositor's savings accounts (ala the Frank Capra movie "It's a Wonderful Life") was the main source of mortgages. Those small lendors were careful, because it was their money. They had to eat the costs of default and foreclosure, and had to be willing to take posession of a property and sell it to maybe eventually get some of their money back. They were careful who they loaned to because the loan was their problems.

But with mortgage bonds, it was all numbers. Every mortgage sold was an instant commission, pack 'em up, flip 'em to large institutional investors, and who cares what happens 5 years down the road. It's all insured, isn't it?

And then the dominoes started falling. Again.

Nothing new...

Did some preliminary location scouting for Austicon. (We might move it back up to October 2009, might not. But up in Michigan, talking to Sal and Garrett and Marcus and John Guest, I found that I really miss SMOFfing.)

I checked in with the renamed Red Lion from Linucon 1 (what's it now, Crown Plaza?), and the "way too small" Holiday Inn at Mopac and 183. At the first Linucon we got somewhere over 300 people. (Penguicon 1.0 had 500, but that's with Terry Pratchett as an anchor guest, plus looting the about 3-year-old corpse of ConTraption for concom and attendee mailing lists. Plus Tracy had chaired ConFusion 19100 in Y2K, and could pull in resources from there too. All that together, plus all the marketing I could do remotely, got us a little over 500 people.)

So 300-500 attendees seems a good range to expect the first year. It's psychologically far better to crowd your space to the gills (jam packed, exciting, everybody wants to be here) than to have your attendees rattling around in too much space and feeling empty and abandoned. (A show floor with 1500 people in it can seem deserted if it's big enough; I've seen this happen.) So get _space_ for 300 people, and be prepared to buy extra con suite materials and attendee baggies at the last minute if more show up.

A good rule of thumb is 1/5 to 1/4 of your attendees get hotel rooms. (Depends on the event, but for SF cons with locals and more than one per room that's the ballpark.) There are two main nights (friday and saturday), so 1/4 of 300 people is 75 rooms, times 2 nights is 150 room nights. (There are a few more on thursday night and a very small number sunday night, but friday and saturday are the big ones. Pretty much any weekend con runs for 2 days straight: from 4pm friday through around 4pm sunday. Scheduling stuff Friday during the day depends on people skipping work for your con, and scheduling Sunday evening cuts into travel arrangements, packing, and cleanup time. A really _nice_ thing to do is negotiate with the hotel for extended checkout time on sunday, but 3pm is about as late as you're likely to get there without them being totally unable to sell the room to someone else for the evening.)

Science Fiction conventions trade off a room block for function space. Instead of paying cash to rent the space, we promise to fill up their hotel rooms and they give us the space for free in exchange. (This is why SF cons are generally at a hotel instead of a convention center; those only take cash. This is _also_ the main reason we can function on a small fraction of the budget of technical conferences, and charge $50 for the weekend instead of several hundred. We're staffed by volunteers, and barter as much as possible to keep the rest of the budget down,)

If our hotel only _had_ 75 rooms we could own the facility, but the Holiday Inn has 194 and the Red Lion has even more. (The Holiday Inn has far more rooms than function space. The Red Lion has three times as much space, but only a few dozen more rooms.) The Red Lion is actually excellently balanced for an SF con of about 1200 people; we'd own the hotel and could pretty much do what we wanted (loud parties at 3am, hall costumes, nerf guns in the halls, skinny dipping in the pool, you name it) without worrying about complaints from other guests.

But with 300 people we'd only be going for about 1/3 of the Red Lion's space this year (both in function space and hotel rooms), so we'd be sharing with somebody. And some groups (evangelical conservatives, straight laced business types, some weddings... it's hard to predict, really) just don't mix well with science fiction conventions. (Note that you never own the _whole_ hotel because you're always sharing with airline people. Most hotels reserve about 10% of their rooms permanently for airlines, as part of a big annual prepaid contracts. This is both for pilots and flight attendants who spend the night away from home, but is also why they can give you a free room if your flight is delayed overnight; it doesn't actually cost them extra to do so. That said, I've never heard of pilots or flight attendants complaining about anything. They'll either sleep through it or join in, especially when alcohol is involved.)

So trading off a room block of 150 nights for function space, we aren't getting the Red Lion's entire function space without forking out a lot of cash. (Linucon 1, which was in the Red Lion and had all their function space, cost me $7000 after everything was settled.) And we aren't expecting enough attendees to make proper use of it if we did.

The main advantage of the Holiday Inn is we can fill up all their function space, and not share with another organized group on that front. We'd still share the upper floors with other hotel guests, but we can have a "quiet floor" (sleeping rooms only, no room parties) separating them from the con. The main disadvantage is no room for growth; above about 500 people we need to move to a bigger hotel, and moving is disruptive to conventions. (Not too bad, but a bit of a pain. Continuity is nice in many small ways, both for the attendees and the convention staff.) A secondary disadvantage is the layout of their space isn't the greatest; they have a ballroom (divisible into thirds) and then two more rooms on another floor, plus an open meeting area in the restaurant. (We could cope with signs. A convention can never have too much signage. But it's not as good as just having a nice compact layout in the first place.)

The main advantage of the Red Lion/Crown Plaza is growth potential. It could handle about 1200 people before we had to look for somewhere bigger. (That's big enough we might just decide to cap attendance instead, but it would be years before it even came up.) Their function space is also well laid out and easily divisible: we could get the 3 longhorn rooms and the 3 rooms on the other side of the hall, and they'd still over half their space (the two big center ballroom sections, and three more rooms on the far side of that) to rent out to other groups.

Crown Plaza's space is also in more demand; the function space is what distinguishes them. Holiday Inn's space was empty when I went to look at it, Red Lion's was 2/3 full (on a Thursday). Red Lion is right up the road from the Airport (183 to 290 to I35, right as you hit the edge of downtown there's the Red Lion) and has what was once (and may still be) the largest ballroom in Austin. Holiday Inn is on the far side of town from the airport, in a fairly residential area (still at a junction of big roads and near the businesses in the Arboretum and that Domain thing, but not quite as centrally located), and the function space seems like a sideline to its main business of overnight stays. When I asked about the last two wekeends in September 2009 and the first three in October, the Crown Plaza wanted to get back to me about availability more than a year in advance. Holiday Inn has all of those still free, their bookings only run about ten months in advance.

This implies we might be able to negotiate a better deal from the Holiday Inn. There are a zillion variables in "what's a good deal", but that's a matter for another day.

August 6, 2008

August 5, 2008

Home late. Collapsed. Cats are being very clingy. Fade's glued to her iMac, but my laptop holds very little interest for me at the moment. Everything needs to be cleaned.

Step 1: Make tea.

Deal with everything else tomorrow...

August 4, 2008

Checkout time at the hotel came and went, now we're at a McDonald's waiting for the mechanic to call. (They're waiting for the part.)

August 3, 2008

Breakfast with Sal and the Aegis crew (and Eric and Cathy and Garrett). Then we hit the road back to Austin, and made it as far as northern Kentucky before I discovered that my car has power steering. (Ok, the escort had rack and pinion, the pontiac has a power steering pump that leaks Squinchers and makes a growling noise when offended. Now I know.) So we're at a hotel until morning.

I'm tired. Sword camp was marvelous. FWL release later this week, I'm just not with it today.

I have 50 megabytes of accumulated email. Eek.

Neither of us are inclined to leave the hotel room. (Fade has internet. She says she wants to hug it.)

August 2, 2008

Ow.

It is the day after sword campp, and I am in pain. I finally completed Basic, after three years of meaning to. (In 2006, sword camp occurred while we were moving from place to place in Pittsburgh, so Fade went but I stayed behind to pack stuff and haul boxes. In 2007, we were moving back to Austin and neither of us got to go, which is why Fade went through Basic again this year since she not only missed a year of training, but didn't have anybody to practice with in between.)

We're hanging out on the Aegis Compound for a day to recover, and then hit the road Monday morning. (We're welcome to stay in an "the only food left is bagels and the camp showers are out of propane" sort of way. The tent we're in was still up from the last event anyway. I'm all for it if it means I don't have to move much right now. Ow.)

Sal, the head of Aegis, used to run a software business and is quite clueful, but the compound is over a mile away from the closest town. Running a land line would cost several thousand dollars and involve negotiating right of way with a couple dozen land owners (apparently even along the roads). Yagi antennas to bridge with wireless need a line of sight, which is great if they want to try to get internet from a national park but heading uphill towards civilization (or at least Pickney) involves two hills and a _lot_ of trees. The current plan is to try cellular internet, but unfortunately this is Michigan so even that's nontrivial...)

July 29, 2008

Sword camp. Day four. Ow.

July 28, 2008

Day three of sword camp. No internet access here, not a lot of time to use my laptop. Fun campfires every night, only managed to land a flaming log on my foot once so far and the burn was smaller than you'd think. Stiff. Sore. Yesterday they woke us up by playing fight music on the PA system really loud (and the fight music includes several varieties of dance music, hip-hop, the theme from the movie "Mortal Combat", etc...) Today they woke us up with bagpipes, which didn't work in my case because I had no incentive to move _towards_ the bagpipes...

July 25, 2008