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.

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 glad I have my little USB cord for the cell phone now. I still can't figure out how to get data through it (have to use bluetooth even while the sucker's plugged in), but my cell phone battery doesn't even manage two hours of data transfer without it.

Sigh. McDonalds closes at 11, Jimmy Johns is uncomfortably loud, and even the starbucks down the street that was open until 2am switched back to Midnight for the thanksgiving break. I continue to miss Metro.

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?)

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.

It is hot chocolate weather. Pondered going down to sixth street, on the theory I haven't been there at night (when it's Doing Its' Thing) in a couple years. Meant to go halloween weekend, but didn't. Didn't this time either.

Also my cellular internet doesn't work here. (I have two bars of signal, but apparently that's not enough to use the internet. Sigh.)

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

Dropped Fade off at the airport this morning, then went home and slept until 5. Very tired still, but I have lots to do today...

At our local McDonald's, the television above the table with the convenient electrical outlet is now tuned to "CNN Headline News". Wow it sucks. It's relentlessly shallow, vapid... obnoxious, really. (It's also louder than my sound cancelling headphones can quite keep up with.) It was like the television equivalent of supermarket tabloids _before_ "Showbiz tonight" came on.

I've decided that yes, I would pay money to get these people to shut up. How much money? Enough to buy a hot chocolate at Starbuck's. (I can't go home and work, four cats and Fade's not there to run interference.)

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.

Back in August Solar from Gentoo noted how _ancient_ the software was on Morris, and started an off-list thread about fixing it. Erik Andersen used to maintain the server, but he got busy managing his company and handed off maintainership of the projects years ago. Server administration pretty much fell through the cracks, and the occasional Debian package update got run on it. Solar suggested reinstalling Morris with something that Lance Albertson of OSUOSL (where the server is physically hosted; it's a xen share on one of their rackmount machines) could admin, or possibly Gentoo Embedded so Solar could admin it and we'd be dogfooding uClibc. (Albeit a fork of uClibc, but with the release schedule uClibc's had recently that's to be expected.)

Mike Frysinger piped up to say he didn't see anything wrong with the status quo. He specifically objected to dogfooding uClibc bcause he maintained his own hand-rolled uClibc system on one of his servers, and in his experience "there just isn't enough man power to keep packages building." I pointed out that was why we wanted to use gentoo embedded rather than something hand-rolled, to which he replied:

i'm not sure i follow.  we dont have the man power today.  changing morris 
over to embedded gentoo wont make the man power materialize.  so what am i 
not understanding ?

At which point the thread petered out because I stopped trying to argue with him. (He was, nominally, the uClibc maintainer at this point. The one who never cut a release.)

Fast forward to today. Between now and then I essentially staged a coup against Mike (albeit in absentia) to make Bernhard maintainer, but we hadn't gotten back around to the server administration issues when the server got cracked and the httpd replaced with a script kiddie bot binary. Denys noticed the following day and emailed me and Erik about it, and I forwarded it to solar and to support at osuosl.org (which is essentially Lance, but it gets tracked better than emailing him directly). They've been dissecting the server for a couple hours now, comparing old backups to see when the crack happened, confirming that it was just a script kiddie and that no important files got tampered with, and discussing how to properly secure the server.

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...

(Why that module used to be called ipw3945 and is now ipl3945, I have no idea.)

I also have no idea why the "Dynamic" CPU policy on Ubuntu 8.04 keeps setting the frequency to 800 mhz when I'm running builds. I have to manually set it to "performance" to reliably get the full 1733 mhz out of my laptop. (Maybe it's trying to keep the heat down enough that the fan stays off? It's plugged into AC power, although the battery's charging...)

I'm going to miss Konqueror when I upgrade my laptop to Ubuntu 8.10. Firefox sucks much less than it used to, but it's still not the browser _I'm_ used to, and konqueror is still much lighter weight. I suppose the Google browser thingy will eventually be released for Linux, that might be worth poking at...

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...)

Today, it does feel like the world has changed, but in a good way. It's a bit like finals are over and the stress is gone, and now it's summer vacation. Somebody is in charge who actually thinks understanding problems might help solve them. No more paniced flailing from somebody totally out of their depth, using increasingly shrill rhetoric and draconian measures to mask incompetence.

I feel the urge to get Obama a hat.

And on that note, off to get angry at something else.

Upgraded my server to Kubuntu 6.10. This was a mistake. I'm not sure words can express quite how much I hate Kubuntu 8.10. Wow, this release sucks.

All the old brokenness (such as /bin/sh->dash and vimrc.tiny) is still there, with fun new driver breakage such as every time I type a key, the screen flickers. (This is a bug I last saw with a Western Digital video card in 1998, but they've managed to reintroduce it. This is of course a regression from the Kubuntu 7.04 previously on this machine, which did not have this problem.)

But mostly, it's because KDE 4.1 is a _disaster_.

It starts by launching two apps, a post-it note thing and something labeled "desktop" that gives you a transparent window. Making them go away was non-obvious (hover over them and they make toolbars on the right, making you think that _every_ window will now have moved its title bar to the right edge and making me hunt for system settings first thing. But no, those two windows are "special"). You click the red X to dismiss 'em, but try it about 3 times, the first two didn't close 'em.

It went to a Vista style launch window menu thing (whatever KDE calls the start button), rather than the traditional menu type. Figuring out how to switch it back took me 15 minutes. (I was looking under system settings rather than right clicking on it.)

After ten minutes of fiddling, I still haven't figured out how to add a terminal window launcher to the task bar. Drag and drop ignores the taskbar and puts it on the desktop background, which I always have covered with dozens of windows so that's useless to me. I want it in the _task_bar_. This should not be this hard.

Konsole's terminal window default size is no longer 80x25. The "new terminal window" icon in the lower left is gone, now you have to create a new one from the pulldown menu.

When I hover over the "konsole" icon I accidentally dropped on my desktop it gives me the same darn sidebar with the red X has three other icons. There doesn't seem to be any way to make it stop doing this. None of the icons in this sidebar have tooltips when you hover over them, so I don't know what they do.

Right clicking on the taskbar to add stuff is painful, I can get a bunch of preprepared crap (ala gnome), none of which is the Konsole icon that's already in the start menu. I can make an "applet launcher" which seems identical to the KDE menu icon. Trying to drag and drop the konsole icon (from the menu or from the desktop), onto the taskbar doesn't work. (That was the way to do it in KDE 3.) I think I've dropped about three konsole launching windows _behind_ the task bar, but I can't check because I haven't figured out how to hide the task bar yet. What used to be the minimize arrow at the right edge now pops up an inexplicable second task bar expansion thing with icons to left justify, center, or right justify my text. What? It's a word processor? I don't want this.

There's a "show dashboard" icon (no tooltip, but if you right click on it that's the name of the thing it says it would remove), and if you click on that it does indeed hide your toolbar, and all windows. And if you click on _anyuthing_ it brings it all back. It shows you a _picture_ of your desktop background, apparently so you can admire the background bitmap.

The new Konqueror hangs while doing a DNS lookup. The whole thing, you can't even switch tabs until the DNS lookup finishes or times out.

I thought "maybe there are known bugs and I need to install updates", so I fished out the light bulb icon from the nest of junk in the toolbar. (If that makes no sense to you, the network icon shows a green globe of the earth. Some serious drugs were deployed selecting these icons, and several of them no longer have tooltips when you hover over them to tell you what it _is_.) It starts by telling me my language support is incomplete (don't care), and that there are no HP devices found (I think it's talking about printers, of which none are connected to this machine). This is _crazy_ bad. Close both of those, and the lightbulb icon is gone, without actually having updated anything. Brilliant.

So I fire up Adept, and it's showing me big icons of what it can install, because we can't handle text and must be confronted with big cartoon pictures. Ok, click on the "view" pulldown... and nothing, that's an empty menu. There's a pulldown menu with NOTHING IN IT. I can't get an reasonable text view, and I can't get it to _stop_ sorting packages into categories and give me one big view of all packages like 8.04 did.

In general, the way most things worked in kde 3 is no longer available, and the new ways were created by a collaboration between Jean-Paul Sartre and a mime, with suggestions from the avant-garde and dadaist movements. WHAT WERE THESE IDIOTS SMOKING?????

I seem to have accidentally installed the Vista version of Linux. The UI is inexplicably different and DARN non-obvious. Do Not Want.

Sigh. I may have to break down and install Gnome. I despise that, but I can at least _cope_ with it. This is just GARBAGE. I've been a loyal KDE user for many years now, but KDE 4 is so saturate with OBVIOUSLY STUPID design decisions aimed at ripping off _VISTA_ of all things, it's simply not worth learning.

If Mark Shuttleworth knew that this was the direction KDE development was taking back when he founded Ubuntu, no _wonder_ he decided to make Gnome the primary desktop.

Luckily, this machine's intended to be a server, not a desktop, so I can mostly ignore KDE being crazy. I can talk to it via ssh once I set a static IP for the thing, so right click on the crazy globe icon and "edit connections"... And there are no connections. Where's eth0? What?

Ok, kill that, go to the start menu, settings... and all that has is QT 4 settings and the kwallet management tool. (There's no way to delete kwallet that I've found, that's another thing I despise. It prompts me for a password to open it... so it can store passwords. IDIOTS.) Ah, system settings is under the "system" menu (same icon as the settings menu, don't ask why both exist). Click network and... Proxy? Socks? What? This is 2008. Ah, connection preferences... and that just configures timeout values for socket read, server connect, server response, and PROXY CONNECT. Service discovery? Blank menu, no entries... The only other network icon is "sharing" which is about windows shares. No. Ah, there's an advanced tab... with nothing useful in it.

What, it it under the internet menu? Nope. System->hardware drivers? Nope, that says "No proprietary drivers are in use on this system". Because no non-proprietary drivers could ever be interesting to see or configure. Running ifconfig from the command line shows I have eth0 up and it got a dhcp address, I want to give it a STATIC address... And apparently, the only way to do so is with vi.

So how do I do it with vi? find /etc -name "*eth0*" produces no hits. There are over 200 entries in /etc, not counting subdirectories. /etc/network/interfaces only lists loopback. It's getting configured from SOMEWHERE, but I have no idea where. Between hal and dbus and udev and upstart and who knows what else is in here, I have no IDEA how my system is being configured, and it's one big tangled mess: I start to rip pieces out everything just _collapses_...

This is not Linux. Time to wipe it and install the real Ubuntu 8.10.

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.

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. :)

Ouch. My sister's getting divorced. Not good...

Once again, nobody came to get candy. Wound up going out and inflicting "happy candy from strangers day" upon my neighbors, just so I don't wind up eating the whole bag. (Got some return fire, of course. There are orange kit kats for the season. Quite tasty.)

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...

Ok, it's added the C++ headers to the command line. Not looking for them in a sane place. Where are they installed... They're not?

Ah, make all-gcc doesn't build libstdc++. Well that's kind of silly. And make all is breaking doing a ./configure that can't figure out what kind of exception model to use. It can build g++ but not libstdc++. How does that make sense?

If it's going to be this much trouble to build, and I've already got it cleanly building _without_ libstdc++, I might as well just try to add uClibc++ to the mix. That's what I wan't long term anyway...

On his way through, he hand delivered our copy of Super Stupor issue 1, which was quite good. I am reminded of my approach to finding the early voting polling place.

Fade and I wandered up to the discount movie theatre afterwards, but they've cycled out just about everything we wanted to see, except Kung Fu Panda which was 2.5 hours to the next showing. Went to Ikea instead (right down the road from there), had some meatballs and got 2 more bookcases.

Note to self: the salted caramel hot chocolate at starbucks remains very tasty, and an "egregious" (the size I normally order) gives me an upset stomach right afterwards, and then Fade and I both sugar crash _hard_ a couple hours later. (And she had a small.)

It's possible this guy may have too much time on his hands.

My laptop battery lasts FOUR HOURS. That's amazing. (Ah, a fresh young battery, as yet perky and unwrinkled. Or some such. Supercapacitors, I'm telling ya...)

I say this because I'm driving Randal Milholland from the bus station to the airport tomorrow. I have the honor of buying _him_ lunch, and he offered to reimburse me for gas. (Yeah, I know how that goes, but two of our cats are named "Peejee" and "Aubrey" after characters in his strip. I long ago mastered the art of Not Going All Fanboy At People, but I'm not exactly worrying about the gas either.)

Ha! I can has laptop battery again!

My laptop battery got so bad a couple days ago that the instant I unpluged it from the wall, the battery indicator turned solid red. Blinking red used to mean "black battery needs food, badly!", and solid red was the next stage "black battery is about to die!". But now it just wasn't holding a charge at all. I was worried just biking to McDonald's or Boomerang's that the suspend-to-ram would run out of juice before I could get there.

Luckily, back when I bought my laptop I bought a spare battery, and yesterday I found the box it was in. This one's only a six cell rather than a nine cell, but it's _not_dead_ and this is important. (An hour later, the little "charging" light is still on. Wow, it's been a while since that was the case. Someday, we get supercapacitors, but in the meantime a fresh laptop battery is exciting. I can go _out_ somewhere again. Such as to the modern secular temple known as Starbucks, where they have salted caramel hot chocolate. Which I am now drinking.)

On the other hand, some random person edited out my tenure as BusyBox maintainer from the wikipedia article on busybox, so I guess I wasn't that important there. (They also have some of the history wrong, but it's Wikipedia so I expect that. Saying Wikipedia is the largest source of anecdotal information on the web is like saying "The sky is blue [citation needed]".)

My previous laptop, the keys popped off so you could clean the cat hair out from under them. This one I popped the "page up" key off once and never did get it quite properly re-attached; it needs some kind of special tool I think. Sadness.

My brother now has a linkedin profile. How odd.

Dragon is curled up next to me on the couch, sleep meowing. (Sound asleep, but breathing fast and making little "mereh" noises.)

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.

I don't usually think about microsoft, but I do check in on them every couple months. Right now, it is kind of interesting to ponder how the current economic crisis affects Microsoft. As far as I can tell, they're taking it in the teeth.

For a decade now, Microsoft has been "too big to fail", a phrase which sounds kind of familiar after the past few months. The computer industry couldn't live without Microsoft, but it also couldn't live without floppy disks, dial-up modems, and 32-bit x86 processors. It managed to transition off all of 'em anyway.

Windows has been a "must buy at any price" which people couldn't afford to do without for years, just like gasoline. But here in Austin, gas prices are down to $2.17/gallon (at the 7-11 on south Congress), because demand's gone way down. Companies are failing, credit is nonexistent, people are scared, and consumers just aren't buying as much gas as they used to. They're not replacing it with anything, they're just making do with less.

Now imagine what that sort of thing is likely to do to Microsoft's quarterly sales figures. Now ponder that Microsoft's sales figures, and the partnerships based on their ability to make hardware vendors money, are literally all they've got left.

For context, keep in mind that Microsoft has been technically bankrupt for years. Yes, moreso then back when they perpetrated Windows 3.1 on the world. There are a number of reasons for this:

• The 1998 antitrust trial gutted company morale. Totally trashed it. When footage of Bill Gates arguing about the definition of "is" winds up on the 6 O'clock news and your company insists it can bundle a ham sandwich if it wants to, this is embarassing to the employees. (Interviews from the period compared working at Microsoft to working for Philip Morris.) What's more, it burned out dozens of senior excutives who retired or went on indefinite "leaves of absence" and never returned. The company burned out its brains fighting the antitrust trial, and they still got convicted of being a predatory monopoly anyway. (They just weaseled out of any enforcement action, but the Findings of Fact still stand.)

• Then the "permatemps" case happened. For decades Microsoft hired "temporary" workers, fired them for two weeks over christmas, and then hired them again in January. Some were there for over a decade, talented and experienced employees with essentially no benefits or job security, watching their "employee" coworkers accrue vacation time and health insurance and get rich off their stock options. Eventually, the permatemps had enough and demanded to be treated the same as permanent employees, with the same benefits. They filed a class action lawsuit, and won. And in response, Microsoft fired the lot of them.

  What Microsoft didn't realize is that the "low status" jobs these workers had done included actually compiling the software. The Windows 2000 build system was maintained entirely by permatemps, and after they left Microsoft couldn't get the sucker to compile anymore. The windows source code may have been in source control, but the build system for it wasn't considered imporant. The build was littered with binary-only build tools the permatemps had written, and when they left their machines were reformatted, destroying the source code. When changes to the source cause a binary-only tool to segfault, and the source code to that tool no longer exists and the people who wrote it are long gone... what do you do?

  What Microsoft did was find an existing development team that had just finished a product. The Windows 2000 development team had broken up and the developers moved on to other projects but Windows Millenium had just finished up so they grabbed that team. Microsoft tasked the Winni-ME team with backporting as much of the Windows 2000 code as they could salvage onto the last codebase they could get to compile (Windows NT 4), and making it look really pretty so people would switch from Windows 2000 to something they could still compile. The result was called "Windows XP", largely viewed as a heck of a step back from Windows 2000, and now you know why.

• Third, wall street turned on Microsoft. The problem was that Microsoft copied Cisco's "pooling" method of acquisitions without properly understanding it. Buying a tiny company for stock instead of cash and treating it as a merger to dodge some taxes also triggered an unexpected SEC rule preventing them trading in their own stop for six months after the "merger". But due to the other games Microsoft played with stock options (again, see Why Microsoft's Stock Options Scare Me), they had to buy back billions of dollars of stock each year just to break even. For six months, their stock buyback program was suspended, and the stock plummeted.

  In the first six months of 2000, right after Microsoft was added to the Dow Jones industrial average, their stock price fell from $100/share to $50/share, and that's where it remains today, eight years later. (Microsoft tried to kick the share price up with a 2-for-1 stock split, dropping the share price to $25. Yesterday's close was $21.53, and no they haven't split again since.) Once upon a time large mutual fund managers thought Microsoft stock never went down, but once it had nobody wanted to touch it.

  After the stock cratered and stayed flat for a few years, the employees who worked at Microsoft to get rich stopped thinking that being a Microsoft employee was an above-average way to make money. As the Pulitzer-winning New York Times article above mentioned, for a lot of employees this wasn't a theoretical problem but actual bankruptcy.

• The fourth thing that hurt Microsoft was Google hiring away all its employees. Google went on a massive hiring binge, and they picked Microsoft clean of anybody with half a brain who was willing to leave. They offered more salary, their stock was on fire, they offered buckets of perks (everything from free food cooked while you wait by a professional chef to one day each week to work on your hobby projects as part of your job) at a time Microsoft was cutting out its existing perks, and real technical challenges. Google was exciting, and it cream skimmed Microsoft of everybody with the initiative to leave and try something new. What was left behind was piles of dead wood, useless talentless hacks hired during the dot-com boom, and they rapidly came to dominate just about every development team at the company.

• The fifth thing that happened was the Vista death march. Microsoft became so dysfunctional that even after trimming every single interesting new feature from "Longhorn" and tacking years of slippage onto its schedule, when Vista finally did ship it didn't even work as well as the existing XP. The years of Vista development ground up the remaining good developers and spit out burnt husks, and in the end nobody wanted it. The failure was enormous, obvious, and humiliating. Years of impotence developers had felt trying to wade through increasing bureaucracy to get Vista out became public shame at its reception, as the scheduled end of life of XP was postponed again and again. Customers paid _extra_ to "downgrade" from Vista to XP. Vista proved both inside Microsoft and to the outside world that the company simply had nothing left. (The other cash cow, Office 2007, didn't do much better. Office 2008 is Macintosh only.)

• Oh, one more thing. Gates retired, and his hand-picked successor (Lotus Notes author Ray Ozzie) turned out to not to be up to the task. His one big idea (that web services like gmail and writely have more of a future than boxed retail copies of software like Office) led Microsoft to a disastrous hostile takeover attempt of Yahoo, which made Microsoft not only a laughingstock but obviously rudderless. Steve Ballmer stayed on as head of the company after Gates' departure, despite investors and employees blaming him for a decade of stagnation and calling for his head. The company flirted with putting a "Triumviratie" of Ray Ozzie, Steve Ballmer, and Craig Mundie in charge, <sarcasm>since that worked so well for ancient Rome</sarcasm>.

So now let's get back to the current economic crisis. The entire stock market's in the toilet, even McDonalds franchies can't get credit, the roaring inflation of the past couple years has stopped in its tracks the same way Paul Volcker stopped it at the end of the 70's: with a credit crunch. Nobody can pay more if nobody has any money. If demand for _gasoline_ has gone down so dramatically, what happens to demand for Windows and Office?

Now imagine what the executives at Microsoft are doing. Not Ballmer, he's so deep in denial he's buried without a trace. Think about the layer of executives under him, and the layer under them. What are they doing?

From what I hear, they've decided to take the money and run. The regulators have their hands full with the banks, who's to notice if Microsoft's managers award themselves huge bonuses, squeezing as much money out of their positions as they can, while they still can? They're not worried about the future of the company, they spent years fruitlessly trying to figure a way forward, and now it suddenly doesn't matter anymore. It's a crisis, there's nothing positve they _can_ do.

I don't have specifics. I'm just getting rumors. But rumor is that the panic at Microsoft has given way to a strange combination of denial and greed. Enron (and Worldcom and the other few dozen corporate failures near the start of the Bush administration) led to indictments, but in the current regulatory environment massive bank fraud leads to nearly a trillion dollars worth of bailouts. If Microsoft is too big to fail, ignoring the future and pocketing cash now is the obvious course of action...

I don't know what's coming, but it could be an interesting few months. I suspect they'll find a way to make their numbers look good later today, they've got quite a history of that. (More here, and here.) They always present a smiling face to the outside world, with well-oiled hair.

But inside the company? Dunno. I used to get excellent info about what was going on inside Microsoft from Dell employees, back when those two companies were joined at the hip and the dev teams exchanged daily builds and talked all the time. These days? The Austin rumor mill simply doesn't seem to care what Microsoft's up to anymore. I just get the occasional snippet. This snippet was that management's acting like a beehive that's smelled smoke, ignoring everything but eating all the honey they can out of the stores while there's still time. I have no way to confirm that at present, so make of it what you will...

Mini's noticed a bit of this, but if the rumors are correct that's just the tip of the iceberg. The amount the executives pay themselves isn't very interesting; them haven given up on salvaging Windows 7 is. After the Yahoo thing Ballmer's credibility as a leader is at an all-time low within the company, and they blame him for the flat stock during his entire tenure... But who have they got to replace him with?

People keep telling me Apple won't take over because Steve Jobs doesn't want to own the PC industry. Except that Steve Jobs didn't _want_ to come back and be CEO of Apple again in the first place, an enormous gift-wrapped opportunity landed in his lap repeatedly until he unwrapped it. How is the PC industry not doing the same thing?

Oh well.

Went down to the Texas state capitol building, found the secretary of state's office, and asked where I could do early voting. (Yes, this is my normal approach to things, why do you ask?) Apparently, the undergraduate library at UT is doing it. I plan to drag Fade to go look at grad school admissions tomorrow anyway, we can early vote while we're there.

Biked to chick-fil-a. It's much cooler than it was, but still a bit uncomfortable sun-wise to do this at 2 in the afternoon in Texas. Enjoying the air conditioning and free soda refills here.

People keep asking me about tinycc, and nobody reads the mailing list thread I linked to, so I wrote up a summary of why I ended my tinycc fork. I note that PCC and llvm/clang are both non-gcc compilers you can poke at, if you're into that sort of thing.

Chick-fil-a has somebody in a cow suit, walking up and down the aisles. Now they're dancing. Right.

I had not previously noticed that the sizes on the menu in Coffee of Doom were S, M, L, and WTF. I want a local coffee shop like that. (I miss Metro.)

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

Yay, msnbc added Rachel Maddow's show to their podcast page. I need to set up an rss feed reader.

I put current uClibc toolchains and system images up on my uclibc web page (which is the same as my busybox web page since they're the same server.)

Digging up my old patchlist->mercurial converter script. The morris subversion repository is bigtime nonstandard, it has several different projects (busybox, uClibc, buildroot, uClibc++, and several fossils) in the same repository. So the commit numbers of any given repository skip a lot. The subversion server is also really slow (even when it's local, subversion is slow). The roundtrip time on an svn command averages somewhere around 15 seconds, which would be 240 per hour, meaning converting extracting a list of separate patches for the entire busybox or uClibc repository can literally take a full day.

I already have a patchlist script to get those patches, and I already left it running overnight to get the full list. Creating a mercurial archive from that patch list is more interesting than doing so from the live svn repository, for several reasons. (Development and testing of the conversion script goes much faster, I'm not bogging down the server with test runs, if I ever decide I need to tweak something and reconvert from the raw data I don't waste a whole day doing it...)

There are, however, two chunks of data missing from the patchlist. You can't fetch svn commit 1 with "svn diff -r 0:1". It gets confused. So in order to get the very first svn commit as a diff, you have to check the first revision out, delete the .svn subdirectories, and then "diff -ruN" with an empty directory. Subversion just doesn't provide an obvious way to do this. (Luckily, the first revision in busybox is 5, and the first one in uClibc is 540, so this doesn't come up on a project I'm interested in. If I want to use this script to make an hg mirror of the qemu repository, I'd have to care, but there are other conversion programs for that.)

The other one, which I do care about, is the release tags. It's important for the repository to record which versions releases were cut from, and digging these out of subversion is a _pain_, and non-obvious. I wrote a python script to do it, what you do is "svn list http://busybox.net/tags" to get a list of directory names. Then you apply some regular expressions to match just the names you're interested in and convert them to release names, so "uClibc_0_9_26/" becomes "uClibc-0.9.26", except you then have to use the _original_ name before the cleanup to do an svn info on that subdirectory ("svn info http://busybox.net/tags/uClibc_0_9_26", and don't worry about that being busybox.net instead of uclibc.org, they're the same server) in order to get a data dump like this from svn info:

Path: uClibc_0_9_26
URL: svn://busybox.net/tags/uClibc_0_9_26
Repository Root: svn://busybox.net
Repository UUID: 69ca8d6d-28ef-0310-b511-8ec308f3f277
Revision: 23748
Node Kind: directory
Last Changed Rev: 8248
Last Changed Date: 2004-01-03 23:34:35 -0600 (Sat, 03 Jan 2004)

And out of that you search for the "Last Changed" lines to get the commit number and date for the mercurial tag. (Of course I did all this in python, doing that much string manipulation in other languages is painful.)

I note that the URL says "tags" but info is actually showing a data dump for a _branch_. Subversion doesn't seem to distinguish between the two concepts. I also note that fetching the current set of tags for busybox takes just under three minutes. (I mentioned svn is slow?) So I implemented a cache file so we don't call info on tags we've already seen.

So now I have all the _info_ I need to create mercurial archives from the svn. Next to go do it, and work out how to keep them up to date after their initial creation...

Ok, I'm all for "never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity", but when Republicans simultaneously freak out about Obama's pastor (this "Reverend Wright" guy) and at the same time insist he's a Muslim... That achieves levels of stupidity that may be synonymous with malice. Can't have it both ways, guys. The _charitable_ interpretation is you're lying to yourselves at "la la la fingers in my ears can't hear you" levels.

Catching up on the qemu weekly news stuff. Yeah, it's laughably far behind, but the reason I got blocked was I hit a bunch of patches posted to the list, and needed to cover the source control commits in order to do the writeups. Now they've switched to subversion and I have a patchlist extracted from that. Put the commit lists in the existing writeups, and now I'm working on the last week of january.

If I really buckle down, I can do about two weeks worth of summaries per day, meaning I can do a month worth of summaries every 2-3 days. I'm currently 9 months behind, so that's upwards of a month to catch up. Wheee...

Re-reading the misfile archive. Perhaps you have to be in the right mood to properly appreciate a line like "Logic is for the weak. Follow me." But I want it on a button anyway.

Mark and Fade and myself went to Maker Faire today. It was awesome. Also very hot, the food was too expensive, and after four hours of walking I wanted to fall over. But we got to watch robots destroy each other, and a tesla coil concert, and Fade got to see many variations of knitting and soap making. I couldn't tell if Penguicon's tesla coil concert was inherently better (I think they did hook more diverse input sources to their tesla coils rather than just a synthesizer keyboard), or if it was just the fact the indoor venue had horrible acoustics and the speaker the announcer was using for "patter" was so loud you couldn't hear the tesla coils when he was talking. (And those weren't anywhere near quiet.) Downside of using an old Hockey rink, I suppose. I wonder whatever happened to the Ice Bats? Off season?

Got a card for sparkfun. I should fiddle with hardware more than I do. I know the theory, but I break stuff. Software you can restore from a backup, hardware less so.

Huh, audio of one of the panels I did at Penguicon 5 went up. Specifically, the talk Garrett and I did about embedded software. (And this is why I have the google vanity alert on my name, even if 95% of what it pulls up is ancient or weird.)

I should probably put a page with links to all the OLS/CELF/Penguicon/Linucon recordings, the youtube videos, papers and articles, that one timesys podcast... (Ok, done it.)

A fun issue that comes up on reboot is that the little app that shows you how much CPU and memory your system is currently using (helpfully named "kde system guard" to make sure you can't remember what it's called when you install) has degraded over the past few releases again. It now does "automatic range detection", I.E. "no, we can't look in /proc to see how many processors and how much memory you have, that would be cheating". So instead it uses the highest value for memory usage and for CPU usage that it's seen so far as the max for the scale, meaning when the system first boots up the graph is completely useless, and keeps rescaling itself as more stuff loads. You can go into its properties and switch off "automatic range detection", but then it wants you to specify the range, with no units, and only one range for both displays (CPU and Memory). I'm _guessing_ it's 0-100%, although I remember in previous versions maxing out _one_ CPU was 100%, but apparently not now...

Managed to screw up my busybox patchlist download, so I deleted it and told it to do it all again. (This is the script that creates these.) I forgot how INSANELY SLOW svn is, it's been going for 4 hours and it's only up to the year 2001.

On the bright side, I once wrote a script somewhere to convert such a patch list into a mercurial archive, and that I can mess with offline...

Peter Mazinger tells me that to get arm soft float working on a newer gcc:

[15:24] <psm> landley: modify arm/t-linux according t-arm-elf and t-linux-eabi (LIB1ASMFUNCS) and undef LIBGCC_SPEC in arm/linux-elf.h, you can also default it to sed s/HARD/SOFT/ /mhard/msoft/ in linux-elf.h

[15:28] <psm> the part from t-linux-eabi is to replace a *tls file with one *lnx, see comment about div0 rasing SIGFPE

[15:43] <psm> if you add that file to libgcc.a, you will end up missing __raise in libgcc.a and that will come up, when you make use of div0 (if you revert arm/ldso in uClibc to an older version, you would see that, see changelog about division

I'm sure that'll make sense if I stare hard enough at the source code. Todo item for later.

Wrote up an explanation of what complying with the GPL for BusyBox actually _means_, from the developer point of view instead of the lawyer point of view. (It seems obvious to _me_, but there still seems to be some confusion about this...)

Spent 7 hours at Chick-fil-a today. Highly productive. I keep forgetting how much I get _done_ when I just get out of the hosue and hunker down with my laptop somewhere the cats can't bother me...

Watched the debate feed on NPR and MSNBC. I agree, Joe the Plumber clearly won.

Oh, wow. I downloaded Dwarf Fortress and ran it under Wine, and it... worked? (*BOGGLE*. I even have sound. No idea how to _play_ the game, but wow...)

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.

Mark continues to have a black belt in paperwork, but is now learning corporate politics on top of that. Interesting to watch...

Got the latest Busybox settlement paperwork signed and returned (the SFLC is nice enough to include fedex return envelopes, I just have to go drop 'em off). While I was there I tried to send the two international faxes I have pending (one to a french lawyer, the other a release for a british TV show that wants to use the footage of me dumping LN2 into a swimming pool, although Howard Tayler might be able to handle that one).

The daily show website has once again screwed up its javascript so if it doesn't recognize the exact browser version you're running (I.E. no Linux system that isn't configured to lie) it refuses to display a video, instead telling you to download a flash plugin you alread have. But it turns out it's on hulu, and they're competent about this whole "web" thing.

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 t