Miguel's weblog - *BSD, cats and more

The Emperor has won (Apple goes Intel)

Mon, 6 Jun 2005 23:05:05 +0200

The official press release from the horse's mouth is here. I have to say that this is very very sad news. Of all the architectures out there Apple, for some unkown reason, has decided to go with the worst cpu ever designed. The G5 processor is low power consuming, very well designed, 64bit CPU. And now they switch to a horribly boated, power hungry, register starved piece of junk. Why? Why in the world is this happening? The only reason IA-32 is still alive is because there's so much closed source software out there that wasting transistors on compatibility with a brain dead ISA is justified. If we lived in a world were free software was the norm, only a recompile would be needed, and the joke that is known as Pentium4 would have never been created. AMD's AMD64 patch surely looks nice, but I'd love to see a version that only did 64bit, not 32/16 legacy support. But do you know what's funny here? Microsoft's Xbox 360 uses PPC processors, so does the PS3. The republic has lost and the new Intel Empire has begun. Goodbye OS X. Hopefully NetBSD will keep running on the PPC based Mac hardware for years.

[Edit] How are they going to avoid the Osborne effect? Who's going to buy a G5 now that planned obsolescence for the PPC systems has been announced? OTOH, this might lower the price of G4s quite a bit.

What Star Wars Character Are You?

Sun, 5 Jun 2005 15:22:57 +0200

On the topic of Star Wars...

Take the quiz: "What Star Wars Character Are You?"

Anakin Skywalker
Watch out for your temper...it could get you into trouble the way it did Anakin. You have enormous potential to be a great Jedi, but stress has made the dark side seem that much more inviting...

Sith Lords, SCMs and more...

Sun, 5 Jun 2005 16:32:22 +0200

Okay, first things first. I know some people are waiting for e-mail from me. I'll catch up ASAP. So no, I've not forgotten about you :)

The upgrade to OpenBSD 3.7 was pretty smooth and was the reason for last weekend's outage, in case you were wondering. Well, it's OpenBSD so little, if any, surprises are expected. Some of the new functionality is pretty nice, and so is the use of gcc 3.x instead of the aging 2.95 series. I pgdump'ed all the database information before the update just in case but, in the end, it wasn't needed, and quite soon I had the server back on track, modulo a minor problem with postfix, which required some tweaking in the config files for the transition from the 2.0 series to 2.2 to work correctly. Another reason why I was looking forward to upgrading to 3.7 is that SVN is now in the ports collection. I really wanted to give svn another try, and this time I can say that it's gotten good enough to replace p4. The first step was converting the p4 repo to svn. I tried using the dest::svk option in VCP but it segfaulted, so I converted the repo to CVS and then used the cvs2svn conversion tool. Worked like a charm. In case you're interested, this is what did it for me...

#!/bin/sh for module in `p4 have | awk -F/ '{print $4}'|sort -u` do vcp "p4:(scienide)@perforce:1666://depot/"$module"/..." "cvs:/pub/devel/cvs:"$module done cd /pub/devel/cvs && find . -name CVSROOT -exec rm -rf {} \; cvs2svn --dump-only --dumpfile=/pub/tmp/cvsdump /pub/devel/cvs ssh mindfields svnadmin load /storage3/devel/svn < /pub/tmp/cvsdump svn checkout svn+ssh://mindfields.energyhq.es.eu.org/storage3/devel/svn/trunk svn

Pretty straightforward, right? So, things I like in svn and I things I like in p4:

P4 enforces permissions on files, so a quick ls will tell me what file(s) I'm currently working on.
svn version numbers are repository wide, which has an interesting side effect. Let's see an example:

flynn@scienide% svn --verbose log -r 216 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ r216 | flynn | 2005-05-30 13:07:08 +0200 (Mon, 30 May 2005) | 1 line Changed paths: M /trunk/gtk-send-pr/gtk-send-pr.h M /trunk/gtk-send-pr/gtk_ui.c M /trunk/gtk-send-pr/main.c
Use a linked list for files ------------------------------------------------------------------------ flynn@scienide% grep Id gtk-send-pr.h gtk_ui.c main.c gtk-send-pr.h: $Id: gtk-send-pr.h 216 2005-05-30 11:07:08Z flynn $ gtk_ui.c: $Id: gtk_ui.c 216 2005-05-30 11:07:08Z flynn $ main.c: $Id: main.c 216 2005-05-30 11:07:08Z flynn $

Note how those 3 files have the same revision and how svn log tells me what I did in change 216 and which files it affected.

My main concern about svn was its speed, or the lack of. This seems to have been addressed in the recent releases and, coupled with the FSFS backend, makes a formidable SCM. So what I'm doing now is keep developing on the p4 repo and then copy and commit those same changes to the svn one. Once I feel confident enough with svn newer development will take place on the svn repo. I have to figure out a way to run a chrooted svnweb system, although Trac looks even more interesting (thanks wac for pointing it out), and probably worth giving a go.

And now, let's talk a bit about Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith. I know a lot has been said about it, so if you've had enough already you might skip the rest of the entry. I'll try not to spoil the movie for those who have not seen it yet. And on that topic, if you plan to watch it later when it comes out on DVD, this is a definitely movie worth watching on the big screen, even if you're not that big a Star Wars fan. After having read some posts on /. and IMDB I get the impression that some people think Star Wars is sci-fi. I don't think that's the case, at all. In my opinion, Star Wars is just fantasy set on space.

2001: A Space Odyssey is sci-fi, Star Wars is not. Another thing I find funny is how some people bash the movie's cheesy love scenes and acting, somehow forgetting that the acting in IV, V and VI wasn't that great either. I've recently watched the old trilogy and, while Alec Guiness' work was pretty good, I wouldn't say Mark Hamill's performance was Oscar material. Not that it matters! Because Star Wars was never about that. Star Wars is about (back then) cutting edge effects, battle scenes and a very interesting story. I found The Phantom Menace to be way worse than the old trilogy, and Attack of the Clones to be almost on par and, to be honest, my expectations for Revenge of the Sith were pretty high, and I'm glad to say that George Lucas has met my expectations.

ILM have reached perfection. I've been follwing their work since Young Sherlock Holmes and, milestone after milestone, these people have set the gold standard of what can be achieved with CGI. In EP3 the rendering is perfect, plain and simple. No flaws, no bad textures or lights, no easily spotted fake-looking characters. The attention paid to detail is incredible. My only complain is that the floors on the Jedi Temple look like they were made of plastic, but that's it. Water, fire, clouds, stone, metal. You name it, the ILM people have perfected it. What can be said about the score. Simply amazing. Very very moving music, like always. Some songs really got stuck in my head. Excellent soundtrack. As for the rest, yes the love scenes are cheesy (it's a Lucas film) and the dialogue is not so good but, as I've said before, who cares? The battle scenes are grandiose, and so are the lightsaber duels. And Vader's transformation, wow. There are a lot of references to the other movies, but I'll leave that as an exercise to the reader.

I realize how easy it is to get passionate about Star Wars. This movie gives you a completely different perspective of Darth Vader, Palpatine and the Jedi Order. I felt so bad for Anakin, what he went through and what his motives were. You can never watch the classic trilogy with the same eyes again after EP3. Vader had been the epitome of evil for so long, and now I feel sorry for him. He's just a poor kid who tried to save the ones he loved and was deceived and manipulated by that Emperor guy. The way the Jedi handled the issue, specially Obi-Wan, was a bit disappointing. I'd venture to say that they were as guilty as others of the fall of the republic. I've read just the first chapter of the novel and it goes into much more detail (not surprising) and makes a very nice read after having watched the movie. Of course, these words are coming from a Star Wars fan, so my comments are pretty biased. If you know what to expect EP3 is, in yours truly opinion, on par with The Empire Strikes Back, my personal favourite. Both are dark, sad and very moving films.

On a different note, did Hollywood run out of ideas once more? We saw trailers for remakes of The Pink Panther (with Beyoncé Knowles, WTF?), The War of the Worlds and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. I wonder when they'll star making remakes of remakes :)

Oh, and for those of you looking forward to watching a sci-fi movie, I've been suggested Serenity. The trailer surely looks promising. We'll see. And now, back to answering e-mail :)

In a nutshell

Tue, 17 May 2005 23:50:28 +0200

I guess it's time for one of those "In a nutshell" posts.

Buffy Boy's loss affected me way more than I could have expected. After all, we were never formally introduced, but it was always nice to see Buffy Boy's new pics and learn about his latest adventures. My guess is that it reminded me of Iris and how we had to put her to sleep too and was it the most painful moment in my life. It took me a solid 4 months before I could even consider owning a cat again, but I have to say I'm very glad I did and have been very happy with Athene since then. And I suspect certain furball that goes by the name of a famous musketeer will enjoy a very happy life from now on.

BSDCan is now over, and some very interesting stuff came out of it, including yet another flame between FreeBSD developer Poul-Henning Kamp and the OpenBSD guys. The questions: Who leaked the post? (It was sent to a closed mailing list, my guess is that it was Hsu, but you never know) and, more important: Why the heck is this behaviour tolerated? This has been going on for years now and, according to Greg Lehey: "phk is not speaking for freebsd". Well, good to know. That doesn't explain why he (and 2 or 3 other people) are allowed to do that.

I've been doing some work on my audio editor. I have some pretty good ideas that I want to test before moving into the interface code. Oh, and I've been listening almost non-stop to Metallica's Live Shit Binge and Purge live set. Awesome stuff. Which reminds me, I have to give my acoustic guitar another chance. It's been years since I last played it.

This week is pretty interesting because on the 19th two big events will take place: Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith opens world wide and OpenBSD 3.7 is officially out. I personally can't wait :)

Thursday

Thu, 5 May 2005 22:59:20 +0200

Considering that the weather is getting hotter by the day and I'd rather not do a trip to the vet every 3 weeks to get food I ordered a 4Kg bag last week, in the hope that it will last until the end of the summer. I'm not going to plug any brand here, but let's say it has so far worked very well (the little girl lost 400 grams) and I'll stick to it as long as the vet is okay with it. As soon as I've arrived home Athene has started looking at the new bag with interest and given her approval. On the topic of cats, when I think about it Iris and Athene happen to be some of the nicest persons I've ever met. Honest, loyal, caring and knowing that the key to happiness lies in being able to enjoy those little things life offers. If only certain beings from other species could learn such a simple concept.

On a not so happy note, the BBC is reporting that IBM will cut 13,000 jobs worldwide. If this is what the new world economy is about, well, it plain sucks. We're not talking about a random bozo who fooled the suits into giving him VC for a crazy project, it's IBM fer Christ's sake. Anyway, good luck to those people. This incident just reminded me why I dislike corporate culture so much.

Ars Technica is running a pretty interesting article called A History of the GUI. I was already familiar with the work done by Xerox in the '70s, but it's amazing nonetheless. They created the first laserprinter in 1973. It's a shame so many people have been brainwashed into thinking Bill Gates & Co actually came up with anything original. It was also nice to see a screenshot of my beloved Amiga Workbench 1.3 after so many years :)

Plans for the weekend include getting a lot of sleep and trying to come up with a real solution to migrate the old blog. Some of the hacks I've seen out there are pretty awful, to be honest. I'll do some more research before I get my hands dirty on perl hacking. Yes, perl :)

After the Sunset

Sun, 5 Jun 2005 12:30:50 +0200

It's not a secret that I love heist movies, so I had to watch After the Sunset. For what it's worth, this is not the first time Pierce Brosnan plays the role of a thief. He already did that in The Thomas Crown Affair. The movie itself is pretty enjoyable, although I found Woody Harrelson's character a bit annoying at times, but perhaps that was the intention. Salma Hayek was a bit too 1 dimensional. I'd rather have had less boobs and more character development. How did Max and Lola meet? How long have they been in business? How was the first Napoleon Diamond stolen? There are some pretty funny moments, while others are a bit obnoxious, but all things considered I enjoyed the movie a lot. Some songs from the soundtrack are pretty catchy, I have too take a look at them. And the sets are simply fantastic, makes you want to be there. Something I've always liked about these movies is how the empathy with the thief is built as we get to know him and the police is always the bad guy, which is kind of ironic because the former is the one breaking the law, albeit in a very sophisticated and, why not, romantic kind of way. My fave heist movie is still Ocean's Eleven, but I'm sure I'll get this one on DVD once it comes out here.

In a Nutshell

Mon, 2 May 2005 21:23:20 +0200

I've been thinking about the Some Kind of Monster documentary I mentioned earlier, specially that scene when Hetfield says "I'm in a shit mood", and that's how I've felt for most of the day, mainly thanks for another headache. I know the weather is to blame this. It's already too hot to get anything done without the help of the air conditioning system. Man, do I hate the Summer-like time. I'm more of a Winter person.

Fortunately I'm managing to get some work done during this 4-day mini-holidays. And today I wanted to do some more drupalization, namely the BSD and GTK+ Send PR sections and, speaking of the devil, a new version of the latter with some small enhancements.

This time the release is dedicated to one of my favourite rascals, Buffy Boy, who has recently spent some time in a Hospital but is already home...

flynn@scienide% gtk-send-pr -v
gtk-send-pr 0.4.6 "Buffy Boy"
Copyright (c) 2003, 2004, 2005 Miguel Mendez . All rights reserved.

As for the rest of the day I'm going to listen to some music and then watch a movie which I'll write about tomorrow.

Some Kind of Monster

Sun, 5 Jun 2005 12:31:35 +0200

I remember the first time I listened to Metallica. It was in 1991, and the song was "The Four Horsemen". It's been a while since then, but I still listen to those albums. As some of you know, I love music, most genres except rap and hip hop, so heavy metal/thrash metal is not an exception. There are some moments when you want to relax with some classical or pop, and there are moments when you need something more powerful and energy filled, and does Metallica fill that niche. I never really got into Load and Reload, and those two plus the S&M album are the only records missing in my collection. When I heard they were working on a new album I had some mixed feelings. My opinion about St. Anger? It's damn good. Sure it's not like their old work, but it's good material, I like it. Some people find the distorted snare sound annoying, I love it.

I was curious about Some Kind of Monster, the documentary that supposedly sheds some light about Metallica's past and future, so I gave it a go. Hetfield going into rehab and the ego problems weren't that surprising, but that scene with Dave Mustaine surely was. I had always considered Dave to be a tough guy. Watching him break into tears was really something I wasn't expecting.I understand his feelings, but come on, it's not like Megadeth was a flop. I have 4 of their records and they rule in their own style. I recently listened to their The system has failed and it still has the same Megadeth sound, which I like. Yes, Back in the day has that Iron Maiden-esque sound, but the rest sounds like Countdown to Extinction. We could play the what if game all day long, but the fact is that Dave's departure from Metallica gave us some great albums from the successful Megadeth guys. I hope he'll get over it, it's been more than 20 years already, after all.

The other interesting topic is Lars. The guy made an ass of himself with the Napster thing a few years ago, but the part where he is selling his art collection and making several million dollars in the process finally convinced me that he has little, if any, resemblance of what he once was. The irony of this is in Garage, Inc's booklet, let me quote page 4 for a second:

"When Lars first came to the States, he had all these singles with devils and pentagrams and rough-looking guys with leather jackers on the covers: Motörhead, Diamond Head, Witchfynde, Sweet Savage, Tygers of Pang Tang. I would stay over at his place for days at a time, making tapes of his records and sleeping on the carpet."

Can you taste the irony? Lars seems to be more worried about his art collection and arguing with others than about making good music, that's the perception I have after watching him in the documentary. And maybe that was the reason why Jason Newsted left. Rob Trujillo looks pretty impressive, though, so perhaps the change was for the better after all.

I admire the guys for the work they've done over the years. In my opinion, Ride the Lightning is their best work and one of the greatest metal albums ever made. You know it's some good music when you can listen to it 20 years after it was recorded and still enjoy it like the first day.

On a final note I found it funny to see the use of Pro Tools (it was Pro Tools, right?) for the mastering and recording of St. Anger. I had this mental image of the group jamming and recording the stuff almost live. Definitely a documentary worth watching if you like the group.

Summertime and the mysterious football team

Sun, 5 Jun 2005 12:32:29 +0200

It seems that we're getting ready for a hot summer. I've turned the Air Conditioner on today for the first time this year in the hope that the room temperature will allow me to get some decent sleep, unlike yesterday and the day before. Athene has been trying to hunt a couple of flies, without much success though, while I was busy doing some ports work. I was a bit too tired to do anything more demanding, so some stuff will have to wait until the weeked.

OSNews is running a story about a very interesting article on the topic of SWT and Swing. I don't do much java programming, and don't really like the platform, but I've found that to be quite refreshing, as it shows the other side of the coin of the SWT vs Swing debate.

And in other news, something that I hope you'll find amazing (found here):

Can you tell me how many football (soccer for those of you on the other side of the pond) players are there? :)

Monday

Mon, 25 Apr 2005 23:19:26 +0200

Well, not much to report from here. I was supposed to have written a little story about Windows users, but that will have to wait until tomorrow, as I've spent the better part of the evening updating the Adonthell port and setting up a -CURRENT box to test gcc 4.0 builds, as mentioned here. The nice weather is probably to blame for Athene's will to play. Not that she's not usually a very active cat, but she's been running and playing with her toys for most of the evening. Now it's time to take a nap, of course. Which reminds me: Welcome home Buffy Boy. A happy ending that it's surely welcomed and also means some friends will get some needed rest too. As I've said before, once you've spent some time with those little furballs you can't imagine life without them. I've also started drupalizing the whole site, the FAQ is done and the rest will follow very soon.

Weekend

Sun, 5 Jun 2005 12:32:55 +0200

Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events featuring Jim Carrey, Emily Browning, Liam Aiken and more is a movie that had been on my have to watch list for a while, and I'm glad I finally did. Some of the sets are fantastic, specially Aunt Josephine's house. I haven't read the books, so I wasn't sure about what to expect, but I'd say that, as a movie, it's pretty good. Over the years Jim Carrey has gone from someone I could barely tolerate, remember his Ace Ventura days, to an actor whose work I look forward to watching, specially since The Truman Show. The kids' acting was very good IMHO, but the sets are the real show. The colours, the textures, almost Tim Burton-esque. Excellent in that aspect. Lemony Snicket's voice sounded familiar, and I later checked on IMDB that it was indeed Jude Law's as I had suspected. Highly recommended.

The reason why I've been quiet the last days is because I've restarted my operating system project, as a complement to my recently restarted journaling filesystem project. So a better part of the weekend has been spent cleaning up old code I hadn't touched since 2001. The obligatory screenshot is here. Since qemu supports not only x86, but amd64, sparc and ppc, it's going to be easier to go for multiplatform support since day 1. According to the FreeBSD Status Report Jan-Mar 2005, Scott Long is working on a journal layer on top of FFS. It will be interesting to check his work, but I still believe that a completely new design is needed, ergo I'll keep working on my filesystem.

Andrew Tridgell finally released his BitKeeper-Compatible Tool. So, Larry, is this what all the fuzz was about? Cry me a river, pal. As little as my opinion might matter, I'm 100% with Tridge and I think both Linus and Larry owe him an apology. Not that it's going to happen. But, overall, I think it's a good thing that this has happened. Why? Because 1) The Linux devs are going to use an open source tool to manage their code, which makes sense since, whether they like it or not, Linux is the poster child of open source, and 2) Because this will hopefully make people realize that Linus Torvalds is just a human being, and as such makes mistakes from time to time. I think he made some unfortunate comments and it's still to be seen how all of this will affect the kernel development process. Not that I care that much, but I like to follow what goes on on high profile projects.

Adapted from this, let me introduce you the concept of the Computer Muggle:

"Computer Muggles" are Windows users in the parlance of the Computing World. Computer Muggles are for the most part oblivious to the entire society of UNIX people which exists alongside their own. Part of the reason for this is that Muggles simply don't believe that UNIX exists, which means they find non-UNIX reasons for the things that happen to them [1]. Another part of the reason is that the Ministry of Geeks works very hard to keep the Computer Muggles in the dark.

And my personal favourite:

"Many Geekettes and Geeks look upon Computer Muggles kindly, but some see Computer Muggles as nothing but a nuisance and a bother."

Oh, that was meant to be humorous if it wasn't blatantly obvious.

As I've been doing for some weeks now, I've selected another set for tomorrow's commute: Greg Benz - Old School Prog Mix 93-97.

In other news, it seems that Buffy Boy is back in full swing, a few more days of rest and observation and the little rascal will be back to his normal schedule. Good to read some good news for a change.

Geeks, meritocracies and chroot blues

Thu, 21 Apr 2005 23:09:55 +0200

When I was in high school I was one of the most popular guys. Oh wait, I wasn't! I was that shy and introverted guy. Now that I look back I wonder how quick people were to attach labels to others. So what do the geeks do? Join a geeky community. Enter the Free software communities, namely the FreeBSD users. Here you won't be judged by how cool you are (or think you are), your looks, or the amount of girls you get to sleep with. You'll be solely judged by the quality of your work. This is the place where your skills can make a difference, and where Joe Sixpack who was cool in high school would be considered a useless pariah. Why am I writing this, you may ask. Because a recent post by Brett Glass has reminded me how these communities work: The Meritocracy. It has somehow brought memories of how things used to be back then and how things work in the open source world today. I don't want to single Brett out, but he's a prime example of what you should not do. I've already told him, but I'll repeat it here: Wishful thinking will get you nowhere in the free software world. If you want something to happen you'll either have to do it yourself or shut up. Cue in the classic "Send patches or shut up". Brett has been using FreeBSD for years and somehow has failed to (or refuses to) grok this very simple concept. How does this connect with the high school story? I've seen this very interesting link in Lauri's weblog and I have to admit that sometimes it's very easy to give in to the dark side when dealing with these muggles of the computing world. And I'm as guilty as the next geek, but I have the impression that some people deserve it anyway :)

I've discovered today that PHP's mail() function doesn't like chroot, so I've installed mini_sendmail and voila!, another satisfied customer. Drupal's mail delivery is working fine now. You know, you can never be too paranoid about security.

Wednesday

Wed, 20 Apr 2005 23:20:40 +0200

First of all I'd like to thank Jim Dutton from Illinois for sending me Steve Pate's "UNIX Filesystems", from my Amazon wishlist. Thanks a bunch Jim! You know, it's not that I write these programs expecting anything in return, but it's very nice to see people appreciate your work, be it an e-mail saying thanks or, in this case, making a developer happy by providing tools that in the end will result in more free software developed. So thanks again, Jim.

In other news it seems like Drupal is here to stay. The more I play with the system the more I like it. It's powerful, extremely customizable but still very easy to use. I still have to find a proper solution to migrate the old MT content to this new site. Most of the proposals I've seen assume a MySQL backend, which is not the case.

I was eating some Rice Krispies® and have discovered that Athene finds them fascinating. She just couldn't help herself from trying to pick some. Of course, in classic cat behaviour, once she's been offered one all interest has vanished.

I'd say it's been a very nice day altogether, save for the fact that I'm still waiting for Buffy Boy's recovery. It's interesting when one sees that only people who live with cats can truly understand how strong an attachment you develop to those little rascals.

Oh, thanks to Drupal's URL aliasing you can keeping getting the RSS feed from index.rdf, no need to change any settings.

Star Wars and the new OpenBSD song

Tue, 19 Apr 2005 21:15:30 +0200

As reported here, Star Wars : Revelations is out. The torrent is pretty fast. I haven't had the time yet to watch it, but the 5 minutes I've seen look very promising. In other Star Wars news, StarWars.com has unveiled three TV spots for STAR WARS: EPISODE III: REVENGE OF THE SITH!. Please please, George, don't make this one suck :)

The new OpenBSD song is out! And it's pretty good actually. In fact, all the songs released so far have been pretty nice. Download them in case you haven't done so already. In true Theo fashion, a flamewar about the t-shirt sizes has been started on the OpenBSD-misc mailing list soon after the announcement. Some people never change :)

Oh, btw, those of you using RSS readers, point your programs here. Thanks.

Experience with Drupal so far

Tue, 19 Apr 2005 19:33:16 +0200

The installation is pretty easy, and I'm glad Drupal supports PostgreSQL out of the box without extra hacks. All I had to do was create a new database and import the template, that's all. So far it seems very flexible, specially the blocks concept which I already love :)

On the other hand, Drupal seems to be fully dynamic, which can cause higher loads on the server, although this is a very low traffic site and a throttle mode can be enabled. One of the features I like about Movable Type is that it lets you publish and rebuild your site so you can have most pages rendered and served statically. I'll have to investigate if such a thing is possible with Drupal.