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 :)

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 :)

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.

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? :)

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.

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.

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.

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.