Pete Zaitcev's Journal [entries|friends|calendar] Pete Zaitcev [ userinfo | livejournal userinfo ] [ calendar | livejournal calendar ]

"We forked Sylpheed and added bugs" [15 Jul 2009|01:36pm] Due to Sylpheed in Rawhide 10.90 being buggy, I tried to migrate to Claws today. It took me about 20 minutes until the first crash. Upon restart, Claws forgot some changes to the configuration that I made before the crash (although dialogs were closed many times), and insisted on re-reading the multi-megabyte Trash folder. Way to go, folks. At least my newly-added filters survived. Claws failed to import Sylpheed filters, and adding them manually is much worse that it was. I really should move to Tbird and render bugs of Claws moot (this will also fix IMAP logins). But it takes a bigger leap. Maybe tomorrow. [link] 3 comments|post comment

Jon Masters was right [06 Jul 2009|04:20pm] Or at least that was what I thought when, after years of service, Rawhide finally cooked itself on my laptop enough to become unbootable due to a crash of glibc. After a short period of despair it turned out that an invocation of cp on ld-2.10.1.so and libc-2.10.1.so was enough to recover (trusting prelink -ua seems suicidal to me, honestly). But all things said, it's not question of if, it's when your Rawhide will brick (or worse, corrupt something). But even so, there's no choice for me but to persist with the latest and greatest, just because it's the only place where the fixes happen (ouside of expensive commercially supported branches). Sorry, Jon. This recurrent thought is prompted by an article at LWN. [link] post comment

LittleBSD [04 Jul 2009|11:37am] To my great surprise, LittleBSD is actually a cosplay cafe (via). But I'm pretty sure they did in fact ripped of Chuck and the name is not a coincidence. Behold the screencap: [link] 1 comment|post comment

Mono and the first applications [02 Jul 2009|01:56pm] LWN addressed the Mono question today. Among other things, Jake mentioned the "applications" argument, specifically "[Jo Shields] also notes that it is the applications that are driving the adoption of Mono, not the technology in and of itself." If Jo actually said any such thing, it's flat out false. The original trio of applications that was supposed to drive the adoption (Beagle, fSpot, and Tomoboy) was specifically designed to try and embed Mono by its boosters (e.g. Miguel in particular). N.B. I don't place any judgement on morality of the plan to introduce poison pill applications in order make Mono indispensable. I only disagree with attempts to pretend that applications somehow naturally sprout and their developers select Mono as the best platform on merits. Mono, excellent it may be, is too politicised for that. If you chose it, you're making a statement about who your friends are. Update: Boiling fora outside of solemn halls of LWN, documented by mjg59. [link] post comment

GIMP and the value of standard window controls [30 Jun 2009|01:01pm] The individual who came up with the current "toolband" UI for GIMP should be made to use it on a netbook, while an eagle pecks on his liver. For crying out loud I'm having trouble placing windows on a 1440x900 screen. [link] 2 comments|post comment

Rebuilding VLC in Rawhide [29 Jun 2009|10:41am] It looks like I have to rebuild VLC for F12 Rawhide, since it's holding up yum update and its dependencies are too expansive to be worked around with --skip-broken. I kept hoping that Nicolas would do his duty but apparently it was in wain, while everything is being built, even Pidgin. The downside of this is that I have better things to do than compensating for an AWOL maintainer, but an upside exists too. It's past due that I learned all the fancy tools Fedora grew over the years, such as Mock. Also, if I somehow work this into Koji, fruits of my labour will be available to everyone. UPDATE: It turns out I need to be a registered developer at RPMfusion before I can use the tools, so I just built it from an src.rpm, and so I'm in posession of vlc-core-1.0.0-0.11rc3.fc12.x86_64.rpm. It was a rather painless process, and remember that Gentoo users do it every day before breakfast. [link] post comment

Multi-process Firefox [25 Jun 2009|12:02pm] Even if Google Chrome goes nowhere, it has done its duty by lighting the fire under the Mozilla's butt (as mentioned previously). Remember how Classpath forced Sun to open Java? Yep. Thank you, evil Google overlords. [link] post comment

A possibly educational problem with Windows XP [09 Jun 2009|09:57pm] I have to maintain a computer running Windows XP, and a couple of months ago its installer quit working for no discernable reason. Apparently the package manger is a service, and it refuses to start. So, I cannot install or uninstall anything, including any updates. I am also entirely helpless when faced with a problem like this. The system is completely opaque to anyone who does not sleep with an MSDN CD under his pillow. The situation reminds me vividly of PackageKit. Although, to tell the truth, I did not experience a similarly complete failure of PackageKit on any of my Fedora boxes, having a daemon to manage packages is also similarly opaque. I am aware of advantages that such setup brings, but still. [link] 1 comment|post comment

Where is the epsilon-administration platform? [07 Jun 2009|03:05pm] Steven asks a good question: does a successor to Cobalt Qube exist? Apparently the old Qube gave him a stellar service for 8 years. But I haven't heard of any little Linux boxes that had a truly useful Web shell ever since Qube died. Sun has a lot to answer for. And I don't expect Oracle to do any better (remember the NIC? yep...). [link] post comment

usbmon vs IOMMU [01 Jun 2009|08:06pm] What usbmon is doing in order to peek at already-remapped areas is strictly illegal, but until recently I was able to get away with it. I'm not the only one with illegal software though. Check out what AGP 3.0 Interface Specification says: It is implementation-dependent whether the core-logic translates accesses directed to the AGP aperture by any system component NOT on the AGP Port – including PCI devices on other Buses. Software should not rely on this capability. UPDATE: Patch posted to drop peeking by Bus Address, use virtual addresses instead. [link] 4 comments|post comment

Spot's FAIL numbers [29 May 2009|05:16pm] Regarding the weights of FAIL (if we accept the additive model), I would not give the Code Management so much of a multiplier. In fact, I much prefer a project that posts well documented tarballs regularly over a project that runs an amorphous development trunk out of an obscure SCM system like Bazaar, Monotone, or Mercurial (the latter is awesome, BTW, only nobody cares). Spot awarded FAIL points to poorly managed releases, but it was not enough to balance the use of bzr, in my view. [link] 2 comments|post comment

tru.dat [21 May 2009|06:24pm] <viro> funny... <viro> telling somebody that they need to learn C is being unpardonably hostile to newbies <viro> introducing more and more magic that needs to be learnt in order to be able to read the kernel source, OTOH, is not Word. [link] post comment

fedora-devel-list [15 May 2009|06:36pm] I dunno, Jessie, fedora-devel-list looks fine to me. Certainly, if you try to destroy /usr like Lennart did, there may be some pushback. But it's probably a good thing. [link] post comment

Jumping through hoops [20 Apr 2009|02:10pm] For the class project at CS.UNM.EDU, I obtained an access to an MPI cluster called "Phoenix". Unfortunately, transferring files turned out to be a chore. From home, I log in to "moons": an access system visible from the Internet, which may or may not be appropriately secured. From moons, I log to "apu": the sole system which routes to a private network that phoenix is on. From apu, I can log to phoenix. So, 3 hops, which is ok for logins, but a nightmare for file transfer. Surprisingly or not, moons allow port forwarding, but apu does not. So, I can cut a hop, but no more. Solution: kermit. I use C-kermit as a client for the first login (to moons). Then, on phoenix, I run kermit -r or kermit -s data.set, and that's it. There are some issues. First, I have to disconnect screen at phoenix for the duration of the transfer. Second, we stopped shipping Kermit after FC6, so it needs building (pre-FC11 Rawhide at home, and F10 at Phoenix (with a bunch of -devel packages lacking)). [link] 3 comments|post comment

Meanwhile in Russia [16 Apr 2009|01:26pm] Seen an amusing blog entry by Kir Kolyshkin yesterday. It's a report from a sysadmin slash tech conference rootconf.ru. Russian tropism for BSD was there in full force. Also, Microsoft guy presented their live migration service and incidentially advocated the command line. Kir said "It looks like they are building Unix in secret". [link] 3 comments|post comment

Thunderbird and patch corruption [03 Apr 2009|10:53am] Bryan Clark was kind enough to point to Mozilla bugs 141983 and 204478 in an e-mail. Honestly I had no idea that the problem had such as storied past! The two nutcases went on about it for more than 10 years, if you count the postings to newsgroups. It looks obvious that breaking a standard-compliant implementation is not going to happen, but even after reading these long bugs I'm still unclear on why a UI element "do not corrupt my messages" cannot be added (together with "don't send HTML" — could even be the same checkbox). Of course, nothing of this would've mattered if Evolution weren't such a steaming pile of fail. Seems like a shining case of competition between free software projects not producing a good result. What is a kernel hacker to do? [link] 2 comments|post comment

Sylpheed's problems [26 Mar 2009|04:18pm] Both gb and dwmw2 report that Sylpheed fails to start (both problems are connected to IMAP). This was not an issue for me, perversely, because I want to have a mode "use IMAP as if it were POP3" -- fetch and purge messages -- and Sylpheed cannot do that. So, instead, I use fetchmail(1). Well, actually I have several IMAP accounts too, which work ok (as long I don't try to rebuild the folder tree and get whole home directory incorporated as a result), but I don't have gigabyte folders. I would say, Sylpheed probably sucks for heavy IMAP users and/or Debian users. Sylpheed also has regressions dragging on for years. The one which I hate the most is that it used to mark the moved (e.g. Clrl-O) messages with a little blue donut (and deleted messages with a cross). They are also marked with a font color, but if a message is selected, the color is lost, so you cannot know what of the selected was marked without the donut. The donut was lost a few years ago at about the time Xft2 was incorporated, and my pleas to fix it fell on deaf ears. Basically the only thing that goes for Sylpheed is that it never corrupts patches. Unfortunately, I see Tbird pine-ing them all the time when RHEL people post them to internal lists. [link] 1 comment|post comment

Thunderbird [21 Mar 2009|10:37am] I receive signals from several quarters that Brian Clark's work started to pay dividends and Linux is about to be freed from the yoke of Evolution (most recently, spot said it). I always move with the mob: I use gnome-terminal as my main console. However, I draw a very sharp line regarding a MUA: it must not corrupt my patches — which both Evo and Thunderbird are known to do, unfortunately. I don't know if Brian has fixed that, and until I do, I continue to use Sylpheed. It never failed me. [link] 1 comment|post comment

The Brave New Fonts [20 Mar 2009|04:06pm] I wish someone taught me how to list, and potentially control, the new Xft2 fonts, because the endless upheaval of Japanese fonts is getting really annoying. Almost every "yum update" changes something. A couple of weeks ago the majority of kanji became really small (although, very pretty). Funnily enough, not all of them: a small number remained. Then they inexplicably returned back. On Monday, all katakana became bitmapped and half-width, while hiragana remained. It is like that now. I suspect that every new rpm -U rebuilds some mysterious tables somewhere, reshuffling the presentation order. But what and where...? It's not your father's xlsfonts anymore. [link] 4 comments|post comment

Juxtaposition 1 [18 Mar 2009|05:32pm] [link] post comment

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