Pete Zaitcev

Livejournal spam

2008-07-16T02:02:13Z

There's so much LJ spam recently that I'm thinking about disabling comments. Comments are useless anyway. Anyone who has anything meaningful to tell me should be able to send an e-mail. Case in point, Ani-nouto never had comments, and it's doing great.

Follow focus nazi

2008-07-09T23:23:04Z

I have a laptop with Synaptics touchpad, and one of the biggest annoyances in its implementation is how the "wheel" strips act upon the GUI element where the mouse is pointing regardless of the current focus. It took years to beat focus-follow-mouse people into a marginal submission, yet they still find every crack to seep through, like kerosene. Naturally, this behaviour is not tunable.

Another retardity in this area is the behaviour of the panel. Some genious came up with an awesome idea to flip windows if panel receives a wheel click. The problem with that is, a strip on the laptop is difficult to make to deliver just one click, so the function is useless to me. Also, it is too easy to hit the strip accidentially (which would not be a big deal if not for the enforced focus-follow). So, for one reason or the other, I would like to disable this behaviour. I don't even want to seek excuses for this wish. Just do it. But it's impossible.

So far the only group that displayed a clue in this was, strangely enough, Mozilla. They fixed bugs I filed and in general had an understanding of various input and display technologies, despite only being browser people. You'd think desktop developers would know how a touchpad differs from a wheel mouse.

UPDATE: Chris pointed out in comments that a fundamental reason exists why wheel behaves this way: the extra button events are mouse buttons, and those go where pointer points. I knew it, but it didn't click. I still think that applications should be able to work around this, although perhaps at the cost of some extra events being delivered.

Unforgivable

2008-06-21T07:16:45Z

Here's what new pulseaudio does after update in Rawhide today:

VLC media player 0.8.6h Janus E: core-util.c: Failed to state home directory /q/zaitcev/.pulse: No such file or directory E: core-util.c: Assertion 'fn' failed at pulsecore/core-util.c:1086, function pa_lock_lockfile(). Aborting. Aborted

Talkative library functions are bad enough, but aborting and taking down whole application?! How amateurish.

Go Seth!

2008-06-21T02:22:45Z

I cancelled a yum update because I suddenly remembered that it's Friday and I had to download Tower of Druaga finale. It seems like only yesterday doing so involved ^a-c and kill -9, but today two ^c were sufficient. Yay.

Jim's strategy

2008-06-21T02:03:35Z

Jeremy posted a shorthand of a meeting with Jim, our CEO. I think it's pretty interesting, although it's not very new for me, because it's consistent with his internal message and I've met with him before.

Jim talks about the need to involve companies (and their member individuals) into the Open Source in general. I quite agree, although in my like of work I see it in a very narrow way. I interact with all kinds of customers. Some are used to the old, "black box" way. If a test round is needed, I send them a kernel, they run it, collect the results, I think about it, change something, send it again... etcetera. Other (for example, Stratus, Fujitsu) chose "open box" approach: they look at my patches and produce feedback on patches.

Even though I never play favourites with customer problems, "open box" people tend to come to solutions much quicker.

I used to think that there must be some downside to "open box", because they have to have some expertise in-house to deal with source, and expertise costs money. But it is more and more apparent that basic reading of the source is not black magic. Customers always have engineers who can read it. Sure, they may not have intimate understanding of it, but that's what they pay Red Hat for. The basic advantage is essentially free for them.

Another thing Jim talks about is taking a high road relatively Ubuntu. From ethical standpoint, he is right, of course. But I keep thinking... Ubuntu is popular. Not as popular as Windows, I guess, but it is a success, and you never argue with success. Fat lot of good will it do to Free Software if everyone moves to Ubuntu. Fortunately, Fedora is a success too, for now at least. But it looks like Jim just believes that truth will always prevail... I am not so sure. It is not how the world works.

Whitelist your cookies

2008-06-12T18:35:03Z

I followed the suggestion at DaveJ's comments as an experiment, because I visit way too many forums and other identity driven sites, but so far it worked very well. There was not a single case of website failing to work with explicit permissions to set cookies, and the work required to add permissions was not too onerous.

It would be even better if Firefox threw up a dialog or something, to let me whitelist a website on the fly, without opening the preferences dialog with its tabs.

I will never fly

2008-06-10T19:42:37Z

I took a glider ride at Moriarty, NM on Sunday. It was pretty incredible. Also, I suck as a pilot so much, it's incredible too. I don't think I had the string centered for more than 3 seconds at a time, if at all.

We took a tow to about 1800 AGL or 8k and from there climbed above 15k, where we caught the mountain wave. My pilot, Dave, said that on a good day people fly from Moriarty to Colorado and back, by hopping from a cloud to cloud.

One unexpected thing is just how loud the wind noise is. Even when doing 40 knots I have to raise my voice above it to be heard.

UPDATE: A Google search unearths an interview with my pilot, Mr. David Sharp.

Firefox and CPU

2008-06-03T20:48:38Z

On my main laptop, running Rawhide, Firefox burns CPU when idle (firefox-3.0-0.65.cvs20080416.fc10). It's not much, top shows 5..7%, but it's persistent. Bram asked about [tools to debug] this just recently, and Jeff Daly replied that Mozilla is working on it. Apparently there is an add-on for it already.

Games... I remember those

2008-06-03T19:30:46Z

I did not play any games in years and years, and the last on I played was Myth. But a couple of days ago someone threw together a game where I was the main character (ok, my alter ego inspired the main character). I just had to try it.

Doing so quickly reminded me just why I'm not a gamer. First, I had to find and attach a mouse to my laptop. The game is based on the RenPy, but mostly consists of 3 shooting galleries and a couple of puzzles. So, to pass with a touchpad is next to impossible. And next, my arm hurts. That's right, I'm an official ninja, yet my arm hurt from playing a computer game.

As for the game, I laughed myself out of my chair, but it was fun in an inside joke way only, so don't bother downloading. For a kernel guy, the equivalent would be a gallery where you shoot Hans Reiser, Adrian Bunk, and Dick Johnson in the face. Nobody too famous, but notorious.

P.S. This episode got me thinking about the open-source gaming (yes, I know, I'm becoming an ESR, drop dead). Speaking of RenPy, I enjoyed Starlight, but so far I've never seen anything anywhere where people would bunch together and do something. The RenPy based VNs and games are usually carried out by one creator, so they tend to be one-offs. Starlight, for example, haven't seen the next chapter yet. Maybe I should check out Wesnoth... Develop those underutilized arm muscles. I heard Rusty poked at it.

Attack of Sqlite

2008-06-01T21:11:07Z

Recently it became fashionable to link Sqlite everywhere (for example, yum uses it). The awsum workout that Firefox gives to your kjournald is also Sqlite. But now I see a little problem. What if anything happens to the database?

XML was bad enough, but it is repairable, if with a bigger difficulty than plain text. When GNOME eliminated battstat-applet, and started to throw an funny dialog, I was able to fix it by removing a few files and directories in my ~/.gconf (Thank you, Federico).

Now my Liferea develped a problem. One of the feeds has a phantom item in it: it shows one unread even if there aren't any unread items. If I click "Mark All Read", Liferea crashes. How am I supposed to repair this? I suppose there may be some command line tools coming with Sqlite which allow to issue SQL statements, but without knowing how the database is laid out, I cannot formulate such statements.

I expect this kind of thing to become more common as more people jump on the bandwagon.

RSPoD on Rawhide

2008-05-22T00:22:48Z

The Penny-Arcade game a.k.a. RSPoD is out today and it bombs on me with: "Could not find a compatible display device // Make sure your display device supports OpenGL 1.2 and the following extensions: ARB_multitexture ... ARB_texture_compression EXT_texture_compression_s3tc". On my system, OpenGL is provided by MESA 7.1-0.29.fc9, and according to glxinfo, some required extensions are missing. That wouldn't be so bad, but I have no idea what how this may be corrected. Hardware OpenGL in the video card, I guess. I have "Radeon Xpress 1100 IGP", which is a low-end mobile card.

UPDATE: Received the following e-mail:

Hi I had the same problem on Vista, because on my laptop the latest installed drivers were the ones I got from windows update. I then installed the ones that came from the manufacturers site and voilà..

. . .

UPDATE: See Anholt's entry.

Rio and Upstart

2008-05-14T07:35:27Z

Seen at Rio's place:

Fedora9のupstart、すごいんですけど...。さすがに組み込みみたいな速さでは無いけれど、これならサスペンドしなくても良いんじゃ...。

Which, in my very approximate translation means:

Upstart of Fedora 9 is great, mostly. As expected it includes no visible speed, so not using suspend is not good.

So, I guess that Rio expected improvements which would allow to stop suspending and they did not materialize... Which makes sense, but why the superlatives then? The title of the post was "upstartすげい！" with the exclamation mark. I would understand if he wrote that Upstart allowed him to end suspends, but no, "速さでない" is simple enough even for me to understand. Oh well, perils of international blogging.

Once I figured out that the control file syntax is documented in events(5) of all places, Upstart became rather tolerable, even welcome. I think that our famously poor bootstrap times (which are not that bad in Fedora when compared to other distros — I've seen real hard benchmarks — but are just bad for me as a user) have more to do with trying to execute too much crap. Upstart allows us to do it more efficiently, but it's a palliative.

UPDATE: piyokun comments that the right translation is more like "Of course it's not as fast as embedded (linux), but with (upstart) you can get by without suspending." So, the "shinakute" is like "doing", "mo" is change of state (he suspended before, but not anymore), "n" is explanation tag, and "ja" is uncertainty. Casual, of course. Oh, and "kumikomu" is a verb meaning "to incorporate". I had no idea that they had a native word for "embedded", instead of a katakanized borrowed word.

John Carmack and Linux VT

2008-05-13T01:25:22Z

Says John:

Our flight computer now has a display screen to show the current status to a pilot. My first inclination was just to mmap the framebuffer and pretend I was back in the days of DOS, but I decided to try and be a good linux programmer and use ncurses. It took me longer than I expected to get it working properly for displaying on the VGA for an application launched from a telnet session, and the performance was very bad. I wound up writing directly to the terminal device myself, spitting out all the escape sequences manually, but it was still quite appallingly slow. I have it working acceptably by only updating the various display items in a scanning fashion to avoid slowing it down on any individual frame, but I should have just followed my first thought and gone with a direct memory mapping.

I'm a little disturbed by the above, because I consider his application essentially equivalent to what Hercules does, and I never saw any performance issues with it. We all know that ncurses is a pig, and of course he should be using Slang instead of ncurses, but since he says that the result was slow even for the raw sequences, certainly this is not the issue. Weird.

It would be awesome if he posted his code somewhere.

UPDATE: John replies in comments:

The flight computer is only a 486-100, so it doesn't take much to bog it down, even with just text writes. I am doing straightforward fwrites and fprintfs to the console tty for everything.

It is at an acceptable rate now, so I probably won't make any other changes, but if RRL decides that they want anything fancy, like scrolling bar graphs, I will go straight to the framebuffer.

Liberal Fascism

2008-05-07T02:35:40Z

I've done with the book at last. A part of my first impression stands: not enough lulz. But overall, it's pretty good, and I came to think the money well spent. Also, the best part turned out to be in the last chapter, where Goldberg delivers a well deserved enema to Bush and Co.

BadName is essentially conquered

2008-05-02T10:23:00Z

The issue with random applications failing to start (Firefox, Nautilus) or blowing up (panel, gvim) with BadName took me about 3 months to find (the bug was filed at the end of January). I'm not sure if my fix is any good, need to poke Ajax about it.

So... Wasted a lot of time, learned several mildly interesting things about the code and people involved.

The sad part is how much it takes to start moving around any modern codebase, and that's with the same language and toolchain. I remember times when no part of the system was off-limits, but these days... not so much. If anything breaks in OpenOffice, I'm not even going to try fixing it.

Ted Tytso on [Open]Solaris

2008-04-23T18:12:46Z

Ted suddenly decided to talk OpenSolaris. Pretty interesting... at least for me, since I spent 7 best years of my life in Sun's orbit.

In passing, aside from the bulk of the post, it seems to me that the final argument, about competitors selling Solaris support, does not hold water. This is exactly what Oracle attempted with their clone of CentOS and they weren't very successful, despite having a strong Linux team under Wim.

Other than that, he's probably right. But he's going to get responses. Whenever I mention Solaris (last time it was when I linked to Jeff Bonwick's blog), I get the most inane responses from Solaris fanboys. It looks like a very vocal community of users, if not contributors. Sounds like Apple almost.

This puts the damper on any dreams I may have about re-living the glory of my youth by getting back to hacking on that codebase.

UPDATE: Not sure why Levon decided to post his reply to his personal blog instead the one at Sun. Surely the other one is more relevant?

Random dmesg errors

2008-04-19T19:29:06Z

I always was against kernel spewing user-generated errors into dmesg, like this:

npviewer.bin[4393]: segfault at f6712030 ip 67e7a0 sp ff9c39ec error 4 in libpthread-2.8.so[677000+15000]

Not helpful, not interesting.

However, the other day my desktop keeled over in a strange way... The /var/log/messages contained this (followed by a stack trace):

Apr 13 18:19:14 niphredil kernel: Xorg: page allocation failure. order:3, mode:0x4020

It looks like a bug in SLUB (does not seem registering with anyone who has the power to track it down though). But my point is, without the printout I would need to find what was happening by other means, and that would probably take forever.

Hmm... My world is shaken.

P.S. kgdb was merged into 2.6.26. The sky is falling.

My classical education is sorely lacking, but

2008-04-17T23:21:30Z

I have discovered the prototype for the Iowahawk's classic parody "Heart of Redness": the Heart of Darkness, a novel by Joseph Conrad.

Clutching the dog-eared copy of Manufacturing Concent rings especially dear to me, because Miggie tried to bait me with it once.

Jon Corbet on Red Hat and Desktop

2008-04-17T17:28:04Z

Seen at LWN today (no permalink — what the heck?):

Red Hat's desktop team has posted an item saying that the company has no plans to offer a "traditional desktop product" anytime soon.

Say what? The referenced item says:

[W]e have no plans to create a traditional desktop product for the consumer market in the foreseeable future.

Umm... RHEL desktop is doing quite well, all we're saying we're not committed to selling it at Best Buy. Not sure how this debacle has happened. Jon was probably short on coffee.

ipv6.google.com

2008-04-16T16:30:45Z

If client is logged in, Google bounces to the old site. In order to access over IPv6, you have to log out and use http://ipv6.google.com/webhp. Apparently, not quite there yet.

One funny thing, using Google while logged out is much faster. Apparently it takes time for them to act upon cookies my client sends. Remind me again how they goaded everyone into this "homepage" thing. Ah yes, Gmail.

Fallback-induced thoughts

2008-04-15T21:29:40Z

I saw two or three bug filings in last couple of months which deal with a USB device not working until ehci_hcd is unloaded. Thinking sensibly, it's rather normal, a poorly-made or poorly-cabled device may choose to report High (480) speed yet will be unable to communicate at that speed. And a couple of devices failing across half a million of users is rare. However, the thing is, such cases were extremely rare before, I don't even remember the last time this happened. So, I'm starting to worry that EHCI hardware or software may have a subtle bug somewhere (perhaps specific silicon percolated to the field).

If only there was a way to tap into Novell's bugzilla and watch their kernel bugs, to collate with ours. Ditto the Bligh's Bugme and Ubuntu's whatever (Launchpad?).

For readily identifiable bugs, we just report them to linux-usb or whatever and then patterns just come together, but the problem of fallback-wannabe devices is too flimsy and vague.

P.S. By "fallback" I mean the new code which switches a port over to a Full (12) speed if enumeration fails. It's a practical solution, but it seems like sweeping the problem under the carpet to me. Also, it won't work for anything that's plugged into a hub.

UPDATE: Amit from Ubuntu pointed to their bug 88746. V.interesting.

Unpleasant mass updates

2008-04-14T22:45:03Z

Mass updates to Bugzilla have a few unpleasant side effects:

Unless they're done by DKL with direct access to the database, they generate a lot of e-mail which buries actual updates.
They destroy the usability of queries for "bugs modified in the last 60/45/30 days". It's a useful trick I learned from Arjan. But now all kernel bugs are recently modified.

The idea, I guess, is that developer has to rescan relevant bugs and either work on them, push them into NEEDINFO, or close them. If hackers are dilligent about it, auto-closer is harmless [and also, unnecessary -- ed]. In reality though, it just does not work that way [and the very existence of auto-closer is the proof -- ed]. At certain point, I started making extra-Bugzilla lists of bugs which look realistic to work on (e.g. have an active submitter who cooperates, for one thing). The rest just rots. I don't even have cycles to push WONTFIX on them (or, actually, I have time to close, but I don't want to deal with the fallout, so I just pretend not to see them -- the task made easier by the mass-update and the resulting mail avalanche).

P.S. My list of bugs is, like, 10 to 50 times smaller than Chuck's and DaveJ's. I don't understand how they cope. It seems impossible to me, so there must be some trade secret good kernel monkeys know.

The Belgian paper

2008-04-09T15:51:11Z

Completely useless. Gee, the thugs running worst shitholes of the world can forge documents signed by children and make all their Web access trackable and non-refutable. Dog bites man. We knew before this paper that they condition children to carry their own telescreens. The only thing I want to know about the BitFrost is how to defeat it, and the paper doesn't say. Useless.

-e for Elimination

2008-04-07T20:15:01Z

After noticing that the annoying and useless (for me) orange star has no setting "go away forever", I concluded it was time to use "rpm -e". However, we have another case of House That Jack Built: system-config-printer needs /usr/bin/system-install-packages (because, you know, it wants to pull printer drivers for you automagically). But the system-install-packages is a part of the gnome front-end, not PackageKit itself (why? a mystery), and that includes the orange star (it's called pk-update-icon). Godly.

At least it's not a throbbing red eye, and not restarted when killed. Also, Yet Another Sneaky Daemon They Sprung On My System While I Looked The Other Way (packagkitd) quetly disappears after a while, releasing my precious memory. I sense some good intent here, but it's not good enough.

P.S. I'm testing if "Check for Updates: Never" and then killing means "go away".

P.P.S. Nope, it still restarts on the next login, and checks for updates. What part of "never" is unclear here?

Timeouts

2008-04-07T03:28:25Z

I didn't try to burn a CD with ub in a while, because my new laptop comes with a built-in burner. After all the hustling with __blk_end_request, I thought the situation called for a test. This looked worrysome:

Track 01: Total bytes read/written: 548321280/548321280 (267735 sectors).
Errno: 5 (Input/output error), close track/session scsi sendcmd: cmd timeout after 5.000 (480) s
CDB:  5B 00 02 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
cmd finished after 5.000s timeout 480s
cmd finished after 5.000s timeout 480s
wodim: Cannot fixate disk.

The resulting CD was not a coaster though. A welcome surprise, but clearly I did something wrong regarding timeouts, and it needs fixing (although I'm quite sure that there's no other person on Earth who would want to burn CDs with ub).

BTW, the new cdrecord looks nice indeed. Before, I only used the one maintained by that self-centered dude with attitude... No idea who maintains this one, but it seems working ok.