According to Wikipedia, I’m a Canadian communist who served on the Toronto City Council in the 1940s.
All news to me. Didn’t know I was a Canadian or a communist.
according to Wikipedia
Reply
Category Archives: General
Ministry for Crap Design
Every year our heating breaks. Every darn year. Aparrently the way to get a reliable central heating system is to have one that’s 15 years old. Ours is a bit newer and part of the series of heaters (aparrently all of them) that suffer from the Ministry of Crap Design getting involved (meaning they break every year).
It’s bloody freezing in here. maybe 12 degrees. It’s 10 outside.
Bloody miserable cold winter.
I almost feel like getting in my car where the heater works and working from there (wireless signal should be strong enough).
still get called for tech support…
okay, when it’s family you can’t really say no. But it does seem a bit strange when you have no idea.
Problems getting new printer to work. My advice is reinstall driver, remove device, reboot. Some random stuff. Remove from device manager, plug in again, see if it changes.
That’s the total of my windows troubleshooting knowledge (hey, apart from all that stuff i know about 3.1 from back in the day).
I’ve done dev work here and there on the platform – inside more unixy areas (software that interfaces with unix, or has been ported from). In other words, no, I don’t speak Hungarian (nor have any wish to).
That said, I’m fully supportive of efforts to make sure our software runs well on the platform. If, for whatever reason (lack of enlightnment or lack of enlightenment further up the chain), someone has to use it, then darn well, our stuff should work well and as expected.
Also, being portable is always a good thing – you never know what the next big thing is going to be like (Okay, it’s unlikely to be VMS or Hurd) but if someone wants a product you sell ported to platform X and yours is more portable than the competitor, odds are you’re the one going to get the sale.
Also, other platforms can help you fix bugs. Fixing bugs is good.
Listening to: Rage Against The Machine
A good definition for annoying
When the bug doesn’t appear with debug logging enabled.
a followup on “Don’t buy MSI”
I’m still waiting to get my box back. I’m meant to be getting a call back from the shop where I bought it later today (I called them, again, this morning).
i want my mythtv box dammit.
Don’t Buy MSI
Not yesterday sunday, but the sunday before that (i.e. now 8 days ago) I bought an MSI Mega 180 case to use as a mythtv box. Not only was it DOA, I still do not have it. It’s expected to come in the day after tomorrow. That is TEN DAYS since i bought the thing.
What seemed to be a well priced and suitable box (PCI slot and mini-pci, so i can use the mini pci for wireless – yay. also space for two HDs) is proving a pain in the arse – and I haven’t even used it yet.
I am very close to getting very annoyed.
OpenOffice
/me hits the developer who made AutoSave ask if you want to save.
Honestly, what the fuck is up with that?
Productivity
Do not under any circumstances apt-get install wesnoth!
It’s quite addictive and very good.
Currently worried about getting anything done for the next… errrr… year?
It’s been ages since I’ve really gotten into a game. I think this may actually be one I’ll get pretty into. Rock on Wesnoth developers!
Helgrind
To try and help in debugging, I’ve been playing with some of the extra tools that come with Valgrind.
Everybody knows that if you aren’t using Valgrind you are living in sin.
I’ve recently tried to have a go at using Helgrind. It’s suppossed to be able to help you in finding race conditions in multithreaded applications.
Well, mysql is multithreaded, and so is NDB (cluster), so, this could be rather useful (especially since, with some new work being done, i’ve found race conditions, i just need to find out where).
From the manual:
Basically what Helgrind does is to look for memory locations which are accessed by more than one thread. For each such location, Helgrind records which of the program’s (pthread_mutex_)locks were held by the accessing thread at the time of the access. The hope is to discover that there is indeed at least one lock which is used by all threads to protect that location. If no such lock can be found, then there is (apparently) no consistent locking strategy being applied for that location, and so a possible data race might result.
sounds reasonable enough.
Now I’m actually chasing up one of it’s possible data races and seeing if it is, in fact, a race.
Has anybody else had any experience with Helgrind? Thoughts?
comment spam protection
hopefully this will help stop comment spam.
using HashCash
makes the client do a md5 of a string for each comment submitted.
okay, so now you need javascript to comment on my blog.
but frankly, that’s better than me fighting urges to kill, torture and maime guilty people. (spammers, not comment leavers)
Why – o – Why does this happen to me?
/build/buildd/gdb-6.3/gdb/linux-nat.c:1208: internal-error: wait_lwp: Assertion `pid == GET_LWP (lp->ptid)’ failed.
A problem internal to GDB has been detected,
further debugging may prove unreliable.
Quit this debugging session? (y or n)
/build/buildd/gdb-6.3/gdb/linux-nat.c:1208: internal-error: wait_lwp: Assertion `pid == GET_LWP (lp->ptid)’ failed.
A problem internal to GDB has been detected,
further debugging may prove unreliable.
Create a core file of GDB? (y or n)
Eurovision
It’s like watching a train wreck.
Boobs are in this year. last year it was taking various items of clothing off. this year, it’s having boobs.
Moldova was a pretty interesting entry. I think I’m hoping they win (writing this as watching the voting).
Although, the advert half way through for the “CD” of Eurovision 2005. Although there is no such thing – there is a copy protected disc that just happens to be partly compatible with some CD players. This stuff irritates me. I’m tempted to write to the ACCC about it. Really, people should not be lied to like this.
log based file system
I think this can be done – with gaurenteed consistency – fairly efficiently.
would love to do some experiments and see what performance i could get.
write performance could be spectacular…
there’s some ideas floating in my head for read performance optimisation – i wonder if any of them make any sense.
getting back on the mat
due to travelling, i haven’t been to jiu jitsu for about a month. longest time i haven’t been since i started. missing doing it – esp while away. maybe should have found some local club or something.
anyway, aparrently there could be a qualification tourdament for grading tomorrow. so tonight i’m going to try to get to a class (before going to see Star Wars). I’ll probably be quite worn out by the end of it.
Two trips away and eating too much has probably done nothing for my fitness.
looking forward to feeling the pain.
okay, maybe not.
but getting on the mat will be great.
still recovering
taking a while to get over jetlag. also a bit sniffly – i bet that isn’t helping.
I’m only a couple of hours off local time now.
It could also have something to do with how easy it is for me to sleep in my own bed. for some reason, morning has never really appealed to me. especially when i’m warm and asleep.
I’m going to have to get some photos up from prague no doubt.
watch this space. i may even set up gallery or something intense like that.
Ubuntu
Where on earth is the “Unfuck Nautilus” checkbox?
oh well, will go to gconf to get a system that’s usable for manipulating files.
Sleep works!
Ubuntu, installed, out of the box, PowerBook 15inch 1ghz – slept and woke up. I am one impressed puppy.
Now just restoring /home
Changing to Ubuntu
The 13GB waste of space that was the unused MacOS X partition is gone. So is the very much hacked Debian Unstable (was living up to its name too much) partition. Currently am installing Ubuntu Hoary Hedgehog on my PowerBook.
I may still have to run a custom kernel (sleep support) – but that’s not going to worry me too much. It’s the fact that things are stable for six months that’s making me excited. No more worrying about if a dist-upgrade will break everything.
You can chuck in the LiveCD on PPC and get a working X configuration. Woah.
Also been playing (briefly) with f-spot on my desktop. Is pretty cool. I’m going to start using it for all my photos. Looks like it scales okay too! The import of my existing photos went pretty smoothly. Some of the dates are totally borked – but hopefully that’s an easy fix to the code. I think i might join the mailing list and make some suggestions (as well as try my hand at implementing some myself). Pulling the source from CVS and trying it out was real easy – this is a good sign.
I can’t wait until the version of Mono is upgraded so I can run Beagle! When f-spot, Beagle and Dashboard hit the pre-installed stage on linux distros, we’re going to have a real set of killer apps to bring people over from the dark side.
blogging linux.conf.au in reverse
didn’t get much time to write while at LCA. So will cover it now, possibly in reverse, but definitely after the fact.
Have slept a lot today. Which is good, really needed it. Back to work though – which should also be fun.
currently: relaxed on the couch, listening to Tool and pulling mail.
Oh, LCA rocked. It so rocked. It rocked so much that Uluru really looks like a pebble.
juicing the google
Pia Waugh, Jeff Smith.