Archive

Book club: Rust after the honeymoon

Earlier this month Daniel, Lars and myself got together to discuss Bryan Cantrill’s article Rust after the honeymoon. This is an overview of what keeps him enjoying working with Rust after having used it for an extended period of time for low level systems work at Oxide, we were

Book club: JSON Web Tokens

This month for our book club Daniel, Lars, Vince and I read Hardcoded secrets, unverified tokens, and other common JWT mistakes which wasn’t quite what we’d thought when it was picked. We had been expecting an analysis of JSON web tokens themselves as several us had been working

Book Club: Zettlekasten

Recently I was part of a call with Daniel and Lars to discuss Zettelkasten, a system for building up a cross-referenced archive of notes to help with research and study that has been getting a lot of discussion recently, the key thing being the building of links between ideas. Tomas

Book club: Our Software Dependency Problem

A short while ago Daniel, Lars and I met to discuss Russ Cox’s excellent essay Our Software Dependency Problem. This essay looks at software reuse in general, especially in the context of modern distribution methods like PyPI and NPM which make the whole process much more frictionless than traditional

Audio Miniconf 2019 Report

This year’s audio miniconference happened last month in Lyon, sponsored by Intel. Thanks to everyone who attended, this event is all about conversations between people, and to Alexandre Belloni for organizing the conference dinner. We started off with Curtis Malainey talking us through some UCM extensions that ChromeOS has

Linux Audio Miniconference 2019

As in previous years we’re going to have an audio miniconference so we can get together and talk through issues, especially design decisions, face to face. This year’s event will be held on Sunday October 31st in Lyon, France, the day after ELC-E. This will be held at

Linux Audio Miniconf 2018 report

The audio miniconference was held on the 21st in the offices of Cirrus Logic in Edinburgh with 15 attendees from across the industry including userspace and kernel developers, with people from several OS vendors and a range of silicon companies. Community We started off with a discussion of community governance

2018 Linux Audio Miniconference

As in previous years we’re trying to organize an audio miniconference so we can get together and talk through issues, especially design decisons, face to face. This year’s event will be held on Sunday October 21st in Edinburgh, the day before ELC Europe starts there. Cirrus Logic have

Bronica Motor Drive SQ-i

I recently got a Bronica SQ-Ai medium format film camera which came with the Motor Drive SQ-i. Since I couldn’t find any documentation at all about it on the internet and had to figure it out for myself I figured I’d put what I figured out here. Hopefully

We show up

It’s really common for pitches to managements within companies about Linux kernel upstreaming to focus on cost savings to vendors from getting their code into the kernel, especially in the embedded space. These benefits are definitely real, especially for vendors trying to address the general market or extend the

OpenTAC sprint

This weekend Toby Churchill kindly hosted a hacking weekend for OpenTAC – myself, Michael Grzeschik, Steve McIntyre and Andy Simpkins got together to bring up the remaining bits of the hardware on the current board revision and get some of the low level tooling like production flashing for the FTDI serial

Expedient ABIs

The biggest change we’ve seen in the Linux kernel for ARM over the past few years has been the transition to providing descriptions of the hardware in systems via device tree. This splits out the description of the devices in the system that can’t be automatically enumerated from

Performance problems

Just over a year ago I implemented an optimization to the SPI core code in Linux that avoids some needless context switches to a worker thread in the main data path that most clients use. This was really nice, it was simple to do but saved a bunch of work

Maintaining your email

One of the difficulties of being a kernel maintainer for a busy subsystem is that you will often end up getting a lot of mail that requires reading and handling which in turn requires sending a lot of mail out in reply. Some of that requires thought and careful consideration

Maximising the efficiency of chained regulators

Linux v4.4 will include a cool new feature contributed by Sascha Hauer of Pengutronix which propagates voltages set on a regulator to the regulators that supply it (taking into account the minimum headroom that the child regulator needs). The original reason for implementing it was to allow us to

Unconscious biases

Matthew Garrett’s recent very good response to Eric Raymond’s recent post opposing inclusiveness efforts in free software reminded me of something I’ve been noticing more and more often: a very substantial proportion of the female developers I encounter working on the kernel are from non-European cultures where

Flashing an AT91SAM9G20-EK from bare metal

Since I just had cause to do this and it was harder than it needed to be due to bitrot in the public documentation I could find I thought I’d write up how to get a modern bootloader onto older Atmel boards. These instructions are written for the AT91SAM9G20-EK

Acer Aspire E11

Recently I was in Seoul in the middle of three weeks of travel and my laptop died on me.  Since I had some work that needed doing fairly urgently I took myself over to Yongsan Electronics Market and got myself a cheap replacement to tide myself over. What I ended

Heating the Internet of Things

Internet of Things seems to be trendy these days, people like the shiny apps for controlling things and typically there are claims that the devices will perform better than their predecessors by offloading things to the cloud – but this makes some people worry that there are potential security issues and

Kernel build times for automated builders

Over the past year or so various people have been automating kernel builds with the aim of both setting the standard that things should build reliably and using the resulting builds for automated testing. This has been having good results, it’s especially nice to compare the results for older

Adventures with ARM server

I recently got a CubieTruck with a terabyte SSD to use as a general always on server. This being an ARM board rather than a PC (with a rather nice form factor – it’s basically the same size as a SSD) you’d normally expect a blog post about it

Human factors

An issue which I always find depressing but sadly unsurprising in discussions of process with software is the frequent disregard for human elements; indeed often the goal people have in creating process is to try to control and eliminate human elements. Little thought is given to what is going to

New job

A few months ago I started a new job at Linaro as the technical lead for the Linaro Stable Kernel – I just posted a brief thing what I’m up to now over on the Linaro blog.

ASoC updates in 3.6

Linux v3.6 was another quiet release for ASoC with just a single notable framework feature being merged: * Added the ability to add and remove DAPM paths dynamically, mostly for reparenting on clock changes. * New machine drivers for Marvell Brownstone, ST-Ericsson Ux500 and ttc-dkp. * New CPU drivers for Blackfin BF6xx

UK landline non-security (and Orange clue)

Yesterday when I got in from work I got my second letter in as many months through from BT saying that my account was being closed as my landline was being transferred to another provider. This was the first I’d heard of this and it causes a cancellation charge

regulator updates in 3.6

Linux 3.6, which was released earlier today, saw continuing improvements in the factoring out of common code in the API – lots of new features making drivers smaller and easier to write! * Initial framework support for GPIO controlled enable signals, saving a bunch of code in drivers. * Move fixed regulator

regmap updates in 3.6

Linux 3.6 was a very quiet release for regmap: * Support for buses and devices specifying their endianness, providing some performance improvements for MMIO devices. * Support for wake IRQs in regmap-irq.

Speaking at ELC-E: "regmap: The Power of Subsystems and Abstractions"

I will be speaking at ELC-E in Barcelona this year, with a talk entitled regmap: The Power of Subsystems and Abstractions. I look forward to seeing some of you at the conference, perhaps even in the audience!

ASoC updates in 3.5

The big news for ASoC in 3.5 is the first two changes here which are pretty major features for the subsystem: * Dynamic PCM support, allowing support for SoCs with internal routing through components with tight sequencing and formatting constraints within their internal paths or where there are multiple components

Regulator updates in 3.5

There’s been a bit of an increase in the amount of core work in version 3.5, regmap has enabled a lot of code to be factored out of drivers and into the core so drivers only need to provide data. This makes things a lot simpler to implement

regmap updates in 3.5

A surprisingly large series of updates for regmap this time, mostly due to all the work Stephen Warren has done to add support for MMIO buses. This wasn’t really the target for the framework but it turns out that there’s a reasonable number of cases where it’s

regulator updates in 3.4

This has been a fairly quiet release from a regulator point of view, the only real framework features added were devm support and a convenience helper for setting up fixed voltage regulators. Much more coming next time, though! The most noticeable thing in the changelog is that Axel Lin continued

regmap updates in 3.4

Things are really quieting down with the regmap API, while we’re still seeing a trickle of new features coming in they’re getting much smaller than they were. * Support for padding between the register and the value when interacting with the device. This is required by some devices with

Anne Brown (1946-2012)

BROWN Anne After a long illness bravely fought, Anne Margaret (née Wilson), wife of Fred and mother to Mark, enthusiastic Scottish country dancer. Service to be held at Borders Crematorium, on Friday, May 25, 2012, at 11 am. Donations, if desired, to Marie Curie Cancer Support. Family flowers only.

ASoC updates in 3.4

Linux version 3.4 has been released. This was a very active release for ASoC in framework terms, in addition to the usual bug fixes and so on there were a large number of framework enhancements though most are fairly small or are laying the groundwork for more user visible

ASoC updates in 3.3

Linux 3.3 was released earlier this week. Aside from a few regmap related updates it was an extremely quiet release for the ASoC framework, the next few releases look like they will be much more active: * Conversion of a number of CODEC drivers to use regmap directly. This is

regulator updates in 3.3

Linux 3.3 was released today. This was the biggest release for the regulator API for quite some time thanks to the contribution of device tree bindings for the API by Rajendra Nayak, the first substantial framework update for a long time, but otherwise was fairly quiet: * OpenFirmware bindings for

regmap updates in 3.3

After the rush of new features in version 3.2 this has been a fairly quiet cycle for the regmap API, the main change being the wider usage by drivers. In terms of development of the subsystem itself this release sees: * Introduction of a generic interrupt controller for regmap based

Yahoo! Groups spam

Yahoo! Groups have for a long time had big problems with allowing people to create obvious spam groups (randomly generated names, no meaningful description and so on) and then add people without any confirmation. This was annoying but at least they have an obvious abuse reporting link in the subscription

TinyHAL

Earlier today I gave a talk at Android Builders Summit about TinyHAL, a generic audio HAL for Android aimed providing a better basis for system integrators to work from. More details on TinyHAL and slides from the talk can be found over at the Wolfson Open Source web site.

regmap updates in 3.2

Version 3.1 of the Linux kernel was the first release to include regmap support and only included a bare minimum of features in order to ease review so version 3.2 has been a pretty big one for regmap development with some pretty major features being built on top

ASoC updates in 3.2

Linux 3.2 was released yesterday. It’s been a fairly busy release for ASoC in terms of the subsystem, including the first piece of work at moving the register I/O code over to regmap to eliminate the duplication there, but a pretty quiet one on the drivers front.

What's wrong with switch statements?

Recently I’ve been noticing a surprising pattern in code I’m reviewing for the kernel. A lot of people seem to have taken to writing code that I’d expect to look like this: switch (thing) { case VALUE: /* Stuff */ break; case BAR: /* Nonsense */ break; default: /* Whatever */ break; } with if

ASoC updates in 3.1

Linus released version 3.1 of the kernel at Kernel Summit this morning. This has been another fairly quiet release for the framework with a few nice power optimizations, a range of driver enhancements and a fairly small set of new drivers. * Lots of cleanups to the register cache code

regmap - a register map abstraction for the Linux kernel

A good proportion of I2C and SPI device drivers in the kernel contain some very similar code for accessing the register maps of hardware connected to those buses – most hardware designers have solved the problem of providing very similar ways. Linux 3.1 introduces a new kernel API called regmap

Making patches easy to review

One of the big things that seems to cause a learning curve for many new contributors for Linux and other projects that make a big effort with code review is the process of putting patches together in a way that makes the code review process more smoothly. This is a

ASoC updates in 3.0

Linux 3.0 was released today – another fairly quiet release for the ASoC core, plus the usual collection of new drivers: * Support DAPM controls that affect multiple paths – mainly used for single register bits that affect the routing for a stereo pair of audio streams. * Simplifications in the cache infrastructure.

I know that place

One slightly unexpected effect of all the travel I’ve been doing recently is that I get a real, visceral sense of place from some slightly surprising places when I see them on the big screen. Having an idea of how the place really is, how people behave, how the

ASoC updates in 2.6.39

Linux 2.6.39 was released earlier today. This release includes a few updates, the main user visible one being that machine drivers can now be registered as regular devices rather than using the soc-audio device. * Support for registering machine drivers as first class devices rather than using the soc-audio

ASoC conference 2011 - Edinburgh, 4-5th May

There will be an ASoC conference in Edinburgh 4th-5th May this year, held in the Scotch Malt Whisky Society in Edinburgh. Full details are in the announcement – if you’ve got an interest in embedded audio on Linux I recommend you attend, there’s a lot of development going on

ASoC updates in 2.6.38

Linux 2.6.38 was just released, with another big update to ASoC including: * Enhancements to multi-component from Jarkko Nikula allowing multiple devices of the same type to be included in one system (and handling other overlaps between devices) and support cross device DAPM. * Support from Dimitris Papastamos for compressing

Changing core code

One of the biggest differences between working on most other OSs and working upstream on drivers for the Linux kernel is that elsewhere the core is usually a fixed thing that has been released and can’t really be changed, even if source is available (which may not even be

Updating the kernel on the Nexus S

Building the kernel for the Nexus S is straightforward – the kernel is public as one would expect so it’s simply a matter of building it using the standard Linux build system (the machine is called herring in the code). There is one gotcha, though – the driver for the BCM4329

Tracing ASoC with trace events

Kernel 2.6.38 will add support for tracing ASoC using trace points. Previously all logging for ASoC had been done using printk(), meaning that changing the active logging required a kernel rebuild and that when trace was enabled the volume of trace could easily become very disruptive to other

ASoC changes in 2.6.37

2.6.37, which was released today, has been a very big release for ASoC – about 40,000 lines of changes covering every single file within the subsystem plus a bunch of new drivers. The highlights are: * Overhaul of the core APIs for registration of all kinds of devices from

Building firmware images for Nexus S

Since I couldn’t seem to readily find any useful instructions for building firmware images for the Nexus S I thought I’d publish some. In a clean directory this sequence of commands should result in a working set of application layer images. They assume you’ve already got all

ASoC changes in 2.6.36

Linux 2.6.36 was released today. This has been a very quiet release for the ASoC core code but one of the busiest releases for a while for new CPU support, with four new architectures added: * CODEC support for  JZ4740, WM8741, and WM8987 * CPU drivers for EP93xx, JZ4740, Marvell

eBooks

Recently I’ve been using ebook readers rather a lot – mostly the Kindle DX, though I have given iBooks a spin as well. Obviously, as with MP3 players, the main win they offer is the ability to easily carry about an entire library without the inconvenience of the physical media.

Editor (and other) customisations

A discussion the other night suggested that I’m quite unusual among geeks in doing vanishingly little customisation of my system – most of my systems have something very close to their default configuration, individual programs are usually at most a very few tweaks away from their upstream settings. For Emacs

ASoC updates in 2.6.35

Linux 2.6.35 has been a fairly interesting release from an ASoC point of view, with several notable framework enhancements: * Support for keeping audio paths through the CODEC up during system suspend, primarily intended for use with devices where the Linux system is one of several independent systems running

LPC 2010 - submit your papers now!

As Lennart just posted the Call for Papers for the 2010 Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC)closes this Monday (the 19th of July). The goal of LPC is to get people working on the various projects that make up the key Linux infrastructure where the kernel and application layers meet together

ASoC updates in 2.6.34

Linux 2.6.34 was released today. This contains a fairly substantial batch of ASoC updates, including: * Support for turning CODEC biases off completely when idle, providing power savings for modern devices with ground referenced outputs where this can be done quickly at runtime without pops and clicks. * Support for

Network I/O

I’ve had the opportunity to use a bunch of different smartphone OSs for extended periods recently. They’ve all taken interestingly different tacks on some of the key stuff, normally all within the bounds of reasonable implementation decisions but with very different results and useful to different people. One

ASoC updates in 2.6.33

This has been another fairly quiet release for ASoC.  Aside from the addition of virtual mux support to DAPM and some further preparatory work for multi-CODEC cards the majority of changes have been driver updates, including: * New CODEC drivers for ADS117x, AK4671, TLV320DAC33, TPA6130A2, WM8711 and WM8727. * Support for the

Oh dear...

Subject: zlib_1.2.3.3.dfsg-16_amd64.changes REJECTED Reject Reasons: lib32z1: lintian output: 'embedded-zlib ./usr/lib32/libz.so.1.2.3.3', +automatically rejected package. lib32z1: If you have a good reason, you may override this lintian tag. I guess I should’ve actually reported the

ASoC updates in 2.6.32

Linux 2.6.32 was released overnight. This has been a fairly busy release for ASoC, with changes including: * Redone power sequencing code, giving shorter power sequences which should reduce the effect of any artifacts that exist. * Reporting of power management decisions via debugfs, enabling much easier diagnosis of path

Setting up regulator consumers with dev_name

The Linux kernel regulator API requires that each system sets up the connections between the various voltage and current regulators in the system and the devices they supply, known as consumers within the regulator API. This is done using the struct device for the consumer device as the key for

ASoC updates in 2.6.31

Linux 2.6.31 was released today. This was a fairly busy release for the ASoC subsystem, with updates including: * DAPM supply widget, for automatically managing things like charge pumps and gateable clocks which may be used by more than one widget. * Core support for setting up constraints for symmetric

Let's hope people can make this work

The new PS3 firmware has an iPlayer client with fullscreen support. It’s not quite broadcast SD quality, never mind HD, but that’s a fairly straightforward problem to resolve and sitting using it last night I couldn’t help but think that this is exactly how TV should work.

Chasing patches into Linux

One thing that often seems to cause problems for people who work over many different areas of the Linux kernel is the process of making sure that patches actually get reviewed and applied. Where the relevant subsystem is actively maintained it’s not a problem but that’s not always

In-kernel audio mixing

Ever since PulseAudio started to be deployed by distributions the most common complaint I’ve seen about ALSA is that unlike current versions of OSS it doesn’t provide mixing of audio from multiple applications inside the kernel. Of course what it really comes down to is that people want

Full quoting

There’s a long standing idea tha one should make an effort to trim out text from the original which is not germane to the new content in your reply. This is not just a bandwidth thing, it’s also about decreasing the effort required for the readers to parse

The Corner

I recently finished David Simon and Ed Burns’ book The Corner, a piece of extended reporting about life around a Baltimore drug corner. There’s one thing about the way they write it which really gets me: every so often they’ll have a section explaining the absurdity of the

EIFF 2009

The Edinburgh Film Festival finished a couple of weeks ago. As ever, I went along and saw a bunch of films and stage interviews. The programme had been a little disappointing, mostly due to feeling a little constricted – some things that are usually present were dropped (Mirrorball being the most

Chrome is getting a Linux installer

Looks like Chrome is going to get a Linux installer like people have been asking for. Might be overkill, though.

GMail UI issues

I read a lot of e-mail, mostly for Linux related purposes. Normally people use well behaved e-mail clients and everything is presented in a fairly standard fashion but there’s some that often stick out like a sore thumb. The obvious one is Outlook, which has well known idiosyncracies but

Stuck on hold

Being stuck listening to hold music for an extended period is annoying. What’s even more annoying for me is when the IVR system regularly interrupts the hold music with a voice announcement, often telling you something enormously useful like pointing out that you’re on hold. Music I find

ASoC changes in 2.6.30

Linux 2.6.30 was released today. This has been a fairly quiet release from the ASoC point of view with no substantial API changes for drivers but there’s a few new interfaces which people may find helpful. Highlights include: * A simple wrapper for the standard ALSA jack detection

DAPM power sequence optimisation

I recently implemented some enhancements to DAPM, the part of ASoC which minimizes the power consumption of the embedded audio subsystem by keeping any unused components powered off while avoiding audible artifacts as the power changes. Prior to these changes DAPM used to change the power for each component with

Counterproductive nags

The Mac OS X version of Twitteriffic has a shareware style registration model: the idea is that if you like the software you’re supposed to register it. Apparently one of the benefits you get from this is that when you start the registered version up it will, instead of

etckeeping git

Working with multiple upstream kernel trees and keeping an eye on more my git repositories tend to end up with large numbers of remotes (this laptop has 22, for example). It’s getting to the point where I need something like etckeeper to keep track of them all.

Buffer overflows ahoy

I may be wrong on this but it looks like Microsoft SMTP clients (at least Windows Mail and Outlook) don’t like being sent a large volume of SSL certificate information when opening a TLS connection. They appear to assume that the data they are being sent is malformed and

Upgrading crm114

When upgrading from older crm114 releases and trying to retain your existing configuration it is important to check that all the configuration options that the new version expects to be set have been set. While some will cause errors if they’re omitted others will appear to work but will

Festen

One of my recent DVD acquisitions was Festen, the first of the Dogma 95 films. In spite of not having seen the film since it came out more than a decade ago (though I did re-watch it once then after first seeing it at the EIFF) it’s been one

Getting kernel support

[This is a slight modification of something I posted to the alsa-devel list earlier today.] One of the biggest surprises that people starting to use Linux seem to run into is that you can’t rely on any particular support level from the community – everything is done on a voluntary

If we build it they will come

It looks like the jack reporting API for ALSA which just got merged into the mainline kernel for inclusion in 2.6.28 already has its first user – code from Matthew Ranostay supporting the jack detection in Sigmatel HDA codecs was just queued for merge in the next merge window.

What's the standard Linux audio API?

Lennart Pottering’s post about the sound APIs available for Linux appears to have caused some consternation from people working with the modern out of tree OSS drivers who feel that the current, out of tree, OSS drivers are being unfairly maligned. This rather misses the point of his post.

When was that, then?

More than once I’ve found myself figuring out when I did something by looking through the changelogs of the free software I was contributing to at the time. It’s rarely any good for specific dates but it works amusingly well to an approximation. And is, of course, a

EIFF 2008

It’s been so long since the film festival that I keep on forgetting half the good films I saw there when talking to people about it, so for the record here’s a brief list of my personal highlights: * Encounters at the End of the World: Werner Hertzog goes

Steve Erikson's Malazan books

I used to read a moderate amount of fantasy but apart from this series I’ve mostly drifted away from it, mainly due to an over-familiarity with genre standards and the fact that these are exacerbated by one of the standards being to present everything in the form of lengthy,

The Linux kernel needs a case sensitive filesystem

The Linux kernel source relies on a case sensitive filesystem. If you attempt to get the sources via git this will manifest as an error along the lines of: fatal: Entry 'include/linux/netfilter/xt_CONNMARK.h There are several header files like this the names of which differ

Sunday afternoons

I do most of my reading in the atumn and winter. In the afternoon when the day is still I sit on my sofa, listen to music and read. On those days the light is grey and soft, casting shadows not much darker than the light itself – if you hold

Apple Mail and format=flowed

There’s one thing that the Apple Mail client gets right which I’ve never seen anything else try to do – the way it formats messages. Most mail clients seem to offer plain text and HTML as user selectable options and do exactly what they’re told regardless of the

Touching like spacemen

Rhonda, have you reported the SCons problems you’ve found to either the Debian mantainer or upstream? That’s much more likely to be an effective way of improving things than blogging about them. For what it’s worth the .scons files are a bug in the SCons core AFAICT

Paradoxical Undressing

Paradoxical Undressing is a mostly spoken word show by Throwing Muses/50 Foot Wave front woman Kristin Hersh. A series of ten minute autobiographical fragments covering the time up until about the first Throwing Muses album read over guitar riffs, interspersed with excerpts from songs (mostly hers but a couple

Wii cleaning

My Wii had been feeling a little toasty (even when it had only been sitting in standby) and had had a few glitches recently. A quick blast with the vacuum cleaner and it’s now running a lot cooler in spite of no visible effect when doing so.

Giving can be hard

One thing that charities often seem to like to do is give you discounts on things they sell or events they run. This is a nice way of saying thank you but if you’re trying to give them money it’s not always something you want to take advantage

Paging Doctor Grumpy

Please, folks, when emailing the same question to multiple people or places send a single email with multiple recipients. Don’t send separate mails to each destination – at best you’ll waste people’s time, at worst you’ll irritate them. There are a few exceptions, mostly to do with

The Wire

Recently I’ve been watching the first season of The Wire. I now see exactly why it comes so highly recommended – the best TV I’ve seen in years. The comparison with a novel is spot on, as much as Babylon 5 was but without any of the weak spots

Standard Operating Procedure

One of the best films that I saw at the EIFF this year was Errol Morris’ documentary Standard Operating Procedure about Abu Ghraib. It takes his usual approach: a series of interviews with those involved with limited narration. Here the most prominent interviewees are Lynndie England and Sabrina Harmann, together

Release day churn

The 2.6.27 pull request for ALSA was something of a surprise to read – a large proportion of the changes in there are for ASoC. Not what I was expecting given how many ASoC changes there are still to be merged, but it’s nice to see, especially given

Seeing what's in front of you

One of the things I keep noticing in Q&A sessions for documentary films is that some people seem to have a hard time relating to the people they see on screen as being actual people. Today I watched The Order of Myths at the EIFF. The film is

Wii Fit a month on

As I wrote previously, my first impressions of Wii Fit were good. A month and a half on and I’m still using it – at this point I’m fairly happy to say that it’s not just novelty value that I’m getting from it. Of course, one way

PS3 and Wii Fit

Recently I bought a PS3, partly because there are a few games due out shortly that I’m rather looking forward to (mostly GTA and Civilization Revolutions) but mostly for the Blu-Ray DVD player and the Linux support. I’d been hoping to also use it as, for example, a

Who's in charge?

Apparently the use of the terms describing free software as organic or non-organic depending on the extent to which the piece of software concerned is controlled or driven by a single company wound a few people up, partly due to the strong value judgements that the terms tend to imply.

Mobile internet access

Last weekend I was mostly relying on handheld devices while visiting the wilds of Stockport, trying to decide what Ii want to do when I move off Orange soon (terrible customer service and poor data plans). For this sort of use while travelling my main need is web access and

WebShell

Last night tef pointed me at WebShell. What a jolly good idea that is.

ARM Linux git tree

It’s surprisingly poorly advertised but there is an ARM Linux git tree available from http://ftp.arm.linux.org.uk/pub/armlinux/kernel/git-cur/ and ftp://ftp.arm.linux.org.uk/pub/armlinux/kernel/git-cur/ with currently accepted patches queued up in it. Very handy, especially for offline use.

github pricing

I see that github have recently announced their pricing plans. Looks like they’ll not be having many kernel developers using their “open source” plan – my current working Linux .git is 261Mb but you start having to pay at 100Mb. git may be very space efficient but the kernel is

My Blueberry Nights

I saw Wong Kar Wai’s new film My Blueberry Nights a week or two back. It has had fairly poor reviews, mostly criticising the film for being insubstantial but pretty. This is fair comment but the reviews seem much harsher than is deserved – the film really is gorgeous and

Phones

Due to the dreadful customer service I’ve had from Orange I’m looking for a new mobile contract and therefore a new phone. This is proving a lot harder than it ever has in the past. My must have feature list should be fairly straightforward: * Hands free phone calls

Lightweight branches

Eddy, I think you’re getting too wrapped up in implementation details here. What all these revision control systems are doing is providing branches which are by some reasonable metric cheap to create and cheap to work with – the way they do it differs but to the user visible result

hope: unknown command

Due to the cheap way in which I generate cookies for e-mail messages every so often mutt ends up trying to interpret the second line of two line cookies as commands. From time to time this is what greets me when I fire it up: $ mutt Error in /home/broonie/

It's just not Kansas

One of the biggest “we’re not in Kansas any more” monents I’ve had with Rails was during a discussion of a conference that a lot of people had been to recently. While we were talking about how the important part of conferences is normally nothing to do with

Going, going, gone

Since my bike was stolen last Sunday (which was annoying, especially since it was taken from the stairs just outside my flat) I was without a bike until Wednesday night. This somehow managed to coincide with a couple of early meetings so rather than trust the buses I ended up

I was going to say

I had been going to write something about the rather good Linux support in my new laptop. Turns out there’s no need. I have great timing sometimes.

iPod Touch as a music player

Like the iPhone the iPod Touch has a multi-touch user interface with everything done through dynamic controls on the screen that dominates the device, all dependent on the physical orientation of the device. This is interesting and it does work well when using the device is your main focus, like

dpkg symbol versioning

About a month ago I added symbol version information to the zlib package, allowing dpkg-shlibdeps to calculate more relaxed dependencies for packages using the library. The results have been very satisfying so far – of the 1784 packages depending on zlib1g on amd64: * 532 depend on zlib1g 1:1.2.3.

Security here we come

The IMAP client provided with the version of Symbian on my phone has an interesting way of verifying certificates used for encrypting IMAP connections. As one would expect the client verifies the signatures on the certificate offered by the IMAP server and will prompt the user if it sees signatures

I think this is what you meant

Clearly most of the people working to extend the lifetimes of copyrights and other licenses just aren’t ambitious enough. I wonder if the relevant lobbyists are going to argue for compliance with the Egyptian law once it comes into effect.

N800 OS2008

Last week I upgraded my N800 to OS2008. This is the most visible update yet – thereś a completely different colour scheme and all the menus have been redone to always be at finger rather than stylus size. The latter is very useful, king it much easier to use the device

Patches are a problem

My workflow when developing has always been about managing and (to use a rather combative term) discarding patches. When I’m writing code I’m constantly trying to get things into a state where they are ready to commit. Anything that’s in my working tree but can’t be

EIFF 2007

I’ve not written up anything from the film festival properly as I meant to and at this rate I’ll never get round to it so here goes… It was a good year for fun late night movies, Teeth especially. It’s a very simple idea and they’ve

SCons DESTDIR support

Michael, it’s not make that supports for DESTDIR – it’s the Makefiles that do it, usually as one of the many features picked up from automake. Half the problem SCons has with this is that there’s no similarly pervasive tool set to at least set standards (even people

In Search of a Midnight Kiss

It’s new year’s eve in Los Angeles; Wilson and Vivian have met as a result of a craigslist advert posted earlier in the day. He’s had a terrible year – his attempts to pursue his dreams started to go wrong before he even reached the city – and as

Spam backscatter

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve started getting messages like this from the SourceForge: Your membership in the mailing list whatever has been disabled due to excessive bounces The last bounce received from you was dated 15-Sep-2007. It’s true – the systems that handle my mail do generate

How many Debian users?

Some people at DebConf 7 were (like Mario) wondering how many users Debian has. They realised that while we have a distributed mirror network we do have all installed systems use security.debian.org by default and we do have control over that. Since apt will only download files when

Timing is everything

Usually seeing a film at the film festival means seeing it in the most favorable circumstances – all the technical stuff will usually be done well, sometimes the filmmakers will often be there to talk about the film and there is usually a large, appreciative audience which helps the atmosphere no

EIFF 2007

Some reviews I’ve twittered of things I’ve seen appear below (I may update). It’s not txt speak but it’s very noticeable how hard I’m finding it to write these quickly in the small space Twitter gives you. I’m a Cyborg But That’s OK:

The dread Y2006 problem

Can anyone spot the problem with having the year the user wants to work with be input using a form like element this: <select name="Year" size=1> in a calendaring application? I knew that the software in question was widely noted for its low quality

Tell No One

I saw Tell No One a week or so ago. It a very good film – a nice thriller, very well put together. I recommend it. That’s not the thing that makes me happiest about the film, though. The thing that makes me happiest is that two of the characters

Uses for an N800

I’ve found two major uses for my N800: * Web browsing while watching TV. Seriously. Being able to check up on questionable facts or look up that actor you half recognized on the IMDB without moving or having something large enough to be noticeable sitting there really does make a

Debian giving back

Rumors reach me that people from the Forest Cafe next to the night venue are so impressed with what has been done with the organ in the night venue that they’re planning to incorporate some organ music into some of their performances.

Not so bad...

It’s not unknown for people maintaining Debian packages via sponsorship to become frustrated with the process sometimes – a feeling sometimes shared by sponsors who find that the person they’re just nodding through packages. This sort of frustration with process gets pretty depressing at times so it’s a

ATI graphics drivers

While the announcement from ATI about their intention to provide better support for Linux is certainly welcome it’s not clear what exactly they intend to do. They don’t appear to have actually said that they will release their drivers. This could actually be a really good thing – for

The law is...

Sadly, the attempts to control distribution of those numbers aren’t being done using copyright but are instead being done using the DMCA. Exactly what that law was intended for. Update: Just to emphasise, if you want to complain about something then the first place to start is with the

One step forward...

It depresses me to see people thinking that the way to get changes affecting many packages done in Debian might be via general resolution or that a number of people seem to feel that getting something accepted into policy is a first step in getting anything big done. Debian may

Polling for changes

Gustavo’s advice to poll the Ubuntu patch archive for useful changes doesn’t have to be restricted to Ubuntu – for a long time I’ve regularly trawled at least the Red Hat/Fedora and SuSE packages for useful changes. The utility of doing this does vary with the package

NIS and Network Manager in Debian etch

The version of NIS to be shipped with Debian 4.0 has support for Network Manager in ypbind, the program responsible for ensuring that NIS client systems can access a NIS server. Unfortunately Network Manager is targeted at client systems with dynamically assigned addresses and does not support some common

In plain sight

Even worse than the usual multipart/alternative messages with a contentless text/plain part are messages like that when there quite clearly is a text/plain version of the message (for example, as another option when you sign up for a list) but it’s not been included and this

Actually...

Holger, I hate to break it to you but there’s prior art for that wheel patent.

Ecartis SMTP client

As Steve found Ecartis isn’t terribly informative about problems it encounters injecting mail via SMTP: 2006-08-14 21:40:25 1GCk6m-0006ZH-Vu == |/usr/lib/ecartis/ecartis -s xen-tools-commits R=vdom_aliases T=address_pipe defer (0): Child process of address_pipe transport returned 75 (could mean temporary error) from command: /usr/

Leafnode 2 packages for Debian

Packages of the Leafnode 2 alpha releases are now avaliable for use with unstable (and probably testing most of the time) in the experimental archive. To install them add lines for experimental to your apt sources: deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ experimental main deb-src http://ftp.debian.org/debian/

Postfix SMTP rejection

Russel, Postfix does support SMTP time rejection using either a SMTP based mechanism Postfix provides or Sendmail Milters. It’s particularly nice to see the Milter support in there – the amount of wheel reinvention with things like antispam support always depressed me.

Widescreen is all in the mind

The reason I can get more on a 16:9 screen is that I tend to size windows with their heights proportional to screen height with and widths proportional to the vertical size of the window (I very rarely run anything full screen). This means that for me extra width

Widescreen

Erich blogged that most TV these days is still shot in 4:3 rather than 16:9. At least in the English speaking world this is normally the case, especially for things intended for export. 4:3 would be a deliberate choice rather than the path of least resistance. TV

Folding

I tend not to mind folding itself overmuch myself: personally, I don’t find it much different to linking to an article published elsewhere. What I do find causes me problems is where the content of feeds doesn’t stand by itself, making the text that appears in the aggregator

zlib generating valgrind warnings

Mike assumes that zlib is valgrind clean. In actual fact there are a number of cases where loop unrolling in the zlib library causes the mentioned “Conditional jump or move depends on uninitialised value(s)” warnings. These are safe since the results of the comparison are subsequently ignored but obviously

Natsemi oversized packet lockup

If you’re having trouble with a natsemi ethernet controller locking up in Linux after complaining about oversized ethernet frames like this: eth0: Oversized(?) Ethernet frame spanned multiple buffers, entry 0x00ba8b status 0xe0000bd5. then this patch (or a kernel version which includes it; 2.6.16 or later should) may

Watches and things

Like Brett I found my watch was getting on my nerves when using a laptop. I came up with a different solution: rather than just remove my watch sometimes I noted that I habitually carry at least two devices which have clocks and stopped wearing a watch at all. Solved

Fix for smart card startup races

The rules mentioned in my last post to avoid race conditions by handling the entire setup of USB smart card readers within udev and /dev: SUBSYSTEM=="usb_device", SYSFS{idVendor}=="04e6", SYSFS{idProduct}=="e003", GROUP="scard", MODE="0664" SUBSYSTEM=="

Bugs is bugs is bugs

Ingo, I fear that you are overstating the situation m68k is now in. Non release critical bugs do tend to get fixed – if they didn’t there would scarcely be any point in having them in the BTS at all. My guess would be that any difference will be felt

Smart card readers at startup

Turns out that as documented in Debian bug 336297 it turns out that there is a problem with using a script invoked by udev to modify permissions on USB entries in /proc (at the time I wrote that post it happened to work due to timing issues). An alternative solution

Debconf 07

Lars, it’s probably worth pointing out that most of the people who are promoting a Debconf in Edinburgh are actually from various places in England. Some of them do appear to be listed on the Volunteers wanted page (and many of the remaining slots look like they mostly need

Natsemi NAPI patch

I’ve just sent off a patch implemeting NAPI support for the natsemi driver in Linux, origianlly based on one by Harald Welte. For those that don’t know, NAPI provides an API allowing Linux network drivers to use generic interrupt mitigation and work throttling capabilities provided by the kernel,

Upgrading sarge to unstable

When using sarge install media to bootstrap an i386 you want to wind up running unstable it’s worth remembering to install with linux26 rather than the default 2.4 kernel. None of the initrd construction methods appear to cope terribly well when generating a ramdisk for 2.6.14

SAUCE is the norm

It’s rather depressing to realise that most of the features of SAUCE that people used to complain about are now standard features of mail servers. The greylisting algorithm it uses is still somewhat more complex and aggressive than most but I’m not convinced that the extra things it

Smart card readers with udev

Recently Debian unstable finally dropped support for the old hotplug system in favour of udev. This has mostly worked fine and been an improvement, especially for my Cube which had been creaking under the strain of processing the lists of supported devices during startup. That now boots approximately twice as

PMAPPROC_CALLIT and access control

ONC RPC has many wondeful features, one of them being that it is that it is possible to do a broadcast RPC call even though services are typically assigned ports dynamically. This is implemented by having the portmapper (the program that registers all the ONC RPC services running on the

And all the clocks in all the world may this once just skip a beat

So, I now have a LVM of my own with Bytemark and most of the things I use (including this) moved off Project Colo. The whole process was shockingly painless, even with a change of MTA to Exim (since everyone seems to be using it and the callout facilities for

TenDRA

I’m just building a new upload of TenDRA. It’s been almost three years since the last upload was made – in that time the number of current bugs has more than doubled. I wonder if this trend will continue? Of course, this leads me to discover that it doesn’

Debconf keysigning

Thanks to Daniel Silverstone’s keysigning scripts I’ve finally completed the keysigning from Debconf 5. Highly recommended for bulk keysignings and for keeping your signatures up to date with new UIDs on keys you’ve already signed. (Although if you are going to use the script you might want

More fun with standards

Going to the other extreme of helpfulness, some standards authors decided that it was useful to explain that Not defined means that this primative is not defined How helpful.

Standards are fun

One of the more helpful things I’ve seen included in a standard: These code points may be useful for… Of course, what those who produced the standard actually meant to say was more like: These code points may look like they might be useful for… but since we’ve

First post

There really ought to be at least one post here, so… Perhaps I will use this for something. From time to time I do have an urge to write something for the benefit of Planet Debian or so but I’ve not really anywhere to put such things except Advogato