Posted by Diego "Flameeyes" Pettenò
Sun, 30 Mar 2008 06:37:00 GMT
Don’t worry, to Ciaran’s disappointment I didn’t fell out of the face of the Earth just yet. Although I’m taking a lower profile in the last few days, there is no doubt I’ll soon be back full-fledged!
What I’m taking care of right now is mostly to fix my house’s cabling. It seems like all the light switches in the house are connected to the return line rather than to the phase line, so they aren’t really good for my idea of moving to LEDs as soon as they are feasible. Also, I’ve been replacing some 20 years old power sockets with some decent and more recent design (for who’s interested, I’m using Vimar Idea everywhere inside the house, I haven’t yet chosen the series to use for the ones outside, but they also need to be replaced).
Also, not sure if you seen it, but I’ve got an article published on LWN! I have to say this is exciting like the first day of school. I hope I’ll be able to write something more after this. Thanks to those users who suggested me to try, and to Donnie who actually convinced me :)
My current working setup… temporary of course!
As I said, I’m limited at the laptop right now, which not only limits my action in Gentoo, but also makes it harder for me to write on the blog, as it keeps me from leaving a Konqueror window open with my current draft if I’m still half-thinking of something. I was just able two days ago to find a way to share data between my BootCamp Windows XP installation and my Parallels one, by using iSCIS on Enterprise. Trying to get Parallels to ccess the external hard drive in a stable fashion was probably asking too much. I have to say iSCSI looks seriously cool over Gigabit.
For the time being, I could suggest you to try out FriendFeed, you’ll find me as Flameeyes there. My reason for saying this is that I’m using Google Reader to keep myself updated on Planets and generic blogs, and I started “sharing” interesting posts that I would like to write about once Enterprise is back online with its screens. You’ll also see the photos I upload on flickr (if only it had Anobii support…)
Oh and I’ve almost finished Ratchet and Clank: Tools of Destruction in Challenge mode (that is, the second time you play it, with extra weapons and tougher enemies). I suppose I should be buying Devil May Cry 4 sooner than expected. Playing some games the night when I’m just too tired to work but I don’t feel like reading is something quite relaxing indeed, I was just not used to that.
Posted in Gentoo, Personal, English | Tags BootCamp, Cabling, Flickr, FriendFeed, Games, iSCSI, LED, LWN, OSX, Parallels, PS3, XP | 1 comment
Posted by Diego "Flameeyes" Pettenò
Thu, 27 Mar 2008 02:03:00 GMT
I hope Joshua won’t get mad at me, but I have to write about this, maybe it will act as a good way to get the mistake noticed.
I’m afraid this year’s SoC is going to follow the path that the previous two instances took already. What makes me afraid of this is that there is little to no coordination between parts.
First off, the announcement for SoC was pretty late, GMN didn’t talk about that at all, which is already a negative bonus. Considering the short timeframe that applicants have to submit their ideas, it isn’t a very nice idea at all. For what it’s worth, it wasn’t even listed in the LWN announcements.
The official SoC ideas page got some new additions, but they came pretty late, not soon enough to give time to the students to start thinking of what to do, and maybe discussing it with the contacts.
There is also a shortage of mentors. I’m afraid this had to be foreseen, there is little to no incentive for mentors to actually do their work, there is little project spirit around lately, and I do understand it. Finding a way to actually get more mentors next year is not going to be an easy thing to solve, so I think we should start looking into that already.
And even with the very few mentors that are around, I can’t see much coordination. I’m not on IRC at the moment as I’m from the laptop, but I got Jabber and my mail client open, neither gave me any information about being accepted as a mentor or about the URL of the mentor’s dashboard to see the applications!
I don’t see any soc@gentoo.org alias or anything like that, and that is also a bad thing: I got a few users contacting me for some ideas, because I actually blog (and care) about Summer of Code. I had to refer them to other developers because I can’t handle them, not my area, or just not something I’d feel comfortable to mentor. Having a single alias that users could write to would allow all the developers interested in SoC to answer as they see fit. Yeah sure there is the mailing list, but you can guess that most people wouldn’t like to make their application’s details public, after all, they are not public even after SoC closes.
The deadlines, short as they are, were not posted on the recently created Gentoo Calendar (at Google of course); while just recently born, it would be a nice addition for this kind of stuff.
Up to now I listed the problems that should have been avoided by the SoC team itself (note to self: try to cut away more time next year so you can be part of the team and make the changes), but the biggest problem of all I wanted to leave last.
I think that both me and Donnie tried to make this point before, but Gentoo developers should really try to blog more. In today’s status of Free Software, blogs are often used to share and bounce around ideas, and to make projects and subprojects more advertised. Try to compare Planet Gnome with Planet Gentoo, and let me know.
In particular, there is just no material on Summer of Code in Planet Gentoo! Just me, Luca and Joshua blogged about it, as far as I can see. I’ve been trying Google Reader in the past weeks (which turned out to be quite good now that I don’t have my Akregator at hand), and I’ve started tagging all the posts I seen (not even read fully!) who wrote about Summer of Code. The result is right now 45 items, and please be known that I started on March 19th, with the exception of one post I was interested in and decided to look up afterward. The vast majority of the posts come from Planet Gnome, which I named before, but there are many posts from Planet KDE too.
I’m sure there are way more posts about Summer of Code around, I just probably don’t follow a lot of blogs of other projects involved, but the fact that Gentoo is not so much on that list is not something I like.
This entry will add to the list, though I’m not happy with this. I really really really hope next year we can avoid these mistakes.. at least I can say I tried though.
Posted in Gentoo, English | Tags Blogging, Google, Mistakes, SoC, SummerOfCode | 4 comments
Posted by Diego "Flameeyes" Pettenò
Wed, 26 Mar 2008 01:41:00 GMT
We’re all used to software upgrades. Gentoo users has to update their tree daily and they’ll probably find something new, unless they are running a full stable system. Windows users have to upgrade their stuff regularly, too, and Mac users the same (almost, having all three operating systems in my office at the moment shows me that Windows update are the most painful, as they require a lot more restarts, and they appear gradually, like after I installed Nokia’s software, Windows Update decided to show me some more upgrades from 2006 and early 2007).
Nowadays a lot of “hardware” that we used to consider absolutely unconcerned with the idea of upgrades started to need those upgrades too, like they were jealous of computers and their operating systems that can upgrade. Or more likely because they started to move from being microcontrollers to full-fledged minicomputers.
So nowadays you update the firmware of your cellphones: Sunday I updated my brother-in-law’s Nokia E61i to the last version of the firmware, that solved a few problems it had. I had to update the firmware of my E61 last year, to fix a SIP connection problem, and to see if that helped my problem of self signed certificates (it didn’t). My VoIP phone also needed three upgrades since I bought it, the first right out of the box, and two later on. My router has had three upgrades (and its software still sucks, I keep it only because it has a nice hardware capable to connect me to the network with as much noise as I have here, which is something that I was unable to find from any other router).
Don’t even try to look at the MacBookPro! It required firmware upgrades to the machine itself, to the_keyboard_, the optical drive, and twice already to the battery! Still in Apple’s house, the Airport Express takes care of its upgrades on its own luckily, while the AppleTV would be quite easy to upgrade if only… let’s not get there now though, ok?
BIOS upgrades on workstation start to be quite common, especially to fix processors’ issues and to support new processors. And speaking of processors, microcode updates are also quite common nowadays, which is something nobody would have guessed when we were still stuck with 80486.
GPS navigation systems have obvious need to update their firmware and their maps but it starts to be ridiculous for me that I, although not owning any, have to keep three of them updated!
I was impressed by the way PSP updates its firmware by the way, just try to play a newer game and boom! it asks you to upgrade the firmware from the UMD itself. Nice way to force people not to limit themselves to older crackable firmwares, indeed.
And now this came to the area from which my considerations started to write this blog: the PlayStation 3 had a firmware upgrade today. A quite long one because I was messing with the network settings at the time and didn’t consider it would have restarted from the beginning to download the new firmware. The funny thing is that i bought it less than two weeks ago, and this is already the second firmware upgrade (the first was out of the box). Slick, uh?
Add to that the new router I’ve made a friend of mine buy today (his old router was a crappy 11b one, a very bad one in many aspects, and he wanted something nice and working): it needed a firmware upgrade right away or it was unable to forward ports through NAT. Ridiculous!
And in all this, I still haven’t been able to play with my DVD writer’s firmware .
I just wonder how much time I’ll have to spend upgrading and upgrading and upgrading.
Posted in Personal, English | Tags apple, Cellphones, DVD, Firmware, MacBookPro, Nokia, PlayStation3, Sony, upgrades, Windows | 2 comments
Posted by Diego "Flameeyes" Pettenò
Mon, 24 Mar 2008 21:47:00 GMT
I said before that for my current job I’m using libxml2, as it has a nicer interface than the ATL interface to MSXML, and it is licensed under a quite permissive license, which allows me to use it for proprietary software (long story).
Unfortunately, its documentation leaves a lot to desire. The API documentation really only provides a very shallow description of the parameters, and the example only cover some quite simple cases, which happens to barely cover my use of libxml2.
For instance, I’m unable to find how I’m supposed to validate a given XML “document” (loaded from a string) against a DTD that is not explicitly written with the document (this is for copy-paste of data, for what it’s worth). Right now I’m just doing the validation through assertions and exceptions, but I’d find it better for me if I could leave the validation directly to libxml2.
You know my motto “delegate everything to other libraries”, no? :) The less tasks I have to code specifically for, the less code I can make mistakes on! Of course this expects that the libraries behave just like I want them to.
So, as the documentation is lacking, I’ll try to come up with some improvements to it. I’ll probably post a few more blogs in the next weeks about it, trying to cover for instance this particular need of mine, and others. I should also probably contact upstream about it.
Posted in English | Tags API, Documentation, libxml2, XML | 1 comment
Posted by Diego "Flameeyes" Pettenò
Mon, 24 Mar 2008 14:01:00 GMT
Following Joshua and Christian here comes the photo of what was my development setup :)
Joshua you were very evil to start this while I’m in the middle of restructuring my office :) As for what I’m using right now, it is very similar to what I posted already although there is a stair in the middle of the room, and raw cables all around.
This was my setup, although I’m in the middle of changing it.
There actually was another very messy desk on the right, which is the one I’m using now. The external hard disk I use mostly for the laptop although it’s a nice way to backup stuff for the workstation too if I need to.
I’m a huge fan of the new aluminum keyboards from Apple, they are one of the best kind of keyboards I tried in the past few years. I’m now using two of them, one for the laptop and one for workstation (although the photo only shows one).
On the hidden desk there were a scanner (Espon Perfection 2580) and an Onkyo A/V Receiver which is the central part of my sudio subsystem :) I really should find a way to put the speakers on the ceiling when I’m done with the new furniture, though, as I’m not sure if I’ll have enough space (I’m going to try keeping just one desk). I’m afraid they aren’t standard though :/
Posted in Gentoo, Personal, English | Tags Memes, Office, Photos, Setups | 3 comments
Posted by Diego "Flameeyes" Pettenò
Sun, 23 Mar 2008 23:52:00 GMT
So, at the pace I’m going (I passed the infamous suspended level two days ago, without the help of my sister), I’m afraid I’ll be completing Ratchet and Clank before the end of April. So I’m looking for other games to play in the next months.
It’s interesting how the only way for me to be quite productive in my work is to stop and play games. I suppose this is what a stress relieve should be, rather than trying to relax by writing a new software.
Anyway, what really baffles me is the price for PS3 titles in Italy, especially when I compare it with Amazon’s prices (yes I know Amazon is even more evil, but allow me to be pragmatic on this, I’ll show you why…).
I’ll take two titles I’m actually looking forward to buy soonish: Unreal Tournament 3 and Devil May Cry 4. Of the latter I’ve played a demo and it looks seriously cool (and Mark confirmed it beforehand too), of the first I don’t need one, UT was one of my favourite games, and it is a very nice way to relieve anger, rather than simple stress.
They would cost me respectively €75.99 and €79.99. A lot, which would mean I wouldn’t buy either for a couple of months and _maybe_buy one of them in the summer. Or look for a second hand copy of them.
Straight from “my wishlist’:http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/registry/265AZ8JI6XHFA, instead, the above titles cost £29.98 and £24.96, which standing from Google’s conversion are €38.52 and €32.07. This is almost half and less than half the price in Italy! It’s also subverted the pricing, as DMC4 costs less than UT3.
The same pricing difference seem to apply to all games. It’s a huge difference, and you can’t simply explain it as the Amazon’s copies not being translated: I’d expect all games to be released in a multi-language disk; and I see similar difference on some Nintendo DS titles I know are multilingual (Yu-Gi-Oh games). I sincerely hope I read it right on most sites that PS3 games are either not region-locked or simply region-locked with DVD-style regions, which would mean Italy and UK being on the same Region, as that would really save me a huge amount of money, to have the same playing material.
On a totally unrelated (for this blog post, but much more related to this blog) note, Tuesday I ‘ll go shopping for the cables, and for a WiFi card. I’m not sure what I’ll pick up, I’ll see if I can find some very very cheap card that could be expected to work in Linux. If it works I’ll have my Gentoo box online Tuesday night, so I’ll be hacking (even though I’d be working from the laptop as console), you’ll have to wait me for my return possibly at the end of the week, when the “new” office will be up and running. I’d rather not start moving this way the router and all the network stuff before moving in the furniture, but I can bring here enterprise’s case and the UPS for the time being.
Ah, and somehow Parallels messed up Bootcamp’s partition on my Mac, so I’ll have to recover it. Luckily booting bootcamp directly works fine so I don’t have to waste time for my job to continue. Good thing I did change the setting of that two weeks ago. I’m also using a partition on the external drive so I don’t waste too much of my internal disk’s space for Windows…
Posted in Gentoo, Personal, English | Tags Amazon, Games, PlayStation3, Prices, PS3RatchetAndClank | 5 comments
Posted by Diego "Flameeyes" Pettenò
Sat, 22 Mar 2008 18:24:00 GMT
My office, yesterday, emptied of computer parts as much as possible
If you thought that the egyptian Curse of the Pharaoh was bad enough, you should really try to fix the cabling of my house. I wrote about the cabling before. I said that to cable two outlets that are, in sight, about at 3 metres distance, I had to use more than 5 metres of cable.
Well, this time to connect two boxes that are in the middle of two connected walls in a 4×3 metres room, I had to use, again, almost five metres of cable. Math would tell me I’d need 3.5 metres. And similarly, between a box and an outlet that are in line, I need almost twice the cable as I’d need to pass them outside the tubes..
It also turned out that two of the sockets were broken. And that actually scares me as the plastic was cracked open, which ain’t good at all, especially considering I bought these not six years ago, and wired them myself, so I’m pretty sure they work. Add to that the “discovery” that one of the universal sockets I used in the office is white… while all the rest of the outlets are dark grey with black cover.
Up to now it was covered by one of the desks so it didn’t matter, but it will matter soon as none of the sockets will be covered when the new furniture is in. Luckily, I know where I can make use of the white socket (downstair in the entrance), so I just have to replace it. This brings the list of stuff to buy up to two simple sockets and one universal socket, Vimar Idea, dark grey. It’s about €20 just for those. But it’s not done yet!
I also found out that the 2.5mm cable, which I use to cable outlets, is barely enough to cable the outlet near the light switch, and that all the cables used in this room are 0.75mm.
And it gets worse, the light switch itself was, again, wired on the return of the fixture, rather than on the phase. If I used LED lights here I would have had the same problem I had before in my bedroom which I solved by putting the switch on the phase. So I decided to fix that too, getting rid of the two cables that were there “extra” (there were two-way switches in this room a long time ago). I also removed the buzzer caables, that were dead cables now, as I removed that too.
The result is quite nice up to now, a lot less cable inside the wall, although I’ll have to bring three new cables around for the outlets. Ah yeah I didn’t say that yet. All the outlets were connected to the phase of the light, with the exception of the one by the door. The reason for this is probably because the tube in the wall was almost full already, and the “technicians” who prepared the cabling the first time found it easier to re-use that. Lovely, isn’t it?
I also removed the antenna cable. We’re switching to sat here, and I found that I never watch anything on my office anymore – I stopped using it as a living room myself, if I want to watch TV or DVDs I go to my bedroom where the TV (and the PS3 ;) ) is.
Anyway, at least I was able to connect the light with a 1mm cable (which should be enough considering I’m not going to use either incandescent or halogen light here), without two-way switches, and making sure that the lights phase is only used for the light. To power up the laptop and the hard-disk (where the music is, as well as my job’s data), I simply took a longer cable to connect to my mother’s bedroom’s socket.
I’ll probably proceed this way until next week, when I can finally go to the shop to buy the parts I need: the three sockets, some 30 metres of 1.5mm wire (10 metres I finished in three years and I didn’t do that much work lately!) and some insulators to wire together the cables (not sure how they are called in English; I should probably learn how all these terms are translated, as it might really make a difference to me).
Posted in Personal, English | Tags Cabling, Electrician, Home, Outlets, Vimar | no comments
Posted by Diego "Flameeyes" Pettenò
Fri, 21 Mar 2008 21:48:00 GMT
We almost all are well comfortable with the idea of a light dimmer, it’s a simple device that usually changes a resistor in series with the an incandescent or halogen lamp to allow reducing or increasing the light that it makes. It ha a very nice effect when you want to have a more softer tone of light in a room, for instance a bedroom.
There is one huge problem with light dimmers though: they work only with lamps that reduce their light depending on the current that passes through them. It does not work well with LEDs (it works up to a point, if my electronics skills tell me good, but it’s not very efficient anyway), and does not work at all with fluorescent lights.
So what is a digital dimmer? Well, it’s not a dimmer at all, at least the one I’m thinking about ;)
You can easily achieve a softer light tone without using actual dimmers and incandescent lights, by using different lamps with different light bulbs. I wrote about this before, I think, saying that I prefer using LED lights in bedroom as they give a softer tone to the light, which is perfect to read, or play the PS3, without getting the eyes tired. Unfortunately, it ’s not very good to clean when there is no light coming from outside.
My solution to this would be to replace the ceiling light with a different one, with, say, five Edison connectors, wired 3/2 with two different switches. I’m just looking around for what I want to use. The idea is then to put two CFLs on one switch, and the tree LED lights on the other: when I need to clean up the room, I could just light up the CFLs and be done with it.
A similar thing I want to do in my office, which is now empty to be cleaned up and refurnished. Instead of changing the light support there, which is quite nice for me and quite nice to light the room, I want to use different lamps entirely.
You can already see in the photo on the right that I have a desklamp on the desk (well, I had, the desk is now closed in half waiting to be replaced too), with a LED bulb that I use when I’m working the night and I don’t want to stay awake too much. It gives me light reduced to the area around the monitors and the keyboard. I used to have a CFL on that lamp, and it made a nice halfway to light most of the room, with a softer tone. As I can’t replace the bulb every time I need a different kind of light, I thought of a different solution for the problem.
I have an old standing lamp, very nice design, let me just ignore for a second the pink glass on it, but it’s not so bad to have around. Unfortunately, it is designed to use halogen lights, and it hasn’t been used for many years now because of that. The bulb in it is a 300W halogen light, so you can think of how bad it is. I’m thinking of removing the dimmer it has, replacing it with a big pushbutton (designed to be pressed with your foot), and replace the circuitry so that I can put a fluorescent light in it. I’ve seen kit with all the circuitry needed at a local shop, it shouldn’t be too difficult to adapt to put it in the lamp.
When I’l have analysed the structure of the lamp and I’m tearing it down to replace the circuitry I’ll see to blog about that, maybe with some photos, it might be useful to others :)
Posted in English | Tags Ecology, Green, Halogen, Lamps, LEDs | 1 comment
Posted by Diego "Flameeyes" Pettenò
Fri, 21 Mar 2008 15:05:00 GMT
And once again I have to ask the lazyweb for some help. This time is to decide what hardware to buy, for a wireless PCI card.
I’m cleaning up my office as I write, I removed almost everything from the room, I just have some stuff on the floor to pick up, and as a result I’ll just have the two desks in it. Then it will be time to re-cable it entirely, as I did for my bedroom last september, and finally to put some new furniture in it (not exactly new because they are things that were downstair in the living room before, but new for my office at least).
Right now I only have here my laptop (as I have work’s stuff on it), the external harddisk for the laptop, where most of the data is, the old UPS as it’s slimmer and the harddisk’s PSU does not care about the waveform, and the IP phone, to receive calls, at least for what concerns computer stuff. I removed Enterprise this morning, together with its three monitors, the AV receiver and the bigger UPS.
One thing that this cleanup made me realise is that I only have one box here that is connected to the wired network segment. I gave Prakesh back to the friend who lent it to me for a while, while Farragut and Klothos are turned down for now in my mother’s bedroom, the IP phone is using DECT, while the base connected to the network is downstair together with the ADSL router. Why should I use a Linksys router to connect that? Okay it’s way easier to get network from rescue CDs, but it’s a waste of power at a minimum, as it has its own PSU which is likely to waste energy in heat. Additionally, it’s two more cables in an already messy office.
So I’m pondering adding a PCI wifi card, either to Enterprise or to the new box I’m going to buy as soon as I’m paid. The problem is to find a good card, very well compatible with Linux (Gentoo in particular, but I suppos that is not a problem, at the worst I’ll be working on adding support for it), 802.11n if at all possible, but not requested. I don’t have 802.11n network here, but I have at least two devices that are compatible with that (the MacBook Pro and the AppleTV), and I’d suspect more stuff to come).
If anybody has a suggestion, it would be very kind of you to share it with me :)
Posted in Personal, English | Tags Hardware, Lazyweb, WiFi | 4 comments
Posted by Diego "Flameeyes" Pettenò
Fri, 21 Mar 2008 10:00:00 GMT
Tonight I finally decided to stop receiving papermail stuff from Maxim. They already make their material (design guides, and the “Engineering Journal”) available online in PDF, but they haven’t added (yet) an RSS feed to know when they are updated. They have an e-mail option, but I’d rather avoid using that as it’s tremendously boring, for me, to receive more stuff in m mailbox.
Now that I’m using specto (I should add it to Portage by the way), I can just monitor the pages for changes and download the new PDFs as they are released. So I disabled the postal mail option. This also saves me from having to find space for the new releases. Unfortunately I’m not yet sure what to do with all these printed copies, as I don’t need them anymore (I rarely used them anyway, even though they came handy more than a couple of times). I tried asking a friend of mine, but he has less space than I do for them. I’ll probably trash them out to be recycled.
This is of course the step forward. The problem comes with the step backward.
As I said before I bought a PlayStation 3. One nice thing is that it comes with a preset Folding@Home client. I tried that to make sure that the place where I put the PS3 wasn’t going to make it overheat too much. Then I started to wonder. The research that Folding@Home is supposed to help is probably the kind of research that might just as well help me and my health problems. I use the PS3 during the late evening/early night, and I turn it down during the night, but since I wake up till I go to play some game, it would stay there sleeping. Why shouldn’t I run Folding@Home?
The reason why I shouldn’t is that it uses a lot of power to do that, about 280W, which a) is a cost b) is environmentally unfriendly. Now I’m debating with myself if it’s worth it. And if it’s worth to run Folding@Home on my workstation too. It’s not wasted power, as it’s employed for a worthy cause, but is it worthy enough not to consider this a step backward?
I’ll have to sleep quite a bit on this.
Posted in Personal, English | Tags Advertisement, Electronic, Folding, Home, Maxim, PlayStation3 | 1 comment
