Author: Andrew van der Stock

  • Advogato – 20 July 2000

    20 Jul 2000 »

    Went to the Compaq GS series launch today. Big Iron. mmmm. 1-32 processors today, 1-48 processors soon. Kicks ass.
    Made contact with Compaq Australia to try and get some eval kit to test multiple bus alpha boxes.

    life

    Watching Springer. A guy just grotted a nose booger on the show – without a hanky or anything. The audience don’t like him. Of course, he’s sleeping with his girlfriend’s roomy and some guy. Lots of bare breasts and beatings tonight too.

    What a classy show. I love it. BLEEEEEP.

  • Advogato – 18 July 2000

    18 Jul 2000 »

    Received some hate mail from lkml weenies after another of my semi-infamous I18N outbursts. What’s the problem with I18N that sends certain types scurrying for the lowest form of flamage?
    To all those who sent me hate mail: FUCK YOU and grow up.

    I’d like to see you grapple with your ASCII-only code and blinkered mindset if you spoke and wrote only Hindi or Arabic.

    The fans are still annoyingly loud.

  • Advogato 17 July 2000

    17 Jul 2000 »

    This room is like being next to a small jet engine. Does anyone have a supply of ATX DC connectors and a 5 or 8 port 48 VDC output somewhere in Australia? I’m sick of all the damn fans. I have (count em!) 12 fans in four active PC’s. CPU fans, case fans. Back end fans because the case fans suck and cause the dang thing to overheat.

    I need quiet fans, ones with low friction and noise bearings or preferably no fans. Fans fans fans ARRRRRGH

    I need to lie down.

  • Advogato – 15 July 2000

    15 Jul 2000 »

    After a typical day of waiting for delivery people (“It’ll be there between 7 am and midday” – the lady confirming my delivery the night before), my shiny new Sony Wega 68 cm TV arrived – at 1.10 pm. This delayed breakfast somewhat 🙁 We eventually got our eggs benedict avec salmon, mushies and tomato about 1.45 pm.
    We watched the Matrix, of course (it’s my reference DVD), and then LA Confidential as a friend hadn’t seen it before. After dinner at Kentucky Fried Dog, we hired two movies, The Right Stuff (it’s sooo long), and US Marshalls (oldie but a goodie).

    Hackery

    I have a funny feeling that Linux’s “generals” do not use non-Intel platforms. They pumped out 2.4.0-test4 without testing on alpha again, even though there was a patch to fix the problem. I’ll chase it down again.

    The 60’s show

    I’m watching my new shiny TV set, and there’s a song by “Titan” or some similar bogus name, that could be straight out of the late 60’s or early 70’s. Don’t they realise that this time period, both musically and fashion wise sucked big time? The band even went to the ends of going low-tech and compressing the sound and it feels mono to me. What’s wrong with the idea of Saturday night being left to modern* techno/dance music?

    * if it’s more than two weeks old, it’s passe.

  • Advogato – 13 July 2000

    13 Jul 2000 »

    Bryce: please consider ISA and PCI pcmcia bridges for the Alpha. I have a ISA pcmcia bridge and if I can get my wavelan card working under the Alpha, that’d be great.
    Geeking from the garden is the best!

    Apparently the poll.h breakage was easily fixed by someone with a clue about osf_sys.c. After reading the real fix, it was “why didn’t I think of that?” with the immediate answer of “it was 1.30 am in the morning after being up for over 18 hours”.

    13 Jul 2000 »

    Working on being a temporary kernel hacker. Somebody ripped stuff out of poll.h without doing a full grep against the entire tree. A few compiles later, and my alpha is still not running 2.4.0-test4-pre6. Dunno. Might try a kernel without reiserfs support to see how that flies.
    Spent a bit of time with Sun this morning whilst they went through their storage offerings. I want a FCAL card so I can beg borrow or steal a A3500 or A5200 or a T3 and make it work with reiserfs on my Alpha.

    It’s 1.40 am and time for bed.

  • Advogato – 11 July 2000

    11 Jul 2000 »

    (just a quickie)
    Sergeant:

    If I had Mr Brain engaged, and seen that Japanese (and the other locales) was selected as a package choice rather than just install everything in sight, it still wouldn’t have been a problem. I love doing that stuff and seeing how close I18N efforts have been. To a dedicated unilingualist, this might have been a re-install showstopper, but to me, it’s a great way to spend an afternoon. I’d like to see all of Linux kernel and all the packages that make up your typical distro to be translated to as many languages as possible.

    I have all available languages configured on my Windows 2000 laptop, and I install them when I can on my Linux installs. I like to see what a native speaker will see when I view native language web sites and e-mail. I can’t read or write them, but it’s pretty hoopy.

    Continuing my G4 story, I stumbled across the correct “fix” by happy co-incidence. I changed the locale back to C or something like that in a config file in /etc somewhere, and lo and behold, the next “su -” worked just fine. This was about a week ago, so no problems since then. The G4 kicks arse. It seriously feels fast doing stuff – certainly faster than my 500 MHz Alpha, even though the G4 is 50 MHz slower.

     

  • Advogato – 10 July 2000

    10 Jul 2000 »

    Internationalization

    ??Andrew???

    If you can read that (and if Advogato’s HTML filtering lets it through), then you’re doing remarkably well. If you can’t see the hiragana or Advogato filters it out (which it does), then it’s situation normal(afu) folks. When 70% of the planet does not speak English and over 50% would use non-roman character sets if they were able to read and write (a major problem in and of itself), ASCII is about as dead as last week’s undies.

    Update: After posting it was obvious that Advogato is itself not I18N clean. I’ll work with Raph on an update (in my copious spare time!). As I’ve seen Danish and a couple of other languages on here, we should not discriminate against the double character set crowd.

    I installed LinuxPPC on the Mac G4 at work (it wasn’t doing anything else) and accidentally went nuts installing everything. It installed Gnome with all the locales, and Japanese was the default system locale. It’s amazing how close some distributions are to localizing pretty much everywhere.

    Detecting NT/2000

    A previous diarist asked the question, how do I detect NT? If you’re writing in Perl (it looked like it), and you have access to the local environment variables (and I believe you do), then use the variable called “OS”. NT sets it to “Windows_NT”.

    C:\>set

    OS=Windows_NT

     

  • Advogato – 9 July 2000

    9 Jul 2000 »

    fun
    Just got another orifice opened by Rebecca playing Total Annilihation. I suffered the old “knock-knock, who’s-there, 10-krogoths and 100 cans” problem. I had three krogoths just hanging around with a bunch of cans and other sundry units, covered 360 with all sorts of advanced defense on the perimeter (including a buzzsaw and three intimidators + radar targeting), and it wasn’t good enough. Blaaaam!

    I sent over 300 cans and four krogoths her way about two hours before but it wasn’t enough. This is the problem with five hour, 500 unit per side games – need more units. At least I whipped her arse good and proper in the first game. With planes, and plenty of them.

    Committees

    Still haven’t committed the SAGE-AU conference to diary yet. But now, as pres, I’m getting some serious grief from professional committee dwellers. You know the sort: they whine and moan, do a bit here and there (and the person involved has done a lot for SAGE over the years), and when you try to show some sort of vision for the future, or even better just do something, they make it out to the new members as if you’re some sort of dictator. ARGGGHH! Donna – if you read this, my intentions are good, I just want to get something, anything done this year. Last year we had no vision and no drive, and it shows. I’m not going to make that mistake again.

  • Advogato – 7 July 2000

    7 Jul 2000 »

    Just come back from the SAGE-AU conference, held at the Gold Coast. I’m president of SAGE-AU now, so I’m biased. We had a dinner at the Seaworld Nara, and I saw two pengiuns going at it hammer and tong. True missionary style if such a thing is possible for pengiuns.
    Excellent security content. Met Bill Cheswick and David LeBlanc and many others. When I recover from my flight, I’ll do a proper writeup.

  • Advogato – 2 July 2000

    2 Jul 2000 »

    Mozilla M16 is a little dodgy, and prefers seg faulting on CNN’s space page (argh!) but it’s better than what Helix Gnome did to my Suse-provided Netscrape: bus faults as soon as I launch the sucker. oh well. There’s always IE on my laptop 🙂
    Mozilla is getting usuable at last. Still way too slow compared to native implementations (IE on the same hardware with only one of the processors churning rather than two is substantially faster than Mozilla under Linux).

    Reinventing the wheel

    rconover discusses how he “discovered” a way to do RTTI, but in C. That’s been standard fare for a while, I’m afraid, and it’s how many C stackguard checkers like electric fence work, but using hardware assistance rather than just a simple “canary” value alone (which can be overwritten with possibly the “correct” value ID for another type you’re happy to deal with.

    As a person involved in XFree86, I don’t want to descend into “C++ is better than C” but it aggravates me to see things like vtables, subclassing and RTTI reinvented to make up for clear deficiencies with a language like C. If you look at XAA and the new metro loader, XFree86 is extending C to places it can barely go (I dare new C programmers to make significant additions to either technology without breaking ABI compatibility).

    XAA in particular could probably be sped up for both compiling, running and speed of writing new modules if it were re-written in C++. Good C++ compilers get the gist of what you’re trying to do when you subclass and fill in non- overloaded methods, and can optimize it out so there’s little or (in most cases) no speed penalty if not a little speed boost due to the lack of a vtable lookup compared to a function pointer lookup. C doesn’t get a chance to do that and you lose type protection when you cast to void * and do all the funky stuff required to provide oblique data references and function pointers.

    If you want to see my C++ is faster than C example, see BeOS. It’s the fastest booting OS I’ve ever used that’s not ROM based (such as N64 or BBC Basic). A Linux kernel with just enough drivers to run my machine takes a good 1.15 to boot into gdm (compared to BeOS’s 10-15 seconds), and Windows 2000 takes over 2 minutes.

    that’s my rant for the day. Right tool – right job.

    2 Jul 2000 »

    The hassles of PCMCIA desktop adapters. The one that Dan C bought to host our gateway’s Wavelan is a PC Card -> ISA device and is PNP. I’ve spent most of this weekend trying to get Linux’s PC Card drivers (pcmcia-cs-3.1.17) to work with it. The problem is that pcmcia-cs requires the cards to be at IRQ 10,11 or else it can’t find it, plus much additional magic to detect my card. Due to IRQ sharing and my PCI bios, I have two devices at IRQ 10 (matrox, tulip) after interrupt sharing and one device (eepro100) at irq 11. Intel Standard Architecture is just so braindead at times.
    The reason for stuffing around is that the host box has 6 gig of disk space, and I want it to be the gateway and server for my home network rather than Dan’s alpha. It was running NetBSD-current boot floppy (!) and working as a gateway, but I wanted nfs, dhcp, dns, router, and ip filter on that box.

    I tried for two days to get Suse 6.4 + latest pcmcia working and it just doesn’t work, even after extensive tweaking. I download the latest NetBSD 1.5 snapshot, and the boot floppies make wi0 just turn up. I configured the interface and it works! ARRRGH this is a case why separate userland utilities and externally delivered pcmcia modules will never beat an integrated approach. I wondered why Linus doesn’t like these big updates, and now I understand completely.

    In addition, the bus stuff on NetBSD is a delight to use and configure. If only Linux had this sort of forethought put into it.