Josh Saddler

Here we are, on the cusp of a new year. Diego, I hope you don't have a fetish, but I've got your back, nonetheless. I started Englishifying your autoepatch docs, after Robin graciously allowed me SVN access.

Anyway, as evidenced by the commit archives, I've managed to keep myself busy on the regular documentation front, while occasionally finding the time to lend a helping doc hand to other projects. Actually, I notice that some commit messages are missing, thanks to CIA being down for several days, and a hiccup or two from the Gentoo mailserver at one point. Ah, well, at least the changes themselves went through.

The other day I had a lot of fun with the guys 'n' gals on #-dev. There might have been much drunk Norwegianisms and lack of pants. And nipple-rubbing. And frozen t-shirt contests (I think I won). An awesome bunch of folks to hang out with. You know who you are.

To do next year, in addition to my normal GDP duties:

1) Soonest: Finish up Dmitry's VDR Guide updates -- Englishification (love that word), layout, etc. Also, finish the autoepatch doc cleanups.
2) Short-term: Poke some more at my other assigned bugs. Need to finish up brix's draft pcmciautils migration guide. I sent him my patch some time ago, but he hasn't responded yet. I've been in contact with him about it for some time since his retirement, but I guess that'll have to wait awhile longer.
3) Long-term: finish writing my uber-sekrit (hahaha) ebuilds for a bit of software released awhile ago. Of course, now I'm all depressed because I found out that not long after I started (which was the day it was released), there was another parallel effort by some other folks, bleah...still, it's a learning experience nonetheless.
4) Longer-term: Finish up that ebuild quiz and send the thing off to tsunam. I really owe him some x86 help, and I'd like to find additional time to help out with the mobile herd. Ooh, maybe amd64 as well, now that I have the proper hardware.
5) Longest-term: continue adding to SwifT's old handbook rewrites in draft/ -- there are some good, solid ideas in there, as well as a whole lot of work to be done, some of it in areas that don't fall under my technical expertise, so others'll have to give that a shot. However, I don't want to have that suck up time unnecessarily, so it'll be an intermittent side project. Speaking of which: might have to see about kbase; it's basically dead, as confirmed by the lack of response to my email inquiries on its lists. It was a good idea, but really brought about too soon for Gentoo's current state. Seems that more development effort should be spent elsewhere, and at this time I am inclined to agree.

There are probably more things I've been intending to finish, but for now these five will do.

Happy New Year to all (especially those who need it most!) in 2007!

The invading forces of reiserfsck have toppled the governments of /dev/sdb and /dev/sdc, and the surviving heads of state have fled in exile. Large tracts of disk surface have been rendered useless, burning microns of real estate valued in the hundreds of gigabytes.

One resident of the prosperous city of /home described the scene:

"Carnage, utter carnage. We ran, we were scattered. We didn't know where our directories were, or our neighbors. We were so scared, we didn't even know our own names anymore. It took days for most of us to regroup -- all of my family in Music/ is safe, but there was nothing left of the .mailbox district. They were all killed; no one in .mailbox got out alive! The city next to us, /usr, was bombed to rubble. It's just gone...gone! They're all dead, I tell you! Dead!!"

A fearful account, indeed. Still, other eyewitnesses report that guerrilla fighters united under the flag of General Fdisk have made a bold counterattack upon the enemy's headquarters. A spokesman delivered a prepared statement to the media:

"Our nation may be burned to the ground, but we will drive out the invaders. We will avenge the atrocities wreaked upon .mailbox and /usr. We will rebuild and be reunited, and we shall be even greater! We will be evermore vigilant. We will build stronger partitions, and place our glorious city of /home within their walls. /home shall be a mighty fortress. Never again shall we be taken by surprise. Long live the Republic of RAID!"

This is Josh Saddler, reporting live from the front lines.

Confirmed. The RAID array is dead, toasted. The hardware itself is okay, but I ran reiserfsck --rebuild-tree after fixing the superblock on /dev/md2 (/). Should have just stuck with fixing the superblock and rebooted.

For whatever reason, reiserfsck decided that almost every last bit of data on the disk should be moved to /lost+found. And now I have an unusable workstation. The only working dir is /bin. Even commands like less don't work. I can cd, ls, and su. That's about it.

Time to reboot with a liveCD and hope that somewhere in the ~40GB of data I really want I can find my /home and start pulling stuff out of it. Reinstalling wouldn't be so bad; after all, I only installed Gentoo on this thing a couple of months ago. Setting everything back up would be annoying and time-consuming, but not fatal. What really pisses me off is that I had backed up everything from the laptop to the workstation before wiping two years' worth of data from the laptop.

At least md1 (/boot) is working. This really drives home the point that RAID1 is not a backup; it's just redundancy. Now I have redundant failures. Next time, I'll put /home on its own partition.

Stupid reiserfsck. Stupid me for running it.

This made me chuckle.

Which is good, since my RAID1 array died on the workstation. (Note to self: when in Gnome, never ever click "Suspend" instead of "Shutdown".) The hardware itself is okay, but . . . Caused a hard lockup when I returned from suspend. Hit the magic OFF button on the box itself, rebooted, and blam:

Kernel panic, unable to mount root VFS, bad superblock magic, not starting arrays, yadda yadda.

Oops. Since I couldn't start any arrays whatsoever after rebooting with a LiveCD, I ended up running reiserfsck --rebuild-sb and --rebuild-tree on the actual partitions, not the raid (md) devices. Right now, / is resyncing in the background; I decided to go ahead and recreate all the arrays once again, following the Gentoo RAID quickinstall howto. It's sort of a scorched earth fix that's one step short of wiping the disk and reinstalling. Once the disks have finished resyncing, I'll try running the reiserfsck commands on the raid arrays themselves, just in case.

Otherwise, I'll have to nuke 2 months of data, productivity, and my complete backup from the laptop that I just wiped and reinstalled. I'm currently typing from said laptop right now, and I will be extremely pissed if I have to kill some 40GB worth of priceless data. My entire old /home dir is currently "backed up" on the nonfunctioning desktop.

*crosses fingers*

All right, I finally did it. I went for the eyecandy. I've never set up any thing having to do with composite, transparency, etc., but I figured that since as long as I'm living on the p.masked Xfce edge anyway, I might as well use its built-in compositor. And...it's interesting. I don't particularly like how the panel automatically gets translucent whenever the mouse isn't on it, and it's actually distracting when I have a terminal superimposed on both Firefox and another terminal...I was surprised that the backgrounded Firefox itself becomes clear enough to see the other terminal underneath it.

And yet people dig this stuff? Or maybe they just dig the effects of more nifty compositing window managers like compiz. Anyway, I don't know if I'll stick with it or not. I'm pleased to say that after a little tweaking, it's a minimal resource hit even for my ancient integrated nVidia GeForce2 Go chip. (One of the very first dedicated mobile GPUs, a whole 16MB memory.)

Interestingly, I seem to be running only semi-hardware-accelerated, as I call it. running "glxinfo" gives a segfault, as it can't find the GLX extension to load, despite the visual results. Problem is, I can't enable "AllowGLXWithComposite", as that results in random hard lockups, which is the fault of being forced to use nvidia-legacy-drivers. These older 7xxx drivers are known to have such bugs, but the newer 8xxx drivers don't support my vintage 2001 hardware. Ah, well. At least adding "RenderAccel" to xorg.conf lets me run this stuff with very little noticeable slowdown. I suspect that I am getting hardware accel; it's just confused.

I think I'll bring along this composited laptop to SCALE and show off the wonders of unstable Xfce and the latest eyecandy. Which reminds me, now I need to see about getting all the effects of compiz, but without using that WM or unmerging yet more masked packages. I want to see what else this old graphics hardware is capable of.

...to Xfce4 4.4, that is. I've finally heeded the urgings of my fellow Xfce enthusiasts dostrow, nichoj, et al, and moved my laptop over to the latest Xfce 4.4 prerelease. Sometimes as a developer, you have to live somewhat on the bleeding edge, in this case, a couple of dozen entries in package.unmask. Yow! Hot stuff. The new Xfce has changed considerably since 4.2. It more resembles a traditional desktop environment, but it still retains the speed and ease of use that it had from the older days. That said, some configuration changes have been made. Configuring the panel is a little less intuitive; the same control works for both the icon strip at the bottom and the window list at the top. (So don't just kill the panel process entirely!) No more xftaskbar4 to kill.

There are still a few outstanding bugs, such as missing icons from things like the main configuration window, missing panel plugin icons (none for cpu-freq), and missing icons for mail and webbrowser in the terminal Applications menu. Also missing is the old ability to change the icon spacing in thunar. Though a host of other features have been added, folder views take up way too much space. Need the icons to be spaced about half as far apart as they currently are.

Also, the new battery applet is not nearly as helpful as the old one. For example, even though lm_sensors doesn't work on this laptop whatsoever, the basic thermal zone info from ACPI was parsed by the battstatus applet (don't ask me why, I'm just glad it did). It displayed temperature, battery charge, and an indicator whenever the fan turned on. Handy, right? Well, the fan indicator is still there, but there's no provision for temperature display anymore. WEAK. Grr. I'd downgrade, but the stable version blocks the masked version. Anyone know a fix-it for this?

Speaking of WEAK, my back has taken a sudden turn for the worse over the last couple of days. Earlier this week (i.e. before I started my new schedule on Wednesday), I was almost back to normal. I could walk without limping, at least most of the day. And now...now I'm not doing so hot. Some excrutiating twinges, and constant pain every step. It's a little better than it was yesterday, but I for sure need to get to the doctor's office and get that x-ray done. The doc said it'd take a minimum of six weeks to heal, and at the end of that time, I can say that I'm definitely not recovered. %$^&# sciatica. And at my age, too. I'd hoped to be well by my wife's birthday and Christmas, but doesn't look like that will happen.

Maybe I'll be fully healed in time for SCALE in February?

There were some good comments on my last journal entry, thanks to everyone who responded. I'm happy to say that some of the problems have been dealt with. I've been talking to several developers who are rather likeminded; just check Planet's entries for the last week or so.

Anyway, I've decided to give my trusty ol' lappy das boot, by which I mean "the boot" rather than "the boat."

It's had Gentoo (Jackass! 2005.1, yay for my old project) installed on it since August 31, 2005. And what with one thing or another, it's just been slowing down. It's got a strange partition layout on it, too. A whole unused 10GB ntfs partition (never got around to installing Windows), a smaller Linux test partition, and the main desktop stuff. Rather inefficient usage of the 60GB disk, considering its recent use. The slowness, combined with space issues, and the fact that I haven't updated it since before gcc-4.1.1 went stable on x86 means that I've decided to just reinstall. Why spend a week compiling when everything will likely break if I try to simultaneously migrate to modular Xorg and switch from gcc-3.4, as well as all the crazy kernel/udev/nvidia/madwifi updates?

Time to wipe the disk and move on to something more recent. I've spent today moving /home to my new USB key and dumping it to my AMD64 box. It really highlights the slow-as-molasses USB1.1 on the laptop, as well as the crappy I/0 and slow system bus. I'll be doing some smarter performance tuning this time around, as well as installing only Xfce. I've been running mostly in Gnome because of some weird Xfce/Fluxbox issues, but with only 128MB memory, any and all workloads are just about unbearable.

Of course, the simpler solution would have been to just plug the laptop drive straight into the IDE cables on the AMD64 box for the updates, but unfortunately, the drive uses some weird laptop-only ATA/power combo connector, not the standard IDE connector. Oh well. I don't mind trying out the Installer LiveCD, especially since I'll have nothing to lose.

Guess I have to go re-read all the changes I've been making to the installation handbooks.

And now, on to the rest...I'm definitely pissed that there are still devs who lack social skills. Being blunt or straightforward is one thing, having a considered technical opinion is another, but being a complete asshole/dick/jerk online is something else. It bothers me when there are devs who are consistently rude in their treatment of other devs. No, beyond that -- there's something very wrong with you when you cannot treat another person as a human being. It seems that Stuart decided to retire because he could no longer endure or didn't want to endure this kind of treatment anymore from devs. Devs, nothing. Let's just think of ourselves as people here. Or if you can't think at this level, look at it another way -- if your boss saw you harassing your fellow coworkers day after day in full view of the public, do you think you'd keep your job for very long? Think in terms of customer service and good reputation. Do you have either? It'd be das boot for you.

Now, suppose you consider that telling someone off is the right thing to do in a given situation. Certainly Stuart could have done this; a final "F*** you" to the folks who'd done him harm. People like Ciaran McCreesh had been consistently rude, antagonistic, and abrasive to work with to him in particular. The records are available for the searching on gentoo-dev; I'm picking the latest in line. Would Stu have been justified in responding along the lines of "Go f*** yourself"? Very possibly. However, does this attitude ever help matters? Rarely.

I'm going to step out on a limb here and do some heart-sharing. I'm going to try and avoid telling people off, but rather calling people out on their bad behavior. What's the difference? It can be very slim, to say the least. The idea is not to name-drop, deliberately hurt another human being, or cause other damage to community, friends, etc. If you're going to reprimand someone for bad behavior, then you'd better have some alternatives for better behavior ready.

Really, Gentoo could be much better off if we weren't so afraid to police ourselves. Some of the worst people to work with in either the developer, community, or former developer groups are the most vocal, and are unafraid to be. They're the tiny minority, but they get what they want and say what they want (including harming others and the work we all do) because, well, they've always gotten away with it.

I've always been a pretty quiet guy. I make it my business to get along with just about anyone and everyone. There are some folks that consistently bother me because their actions consistently bother me. Everyone else, hey, join the fun. I've tried to be consistent in the last 18 months of helping out with Gentoo, and especially the last 9 months as a developer. I don't go out of my way to piss people off, I try to hear all sides of the issue, and I assume devs are capable workers until I see otherwise. I like to try to be friends with folks as much as possible online.

All that being said, I'm saddened that Stuart is retiring because to my mind, the final straw seems to be the words of Chris (and possibly to a lesser extent Ciaran). I don't have any particular problem with Chris; he's been great fun to talk and work with in the past. Unfortunately, he also has a tendency to be very hardheaded, to the point of "screw you and your ideas; do it your own damn way and I'll do it my own, and I know I'm right and you're an idiot; you don't understand the issue at all". Hey, at some point most people reach that attitude, or at least parts of it. But with Chris, it's been a growing trend, especially around the stress of release times. I noticed how he attacked the Seeds project, going so far as to say "you're wasting your time; your skills should (not could, should) be spent doing other things for Gentoo." Who started Seeds? Stuart. And Stu himself forgot this when he told Chris much the same thing a day ago in regards to versioning the Portage tree. At least he did later admit his statement was out of line.

So, now we have a dev who's retiring because of all the weight of all the bullcrap that's been ladled out on him over the years. We have a dev who has been part of the final straw. And yet, this is not unique. This has been repeating over and over for at least a year now -- developers retiring so that they don't have to face another day getting put down, shot at, and devalued. How can we fix things so the risk of this happening again is lessened? Well, by thinking of better ways to tell someone "You need to do some more research on the technical facts of the subject so that you can better understand the situation"...something besides words to the effect of "You're stupid, shut up, never speak again, you know jack". Yes, what I'm asking for is a nicer way of saying just that.

Why nicer? Because look where meanness, pettiness, spite, and malice have got the world today. Look where they've taken this community of people called "Gentoo developers." They've made us scared to blog about such topics and use actual names of people for fear of reprisals on IRC or nasty blog posts. They've made us afraid of working with other team members. They've hardened our hearts so that we don't want to have a f***ing thing to do with so and so or with team foo.

And it's killing me.

This is a general statement:

There's something very f***ed up beyond all recognition with your head and with who you are if you are unable or don't want to interact with people on a basic human level. Step down off your technocratic throne of knowledge, pull the stick out of your ass, the chip off your shoulder, and acknowledge that the person you're typing to is your brother, your sister, a human like yourself.

Because really, the spite, malice, envy, and all that stuff above that I just talked about? Those are really just facets of something more ancient, and just as deadly to yourself and to others: hate.

It's no wonder we can't make any progress on the technical front; we don't even have the people side down yet. If Gentoo is ever going to go anywhere, we've got to purge ourselves of all the hatred. If that means dismissing individuals who bring us down, then so be it. That's perhaps the final step -- long before then, I wish we could have the courage to pull a brother aside and chastise him. Admonish him. Show him a better way. I'm glad Jan Kundrat did that for me recently after a particularly crazy bug.

So, how do we stem the onslaught of bickering, petty squables, and antagonism?

It starts with you.