Josh Saddler

Thanks to Markos Chandras, RedNotebook is now in the tree. RedNotebook is a really cool lightweight journal for your desktop. It needs only pygtk and pyyaml. It's got nifty features like a calendar, tags, templates, searches, format export, and more. It's quite actively developed upstream; I plan to proxy-maintain it for the good of Gentoo users everywhere. Go on, try it out!

* * *

Also, as you may have noticed, the look of my weblog has changed. Instead of the Evopress skin, I'm now using the Gentoo skin I created for Planet Gentoo, based on Evopress. Now it's all-purple, just like the old Planet look before the b2evolution upgrade some months ago. You wouldn't believe how long it took me to create the top purple graphic; I ended up having to hand-edit that thing pixel by pixel. I couldn't find any easy way using the GIMP to recolor the existing blue gradient into a purple gradient. So I made my own, pixel by pixel. I think it looks pretty good.

All developers that want to switch to the new skin:

1. Log into your backoffice
2. Go to Blog settings -> Skin
3. Select the "evonews" skin
4. Presto, a nice new purplish blog. Wear your colors with pride!

Ignore the "evogentoo" skin; that's a leftover test skin. I still have to iron out that bug, and fix the preview so that it appears on the correct skin entry. Enjoy!

On Christmas Eve, a special present arrived from UPS: the HIS Radeon X1950 Pro I purchased on eBay. For the week prior to Christmas I removed the discrete nVidia 7600GT and ran off the integrated nVidia Geforce 8200 chip in my motherboard. Utter pain!

Drawing the screen, whether compositing was on or off, was painfully slow. Running any kind of game was out of the question. UT2004 was impossible. I managed to gain a bit of 2D speed by adding GlyphCache and InitialPixmapPlacement options to xorg.conf, but the desktop was still slow as molasses. Made using the computer quite painful. I can personally verify all the reports that nVidia's drivers for the Geforce 8000 series suck balls are quite true. The only thing I gained was being able to run the framebuffer console at 1440x900, my monitor's native resolution. The Geforce 8200 supports this framebuffer mode; the 7600GT only supports up to 1024x768. Not that it matters once Xorg is launched. Anyway, that was a miserable failure, so I was really happy when the HIS Radeon card showed up.

To be honest, I spent a few more bucks on it than I'd like. With shipping, it was about $51. But I figured this could be a tech toy for the next several months. After this fall's debacle with that HIS RadeonHD 4670, I picked up an older R500 card for half the cost, and this one is at the top of the line for its generation. It should have been an upgrade on my nVidia 7600GT even with the FOSS drivers. With all the documentation ATI has released, the developers of the FOSS driver (xf86-video-ati in my case) were able to get working 2D and 3D acceleration some months ago. So, emboldened by all the articles and forums posts over at Phoronix on the exciting things happening to the FOSS Radeon/Xorg/Mesa stack, I gave it a whirl.

The Good

1. There is indeed 3D acceleration. It's partly usable.
2. The 2D acceleration is the fastest of any chip I tried, faster than even the 7600GT with the proprietary driver. Once I switched from XAA to EXA acceleration, it was even faster!
3. Running at my monitor's native resolution at the framebuffer console is possible.
4. It was nice to be able to remove all proprietary kernel modules.
5. The whole desktop stack loads a bit faster, with less modesetting flicker.
6. 3D performance is actually better with the FOSS drivers than it is with ATI's Catalyst (fglrx) driver.

All the stuttering and lockups I'd run into with the RadeonHD 4670 card a few months ago? Yeah, I now believe those weren't hardware issues at all, but shitty, shitty fglrx driver code. I ran into the exact same thing when trying to use fglrx with the X1950 Pro. UT2004 was a constant stutter-fest. Absolutely unusable. When it comes to the proprietary vs. FOSS drivers for usability, there's no contest. FOSS wins across the board.

The Bad

1. Keywording 70 packages or so in package.keywords is a tedious chore. I was after the latest X-server, Radeon, and Mesa updates, which necessitated moving to ~arch for most of the required X packages.
2. I can't switch virtual terminals. The monitor shuts off if it's running on anything but VT7 once X is loaded. Apparently I'm not the only one to experience this issue with this card.
3. Poor 3D performance. I had to turn down all settings to minimums in UT2004, though I kept the resolution maxed. And even with all the minimizing, framerates grew pretty choppy throughout the game. Though the R500 performance has come a long way in the Radeon driver, it's still nowhere near the level offered by my 7600GT and the proprietary nVidia driver. I dunno if the RadeonHD driver would offer any improvement; it shares a large part of its codebase with the Radeon driver.
4. The "gotchas" involved with switching from the proprietary nVidia driver to anything else. If you switch from one proprietary driver to an open-source driver, or a proprietary (nVidia) to proprietary (ATI), you'll have to manually delete a few libGL files, as the symlinks get shattered in a way that eselect doesn't know how to handle. Let's hope that bug gets fixed soon.

The Ugly

1. The fan. I think the video card's fan may have been damaged in transit. I took out the card after just a week because the noise from the fan was so damned annoying. Now, it's not that it's particularly loud; it's not all that much louder than the system fans (which are pretty quiet even when at max). No, what really grated on me was the hideous noise character of this fan. I've asked for some help from folks in the know, so we'll see where this goes. Too bad too; it uses the same IceQ cooler that the 4670 uses, and the 4670's cooler was amazing. I couldn't hardly hear it no matter the load on the card. It had a smooth, pleasant noise character, blending right in with my system fans at low RPMs.
2. Running into the ALSA and OpenAL updates at the same time I was trying to upgrade my hardware and its drivers. ALSA cannot compile. Bug still not fixed.

The new OpenAL version seems to be from a different upstream, one who has no idea what he's doing as far as documentation goes. I had a working config file for .0.0.8, and 1.5.304 broke it. There's nothing but an extremely sparse sample config to suggest what to do. No matter what I put in the new .ini-style config file, I couldn't make it pick up my microphone. When it finally did seem to be able to identify plughw:0,0, it then petulantly died with the message that the requested buffer size was too large. Based on IRC logs I found via Google, upstream suggests that's ALSA's fault, not OpenAL. Whatever, man. All I know is that the previous versions of OpenAL have always worked regardless of my ALSA version. The new one doesn't. So I added 1.5 to package.mask and downgraded. Presto, working microphone. Just the thing for the upcoming UT2004 tourney.
3. Spending $50 just a week before ATI releases the long-awaited R600/R700 programming documentation. Yeah, I'm kicking myself a bit. I'm wishing that I still had that HIS RadeonHD 4670, something that should have better performance than even an X1950 Pro, no matter which drivers are used. But as it is, the FOSS driver devs don't really expect to get a working driver with any kind of OpenGL acceleration for another few months. Approximate feature parity with the R500's current driver codebase is expected in another 8 months or so. So it'd be a long wait, but one that I'm starting to think is worth it.
4. Did I mention the fan? I can't stick that thing back in the case until I've found a cheap solution to silencing the beast. It's not worth pouring a lot of money into it. I mean, if money is being tossed about, I may as well pick up a silent low- to mid-range 4000 card off NewEgg (again).

* * *

The X1950 Pro is currently stored in the closet. I'll dig it out again once I find some solutions to various bugs. Or when more 3D performance improvements are merged. I'd like to use it for UT2004 as well as general desktop work, but I need better 3D performance. And I need to fix that fan! Maybe I can find a decently priced Arctic Cooling Accelero S1 rev 2 someplace.

I'm also really looking forward to the coming KMS and GEM support for R500 cards, hopefully that will all be merged into the 2.6.29 kernel. Just a few more months . . .

Hello again, Planet. Another month, another week, another doc or three, another bug, another GMN. Etc.

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For the last month I've been dealing with optical drive issues. First my IDE drive, then the new SATA drive.

The issues with the Samsung IDE optical drive seem to be resolved with kernel 2.6.25, and with the newest stable gstreamer packages. Audio applications can not only see the drive and the media inside, but can actually play the tracks.

Now, however, I'm having issues with the Asus SATA drive I bought when the IDE drive was acting up. It's giving my system fits, as you can see in bug 221145. Libata just hates this drive, no matter what kernel I use.

I did discover that the SATA cables I had been using were bad; they were the original cables packaged with my MSI motherboard. I ordered replacements and plugged 'em in. No more cryptic. I/O errors in /var/log/messages.

However, the drive is still no better off than it was. Applications can see what's in the drive, but can't read from it. The weird thing is that I can sometimes use the drive to burn discs. I was able to burn distro ISOs, and copy them from the Samsung to the SATA drive for on-the-fly burning. But reading is right out. Strange. There are no error messages; there are no unusual messages of any kind. For awhile, I wasn't sure if the errors were of the common variety (poor SATA cables; seems it's universal), or if the SATA ports on the motherboard itself were bad. Given that just swapping out cables removes the errors messages, I assume it was the former.

So basically, I've spent $53 on a drive (Asus DRW-2014L1T), SATA cables, and shipping, and I'm stuck with a piece of nonworking hardware. Maybe I should have gone for another IDE drive, but I only have one IDE port on my motherboard, and it's in use by the other drive. Besides, SATA is supposed to be the way forward. I'd like to eventually have just one kind of interface for everything. Better bandwidth than IDE, no master/slave hassle, etc. Alas, the kernel and my applications refuse to cooperate with the drive. And there's no updated firmware available from the manufacturer, either.

If anyone has any suggestions not already covered in the bug, lemme know. I'm about out of ideas. The only thing I've come up with is booting with some other distro CD, one with known good hardware detection, like Knoppix or *buntu, from the IDE drive, then try to play a disc in the SATA drive and see if it works. If it does, I'll have to hunt up the kernel config and version for the LiveCD.

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Now on to the good news. Jeremy Olexa (darkside) has added wicd to the tree. And not just wicd -- a working version! So now my laptop is amazingly happy. As am I; I had been trying to make wicd work for a long time without success. Fortunately, upstream released 1.5, which creates a much simpler dependency chain, and introduces better networking scripts.

Wicd really makes networking much easier when jumping between networks. It removes all the guesswork from network configuration, as well as the long, arcane iwconfig and wpa_supplicant command sequences. Random public hotspots are no longer a challenge. Just point and click to connect. Wicd is faster and more reliable than NetworkManager, and it has fewer dependencies.

I filed a bug requesting configuration information to be added to the ebuild. Jeremy obliged, so do read the output after you've installed wicd. It really is simple to setup, though baselayout-2/openrc users will need to make a couple of changes, replacing /etc/conf.d/rc with /etc/rc.conf. Here's how I setup wicd for my laptop:

# rc-update del net.wlan0
# rc-update del net.eth0
# rc-update add wicd default battery
# nano -w /etc/conf.d/rc
RC_PLUG_SERVICES="!net.wlan0 !net.eth0"

I rebooted, just to test its autostart capabilities; previous versions could never start properly. 1.5 does; no issues so far. It displayed my network, asked for my key, and then connected. Simple, but oh-so-wonderful.

I'm now a proud wicd user.

Makin' good progress on the handbooks and other documentation for the upcoming 2008.0 release.

Sent off the networkless handbook tarballs to releng as promised by the deadline. Finished the Portage handbooks. Also got just about everything done for the networked handbooks, too. There's one blocker for the tracker bug, and that's something that doesn't really need to be.

Also there's some changes to make to a few of the other documents, but those aren't too bad...compared to last release.

I'm getting precisely zero help from the rest of the GDP with the release, though. That's not making me all that happy. It's the sort of thing to make someone retire, go on vacation for a year, or never work on the handbooks ever again and everyone is screwed because no one's left to work on 'em.

That being said, my stress levels are much lower this release. Much, much lower.

Which is good, since my sciatica has flared up since getting injured at SCALE a couple of weeks ago, making it almost impossible for me to walk sometimes. Excruciating pain at times. I'm starting to get better, but it'll be several more weeks before I'm "well."

If Comcast is your ISP, dump 'em if you possibly can.

Find out what's up with your connection.

Packet hacking. Makes me wonder what my own provider, Cox, may have been up to. At least I don't really see them making news the way Comcast does!

Damned American ISPs. When this stuff occurs, there's usually nothing we can do about it, as there's only one provider that owns the wire running into the home. I've got no choice if I want internet service; it's Cox or nothing. But I've no complaints, aside from more brief outages than I care for, and measly bandwidth for the (slowly increasing) money. It's slowly gone up to $26.95 per month, and that gets me 1.5mbit/sec down, 256mbit up. In more normal numbers, that's 200kbytes down, and 32kbytes up, which is why I make few big changes to my devspace. Takes forever to upload or change content.

My anemic rates are typical for American ISPs. That's a basic connection by the way; it's considerably more if you want the next two levels of service, and there's no guarantee your monthly bill will stay the same. We've already had a bill hike once or twice because Cox "experienced increased operating costs" and made an extremely poor business decision by passing costs directly to the consumer. I was paying something under $20/month, it was $10/month before that, and now ... $30 for a basic internet-only package. No cable, no phone, just basic internet.

Apparently, Europe is ahead of most everyone in the world; no matter where you are, what country or city, there's something like at least 16 different ISP choices. Or so some of the guys in #gentoo-dev like to brag. And they get more bandwidth, too. I saw some statistic that said Japan leads the world in bandwidth per capita; some ridiculous number like 56mbit per person. That's one wired nation. The US is behind almost everyone; we're being beaten by some developing nations, even. Though some 3rd world/developing countries have it even worse than we do; I remember a news story that reported Kazakhstan has a real-world price of well over $1000/month for basic access similar to mine.

What are your experiences with ISPs and service levels for a given cost? What's your connection like?

I'm still on devaway, even though I've been active enough the last couple of weeks to not be on devaway. I'm still healing. Still can't spend as much time on the computer as I used to without my eyes getting really uncomfortable and hurty.

I also injured my back, hip, and leg at work two Thursdays ago lugging around heavy boxes improperly. I was not Working Safe/Staying Healthy(tm). So now I'm paying for it by being basically crippled. Sheesh! It's truly one health problem after another with me. There are Old People who have better health. My body's slowly (or not-so-slowly) self-destructing.

To cheer myself up, yesterday I finally purchased a new sound card: Chaintech AV-710. It came today, so I wasted no time installing it. Sounds very nice; there's some noticeable improvement over the onboard Intel HDA chip on my motherboard (Realtek 883, nVidia MCP 55). The lows and highs especially are improved, but that may be due to the additional effort I put in to setting up this card in Gentoo.

The AV-710 uses the VIA Envy24HT-S chip and a VIA DAC, and while that's a great chip in and of itself, the card also has a very fine Wolfson DAC on the rear channels. So after some tinkering, I managed to get stereo 2-channel sound routed through that jack, skipping the usual analog stereo jack. I traded the green plug for the black plug right next to the S/PDIF plug, and it makes a noticeable difference. Got one of these cards and want to use the Wolfson DAC for stereo output? Edit ~/.asoundrc as shown:

pcm.ice1724 {
type hw
card 0
}

ctl.ice1724 {
type hw
card 0
}

pcm.!default {
type plug
slave.pcm "spdif"
}

I also copied the file to /etc/asoundrc and /etc/asound.conf, so that it works system-wide. Only one of these is needed, though. I couldn't find any documentation on this, so I took a guess as to what might be needed. One of 'em works, though, as all my users have working audio.

Part of the setup included disabling the onboard audio in BIOS, removing all Intel HDA support from the kernel and adding the new module (ice1724), editing the various module config files and ALSA_CARDS in /etc/make.conf. I also had to delete /etc/asound.state before running alsaconf as root in order to make sure that my new card was properly setup. Previously, the old asound.state from the nVidia chip was preserved even after running alsaconf and restarting alsasound multiple times. Deleting it and re-running the commands was the only way to get an asound.state for the new card.

So now I have this exceptionally nice-sounding card for only $23. There are a few limits to my new hardware, including speaker quality (cheap Logitech X-230 2.1 speakers, $30) and software output. The problem with using the Wolfson DAC and the accompanying port is that sound isn't being routed to any of the other ports. The front audio ports don't work, and neither does the regular stereo port on the card. I haven't tested the microphone inputs on the front or the back yet. Also, only one bit of software can use the card at a time. If I'm using Audacious, I can't get any sound from mplayer or from a game or a system beep. dmix may fix some of these problems, but I'm not sure, as I haven't ever had to use it or configure it.

I may end up using the regular VIA DAC instead of the Wolfson, simply because I don't want to have to perform software switches just to enable headphones/headsets for Skype or UT2004. Much easier to just plug in the hardware when desired.

Finally, rerouting sound through the Wolfson DAC has somehow completely disabled software sound control. None of the volume sliders in alsamixer, gnome-volume, Audacious, etc. work. Neither do any of the mute functions. The only thing that works is the volume knob on the X-230 speakers themselves. Weird. So I have three tasks:

1. Determine if I'd get even better sound by upgrading my speakers
2. Figure out how to enable other ports for headphone/headset/microphone use
3. Get software volume controls working again

To sum up: life was much simpler, though not as good-sounding, before I bought my new gear. Still, I'm keeping it. I now have better playback quality and a decent line-in port for future audio recording purposes.

I've been thinking of buying this card solely for its MIDI port. It's supposedly a Chaintech AV-512, but at only $10, it's really just a knock-off imitation. It's got an old C-Media CMI 8738 chip, so it'd be useless for everything but MIDI input. Not sure if I'll get it yet. I'll have to see how well I do with figuring out basic line-in recording before moving on to anything as complex as MIDI controllers!

It would seem to be my birthday today.

For a month and a half now, I've been having health issues. This is on top of my back that's still healing from October 2006, and my neck, which still hasn't fully healed from July's whiplash.

My eyes. They've been not working. Now they're much better, and the left is mostly normal, while the right still isn't as good as it should be. See, I've been battling chronic conjunctivitis. It's gone from unbearable pain and being unable to stand any light to almost normal. Bright sunlight still doesn't feel all that nice, nor am I allowed to read or do anything on computers/TVs for extended periods. Per doctor's orders. Which means that (unfortunately) I do exactly the opposite when I'm at work, as everything I do at the library is visual. And under constant fluorescent lights no less, which are only slightly better than sunlight.

Really, I'm probably at 75 - 80%, at least. The big worry for me is that I still have conjunctivitis, and in addition to growing discomfort as I do certain tasks longer and longer (computers at work, or reading at home), the vision in my right eye is still much worse. I think that may end up being permanent. This stupid conjunctivitis has kicked up the astigmatism, and to a degree, the nearsightedness in that eye. It's . . . difficult. Difficult to not be able to do much. I do everything at work as usual, because I have to. Home is different, though the last two weeks have had some noticeable improvement, to the point that I'm now regularly overstressing my eyes because I keep thinking I'm well enough. Well enough to indulge in reading several books, or even trying to check email and do Gentoo-related tasks.

Ah yes, about Gentoo. I've been on devaway for a little while now by necessity, and am slowly easing back in to the work. Fortunately, there hasn't been a lot happening on the docs front; nothing too pressing. Nothing too pressing in terms of needs to get done right now, but I've already started thinking ahead to the 2007.1 release, currently slated for November. It's never very far from my mind.

And, well, I still have 4 documents I was writing when the eye problems hit. I've got a blas-lapack document to edit/rewrite, the Alpha-diet proposal to edit, the proposed framebuffer guide to outline, and the handbook release howto I've created. Need to finish up the last one first, unless the others are easier/quicker. It's hard to tell what will be what; everything is hard to do with my eyes the way they are.

Anyway, I'm still not officially "back" yet, much as I try. It will just take more time before I'll be up to the usual levels of productivity.

So we grabbed my wife's sister earlier tonight and I took us all out to see "Rush Hour 3", a very funny movie by the way.

When we got back, we just left our car parked out on the street, instead of taking back our assigned spot elsewhere once my sister-in-law left.

A few hours later, the police knocked on our door -- a drunk driver totaled our car and lightly damaged 3 others, including his own. He's in jail, our car is completely destroyed. No one was hurt, and we seem to have retrieved our important stuff from the car too, minus some of my wife's teaching supplies.

And this is after I got severe whiplash 1.5 weeks ago from riding the rollercoaster, followed by a viral + bacterial infection in my left eye which I think I finally recovered from yesterday.

My wife says bad things happen in threes, so the car being totaled was the third. But, shall we not accept the bad along with the good from the Lord? He gives, and He takes. It is not for me to close my hands tightly around any blessing He gives. If He wants us to have something for a time, then I need to hold out open hands. When that time is up, I need to stay faithful and see what He gives next. When something is taken, it's because He has something planned for me next. I'm thankful that He has given us this situation -- I'm waiting to see what He does next and what He wants us to do next. I think it's teaching me that I can rely on Him for any need. My relationship with Him should be active participation. I want to learn more of Him, grow more in Him.

Wait and see.

Anyway, dealing with all the stuff may or may not cut back on time for Gentoo. We'll see. At least I had a nice smooth Gnome 2.18 upgrade earlier today. Hint: as leio and dang said, be sure to run revdep-rebuild -X for the expat upgrade. You'll need to run dispatch-conf after the whole merge anyway, as well as another revdep-rebuild just to make sure.

Was just getting ready to play some Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 via Wine when bam -- my DVDRW drive lets go. Well, technically, the disc did; I've been playing it for some time even though it was cracked about 1/4 of the way through. I never expected it to fly apart inside the drive; I just expected it to eventually reach the point where it couldn't be read at all, then I'd go bargain-bin hunting to find a replacement.

My mistake, it seems.

So now I'm out an optical drive. It's probably not safe to use ever again even if I'm sure I got the last of the disc fragments out.

Ah well. I've been wanting to switch to SATA burners anyway. This gives me an excuse to buy two, instead of the single drive I've had.

I don't think I'll buy Samsung again, though. That thing should have a read of 48x, but instead it's closer to 12x. Write speeds are better, though only half to 3/4 of the advertised speed even when using the rated media. Unless this is something Linux-wide, or a K3b issue, I think Samsung's optical drives leave a lot to be desired.

Time to go shopping...I wonder if there are any good quality SATA burners on the market. All I've seen are rather lackluster LG and Samsung models.

Bah. Being driveless sucks. My workstation is out of commission for awhile. No music, no media, no fun.

It's been some days since I did it, but I finally finished up that Compilation Optimization guide. A revised draft has been posted to the bug.

* * *

After reading my previous entry on old reviews, I think I'm going to have to do another review or two. I've always wanted to try out Arch Linux and Zenwalk Linux, and I do have a spare drive available. Actually, I've been considering switching to one or the other on my laptop. Compiling Gentoo on it has just grown too painful; the hardware is just running slower and slower. It started with frying half my RAM and then the memory slot a long time ago, so now I have only 128MB. Since then, somehow the machine has grown even slower. Compiling heats it up to almost 80C, sometimes a little higher.

Arch and Zenwalk caught my attention, since they seem like they'd be a little lighter on resource usage. Binary packages sure sound nice. Strong points: Arch is optimized for i686, has binary packages and makes source compilation fairly easy, though they don't have anything like Gentoo's USE flags. Zenwalk is a rather small download, has Xfce by default, and seems to have reasonable dependency tracking. Downside is that it's optimized for i486; they cater to a lower common denominator (helloooooo, 1989!) ... and it's Slackware-based.

Anyway, I've been exploring the merits of other distros for my poor old laptop, and these two are at the top. While on this journey of distro evaluation, I started writing down all the kinds of things I look for in a distribution. The end result is a surprisingly long, detailed document, as these kinds of things need to be well thought out, since I don't intend to be constantly switching between distros every few months. Maybe I'll post them as an epic miniseries: things you should keep track of when trying to find the distro that fits your needs.

* * *

With the recent creation of the Gentoo Artwork Project, I decided to start trying my hand at theme creation. I've got an almost-finished GDM theme, and I'm trying to port a Metacity theme and a Fluxbox theme to xfwm4, but without much luck. I haven't been able to find a single howto on porting themes, though I did find a guide on creating xfwm4 themes. Specifically, I've been trying to port the arsen Metacity theme to xfwm4, since arsen is the most awesome theme I've ever used. It's a slow, painful process. Metacity uses PNG, xfwm4 uses XPM, etc.

If I ever get anywhere with all this experimentation, I'll give the Artwork folks a ping.

* * *

Now you should go download and listen to an amazing album by Nest. It's been getting great reviews all over the place. It's rather stunning. Turn down the lights and just listen.

When you're finished, you need to get a couple of free mini-EPs by the San Francisco-based quartet karmacoda. Moody, chill, ambient triphop is a good starting point for their sound, though it's only the tip of a very large iceberg. Soaring female vocals over layered, inventive beats and soundscapes. Get 'em here: Display EP and Transitory EP.

SCALE 2007 was a blast, as some have already reported. My wife and I arrived late Friday night, whereupon we met a few Gentoo devs, including Pete, Christel, Josh, Dan, and Mike. Hurray for the bar! I proceeded to get loaded with two (2!) Sprites, with ice. Yes, fizzy sweet nonalcoholic beverages are my drink of choice. Mmm, sugar. Diabetics should probably not read this blog. More devs, users, and random folks from other FOSS projects dropped by. And, of course, the merits of double-doubles...Christel ordered a double rum and coke, and I jokingly told the waiter "make it a double-double!" He obliged, and she didn't realize it until 15 minutes into her drink! . We also discussed the merits of paragliding versus paraFALLING, and the (relative) merits of buttplugs -- not for any of those present, but for certain people in other countries.... Anyway, we had a blast until 1AM or so, when it was time to crash.

Saturday came far too early. Seven hours of sleep, ugh. Headed downstairs to face the line for a bit at 9:30, until some kind SCALE organizer pointed out that since I was an exhibitor I could just head right in. Met up with Pete, who was the first on the scene. David showed up a little later I think, and then a general crowd of Gentoo devs showed up. We set up various desktops and laptops on the table in our (all too small) booth, and when I dodged upstairs to get /dev/snacks (as I affectionately labeled them), I came back to discover the mother of all booth attractions...a 28-someodd inch widescreen LCD TV hooked up to a Playstation3 running the Gentoo/PPC64 livecd. This was courtesy Dan (dostrow) -- oh man, it was so sweet, and proved to be quite the draw for the rest of the event. Even had a "Powered by Gentoo" sticker on it. One of those stickers was later slapped on my butt by a mischievous Christel. Actually, that same cheek was repeatedly groped by Josh and by my wife at various opportune (read: someone had a camera) moments, with predictable comic effect.

I caught two talks on Saturday, Jono Bacon's How to Herd Cats and Influence People (aka Heckle Gentoo and Get Heckled Back!), as well as Alex Ionescu's ReactOS talk. I had one question...."Can it run StarCraft?" His answer: "Yes." I'm sold!

Once Saturday was finished, we ended up going out to a nearby Thai restaurant...so good! So yummy! There were about 22 of us once we all got there (turns out that GPS is in fact a bad thing). All of us devs, my wife, some Freenode staff, Gnome developers, and some attendees who'd just arrived from San Diego. I chatted with them for a bit, since they work at the UCSD library (fellow library-types! yay!), so it just goes to show I'm not the only Linux-type who works in a library.

After that, we returned to the hotel and went our separate ways for a bit. A bunch of us headed to the roof of the parking lot to watch the planes land nearby at LAX, but they weren't going for the closer runway, and it started to rain. Back inside, then ... only to discover Christel&co getting friendly with Mr. Vodka and Mr. Laptop. (Licking ensued, the video is on YouTube somewhere). Merriment! Eventually we giggled our way into the hall, and Pete had the great suggestion that we play Tremulous. Oh man, that game is intense. The aliens totally have an advantage over the humans if used right. Eventually, they wouldn't let me play as aliens anymore, even when it was me vs. them (blackace, latexer, calculus and I took turns on 3 machines). Bah. I scared the **** out of them, though. "Where is he?!? Where is he!! AHHHHheATEmyarseoff!" --> this was Pete screaming like a little girl. I stumbled off to bed at 1:30, feeling like I had a cold.

This was justified; I spent all Sunday feeling sick. I think some SCALE attendee gave me a cold, so I manned the booth despite feeling terrible. Met users, other FOSS project members, folks curious about Gentoo, etc. Thanks to James, Pete, and David we had lightscribe CDs to give away that day, not just our handwritten, limited-edition one-of-a-kind Sharpie CDs. The lightscribe discs looked really terrific!

We intermittently ran a networked Tremulous game on Pete's AMD64 and my laptop as part of the demo, and Steve (nerdboy) brought his k'neXBox (as I dubbed it) out. Didn't get that working; it had hardware issues, but it got some attention anyway, since its case was made of K'nex parts. Sunday didn't feel quite as busy as Saturday, but it was still a good time. I finally went swag-hunting with David, and had to deal with some crazy old guy who monopolized our entire booth. Grr. He dragged out a chair, plopped into it, and proceeded to tell stories about everything imaginable, while blocking access, trapping all our devs at once, and drove off attendees all at the same time! > And he ate all our candy! All our other visitors were nice enough, though one guy asked us "What is Gentoo? Who are you guys?", and instead of listening, proceeded to use our PS3 to look up wikipedia's article. Ummm, okay? I'm told Linux events have their share of wacky folks, so I guess this is to be expected.

Anyway, on the last night, we went out for dinner at a craptastic Pizza Hut before going our separate ways. I came away with a better sense of who these people are that I work with. They're a fun, awesome group, and it's too bad we can't hang out in person more. At least we have IRC. Of the devs who were supposed to attend, only Chris, Elfyn, and Steve didn't make it. The rest of us had quite a huge party going at all times.

Looking forward to the next time all (or some) of us can get together in person. FOSSCON is just around the corner...

Still reading? Man, you're focused. Go get yourself a cold drink or something, and remember to blink!

I've been working on a little project for Gentoo. I'm keeping it under wraps at the moment, since if I never get to an actual release I don't want to dash anyone's (misplaced?) hopes. Unfortunately, the only release by upstream is an RPM -- and one that gives the FHS the finger (whoever heard of /usr/appname/? bah. It's worse than /usr/kde/). Adapting it to an ebuild is proving to be a big PITA, especially for someone who's new to writing ebuilds (me). The best part is that this would normally work slightly better on x86, which it's designed for, but I'm developing and testing on amd64. It actually runs perfectly; requires a few emul-linux-x86-* libs as it's 32bit, but it does run.

Unfortunately, I have yet to find a way to make rpm.eclass work with the rest of Portage so that it installs to /opt/ properly. More precisely, it should be installed to /opt/, as specified in the devmanual, since it's a binary package. However, the dang thing expects to find its shared libraries in /usr/lib/, which is bad 1) because even x86 binary packages still must have everything placed in /opt/, and 2) because /usr/lib/ is no good on amd64, because it should be /usr/lib32/. And no, I won't/can't resort to any symlinking kludge from /opt/ to /usr/; that wouldn't fly too well with other developers.

However, since the source code is not released, I can't think of a way to make the app look for its .so in something besides /usr/lib/. More headaches: I've been trying to submit a support request at upstream's website, but keep running into rather convenient 500 Internal Error messages. I'll send another request and a phone call or two on Monday, once the Thanksgiving craziness is more settled down. tsunam has been a help in figuring out a few things, too. Thanks!

I'm really excited about this package. I want to get it working according to Gentoo standards. It works just fine when all the stuff is dropped as-is into /usr/lib32 (don't ask me why), but /usr/lib and /opt/ cause the dreaded "cannot load shared object" error. ldd shows nothing out of the ordinary, not that it would be fixable if it did. I hope upstream listens to my request; this app is something that I really want to bring to the Gentoo community. I may have to find a proxy maintainer, since I don't have commit access to the right part of the tree, but I do want it to be in Portage.

And, I want to be my first "real" successful ebuild.

* * *

Speaking of Thanksgiving, I cooked quite the feast yesterday. (Rant: I'm never doing a turkey again, even though it turned out to be delicious, especially since it was my first time roasting one.) Yay for my first Thanksgiving as a married man. All the cooking seemed to go over very well with my wife and the rest of the family. 'Twas fun; I should do really big, complicated dinners more often.

It's been quite the commit-fest for me this past week -- in part because I've been housebound. See, a week or so ago I noticed that I was limping slightly at work, I had some painful twinges in my right knee and hip/lower back. I shrugged it off; I didn't remember doing anything to myself, so why worry? But a couple days later I couldn't even move. Felt like a hundred electrified icepicks were stabbing their way out from the inside; my whole leg and back were in terrible pain. Couldn't walk, couldn't move, just breathing hurt. Just being vertical is a b*tch; gravity pulls on the leg something fierce.

So I made use of my new county-provided medical insurance and went in for an examination: turns out I have sciatic nerve damage. How on earth does an otherwise normal person in his mid-twenties get that, I wonder? I work at a library; it's not like there's anything really strenuous to do. Anyway, the doc said it'd take probably six weeks to heal. In the mean time, I have some strong painkillers/anti-inflammatory drugs, along with a bedtime muscle relaxant (Flexeril), which I've taken before -- and yes, it still makes me floaty and spacey every time I take it, even just as a half-dose.

I feel really terrible about missing work, especially since I've only been there since July. Even with the doctor's note and the county medical leave-yadda-yadda, I'm still the newest guy there, and I don't want to lose my job!

At least today is the last day of the enforced leave, so I'll see what it's like walking around constantly in a day or so. The painkillers help, though they're bad for my stomach -- they're partially what landed me in the ER a year ago.

All this to say that I've been doing a whole lotta editing on the docs. Got a lot more conditionals into the handbooks, so now you won't see as many instructions for arches that aren't your own. Also removed all XMMS references from the docs per Flameeyes's request. No, no flaming, we can't have XMMS in our docs if it's not in our tree. I'm a big XMMS fan, and I wanted it to stay too, but I understand why it left. Farewell!

(Side rant: the only issue I have with Audacious is that its file picker is absolute piss; you can't even select multiple files to add at the same time; you have to do it one by one.)

So while I'm not quite to tsunam's level of commits, I'm pleased with the complicated commits I've been making so far. I have dreams of reaching the 1000 mark, but it's tricky with documentation, since you can spend a week writing or rewriting a complete doc, putting in a phenominal amount of changes, word count, guideXML, and so on, but it only shows up as 1 or 2 commits. Oh well. Quality over quantity, right? That's where my focus should be.

So despite the chance to take the weight off my injury(ies) and do some work for Gentoo, I'm itching to get back to my job. There's only so much break I can take.

So. Happy birthday to me? 24 on the 28th, it would seem.

Yesterday I turned in my two weeks notice to Borders, which means I'll be able to focus everything on my library job. However, I'm still looking for another daytime part-time job to fill out my working schedule, at least until (and if) the county has me go full-time. Did get one job offer from a company that wants me to write XML-based documentation for them, but they're located in Wisconsin, and failed to notice the part of my resume that said Unwilling to relocate. Ah well.

Today should be a happy occasion, but I opened my email a short while ago and was greeted with SwifT's retirement announcement! What's that all about!?!

Anyway, I sent my reply in. Sven, you'll be missed, and not just because of your docs work. Thanks for all that you've done for Gentoo.

PS: What's up with retirement messages retrieved by my mail client? I never get the original message! I only receive the first reply to it by some other developer who was kind enough to quote the original. I hate secondhand news! Stupid email.

Thanks to rane on #gentoo-doc for linking this. Especially the Italian one.

Last night's cooking experiment went handsomely. I finally got to make a recipe I created several months ago, and boy, is it good:

Southwest Chicken Casserole
Chicken breasts
4 oz. mild green chiles, diced
1 can condensed chicken soup
1/2 cup water
1 1/2 cup (at least) shredded cheese blend
3 8-inch tortillas, cut into 1-inch strips

Turned out to be a real treat, though it would have been easier if I'd cooked the chicken separately in a skillet before mixing everything and baking. Still, it was scrumptious. Definitely New Mexican-syle, since that's where my wife grew up. In NM, "real" cooking must be done with green chiles. Go ask drobbins about the workings of good New Mexican cooking.

* * *

In other news, I went back to using WPA on my laptop for the first time in about a year. I'm feeling quite comfortably secure now. It's really amazing. Back in the day, using WPA was really a pain, since it froze my computer on every shutdown, sometimes on startup too. Not so anymore; it worked out of the box on the first try. I haven't forgotten how to do a proper /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf -- and now the drivers actually work with it. Hats off to brix, the old wireless dev who put in a lot of good work. And to UberLord, the new maintainer of all things wireless.

PS: Why is it that when I was using WEP, I didn't find any networks besides my own with iwlist, but now that I'm on WPA, I found an open network operating nearby? Just coincidence that the other one was never running? The plot thickens.

In case you haven't heard, Gentoo founder Daniel Robbins has recently set up his own weblog. It's pretty. It's informative. Go read!

http://www.funtoo.org

3:13 AM.

getting married today.

and i'm almost done moving!

Hey DistroWatch Weekly, why don't you get your facts straight before coming up with "articles" that don't even deserve the name. It's a shame, too; I've never really seen DW spread such FUD before.

Scroll down to comment #70 on the above link for my measured response. Also, I see that solar and antarus have posted comments too, #20 & #67.