jcm's blog

Hackergotchi, n.: Yet another weird FLOSS movement byproduct.

Thanks Matt. Now all I need is a jcm South Park character… I suppose I could play with the new GIMP 2.2 I have freshly installed. Actually, I’m now strongly considering just sticking Ubuntu breezy on the Powerbook and being done with it. There was a time when I really cared about installing it all the hard way and fighting the early issues with getting Debian to work on one of these babies – but I just don’t care enough any more. I know how to setup gnome-volume-manager, D-BUS, hald, etc. but I’d kinda rather it just worked in a supportable way for on the move laptop use.

Didn’t get a whole lot done outside today. I think it’s the weather not being so great. I’m aiming to get other stuff done at home though – tomorrow I am in Bracknell anyway, so I get forced to go outside for a few hours. I’ll take my bike if the tyre is holding after I figured out why the value had gotten slightly stuck in the “deflate slowly” position. I want a Marin.

I mailed martin about meeting up while I’m in Edinburgh (434 miles away roughly). Hmmm. So far that’s one jriddell and an mling to catch up with – anyone else hanging around the area and want to meet up?

I lost 18 hours of my life on the latest series of 24 and wasn’t much enthused for all that. The ending was particularly pants considering it was meant to be the culmination of so much CTU effort. But, that’s Hollywood for you. There’s a new show coming out about people trapped on an island that’s apparently (according to one clc) the “new 24″, but I’d settle for just having a little less suckage. Still, it’s my own fault for watching it

Jon.

I have decided to go to the rally in Edinburgh on the 2nd of July. I’ll be taking the sleeper service from London Euston on the Friday evening and returning on Sunday night in time to be back for Monday. If anyone would like to join me – it’s not too late to book some train tickets via First ScotRail. You won’t want to use the website since it doesn’t allow online bookings for that particular service (thanks in part to the new “National Reservations System” having teething problems with certain types of bookings and other processing problems ) – call them on +44 8457 55 00 33 and make a booking after listening to the nasal-pitched recorded voice instead.

This is a worthy cause. Let’s show Tony and especially Bush (and his Administration cronies) that it should be taken seriously by peacefully making the point that we – in the richer countries – should take some responsibility and do the decent thing when it comes to third world debt and poverty. Yes, it’ll be congested, but I think Edinburgh can live with it for just one day.

Jon.

I resigned earlier today.

For the past three years, I have been working with a small band of extremely talented people at a small NMR instrumentation company in Oxford. Last summer, around the time of OLS, the company was sold to another and took on a whole new direction, one less conducive to furthering my career development.

I learned a lot from working at the company and really enjoyed working with a few individuals in particular. Some of these people are so seriously cool, you’d be very surprised – my boss is the greatest guy you could work with and the electronics guy is so amazingly skilled that he can write software, VHDL, design cutting edge NMR instrumentation, hardware diagnostics and run a company quite literally all at the same time. I really respect that level of natural-born skill in someone.

I’m taking a new job with an Embedded Linux company in July and this will be a change from working with NMR instrumentation but not all that different from what I have been doing. I hope that I get the opportunity to work with some of these people again in the future.

“so long, and thanks for all the fun”.

Jon.

I’m off to Clapham Junction to meet up with some fellow printk folks and tinker with panic. I’ve got a proposal to work on later and some articles which are starting to feel a little overdue. Meanwhile, the music practice is not as far along as I wanted. I’ve got to make a call on whether I can learn this one piece in time and it’s starting to look like a real bad idea adding it in at this stage – a shame because I don’t want to disappoint. Meh.

Apparently, one can fly to New York relatively inexpensively from Ottawa. I’ll have a think about doing that while I’m on the East Coast – I’ve been to the State but never to the City itself. Some other folks would like me to head over to LinuxWorld San Francisco, but I think that’d probably be a little too much for one trip, tempting though

Jon.

Well, it looks like the French have voted no to the European Constitution in Sunday’s referendum. What a shame. Despite many of my friends and family not necessarily agreeing with me on Europe, I’m actually in favour of integration. A United States of Europe would be a good thing in the longer term and redress the balance in power across the individual member states (one reason I suppose for the French voting no to the process).

I was explaining my dislike for the Monarchy system in this country to a visiting relative this evening. I’m not anti everything, but I believe in doing things which pragmatically benefit the majority of the people. Having a Queen here is a bad idea (she’s unelected – I’m talking about theory here, not the practical fact that she never actually enforces her technical power) and having a disparity between rich “Western” European countries and those in the East is a bad thing too. We shouldn’t have rebates for the UK, we’re not that special (we’re only in the position we’re in due to our historical evilness as a Borg-like Empire) and we don’t deserve special treatment. We should look upon the recent member states joining Europe as a sign of things to come – namely that we are starting to see an effort to bring balance to the system.

Well that’ll make a few of you hate me. Meh. Think about it. Do you really care about the UK so much that you don’t see the idea of European integration as a good thing? Europe has so far been fantastically beneficial to us and allows for so much free travel and commerce between member states. We should take that to its logical conclusion and go the whole way. I’m not even British anyway – I’m a European Citizen.

Jon.

Anyone got an apt repository I can use for getting hold of Beagle on a Debian testing box (no, I’m not going to switch to breezy)?

I have installed most of the prerequisites from experimental as per the Beagle Debian Install instuctions but am having problems building the sources and don’t have much time to spend on this (read: I’m just curious, I’m not going to spent hours trying to build it until I actually have a reason to do use it). Looks pretty cool though. They’ve apparently ripped out dbus support from the latest version hiding in CVS (which is amusing, given who’s working on the project) and have based the search infrastructure on what looks like a beagle daemon that uses XA files tags for markers (why not? It’s a valid use for extended attributes if ever I saw one – could we also get it to tag files with their supposed contents so I can do away with silly file extensions and then have it watch for inotify changes so new files get indexed automatially in the same way?).

Wibble. I should do some work. I’m not going to Totnes as I’ve been sticking bits together for a certain magazine whose editor (in Totnes) might hit me with a big stick if I turn up today without a few columns for him to peruse

Got in touch with a certain Mark Lord last night. Looks like he’s also keen on meeting up at OLS. Hopefully I can get him to show me some climbing stuff – and we can go hunting waskally geocaches down by Dow’s Lake (I was walking on it in February). Yay!

Jon.

Apple: Why did you use FAT32/HFS?

(Actually they’re between a rock and a hard place here but meh. I’m ranting as it’s 05:17 and I just had another lovely little ipod experience…)

The ipod is a cool little gadget, that’s certainly a given by most at this point. Why, then, oh why, did they have to pick the regular filesystem approach quite as they did? I’m actually starting to prefer the idea of not having a generic firewire disk. The problem with their approach is that it’s trivial to blow away the entire iTunesDB as just happened to my unit. Fortunately, I’m not using iTunes (I learned from my mistake last time when my first ipod unit got trashed when I was actually using iTunes with Mac OS X and the laptop went to sleep without – I guess – properly syncing the disk. Great. Turns out you really don’t want to run out of battery or reboot since you’ll risk losing it all and having a very empty looking 30/40/60GB or whatever).

So, not using iTunes, I’m able to copy over my gtkpod iTunesDB and iTunesDB.ext manually after running a fsck.vfat against the underpinning filesystem (and getting a scary FAT inconsistency error and guessing FAT1 was probably still actually ok to be used) and then finally convince gtkpod to fire up and recognise all of my music without having to go crazy. Not something I want to happen at 5am. Linux Firewire clearly needs a little work. Why?

jcm@perihelion:~$ uname -a
Linux perihelion 2.6.11.10 #1 Fri May 27 00:54:19 BST 2005 i686 GNU/Linux

I just built this kernel (yes it’s already outdated by 2.6.11.11 but meh) and yet it managed to roll over and dislike my firewire ipod disk after a day or so of uptime (needs some investigating after I actually do a proper backup of the contents). It’s also not possible to eject the device without eject getting stuck in a syscall and there’s a lovely little oops in the scsi layer there too. Cool.

I’m getting some sleep.

Jon.