Birch Street Computing (RSS Feed)

my udev just exploded

Tue, 06 Apr 2010 19:54:00 EDT

Every time I reboot my server machine something explodes. It's my own fault, but its still annoying. This time I found out that the newer versions of udev really don't work with the deprecated SYSFS stuff. I found out because my system wouldn't create /dev nodes for /dev/sda1 and the like. I had to manually futz with udev to get the devices in dev, then mount the file systems, then ultimately I downgraded to udev-149.

I knew that version worked and found a bug (http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=302173) with a similar issue. I know the right way to fix it is to build a kernel, but I wish the warning the udev ebuild printed was a little more prominent - maybe print something like : "No, Seriously this version won't work at all with the old SYFS layout, you jerk".

Maybe then I would have paid attention. :-)

Fedora 12 works for me

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 17:59:00 EST

So I've been hankering to try a new distro for a while and after a few false starts in years past, I'm now running Fedora on my laptop. Fedora 12 is the first version I've simply been able to boot up with and have it just load and work without strange glitches. Even the much maligned (by me) NetworkManager is working quite well. Hibernate works, but there is a minor "scrambled" screen before it loads. Other than that, I'm pleased.

Following a couple blog posts got me up and running with the multimedia stuff that the stock distro does not supply. All-in-all it took me very little time to get stuff working well. I'm even all KDE 4.4-up. Aside from my second Kubuntu install from years ago (I think it was a 7.x, but I'm not sure) this has to be one of the bet Linux install experiences - especially counting the post install "get the environment the way I like it" work.

Nasuni, at long last

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 10:14:00 EST

Today is a crazy day at work, because we're launching our product beta to the world. The Nasuni Filer provides a local network filesystem (CIFS) that is backed by cloud storage, and the user can choose what cloud vendor to use. Files are encrypted remotely and snapshots are automatically made available.

I won't say what parts I worked on. At least not until its been out there for a while. :-)

Everybody is hopping around looking at a monitor we set up to show who's signing up and downloading filers. Let's see if I can get some work done today amidst the excitement.

My 2010 website refresh

Sun, 31 Jan 2010 13:48:00 EST

So I finally got to a point where I could no longer stand the software I wrote to generate this website. So I redid it, it has a significantly simplified core and I swapped the old Zope-Style page templates for the jinja2 templating library. I like Jinja and I've been doing a lot of Django stuff at work, so it makes sense for me.

I also use some standard library modules where I had been using custom code before. It is always an interesting experience to learn about something like that, a little bit deflating though. :-)

I don't write the code for this site for any other reason than fun. I get to learn a bit and keep coding at my own (snails pace) schedule. Now that the code is all nice and shiny I wonder if I'll have to write more often, not that I'm promising myself anything.

Link: About Intellectual Property and Competition

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 20:31:00 EDT

Just read this article: How “Intellectual Property” Impedes Competition. Which I thought was very interesting. I especially like: "Real, tangible property rights result from natural scarcity and follow as a matter of course from the attempt to maintain occupancy of physical property that cannot be possessed by more than one person at a time."

I think this is why people who defened very strong IP regimes by comparing to real property rights are not making a good argument. I don't totally agree with the article either but I always like to read arguments for limited IP with pro market perspectives.

Buy This Book

Sun, 05 Jul 2009 10:34:00 EDT

If you are interested in distributed version control, buy Mercurial: The Definitive Guide by Bryan O'Sullivan at your first opportunity. I had a chance to make some corrections and suggestions at the online copy so I know it's good. :-)

And while you're at it download release 1.3 with the latest and greatest features and fixes.

Good Things in Bad Times

Sun, 08 Mar 2009 19:35:00 EDT

The good news starts off with the release of Mercurial version 1.2, in which my largest contribution becomes part of an official release. Now people who have multiple branches (probably named branches) that are unwanted can close a branch. As with normal operation in Mercurial nothing gets deleted, as that would change history, instead a new commit flags the branch as "closed." A closed branch can then easily be ignored by commands or tools. The heads and branches commands can be set to skip displaying the closed branch.

The other big thing in the release that is relevant to me is the addition of the pure-python modules. The parts of Mercurial that were covered by C modules now have python equivalents. I like this for a couple of reasons, it makes it easier for folks to try running on Jython or PyPy or other similar platforms. I also like it because python is (for me at least) easier to read than C. Now its easier to get the gist of a module before seeing the work done to speed it up.

Next up is the pleasant discovery of matplotlib a graphics & plotting library for Python. Or, I could say re-discovery because I think I ran across it a while ago but forgot about it. Now that I need to draw graphs with lots of data points for work, I think this lib will really come in handy. The result even looks pretty.

My self-made tool for partially synchronizing my music directory between desktop and laptop is making some good progress after being dormant for a while. The "pull" and compare functions are working but I still need to implement a "push" operation. The tool is heavily influenced by the Mercurial cli and even some of its code structure. I will probably will make the code available, but don't plan on advertising it too much. The "database" structure isn't a generic one with wide application.

The Anti-Resolution

Sun, 08 Feb 2009 17:58:00 EST

For the whole month of January I've been putting off writing an entry. I keep meaning to come up with something more substaintail then the average entry. But I do have some good news, I've got more patches in Mercurial, got even more new music, just tried KDE 4.2 which seems pretty sweet so far, and seem caught up on most of my outstanding tasks.

I'm still failing at being a Cool Internet Guy... but that was to be expected. In order to taunt myself I want to make a list of things I plan on writing about. This may (or may not) motivate me.

Hypothetical business ideas
Why I like filesystems over databases
Mercurial's general awesomeness
My ideal Linux distro
Books I've been reading

Furlough

Sun, 28 Dec 2008 20:05:00 EST

I've taken the week off. It's not company policy, I don't have to, but I always feel idle at work when coming in during these odd short weeks. The worst is the day after Christmas, I've done it before and didn't enjoy it. If I was deep into a project where I could work independently for a while it would be different, I think. Anyway, with a free week I can catch up on some reading... I haven't read a whole book since this summer.

Since I don't feel like doing anything difficult, I will very briefly rate the CDs I received as Xmas gifts:

Made Out of Babies - The Ruiner [4.5/5] - The vocals are both frightening and inviting at the same time. :-) Favorite tracks: Cooker, The Major.
Dillinger Escape Plan - Ire Works [4/5] - I love the pseudo-pop and Patton-esque parts... of course I like Patton's music so I guess that seems to make sense. Favorite tracks: Black Bubblegum, When Acting as a Particle.
Deadbird - Twilight Ritual [3.5/5] - I haven't listened to it enough to make a solid decision, but its pretty decent. Got it on a whim, due to Amazon recommendations.

Why Thee Kay

Sun, 07 Dec 2008 20:05:00 EST

Well, Python 3000 is done and 3.0 has been released. I like a lot of the changes that have been made to the language. My favorite is probably the change to make print a function, I've run into many situations where I would have like to create a class with a print(...) method but had to settle for a less convenient name.

But today, I'm not here to be positive. I'm going to gripe! Or a least express a little bit of skepticism. So far there are two things about the change that I don't quite like. There is the removal of the callable(...) function. This is minor, but I really don't get it. Maybe I'm weird in that I was using it pretty often. But it's easy to deal with, just create my own utility function that does the same thing.

Less easy for me to just deal with, is the change to unicode strings everywhere. What bugs me isn't that unicode is used as the default, but that "regular" byte strings have been sort-of deprecated. sys.argv, sys.stdin and sys.stdout are now "text" based which really doesn't make sense on Linux/Unix systems. How the hell does the language know that I'm not piping in binary data? I wouldn't be bothered as much if there was a bytes equivalent open by default (rawstdin or some such). I guess I can do something like: "os.fdopen(sys.stdin.fileno(), 'rb')" but that seems quite clunky. The old model was simple on unix-like systems, it was obvious and straightforward.

I hadn't thought much about the issue until I read some messages by Matt Mackall, the creator of Mercurial, who was complaining about the change. Personally, I would've gone with byte strings, that always have an attached encoding which is always defaulted to UTF-8 everywhere. :-) The fact that there is more than one way to represent unicode "text" makes it hard to know what the original byte stream was. This is too bad, because it's nice to be able to write stupid programs.

Power, Usability and Freedom

Sun, 30 Nov 2008 16:08:00 EST

I've been wanting to write about usability for a couple of weeks now. But, not the typical topic of usability in GUIs for average users. I've been thinking about usability of CLI tools and APIs for power users, administrators and developers. I don't have all my ideas prepped for this, so it's not happening today.

However, this article on the (so called) "Properties Pattern" popped up on my radar and really resonated with me. Since I do a lot of work related to configuration, to me, it just makes sense to build software that does not punish me when I want to add or modify values. In addition the pattern adds ways to talk about inheriting values and such. One thing that I really liked was how Yegge mentioned that it's very common but not very formal. I can thing of a number of times at work, and for fun I've done an ad-hoc sort of subset of this.

This brings me to the next thing I was thinking about, the traditional engineering trade-off. I think everyone has a bias, whether it is to work toward performance, or user-facing usability, or flexibility to change the system. In my case, I think I tend toward the latter cases. I prefer dynamic languages and having a way to store/fetch configuration without having to change a lot of code. It might bug other people that it you can't say for certain that 'foo' will appear somewhere or not, but that is part of the trade off. I'm not dead set on anything, though, but I like mulling over this kind of food-for-thought.

On an unrelated note, I don't think I'm going to try to do entries on Sunday. I think I should just start writing when I have an idea. By the time I decide it's time to sit down and write an entry, I've already forgotten some of the things I wanted to write. :-P

Only slight brain damage

Sun, 23 Nov 2008 11:37:00 EST

It turns out that I can think of good subjects for postings when I am driving around in my car. Then, I forget what I was thinking about not long after. Anyway, I wanted to make up for not writing anything last week, and writing a paltry little the week before by creating something good today. I tend not to plan the content of my posts out, so I have no idea how much I will be writing next.

First off, my "link of the week" is pretty interesting. Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson which can be read entirely online. I've read up to Part 2-16, and am constantly amazed at how relevant the essay is, especially in regards to the Wall Street bailout, the talk of a "Big-3" auto-makers bailout, and the general economic reporting on the news. Which is, by the way, generally awful.

I am amused that I didn't find the link on a site like reason.com, which I read pretty regularly, but on a post in a blog linked off of Planet Python. It should be a handy link to pass to people when I'm asked, occasionally, to explain my opinion on the current econ. talk going around.

At work, yet another animated movie is coming out from a company that is a customer. I usually feel funny about posting about work related things, because I don't want to accidentally give out any secret info. :-) But since the some of the customers are right there on the front of the company webpage, I don't mind linking to that.

And it is kind of funny looking at the website, as someone on the inside, the marketing oriented material is like a fun-house mirror view of what were talking about all the time.

Lastly, for fun, I've started fooling around with some python code that would be used to organize and label my music collection (mostly mp3/ogg) outside of Amarok. I love that program, but the new version lacks some of the file management features that the KDE 3 version had. It is also a bit of a pain to fire up a GUI application on the headless box just to pull files from an outside directory into the collection and have them end up in the tree structure I like. It's also a bit of a playground for doing things like trying to copy the way mercurial does it's test scripts.

Weekly Roundup - Need a better naming scheme edtion

Sun, 09 Nov 2008 20:40:00 EST

I feel old.

I hate game companies and the platforms I don't have. I simply refuse to waste money (or compromise my uptime) to waste time, even if is fun.

These signs are cool.

Weekly Roundup - Day Late Edition

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 19:40:00 EST

So I was lazy yesterday, and didn't make an entry. I was taking it easy recovering from a (for me) long night after seeing Zozobra and Pelican live! There were four bands in the show at Harper's Ferry that night.

Zozobra, the band I was most interested in, started off, and was very good. They were joined by Stephen Brodsky, who came on solo after. He had my attention at first, but the music was a little too much of a "downer" to hold my attention. I would have liked a little more - pep, to use a kind of old-fashiondy word. :-)

Kayo Dot, er... lost me and I think the crowd too. During the quieter parts of their set the crowd noise was prominent. Every once in a while they started to do something focused, and then they'd go back to doodling around. Too bad, because I think they were talented, just not the kind of thing I was hoping for in a live show.

Pelican was excellent, they have a powerful sound that, even when when it is not driving, gets you ready for the next wave. I got and listened to City of Echoes a couple of times before their show. I'm glad they did not do only pieces from that album, so far I like the previous work better. Regardless, the start and end of the show, redeemed the not-so-awesome middle bands.

Then as part of my recovery regimen on Sunday I watched two Original Series episodes of Star Trek, then a little football and then the whole of Star Trek the Motion Picture. Yes, I am such a huge nerd. :-)

Finally, since this is pretty good timing to remind every one that on Tuesday, November Fourth, to stay home and avoid politics if you can. Remember, don't vote, it only encourages them. (Not sarcasm, but I'd really hope that you do whatever you want to. Personally, I'm not going to.)

Weekly Roundup IV

Sun, 26 Oct 2008 20:02:00 EDT

I commited my most fundamental change to the codebase at work so far. I was pretty proud, but late on Friday we found some issues. However, it is nothing that I can't deal with in the scripted portion of the code. Have I mentioned how much I like working in python? :-)

Finally got Amarok Beta 2 compiled and installed on my system. That damn mysql embedded library did not want to link without -fPIC. Instead of waiting patiently, I just forced the CFLAGS on the mysql install. Not as clean as waiting for Gentoo to come up with a better fix in the ebuild but I can at least use the program with fewer bugs.

Weekly Roundup - Part Three

Sun, 19 Oct 2008 15:45:00 EDT

Arms very tired - Moved leaves around.
Helped fix a bug in hg on Saturday's bug stomping day.
I do not want to see any more New Hampshire political ads. Make that: I'm sick of all political ads.

Weekly Roundup - Part Two

Sun, 12 Oct 2008 15:00:00 EDT

True to my word! I'm writing another entry.

Food: I ate at an Indian Restaurant for the very first time.
Music: I dicovered, and really liked, Genghis Tron's Board up the House.
No two desktops (of mine) are not using KDE 4.x. This even includes work. Gentoo's even finally got it in the official portage tree, but I was happily using the overlay for a while.
One of my busiest weeks at work in a while. I am down with the sickness (Java). Wait, is that good or bad?

Remember kids, voting is for losers!

Weekly Roundup - First Edition

Sun, 05 Oct 2008 09:56:00 EDT

In my continuing quest to be a "cool internet guy" I've decided to write at least one entry a week, which I will write either Saturday or Sunday. I plan on making a short list of interesing highlights from the past week which the occasional passers-by may find interesting.

On to the show...

At work: Scripted iSCSI using the open-iscsi utils; Battled the evil DRAC cards, they really don't like having gratuitous ARP turned on.
I pulled a muscle in my side, giving me the amazing superpower of being able to stop a sneeze before it happens. I have never been able to do that before. Thank you annoying pain.
The US Congress sucks.
Zozobra: Bird of Prey = awesome. I love Amazon's mp3 store.
I submitted another patch to Mercurial. We'll see how that goes.

Fads and Dogears

Sun, 07 Sep 2008 11:12:00 EDT

Lately I've been starting to play with dynamic web pages again, after a long break. I've converted to RESTology mainly due to what I've learned at work coupled with an interest in Python's WSGI interface.

In that vein I've written two experimental scripts that manage bookmarks and an feedreader, dogears and fads. Neither script is really suitable for publication at this point yet. Fads is totally read-only at this point, the feed cache must be refreshed with an external script. I actually plan on leaving it that way but do want some tracking of what entries have been read, possibly even tagging.

But back on the subject of REST, I'm really enthusiastic about how it encourages thinking about the structure of objects in a web application. That's on top the ease of writing client scripts. However, I did find one issue when working with my test applications. Konqueror does not support PUT and DELETE requests! When using XMLHttpRequest objects, Konqueror limits you to GET and POST. Based on the code it looks like an over-restrictive security mechanism. I took the lazy way out and created handlers that accept POST requests with an "op" param, the op is either PUT or DELETE. So posting to the URL with that parameter set makes a phony PUT or DELETE request.

Anyway, aside from the vagaries of browser support, I'm finding that REST and WSGI make writing web-apps fun again.

Nvidia in Black and White

Mon, 26 May 2008 09:37:00 EDT

I'm blogging this in case any one else has the same issue.

In my attempt to start building a multimedia/Home Theater PC I was trying to connect the nvidia card to a (smallish) CRT television. For a while it seemed like there were two options, no picture or black & wite only. I kept adjusting xorg.conf over and over trying to find the right combination of options.

I knew the card was working because the console printed color up until X started. It turns out it was a hardare problem though, with the cabling! I had an S-video to composite adapter pugged into the video card. The composite cable then connected the TV to the adapter. Nothing seemed to work until I found this post at fedoraforum.org. Apparently, X is being too smart for its own good.

Once I set Xorg's TVOutFormat to COMPOSITE (the black screen when using the S-video adapter), I plugged in the "octopus" that came with my other nvidia card to the computer and connected the yellow composite cable to the blue connector on the octopus. Restarted X and everything began to work.

I'm glad my other card came with that adapter, but I wonder why the output seems to be so convoluted. It doesn't immediately come to mind that the component cable is sometimes used for composite output.

Hey at least I was able to watch my Matroska encoded Star Trek episodes on the TV. :-)