So I'm still using shout to stream the stuff
into icecast, and I'm now actually listening to the stream. And
for some reason, it gets choppy every so often. This is on a
100MBit ethernet circuit. I have no idea what's happening
here, although I'm vaguely suspicious of assorted clock skewing
so I've killed off xntpd for now. I had a look at the
shout code, too. It looks like someone wrote it by figuring out
what functions they'd need in, for
example, main(), writing function calls for all those
functions, and then figuring out how to implement each one. It's
clean in one way, but in another way it's bloody impossible to
follow. Too much jumping around between functions.
Looking at netstat I notice that the icecast stream is
backing up data on the Recv-Q. What the hell? Maybe there's
something in a newer kernel to fix this. I had a look at
patching Klortho up to pre9, and ran into some trouble - after
pre6, adding a vga=792 to the boot command no longer
brings the machine up in usable graphics mode. However,
it does work up as far as pre8 if you specify
vga=ask and then feed it the mode number (in hex,
without the leading 0x) on bootup. This is a MAJOR pain. I
looked through the patches, but nothing really stood out as
being the culprit. There's been some very minimal change to the
VESA framebuffer stuff, and a bit elsewhere in things like
fbcon.c, but nothing that I can imagine would cause
what I'm seeing.
Also, VMware breaks under pre7 or pre8, although I think I
recall some discussion on the VMware news server about this.
Huge patches to OMS
today. Including something which breaks the esd build (change
'rate' to 'speed' and it'll build). I wish they'd use a damn
ChangeLog. Oh, you'll need to change 'filds' to 'flds' in the
ac3dec build too. And after all that, it still won't
work. Perils of bleeding edge, etc.
October 30th
Midtown Madness 2 is an exceedingly fun
game, mostly when played in "Cruise" mode whereby you
can drive around trying silliness. Currently, I've managed to
leap clean over Lombard Street, park a car on a roof, get a car
stuck in a compound with no exit (another jump), jump a
firetruck over the Tower Bridge, push a police car into both San
Francisco harbour and the Thames, and flip a car end-over-end in
Hyde Park with some help from a fountain. I like the idea that
you can just implement some basic physics, a three-dimensional
world for 'em to live in, and some assorted AI for the traffic,
cops and pedestrians, and then let people do what the hell they
like.
The Perl 5.6 patch has reappeared in the pilot-link
source. Bizarre. Looks like someone rodgered the CVS tree, then
repaired it.
Left shout running overnight. No small
children were harmed. A good sign.
Feh. OMS is still
upset. Works with some DVDs, doesn't work with
others. Bizarre. I had a poke around in the code, but it's a bit
complex and I gave up, rebooted to NT, and watched Blade
instead.
October 27th
Played around with Gronk today, starting with
making it read Grip's config file to
find out how MP3 files are tagged.
I've just crashed Gonzo for the
first time in quite a while by trying out LiveICE-xmms (as
recommended in the Gronk
README). Hmm. I think I'm gonna use shout or something instead of
it. I'm talking hard crash, too. It stopped cold. Of course,
I've the Magic SysRq key disabled, so I guess it's kinda my own
fault. Please wait, fsck in
progress.
After some abuse, I got shout compiled and built. And running,
after a fashion. I'm not sure that all the commandline flags
work, and the Makefiles are a little toasted, but heck. It's a
start. Now to glue it on to Gronk.
October 26th
Put a little VM randomness on a page, for
anyone insane enough to borrow it. Also cleaned up/updated a few
other pages around the site. I still haven't stylesheeted
everything, and some of the stuff in the Emacs
hacking section hasn't been touched, quite literally, in
years.
It appears that I imagined the entire Perl 5.6 fix for
pilot-link. Bizarre. What you want to do is add
'POLLUTE'=>'1' in
Makefile.PL.
The useradmin problem for the helpdesk was solved by upgrading
to a version of Apache that
supports the -b flag for
htpasswd. Shazam. Fixed over the phone, thank you
Louise!
OMS is dumping core
again, this time somewhere in threading
code. Argh.
October 25th
Paul called this morning to briefly check a
couple of things with the helpdesk. The useradmin stuff isn't
working for some reason which I thought might be
permissions-related but apparently isn't. Hmm. Might need to go
back in and check it.
October 24th
A little more hacking on the helpdesk, and
presto, it's working. Paul has said he's going to spend the rest
of the week breaking it, and then it goes live on Monday next
along with any fixes I make. Oh, hang on. Monday's a bank
holiday. So, Tuesday, then.
Posted my id3lib patch for
Grip on the
sourceforge
Grip site at the maintainer's request. Whee! Then I
downloaded the new release (2.95), played with it for 30
seconds, and went back to my hacked copy. I should make a proper
patch for the changes I've made, I guess.
I poked around at the DGA code in xmms, and looked at what I'd
have to rip off to make DGA work in OMS. It doesn't look
exceedingly difficult, but I still don't know DGA,
so... *battens down hatches*
October 23rd
Spent a few hours working on the helpdesk
today. Most of it works, now, including at least one "I
didn't think of that, but the code handles it okay"
incident.
October 22nd
Final F1 of the season today, as Ferrari go
for the constructors' championship to add to the drivers'
championship of a fortnight ago. Cars off after the first
lap. Whee! There's a camera view mid-circuit that looks somewhat
surreal, due to the colouring of the grass and, I guess, the
angle of sunlight on the track. Schumacher won the race, giving
Ferrari the constructors' title. Good stuff!
Klortho fell over really hard just now. The hard drive was
clicking. Nothing lost, but I did have to do a hard
reset - not just the power switch, Fn and the power
switch!
As predicted, hotmail guy was unhappy with my reply. Very
unhappy. Like, name-calling unhappy. Sheesh. Some people.
The Plucker folk
have done some updates on the pilot-link source. The Perl stuff
should now build on 5.6, although I'm not sure their solution is
the right one. I've removed that portion of my patch; what
remains is the malsync stuff and the other bugfixes I'd stuck in.
I'm writing a helpdesk for Stepstone to tide 'em over until the
official corporate helpdesk gets installed. Much as I dislike
the sort of "not written here" attitude that leads to
57 different varieties of the same piece of code existing on
freshmeat, I'm doing this from scratch for two reasons: firstly,
I'm more offline than on, so searching for the right components
is a PITA; secondly, this is paying for my laptop. It wouldn't
be very ethical to just glom together a bunch of netstuff and
call it "work".
October 21st
Shopping (music, DVDs, book) and drinking
(the
pub).
October 20th
Second TV booster returned to Maplin. Seems like I won't
be watching TV in bed...
Managed to build a shared DGA library, eventually - I resorted
to adding a patch to the 33 or so already in the RPM that
modifies X11.tmpl, which is kinda abusive, but I was fed up with
tooling with X. It takes longer to build X than it takes to
build a kernel. This makes little or no sense to me. Of course,
I then discovered that the X11 plugin for OMS merely
requires DGA; it doesn't actually use it! So, I had a
look at the DGA readme to see if I can figure out
how to use it. Looks simple. That's "simple" as in
"primitive", like if I want to draw a line I need to
write my own routine to do it. Euw.
OMS has improved since
I last had it running - it's less choppy, even though the
framerate appears to have halved(!); also, I can skip a few
chapters before the mpeg plugin dies. Not anywhere near perfect,
but certainly improving.
And I have a :CueCat. I have no idea what use I'll put it to,
but hey. Geek toy!
October 19th
Finally figured out why OMS wasn't running: I
don't have a shared library for DGA. Cue immense silliness as I
rebuild XFree86 from source, trying to figure out which magical
incantation persuades it to build
libXxf86dga.so. Dealing with X source is bad enough;
what complicates things further is that I'm building from an RPM
file, and I'm too lazy to read the build commands the .spec file
uses. So it's sort of "pushd, tweak tweak,
popd, rpm -bc --short-circuit
XFree86-3.3.5.spec". Lather, Rinse, Repeat.
Of course, I tried usinq the SDL output plugin first, since I
have SDL 1.1.4 installed. Blammo, core dump. I suppose I should
try fixing it, although the required fix is probably more
complicated than upgrading to the recommended SDL 1.1.5. Also,
OMS is full of shared
libraries (ok, plugins) and from memory, debugging them with
gdb is, to put it mildly, not fun. Of course, I've
always been a "printf, make and run"
debugger. Old sk00l timewasting.
Some random hotmail guy mailed me about making money out of my
CCSE. He obviously missed the tone of the paragraph concerning
qualifications. Also, the mail read like a marketing
pitch. Ick. I'm sure he'll love my
reply.
October 18th
Spent much of the day attempting to coax NT
back into life. Once I figured out why the network driver wasn't
loading - the "Upgrade" button didn't work so I had to
manually remove the existing driver and then install the new one
- it was plain sailing, right up to and including installing DVD
software. Woo woo! Spent the rest of the day poking at the
installation (black desktop, check; toys on desktop, check...)
and playing Unreal. I know, how very 1998 or
something.
October 17th
Aie! Work! Fixed up a website problem for
Stepstone today. It was so traumatic, working after almost a
month of slacking, that I spent the rest of the day knocking
around with JoeV
again.
I'm writing this on my Pilot while taking the bus
to the office, and it occurs to me that a Pilot-based web authoring
system would be kinda neat. For my own use, I could tie it into
the linkfarm toy I've been playing with. The Pilot end of things
needn't be any more complex than parsing a particular category
of Memos and applying my near-standard markup to them.
Managed to pretty much total my NT installation. Just as well I
don't keep anything actually useful on it. In the process of
trying to untotal it I failed miserably, and it looks like being
a rip-and-reinstall job. Gah. I HATE WINDOWS.
October 16th
Called over to JoeV's again to fix a few
things on the Micromail
site. In the process, I discovered the pain involved in
upgrading GnoRPM. Lots. It's not helped by the fact that GnoRPM
likes to fail quietly rather than telling you what's wrong, and
also by the fact that half the RDF information is useless - most
of the Metalab-based packages don't seem to exist, and a few of
the entries appear to be corrupted. And it would be really nice
if I could tell it that I don't have the slightest interest in
(a) packages for older versions of RedHat and (b) packages for
non-x86 architectures. This is the latest, Alan Cox-blessed
version of GnoRPM, too.
October 15th
I'm getting far too much amusement out of
watching XMMS playing
something like "track #1345".
Called over to JoeV's
place and abused his net connection for a few hours, allowing me
to check in all those BBDB patches I'd been
generating.
There's a second problem with the perl Monitor module; if I suspend
the laptop, Perl::Tk's timer gets all hosed and the
monitors all go to sleep for a few centuries. No biggy, just
restart the monitors. So I guess the next thing is that I need
to bind a default restart gesture into the
module.
Modified the mud client to use
Emacs' customization interface. I'm going to have to read some
more documentation to get the setup right, and possibly hack up
a few helper functions, but it's certainly looking
good. Especially on XEmacs, where they've had in-buffer graphics
for, oh, years now...
Had another peek at the required evil to get VM to behave sensibly
with POP mailboxen. I've got a good idea of what I want to do
with it now, and it's horrific, but it confines the
modifications to the POP handler rather than requiring me to go
delving in the folder code and all the rest of that funky
stuff.
October 14th
Bob: I think I'll go to the pub today and get
drunk while it's still bright! Waider: I feel morally obliged to help you!
Boy, was that ever a dumb thing to say. Being hung over at 9:30
in the evening, when most people are just getting ready to go
out, is not fun.
October 13th
Upgraded Gonzo to test9 since the latest version
of the SB Live!
Driver requires some random PCI-related call in it. The cost
of being on the bleeding edge, etc. etc.
Investigated Gronk
installation, seeing as I now have a rash of MP3 files to throw
at it. Parts of it look needlessly complex and I suspect I can
dig some bits out of mp3name.pl for it. Also it's
another candidate for reading .griprc to discover
things like MP3 filename formats, etc. And hey, now that I've
hacked Grip to put
in ID3v2.3 tags, I don't REALLY need all these damned CDDB files, right?
Started converting my id3lib module to C++, since
the C interface to the library leaves out a bunch of stuff. And
now I've broken the code somehow. Gah.
October 12th
Argh. 800K of an email message. Not much,
except that I'm still confined to mobile access. And it's
probably some bloody Windows executable
flong.
And now a 900K message. Gonna have to kill my siblings, I
think.
Discovered that the perl
Monitor module chews memory like nobody's business. Turns
out that calling $main->after() at the end of the
update function is the wrong way to do it; a single call to
$main->repeat() is the Right Thing.
October 11th
Brought my apparently-not-working TV
booster/splitter back to Peats, where they gave me a
replacement. No quibbles. I like that.
October 10th
After some experimentation, I discovered
that the bulk of my original pilot-link patch
could be replaced by a one-line patch to
Makefile.PL. So that's what documentation is
for. I've updated the pilot-link patch to
cope.
Went messing with snorq some
more so that you should now be able to dictate how it lays stuff
out. I also added in Goats
and JerkCity. JerkCity is
offensive. Really, REALLY offensive. Don't click on that link
and then come whining to me about your poor offended
sensibilities.
Modified cddb-mode.el's readline code to work a little
like Microsoft's AutoComplete - it inserts a default string, and
then positions the cursor at the start. If you type the same
stuff, it behaves as if it's in overwrite mode; if you type
something different, it kills the rest of the line the first
time you do it. I've even got it to switch on
transient-mark-mode in the minibuffer so you can see what it's
doing. I'm thinking of making this a general minibuffer keymap
hack for my local Emacs, since it stops me having to use
C-k all the time. And I'm lazy, dammit.
Did some more work on my linkfarm toy, including a bunch of lisp
code that tries to find a link for the text preceding the
current point in the buffer, which is kinda
neat. Tying this into live typing kills Emacs, though. Well, not
exactly "kills"; more like "makes so slow as to
allow for coffee between keystokes ". Two things spring to
mind: caching and only searching when a word-terminator is
entered.
October 9th
Dixon's phoned me at some
ungodly hour (i.e. before lunch) to tell me that my Pilot is
ready for collection. Cool!
Yay! Schumacher wins Suzuka Grand Prix,
becomes 2000 World Champion. That rules.
I've decided I'm happy enough with my perl Monitor module that I'll stick
it here. Essentially this is a silly little module designed to
make it easy to build monitors that use periodic polling to
update themselves, such as a battery monitor or a share
monitor. I now have an IrDA
monitor on my desktop toolbar,
too.
Hushed up some compiler noise in BBDB. I need to commit a bunch of changes
really soon before I get out of hand.
Wrote a bit more of the id3lib Perl module. It's slow, since I'm
learning about XS as I go along, and also since I'm learning
about id3lib as I go
along. Far too many functions have no return value, IMHO.
And Klortho's still doing that once-a-day lock-up thing. GRR.
October 7th
Klortho locked up hard again while
ripping. Looks like the incessant disk activity is causing the
CD drive to drop an interrupt here and there, and then the whole
machine locks up as it tries to access the hard drive - looks
like the entire IDE controller gets locked out. Ouch. After
running fsck I modified rc.local to check if I'm
networked and to mount the NFS share on Gonzo if it's
available. This way the laptop boots without errors but will
also pick up network facilities if they've been provided, which
is nice.
October 6th
Started reading about how Perl's XS
mechanism works, and then started trying to write a module for
id3lib. Slightly hampered
by the fact that I don't know how to use id3lib, I had a look at
downloading it and decided that I didn't have the patience to
wait for 800+K over a 9600-baud link. So I got Conor to download
it onto a floppy from his office. Sigh. Brings back memories of
college...
I also had a look at trying to figure out how CDDB-commercial's HTML
interface converts a 32-bit discid into a 128-bit hunk o' junk
with the intention, I'm guessing, of not allowing people to
randomly haul disc data out without actually having a disc. I
can't think of a motive for that, though. Anyway. I'm beginning
to suspect it's some sort of hashing algorithm since I can't see
any obvious derivation from the discid, and also since the
resulting number is actually too big to handle as an actual
number without special-purpose libraries, which I refuse to
believe they're doing. No, I have no idea why I have this
notion. Problem here is that I really don't know anything about
hashing algorithms; this is going to have to be a reversible
algorithm, too, since otherwise it just makes more work for the
search engine - unless they've simply databased all the
precomputed values or something silly like
that.
Played around a little with VM, trying to see if I
could quickly hack up better POP support as ranted about here. It's a little more involved than
I first guessed, but I might be able to do something nasty that
works. Hyuk hyuk.
Modified Grip to not
pop up a modal dialog box when it can't look up your disc
(should be a status bar on it for this sort of lark, I think)
and also added a "Load Disc Info" button which reloads the local
CDDB file after I've edited
it. So, the procedure at the moment is insert disc, save blank
CDDB file, edit CDDB file in Emacs - I now
have a fully-fledged cddb-mode.el - reload edited CDDB file, send to CDDB server on Gonzo,
press "Look up CDDB" button, and it does the rip for me. Not
overly painful.
October 5th
Fiddling around with stuff like BBDB in
between entering new tracklists for the CD ripping. Klortho fell
over hard today, and ate a few unspecified disk blocks. Hope it
was nothing important. More annoying was that I had an Emacs
session running with at least a dozen active buffers, at least
one of which was unsaved. Gah. The first sign of this, btw, was
an apparently frozen Netscape, and I've just
noticed it's frozen again. Yikes.
Phew, it's unfrozen again.
I've decided that mp3name.pl should, in the interests
of peace and harmony, be able to read Grip's config file
(~/.grip) in order to prevent overzealous relocating of
files.
Got annoyed with Grip's data-entry (it's
not optimised for entering data on your entire collection, is
one way of describing it) and threw together some elisp to make
it easier to edit the files in Emacs.
October 4th
I'm trying not to think about what my phone
bill is going to look like. Mobile access is costing me maybe an
hour or two of phone time per day, and the Irish mobile rates
aren't cheap. Actually, I've no idea what they are at present,
beyond "not cheap". I could look up my provider's website, but
that'd require me to go online again...
Finally caught up with the relocated pilot-link code; you need
to use pserver:anonymous@cvs.gnu-designs.com:/cvs/openpalm
as the CVS root, as opposed to .../cvs/palm which is
what you'd think from the website. They've STILL not fixed the
Perl interface, and a lot of the changes I saw appear to be code
reformats.
The MP3 ripping continues apace.
October 3rd
Caught up on the files I'd nuked yesterday
and added some more. Had a brief foray into understanding how
inetd-invoked programs work, culminating in two discoveries:
one, I can't seem to use a Perl script as such a program, and
two, I can't figure out how to do what I was going to do with
inetd. The latter revolves around the fact that I don't always
use my main ISP dialin for net access, but I can't get at their
news server if I'm not in their IP pool. So I've set up Gnus to
connect to localhost:119, which I tunnel on an as-required basis
through the waider.ie mailserver - which IS in the ISP's IP pool
- and from there connect to the news server. Now, I'd rather
that this happened on demand, but I can't run the ssh tunnel all
the time for two reasons: the obvious one being that I'm not
online all the time, and the non-obvious one being that ssh
tunnelling, at least in my instance, appears to be broken such
that it only works once and silently fails after
that. Hence the inet idea, whereby the tunnel gets spawned off
when I fire up Gnus. Part of this requires ssh to use
ssh-askpass, which I think is incredibly cool and reminds me of
Ordo in Cryptonomicon. Anyway.
Not gonna happen just yet.
Dug up a few RPMs I had lying around for IBM's speech-rec toy,
ViaVoice. It won't work on Klortho because the Maestro drivers
for Linux have a fixed recording rate, and it's apparently not
anything that ViaVoice is happy with. Gonzo, on
the other hand, was quite happy to run the stuff. It's kinda
neat in that it was able to comprehend a bunch of speech
straight away with pretty much no calibration, but I need to
read up on the doco and find out how to "educate"
it. All sorts of amusing things occurred to me to do with this,
like recording phone calls, movies, spoken-word stuff from
CDs...
October 2nd
Spent a lot of the day ripping MP3 files.
I'm using Grip to do
the ripping and I've a
few issues with it which I should probably look into fixing.
Firstly, it's jumpy as hell. This is particularly evident on a
virtual desktop system where, if it does something like scanning
a newly-loaded disc while it's on a non-visible desktop, the
whole thing jumps to some arbitrary point on the current desktop
- occasionally offscreen. And this is without asking it to keep
the window at a minimum size. Secondly, a common Gtk complaint
(so maybe it's a Gtk problem!): it uses Windows metaphors and
then fails to implement them properly. Typical examples of this
are that you can resize the column widths, but it doesn't
remember them between sessions, and the pulldown lists don't
have a binding for `Enter'; rather, hitting `Escape' collapses
the list with your current option selected. How's that for
non-intuitive? Thirdly, it doesn't, by default, do anything with
data you enter for tracklists, etc. This meant that I had to
type in a few tracklists twice because I'd forgotten to either
send them to CDDBwriting
Motif code to do this sort of thing in 1992, I fail to see
why it's so difficult in 2000. Fifthly, well, I'm going on a bit
here, I guess I really should see about fixing some of
this stuff...
I did a little more messing with the MP3 renaming program, too,
adding options to override the artist, album and title. Which
turned out to be incredibly useful. Then I added some more code
to figure out duplicates, and managed to nuke about 5 hours
worth of ripped MP3s. Doh. At least I still have the CDDB files.
October 1st
Some random MP3 mucking
about. I finally built myself a local copy of CDDB to keep me
amused or something; it turned out to be non-trivial for a few
reasons, some associated with me failing to read the
manual. Some, on the other hand, are IMHO down to boneheadedness
SOMEWHERE along the line. And why has noone implemented the
SRCH command? Hmm? It'd make life SO much easier for
mp3name.pl.