NOTE TO THE SLEEPY: This post is about Debian Planet (founded 2000), not Planet Debian (founded 2004).

Sorry about the needless verbosity of the previous post. I’ll try keep this one shorter because I’d like some feedback on it. robster (who founded it) and I are essentially the only active staff of Debian Planet, and neither of us are able dedicate much time to it because we’re both kept busy with all manner of university-related stuff, both academic and not. It’s been suggested by some people within Debian that DWN and especially Planet Debian render it defunct and nobody reads it anyway. However, robster and I don’t really share this opinion – Planet Debian contains opinions, hacks, experiences, recipes and stuff that can be very interesting if you know the people involved, but really doesn’t necessarily perform the function of making Debian’s development more translucent to the outside world if you’re not on the mailing lists (although certain relevant blog posts can be highlighted, as DWN does). DWN seems to be aimed at a fairly technical audience who is generally aware of the projects’ internals but wants to keep up with day-to-day issues – it frequently includes stuff that’s not hugely relevant to the big picture unless you’re inside the project.

As far as we know there aren’t any other sites that are aimed at demystifying Debian for users, and with the advent of Ubuntu, depending on your viewpoint we stand to lose or gain (indirectly) many more users too, some of whom may take (or retain) an interest in Debian development (and we can cover Ubuntu too). The site does something in the region of 30 GB a month, a lot of this down to RSS feeds, so I’m sure articles that are posted actually do get read by quite a few people. Posts to the site itself asking if we should continue, and in what form, have prompted a surprising amount of positive feedback, and have been enough to dispel any ideas of closing down the site, although we’ve been quite lax at following up the resultant offers of assistance thus far (an ESR style list subscription of anyone who shows interest is exceedingly tempting).

What we’d like to do now is make it easier for other people to contribute (our editorial control has been an iron grasp thus far, with most articles being written or mostly rewritten by a very select few), and find some more people to help us out with keeping up with goings-on in the project, and we’ve also potentially got to find new hosting over the next few weeks. Are we misguided? Should we bother securing new hosting for the site and keep it going, or is it as needless as people say? Does anyone who’s reading this agree with our goals and want to help us out?

I’ve just been round at robster’s room helping him replace the AMD Sempron 3000+ which he had in his new Biostar 210V (similar to my 200V) and the BIOS apparently didn’t recognise. We put in an SB Live 7.1 because on-board VIA 82xx sound is crap (even if the planets are in alignment, DXS is in the right randomly numbered mode, and you manage to get ALSA and friends to do the appropriate resampling to 48kHz, it still sounds crap as a consequence – although do let me know if you know how to make it sound good), a 60GB HDD I had lying around while he’s waiting for CCL to replace or give him credit for his 2nd broken pair of HGST Deskstars, and swapped the Sempron for an AMD Athlon XP 2800+.

Unfortunately it was recognised by the BIOS as a 1250MHz processor or something… so I looked at the motherboard manual and found some jumpers to set the front-side bus speed. Firstly we were amazed it had jumpers (can’t BIOSes autoconfigure this stuff nowdays?), and secondly how the default setting was for a 100MHz FSB speed. The consequence was that the DDR400 RAM was running at DDR266 and the processor was running massively slowly. Setting the FSB to 166MHz made the processor and RAM run at the correct speeds, indicating that probably the Sempron would’ve worked anyway. Oh well, the Athlon XP is a better chip, and given the hassle with the actually broken hardware, CCL definitely won’t refund the Sempron if it’s not broken.

We set about installing Debian, really enjoying the partition manager in sarge d-i rc3, setting up LVM on degraded RAID arrays and such like, although it’s a shame that it falls back to crappy old lilo when installing on XFS root partitions. If sarge had a kernel where XFS wasn’t completely f🤬ed, unlike 2.6.8, then the xfs_freeze/unfreeze hack in grub-install would work. I just switched to the shell and installed 2.6.11 and grub manually before the reboot. I get the feeling joeyh really wouldn’t appreciate any kernel change right now though. Anyway, I digress…

The first boot was a disaster, the kernel was oopsing all over the place in all sorts of random locations, and usually ended up panicing some way into the boot. My assumption was that 2.6.11 was broken somehow, so we booted the install CD again to change it, and the kernel on that was hosed too. Uh oh! I was worried that I’d fried the processor with static whilst installing it, but it’s easier to eliminate the possibility that the RAM wasn’t broken. I removed one DIMM and it started working… but when I tried that DIMM on it’s own, the system worked too. I tried all permutations of the two DIMMs in the two slots, and discovered that when they were both in, the system screwed up, but when one or other was in either slot, the system worked fine. Apparently the CCL value RAM didn’t actually work when it actually got clocked at DDR400, so it needs to go back for replacement or credit too. Interestingly, memtest86 didn’t find any problem with any configuration within any sensible amount of time, and for me in the past it’s either found problems very quickly, or never found them at all.

A few lessons learnt (or re-learnt):

• Double check for for relevant jumpers on your motherboard if CPUs run at the wrong speed. Apparently some computers on sale now still have them!
• Don’t buy cheap RAM, it’s a false economy, life’s too short…
• If you’re planning to set up a RAID1 array in a new system, buy two different brands of disk or they’ll be from the same batch, experience the same wear, and fail in the same way at the same time. This happened to me with my system about a year ago, when both 3-month old HGST drives failed within 24 hours of each other (I now have a Seagate I bought at the time to recover my data onto, use one of the HGST replacements, and sold the other), and robster’s on his 2nd pair of broken HGST drives from the same batches…

Some people seem to be lucky with hardware and it works for them, or fails in obvious or non-critical ways whilst within warranty, and some people seem to be very unlucky and everything goes wrong – horribly, insidiously, and without any suitable recourse. In general I seem to be one of the former people, and robster, my brother and most of my friends are the latter people, embarrassingly including quite a few people I’ve helped to build their own computers. Although saying that, lightning will probably now strike all of the hardware that I own… I’ll keep you posted.

<rant rage=”incandescent”>I’d rashly assumed that the optician service at Boots would be competent, being as it is a large nationwide corporation who are likely to only hire appropriately qualified staff. This is, I think, true in the case of the actual opticians, who I have seen two of, and have been impressed and had no cause for complaint. However, the woman whose job it was to teach me how to insert, remove, clean, etc my new contact lenses is clearly *not* qualified to do so, and deserves to 🤬 after 🤬 in some kind of 🤬.

Today was my 5th day of wearing contact lenses, and thus far I’d been finding it very difficult to put the lenses in correctly, have them stay in place and not fall out, sometimes experienced blurred vision, etc. It’s now exceedingly obvious why this is, but I’d been putting it down to lens n00bishness – not being used to them, or being inexperienced at putting them in. When putting the lens in today I noticed it had numbers on, which actually say 123, but I thought they said 125 and indicated the prescription of the lens. This surprised me given my prescription is -1.75… aha I thought… wrong lenses? Looking at the box, I saw they were correct, but that the numbers were there to correctly orient the lens. The diagram quickly revealed the reason for my discomfort and persistent problems – the woman at Boots clearly, explicitly and repeatedly explained to me the COMPLETELY INCORRECT AND UPSIDE-DOWN orientation of the lens, with the edges forming a convex shape rather than the obviously correct concave shape (much like that of the cornea, no?).

If they think I’m going to sign up to their “vision care plan” and give them a penny more after the humiliating torture of having the woman sit and watch me try for an hour to put a lens in when it was upside-down, followed by these 5 days of absolutely inexplicable frustration, they can go and 🤬 themselves with a 🤬. I’m going to go and 🤬 them tomorrow. 🤬!</rant>

Update: Went to see them today… spoke to a “Team Manager”. She apologised and said she’d talk to the person involved, and gave me 1 months’ free lenses. Not sure that quite makes up for the level of incompetence and the discomfort I faced. I may still write to them, complain next week at my aftercare appointment, or just change optician.

My new phone went live last Thursday, and I didn’t really have a chance to play with 3G until now, traveling to a friend’s place yesterday and currently heading home on the train. Without changing any configuration on my laptop except making rfcomm0 point to the new phone’s MAC, I was able to “dial up” with 3G instead of crappy old GPRS. All of the problems I spoke about before are gone – it really must’ve been some combination of buggy firmware on the Nokia 6230, and O2 being crap. With this Nokia 6630 and Vodafone 3G, I get a noticeably faster and very resilient connection – Symbian on the phone does the right magic to keep the connection between the laptop and phone up when passing through brief areas with no connectivity, or passing between 3G and GSM coverage. I’m really impressed, I’m able to surf, IRC, chat on Jabber and download the odd package or two from wherever I am – the only downside I’ve hit upon so far is that in order to visit apparently dubious sites like the IRC channel search engine I need to use a credit card and pay £1.50 (in exchange for £4 call credit) to disable Vodafone’s adult content filter. Shame I don’t have one…

I worked at an ISP in London one summer a few years ago, and one of the guys there used to say things like “argh, total nosebleed” when things weren’t going well or proving to be difficult. I didn’t really adopt the phrase except on one occasion when I actually did have a nosebleed and went to the bathroom to sit it out until it stopped. I’ve always had intermittent spells of nosebleeds for as long as I can remember, particularly when its hot during the summer, or I’ve got a cold like at the moment. Nobody realised what had happened or why I’d rushed out until I got back to the office and I explained that there was no problem, I had actually just had a nosebleed… It seems particularly apt at the moment, I’ve had 5 or so in the past 3 days whilst stressing about completing a PhD application I’ve left until absolutely the last minute (through nobody’s fault but my own hesitation about whether or not to apply). Argh, complete and utter nosebleed!

$ darcs record
hunk ./trace/main.c 90
- if (ptrace(PTRACE_SYSCALL, pid, signal, NULL) < 0)
+ if (ptrace(PTRACE_SYSCALL, pid, NULL, signal) < 0)
Shall I record this patch? (1/1) [ynWsfqadjk], or ? for help: y
What is the patch name? actually deliver signals
Do you want to add a long comment? [yn] n
Finished recording patch 'actually deliver signals'
$

This doesn’t actually make my project work any better, it just means that it exits rather than goes into an infinite loop when I cause the process being traced to segfault, which I do whenever it makes a fork or vfork (for some reason gcc does this, so my project can’t trace itself being compiled) syscall versus clone which is how all the cool kids implement fork these days.

I’ve joined my brothers & sister and their families at my sister’s flat in London for an Easter lunch. The Easter bunny has visited and my nieces have, with usual amounts of screaming and a little bit of help, located all of the chocolate eggs left here by the Easter bunny. Currently people are watching some mediocre quality 80s style Easter day viewing – Agatha Christi’s Poirot in Evil Under the Sun, although I think most people have tired of it now and are leaving soon.

On the way here I was fairly pointlessly using my soon to be replaced Nokia 6230 with O2 GPRS and Bluetooth to say “woot *on train*” on IRC, and check the times for when and where I had to change train. As with other times I’ve used GPRS, it’s been intensely frustrating. I can cope with a slow connection, and a lossy connection, so long as ssh doesn’t drop, and web pages load eventually, but the problem that continues to vex is the horribly unreliable connections. It can’t seem to keep a connection up for more than about 5 minutes – the PPP connection keeps dropping for one of a variety of reasons.

One I don’t understand is the phone just dropping the PPP connection with the laptop – it’s supposed to be a packet data service, so why can’t the phone keep the connection up with the laptop even when there’s no signal? I’d rather a few packets get lost than have to re-restablish the connection. You even get the old-fashioned NO CARRIER message if you try to establish the connection when there’s no coverage.

The second is more understandable but I think still ill-conceived. I get this error in syslog: kernel: rfcomm_recv_frame: bad checksum in packet. Looking at the code, every rfcomm packet payload has its checksum verified, and the whole packet is unceremoneously dropped with apparently no nak or retransmission if the checksum doesn’t match the data. As an emulation of a serial link, I think this is pretty poor – serial links may scramble bits, but I doubt they lose a few k of consecutive bits. Unsurprisingly, pppd’s packets with their own checksumming and such can’t deal with this, so the connection just drops.

I can’t put persist on in pppd either, because when this error happens, the connection seems to drop uncleanly and is not closed from the phone’s perspective, so it doesn’t reply to requests to open a new rfcomm connection. To compound the problem, the “Disconnect all active clients?” prompt when you try to disable Bluetooth doesn’t actually work – I have to powercycle the phone. Does anyone grok rfcomm? What happens if I just comment out the checksum check, or modify the code to allow data packets with invalid checksums to propogate up to pppd?

Hopefully the situation will get better when my new phone is activated, although I’m suspicious that the even patchier 3G coverage will just make the connection even worse, and they won’t yet have realised that packet connections should actually persistent even when there’s no coverage. Even more hopefully the phone’s Bluetooth implementation will be less buggy and not need powercycling when the connection gets dropped. I need to get gnokii talking to my old phone (either with Bluetooth or with the USB cable that came with my new one) so I can load the contacts and calendar entries onto my new phone.

And when powernowd scales the CPU downwards, rhythmbox skips, but let’s not get started about rhythmbox… a series of patches are forthcoming. 🙂

My eyesight’s not bad, only slight short sightedness, but I took to wearing my glasses all the time in school because it irked me to have to keep putting them on and off to see certain things. On a bit of a whim I decided to give contact lenses a try, and I had an optician’s appointment today to check I was OK to get some, and have them fitted.

After a few tests and some pondering she put a pair of 2-week lenses in for me to try out, and let me have a wander round town for 20 minutes to check they were comfortable and fitted properly. It was so cool, you don’t realise how much glasses suck until you’re given the opportunity to see clearly without them. Peripheral vision without turning your head! And contact lenses won’t wear holes in the sides of my nose, I don’t have to take them off to go rowing (or swimming? dunno), and I’ll (hopefully) stop compulsively poking myself in the nose to push my glasses back up (which I do even when I’m not wearing them).

Whilst graced with such visual lucidity I dropped in to Carphone Warehouse and discovered my O2 contract was ripe for termination, so got myself a new Nokia 6630 on Vodafone 3G. I went back to the optician and she took the lenses out and ordered some for me, and then discovered I have to wait up to a week for them to arrive and go back for a lesson in poking myself in the eye, etc. It was intensely frustrating to walk back in to the optician with contacts on and out again with my crappy old glasses.

In other news, I discovered Galloway & Porter (a bargain/factory return bookshop in Cambridge) have a large number of foolishly cheap O’Reilly books in the basement, so I bought four (Perl Bookshelf, Perl Cookbook, C# Nutshell, SQL Nutshell) for only £30. Wahey! Returning to college I found out that my Nokia 6630’s locked to Vodafone and nobody’s cracked the locking codes yet, so I can’t put my O2 sim in – I’m unable to use it until next week when my number ports over. Roll on next week!

What do people use to manage and publish their photos? I’ve got a new digital camera (Canon IXUS 500 if anyone is curious, great for the price) and already have over 1000+ photos from it and photo CDs, and 7 films that still need developing. I’d like a web gallery that does this:

• Stores the originals sensibly (filesystem ideally) and without modification
• Generates sensibly-sized slides and thumbnails for web viewing and ideally caches them
• Allows me to easily rotate pictures for viewing, either preserving the original or doing it losslessly
• Allows me to arrange pictures into galleries and associate captions, and ideally move them around
• For bonus points, reading EXIF data such as times and orientation
• For double bonus points, integrating with WordPress somehow to handle linking/inclusion would be cool

A program that did these and had a good export to web feature would be acceptable also. But generally, I want the moon on a stick. Anyone got any recommendations?

My registration for robot101.net has now completed, so it is now the canonical URL for my blog. I will replace www.hadesian.co.uk with annoying redirects, and take it off-line after a while (it’s primarily the domain for my family’s e-mail).