February 1, 2003

i had some vivid dreams of being in band practice in high school last night. there were a lot of people in the percussion section that i used to play with from middle school throughout high school. it was the day of our concert and we couldn't really play the music.

my percussion dreams are usually pretty frantic - running around getting to different instruments and stuff. which is actually what it was like sometimes. i am not having much luck finding out what these types of dreams might mean on the internet, but google has some stuff about tooth dreams. fortunately i haven't had many of those lately.

boring.

trying to get usb working on my k6-300:

usb.c: Maybe the USB cable is bad?

i have two motherboard manuals, but neither is for the motherboard i have. i really truly thought that the cable phil game me would work. just like with the cable modem this afternoon.

wasn't this why i got a mac?

February 2, 2003

life is strange (or, you don't really want to read this entry).

when i was a sophomore in college (~late 1998), if i was downloading something from the net and my roommates started transferring files, my download would crawl to a halt. (they were running windows, while i used linux. one of the roommates was using linux way before me, so it's not like they were "lame")

this was very frustrating - i had no idea what was wrong. i ended up calling 3com - not expecting any help (since i was running linux). the support guy had me download a dos tool, which i ran, and he had me set the card to half-duplex mode. while i was waiting for it to reboot, he mentioned that he just got red hat, and wanted to learn this linux thing. i forget what i said to him. after my computer finished booting into linux, i tried downloading things and it was fast again!

i have a hard time remembering any other times i've called tech support and they were actually helpful.

anyway, fast forward to 2003. since my lovely powermac suspends, i've gotten used to sleeping with no computers on in my room. now that i have the K6 in my room, i decided to try the swsusp patches. i figured it would be faster in the long run to invest some time in getting a cross compiler working on os x rather than build on the 300 MHz K6. this did not turn out to be the case, however i did get a kernel built and it actually works great.

so well, in fact, that i wanted to use it on my vaio n505 which is having some (un)suspending problems with phoebe (and in fact has never had a working pcmcia when unsuspending). since phoebe seems to have really messed up wavelan drivers, i had to use my 3com 10/100 pcmcia nic with it and nat to my powerbook. due to the convoluted network setup i'm using, i had to do two copies of the kernel/patch etc.: one from the k6 -> powerbook, then powerbook -> vaio. well, the scp to the vaio was going at a *screaming* 6K/s over the 100 mbit link (with nothing else on the link).

to make a long story short it was the same problem as before.

while all that was going on, and the original swsusp, i was still fighting this cross compiler. eventually i got it working, though, and started a kernel build (after the vaio build started). and the cross compile build finished first. yay.

(wasn't this why i got a mac?)

see this is why i said not to read this entry. i should probably get some sleep since it's 8:30 am and i have a bunch of errands to do today.

February 3, 2003

it feels like 2000. i went to sleep at 8:30, 9, 9:30? i don't remember. i woke up at one and 2 something, although it broke my flannel sheets' heart to do so. i think i wasted an hour or two doing i have no idea what on my computers, but i managed to stumble outside while stores were still open. i think joe came with me.

i went to the local computer type store, to try to get a usb thing for my motherboard again (i don't know if phik's was bad or if it had the wrong wires). the guy said he sold the one he had, but if i come by at six i could pick one up. the 6th? no. 6 pm. in 2 hours. i don't even want to think about where he was going to get it. joe says to make sure i pay with cash.

i have a receipt here for some furniture, so we must have made it back to the furniture store while it was still open. while we were there another patron asked the owner (well, he's the only guy i've seen working there) when they closed. "hmm today? let's see..." and looked at his watch... a minute goes by... the patron says "6 ok?" "yeah that sounds good." joe made me pay in cash.

then we watched like 17 hours of hockey. the BU crowd came up with innumerable chants, mostly involving one team or another sucking this or that. after the game a subway guitarist and some old (presumably homeless) man almost got into a brawl.

ok sleep.

February 4, 2003

well i had a tooth dream last night. i was having trouble talking, and reached into my mouth and pulled out 3 or 4 pieces of molar. i didn't have time to dwell on that (fortunately) as i was trying to explain to some people (who were "teaching" a "class" i was in) that i hadn't been in school for about a year so writing and stuff was hard for me. well, actually it's been over 3 years - i think i was thinking that it's been a year since i had a job (although it's actually only 3 months).

today's .spec file trick of the day:

# do this for upgrades...in case the old modules get removed we have # loopback in the kernel so that mkinitrd will work. %pre /sbin/modprobe loop 2> /dev/null > /dev/null || : exit 0

well i now have a dresser and a bookshelf. it's almost as if i live in boston now. i have some other stuff to get, but i plan on doing a bunch of lists and i'll list those then.

i had some success today: i got a UML kernel running, and a cross-compiled kernel loading modules.

i read on the UML page about some problems with it on older cpus and thought that might be it. phil said "oh sometimes you just have to hit enter on the console." turns out it was that. although i am still getting an occasional BUG(). there's really no reason why i should use UML on that box - it really isn't beefy enough to warrant it and i don't actually have any data on it. so tomorrow i'll just skip that and put a lustre kernel on it.

the cross-compiled problem was just that i had [ ] set version number on thingie dingies enabled in the kernel. i've never (ever) gotten that to work right, i think. however pcmcia in 2.4.20 really disagrees with my laptop, so now i'm building one using the external pcmcia-cs drivers (which i think i always used to have to do). maybe i should get a mac?

since the furniture delivery guy didn't get to my place until after 5, the hardware store was closed when i tried to buy a hammer. fortunately phil had one, and he felt sorry for my delirious state (my body really shouldn't have woken itself up at 9 am) so i ended up cooking some food. i think it was a meat and a some sort of vegetable. there were definitely cookies at the end. i feel much better now, although tired.

February 5, 2003

two more classic dream themes last night. the first was i stumbled into a neighbor's house (from when i was growing up) and he was lying on the floor, reading a book or a photo album. i'm not sure if his wife told me or not, but i knew he was dying. not dying in the sense of he has a few months to live, but as in this was his last day. he actually died a couple of years ago; i think i mentioned it but if memory serves me well (it rarely does), it was a poorly written entry, which i would be embarassed to link to. anyway, the thing was that as i came through the window or whatever (now that i think about it, i think i was just in their yard?) i tripped over him, and kept doing so... i couldn't get out of his way and kept stepping on him as he was dying there on the ground.

the other dream was i was naked at algiers or charlies or something. i think maybe lola was there?

another dream i had was i was playing duck duck goose with a bunch of friends from elementary and high school. well not all of them were friends.

and finally another one was i was at a friend's house playing (i think) sega sports football on his sega [genesis] and we stayed up all night, and i was supposed to be in a running race that morning. i guess my dad was organizing the race, because he started us off. it actually started out on harvard ave, went across beacon (coolidge corner) and then turned left onto longwood. i was keeping up with my dad, and so was my friend. he actually started to pull away, but i followed him. unfortunately i didn't know the course, but i think i woke up or switched to a different dream or something. usually in dreams where i have to run, i can't... i'm being dragged down or have to crawl or something. this (apparently) is due to whatever the brain does so that you don't flail around at night when having dreams. anyway in this dream i could run pretty well.

i made the docks on my macs the maximum size. my desktop is 2624 pixels wide (i have the docks on the right edge), so i figure why not. i deserve it, right? i don't know why, but for some reason the larger icons feel more friendly.

i guess this makes sense, but swsusp didn't solve the problems with the wavelan card after suspending.

i don't know why i feel so. tired.

well it seems my k6 does have some apm support (and maybe some acpi). unfortunately, it's an AT case (the motherboard can do both AT and ATX) so the fan still stays on. but i think when i suspend it, it beeps. i don't think i can actually flip the power switch to turn off the power supply fan, though, so i still want to use swsusp.

how i found out about apm support is a funny story. i got a usb card today, and my sun type-6 usb keyboard wasn't working with it - in much the same was as it didn't work with phil's dingus (in fact, the keyboard no longer works in my macs or the vaio). so, i was going to plug phil's dingus back in and try something else. at first i was going to try the ipaq, but decided a usb hub would be a safer option.

(btw - using swsusp doesn't let you add/remove hardware w/o rebooting. linux gets very confused (and angry) if you do this)

so i turned the box off, and plugged the dingus in, and screwed it to the case. flipped the power switch and there was a strange buzzing. turned it off, back on... still buzzing. so, i move the usb thing (while it's running) and get some nice sparks. i think i know why the keyboard doesn't work.

anyway after i took the dingus out, and turned on the box, it told me that the bios settings had been reset. in the process of making sure they were correct, i found that there were pm settings that i could turn on.

ALSO, if you use installkernel to install a kernel, but, oh say, get the arguments mixed up because a simple thing as --help doesn't work, and the kernel image gets installed as System.map, then depmod promptly seg faults. there's got to be a drinking game for this somewhere.

February 6, 2003

i feel exhausted again. highlights for the day:

• my room is cleanish now.
• i (finally) installed my whiteboard. it is a bit bent.
• i finished the sims. i accidentally had another kid with my wife, but since we both had jobs nobody was there when he was crying so civil services came and took him away. perfect.
• i had thai with phil but at a different place than i usually have.
• bruins won.
• if you forgot to get me a christmas present, i need a new hat. i wear size 7 3/8.
• i can't think of anything else.

February 7, 2003

i had a dream where my dad worked for howard stern.

stats are fun (from espn.com):

rank	name	team	points	+/-
1	mario lemieux	pit	69	-6
2	marcus naslund	van	68	-2
3	joe thornton	bos	66	19
4	jaromir jagr	was	61	2
	todd bertuzzi	van	61	-7

boy it would be sweet if thornton tied lemieux tomorrow (although i'd accept him passing too).

February 8, 2003

i'm a knife.

knifin' around.

cutcutcutcutcutcutcutcutcutcutcutcutcutcutcutcutcutcutcut

February 9, 2003

sometimes my fingers don't do what i tell them.

<boc> i grrl do dick

so i was hungry today and i was talking to phik and since he likes to help me cook so we were going to make some food. i was in the mood for some fish and a hamburger. instead, we had deviled eggs, asparagus, and some corn chowder. it was pretty good. i don't know why i served myself that last bowl; i was completely full. of course i somehow managed to stuff a few cookies in there too, and am paying the price. phil says that my teeth hurting means that it's working, but i'm not so sure.

after that we played some excellent games of halo. my partner and i took joe and phik to the cleaners, repeatedly. phil did not appreciate me spiking his controller every time i captured their flag. easy come easy go is what i say.

jacob@wet-pants:build$ ./iPaqUSB Starting main loop. got device: vend 0x0000049f prod 0x00000003 release 0 Configurations: 1 Interface has 2 endpoints PipeRef 1: direction out, transfer type bulk, maxPacketSize 64 PipeRef 2: direction in, transfer type bulk, maxPacketSize 16 Wrote "foo" (3 bytes) to bulk endpoint Read (1 bytes) from bulk endpoint _

February 10, 2003

beanpot.

jackpot.

February 11, 2003

two things have been brought to my attention recently:

1. it's not obvious that the above picture is of my laptop panicking
2. my recent entries have been boring

strangely, the two have something to do with each other.

the past few days have seen me trying to get my ipaq talking to mac os x. i can't even begin to describe what i've been doing with this in anything resembling interesting prose.

also, the kernel driver i've been doing today makes my laptop crash.

i seem to have spent the last 5 hours mostly doing cut-n-paste (though by re-typing it rather than actual cutting/pasting so i can learn some of this stuff). when i turn my ipaq on i get a /dev/pocketpc0 and when i turn it off it goes away. i can even open this device and read an infinite number of the character 'f' from it:

jacob@wet-pants:jacob$ sudo dd if=/dev/pocketpc0 of=/dev/null count=128 0+128 records in 0+1 records out 128 bytes transferred in 0.106380 secs (1203 bytes/sec) jacob@wet-pants:jacob$ _

tomorrow i have to finish some things i was too lazy to implement, and to actully hook up the device in /dev to the ipaq. and then it's GO TIME.

(see, i said it's boring)

in other news i had some yummy thai at phik's while we watched the bruins suck. it is sad, but joe and i can tell in the first 5 minutes of a game if the bruins are going to win or lose.

also, we played some halo. phil will tell you that he doesn't like it when i get the invisibility thing and snipe him as he respawns, but i will tell you that i don't like it when phil wins. i think it's a fair trade. in any case, BOY do we have a surprise for joe and shaver when we play mitten(s?) on battle creek.

last night when i went to bed i was really excited about all these things i was going to do during the day. when i woke up, i couldn't remember any of them.

February 12, 2003

i broke down and actually read the book about I/O Kit hacking which the other docs said i should have been familiar with. i don't know what i was thinking by reading them without being familiar with the other book. anyway, that explained how drivers worked that i could begin to understand how this ether of confusion fits together.

so much so, that i got to delete the 300+ loc that i copy-n-pasted last night for so many hours, and copy-n-pasted some different code back in. now, i get a /dev/tty.pocketpc0 device when i turn on my ipaq. this one, however, was made by the mysterious IOBSDSerialSomething object which means i have less code that was typed in wrong. all in all, i am at the same point as when i went to bed yesterday, except that i am doing it right this time. this is a welcome change, since yesterday i knew i was doing it wrong. so tomorrow i have to finish some things i was too lazy to implement, and to actully hook up the device in /dev to the ipaq. and then it's GO TIME.

i went to the store, and finally got a stupid stop-n-shop dingus card. i saved a whopping 20% or so as they were selling cookies at 33% off with the card. phil doesn't think wiping them out of cookies is worth his time, though, but something tells me i should go back and stock up tomorrow. [ ed: i will definitely be going to the store, as i forgot to get contact solution ]

"our" TiVo2 would have arrived today, if i had been awake to sign for it. that means i have to get up to wait for them to come again - between 10:30 and 2 - which i had feared would be impossible considering i woke up at 2 today, and wouldn't be able to fall asleep again until 6. i think i will be able to fall asleep now though.

February 13, 2003

it's 6:30 am and i'm not sleeping. i tried for a few hours, but couldn't turn the corner. i supposedly have a wake-up call coming in at 10 from shaver, so i'm probably going to try to get a couple of hours in. hopefully i don't know how to remove the battery from my phone in my sleep.

interestingly enough, they don't turn on hinting in their x server.

the new safari butchers this. of course this works (and is not only more clever, but looks nicer too).

shaver's wake-up jab arrived (i won't even mention it was late) way before the TiVo will ever get here. they have 28 minutes until i will be upset with them.

speaking of being upset, a few tests indicate that our megamodem hasn't been turned on. since i am already waiting for ups, i figured i'd give rcn a call. apparently, there was no record of joe actually ordering the so-called service, only checking on the pricing. the person joe talked to must have written down that we wanted the service on a napkin. i told the person i was on the phone with that indeed we wanted the service. since i'm not registered on the account, i had to get some information from joe from irc. i decided to call back, as joe might have been at lunch. when i did, the woman said i couldn't get the service added myself: joe had to call. even though i was just told the opposite not 20 minutes prior.

phik is megamodemming as i type this.

tivo is here. i've managed to distract myself with web monkeying for a few hours, so i need to get back to my driver.

it's a whole new house of blue.

A LIST OF THINGS THAT HAVE BEEN UPGRADED IN OUR APARTMENT IN THE LAST TWO DAYS:

• A NEW TIVO 2 (WITH USB ETHERNET DINGUS [ WHICH LETS US GET RID OF OUR LAND PHONE LINE ])
• MEGAMODEM FOR INFINITE INTERNET
• NEW SAFARI RELEASE
• NEW X11 RELEASE
• OS X 10.2.4
• UPDATED FINK (I HADN'T UPGRADED TO THE JAGUAR VERSION)
• WEDNESDAY NIGHT SITE REDESIGN (AND MY INBOX IS COMPLAINT-FREE)

if only joe would get an airport extreme.

it's 12:26, and i'm not all that tired. yesterday or the day before (whever i went to the store) as i was checking out my stuff some crazy old woman started talking to me. next time, i will remember to keep my headphones on. i really hope i can fall asleep, because i need to finish some things i was too lazy to implement the other day, and to actully hook up the device in /dev to the ipaq. and then it's GO TIME.

February 14, 2003

i spent all night dreaming about the I/O Kit. it never made so much sense. especially the part about 1-on-1 hockey.

i'm awake at 6:something after sleeping all night - does this mean i am on a daylight sleeping schedule? i think it's just a trick. i'll probably be asleep by 2 pm.

i need to initiate a thermostat regime change.

shaver loves me because i added an alternate stylesheet.

LoolixUSBPocketPC(0x2e15e00)::start() LoolixUSBPocketPC(0x2e15e00)::start: found 1 configurations LoolixUSBPocketPC(0x2e15e00)::configureDevice() LoolixUSBPocketPC(0x2e15e00)::initDevice: using configuration 0 LoolixUSBPocketPC(0x2e15e00)::SetStructureDefaults() LoolixUSBPocketPC(0x2e15e00)::configureDevice: interface 0 has 2 endpoints LoolixUSBPocketPC(0x2e15e00)::createSerialStream() LoolixUSBPocketPC(0x2e15e00)::acquirePort() LoolixUSBPocketPC(0x2e15e00)::allocateResources() LoolixUSBPocketPC(0x2e15e00)::allocateResources: found bulk input pipe: 0x2be3c80 LoolixUSBPocketPC(0x2e15e00)::allocateResources: found bulk output pipe: 0x2c4a880 LoolixUSBPocketPC(0x2e15e00)::allocateResources: input buffer: 0x2edad00 LoolixUSBPocketPC(0x2e15e00)::allocationResources: output buffer 0x2b78000

so /dev gets populated with a device, and i can open it, and we get all the ports on the iPaq and get it to start doing stuff, but no data actually gets transferred (YET!).

exciting stuff!

knuble at :10! knuble at :27! at that point i didn't expect it to end up being a come-from-behind-OT-win, but fortunately the OT started out how the game started. also, stock on the second line is pretty sweet.

fenway's midnight movie is the big lebowski YES.

the movie was excellent. i think joe and i laughed the most of anyone in the theatre. they only laughed at the lame, obvious jokes, but joe and i (the true fans that we are) laughed at the actually funny things. also one of the songs was different than what's on the dvd.

it turns out, the bruins have not lost an OT game to an eastern conference team this season. they have not won an OT game against a western conference team.

i am so tired. hopefully i will have a full night of deep sleep.

February 15, 2003

mmmm 12 hours of I/O Kit dreamless sleep....

i did have a dream where i was renting my parents house. i think i had lost my iPod and my sister's too. i think i found them. i was playing the sims or sim city or something on my conputer, and i could use my sgi monitor as a touchscreen. the game was much easier to play with a touch screen than with a mouse.

sleeping for 12 hours isn't easy: i have a headache, and my shoulder hurts a lot because i slept on it wrong.

time for driver debugging.

i played halo instead. joe had a fire going, since our "heat" can only get the apartment up to about 65°, which caused our smoke alarm to go off. since our ceiling is so tall we couldn't turn it off (that's a hockey stick):

February 16, 2003

for some reason we played a lot of xfrisk today. it has some problems, like if it gets a delete event, it EXITS. so we had a few games where each of us learned this by clicking on the close button on the WM. oh and when one person exits, the game is over.

yeah it's an Xt app. blizzard promised to port it to gtk though.

we took out our xfrisk frustrations by playing some halo. the phantoms game is very, very, fun.

i tried to debug my driver today, which led me to search for this. it did not go well.

i think i know that the problem is that i didn't cut-n-paste enough stuff, so that's easy to fix.

also NOTE TO CNN: DC, WEST VIRGINIA, DELAWARE, MARYLAND, AND VIRGINIA ARE NOT IN THE NORTHEAST. please update your internet.

i ate 3,000 cookies today.

February 17, 2003

this article wasn't fun to read while watching nashville outplay the bruins.

it looks like nashville is going to win 5-1. one minute into the game, if you had told me this, i would not have been surprised. we'll see which bruins team skates on wednesday.

it's pretty much been one of those days:

@@ -1412,7 +1412,7 @@ kr = thread_block ((void(*)(void))0); IOLockLock (port->serialRequestLock); - if (kr = THREAD_RESTART) { + if (kr == THREAD_RESTART) { continue; } else {

February 18, 2003

quick dream roundup:

• something about ppp
• playing my old drumset in my parents' attic
• riding a motorcycle / police car doesn't pull me over
• something about some school or something

i thought today was going to be horrible when after i commented out the debug spew in my driver, it didn't work. uncommenting it didn't help. then i remembered i turned off autoconnect. if i manually connected, it worked again.

i fixed some typos and thinkos, and now it works perfectly. i've got synce installed (thanks to libpoll), but i haven't gotten it to work yet. they need some help with their autofoo, though.

re-enabling autoconnect makes synce work:

jacob@wet-pants:bin$ ./pcp ~/bad_day.mpeg :bad_day.mpeg File copy of 425988 bytes took 0 minutes and 8 seconds, that's 53248 bytes/s. jacob@wet-pants:bin$ ./pcp :bad_day.mpeg ~/bad_day.mpeg File copy of 425988 bytes took 0 minutes and 11 seconds, that's 38726 bytes/s. jacob@wet-pants:bin$ _

yay.

i'm not really looking forward to tomorrow.

things went so well today - i fixed the last couple of bugs in my driver, i got synce talking to it, and multisync builds, dinner with phil and joe - that tomorrow can't possibly compete. sure there will be a new penny arcade and a west wing (although i don't know if i'll be able to stand watching the whole thing), but things just won't be as good.

i think part of the problem is the multisync code i read today. honestly, there is a reason the spacebar key is the largest one on the keyboard. use it. enter's also pretty big [ed: my generous use of <p> should make my views on this obvious]. also it looks like they've never seen any other app that had plug-ins.

but does this crappy (looking) code mean that it doesn't work? no. so it really shouldn't bother me.

i have been accused of being really critical of people and the work they do. i like to think that i'm being as hard on them as i am on myself, and as hard on myself as i am on them.

for example, when i write code, i imagine miguel looking over my shoulder and giving me a hard time for writing such crappy code. or i hear myself critiquing the code, as if i was reading someone else's code.

this can cause a big road block: i concentrate on writing great (perfect?) code instead of writing any code.

so, when i read code like multisync, it frustrates me that people can write really ugly code, but nevertheless write code that actually does stuff, while i can have such a difficult time doing this.

i remember this email app i used to work on, and re-writing it over and over again. i didn't get it right the first time (honestly i never really got it right) but i just chose a method of doing something and went with it until it turned out to be a bad idea.

theoretically i should be better off now: being able to see problems with some implementation well in advance should save me lots of time. but the crippling aspect of not being able to write any code is as frustrating as it is unproductive.

or maybe i feel bad because joe took me to the farm in halo tonight.

February 19, 2003

i haven't done an update from xemacs in a long time but i have it loaded so whatever.

i spent much of today playing with multisync. i got the plugins building as plugins on os x, in addition to getting a somewhat cleaned version in a CVS repo. it's possibly some of the worst code i've ever read. shaver offered to pay to fly me out to .se to give the developers a seminar in how to program. i've already started on LESSON ONE: "THE SPACEBAR." it's controversial but hey it's the 90's.

i went to "pepper chicken" (it's a sister-restaurant of applebee's i think) with phik and the bleeeezzards. wow was that some good chicken. i think i will have it for lunch tomorrow and the next day yum.

i had been meaning to recommend to blizzard the zwan album (href boycotted due to excessive use of flash) but i kept forgetting but fortunately he got it on his own and he likes it. i listened to it on the way to phik's and it is so good. well except maybe for the lyrics.

the bruins got a point, nothing else is of interest.

February 20, 2003

this morning when i woke up i turned on my computer, and had about 3000 windows popped up on my irc client because i had "stolen" some guy's nick. shaver was talking about travelling between YYZ and buffalo, i think. then i woke up.

in my dream, i hadn't been that tired, so i just went back to sleep for another hour and a half. i woke up dreaming about being in an aquarium where there was some vampire or something. i think things were about to get worse before they got better.

i just synched my mac os x addressbook to my iPaq using free software.

i have a lot of code to re-write this weekend.

"This is the kind of day that almost makes you feel good to be alive."

February 21, 2003

it was like 40° today so i went running. i hadn't gone since around thanksgiving, and i really felt it. hopefully we'll get another cold front and i won't have to run again. ever.

with my success in os x addressbook hacking, i thought i'd write a backend for evolution to use it. it's probably pretty easy for all i know, since i couldn't get evo HEAD to be able to link itself.

that took a lot of time, since i am stubborn, and don't like being defeated by software.

i managed to catch the bruins game. they lost, but thornton got an amazing 1-on-3 goal. hopefully, someone else on the team will figure out how to score, and they might be able to make the playoffs.

after that, joe and i played frankenstein with some computers. my k6 300 (formerly my main development box in college, then a brief stint as bug-buddy.org, and recently the router at our apartment) is now sitting in an ATX case. it's old AT case now houses our "new" router: joe's k6 200 (but with the old router's hard drive). these routers have a tendency to kernel panic when we first install them, then be fine. we'll see.

i was going to lustrefy my k6 box (this is how much i love my friend phil), however that's not going so well. first, i tried the "chaos" kernel rpm. it turns out to be for P4s (which my K6 is not). then, i tried just about every possible patch they had except for the right one (well i tried 2). and since building a kernel is too easy, i of course have to cross compile it, which requires some "tweaks" to the Makefile to get things working on non-gnu/non-linux machines.

my guess is that i'll never get this working.

ok, ignoring the fact that i'm cross compiling (remember, i said ignoring), what's up with this:

handler.c: In function `mds_getattr_name': handler.c:683: `IT_SETATTR' undeclared (first use in this function) handler.c:683: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once handler.c:683: for each function it appears in.)

this is with lustre 0.5.20.1, portals 0.5.20.1, linux 2.4.18-18.8.0-l12.

February 22, 2003

i'm reminded of yesterday's run every time i move.

[ IF UNIX IS BORING SKIP A FEW PARAGRAPHS ]

last night's computer switch-up definitely went too smoothly. this morning, i discovered that the router's sshd was non-responsive, although it was still routing our internet like a trooper. a check of the console revealed some "bad slab" errors with some page this or kmem that. making it do anything too hard caused a panic. i thought that maybe the kernel was to blame - since i didn't know if it had the right ide driver. so i built a "new" one - 2.2.23 - and that panicked before it got a whole page of output out.

so i did what any sane person would do: decided to put phoebe 3 on it (i had a backup of it already so i wasn't too concerned with killing it's state). well, i couldn't get it to boot from a floppy, so i installed it on the k6-300, then moved the hard drive over. booted it and... instant panic.

so, i figure at this point it might be a ram problem. so i took out the simms (i don't know what masochist designed those things) and tried to put in a dimm from serendipity. it didn't fit, so i put in the 2 32M simms from serendipity instead. boots perfectly.

[ THE NON-UNIX PART ]

at this point phil came over and we had some tasty indian food. the plan for when shaver and zach come here in march is to get a few dishes from the indian, thai, and vietnamese places nearby and eat until our stomachs burst. i am very excited about this plan.

[ UNIX BITS CONT. ]

then it was back home, to try to get dhcp/dns/masquerading set up on the new install. this took a very long amount of time. i don't remember what took so long, but i think i was distracted by phil's constant whining. it turns out that the tulip card just won't get a dhcp lease from the cablemodem; we have to connect the 3com card to it (funny, it's a 3com modem). and before you suggest that the cablemodem needs the 3com card's mac address, my powerbook and the airport can both dhcp from the cablemodem without a problem.

anyway i finally got it up, and now our network is working flawlessly.

if only i could say the same for my lustre kernels...

they just won't boot. if i'm lucky, i can get to "Uncompressing Linux... Ok, now booting the kernel..." before it goes back to the POST. otherwise it reboots instantly. phil will blame the cross-compiler, but i'm not so convinced.

(incidently, grubby seg faults when i try to run installkernel. go unix!)

it reboots with a cross-compiled kernel, with a normal kernel, with kernel built for the k6, with a kernel built for a 386. i'm building a lustre kernel with a .config from mgalgoci (i don't know what this is supposed to do), and then i have a cross compiled phoebe2 kernel waiting. and then i'm promptly going to bed.

also:

• when i was messing with usb and killed my sun keyboard, i think i also killed my usb floppy drive.
• ...which makes it hard to install linux on my vaio. phoebe3 no worky with my pcmcia cd drive, and i can't get any network drivers w/o the floppy drive. so i might just do a hard drive install (again).
• oj was $2 off (for a 3 quart thing) at the store.

i really have no idea what i was doing before, but the kernels i'm building now seem to work fine. traditionally, i have a night's sleep in between the "i have no idea what's going on" phase and the "what was i thinking?" phase.

there is some bastardization of swsusp in the lustre kernel, but it doesn't build right. i got a nasty merge of the latest 2.4.18 patch to build, but it doesn't suspend. the good news is that with apm, it powers off, so when i do (note confidence) get swsusp working, i won't have to guess when it's done: the box should just turn off.

this may not be exciting to some of you, but i never had an ATX case so it's a nice change for me. although my mac and laptops do it.

i can see the lustre team being thrilled by my swsusp and cross-compiling patches. i think those are the only things keeping them from a 1.0 release.

yikes it's 7 am.

February 23, 2003

i gave up on getting swsusp working with the lustre kernel, but i got lustre built (cross-compiled!) and am editing this on a lustre mount.

so far it hasn't crashed.

we played with lustre a bit more, but didn't have much success with remote hosts. the vaio (and joe's desktop) can mount the lustre dingus, but can't ls it. open is returning -EFAULT or something. phik was (understandably) entrenched in his MOO hacking, but i'll probably head over to their bugzilla soon enough.

in the meantime, i've set up apache on the lustre server to serve a checked-out copy of loolix.com while i edit it (ie, i'm editing it on a lustre mount right now). i'm forced to use stallmacs since lustre and xemacs don't get along ("Invalid argument when trying to save foo"). but so far no pages full of NULLs.

joe got his airport on our network in his room. this will be handy this summer, when we hang out on our porch.

it turns out i'm not going to need swsusp. the lustre box is out in the living room so it can be on the ethernet, and it turns out that my wavelan card works if i rmmod yenta_socket after resuming on the vaio.

i sent the synce folks my darwin fixes, and hopefully i'll get a response about my synching problems soon. in the process of doing that, i found the answer to one of my questions about multisync, so it's not as broken as i thought.

i also got evo HEAD to link / run on OS X, but there seem to be some severe problems with libglade and shlib bonobo components. hopefully we'll be able to sort them out. the other problem is that when i try to open my INBOX, evo crashes after a while since it's having charset conversion problems. it takes me back.

February 24, 2003

i decided i didn't need to sleep. i can't find a simple tool to grab an image from a webcam. do i have to write one myself? (because it's really not worth it)

on the cheerier side i think simon is coming over today.

phil and blizzard came over for dinner. phil brought simon and blizzard brought pizza.

phil couldn't fix our lustre stuff. he mumbled something about something missing in my kernel, and that zab wasn't around, and then he started playing moo again.

i've been up for almost 6 hours, so i think i'm going to sleep.

February 26, 2003

i think i had a dream where i was in halo, fighting against modutils. i think phik and zab were on my team, and that depmod kept dodging my needler shots.

so far, iMovie 3 is a big improvement over iMovie 2. it feels much smoother, and does some things automatically that i had to do manually before. also, it hasn't crashed for me (yet).

it doesn't think it supports iDVD 2, but i have a hunch that if you export to "Full DV" QuickTime, iDVD 2 will handle it just fine. well, it's not so much a hunch as a coping mechanism. if it doesn't work i might have to yell, which might scare simon.

the bruins played pretty well last night. the playoffs are basically here, since they're in a race for the last few playoff spots. hopefully they'll be able to get hot going into the playoffs, and beat the much hated senators.

today is probably going to be rough again, since i went to bed at 10 and only got around 6 hours of "sleep". it's pretty cold in here (it being 5 something in the morning), and although he should be used to it, he's been spending an awful lot of time by the fireplace with a lighter and a phonebook.

yikes. i haven't been outside in days and days, so i had no idea it was 6° outside. i'm going back to the flannel-womb, sleep or no sleep.

so. cold.

i had a dream where joe and i were watching the fifth element on tbs, and during a quiet part of the movie, they ran a commercial while the movie was still on. i kept saying to joe, "turn it off. turn it off." and managed to wake myself up.

i got a couple more hours of sleep. it's still way too cold in my apartment, but the DVD i burned works. yay for not giving apple $50.

some notes on last night's game:

Upon leaving last July, Guerin made a point of saying the Stars were committed to a Cup, and he didn't see the same commitment out of the Bruins. [ link mine ]

A website report had the Bruins considering bringing in Ray Bourque, their five-time Norris Trophy winner, to finish out the season as coach. Channel 7 reported the front office recently contacted Barry Melrose, the former NHL coach and now ESPN analyst, about taking Ftorek's spot.

for the record, i (and joe too) like ftorek. i don't like seeing coaches fired just because their team is losing. well, except for hargrove after the '97 series. sigh.

February 27, 2003

honestly i don't know why i try anymore.

phil had a potential lustre fix he wanted me to try, so i went to get the vaio. at some point during the last 2 or 3 days (while the laptop was suspended), something happened which screws up interrupts in linux.

as i unsuspended, i got a "hda: timeout" message, and when i tried to use lustre i got a bunch of "eth0: TX timeout" messages. on reboot, the wavelan card doesn't work ("RequestIRQ: Resource in use"). oh and before you ask, yes it works with windows.

it's now some 2 hours later, and i'm going to hope it fixes itself while i sleep, else it's going to get an acpi kernel in the morning. and really, nobody wants that.

highs and lows for the day:

• i got past the invisible sword guys in halo
• the bruins lost to the rangers

February 28, 2003

i woke up from a dream where i was listening to a nirvana cover of "we didn't start the fire."

then simon threw up.

in an attempt to make up for his morning's mess, simon has been extra cute today: