Finished putting the PostgreSQL 7.3 packages together today. Turned out pretty good, it auto-upgrades databases on a 7.2 -> 7.3 upgrade. Works pretty good so far, I've put out a request on the list for people to try it out before I put it in unstable.
There's a ton of great fixes in the 7.3 series. Can't wait to bang on it a bit more.
I think I'm gonna try getting Qt 3.1 out in unstable by tomorrow. Got a day off so I'll have a decent amount of time to work on it.
Made it back home fine. I must say, even though they've scaled down from what they started with, Midwest Express is still a pretty nice airline to fly. Doesn't hurt that I get a direct flight from Milwaukee to Raleigh, either. I really hate dealing with hopping around to get where I'm going.
Got some good loot for Christmas. The best was a huge suprise -- Dad got me a pair of Etymotic ER-4P headphones. These are in-ear, very hi-fi headphones that block out pretty much all ambient noise. Until you've heard a pair, it's really hard to describe just how incredible the sound is. I'm going back and listening to some of my favorite recordings, and hearing things I had no idea were there! It's really amazing. Go look for some reviews on the net, and you'll see that pretty much everyone agrees. They're hard to beat. I've been listening to music pretty much continuously since the ride home. =)
Speaking of music, over at the Very Big Blog, I see that Duran Duran has gotten back together and is recording another album. I had started out long ago listening to them just because they were the pop band of the hour, but I have since come back to them and started listening to their newer stuff, as well as the older, and while they started out working in the (fairly cheesy) pop circuit, there's really a lot of music to their music. As time goes on they've really grown, and I find now that I listen to them fairly regularly. I'm looking forward to seeing what comes of it, they've always been pretty on-again, off-again, it's good to see they're doing something again.
Also picked up some more stuff that Mike Patton was involved in, this time a band called Secret Chiefs 3. I haven't decided yet whether I like it, but it is interesting, as always.
In porting news, I got KMUD ported on the plane up to Wisconsin, and have got OpenNMS pretty much working now on OSX again, with the new 1.4.1 developer preview JDK from Apple. I plan on doing some catching up KDE-wise to figure out what I've missed, but it appears they haven't released a new 3.1 rc to packagers yet, so I've got a little play room.
So here I am in frosty Wisconsin, and I've come to a realization:
I'm a wimp.
Every time I come back here I think how nice it is to visit family, but dear GOD this is a frozen wasteland. You know what? It gets cold here. Turns out, the further North you go, the colder it gets!
Well, at least in the northern hemisphere. =)
Let me give you an example.
See this?
(click for larger picture)
You know what that's for? I bet you can guess. Here in Wisconsin, they get so much snow, so regularly, they have little flourescent poles on fire hydrants and other important utility stuff so that they can find them if they're completely covered in snow!!!
That's right. You heard me.
Madness, pure madness.
At least in North Carolina, if we get a foot of snow everyone freaks out and we get an impromptu vacation. Here in Wisconsin that's normal.
I got tomcat and all it's billions of dependencies updated and put in unstable tonight. First step in getting OpenNMS Fink packages put together. I'm gonna give it a shot over the holidays, but I expect it'll be pretty hectic. We'll see how that goes. =)
Speaking of, it's unlikely I'll be doing much updating here for a bit -- I'm going to be busy with family for a bit (big suprise, Chris-what?).
So it appears that once again, GNU-Darwin shows their inadequacy in understanding anything they touch.
MacSlash and Slashdot both have articles on GNU-Darwin's decision to freeze PPC support, and to drop support for distributing any packages that link against bits of OSX that aren't in Darwin.
This, in itself, isn't necessarily bad, they're welcome to do whatever they want, but their reasons for doing it are just stupid. And I quote:
First, Apple continues the wall-of-silence with respect to their repugnant DMCA-based legal action, and there is no reason whatsoever for us to think that they will not undertake similar action in the future. It is regrettable that the DMCA was Apple-sponsored legislation, and it is now time for them to disavow it and promise never to employ it.
Second, APSL is languishing, and it is unacceptable to the free software community. It is now time for an APSL revision, which brings the license in line with the free software definition in accordance with the expectations of GNU Project.
(for reference, the APSL license is here.)
First of all, the problem is not that Apple is using the DMCA -- that's just the (admittedly heavy-handed) way that they're handling the fact that you broke their license agreement. Apple licensed the MPEG-2 decoder, so they can't just do whatever they want with the resultant iDVD software. The limits were in part because of limitations put on them.
Secondly, correct me if I'm wrong, but what the heck are they doing trying to GNU-ize a system that has always been non-Free anyways (in their definition) in the first place? My post on the subject on MacSlash was, basically:
They're taking a system that was not GNU (APSL), and then complaining that it's not GNU! It's not quite on the same level, but is the same idea as the CygWin folks complaining that Windows is not Free. Well no s**t, sherlock, no one said it was.
If GNU-Darwin feels that strongly, they should be working on Linux or, even better, HURD. Instead, they're complaining that the Japanese car they just bought is Japanese, so why don't we stick it to them and complain until they change their culture and become American.
Judging by the (for the most part) backlash on /. and MacSlash, I expect there isn't much sympathy for them. I guess that means more people will be moving to the (GPL'd) project I work on anways... (all 3 of them ;)
So tonight we've got 16 people going from work (and family) to see the two towers, or so I'm told!!!
Madness, pure madness... Should be a blast. =)
In KDE news, I got word from pogma that working dlcompat code is in dlcompat CVS now; I build it and tried it out and arts starts up, even with arts-tools installed (yay!). noatun and kaboodle still run like crap, but it's definite progress. Now that that is done, the question is whether to include kdemultimedia at all, or at least those parts. They're pretty worthless, as is, it looks like there's some definite platform issues still.
On the bright side, pogma's changes make me pretty confident that there aren't going to be other hidden symbol issues in other bits of KDE, so if nothing else I feel better about a release.
Latest word on the KDE list is that 3.1 release candidates post-security-audit may be available this week, and a proper KDE 3.1 release is now expected in early January.
I've whipped together a script that will generate Fink CDs based on binaries you've built on your machine. It works so far, I managed to install KDE on my laptop with fresh builds from my G4... should be very handy!
pogma on IRC (the author of the libdl compatibility library for OSX) just found the problem with the missing static symbols in kdemultimedia. The workaround is a small change to dlcompat to do a symbol lookup on each dependent library, to force dyld into noticing the libraries.
It appears that the kdemultimedia problem is fixed!
As soon as that dlcompat code is available, I'm basically set, and just waiting on the KDE folks to finalize 3.1.
ROCK ON!
Well, the Lord of the Rings (Fellowship of the Rings) viewing at work went pretty well. We ordered in some pizza and set up the projector and watched the 3 1/2 hour special edition at about 6 feet wide. 'twas pretty cool. Looking forward to seeing the Two Towers on Wednesday, we've got a big group going.
Erk, looks like that doesn't work as well as I'd hoped. It appears to be parsing the output of help options to determine drivers and stuff, and it's not parsing right. =)
Guess I'll have to see if they've updated it at all to work with rc1.
Lotsa little fixes got updated last night and this morning.
First of all, I committed some updates to Fink stable in the KDE tree. I added the CoreAudio driver to arts, and updated the dependencies in kdelibs and kdebase, so stable and unstable both have access to audio, and to proper dependencies when downloading now.
Also I "backported" the quanta, kxmleditor, and kvim packages to unstable so that I could release them before 3.1 final.
I worked on a lot of that last night and let it build while I slept. Everything looked fine this morning so I committed.
Then this afternoon I happened upon KumaPlayer, a spiffy KDE wrapper for MPlayer -- one of the best media players on UNIX, so I threw together a quick package for it in experimental.
Also, PerlQt 3.004 final was released today, which incorporates the fixes to play well on MacOSX, among other things, so I upped the version on my Fink package in experimental and rebuilt. All appears to be well. I really can't wait for the KDE final releases, KDE is finally going to resemble a first-class-citizen on OSX. This release is orders of magnitude faster on loading apps and such, compared to the 3.0.7 release in stable and unstable now.
Ahh, happy days.
Don't believe me? Check out the 50 reasons Lord of the Rings sucks!
Actually, we're having a viewing of the long version of Fellowship after work tomorrow, gonna set up the big projector and stuff, should be a blast. A bunch of us from work already have tickets for Wednesday. Whee!
Welp, turns out something in the KDE that went out in the stable release is missing some dependencies.
I'm gonna update the arts package in stable to include the coreaudio driver and fix all the dependencies, and try to get them into the updates.
Gaah!
Finally got around to trying to build kdebindings again... looks like it works! It has it's own version of libsmoke in it too, that seems to be OK, so I'm setting up perlqt to build against it. Things are getting *darn* close.
Well, I got PerlQt working on OSX. (screenshot)
It works great, and the recent KDE speedups make a noticable difference over the marginally-working PerlQt I had before. It's as snappy as it can be without more XFree86 speedups.
I just wish we could get over this #&$*@# problem with libartsmidi and friends, and I'd be basically prepared for release. All that would be left is waiting for 3.1 rc6 to come out, with the security audit done, and I'm golden!
Yet again, we had some power outages today at work. This time my cube was one of the ones affected, so I went home early to work remotely. Blah.
I think I've got perlqt building on OSX properly now, I'll know shortly. Had to force it to link using c++ -- silly perl makemaker tried linking stuff with cc which causes all kinds of symbol badness.
For the Linux geeks out there, if you haven't installed RedHat 8 yet, MY GOD the font rendering is beautiful. It comes pretty darn close to looking as nice as MacOSX's if you pick decent default fonts.
Mozilla is making builds for RedHat 8 with support for the Xft font renderer available in RH8, it looks just *incredible*.
Also, if you haven't checked it out, there's an incredibly handy utility called cpan2rpm for making RPMs out of basically any perl module. It'll do pretty much everything for you, it just saved me about 2 hours of work getting my system happy here at work.
Yay!
So an estimated 1.2 million people lost power in North and South Carolina in the ice storms last week. I just got power today. Finally getting toasty in here again. Yay!
Took some pictures while my home machine was down. I took a few more today outside our office; closeups on the tree leaning against the building, and the one on one of our sales guy's car.
At any rate, my buddy Larry let me crash at his place while I had no power. I owe him BIG time.
So today I went into work and got everything set back up, luckily no whacky drive issues or anything; I took the opportunity to get some stuff upgraded, all the software updates and such have been applied now. Ahhhhh...
Now I've gotta figure out where I left off on the KDE stuff -- there's still a lot of work to do. While I was gone, I found out that KDE 3.1 did officially get delayed pending security updates. Going by what they said on the packager list, the changes are going to touch a large amount of the code, albeit lightly. It'll give time for us to get a handle on the library issues, maybe...
Regardless, I'm overdue for some geekin' out. Right now what I want to do most is curl up in my electric blanket and veg. =)
So KDE 3.1 on OSX is coming closer. For the most part everything is cleaned up, and I've got most of it building, but we're still running into some weird symbol problems with OSX's linker (no way!)
(Read on for the full, gory details.)
This is my first time posting to my new, spiffy, Movable Type blog.
It's pretty nice, although I'm still working to get my head around it. We'll see how this goes...
My buddy Larry (of HickoryWind fame) told me to try this out, so I'm giving it a whirl.
Whee!
