February 2003 Archives

I've updated my blog to MovableType 2.63 -- let me know if you run into any problems.

With some help from Peter O'Gorman, I got KDE-Darwin's admin/ tree updated to libtool 1.5 CVS -- it's building perfectly after one minor patch that has been sent upstream to the libtool folks, so in theory, if we can get KDE to update to 1.5 when it's released, a large part of the darwin-specific patches won't be needed!

I'm double-checking the build right now, and if all looks good, I'll see if I can get my (other) admin patches into KDE upstream tomorrow.

Well, I've finally completed the upgrades on my server. At least one of the disks in the RAID array was starting to go bad, so I ordered new ones Wednesday and did some emergency surgery all day Saturday.

Thankfully, I'm using a 3Ware card (I can't say enough good things about these) and we had a spare one at work they let me borrow, so I hooked the old drives up to work's card, and then hooked the new ones up to my existing RAID card, and did the transfer. Copying everything over took probably 10 hours, somewhere in there I went to bed. =)

This morning I picked up my stuff I ordered from QuietPC.com -- I replaced the power supply and CPU fan with their QuietPC counterparts, and then put sound-dampening material all around the case. The difference is STAGGERING. I've got the machine in my living room (since that's where the DSL line comes in). It is *so* much quieter, I can barely hear the thing when it's on now, and it's pretty much invisible when the TV's going.

On a side note, I had originally planned on replacing the drives *and* the RAID card with the Promise SX4000 after reading a number of reviews saying how it beats the 3Ware ATA RAID cards. I foolishly didn't do enough research and bought the thing, and it turns out it's a great card -- if you're running Windows. The Linux drivers are crap, and Alan Cox has said a number of disparaging things about them (and Promise's Linux support in general) over time -- I should have known better. Anyways, the card is worthless under Linux, I plan on putting it (and the remaining undamaged drives from server) in my Window box since you wouldn't notice the unreliability there anyways. Perhaps the SX stands for "sux".

So a week or two ago, I noticed that Luciano Montanaro got konqueror/embedded updated to the 3.1 tree. I've managed to get it to build with Qt/Mac but it still has problems running. If anyone wants to give it a shot, I can put together a tarball...

Well you'd better find out. There's all kinds of unsavory folks on the net, you wouldn't want them to get it, would you?!

Upgraded to MT 2.61. Please let me know if you see any issues.

Scratch that, I upgraded to 2.62. <grin>

I updated the KXMLEditor package in Fink unstable to 0.8.1. It's only minor changes, shouldn't be any significant problems updating.

Also updated the KDE packages to complete the move to the 20030209 kde-admindir snapshot (which has the new KDE doc directory) in my experimental tree, so the KDE help should be fixed soon. While I was at it, I added support for the new cctools virtual package in the build dependencies, so I no longer need a check for cctools directly in the info file.

While it's never nice to see someone have problems, it's good to see a little validation on how cool Fink can be. A lot of work goes into making these things happen, and seeing stuff like "Ironically, 'fink install kde' just worked on my OS X box -- one command to install a fully functional KDE desktop with almost no configuration." is just plain cool.

I've released fink packages for PerlQt and libsmoke. They're pretty solid, the only problems are with the OpenGL code on Apple's X11, so I've disabled the dependency on the opengl-pm package for now. If I can get that worked out, I'll up the revision and put out a new version.

For now it's totally usable for anything but the qt opengl stuff.

I've got PerlQt 3.006 and the OpenGL perl module working... Check out the PerlQT OpenGL demos!

There are some problems linking OpenGL with the Apple X11, once I get those worked out I'll release to unstable.

Not directly related to my blog for the most part, but I've updated to Movable Type 2.6. Looks like the transition went smoothly, let me know if you see any problems.

Put out some updates in Fink unstable today.

I updated kdebase for a minor upgrade issue -- also updated the i18n stuff to understand the new doc trees -- this should fix the problem that was reported to the fink list about hebrew support (and probably others).

KDE in unstable is looking pretty good -- I'm pretty much ready to release as soon as the png3 stuff is all moved to stable.

How can they lose only *some* of my glue records in the root servers?!

AARGH!

Thankfully, I finally got things cleaned up enough that I'm now switching to another registrar. Goodbye, Network Solutions. If you've been having trouble reaching the site, it should be evening out soon...

Apple's 0.2 version of their X11 beta has just been released. Looks like they've fixed a bunch of issues, and only a few things remain that are true annoyances as far as I'm concerned. The last version was too buggy for regular use, to me, but this one looks good enough to put into regular rotation.

Good job, Apple!

Update: Looks like they still haven't fixed the issue of 0,0 on the screen being above the apple menu bar. If you plan on using Apple's X11, plan on using quartz-wm or you can still lose your windows behind the menu.

<@jkh> I remember the x11 marketing meeting when we were all asking "what do we do about tech support for this new thing? It's a total lion's den from the traditional mac user's perspective"
<@jkh> and I said "I have an idea, just put Eric Melville's name in as the contact in the final screen of the installer. he's an intern. He won't mind"
<@jkh> and then they gave me a bonus
<@jkh> it's that kind of "out of the box" thinking that gets you ahead in a company like Apple

I've updated to PostgreSQL 7.3.2 in Fink unstable. These packages rename everything to postgresql73 to fit upgrade policy.

Also got qt3 updated in dports so that it works with cups, and also so that there is a puredarwin variant (port install qt3 +puredarwin).

OpenNMS tagged today. IcmpSocket.c is still acting up on MacOSX, I'm looking for someone to help on that, otherwise I think the mac port is ready.

So this guy going by the name "Lenny Bruce" has been trolling the Fink lists, raving about some supposed conspiracy in which Tenon somehow coerced the XonX folks into not releasing hardware-accelerated OpenGL support.

Hehe, it makes me want to laugh just writing it.

Anyways, I've captured some of the better morsels from the thread to a text file, and at the end have added the off-list discussion that continued between him and I after Max banned him from the list. Check it out, it's pretty amusing. It's cute, he even wrote me a poem! If he is foolish enough to respond, I'll be sure to post it to the end of that file...

Update: he's posting to my blog. So what do you think? Is removing someone from a mailing list on SourceForge a freedom of speech infringment? You know my opinion. Of course, he keeps threatening me even though I'm not the one who removed him, so even if it is he's talking to the wrong person, but he's certainly entertaining, either way.

I was once again reminded why I read Jen Funk Segrest's VeryBigBlog. I'm not usually a huge fan of her designs (although they are very well done), but every couple of days she says something that just tickles me.

Here's a great quote from a thread on how people freeload so much on free design/art/whatever sites:

Awesome.

I'm reminded of those games in kids' magazines.

Can you see what's wrong with this picture?

Well, I got OpenNMS running just fine on MacOSX now... The biggest hurdle (the JNI crashing issue) was because of flat namespaces. Changing RRDTool and the JNI libs to build twolevel fixes everything.

Packages are in experimental, I'm going to wait for the impending 1.1.1 release this next weekend and release to unstable.

(whoo!)

I'm sure everyone else has seen this, but space shuttle Columbia broke up on reentry this morning. I hope this doesn't mean the death-blow for the US space program, although a part of me wishes that were so, to finally make room for private enterprise getting into space without getting beaten down by the government.

Sometimes at times like this, you need a little levity: