Older blog entries for Spooky (starting at number 51)

I've finally branched off gnome-games 2.6 and started to work on 2.7. The real meaning of this, in the short term, is that I get to go through and apply all the patches that people submitted during the freeze. Maybe someday soon I'll get to write some code, but since that will be the Aisleriot resizing code I'm not entirely sure I'm looking forward to it.

I'm in the process of releasing gnome-games 2.5.8 as I write this. Two things strike me: one is that I seem to be doing releases about one step ahead of the release team (2.5.7 was my beta 1). The other is that I have now done more releases for 2.5 than I did for 2.3. This is odd because I could have sworn I was being slacker about the releases this time around.

For those of you still stuck in the dark ages of GNOME 2.4 there will probably be another 2.4 gnome-games release in a week or so with some bug fixes back-ported. Yeah, I know I said that 2.4.2 would be the last one.

I've finally decided to actually use IRC after eleven years of resisting its siren song (I saw what it did to my friends back in '93, or maybe it was MUDs that sucked their will to live, it's getting hard to remember). Ten minutes of lurking on #gnome-hackers has Shaun point out a bug in gnect. It's some kind of conspiracy.

The big news around here is, of course, the continuing success of The Lord of the Rings movies. It is generally regarded as "our film" which is a little odd given that most of "us" had absolutely nothing to do with making it (although most of us do know someone who worked on it). At the same time it does mean something to me as a New Zealander. I was in the States when The Fellowship of the Ring was released and being able to see "home" up on the big screen made a big difference to the emotional impact of the film. Similarly, after seeing the Two Towers for the first time I was overcome with a desire to head out to the Strath-Taeri. It's not that I imagine Rohirrim riding across it when I see it, in reality it produces quite an eerie feeling, but I hadn't seen it in years despite it being only an hours drive from home (the nearest parts are technically within the city limits).

My scheme to naively install Fedora's undocumented ppc64 RPMs from the development branch onto a spare partition on my G5 seems to have worked. I can now boot and run a very basic ppc64 system (after adding my own fedora-release rpm). It is possibly the most basic system where you can edit things (vim), install stuff (rpm) and grap stuff off the web (wget), but it does work. I still don't know whether the ppc64 packages were meant to work or not or what the people at Red Hat were thinking when they compiled them, but I'm happy.

Dependency Hell

Did you know that rpm has over 50 packages it depends on either directly or indirectly. There are the obvious ones like glibc and it's a good thing that SysVinit show up eventually. However you also need glib, both versions 1 and 2 ! The upside is that you by just fufilling the requirements for rpm and you have everything you need for a basic, bootable, system.

Configuration

Fedora really freaks if you don't have an fstab file. It's kind of fun seeing how well (or badly) a system handles itself without even basic configuration. For the record, Fedora does well enough: you can creat the fstab file from within Fedora.

For the last two weeks the keys in the top left hand corner of my keyboard have been dead. Just the group that includes <tab>, ~, <caps lock> and <esc>. You can actually survive an amazingly long time without those keys. Ctrl-I replaces <tab>, you type out your home directory in full and <esc> can be replaced with Ctrl-C in vim. Caps Lock is of course an abomination and wasn't missed. A broken cluster of keys is of course the classic symptom of a broken track in the keyboard matrix and potentially a bastard to fix.

I finally fixed it today. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the Apple keyboard was actually as well made as it is pretty. Well made except for the scratch in the plastic of the circuit board that had let the track arc to the metal back-plate and burnt the track away. A quick job with the conductive marker pen and a bit of tape and she's good-as-new. Except for the crumbs in the hard to reach corners; I really must stop web-surfing during breakfast.

What really impressed me though was the 2.6 kernel. People have gone gaga over how snappy it is, but what I have found really nice is the new input layer and the way it "just works". While testing the keyboard my laptop ended up with three keyboards and two mice. They all worked and I didn't have to touch any software, just plugged things in and pulled them out again. I still haven't figured out why it thought the eject button on the Apple keyboard was Right Super though.

I also fixed the bike's brakes and the A laser, so it has been a good day for fixing things.

I ignore this for a day and suddenly a week has slipped by. Typical.

gnome-games

gnome-games is well on track for it's 2.6 release. The only work left to do is to finish up the documentation (most of it was updated as I did the work) and fix whatever bugs show up in the latest release. 2.6 isn't going to have everything I wanted in it, but it certainly has moved forward. I'm taking about a weeks break from serious work and then I will branch off 2.7 and start breaking things.

When I took on gnome-games (just after 2.2) there were 130 odd bugs in bugzilla, when 2.4 was released it was down to a hard core of about 50 which are either feature requests or really hard to fix (e.g. aisleriot rescaling). Now, just before 2.6, there are still about 50 bugs. The features I have implemented have all been replaced with new feature requests !

Of course 50 bugs is only about 3 per program so thats really not so bad.

ppc64 and Fedora

I'm now trying to boot-strap a Fedora ppc64 system. Red Hat has built these ppc64 rpms so I thought I'd try them. I can't find any documentation and I have no idea what exact system they are targeted at or whether they are meant to work at all, but I figure there is no harm in finding out. It will be worth it if I can move away from this aging Yellowdog system.

Work

It's progressing, although I'm back to trying to make lasers stable again. One is doing just fine, the other is throwing a hissy fit. The prime suspect is feedback. This means rearranging the optics no matter what I do. It is just a matter of degree. The easiest solutions haven't worked so I think tomorrow it might just be time to bite the bullet and do everything.

Ignore this, advogato is doing weird things to me and not quite getting the date right. What was here was meant to be for the 25th and that had overwritten an entry I had never posted on the 19th. Make sense ? No, it doesn't to me either, its just a web-browser cache thing that screws me up.

Not much going on. Work is holding a mini-conference. Home is dealing with hyper-active kittens. Hacking is all about cleaning up the last of the known bugs for gnome-games 2.6.

Just for fun I "upgraded" my laptop to Fedora Core 2 test 1. This experience has been a little bit more interesting than I would have liked. Especially since I used yum rather than a CD install. It worked, but there appear to be a few more loose ends to clean up than a CD install would have. Conversely it only took a third of the time of downloading isos so, all up, I've probably come out ahead.

I'd just like to say publicly that I've always appreciated the way Jeff has done things and hope to keep doing so in the future. I don't mind the dodgy release names, although quite frankly I've haven't understood a lot of the recent ones. I suspect I haven't watched the right movies.

I also agree with Jeff's solution , but not for the same reasons. It's a joke thats gone on way too long. It seemed fresh and witty when Linus parodied serious code-names like "Chicago" with the "Greased Weasel" kernels back in 1996. Eight years is definitely a tradition, if not an ingrained part of our culture, but maybe it's time for the tradition to be euthanised. After all, the good names have all been taken.

Friday was a public holiday here in New Zealand (Waitangi Day) and I took a ride up the old Taeri Gorge railway line on a jigger. For those of you not familiar with a jigger it is a small rail-cart, with a motor attached, designed for ferrying work-men up and down a rail-line. Certain obvious features are missing from these devices: real seating, sides, any sort of seat-belt or safety device, or for that matter effective brakes. All this is what makes it fun, that and the tall viaducts.

The track itself is a scenic one (it's usual use is for tourists) and it mostly travels above the Taeri River through a fifty kilometer long gorge. At the end of the gorge it heads out into rolling hills covered in rocky outcrops (for those of you who think of New Zealand geography in terms of The Lord of the Rings: like where Aragorn meets Eomer for the first time). Finally it descends into the town of Middlemarch that can be accurately described as sleepy. Strangely enough all of this is still within the Dunedin city limits, but that is just an historical accident and no reflection of its use by humans.

None of the five jiggers used were particularly reliable. In fact the trip was partly designed as a shake-down for them. None-the-less the trip was fun and I learnt how to drive one. They are curious devices, nominally they have the same controls as a car (sans steering wheel) but they are as awkwardly arranged as humaney possible and used in completely the opposite way to how one would normally drive a car. Your primary speed control is the clutch. The throttle is mostly wide open and the less said about the brakes the better.

The nearest anyone came to killing themselves was on the way home when one of the jiggers decided to come loose in the trailer. Stopping a car when you have half a tonne of steel rolling freely about the back is "interesting".