Older blog entries for Zaitcev (starting at number 168)

What's up with rillian's Ghostscript? Not a peep from Raph as yet.

23 Mar 2003 (updated 28 Mar 2003 at 21:35 UTC) »

The Iraq campaign somehow made a lot of people much worse and disgusting than they were, to what Advogato recentlog is a bright evidence. A member wrote: "George Bush and his loathesome band of war criminals [...] lawlessly ravage Iraq, causing death and destruction in their wake." The guy knows about interogation with acid baths, dissidents in wood shredders, and refugees set on fire, but thinks it's all right. Putting an end to all that is "loathsome" and "criminal" to him.

[== Update 3/28:

Immediately, raph replied with the following.

    Zaitcev: passions are running high, on all sides. I ask you (and all Advogato posters) to be respectful of other people's opinions. There is no question that Bush is responsible for death and destruction on a large scale. Whether it's legal according to international law is one question. Whether it improves the situation for the Iraqi people is another (I honestly hope it does). Reasonable people can, and do, differ on these questions.
This is unbelievable. He is completely captured by the leftist propaganda and lies, but still pretends to "be nice".

I think it was a great shame that he was arrested for a non-violent protest. Apparently it did nothing to help his political and citizen's thinking. Remember the old saying that a liberal is a conservative who was arrested and a conservative is a liberal who was mugged?

Currently, Raph started to try to squeeze or off-load topics unrelated to free software manually, as his message above suggests. He also attempts to set an example with "the other blog", which is commendabe, but fails to mask the failure of his own creation, the trust web and metric, to deal with unwanted posters. At least the failure so far. One is to hope that he is thinking about a solution.

I decided to take his hint and leave, but let's see what he is going to do about rabid ravings of mglazer (obviously, rabid ravings of leftists are of no concern to him, even though he pretends to hand the niceness evenly left and right).

==]

Funnily how the David Dawes made the ejection of Keith Packard from XFree86 to coincide with the begining of the next battle in the war with Islamists. Coincidence, no doublt.

I just wasted a perfectly good week on an s390x bug in recent kernels. If a 64 bit program executes a 31 bit program, load_elf_binary() uses TASK_UNMAPPED_BASE before it sets the mode bit, but on some platforms the former uses the latter. So, the /etc/ld.so cannot mmap anything. A whole week!!

7 Mar 2003 (updated 7 Mar 2003 at 23:32 UTC) »
Welcome, Riel

Rik van Riel posted his first message to internal lists today, and is getting settled at his new place, which is to say, in the same team with me (centered around Boston). I am pretty sure he'll like it here. This is very cool. We attract all the very best people, and I hope that some of their smarts rubs off on me.

Mainframe

I got my target kernel compiled, but it is unable to deactivate the comparator timer, and loops, doing about 660,000 timer interrupts per second. Mystery.

[Update: No sooner I post the entry, Martin S. (the arch maintainer) posts a fix]

Yesteday, I stepped off the terminal for an evening stroll, and was greeted by the following message upon return:

RPIMGR046T User ID ETPRPTN access has been revoked.
LOGOFF AT 22:13:02 CST TUESDAY 03/04/03 BY SYSTEM

Since my patches and trees were on destroyed minidisks, two days of work were wasted. Oh well. Examination of mail archives revealed that I was warned with a single word: "TSSIA" (actually, the angel of death misspelled it as "TSISA"). OK, YA TLA.

Today, I exercised taking a certain point actoss, in particular to mharris, with very little success. The nature of the point is not important, but for the record it dealt with a balance between source compability, binary compatibility, and pace of development for a project. Apparently, my wording made Mike to latch on the essay framing instead of the point iself, repeatedly. I need to take a writing class. Or start drinking beer and discuss development in bars.

I just realized that I spent a whole week (with weekend) trying to get IBM BladeCenter to work with obsolete kernels. Feeling a little numb now.

mulix:

For 2.5, you must send patches to a designated subsistem leutenant instead of Linus. In your case that would be Perex@suse.cz (Jaroslav Kyzela), unless you want to support the OSS part. That one is tougher, because nobody cares about it. Since it's a god forsaken subsystem, I do not remember who takes care of that. You might want to try a generic patch aggregator, such as DJ or Trivial (if the patch is trivial).

I still remember good old times when you could send a patch to Linus and expect it to get in, but it is a matter of folk legend now.

== From the desk of a fellow ymfpci maintainer.

One point about the Sun Java memo which I do not see discussed is how a project never generates fixed releases, but incorporates fixes into new releases instead, together with scores of new bugs. Apparently, certain dynamics made this effect devastating for JRE on Solaris/sparc. This does not mean other projects in general and free software in particular are immune to it. My personal expirience suggests that GNOME suffers from this a great deal. Getting bugs wontfixed is the norm, probably because the monkey people have no resources to triage bugs, fix, QA and ship them (my last bug treated this way was 57453, though I recall it happening before).

For the Linux kernel, the whole problem is addressed with the dual-track odd/even releases, and with an economic model which allows vendors to support old kernels. The mechanism is imperfect still. For instance, Red Hat had to switch ancient 2.4.7 and old 2.4.9 based distros to 2.4.18 stream with an update, because it was not possible to retrofit fixes into those codebases, given the resources. I think what former Javasoft does may be likened to Red Hat shipping kernel 2.5.34, because it was "current" at the moment of the release. The scary part is that it's not impossible. My memory is getting fuzzy, but I think Red Hat shipped something like 2.1.59 once upon a time. I guess we improved a bit since then... I am sure Sun can improve, too, if only they wanted.

Indeed, Advogato looks like crap on Mozilla with Xft, which comes with Red Hat beta Phoebe. I borrowed advice from jooon with great many thanks. Only I did not want to bother with any Java fonts with dubious licenses, so I added the following to my ~/.font.conf:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
    <!-- From http://www.advogato.org/person/jooon/diary.html?start=18 -->
        <match target="pattern">
                <test qual="any" name="family">
                        <string>Lucida</string>
                </test>
                <edit name="family" mode="assign" binding="strong">
                        <string>Luxi Sans</string>
                </edit>
        </match>
</fontconfig>

159 older entries...

New Advogato Features

New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.

Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.

If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!