Older blog entries for Zaitcev (starting at number 420)

Games... I remember those

I did not play any games in years and years, and the last on I played was Myth. But a couple of days ago someone threw together a game where I was the main character (ok, my alter ego inspired the main character). I just had to try it.

Doing so quickly reminded me just why I'm not a gamer. First, I had to find and attach a mouse to my laptop. The game is based on the RenPy, but mostly consists of 3 shooting galleries and a couple of puzzles. So, to pass with a touchpad is next to impossible. And next, my arm hurts. That's right, I'm an official ninja, yet my arm hurt from playing a computer game.

As for the game, I laughed myself out of my chair, but it was fun in an inside joke way only, so don't bother downloading. For a kernel guy, the equivalent would be a gallery where you shoot Hans Reiser, Adrian Bunk, and Dick Johnson in the face. Nobody too famous, but notorious.

P.S. This episode got me thinking about the open-source gaming (yes, I know, I'm becoming an ESR, drop dead). Speaking of RenPy, I enjoyed Starlight, but so far I've never seen anything anywhere where people would bunch together and do something. The RenPy based VNs and games are usually carried out by one creator, so they tend to be one-offs. Starlight, for example, haven't seen the next chapter yet. Maybe I should check out Wesnoth... Develop those underutilized arm muscles. I heard Rusty poked at it.

Syndicated 2008-06-03 19:30:46 (Updated 2008-06-03 20:42:53) from Pete Zaitcev

Attack of Sqlite

Recently it became fashionable to link Sqlite everywhere (for example, yum uses it). The awsum workout that Firefox gives to your kjournald is also Sqlite. But now I see a little problem. What if anything happens to the database?

XML was bad enough, but it is repairable, if with a bigger difficulty than plain text. When GNOME eliminated battstat-applet, and started to throw an funny dialog, I was able to fix it by removing a few files and directories in my ~/.gconf (Thank you, Federico).

Now my Liferea develped a problem. One of the feeds has a phantom item in it: it shows one unread even if there aren't any unread items. If I click "Mark All Read", Liferea crashes. How am I supposed to repair this? I suppose there may be some command line tools coming with Sqlite which allow to issue SQL statements, but without knowing how the database is laid out, I cannot formulate such statements.

I expect this kind of thing to become more common as more people jump on the bandwagon.

Syndicated 2008-06-01 21:11:07 from Pete Zaitcev

RSPoD on Rawhide

The Penny-Arcade game a.k.a. RSPoD is out today and it bombs on me with: "Could not find a compatible display device // Make sure your display device supports OpenGL 1.2 and the following extensions: ARB_multitexture ... ARB_texture_compression EXT_texture_compression_s3tc". On my system, OpenGL is provided by MESA 7.1-0.29.fc9, and according to glxinfo, some required extensions are missing. That wouldn't be so bad, but I have no idea what how this may be corrected. Hardware OpenGL in the video card, I guess. I have "Radeon Xpress 1100 IGP", which is a low-end mobile card.

UPDATE: Received the following e-mail:

Hi I had the same problem on Vista, because on my laptop the latest installed drivers were the ones I got from windows update. I then installed the ones that came from the manufacturers site and voilà..

. . .

UPDATE: See Anholt's entry.

Syndicated 2008-05-22 00:22:48 (Updated 2008-05-23 04:16:21) from Pete Zaitcev

Rio and Upstart

Seen at Rio's place:

Fedora9のupstart、すごいんですけど...。さすがに組み込みみたいな速さでは無いけれど、これならサスペンドしなくても良いんじゃ...。

Which, in my very approximate translation means:

Upstart of Fedora 9 is great, mostly. As expected it includes no visible speed, so not using suspend is not good.

So, I guess that Rio expected improvements which would allow to stop suspending and they did not materialize... Which makes sense, but why the superlatives then? The title of the post was "upstartすげい！" with the exclamation mark. I would understand if he wrote that Upstart allowed him to end suspends, but no, "速さでない" is simple enough even for me to understand. Oh well, perils of international blogging.

Once I figured out that the control file syntax is documented in events(5) of all places, Upstart became rather tolerable, even welcome. I think that our famously poor bootstrap times (which are not that bad in Fedora when compared to other distros — I've seen real hard benchmarks — but are just bad for me as a user) have more to do with trying to execute too much crap. Upstart allows us to do it more efficiently, but it's a palliative.

UPDATE: piyokun comments that the right translation is more like "Of course it's not as fast as embedded (linux), but with (upstart) you can get by without suspending." So, the "shinakute" is like "doing", "mo" is change of state (he suspended before, but not anymore), "n" is explanation tag, and "ja" is uncertainty. Casual, of course. Oh, and "kumikomu" is a verb meaning "to incorporate". I had no idea that they had a native word for "embedded", instead of a katakanized borrowed word.

Syndicated 2008-05-14 07:35:27 (Updated 2008-05-14 17:48:31) from Pete Zaitcev

John Carmack and Linux VT

Says John:

Our flight computer now has a display screen to show the current status to a pilot. My first inclination was just to mmap the framebuffer and pretend I was back in the days of DOS, but I decided to try and be a good linux programmer and use ncurses. It took me longer than I expected to get it working properly for displaying on the VGA for an application launched from a telnet session, and the performance was very bad. I wound up writing directly to the terminal device myself, spitting out all the escape sequences manually, but it was still quite appallingly slow. I have it working acceptably by only updating the various display items in a scanning fashion to avoid slowing it down on any individual frame, but I should have just followed my first thought and gone with a direct memory mapping.

I'm a little disturbed by the above, because I consider his application essentially equivalent to what Hercules does, and I never saw any performance issues with it. We all know that ncurses is a pig, and of course he should be using Slang instead of ncurses, but since he says that the result was slow even for the raw sequences, certainly this is not the issue. Weird.

It would be awesome if he posted his code somewhere.

UPDATE: John replies in comments:

The flight computer is only a 486-100, so it doesn't take much to bog it down, even with just text writes. I am doing straightforward fwrites and fprintfs to the console tty for everything.

It is at an acceptable rate now, so I probably won't make any other changes, but if RRL decides that they want anything fancy, like scrolling bar graphs, I will go straight to the framebuffer.

Syndicated 2008-05-13 01:25:22 (Updated 2008-05-13 20:14:59) from Pete Zaitcev

BadName is essentially conquered

The issue with random applications failing to start (Firefox, Nautilus) or blowing up (panel, gvim) with BadName took me about 3 months to find (the bug was filed at the end of January). I'm not sure if my fix is any good, need to poke Ajax about it.

So... Wasted a lot of time, learned several mildly interesting things about the code and people involved.

The sad part is how much it takes to start moving around any modern codebase, and that's with the same language and toolchain. I remember times when no part of the system was off-limits, but these days... not so much. If anything breaks in OpenOffice, I'm not even going to try fixing it.

Syndicated 2008-05-02 10:23:00 (Updated 2008-05-02 10:24:01) from Pete Zaitcev

Ted Tytso on [Open]Solaris

Ted suddenly decided to talk OpenSolaris. Pretty interesting... at least for me, since I spent 7 best years of my life in Sun's orbit.

In passing, aside from the bulk of the post, it seems to me that the final argument, about competitors selling Solaris support, does not hold water. This is exactly what Oracle attempted with their clone of CentOS and they weren't very successful, despite having a strong Linux team under Wim.

Other than that, he's probably right. But he's going to get responses. Whenever I mention Solaris (last time it was when I linked to Jeff Bonwick's blog), I get the most inane responses from Solaris fanboys. It looks like a very vocal community of users, if not contributors. Sounds like Apple almost.

This puts the damper on any dreams I may have about re-living the glory of my youth by getting back to hacking on that codebase.

UPDATE: Not sure why Levon decided to post his reply to his personal blog instead the one at Sun. Surely the other one is more relevant?

Syndicated 2008-04-23 18:12:46 (Updated 2008-04-23 20:38:59) from Pete Zaitcev

Random dmesg errors

I always was against kernel spewing user-generated errors into dmesg, like this:

npviewer.bin[4393]: segfault at f6712030 ip 67e7a0 sp ff9c39ec error 4 in libpthread-2.8.so[677000+15000]

Not helpful, not interesting.

However, the other day my desktop keeled over in a strange way... The /var/log/messages contained this (followed by a stack trace):

Apr 13 18:19:14 niphredil kernel: Xorg: page allocation failure. order:3, mode:0x4020

It looks like a bug in SLUB (does not seem registering with anyone who has the power to track it down though). But my point is, without the printout I would need to find what was happening by other means, and that would probably take forever.

Hmm... My world is shaken.

P.S. kgdb was merged into 2.6.26. The sky is falling.

Syndicated 2008-04-19 19:29:06 from Pete Zaitcev

Jon Corbet on Red Hat and Desktop

Seen at LWN today (no permalink — what the heck?):

Red Hat's desktop team has posted an item saying that the company has no plans to offer a "traditional desktop product" anytime soon.

Say what? The referenced item says:

[W]e have no plans to create a traditional desktop product for the consumer market in the foreseeable future.

Umm... RHEL desktop is doing quite well, all we're saying we're not committed to selling it at Best Buy. Not sure how this debacle has happened. Jon was probably short on coffee.

Syndicated 2008-04-17 17:28:04 from Pete Zaitcev

ipv6.google.com

If client is logged in, Google bounces to the old site. In order to access over IPv6, you have to log out and use http://ipv6.google.com/webhp. Apparently, not quite there yet.

One funny thing, using Google while logged out is much faster. Apparently it takes time for them to act upon cookies my client sends. Remind me again how they goaded everyone into this "homepage" thing. Ah yes, Gmail.

Syndicated 2008-04-16 16:30:45 from Pete Zaitcev