Older blog entries for aristeu (starting at number 60)

lots of stuff these days. I finnaly done the "news bar" for screen! So now my hardstatus bar is complete: it warns me on hardstatus bar if someone told something to me on IRC (or ICQ/MSN/etc if you use bitlbee) and what was said and now there's a newsbar that keeps reading ~/.screen/feed which can be updated with all sorts of stuff. here is a screenshot. and here you'll find every file separated and a ready-to-use tarball. of course, edit .screenrc and tune it for your needs (there's also 3 hardstatus strings to choose). In the same URL there's a quick and dirty rss reader, anyone not needing go to bed 10 minutes ago can do a better job :)

today I had a pleasant experience. somedays ago I wrote an entry here and, as other entries, I was thinking that that would be only useful for me, one day, remember what I was doing at that time. for my surprise today I received a mail from a employee of the same company the project I'm working on, except that he's from Germany. obviously he doesn't know that because I never told it here. anyway, he was asking how I solved that problem in detail because he's stuck at the same problem (prolly he's working in a similar board, same company). It's nice that, after all, this blog thing is being really useful for someone other than me.

been working with uinputd these days and now my home machine has a planetplanet getting feeds from uinputd, thumbs and cabal which are generated by subverssed. it's nice but I really doubt anyone else than me will read. I guess it'll be useful to know when I'm writing too much and coding less.

I'm with sociallife.ko module unloaded so don't expect to find me in IRC/ICQ/google talk/msn/cell phone.

being offline lately has been the best way to get things done. no mail, no IRC, no nothing. and for this I must confess that svk is the best thing around. it works great specially when nobody else than you are working in a project. ok, I know git can do it to, blah blah blah. later, ok? when I get some time to set up stgit and a test repository.

I've been in codemonkey mode last days at work. porting an cpp application to Linux. lots of small things and to make the job even more boring, we decided to keep a separate directory for all files we modify, so, if there's a small thing to fix, it's a copy-run_dos2unix-add_to_svn-commit_it_clean-make_the_change-test-commit_it_back. try 70 changesets like this and you'll see that there's no fun on it. specially when you forget one of the steps. well, now it's finished and I hope next days things will get more interesting.

back from OLS. it wasn't quite what I expected but all in all it was fine. Ottawa and Toronto are very nice. "Try it on winter!" some said. I agree, three months without a single day of sun should be really boring.

nothing special these days, working in different small projects.

ok, I've been cursing D-Link for almost a year and I was wrong. It's not their fault my DWL-G650 doesn't works but yenta_socket driver (O2Micro oz6812 CardBus controller). I just got another Atheros based cardbus from 3com and it didn't worked as DWL-G650 didn't. tx works flawlessly but there're lots of lost packets in rx because of frame errors and it happens on windows too (windows xp service pack 2, latest drivers from D-Link and 3com). In linux is easy to notice it:

root@matthew:~/data# ping 192.168.67.1
PING 192.168.67.1 (192.168.67.1): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 192.168.67.1: icmp_seq=0 ttl=64 time=1.5 ms
wrong data byte #20 should be 0x14 but was 0x0
        0 10 18 1 18 19 1a 1b 1c 1d 1e 1f 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 2a 2b 2c 2d 2e 2f 30 31 32 33
        34 35 36 37 0 0 0 0 84 dc 5 8 ff ff ff ff
64 bytes from 192.168.67.1: icmp_seq=4 ttl=64 time=1.3 ms
wrong data byte #20 should be 0x14 but was 0x0
        0 10 18 1 18 19 1a 1b 1c 1d 1e 1f 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 2a 2b 2c 2d 2e 2f 30 31 32 33
        34 35 36 37 0 0 0 0 84 dc 5 8 ff ff ff ff

googling a bit I found this link to a forum. in this thread someone is reporting that actully there's a problem with atheros chipsets and oz6812 cardbus controller. then I started playing with yenta_socket driver checking oz8612 datasheet and seems I found the problem: oz6812 shouldn't enable write burst/prefetching and I'm not sure why yet (because this I didn't sent the patch yet) the first byte at 0xD4 should be zeroed. The fact is that I have my both atheros based cards working now and as soon as I find some kind of theory I'll send the patch to lkml and madwifi-users. this was a wonderful day 8)

I've been busy working on thumbs. I'm almost finishing the html template parser, one of the hardest features to be implemented in thumbs 1.0. also, I got obexftpd to take a look on it and try to make it functional (seems its latest update was in 2003 or so). it's a bit sad don't find some tools to play with bluetooth without using kde or gnome. let's see if I can help on this.

ols: got my visa and everything's set. I'll fly to Sao Paulo then to Toronto without stopping in uncle sam's lands. from Toronto I'll get a train to Ottawa in the same day. It'll be 6 hours by train and I hope I'll be able to take lots of pictures in the way.

Today I noticed how different is to program when you're very tired and when you're awake for some hours. yesterday at night I was trying to solve a problem in a game engine I've been working on. The problem was so huge and so complicated that I created a text file to try to organize my ideas. And then I went to bed. In the next morning while I was going to work (my company pays a cab from our office to the client, wheeeeee) I took a look in the problem without much hope. Damn, the "huge" was suddenly so simple that I almost solved it entirely while I was in the cab. It's strange that usually I don't feel tired and I have to measure how fast things are going to know if it's time to rest or not.

today at work I finally installed git and made a simple script so I can keep my tree in sync with Marcelo's 8xx tree. When I got some spare time I'll try to learn how it works. For now, quilt + svn seems to be a lot sufficient (make patches in quilt, test all of them and when I'm sure, make changesets based on those patches. While it's not done, the "patches/" directory are stored also in a svn repository, so I can work in different machines and the patches are always in sync). I have to say, quilt simply rox. Then, to finish the day, I gave svk a try. Amazing how intuitive it is and how useful it will be in my everyday's cab sessions 8)

spent some days to get 2.6 running in a mpc860 based board. while 2.4 runs fine, I couldn't manage to make it work until today. with help of some fine people in #mklinux we figured the problem: this board has registers mapped in physical address 0xFF000000. to make use of them, the 8xx port maps it to the same virtual address, i.e. 0xFF000000 virtual. this is not a problem in 2.4 but in 2.6 it is because kernel by default reserves an area beginning in 0xFF100000 for allocating consistent DMA areas. guess what: I hit in a WARN_ON() on dma_alloc_init() and interrupts just don't work (hangs trying to register inet socket types as it depends on rcu, which works using tasklets). easy, wasn't it? :)

I just finished to take a look in my uncle's computer. amazing, he got a computer about two weeks ago and it was full of trojans and all sorts of crap. and he's using firefox, firebird and AVG anti virus. seems another don't-open-strange-attachments problem.

I still don't understand what those flight companies do in web based sales. If I check for a flight to/from Toronto I got prices like US$2000,00 and up. Now, ask one of those travel agencies. US$1000,00. well, anyway seems I'm really going to OLS this year, despite all cabal and stuff.

ok, a big "doh" for me: for some time I've been wondering what is wrong with qemu. in my old tbird it took too much time to boot. after booting, the system were quite usable. then I put the same image to run in a sempron 2800+. same behaviour. then I tried with my new workstation thinking "ok, now it _has_ to boot fast". same thing. some hours later, while doing something else I figured out what was happening: I always boot using -nographic option, so only serial output is visible. as lilo isn't configured to use serial port, I didn't noticed it's configured to wait some seconds before booting :PPP