Advogato: Personal info for davej

davej is currently certified at Master level.

Name: Dave Jones
Member since: 2000-03-23 09:44:32
Last Login: 2008-03-15 06:06:54

Homepage: http://www.codemonkey.org.uk

Notes: Look here instead for blog stuff.

Projects

Lead Developer on Powertweak-Linux
Lead Developer on Sourcery
Lead Developer on x86info
Developer on Linux Kernel Janitor
Developer on Linux
Developer on Evangelism
Lead Developer on BIOS Explorer
Developer on OProfile
Contributor on Spamfilter
Developer on pciids
Developer on PCI Utilities
Developer on Linuxperf
Developer on CPUFreq
Helper on The XFree86 Project
Contributor on Direct Rendering Infrastructur
Developer on Red Hat
Developer on Fedora Project

Recent blog entries by davej

Syndication: RSS 2.0

3 Sep 2008 »

lockdep lolz.

My entry for the "most extensive debug output from a single event" world record.

.. and with that, I'm off on vacation for a week.

Syndicated 2008-09-03 00:37:01 from Dave Jones recollection of stuff that happened.

27 Aug 2008 »

Open source noise machines.

this is pretty cool.
I'm an avid collector of effect units (I lost count a while back just how many I have). Having something tweakable in this manner is kind of neat. Though I don't think I'll be getting one for a few reasons.

First, I use my noise-making as an escape from open source. Sometimes, even I need to switch off, and moving to a different room to run gdb in a different use-case isn't really escaping.

Secondly, since the beginning of the year I've been building a modular analog synth. The beauty of this thing is it's pretty much entirely open. Want more oscillators? fine, buy some, screw them in. Extra filters? same deal. Once you have a collection of mounted modules, you then get a large number of possible patch combinations between the various modules. For many of the modules, people have even made various 'hacks' to improve them in some manner or other. The manufacturers have in some cases even adopted those changes in later revisions of modules which is really awesome.

Whilst as a synth, it's primarily for the creation of sound, it also works really well as a sound-mangler of any input source, making it a supe r guitar effects pedal on steroids. And with cool sounding modules like "malgorithm", I'm easily persuaded.
The nice advantage of analog gear is that it rarely goes wrong in the sense that computers do. It frequently does completely unpredictable things, but it's usually a 'happy accident' than a complete disaster.

The only downside is these things get to be habit forming, and start to take over the house. Mine has already
grown to twice the size I was initially expecting, and will probably increase some more before I'm "done".

I keep meaning to record some of the output of this and other devices. One of these days I'll get to it. Until then, just imagine mains hum modulated by howling feedback with sub-bass that makes the walls shake, and you're probably pretty close to the sorts of sonic mayhem this thing puts out. (It's not /all/ it can do, it's just what I tend to make it do a lot).

Syndicated 2008-08-27 17:00:13 from Dave Jones recollection of stuff that happened.

27 Aug 2008 »

Highlighting.

I'm a big fan of highlighting text. (But only on computer screens, I hate highlighters on paper, and really don't understand those people who selectively highlight semi-random parts of books). To this end, I have the usual things set up, like my .vimrc enables syntax highlighting to show me when I've forgotten what C should look like. I've also started extending it to other uses. Like highlighting common bugs. It turns out to be handy when both writing code, and reviewing other peoples.

It's pretty simple to do in vim. For example..
highlight kmalloc ctermbg=red guibg=red match kmalloc /k[mzc]alloc(GFP_/ highlight memset ctermbg=red guibg=red match memset /memset.*\,\(\ \|\)0\(\ \|\));/

Now, go ahead and try that zero sized memset. Or a kmalloc with swapped arguments. The bright red text screaming AWOOGA in your face should be attention grabbing enough for you to instantly realize what's up as soon as you've written the erroneous line of code.

The above regexps aren't new either. I've posted blog entries before about how I recursive grepped for the latter across all 80gb of the Fedora source tree periodically. (And it still keeps turning up new casualties).

I've also extended mutt to catch this nonsense.

color index red default '~b "memset.*\,\(\ \|\)0\(\ \|\));"'

When paging through my inbox, when I see a mail in red, I know there's something silly in it, which needs further review. (Very handy for reading things like commit mailing lists, or code review lists).

Even if you don't write C, there are probably regexps for catching API misuses in other languages too, so the above principles should be useful. (I use vim/mutt almost exclusively, no idea how to make highlighting work with emacs etc, but I'm sure it's doable there too).

Syndicated 2008-08-27 16:44:52 from Dave Jones recollection of stuff that happened.

26 Aug 2008 »

My ass has a carbon footprint.

I've really enjoyed not traveling anywhere this last month. As much as I like seeing different places, I really enjoy being back home. I find that miss the little things. I miss having a routine.
Next week sees the restart of lots[*] of traveling.

Beginning with a vacation. I'm in San Francisco from next Wednesday through Sunday. (locals: drop me a mail if you'd like to meet up for a food/beer or whatever.) I've got stuff planned for most the week, but there's guaranteed to be a bunch of free time too. On Thursday I'm off to Alcatraz for a few hours, which should be interesting. And on Friday night, I'm heading over to Oakland to see Nine Inch Nails which should be good fun. (if any locals I know are also going, send hot mailz. I need knowledge on how to survive Oakland without getting stabbed/shot/etc. Teach me your survival skills.)

Assuming I survive my outing to Oakland, I get back to Boston on Sunday evening, and get a whole week at home, before heading back out to the west coast again, this time to Portland, Oregon for the Linux kernel summit, and plumbers conf. I'm giving a talk there on how much of an awesome idea it would be if every Linux distro shipped a standard initrd. It's either going to be awesome, or a lead balloon.

[*] ok, it's not "lots", but two coast to coast trips in the same month are still what I deem 'excessive'.

Syndicated 2008-08-26 23:00:59 from Dave Jones recollection of stuff that happened.

25 Aug 2008 »

Continuing the adventure with password changes.

After having to change my Fedora passwords/keys last week, I went about changing pretty much every other password I had too.
In doing so, I realised something enlightening. (read as: I'd made a horrific novice mistake).

I knew I'd committed the sin of writing down passwords for certain things. But "ah, I'll just encrypt the file and it'll be ok" was in hindsight pretty dumb. What I had done though was this..

gpg password.txt.gpg vi password.txt gpg -e password.txt

GAME. OVER.

Encrypting this file was utterly pointless. If my computer had been stolen, all an attacker would have had to do to see the contents of that file was strings /dev/sda and it would have found the plaintext password.txt easily enough.

Had I done the above operation in tmpfs, and moved the resulting .gpg file to hard disk afterward, I would have been okay. But because I'm a dumbass, I'd done the above directly on hard disk. Numerous times.

Tools like scrub exist to scribble over a file before it gets erased, but they wouldn't have helped me in the situation above, as it's gpg that removes the original unencrypted file. Also, scrub isn't necessarily reliable on a journalled filesystem.

What I really needed is a 'scrub unused data blocks' utility. In the absence of such a utility, I did dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda and reinstalled. (It was long overdue a fresh reinstall anyway).

Syndicated 2008-08-25 16:06:04 from Dave Jones recollection of stuff that happened.

477 older entries...

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