Older blog entries for dwmw2 (starting at number 159)

Fedora release 6.92 Rawhide)
Kernel 2.6.20-1.3035.fc7 on an ppc64

ps3 login:

Wheee. The Fedora rawhide kernel finally boots on PlayStation 3. There are a few more details we need to address, like the fact that kexec and reboot aren't working right now, but it looks like we should be in reasonable shape for Fedora 7.

We'll need a bootloader. Ideally that would be petitboot, which the ozlabs folks should have ready any day now, but given the Fedora 7 feature freeze is already upon us I have a horrid suspicion we're going to be making an 'otheros.bld' (flash bootloader for PS3) which we make available separately, and which just has a horrid hack to interpret and obey /etc/yaboot.conf from the hard drive.

When we have more scope to play -- and once kexec actually works in our kernel so it can boot other kernels, which is sort of important for a bootloader -- we'll look at building the bootloader blob properly.

Hm, that 'on an ppc64' still bugs me. I'm sure I submitted a patch to fix it once, long ago when it happened on Alpha.

Again the Fedora release looms and I set about installing rawhide on every PowerPC machine I can find. And again I can't find much wrong with it that's specific to PowerPC.

We thought we'd found one when the kernel wouldn't boot on 32-bit Macs, but that turned out to be a generic memory allocation bug which just happened to be triggered with our configuration by the PowerMac IDE driver. If it hadn't been relatively easy to reproduce in the ppc32 testing, it might have taken much longer to find it.

It's not the first time that the existence of Fedora on PowerPC has had a beneficial effect across all architectures.

There is a petition at http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/iplayer/ imploring the Prime Minister to "prevent the BBC from making its iPlayer on-demand television service available to Windows users only".

While the government doesn't have any direct control over the BBC, they can certainly raise questions about the commercial impartiality which the BBC is supposed to practise.

I'd encourage all UK citizens, even Windows users, to sign up. The problems with the BBC's existing proposals run far deeper than merely restricting access to Windows users.

Much as I hate to advocate the use of dead tree in the 21st century, I actually concluded that was the best way to provide feedback to the BBC about their proposal to inflict DRM on the licence payer and require the use of recent versions of Windows.

It isn't particularly hard to stir up a storm of semi-coherent emails all making the same points -- people can even cut and paste the best bits. You don't have to care much to send an email; it only takes a few moments. Especially amongst the less technical, a real letter unfortunately does seem to hold more weight than contemporary means of communication.

That's why I spent a day or so putting my thoughts down on paper rather than just submitting them electronically -- much to the amazement of those who've heard me rant so frequently about the archaic practice of physically transporting dead tree around the planet.

I'm also very tempted to write to my Member of Parliament about the issue. Although the BBC is independent and doesn't answer directly to Parliament, it is a public body and is held to account by the government for its behaviour.

The BBC is, in general, extremely careful to be seen to be independent -- not just politically but also commercially. To quote but one example, it even goes as far as to make up fictional packets for breakfast cereals in its drama programmes, to avoid "advertising" one particular product even so subtley.

Yet today we see them proposing not only to endorse a single company's commercial product, but to enforce its use, and to exclude all competition. That would be entirely unacceptable behaviour on the part of the BBC, and is the kind of thing which I would expect to lead to discussions in government and a very public slap on the wrist for those concerned.

It's weird, because the BBC know that what they're doing is wrong, and they've even taken steps to correct it in very similar circumstances in the past. In 2003, they renegotiated their contract with the satellite broadcaster BSkyB to ensure that their satellite broadcasts are now unencrypted and can be received by anyone with standard equipment -- rather than being tied in to using equipment from a single vendor.

I hear rumours from insiders that the gratuitous use of DRM is a posterior-covering exercise from a BBC exec; being used to justify certain flawed technical decisions which have been made in the past. As much as I dislike the idea that the rumour could be true, it certainly seems to make more sense than the idea that the BBC have completely lost the plot.

Every BBC licence payer who cares about DRM and/or Free Software should pay attention to their current public consultation and offer feedback.

They have concluded that despite the fact that their content is currently broadcast free-to-air through terrestrial and satellite services, they must inflict gratuitous DRM upon its users when they access it over the Internet.

Furthermore, they conclude that in order to achieve this goal they must mandate the use of recent versions of Windows and its Media Player. Users of any other systems are to be excluded.

My own response to this is partially shown in an Advogato article, and others have commented elsewhere.

Sometimes I really despair of humanity.

From: UK Sales Ops Group <uk_sales_ops@cathaypacific.com>
Cc: david@woodhow.se
Subject: Ticket Refund

Dear Mr Woodhouse,
...

What part of "write down my name again and add an at sign and a dot to make it read David at Woodhou dot s e" is so hard to understand? Why do people see the need to add and change letters?

This one's particularly impressive since after they read "david at woodhouse dot se" back to me I'd gone to the trouble of spelling it out to them -- "h o u dot s e" -- and they still managed to screw it up.

I set up the domain because I thought an email address which is identical to my name except for a couple of bits of punctuation would be far easier to dictate over the phone than my normal address. So far it seems to be harder though.

Extra bonus points to Cathay Pacific for disregarding the explicit instruction on the telephone yesterday that they were not to contact me by telephone but must use email instead. Calling me after their email bounced might have been acceptable (although the incompetence is less so) but they did it before trying to mail me.

Hi David,

It appears that Andrew and Arnold Ltd use IP ranges that are registered as Swedish - this is why you can not view BBC content.

The BBC policy is to only serve broadband content to users who have a UK registered IP address.

Sorry for any disappointment.

Best wishes,

Gina
PC Broadband

[Querying whois.ripe.net]
[whois.ripe.net]
country:        GB
...

Muppets. Is there actually anyone with half a clue left at the BBC? There seems to have been a mass exodus of clue a year or two ago, and it's all gone to pot.

Zaitcev asks: "why in the world does OLPC use OpenFirmware?"

I'm inclined to agree that an after-boot firmware interface is unnecessary; I don't see the point in keeping OpenFirmware alive after the system is booted -- but OpenFirmware does seem to be a good choice as the boot firmware. It's a lot smaller and easier to deal with than Linux-as-bootloader, which we were using before. We only have 1MiB of NOR flash to boot from, and L-A-B was too big. OpenFirmware does the job very nicely.

It's also been a godsend when we've been bringing up the hardware. We've designed entirely new chips for OLPC, and have been working with FPGA versions of them during their lifecycle (the final build with the ASICs of everything should happen this week). Debugging that hardware with OpenFirmware is like magic -- especially if you watch Mitch doing it :)

Heh. Why do I find it so ironically amusing that the SPF morons, after trying to retroactively redefine the way that email works after a few decades of history, are now whining that their own silly scheme is itself being misused; just as their own incompatible idiocy goes against the way we've implemented RFC821 and then RFC2821 all these years.

SPF was always a bad idea; the fact that other nutters are abusing SPF records to mean something other than what the original set of nutters intend them to mean, and thus lose even more perfectly valid mail in the process, is just tragically funny.

Wheee. With a little bit of hacking to provide NPTL support in qemu, nspluginwrapper can now run the i386 flash plugin inside firefox on PowerPC machines.

The colours seem wrong-endian (just as when we run the standalone flash player in qemu-i386), and on some content it'll crash after a couple of clone() calls so I suspect the TLS stuff isn't quite right -- but it's getting there...