Lessons learnt:

1. If you run Debian unstable and update often then sometimes things break. No surprises there, thats part of its purpose. And I'm happy to say this has been the first nasty one in a while.
2. udev is more fragile than I would like for something so critical.

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 10:45:45 +1000

Chiz and I took a nice break in the Kangaroo Valley over the weekend. It was very relaxing and a great chance to unwind.

Not much to report other than that we took some nice snaps along the way.

Photos...

Sun, 13 Jul 2008 23:29:01 +1000

Simon Rumble emailed me some links to about what is going on [1], [2]. These links make a lot more sense than my wild conjecture :-)

It seems that the cycle way will actually be between the footpath and the road, or in other words, part of the road will be sectioned off for cyclists, allong side the recently beautified footpath. I guess the construction will last a while longer as they seem to have only got as far as the footpath to date.

In other news, the jackammer stopped at around 11:30.

1: http://www.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au/Development/CityImprovements/RoadsAndStreetscapes/KingStCycleRoute.asp
2: http://www.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au/Development/CityImprovements/RoadsAndStreetscapes/KingStCycleRoute/KingStCycleway.html

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 15:44:04 +1000

On Sunday we went to yum-cha at Maroubra Junction, very crowded and totally awesome food, and then brefily to La Perouse. The weather was really nice. I didn't have my usual camera with me, but I did take some nice snaps with Chiz's compact camera, which luckily she had in her bag.

Photos...

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 12:52:50 +1000

On Saturday Chiz and I did the manly scenic walk from The Spit to Manly (actually from Seaforth to The Spit to Manly as we missed the bus stop). I think that it ended up being about 10km for us and taking about 3 hours, which was pretty much ideal for us.

It was a bit cold and the day was starting to die by the time we took the ferry back to Circular Quay, next time we will try and start our hiking a bit earlier.

Photos...

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 11:01:53 +1000

Wednesday was a wonderful sunny day in day in Boston and I had plenty of time to explore and take some more snaps before my flight left in the evening. They were generally of much better quality than my efforts on Sunday, which was overcast and rainy.

I also managed to find some excellent lunch on Charles St. in Beacon Hill. I don't remember the name of the little Italian place on the 0.5th floor, but their chicken salad was awesome.

Boston is a pretty nice place and the people seemed pretty friendly - though perhaps because the Red Sox were playing at home and mostly winning while I was there. It also seemed pretty safe, perhaps due to the police presence. I observed four separate police services in operation during the course of my stay: Boston City Police, Middlesex County Police, Massachusetts State Police and Transit Police.

Photos...

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 15:58:22 +1000

I'm currently in Boston for Xen Summit which kicks off today. Yesterday I had a little bit of time to explore Boston and catch up with Geoff Harrison, who I hadn't seen since our days working together at VA Linux about 7 years ago.

Photos...

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 09:56:48 -0400

In April Chiz and I stopped by Hong Kong for a couple of days. Lots of tall buildings. Lots of great food. And somewhat suprprisingly, lots of greenery, birds and turtles at Hong Kong Park right in the middle of town.

Photos...

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 14:02:40 +1000

In February Chiz and I went to Zao Onsen in the north of Japan for a few days Skiing. The weather great on the first day, and pretty average from then on in. But the snow was awesome and 40 lifts was more than enough to keep us busy.

As the name implies Zao Onsen has Onsen (hot spring baths). And the small stream that ran past our hotel was steaming (photo). Zao Onsen also features a forrest Juhyo, pine trees covered with snow to the point of looking like giant snow monsters (photo). Totally awewsome.

If you like to ski and are thinking about a trip to Japan then I think Zao Onsen is certainly on a par with Nagano and Hokkaido. Chiz thinks that is is better :-)

Photos...

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 18:20:11 +1000

Chiz and I just got back from a week in Tokyo. I spent some time in the office catching up with people, eating good food and doing pretty much the same outside the office, though with fewer computers and more beers. Chiz's week was pretty similar, though amusingly we tended to catch up with different friends, so we didn't see much of each other during the week.

On Saturday our good friends Chiaki and Alex were married at a shinto ceremony at Meiji Jingu. It was great to be able to be a part of such a wonderful day. And so nice to see so many faces that we don't see very often - as well as quite a few that we do see quite often.

After the ceremony there was a reception at Meiji Kinen. Then a bit later an after party in Daikanyama, an improptu after-after party in Ebisu, and more drinks in a different part of Ebisu. At that point Chiz and I went home - It was middnight and we had started the days festivities at 8:30am. Alex, Chiaki and others kicked on until 4am doing karaoke.

Congratulations Alex & Chiaki!

I have some photos of the early portions of the day. Sorry none of the ceremoney, as photography wasn't permitted at that point. And it seems that around about the start of the reception I became rather more interested in the party than taking snaps of it.

Photos...

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 14:24:28 +1000

Sunday was yet another beautiful day in Sydney and Chiz and I headed down to Circular Quay and then across to the Botanical Gardens. We found a Scotish couple inside feeding the Cockatoos and they kindly let Chiz have a go too. Not to long after that it started to get dark and we went off to find the resident fruit bats.

photos...

Mon, 26 May 2008 11:25:53 +1000

Once again I've been working away at my patches to move the mapping of EFI on ia64 Xen to match that of ia64 Linux [*].

Why? Because it turns out that you can only teach the firmware about this mapping a maximum of one times between (hard) reboots. This of course is a problem when kexecing between Xen and Linux (aka soft reboot).

Since my last proclamation that things seemed to be working, circa LCA, two fairly serious bugs have been found (by Alex Willamson) and fixed (by me).

The first bug involved registering with the firmware where exactly the handler for PAL and SAL calls exist. I managed to find this problem quite quickly - a stroke of luck to be honest - and it was just a simple matter of teaching the relevant code the new virtual address.

The second bug was that launching an HVM (fully virtualised) domain would cause the hypervisor to lock up - clearly a problem. This took a bit longer to find the cause of and a lot longer to fix. My old enemy TLB repinning was the culprit. But after much pain I seem to have worked out what to do with the VPD (privregs) entry and appear to have a winning combination.

Now that is all finally under control I'm catching up on kexec-tools and LVS patches, some outstanding Debian bugs against packages that I maintain, and finally getting a chance to look at doing something interesting with the xen networking code. Ok, that is a long list, I wonder how far I will get before EFI consumes me again.

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 10:24:47 +1000

These go out to all those who are partial towards either photos of buildings on Swanson St. near the University of Melbourne or dead trees by the Yarra River a bit further downstream. Of particular note was the notice put up by the Bunny Sherrif nearby some of the dead trees. more...

In unrelated news, my Kexec for ia64 Xen code still appears to be working. I've upported to the latest ia64 xen-unstable.hg, consolidated some TLB unpining code, and made a fresh release, v20080206 to celebrate. Now if only someone other than me would test the code and point out where the next big bug lies. more....

Wed, 06 Feb 2008 18:08:19 +0900

alt="[Building in Melbourne]" width="79" height="120" align="left"> I've just got back from a week in Melbourne, attending Linux.Conf.Au.

Linux.Conf.Au

I'll try and publish some sort of report at some stage, but suffice to say its been an absolute ripper. For those of you who aren't here, or are here but missed something, I encourage you to look at the video's of the presentations that are online, linked from the programme.

Perhaps my favourite was a lightning talk on Greasemonkey by Paul Fenwick. It doesn't seem that the lightening talks were recorded by the AV guys, but an informal summary by Paul is here.

Update: The lightening talks are now online. [OGG] [SPX]. The greasmonkey talk is the very last one for those who feel like seeking. It is also available by iteself on Youtube here.

Getting Home

I flew home via Sydney and the second leg was punctuated by and unexpected stop in Cairns around 2am to fix the de-icing equipment on one of the engines - they said they expected ice further north and couldn't take any risks, fair enough given the layer of snow that was covering Tokyo when I arrived. As the plane was still heavy with fuel, we had to circle around Cairns for an hour or so before landing. In all, we arrived about 2 1/2 hours late. No complains, the staff did a good job keeping everyone informed of what was going on.

The lovely child behind me decided that about an hour or so out of Cairns was a good time to start talking to himself. This got louder and louder and eventually turned into screaming which lasted until breakfast. The poor thing was probably distressed to the max. Though his antics did nothing to soothe myself or nearby passengers.

Just to spice things up an extra bit, the train from the airport into town was delayed - due to snow of course.

Lastly, I've heard stories of people operating checkout-counters paying more attention to the conversation with their colleague than the customer they are serving. But I was surprised to see the same tactic used by the lady who handled paperwork as I prepared to leave Sydney.

Code

On the coding front, I posted an updated version of my kexec for Xen on ia64 patches just before I left Tokyo. I haven't had time to break it yet, but it does solve a bunch of tedious bugs - mainly relating to TLB flushing or pinning - and I'm feeling pretty good about it right now. more...

I have a couple of patches and emails awaiting my attention, mainly relating to LVS, ldirectord or kexec-tools. I will try to attend to them along with my email backlog this week.

Web

Raster and I took a few moments at Linux.Conf.Au to copy the photos that he took at my wedding onto my laptop. I have put an edited version up. more...

Chizuko has also been working on a fun new site, Psychommunity.Org.

Life

Chizuko's visa has finally come through and we are planning to move ourselves to Sydney in April. So to all our friends down there, see you soon :-)

Mon, 04 Feb 2008 18:25:23 +0900

Its not often somone interviews me, but this month my number was up. Howard Dahdah of Computerworld spoke to me recently about Linux-HA in the lead up to the Linux-HA BOF at Linux.Conf.au 2008 to be held at Melbourne University later this month / early next month.

Article: The low-down on the Linux High-Availability Project - Cluster improvements deepen Linux HA’s appeal

Update: The article seems to have been syndicated on Network World, here. My number must really be up this time.

Wed, 16 Jan 2008 11:19:44 +0900

As I mentioned in my last entry for last year I've been working on some tedious problems relating to re-pining TLB entries when switching region registers on IA64.

The good news is that the fix I found and wrote about really does work. The bad news is that only solves 2 out of 3 cases. VHPT disabled works. VHPT enabled works. per-vcu-VHPT fails.

Using the HW debugger I can look and see what the TLB entries are. Its rather slow to use, so it isn't practical to check every time an re-pin is to be done. But spot checks indicate that I'm twiddling the right values. So I guess its time for some rigorous head-scratching.

Thu, 10 Jan 2008 23:35:33 +0900

I always find myself travelling at this time of year and this year is no exception. I opened the account by travelling to my parents-in-law's place in Tsuruga, Fukui where my wife Chizuko and I spent a couple of days with her family - as is the done thing for New Year's in Japan.

Map: Tokyo to Tsuruga

The evening that we arrived it snowed quite heavily and when we awoke the world had turned white. Which was quite fortunate as Chizuko and I had it in mind to go skiing.

Imajo 365 had a reasonable amount of snow but a combination of very close weather and a very small patronage - I guess to be expected for New Years Day - meant that only one lift was open and thus only one run was available. None the less it was good to stretch our legs.

Map: Tsuruga to Imajo

A few days later we went to Hakodateyama for some more skiing. This time Kfish came up from Kyoto to join us for the day. All but one lift was open and although the runs were quite short, where as a reasonable amount of powder and I managed to end up face down once or twice.

Maps: Tsuruga to Hakodateyama, Kyoto University to Hakodateyama

Though somewhat limited, the skiing wet our appetite and upon returning to Tokyo we promptly booked a trip to go and ski at Zao-Onsen in mid-February. Neither Chizuko or I have been to the Tohoku region before and we are quite excited about the trip. We plan to spend a night in Yamagata before heading off to the slopes.

Maps: Tokyo to Yamagata, Yamagata to Zao-Onsen

We will also be joining my work-buddies in their annual ski trip, which will take us to Rusutsu in early March. The trip was in Rusutsu last year as well and was completely awesome, fingers crossed it will be this year too.

Map: Tokyo to Rusutsu

And just to save this entry from being entirely about skiing, the last item on my travel list (though not chronologically), is Linux.Conf.Au at Melbourne University in late January / early February. I'm not doing any presentations this year, and about my only commitment appart from listening to awesome talks and catching up with people is to help organise the Linux-HA BOF. Linux.Conf.Au is always a blast and I'm looking forward to this year's edition.

Map: Tokyo to Melbourne

* These aren't the actual routes between destinations taken / planned to be taken, and in some cases they aren't even close, but they are fun anyway.

Update: Without realising it my wife wrote the more-or-less the same information a few hours later. more...

Tue, 08 Jan 2008 21:41:51 +0900

If you have a in interest in Japan beyond bizzare fashion trends and manga, then "Shebaeredomo, Shaberedomo" - dubiously "Talk, Talk, Talk" in English - a film about rakugo - a form of Japanese commedy - directed by Hideyuki Hirayama may interest you. offsite review...

I'm not entirely sure how interesting it would be to people who are not familiar with Japan, but to explain the young boy character - Osaka != Tokyo. Think Sydney vs Melbourne or San Francisco vs Los Angeles, or any other rivally between two not too geographically-distant cities, but with different dialects thrown in to spice things up a bit.

Fri, 07 Dec 2007 15:50:09 +0900

This year seems to be they year for wedding for my friends. I've been to no fewer than 4 in the past few months, not including my own, and missed about as many due to travel constraints.

I had already way put up way too many photos of my wedding and honeymoon up a month or so back. But since then I have accumulated even more. To this end I'm happy to announce that I have put up photos by Chihiro Kinoshta, a university friend of my wife; Seiichi Takinami, my wife's uncle; and Isako Takinami, my mother-in-law.

Fri, 07 Dec 2007 15:04:05 +0900

As I wrote recently [*] I have been having a lot of trouble getting my EFI mapping patches working. This is a fairly essential part of my port of kexec to IA64 Xen. It turns out that the problem was caused by not setting the protection keys up correctly - I did this in the original C implementation, but it got left out when I ported everything over to assembly. Easy to fix. A real pain to find.

Thanks to Alex Williamson from HP for making a machine available that exhibited the problem - so far it only shows up on an HP rx3600 with an dual-ported Intel e1000 plugged into a hot-plug PCI slot with one of the ports hidden from domain0 using the pcihide command line option to the domain0 kernel.

Alex also reported that some user-space applications were segfaulting. This turned out to be easily reproduced by either trying to build xen - gcc would segfault at some point; or running vim xen/arch/ia64/xen/ivt.S - the file that I was hacking on. It turned out that this problem was fixed by removing a patch that I wrote to clean up the assembly code by re-using some portions at the expense of extra branches. A dubious change at best. Good riddance!

EFI Mapping Patches Take IV posted [*]. Happy times.

For a brief moment of time I had the great feeling of making two steps forward. This didn't last long. Even before I had posted the patches three new problems reared their ugly heads: The Intel Tiger2 that I have hangs on a SAL call when booting the second hypervisor when doing Xen-to-Xen kexec; The rx3600 seems to hang in purgatory when doing kexec - I hate it when that happens, its really painful to debug; And the rx3600 seems to have trouble registering the crashkernel region, which is reserved memory for kdump to run its second kernel in.

Two problems solved. Three problems found. Progress? Barely.

In unrelated news, my wife Chizuko has been learning HTML and CSS and pushed up the latest version of her home page www.chizart.net a little earlier today. At least something seems to be moving forwards.

Thu, 29 Nov 2007 17:45:02 +0900

On my bike ride to and from work I wind my way around the imperial palace for a kilometre or so. So far on three occasions over the past year and a half, including twice in the last week a bunch of police and the like were at one of the larger entrances to the palace. And police were at all the minor entrances to the footpath that encircles the palace that I pass. I assume that this indicates that the emperor, his son the crown-price or some other dignatory is coming or going. Today there were several helecopters circling over-head. I wonder if they are on to me...

Wed, 28 Nov 2007 14:16:15 +0900

And I am still puzzling over why my EFI mapping patches blow up on Alex Willamson's machines but not mine. It looks like the problem is that the hypervisor is trying to handle a fault for EFI memory that should be left to domain~0 to handle. But I can neither reproduce the problem nor work out why its occuring. Its a bit of a bummer because the rest of the ia64 xen kexec work has been merged but without this change its not functional. Mailing list mublings about this.

Tue, 13 Nov 2007 12:35:18 +0900

• All bar 400km were done on my white Riteway Shepherd 3.0 (Japanese). A very nice bike. And good value too.
• The remainder was done on a rental bike which I rode from Sydney to Cessnock and back with my mate Alex Reeder - The Hunter Valley is very hot in the afternoons in late January. Photo of me exhasted with a long way still to go.
• 300km was done on The Tour de Chiba 2006 (Japanese), a 3 day event running around Chiba, the prefecture next to Tokyo. Sadly I missed the event this year, but it was for a good cause - I was at a friend's wedding in Hawaii.
• Its a little over 10km from my home to the office and it takes about 35 minutes in traffic. Which I think means that I spend almost as much time stopped as going. Route on veloroutes.org.
• The subway takes 23 minutes + 15 minutes walk + a few minutes waiting time. It travels 16km and costs 290 yen each way.
• The original odometer broke, but I was able to set the value on the new one to the value that the old one had recorded - the screen was busted, but you could still make some portions out.
• I do have another bike, a very light-weight, black Cannondale r700, but I don't ride it much as the Riteway is fast enough for the trip to work and I haven't had much time for weekend rides of late.

Ok, I'll stop talking about bikes now.

Wed, 07 Nov 2007 17:28:48 +0900

Chizuko and I were legally married at the Shinjuku-ku ward office in Tokyo on the 7th of July 2007 (7/7/7). We had a civic ceromony and reception at Ristorante Donnaloia in Kobe on the 23rd September. We took our honeymoon in Fiji and Sydney from the 30th September until the 15th October. During the time in Sydney we held a party at the Coogee Bay Hotel.

A rather raw and uncut dump of the photos from these events is up. We hope to find some time to cut things down to a more reasonable size in the not to distant future. more...

Mon, 29 Oct 2007 17:23:24 +0900

I'll forgive those who think that "SMP Xen IA64 Kexec" is a meaningless arrangement of characters, but its actually the SMP (multi-processor) for IA64 (a exotic architecture from Intel) potion a project that I have been working on for quite some time. The project itself is to port Kexec (a soft-reboot mechanism) to Xen (a virtualisation technology). If this isn't making any sense and you'd like it to, please see the presentation that I made at Linux.Conf.Au this year on the topic Kexec: Soft-Reboot and Crash-Dump Analysis for Linux and Xen.

Today I was very happy to be able to make the 20070713 alpha release of the code, which includes SMP support. This may not sound very exciting, but I seem to remember promising myself that uni-processor version would be ready for Christmas. A goal which I reached with a few days to spare. And distractions aside, I've been working on the SMP stuff ever since. Ok, I admit it, there were a lot of distractions :-)

Most of the work involved porting portions of CPU_HOTPLUG to xen, the portions that allow CPUS to be taken off-line, which is done just before kexecing - the OS boot code handles bringing them back online. The catch was making sure that the entries that had been pinned into the TLB were removed correctly. Empirically both removing an entry that wasn't present and failing to remove one that was present turned out to be fatal. A tricky thing to debug when the OS has basically been shut down. Well, not so tricky once you work out thats what the problem is, and narrowing down that as the cause took most of the time.

As its now the Friday afternoon before a 3 day weekend, I'm happy with the process thats been made, as long as I don't reflect on how long it took... oops.

Fri, 13 Jul 2007 17:56:01 +0900

I went over to Seattle to visit my good friends Dave Miller and Soyong Park. While I was there we had some fine times exploring Seattle, and even found time to take a day-trip to Vancouver. Here are some photos that I took on my journey. more...

Mon, 09 Apr 2007 20:49:16 -0700

This year the cherry blossoms are blooming early, and the early-blooming variety is already in full blossom. Magnus, Chiro-chan, Chiz-chan and I took advantage of this with some mid-March hanami action yesterday.

photos...

Mon, 19 Mar 2007 10:56:16 +0900

Today I went along to a symposium held by The Linux Foundation Japan. At the Q&A session at the end of his presentation Andrew Morton was asked when he thought some new work might me merged into the mainline tree. He began his response with:

Its a major change to the CPU scheduler by Con Kolivas.
He's from Australia, and thats where all the best code comes from.

I wonder what the traslators made of that.

Tue, 13 Mar 2007 16:38:36 +0900

I've been using crosstool for quite a while now to produce cross compilers which I use primarily to produce code to run on ia64 while working on kexec.

One of the nice things about crosstool is has a vast selection of possible architecture, gcc and glibc combinations available. Around 3,700 by my counting. One of the difficult things about using crosstool is choosing which configuration to use for a given architecture. There is a build matrix available to help. However I found that I was not getting the same results as it indicates and that there seem to be a lot of combinations missing. Is this because they are invalid, to save space, or for some other reason? I decided to investigate further.

I developed a small script to test every combination available. I set this running on my desktop at work for a day or so, and given its rate of progress it seemed like it would take about 3 months to complete. So I fired it up on my machine at home to try and half this time. This all worked pretty well, except that the machine at home which is usually off has to run its fan quite a lot to keep itself cool now. An annoying whirring noise that permeates my apartment for about 5 seconds every 30 seconds. No big deal, that whirring noise is for the cause.

This morning I noticed that the machine at home actually hadn't made any progress for about 4 days. The whirring was still going on, so I knew it was doing something. A quick investigation showed that with glibc-2.2.3 if you pass in an target that it doesn't know about (e.g. sh-unknown-linux-gnu) then it's configure gets stuck in an endless loop. Examining a little closer it seems that the loop examines a string of ever growing length, so presumably it will eventually run out of memory and segfault, but it was still going strong after 4 days, and thats just too long.

I came up with a trivial hack to fix this. If config.sub fails, configure should too. The version below prints out config.sub's output (error message which is curiously printed to sdtout instead of stderr) before bailing to make the log a little less cryptic.

It all seems to be working fine now. And as I am now someway into a lazy Sunday afternoon, I thought it would be a great time to share my pain.

--- glibc-2.2.3/configure	2007-03-11 12:06:32.000000000 +0900
+++ glibc-2.2.3/configure	2007-03-11 12:06:35.000000000 +0900
@@ -914,7 +914,10 @@
   esac ;;
 esac
 
-host=`${CONFIG_SHELL-/bin/sh} $ac_config_sub $host_alias`
+if [ ! host=`${CONFIG_SHELL-/bin/sh} $ac_config_sub $host_alias` ]; then
+	echo "$host"
+	exit 1
+fi
 host_cpu=`echo $host | sed 's/^\([^-]*\)-\([^-]*\)-\(.*\)$/\1/'`
 host_vendor=`echo $host | sed 's/^\([^-]*\)-\([^-]*\)-\(.*\)$/\2/'`
 host_os=`echo $host | sed 's/^\([^-]*\)-\([^-]*\)-\(.*\)$/\3/'`
@@ -1388,7 +1388,10 @@
   esac ;;
 esac
 
-build=`${CONFIG_SHELL-/bin/sh} $ac_config_sub $build_alias`
+if [ ! build=`${CONFIG_SHELL-/bin/sh} $ac_config_sub $build_alias` ]; then
+	echo "$build"
+	exit 1
+fi
 build_cpu=`echo $build | sed 's/^\([^-]*\)-\([^-]*\)-\(.*\)$/\1/'`
 build_vendor=`echo $build | sed 's/^\([^-]*\)-\([^-]*\)-\(.*\)$/\2/'`
 build_os=`echo $build | sed 's/^\([^-]*\)-\([^-]*\)-\(.*\)$/\3/'`
@@ -1777,7 +1777,10 @@
   esac ;;
 esac
 
-build=`${CONFIG_SHELL-/bin/sh} $ac_config_sub $build_alias`
+if [ ! build=`${CONFIG_SHELL-/bin/sh} $ac_config_sub $build_alias` ]; then
+	echo "$build"
+	exit 1
+fi
 build_cpu=`echo $build | sed 's/^\([^-]*\)-\([^-]*\)-\(.*\)$/\1/'`
 build_vendor=`echo $build | sed 's/^\([^-]*\)-\([^-]*\)-\(.*\)$/\2/'`
 build_os=`echo $build | sed 's/^\([^-]*\)-\([^-]*\)-\(.*\)$/\3/'`

Sun, 11 Mar 2007 12:48:15 +0900

It occurred to me that while I have seen quite a few dictionaries of Aussie slang that explain things in (alternate?) English, I hadn't run across a Japanese translation of such important concepts as bonzer and ripper*. To this end I have started adding Australian slang to saidict, an add-on Japanese/English dictionary that is intended to supplement Jim Breen's edict.

So far there are only about a dozen entries. They are all tagged as "Australian slang", so you can easily grep for them. Corrections, additions, and other feedback more than welcome.

Download: saidict.utf8
Home: ~horms/junk/

This is slang, and as such some terms may be vulgar or offensive.
Those who are easily offended should consider entertaining themselves elsewhere.

* According to Kfish ripper is actually a term originates from Chinese and was introduced to Australia by gold diggers of Chinese origin the 1850s. The same word, rippa also exists in Japanese, and has the same meaning :-)

Mon, 05 Feb 2007 13:44:24 +0900

I got sick of the old brokenness of by RSS feed, and have written by own feed generator, with the help of Alex.
Out with the old brokenness, in with the new!

The RSS feed is, as before, available from http://www.vergenet.net/~horms/pleb_blossom/rss.xml.

The Atom feed is no longer available.

The code, though work in progress and probably not useful to anyone except me, is available.

Download: genBlog
Home: ~horms/junk/

Feedback, please.

Fri, 02 Feb 2007 17:53:18 +0900

Download: mail.xargs
Home: ~horms/junk/

Wed, 09 Aug 2006 15:55:00 +0900

I'm off to Canada for two weeks tomorrow. First stop is Ottawa for a week to attend OLS and surrounding events. Then a week of not doing much at all, probably in Motreal.

I probably won't be doing much email during this time, so if you need me for something, please be patient.

Thu, 13 Jul 2006 22:46:14 +0900

I spent far to long working out that the Kuroutou Shikou KRTV-7131 can use linux's saa7131 (~2.6.17-rc5) driver without modification by specifying card=65, which uses the settings for a V-Stream Studio TV Terminator. This is basically the same board, except that the one I have is missing the FM Tuner option.

modprobe saa7134 card=65

If your kernel doesn't automatically insert the tuner module at this point, you should add it manually. It should automatically detect a type 54 tuner. If this doesn't happen, then you might be able to specify type=54 on the modprobe command line. Failing that, recompile the kernel with CONFIG_KMOD so that the saa7134 module insertion will automatically pull in tuner.

modprobe tuner #type=54

Sun, 04 Jun 2006 21:58:49 +0900

I poped over to Hong Kong with Chiz to visit my brother. The weather was crap, but we had a great time anwyay. It was my first trip to Hong Kong, I hope I can go back soon. photos...

Tue, 30 May 2006 18:48:44 +0900

It seems that I'll be heading up to Ottawa for OLS in July with my colleague Magnus Damm. Its my first trip to that part of the world for a while, I'm looking forward to the conference, and looking forward with catching up with lots of people.

Excitement!

Thu, 18 May 2006 16:36:40 +0900

The other day I bought myself a sexy new monitor, installed xdm, and on that nice big screen, Debian's default xdm config was well, just so damn ugly it insulted me (though not as much as gdm). As my xdm config had bitrotted over the years I got too and finished packaging entrance, the display manager from Enligthenment. That definately was not insulting, its fast, looks good, and with a bit of fixing on my part, now works. I'm planning to hack on it some more to get better error reporting, and more configuratbility in there.

Insult-O-Meter

gdm > xinit > xdm > entrance (slow) (console ain't X) (Debian's config too ugly) (nice)

At the end of all of those fun and games, Debian packages for entrance, entice (Enlightenment's somewhat bitrotted image viewer), and the required libraries are now available on packages.vergenet.net/vergenet. And all the changes I made to make this happen are in CVS. The packages are apt-gettable, though you'll end up with all the other packages that are lying around there. Drop me a line if you want me to break it up a bit.

Mon, 08 May 2006 17:29:50 +0900

Today was the first decently warm day of the year here in the metropolis of crying babies. I'm looking forward to the warm party months.

In completely unrelated news, I went to watch my friends' band, The Back Horn, play at Liquid Room in Ebisu last week. So much energy I was bouncing off the walls for three or four days afterwards. Rock on!

Mon, 01 May 2006 19:21:29 +0900

I put it online on the off chance that its useful to someone else too. more...

Thu, 27 Apr 2006 23:23:30 +0900

On request for my good mate Fusion94.

Download: sort-hr
Home: ~horms/junk/

Wed, 26 Apr 2006 18:01:46 +0900

Download: ndebootstrap
Home: ~horms/junk/

Mon, 17 Apr 2006 18:41:48 +0900

Apparently someone has packaged Pia for Debian.

# dpkg -p pia
Package: pia
Priority: extra
Section: x11
Installed-Size: 112
Maintainer: Gerd Knorr 
Architecture: i386
Source: xawtv
Version: 3.94-1.1
Depends: libc6 (>= 2.3.5-1), libfontconfig1 (>= 2.3.0), libfreetype6 (>= 2.1.5-1
), libice6, libjpeg62, libsm6, libx11-6, libxaw7 (>> 4.1.0), libxext6, libxft2 (
>> 2.1.1), libxinerama1, libxmu6, libxpm4, libxrandr2, libxrender1 (>= 1:0.9.0.2
), libxt6, libxv1, libxxf86dga1, libxxf86vm1, xlibmesa-gl | libgl1, zlib1g (>= 1
:1.2.1), xawtv-plugins (= 3.94-1.1)
Size: 34328
 This is a simple movie player.  It is used by xawtv and motv to
 playback movie files which are recorded from TV.

(I lied about the pumpkins)

Tue, 11 Apr 2006 10:53:19 +0900

I added it to saidict for safe keeping.

References: asyura.com, asahi.com.

Tue, 04 Apr 2006 21:12:07 +0900

I also addded this to added it saidict for safe keeping.

References: asahi.com.

Tue, 04 Apr 2006 21:12:07 +0900

For the past few months I have been working on code relating to Xen. This week a colleage joined the team. To get him up to speed I've been helping him to get xen built, which can be a less than trivial task. On the third day he came out with this gem.

An interesting mix of kernel and user space crap.

Magnus Damm

Wed, 29 Mar 2006 11:43:36 +0900

While doing some work on okiniri I stumbled upon a feature of date that I wasn't aware of. I'm not sure when these got introduced, but they are certainly there in 5.94.

You can ask date to do arbitary timezone conversions for you. So lets say you're sitting at your desk in a lifeless office complex in Tokyo, and you're chatting to Kfish on IRC, who is in Sydney wondering about scheduling some downtime for a server in San Francisco.

"Mate, what time will midnight in Sydney be in San Francisco?", he asks.

Rather than be lame and run off to some web-based for, I dig out date.

# TZ="America/Los_Angeles" date --date='TZ="Australia/Sydney 00:00"' --rfc-2822
Tue, 21 Mar 2006 16:00:00 -0800

This works despite my prevailing timezone being Japan/Tokyo.

# date --rfc-2822
Thu, 23 Mar 2006 09:22:21 +0900

The --rfc-2822 isn't neccessary, but I like that format. Of course you can ask date for any format, and it will default to the prefered format for your prevailing locale. You can also supply the input in various formats. Of course you can use the current time instead of the current time, and omiting one or both of the TZ specifications will use the prevailing timezone.

The available timezones are in /usr/share/zoneinfo/, and the prevailing one being /etc/localtime which is typically a symlink into /usr/share/zoneinfo/

For more information about date and timezones see "27.9 Specifying time zone rules" in the corutils manual, online or locally by running info date

Thu, 23 Mar 2006 09:26:29 +0900

I've got in on Hanami early this year, snapping these shots on the way to work this morning. Most of the trees havn't started blossoming yet. But Shinjuku Chuo Park has a few trees of a variety that bloom about a week early, I first noticed them showing colour on Saturday. So I guess that next weekend the real fun will start. more...

Mon, 20 Mar 2006 12:12:53 +0900

When working with Git I sometimes make wrappers to help me out. The only one I am currently using is okiniri-export. Its pretty simple, given a changeset, report its commit message, diffstat and diff. I think the date-foo that it ues is pretty new, it works with "date (GNU coreutils) 5.94", but might break with earlier versions. more...

Mon, 20 Mar 2006 10:05:19 +0900

Attending Linux.Conf.Au is always a time of inspiration for me. This year's excellent edition in Dunedin was no exception. I'm hoping to find time to explore all sorts of ideas that in the coming year. Here is the first cab off the rank.

As part of his key-note, Mark Shuttleworth discussed how the Rosetta component of Launchpad is working to break down barriers for those wanting to contribute translations to open source projects at his key-note. I started thinking about an unreleased piece that I wrote last year about Open Source and multilingual desktops. And after having a chance to chat about my ideas with Mark over lunch while he was in Tokyo last week I was encouraged to give my ideas a wider audience.

Using Free and Open Source Software Principles to Create an Integrated Multilingual Desktop Environment
Free and Open Source sofware makes use of the ability for users to create their own solutions, and collaboration to create high quality software at a rapid rate. This discussion looks at how similar techinques could be used to improve multilingual desktop environments.

Checking the dates I see that was inspired to make the original after various discissions with Kfish not long after Linux.Conf.Au last year. Figures.

Sun, 12 Feb 2006 23:58:46 +0900

A first cut of some photos from in and around Linux.Conf.Au 2006. Includes Dave Miller, Greh Lehey, Rusty and Jeff Waugh shaving for the John Lions Chair. more...

Mon, 30 Jan 2006 13:02:16 +1300

I've finished a draft of my presentation to be made at the Debian Miniconf at Linux.Conf.Au in Dunedin next week. Feedback welcome. more...

Thu, 19 Jan 2006 12:02:27 +0900

I can tell that LCA 2006 (23rd - 28th January) is getting close, becasue I've spent the weekend so far preparing presentation slides and a laptop to take. So, for those of you who have been waiting to track me down for good or for bad, you won't have to wait too much longer. I'm abandoning the cilly Tokyo winter and heading down to New Zealand for the entire week.

I start off with a quick trip to the Bay of Islands, north of Aukland to visit my Dad (no I'm not from New Zealand and neither is he, but he's been living there for about a year now). I should get down to Dunedin on Monday afternoon, in time to freshen up for the performance night at Arc Cafe as part of the Dicital Art Mini-Conf, organised by Kfish and the gang.

On Tuesday, if all goes to plan I'll be giving a presentation at the Debian Mini-Conf about what the Debian Kernel Team has been up to in the past year. And on Thursday my good mate Dave Miller is giving a keynote. I haven't even looked at the programme yet and already my week is filling up.

LCA 2006, Dunedin.
I'll be there, and I will be wearing Speights underwear!

Sat, 14 Jan 2006 17:47:36 +0900

If you have a PSP (Play Station Portable) in Japanese, and you want to change it to English, and you don't read Japanese and thus can't read the menus, this page is for you. more...

Sat, 07 Jan 2006 13:26:11 +0900

Photos from new year's in and around Shinjuku in Tokyo, including hatsumode, a trip to a temple in the cold of the night on new years day. more...

Sun, 01 Jan 2006 18:00:21 +0900

Download: dpkg-unpack-build
Home: ~horms/junk/

Tue, 27 Dec 2005 14:35:41 +0900

 # power-toggle 172.17.100.1 7 pass status
 STATE: ON
 # power-toggle 172.17.100.1 7 pass off
 Turning off...
 # power-toggle 172.17.100.1 7 pass off
 Already off...
 # power-toggle 172.17.100.1 7 pass reset
 Turning on...
 # power-toggle 172.17.100.1 7 pass reset
 Turning off...
 Sleeping for 10s...
 Turning on...

Download: power-toggle
Home: ~horms/junk/

Mon, 19 Dec 2005 13:21:07 +0900

ccache is a compiler cache. I find it greatly reduces compile time when I have to recompile the same code over and over, which is often the case when I prepare Debian packages.

It can be invovked in a variety of ways. For me the easist is to make a symlink the name of the compiler in my path. For example, ~/local/bin is in my path before /usr/bin, and I want all invocations to gcc to use the compiler, so I do this

# which gcc /usr/bin/gcc # (cd ~/local/bin && ln -s /usr/bin/ccache gcc; ) # which gcc /home/horms/local/bin/gcc

So now when I invoke gcc it actually runs ccache, it does its magic and calls /usr/bin/gcc as needed. As ccache invocations look exactly the same as gcc invocations, this means its easy to get ccache into a build.

# which gcc /usr/bin/gcc # ccache-update-links ~/local/bin # which gcc /home/horms/local/bin/gcc

But with different versions of gcc, and recently doing some work with cross-compilers, I have a lot of symlinks I want to create, and this is a bit of a chore. So I wrote a ccache-update-links to do this for me. Note that it actually just creates and overwrites links, it doesn't know how to delete dead links. Perhaps I should add that...

Download: ccache-update-links
Home: ~horms/junk/

Thu, 08 Dec 2005 13:20:56 +0900

Saidict has expanded 100% from one word to two! More...

Fri, 18 Nov 2005 09:45:29 +0900

cat >> $HOME/.magic << EOF
# Ulead Photo Explorer5
# Source: http://www.jisyo.com/cgibin/view.cgi?EXT=pe5 (Japanese)
0	string		IIO2H		Ulead Photo Explorer5
EOF

Its Debian Bug #339397 for now.

Wed, 16 Nov 2005 10:29:47 +0900

Fortunately Dave's attempts at taking photos were more successful than mine. As an added bonus, his trip with Soyong was around 2 weeks, whereas Chiz and I only dropped in for 2 days. You can read all about it on his blog [Oct] [Nov] which also has links to lots of awesome photos.

In semi-related news, by brother sent me a copy of Lee Frost's "The Complete Guide to Night and Low-Light Photography". Mmm, wish I had my camera back...

Wed, 16 Nov 2005 10:25:00 +0900

See what I've been reading here

Thu, 27 Oct 2005 11:41:44 +0900

New images for enlightenment's E-Biff.

	No New Messages	New Messages	9 Messages, 7 New
New:	[png] [xcf]	[png] [xcf]	[png] [xcf]
Original:	[png]	[png]	[png]

This and other exciting can be found in my junk-yard.

Fri, 07 Oct 2005 16:19:11 +0900

I've been thinking of writing a supplementry Japanese-English diectionary, basically for words I can't find in Edict.

So far I have an entry for "retranslation function", courtesy of Yuichi Yoshida, the uim-anthy author.

Works wonderfully with Gjiten, and should work equally well in anything that supports edict format dictionaries. Though it would be arguably more useful if it had more entries.

Download: saidict.utf8

If you need another format, pkf and friends can do that for you.

This and other exciting can be found in my junk-yard.

Fri, 07 Oct 2005 16:16:31 +0900

My good mate Derek sent me this link (local copy) explaining the ways of 25-way Janken - Extreme Scissors Paper Rock.

Two words: Insane!

Sat, 01 Oct 2005 15:22:26 +0900

As a follow up to my breif report on uim-anthy, I should mention that for many (prehaps all) applications the locale also needs to be set for Japanese input to work. This means you a) need a Japanese locale (dpkg-reconfigure locales on Debian) and b) you need to set the locale.

If you want all messages and interaction to be in Japanese, when available, then set LC_ALL:

export LC_ALL=ja_JP.UTF-8

If you want messages and the like in the default language, but also want to be able to do input in Japanese, then set LC_CTYPE:

export LC_CTYPE=ja_JP.UTF-8

Of course, you can set LC_ALL to other values, to use different languages, and LC_CTYPE can be set independantly.

If you use EUC-JP instead of UTF-8, or more to the point, have an application, such as Eterm, that supports EUC-JP but not UTF-8, then use ja_JP.eucJP as the locale instead. Noting that you can set this environment on a per programme invocation basis.

Miscelaneous Notes:

• You can show the current value of all locale parameters locale command. In a nutshell, any LC_* values will take the value of LC_ALL, unless explicitly set in the environment. Compare invocations of locale and env | egrep "^(LANG|LC_)"

• This is probably an EUC-JP thing, but I find jless works, and less doesn't.

  export PAGER=jless

• If you reconfigure your locales and use Debian then the localepurge package contains a command of the same name that will reclaim uneccessarily used disk space. Not sure if this exists on other distributions.

Mon, 12 Sep 2005 12:26:03 +0900

--- /etc/X11/xkb/keycodes/xfree86	2005-07-12 21:58:36.000000000 +0300
+++ /etc/X11/xkb/keycodes/xfree86	2005-07-16 13:21:25.000000000 +0300
@@ -151,8 +151,10 @@
     // Keys that are generated on Japanese keyboards
 
     alias <HZTG> = <TLDE>;	// Hankaku_Zenkaku toggle
-    <HKTG> =   208;		// Hiragana_Katakana toggle
-    <AB11> =   211;		// backslash/underscore
+    <HKTG> =   120;		// Hiragana_Katakana toggle
+    //<HKTG> =   208;		// Hiragana_Katakana toggle
+    alias <AB11> = <KPDC>;	// backslash/underscore
+    //<AB11> =   211;		// backslash/underscore
     <XFER> =   129;		// Henkan
     <NFER> =   131;		// Muhenkan
     <AE13> =   133;		// Yen

uim-xim&
XMODIFIERS=@im=uim
GTK_IM_MODULE=uim

A complete list is avalable in the ChangeLog.

Perdition 1.17 is available for download in the Perdition download directory.

For more information on Perdition, please see the Perdition home page.

Wed, 22 Jun 2005 15:53:25 +0900

Theo de Raadt, famed for his work on OpenBSD has given some analysis of why he dislikes Linux in a Forbes.Com article. Thanks to Jaq for putting me on to this.

I found it particularly interesting the way he makes reference to the having lots of developers working on rapidly developing new features to reach the needs of users as a bad things. And furthermore commented on how big companies fuding Linux development fueled its popularity while in practice they were using the opensource community as an unpaid workforce.

The thing is, that is the whole idea. People working together to produce software that meets the needs of people, when they want it, not when some ivory-tower development model says they can have it. It turns out that this also works pretty well for companies, and they realise that by funding open source development they get a whole lot more out than they put in. And the really great thing is, everyone gets a whole lot more out.

While I don't have anything against OpenBSD, I really think Theo is missing the point. I'd like to close off with a recent contribution I made (vanity?) allow someone to do local portmaping for LVS, because they needed to be able to do that.

Tue, 21 Jun 2005 12:58:14 +0900

--- linux-2.6.12.bak/drivers/input/mouse/synaptics.c	2005-06-18 14:24:58.000000000 +0900
+++ linux-2.6.12/drivers/input/mouse/synaptics.c	2005-06-18 18:10:22.000000000 +0900
@@ -608,6 +608,13 @@ static struct dmi_system_id toshiba_dmi_
 			DMI_MATCH(DMI_PRODUCT_NAME , "Satellite"),
 		},
 	},
+	{
+		.ident = "Toshiba Dynabook",
+		.matches = {
+			DMI_MATCH(DMI_SYS_VENDOR, "TOSHIBA"),
+			DMI_MATCH(DMI_PRODUCT_NAME , "dynabook"),
+		},
+	},
 	{ }
 };
 #endif
@@ -656,7 +663,7 @@ int synaptics_init(struct psmouse *psmou
 	 * thye same as rate of standard PS/2 mouse.
 	 */
 	if (psmouse->rate >= 80 && dmi_check_system(toshiba_dmi_table)) {
-		printk(KERN_INFO "synaptics: Toshiba Satellite detected, limiting rate to 40pps.\n");
+		printk(KERN_INFO "synaptics: Toshiba Satellite or Dynabook detected, limiting rate to 40pps.\n");
 		psmouse->rate = 40;
 	}
 #endif

It seems that somewhere between 0.10 and 0.11.2 there format that git uses to report diffs between trees changed. This broke okiniri (my fun scripts written about git/cognito), so I fixed it. I also added the poorly named okiniri-linearise-head to make it easier to break up the stable 2.6.11.X patches into something like this.

Get Okiniri Here!

Thu, 09 Jun 2005 19:38:59 +0900

I've decided to establish Planet Horms using the fine Planet feed aggregator. I hope that the mish-mash of content accurately reflects my life.

[not suitable for children... or anyone else for that matter]

Tue, 17 May 2005 16:45:05 +0900