Planet UWCS

Counting off years at an arbitrary date on a calendar seems a bit meaningless - to many people I suppose it makes sense, because everyone gets together at New Year's Eve, and there's a big party to remember things by. With me it's different; for the last few New Years, things have been quiet. The big events in my life are not the times when I take a few days to relax, as pleasant as they are. Thinking about it, the biggest social events these days are software conferences. Sad, but true. I find myself reflecting on the year just gone. ...

It has been quite a while since I switched to using only Jabber (a.k.a. XMPP) for all my instant messaging. We use Jabber a lot at work, as well, and there are plans to set up an internal Jabber server eventually. (At the moment, everyone uses their personal Jabber IDs, which isn't ideal.) I've been having problems with jabber.org.uk lately - they seem unreliable at times, although they're going through a complicated migration to ejabberd which should eventually fix things. In the meantime, because I rely on it so heavily, I need it to work now. ...

Lately I've been having crazy ideas. Even more than usual, perhaps. I think the trick is to try and break the wildly unrealistic goals down into bite-size chunks that could actually work. Like, for instance, getting the project you want to hack on mirrored into your favourite repository format. In other news, I've finally got around to learning how to set up public git mirrors of cvs and svn repositories - there are plenty of tutorials about creating private repositories, but very few which deal with public ones in detail. ...

I haven't been writing so much recently - only one blog post for January, and I didn't even find the time to finish all the things I did in December. This is because I'm busy. Honest. So, before it gets too far into February, I'd better summarize things a little. Projects I worked on recently: f-spot - Near the end of December, I joined the Debian Mono packaging team, and helped clear up a few bugs in the photo management application I use. However, it turns out that f-spot could really use more help upstream - the number of forwarded Debian bugs is quite high, and there are some pretty nasty bugs outstanding. In fact, the upload we made has been synced to Ubuntu Hardy, so a bunch of users are going to run into horrible problems unless we fix them before the release. Oh dear. enscript - I finally started to write some code for GNU Enscript. Recently I fixed the build system so that it didn't fail `make distcheck', for the first time in over a decade. Win. I'm trying to work towards a maintenance release, rather like the new maintainer of a2ps has done. gnu-standards - the GNU maintainers' information document was under a license that didn't allow modifications, so it had to be packaged in Debian's non-free section. I asked about it, and it got relicensed. So now I'm trying to get the Debian package updated and moved back into `main'. postgresql-autodoc - this was a random package I picked up, adopted, and got uploaded sometime in December. I haven't heard any complaints yet, but then my fixes were mostly for typos. ...

I've had two cases recently where an old configuration file has been causing problems, and there's no clean upgrade strategy. My wireless card was made by Broadcom, and I use the newer b43 driver in Linux. However, the new mac80211 drivers introduce a second network interface (used internally by mac80211) but with the same MAC address as the normal interface. And because it gets created first, udev puts this master interface into the place where the real interface is meant to be, and the real one gets called 'wlan0_rename'. The fix was to look at /etc/udev/rules.d/z25_persistent-net.rules on Debian, and either add 'ATTRS{type}="1"' to the appropriate line, or delete the file, and let it get created on the next boot. ...

Firstly, a rant: as of December 2007, a self-righteous idiot named Chris Cunningham thinks he can change the name of "Fitts' law" to "Fitts's law" on wikipedia, in the name of grammar. To boot, he claims to have changed every link to "GNU/Linux" to point to "Linux", probably without regard to the difference in meaning. I am not happy. Fortunately, a recent attempt to become an admin was unsuccessful. Anyway. I noticed recently in Epiphany that I couldn't hit the scrollbar by slamming the mouse to the right edge of the screen. It turns out there are two bugs stopping me doing this, one less subtle than the other. ...

So I'm in Morpeth for Christmas, staying with my mum. Until today there was no internet access here - they had been paying for an ADSL connection since May, but hadn't managed to get the modem to work with the computer. After a trip to the shops for a nice ADSL wireless router, I can now type blog entries from bed. There was an existing computer to get working with the router as well. It looked like it had an ethernet port on the back, so should have been easy. However, it was running Windows 98, and I couldn't see it in the hardware list - no drivers. After a bit of prodding around with a Debian live cd, I realised that the integrated network card was even turned off in the BIOS. After that, I had to fiddle around with downloading drivers on my laptop from 3com's website, transferring them via a USB keyring and the Debian live cd (no built-in USB mass storage support nine years ago) to the HDD, and then brave the install procedure. ...

Continuing my search for the subtle things that have annoyed me for years about my desktop usage, I want to think about shell startup times. Application startup times have been done to death, I'm sure - it is one of the more obvious areas to work on when improving a desktop application. Evolution's startup time is still appalling, for instance; I count five seconds before I get a GUI, and many more before I see any email. Still, in the case of my bloated email client, it doesn't matter that much - I generally start it once a day, at 9am, when I need coffee anyway. It then proceeds to hang around in the background. It would certainly be nice for applications in general to start more quickly, but it's not the cause of these subconscious feelings of annoyance that I want to pin down. ...

Some things always feel uncomfortable about my desktop usage, even when I change solutions - KDE, GNOME, XFCE, all the way down to evilwm and beyond, to the console. I want to pin these problems down, in order to address them. First I want to focus on network lag. Take email as an example. One of the biggest changes I made to my use of email a few years ago was to store all my email on an IMAP server, so that I can access it from any computer I happen to be using. This has obvious advantages - I have an archive going back years, can do spam filtering and classification in one place, and so on. It does mean performance can suffer, and I'm dependent on a net connection to read my old email. Compare how git changes how you can work with source code, both through its speed and through being able to commit while offline. ...

My attempt to learn to use emacs continues. Today's discovery: I can enable emacs-like keybindings in GTK text fields (well, Readline-like) - this includes form fields in Epiphany. I have remapped C-w to backward-kill-word, to be more like Readline. I'm working up to writing some lisp to make common tasks easier... like writing blog entries, perhaps. I'll need to synchronize my .emacs files somehow... but I need to make more of an effort to use emacs over vim at work.