Has anyone actually gotten the Hoary installer to do anything useful with software raid?
like, i’d like it to:
a) recognise my 200GB /home raid
b) create one for /
Software raid is the suck
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Going Hoary on the Desktop
Downloading hoary-install-i386.iso and will soon be Ubuntu on my desktop machine. There is no doubt that my laptop will shortly follow (shipping a kernel with benh’s sleep patch for my albook will make me an instant-switch).
The main thing I want to make sure of is that they build their kernels with sane enough options for XFS.
sydney meeting
I’m in Sydney for the weekend for a Linux Australia committee meeting. This will be the third year I’ve been on the LA committee.
So, if you’re in Sydney and want to join us for a drink and a discussion – get in contact (la committee, me, or ppl on the slug list should know).
Lots to discuss and talk about, should be good.
helping in public forums
So, what’s my deal with helping out in public forums?
we seem to all be a helpful lot at mysql… hanging out in the web based forums at dev.mysql.com (for some obscure reason, some people actually like web based forums. give me usenet anyday), or on the lists (like the cluster list) and in #mysql on freenode.
i guess i help where i can (and it’s quick, or a likely bug, or when it’s a good idea to clearly document something). Also, reading the forum/list can help me learn some stuff too.
I less enjoy it when it is “Distributing (basic) clue to users”. Especially when it’s just simple bloody obvious things. People tend to actually have well thought out questions on a list. IRC it tends to be different.
although i wont go and spend time investigating something for a list/forum Q. I figure that if i have to expend effort, then it’s probably something that should be put to support – as in paid support.
I remember asking for a fair bit of handholding into GNU Arch. But that is a bit of a “once it clicks, it’s all good”, and i was trying to get into it before there was the wiki and stuff with lots of useful info and stuff.
although this is just my ramblings and thoughts… will have to look up if there’s any actual policy on this.
ethereal
Ethereal, I love you and want to have your babies.
(okay, this may sound bizarre… but it so rocks)
over use of XML when XML is not what you want
sometimes XML is great. Sometimes, it’s not. If GnuCash used a database (e.g. embedded mysql) – we’d be in great shape. I could easily extract stuff out of it into my own reports and stuff and it’d rock. Instead, I can’t and have to learn some other way. annoying. Accounts.gnucash is now about 700kb. That’s less than a year. Going to be lots of fun in a few years… hrrmm.
All this finance data is in tables. You know what that means? A relational database is ideal.
same with Gnome Time Tracker. cool app. Won’t scale at some point no doubt. Currently, i have a greater than 300kb gnotime-data.xml file. why? I ask. Surely there is a better way. How is it going to run when i’ve been using it every day for year?
On the other hand – using XML for documents in OOo and stuff is like the best thing ever (it makes sense). For RPC it still seems like a huge amount of overkill.
it’s another rant on ‘the right tools for the right job’
lunch with the sgi guys
had lunch today with (some of) the guys in my team when I was working at SGI. Was good to catch up.
pessimistic fortune
Every program has at least one bug and can be shortened by at least one instruction — from which, by induction, one can deduce that every program can be reduced to one instruction which doesn’t work.
a couple of hours sleep
now i do feel a bit better, which is good. i guess we’ll see how we go.
urgh
been up for about two hours and have wanted to go back to bed the entire time. hoping i don’t just fall asleep. urgh. hope i’m not catching anything that other ppl here have had.
made a start on 0.4
well, i branched and made a fix…. annoying little bug for a little while. now all that’s needed is to go through the rest of those listed in bugzilla.
once that’s done, it’s enough features for a release :)
GnomeAbout stuff
As far as I can work out, this is a good handler to make sure that an About box is shown every time you select Help->About from the menu (i should really look at some other project’s code).
void on_about1_activate(GtkWidget *w)
{
GtkWidget *about;
GladeXML *xml = glade_xml_new (PACKAGE_SOURCE_DIR"/Finance.glade", "about", NULL);
about = glade_xml_get_widget (xml, "about");
gtk_widget_show (about);
gtk_object_unref(GTK_OBJECT(xml));
}
the next version of ubuntu
the preview live CD is out. got the ppc and x86 ones and tried it on my laptop and desktop respectively. Went pretty well. It did video mirroring (and not xinerama) on my desktop, which is annoying, but nobody else does it right either.
the pcmcia wireless card worked out of the box on my laptop. This is pretty impressive – i just had to put my WEP key in.
When Hoary Hedgehog is released, I’m actually very tempted to switch (assuming, of course, that i get sleep support!)
another hot day
Well… it’s nearly 1pm and it’s 32 degrees. It’s warm – probably feels like that because it’s been about 30 degrees since i started working. It’s a few degrees colder in the office (which is good).
public holiday tomorrow, which is good. Although if we should have a holiday for what is essentially Invasion Day is a bit undecided. Back in the 80s and 90s we would have had this debate – but Australian society has headed towards the lunatic right and seems incapable of proper thought, argument and debate. It also okay with human rights violations, torture and the imprisonment of children.
As we increasingly move towards an education system that’s based on ability to pay, not academic ability – i don’t think it’s a time for celebrating Australia as it is.
I’ll be with friends tomorrow, enjoying some time together, as we are fond to do.
MySQL port of MemberDB
Spent probably about 3 hours today porting the database schema to MySQL 5 along with finding some bugs in the process. Pretty minor ones, mainly to do with how things could be improved to improve compatibility with schemas written with postgresql in mind.
While chasing up some stuff on why the serial type alias in mysql wasn’t exactly the same as postgresql serial type (which is an integer with a sequence and default value) i found this gem in the postgresql docs:
Note: Prior to PostgreSQL 7.3, serial implied UNIQUE. This is no longer automatic. If you wish a serial column to be in a unique constraint or a primary key, it must now be specified, same as with any other data type.
Great huh? So upgrade postgresql and don’t go sifting through your tables (now come on, everybody uses a serial/auto_increment field in a lot of tables) you loose!
i.e. there’s bugs in memberdb now that weren’t there when i started and i didn’t change any code to make them. hrrm…
anyway, i’ll write at some time the few easy steps it took to get the schema across (it takes no time once you know what you’re doing – like a few commands and a few search and replaces).
for now, you can get stuff from arch: stewart@flamingspork.com–memberdb/memberdb–mysql–0.4
the schema loads, i’ll have to change one bit of code to make it all work – otherwise everything should be fine (but let me test first – or provide fixes, not complaints :)
Slashdot – Novell to port Evolution to Windows
Okay, so I nearly never read slashdot comments… but sometime’s they’re really funny (and often really stupid). This one caught my eye:
I hear Kentucky has already started the port of Creationism to Windows. Lets hope the right team delivers first.
MemberDB – A Membership Database
MemberDB – A Membership Database
I released 0.3 today. Contains all the election code as used in the LA 2005 Election.
Yes, there’s known bugs in this release.. check bugzilla for current ones.
Preliminary election results
Linux Australia members can log into the membership site and view the preliminary results of the 2005 election.
(Obviously) going through all my old images
Yes, I took images on my camera phone. I feel dirty, they look so bad. This is scaled down so it looks okay. Behind all those ethernet and fibre channel cables are some machines that we used to test CXFS on when I was at SGI.
Inside an SGI Indy
When I was working at SGI, I bought a camera phone. So what do I then go and take a picture of? The insides of an Indy!
You can even see the bottom of Owen’s O2 at the top left!
