https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/ Recent content in Posts on Staring at the C Hugo -- gohugo.io en-us Wed, 27 Aug 2025 17:21:13 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2025-08-27-vfio-user-client-in-qemu/ Wed, 27 Aug 2025 17:21:13 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2025-08-27-vfio-user-client-in-qemu/ The recent release of QEMU 10.1 now comes with its very own vfio-user client. You can try this out yourself relatively easily - please give it a go!1 vfio-user is a framework that allows implementing PCI devices in userspace. Clients (such as QEMU) talk the vfio-user protocol over a UNIX socket to a device server; it looks something like this: To implement a virtual device for a guest VM, there are generally two parts required: “frontend” driver code in the guest VM, and a “backend” device implementation. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/its-always-dns/ Sun, 23 Jun 2024 15:15:40 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/its-always-dns/ The meme is real, but I think this particular case is sort of interesting, because it turned out, ultimately, to not be due to DNS configuration, but an honest-to-goodness bug in glibc. As previously mentioned, I heavily rely on email-oauth2-proxy for my work email. Every now and then, I’d see a failure like this: Email OAuth 2.0 Proxy: Caught network error in IMAP server at [::]:1993 (unsecured) proxying outlook.office365.com:993 (SSL/TLS) - is there a network connection? https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2023-11-04-scroll-wheel-in-vim/ Sat, 04 Nov 2023 16:21:50 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2023-11-04-scroll-wheel-in-vim/ I intentionally have mouse support disabled in vim, as I find not being able to select text the same way as in any other terminal screen unergonomic. However, this has an annoying problem as a libvte / gnome-terminal user: the terminal, on switching to an “alternate screen” application like vim that has mouse support disabled, “helpfully” maps scroll wheel events to arrow up/down events. This is possibly fine, except I use the scroll wheel click as middle-button paste, and I’m constantly accidentally pasting something in the wrong place as a result. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/a-headless-office-365-proxy/ Wed, 09 Nov 2022 23:47:56 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/a-headless-office-365-proxy/ As I mentioned in my last post, I’ve been experimenting with replacing davmail with Simon Robinson’s super-cool email-oauth2-proxy, and hooking fetchmail and mutt up to it. As before, here’s a specific rundown of how I configured O365 access using this. Configuration We need some small tweaks to the shipped configuration file. It’s used for both permanent configuration and acquired tokens, but the static part looks something like this: [email@yourcompany.com] permission_url = https://login. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/fetchmail-and-office-365/ Sun, 06 Nov 2022 22:27:14 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/fetchmail-and-office-365/ I previously described accessing Office365 email (and in particular its oauth2 flow) via davmail, allowing me to continue using fetchmail, procmail and mutt. As davmail is java, it’s a pain to have around, so I thought I’d give some details on how to do this more directly in fetchmail, as all the available docs I found were a little vague, and it’s quite easy to screw up. As it happens, I came across a generally better solution shortly after writing this post, on which more later. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/relative-__file__-with-cmake/ Thu, 16 Jun 2022 10:04:56 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/relative-__file__-with-cmake/ I have the misfortune of maintaining some things using CMake. One major annoyance is that __FILE__ is an absolute path, and that can’t be changed in CMake itself. Like most CMake annoyances, you can find a discussion online from about 15 years ago, but no sign of an actual fix. Instead, you need a hack: this - I think - is the simplest one. First, in our top-level CMakeLists.txt, we’ll define this helper function: https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/how-i-code-review/ Sat, 05 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/how-i-code-review/ I thought it might be interesting, at least to myself, to write up how I approach code reviews. My history in tech is one where close code review was emphasized and well-respected: most appreciated that a detailed review was not only worth the reviewer’s time, but mutually beneficial, and often a great learning experience for everyone. So my tiny mind can’t process ideas like post-commit reviews, that seem to be predicated on the idea that testing is some kind of replacement for code review. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/testing-a-c-library-with-python/ Wed, 22 Dec 2021 11:45:38 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/testing-a-c-library-with-python/ It’s still common for a systems library to be written in the default lingua franca, C, although Rust is encroaching, for good reasons. However, when it comes to testing, things get tedious quickly: writing unit or component tests in C is a slow, bug-prone exercise. With libvfio-user, after fixing too many bugs that were due to the test rather than the test subject, I decided it would be worth looking at alternative approaches. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/github-prs/ Sat, 06 Feb 2021 13:46:53 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/github-prs/ Stefan Hajnoczi recently posted about clean commit history. It’s a controversial viewpoint that not everyone agrees with - there is a sizable population in favour of “never rewrite history”. For me, though, the points he makes there are totally correct: each commit should be a logical change, main (neé master) should stay green, and CI should pass at every single point in main’s history. More than just CI though: regardless of whether it passes CI, the main branch should be of good quality at all times, if you want to avoid the Quality Death Spiral. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/mutt-and-office365/ Fri, 06 Nov 2020 11:50:39 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/mutt-and-office365/ For reasons, I now need to interact with Office365 mail and calendar. It should go without saying that the Outlook webapp is almost painfully unusable (there really is no key binding for “next unread email”). Thus began the quest to get mutt interacting with the O365 server. This was a rather painful process: so much of the information on the web refers to earlier authentication schemes, Microsoft-special protocols, things that don’t support 2FA, dead Linux software, useless Linux software, etc. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/procmail-and-threads/ Mon, 14 Sep 2020 19:13:05 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/procmail-and-threads/ I’m apparently old-school enough to find gmail and co painfully inefficient for handling significant amounts of mail. I still find procmail+mutt hard to beat. One thing mutt can’t do, however, is filter threads automatically - there’s no “mute” facility like gmail has; threads have to processed manually. Equally, procmail itself has no threading facilities or understanding of Message-Id or References. Matching email threads It can be done, though, with some cheesy awk: https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/arrow-keys-in-firefox/ Wed, 02 Sep 2020 18:01:26 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/arrow-keys-in-firefox/ I’m not the only one disappointed in the way the web has worked out in lots of ways. From <blink> onwards, so much semantic information is missing from the average website, sometimes wilfully it appears. Why is there so little structural data on what the components of a page are? One particular peccadillo I dislike is “Previous/Next Page” elements on a list page. Nobody ever uses <a rel="next" ...>. If you’re lucky, there’s an aria-label attribute for accessibility purposes, but as it’s a free-form text, and there isn’t even a convention, it could be pretty much anything. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/docker-go-and-usdt/ Thu, 06 Aug 2020 09:09:13 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/docker-go-and-usdt/ We have what should be a simple task: we’re on CentOS 7, and we want to deploy a Go binary that will have USDT tracepoints. USDT is an attractive option for a few debugging purposes. It allows applications to define tracepoints with higher levels of stability and semantic meaning than more ad-hoc methods like dynamic uprobes. Usage of USDT tracepoints tends to have a different focus from other monitoring techniques like logging, Prometheus, OpenTracing etc. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/ctag-ordering/ Fri, 19 Jun 2020 11:07:35 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/ctag-ordering/ Going to the first matching tag in vim with Control-] can be rather annoying. The exuberant-ctags secondary sort key is the filename, not the tag kind. If you have a struct type that’s also a common member name, you’re forced into using :tselect to find the struct instead of all the members. Most of the time, the struct definition is what you want. To avoid this issue, I sort the tags file such that any kind == "s" entries come first for that tag. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/a-simple-pibell/ Tue, 05 May 2020 21:59:53 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/a-simple-pibell/ With all this free time I finally got around to installing a doorbell at home. I had no interest in Ring or the like: what I really wanted was a simple push doorbell that fit the (Victorian) house but would also somehow notify me if I was downstairs… There are several documented projects on splicing in a Raspberry Pi into existing powered doorbell systems, but that wasn’t what I wanted either. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/urls-in-gnome-terminal/ Thu, 09 Apr 2020 14:35:04 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/urls-in-gnome-terminal/ For some time now, gnome-terminal amongst others has had a heuristic that guesses at URLs, and allows you to control-click to directly open it. However, this was easily foxed by applications doing line-wrapping instead of letting the terminal do so. A few years ago, gnome-terminal gained ANSI escape sequences for URL highlighting. It requires applications to output the necessary escape codes, but works far more reliably. Annoyingly, you still need to control-click, but that is easily fixed. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/migrated-blog/ Mon, 06 Apr 2020 11:33:36 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/migrated-blog/ With my Coronavirus-related CFT I finally got around to migrating off Blogger. I lost comments, but I think I’ll probably keep it like that: there’s twitter, and Blogger’s anti-spam facilities were pretty much hopeless. My first attempt used jekyll. I suppose this works best with Github Pages, because I gave up on it pretty quickly: various irritating Ruby version incompatibilities, random tracebacks from modules, import not working well at all etc. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2020-03-09-github-commits-via-email/ Mon, 09 Mar 2020 00:40:00 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2020-03-09-github-commits-via-email/ I’m the old-fashioned type who still likes getting email: I can process it at my leisure while still handling high volume. Unfortunately github itself can’t email you when commits are made to a particular repo (unless you own it and can configure hooks). So I need to resort to the atom feeds, and rss2email: $ r2e new jlevon@movementarian.org $ vi .rss2email/config.py # set local (sendmail) delivery, disable HTML mail, etc. $ r2e opmlimport subscriptions. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2019-11-07-new-version-of-zoom-recording-downloader/ Thu, 07 Nov 2019 16:56:00 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2019-11-07-new-version-of-zoom-recording-downloader/ I just published new version of zoom-lomax. This is updated to use the v2 Zoom API, as v1 is going away at some point. I run this every night so I can catch up on any meetings outside of my normal timezone the next day; it’s proven very useful for me. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2019-10-22-open-all-links-in-gerrit/ Tue, 22 Oct 2019 22:32:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2019-10-22-open-all-links-in-gerrit/ Newer versions of Gerrit, somewhat insanely, lack the old “Open All” button to open each file in its own tab. Here’s a bookmarklet that does so: javascript: ( function() { var dl = document.querySelectorAll(".pathLink"); if (!dl.length) { dl = document.querySelectorAll("a.gr-file-list"); } if (!dl.length) { dl = document.querySelectorAll(".path"); } if (!dl.length) { dl = document.querySelectorAll(".com-google-gerrit-client-change-FileTable-FileTableCss-pathColumn > a"); } if (!dl.length) { dl = document.querySelector('body > gr-app') .shadowRoot.querySelector('gr-app-element') .shadowRoot.querySelector('gr-change-view') .shadowRoot.querySelector('gr-file-list') .shadowRoot.querySelectorAll('.pathLink'); } if (! https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2019-10-14-adding-an-external-nic-to-a-triton-compute-node/ Mon, 14 Oct 2019 15:21:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2019-10-14-adding-an-external-nic-to-a-triton-compute-node/ I found it a little bit non-obvious how to use NAPI to add an external NIC to a compute node so it can reach the external network rather than just the internal admin one. We need to first tag the underlying physical NIC on the compute node with the externalNIC tag. We need to look up the MAC of the physical NIC: computenode# # dladm show-phys -m ixgbe0 LINK SLOT ADDRESS INUSE CLIENT ixgbe0 primary e4:11:5b:97:83:49 yes ixgbe0 then tell NAPI (from the headnode) that this NIC is going to provide the external tag: https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2019-02-12-modifying-boot-files-with-smartos-under-loader/ Tue, 12 Feb 2019 15:15:00 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2019-02-12-modifying-boot-files-with-smartos-under-loader/ With the advent of newboot in SmartOS/Triton, newly-installed systems will use loader as the bootloader, replacing grub. See RFD 156 for some technical background on the motivation of the switch. It’s often the case that people want to make some modification to an /etc file in subsequent SmartOS boots. As we boot from ramdisk, we can’t just directly modify the files. As originally described on Keith’s blog the way to get around this problem involves specifying specific files to over-ride the default. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2019-01-30-my-awesome-download-manager/ Wed, 30 Jan 2019 09:33:00 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2019-01-30-my-awesome-download-manager/ Since Liferea in more recent versions requires a download manager (it does not attempt to deal with the constant “new” podcast downloads on broken RSS feeds), I tried a few different ones. None of them worked. The best of a bad bunch was uGet, but that still often got stuck on a busy loop, forgot where to download, failed to handle duplicates etc. I realised that in fact the best option was this marvellous piece of engineering: https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2019-01-24-wodim-under-ubuntu/ Thu, 24 Jan 2019 11:06:00 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2019-01-24-wodim-under-ubuntu/ wodim/k3b are unusable on Ubuntu: after making sure you’re in the cdrom group, you need to add to /etc/security/limits.conf: @cdrom - memlock unlimited (Or some limit, I suppose, if you’re bothered.) https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2018-10-26-pci-pass-through-support-with-bhyve-and-smartos/ Fri, 26 Oct 2018 13:11:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2018-10-26-pci-pass-through-support-with-bhyve-and-smartos/ Some prompting on IRC led me to do this write-up on how to configure PCI passthrough for a bhyve instance running on SmartOS. Please be aware this isn’t necessarily fully supported or tested; it may work for you, it also may not. Some of this is covered under RFD 114; the below is more of a HOWTO. Global zone configuration To allow a bhyve zone to access a PCI device, we need to prevent the global zone’s access to it, and make it available to bhyve zones. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2018-02-26-pcid-support-on-illumos/ Mon, 26 Feb 2018 11:32:00 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2018-02-26-pcid-support-on-illumos/ I joined Joyent at the start of the year while Meltdown was breaking news; it was certainly an “interesting” time to start a new job. Luckily by my first week, Alex and Robert had pretty much figured out how the changes should look and made good inroads on the implementation. So I began working with Alex on his KPTI trampoline code (mainly involving breaking it with my old friend KMDB). I also picked up the PCID work which I describe here. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2016-11-03-converting-html-mail-via-procmail/ Thu, 03 Nov 2016 20:27:00 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2016-11-03-converting-html-mail-via-procmail/ All the procmail recipes I found on a quick search failed to handle quoted-printable HTML encodings, regularly used everywhere. And those that had quoted-printable examples used tools no longer maintained - such as mimencode. The solution is to use Perl directly: :0 * ^Content-Type: text/html; { :0c html/ :0fwb * ^Content-Transfer-Encoding: *quoted-printable | perl -pe 'use MIME::QuotedPrint; $_=MIME::QuotedPrint::decode($_);' :0fwb | lynx -dump -force_html -stdin :0fwh | formail -i "Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii" } https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2014-01-10-ripping-vinyl-on-linux/ Fri, 10 Jan 2014 11:53:00 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2014-01-10-ripping-vinyl-on-linux/ I’ve been ripping a lot of stuff from vinyl to FLAC recently. Here’s how I do it. I have an Alesis I/O 2, which works well and seems fairly decent quality. First, most important, step, is to stop trying to use Audacity. It’s incredibly broken and unreliable. Go get ocenaudio instead. It’s fairly new, but it works reliably. After monitoring your levels, record the whole thing into ocenaudio. First trim any obviously loud clicks such as when landing the needle. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2012-05-31-recording-on-linux-with-alesis-io-2/ Thu, 31 May 2012 16:39:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2012-05-31-recording-on-linux-with-alesis-io-2/ A little note for myself: to get low-latency monitoring, and more importantly, record at the right rate, you need to set the Configuration-Profile to “Digital Stereo Input” in pavucontrol! Update: you also need this in ~/.pulse/daemon.conf : default-sample-rate=48000 Another update: PA/ALSA often seems to forget the sensible default devices, and ocenaudio starts trying to record from the monitor devices. Solution seems to be to run pavucontrol, start ocenaudio recording, and change the drop down box to select io|2 Digital Stereo. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2011-03-15-old-web-content/ Tue, 15 Mar 2011 14:24:28 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2011-03-15-old-web-content/ I think it's important that everyone should endeavour to maintain existing web content, even if it's not currently relevant. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2011-02-22-paypal-idiocy/ Tue, 22 Feb 2011 11:17:00 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2011-02-22-paypal-idiocy/ This is unbelievably stupid of Paypal. I just got this email from them: vinyl tap records would like you to use PayPal - the safer, easier way to pay and get paid online. To send vinyl tap records your payment and see the details of this invoice, copy and paste this link into your web browser: https://www.paypal.com/uk/cmd=_prq&id=... So much for “never click a URL in email”. Even worse, if you log in separately, the request is not visible anywhere. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2011-02-18-natwest-phishing-service/ Fri, 18 Feb 2011 02:36:00 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2011-02-18-natwest-phishing-service/ I got some NatWest phishing spam the other day and was amused to notice this: <title>NatWest - Security Information</title> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" /> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://www.natwest.com/microsites/global/phishing_demo/includes/css/generic.css" media="all" /> ... <a href="http://www.natwest.com/"><img src="http://www.natwest.com/microsites/global/phishing_demo/images/h_logo.gif" alt="NatWest - Load home page" /></a> Enterprising of them to actually uses NatWest’s explanation of phishing to … phish. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2011-02-03-name-and-shame-time/ Thu, 03 Feb 2011 13:02:00 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2011-02-03-name-and-shame-time/ To quote 123-reg customer support: > When will you be supporting AAAA records? There are no current plans to implement this but notifications will be sent out if this takes place. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2011-01-05-avoid-vps247-hosting/ Wed, 05 Jan 2011 23:39:00 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2011-01-05-avoid-vps247-hosting/ Late last year, I was forced to find a new host for movementarian.org, as my previous hosting provider (Blue Room Hosting, who were really great) were shutting down. I went with VPS247, as they were local to Manchester and seemed reasonable. Unfortunately my experience has been terrible. They’ve failed to keep the machines on the net, regularly causing ssh sessions to die. The dmesg is full of warnings about the block drivers failing to write for more than two minutes: evidently the SAN setup they have is totally unreliable. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2010-09-02-pbranch-curiosities/ Thu, 02 Sep 2010 01:13:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2010-09-02-pbranch-curiosities/ I’ve started using pbranch extension for hg more seriously. It works nicely but is a little rough around the edges, in particular: No hg qpop/push equivalent I really miss this. I find myself constantly doing hg pgraph to figure out where I am and then typing the patch above or below. No way to shelve a patch With MQ, I can easily guard a patch to temporarily remove it from the queue. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2010-09-02-re-enable-ctrl-alt-backspace-in-xorg/ Thu, 02 Sep 2010 01:05:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2010-09-02-re-enable-ctrl-alt-backspace-in-xorg/ Create the following as /etc/hal/fdi/policy/30user/10-x11-zap.fdi: <?xml version=“1.0” encoding=“UTF-8”?> <deviceinfo version=“0.2”> <device> <!– Default X.org input configuration is defined in: /etc/hal/fdi/policy/30user/10-x11-input.fdi Settings here modify or override the default configuration. See comment in the file above for more information. To see the currently active hal X.org input configuration run lshal or hal-device(1m) and search for “input.x11*” keys. Hal and X must be restarted for changes here to take any effect –> <match key=“info. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2010-09-02-disabling-that-goddamn-gtk-bell/ Thu, 02 Sep 2010 01:03:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2010-09-02-disabling-that-goddamn-gtk-bell/ echo ‘gtk-error-bell = 0’ »$HOME/.gtkrc-2.0 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2010-01-31-changing-liferea-keyboard-shortcuts/ Sun, 31 Jan 2010 17:26:00 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2010-01-31-changing-liferea-keyboard-shortcuts/ Liferea has no keyboard shortcut editor itself, but “Toggle unread status” demands the wrist-breaking chord action of Control-U. It expects you to be able to edit the shortcuts via the editable menu feature of GTK+. Unfortunately that’s disabled on all modern GNOME installs, and there’s no UI for re-enabling it. As usual, gconf-editor to the rescue. The key you need to change is /desktop/gnome/interface/can_change_accels. After re-starting Liferea, you can then edit via hovering over the menu item and pressing the combination. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2010-01-26-epson-all-in-ones-avoid-like-the-plague/ Tue, 26 Jan 2010 23:36:00 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2010-01-26-epson-all-in-ones-avoid-like-the-plague/ Browsing the net, you might get the impression that Epson Stylus All-in-ones are well supported under Linux. Unfortunately this is not the case. The pipslite driver you have to install is extremely flaky, and Fedora SELinux doesn’t work properly with it. There’s no “draft” mode for some bizarre reason; printing is extremely slow and often randomly cancels half-printed jobs due to USB resets The scanner doesn’t work at all with the iscan software, despite claims to the contrary. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2010-01-26-setting-up-jack-on-fedora-12/ Tue, 26 Jan 2010 17:28:00 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2010-01-26-setting-up-jack-on-fedora-12/ Audacity is somewhat of a broken joke these days, so I needed to use Ardour to record. And that meant setting up JACK. Since JACK insists on exclusivity, I also needed to route pulseaudio through JACK so I could use other apps at the same time. Unfortunately, this is a bit of a pig to figure out. I hacked it as follows: First edit /etc/pulse/default.pa, you need to add two lines: https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2010-01-17-liferea-strict-feed-validation-tip/ Sun, 17 Jan 2010 16:33:00 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2010-01-17-liferea-strict-feed-validation-tip/ New versions of Liferea refuse to parse any feed that fails to validate, even for relatively “minor” problems (the libxml2 recovery facility is no longer used; besides, it abandons the rest of the feed when it hits such problems). I don’t want to use Google Reader, since I don’t like the interface. Typically bad feeds have things like high-bit chars or bare ampersands. Thankfully, there’s a “conversion filter” feature that you can use to work around the bad feeds. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2009-11-10-esr/ Tue, 10 Nov 2009 16:27:00 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2009-11-10-esr/ “The main indicators of egotism as I intend it here are are loud self-display, insecurity, constant approval-seeking, overinflating one’s accomplishments, touchiness about slights, and territorial twitchiness about one’s expertise. My claim is that egotism is a disease of the incapable, and vanishes or nearly vanishes among the super-capable.” “I’m the crippled kid who became a black-belt martial artist and teacher of martial artists. I’ve made the New York Times bestseller list as a writer. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2009-10-29-enabling-xvm-on-opensolaris/ Thu, 29 Oct 2009 18:31:58 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2009-10-29-enabling-xvm-on-opensolaris/ Another significant usability improvement that landed in build 126 is Gary and Bill's work on enabling Xen. Now, running xVM should be as simple as: # pkg install xvm-gui # echo 'set zfs:zfs_arc_max = 0x10000000' >>/etc/system # yes, you still need this, sadly # svcadm enable -r milestone/xvm # reboot There's also a new Visual Panel for doing this if you prefer a graphical method. More in the flag day message. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2009-10-29-dry-run-migration/ Thu, 29 Oct 2009 18:31:23 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2009-10-29-dry-run-migration/ As part of our ongoing work on improving the ease of use of xVM, the newly available build 126 of OpenSolaris has my putback for: 6878952 Would like dry-run migration This feature is useful for doing a simple check as to whether a guest can successfully migrate to another dom0 host. For example, domu-221 here is using a disk path that doesn't exist on the remote host hiss: # virsh migrate --dryrun domu-221 xen:/// hiss error: POST operation failed: xend_post: error from xen daemon: (xend. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2009-10-20-a-horrible-little-elementtree-gotcha/ Tue, 20 Oct 2009 16:42:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2009-10-20-a-horrible-little-elementtree-gotcha/ What does this print: from lxml import etree doc = etree.fromstring('<a><b><c/></b></a>') newdoc = etree.ElementTree(doc.find('b')) print newdoc.xpath('/b/c')[0].xpath('/a') The answer is: [<Element a at 817548c>]. The first point to note is that xpath() against an element is only relative to that element: any absolute XPaths enumerate from the top of the containing tree. The second point is that the shallow copying of etree means that _Element::xpath, unlike _ElementTree::xpath, evaluates absolute paths from the top of the original underlying tree! https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2009-10-19-youtube-annoyance/ Mon, 19 Oct 2009 17:29:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2009-10-19-youtube-annoyance/ How much time would it really take to order multi-part videos, so the suggestion at the end of the video is the next part? Please! https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2009-10-15-xvm-and-comstar-iscsi/ Thu, 15 Oct 2009 15:27:02 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2009-10-15-xvm-and-comstar-iscsi/ I recently had cause to try out COMSTAR for the first time, and I thought I'd write up the steps needed. Unfortunately, it's considerably more complex than the fall-over-easy shareiscsi=on ZFS feature. Configuring the COMSTAR server First install the storage-server packages and enable the services: # svcadm enable -r stmf # svcadm enable -r iscsi/target We want to create a target group for each of our xVM guests, each of which will have one LUN in it. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2009-10-10-an-annoying-python-gotcha/ Sat, 10 Oct 2009 17:05:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2009-10-10-an-annoying-python-gotcha/ Imagine you have this in mod.py: import foo class bar(object): ... def __del__(self): foo.cleanup(self.myhandle) Seems fine right? In fact, there’s a nasty bug here. If I try to use this module in client.py like so: import mod mybar = bar() Then you’re likely to get an exception when the program exits. This is because Python, for some bizarre reason, Nones out the globals in mod.py when taking down the interpreter. The actual __del__ method can be called sometime after this, and it ends up trying None. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2009-06-04-kernel-solipsism/ Thu, 04 Jun 2009 13:11:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2009-06-04-kernel-solipsism/ Thomas Gleixner: Exactly that’s the point. Adding dom0 makes life easier for a group of users who decided to use Xen some time ago, but what Ingo wants is technical improvement of the kernel… The kernel policy always was and still is to accept only those features which have a technical benefit to the code base. It boggles the mind that someone could get things so backwards. The kernel exists to provide services to the outside world, not the other way around. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2009-06-02-opensolaris-2009-06-guest-domain-on-a-linux-dom0/ Tue, 02 Jun 2009 19:35:10 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2009-06-02-opensolaris-2009-06-guest-domain-on-a-linux-dom0/ Just a quick note: you can follow the instructions I provided for the 2008.11 release, with one change. On a 64-bit machine, replace any instances of /boot/x86.microroot with /boot/amd64/x86.microroot. As of 2009.06, the boot archive is split into 32-bit and 64-bit variants. If you get a message like this: krtld: failed to open '/platform/i86xpv/kernel/amd64/unix' Then you've probably given the wrong combination of unix and microroot. By the way, in my previous entry, I mentioned we were working on upstreaming our virt-install changes. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2009-05-18-bnp/ Mon, 18 May 2009 13:24:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2009-05-18-bnp/ Charlie Brooker on the BNP party political broadcast: Nick Griffin’s first line is “Don’t turn it off!”, which in terms of opening gambits is about as enticing as hearing someone shout “Try not to be sick!” immediately prior to intercourse. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2009-03-26-outputting-xml-in-standard-python/ Thu, 26 Mar 2009 02:43:00 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2009-03-26-outputting-xml-in-standard-python/ Is it really this ugly? I expected something like this: doc = xmldoc() doc.start('foo', { 'id': 'blah' }) doc.start('sub') doc.text('subtext') doc.close('sub') doc.close('foo') print doc and I thought I had it in SimpleXMLWriter. However, I have to jump hoops to get it to output to a string, and it doesn’t have any pretty-print. I tried using ElementTree, but that also doesn’t pretty print! libxml2 is horribly low-level. lxml seems to do pretty printing, but it’s still just as ugly as the best option I’ve found so far, xml. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2009-03-22-scoble-sets-a-new-record/ Sun, 22 Mar 2009 22:55:00 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2009-03-22-scoble-sets-a-new-record/ I really hate the word “friend.” It has no meaning anymore. No one can define what a friend is. Believe me, I’ve asked dozens of people to define it for me. My wife is my most “true” friend, for instance but if you trust her with picking a great wine (she doesn’t drink much) or picking a great sushi restaurant (she hates the stuff) you’ll be very disappointed. You’d be better off asking @garyvee about the wine even though you’ve never met him and he probably wouldn’t be listed among your “true” friends. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2009-03-16-sheesh/ Mon, 16 Mar 2009 20:31:00 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2009-03-16-sheesh/ Apparently applications should be prepared to lose 60 minutes of data to work around the file system now. Of course the notion that application should have explicit load/save operations is a nonsense already. Now we should “fix” one of the few places that never had this (ever seen a browser where you have to save your bookmarks explicitly when you quit?) to expose this implementation detail in a data-losing way again. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2009-03-16-amazon/ Mon, 16 Mar 2009 01:25:00 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2009-03-16-amazon/ It’s a shame that it’s basically impossible to compete with Amazon when it comes to online book selling, because their website is so horribly awful to use. Not fair. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2009-03-14-its-not-just-atol-nicholas/ Sat, 14 Mar 2009 12:03:00 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2009-03-14-its-not-just-atol-nicholas/ Nicholas Nethercote warns us against atol(). Sadly, he recommends using strtol() instead. This interface is almost as bad. If atol() is impossible to get right, strtol() has to be classified under the obvious use is wrong. As a perfect example of how horrible strtol() is, let’s look at his example code: int i1 = strtol(s, &endptr, 0); if (*endptr != ',') goto bad; int i2 = strtol(endptr+1, &endptr, 0); if (*endptr ! https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2009-03-09-heston-blumethals-feasts/ Mon, 09 Mar 2009 22:47:00 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2009-03-09-heston-blumethals-feasts/ I’ve just watched last week’s episode of this series, Heston Blumenthal’s Victorian Feast. The guy is the epitome of the mad scientist (his dessert was strawberry, elderflower and absinthe dildo jelly with earl grey ice cream). I had one of his inventions a while back: strawberry, olive and leather vanilla sundae. It was pretty nice, though the rather more staid chocolate wine popsicle was much nicer. You should watch Tuesday’s… https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2009-03-07-tomcat-on-centos-5-2-just-dont/ Sat, 07 Mar 2009 19:10:00 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2009-03-07-tomcat-on-centos-5-2-just-dont/ If you were thinking of trying to use CentOS 5.2’s tomcat packages: don’t. You just get a silent 400 Bad request error on the holding page for no reason. Download it from upstream, and use that directly. It’s very poorly documented, sadly, so to get started: Install the Sun JRE and set $JAVA_HOME appropriately - gcj is … lacking Grab the Tomcat ‘core’ tarball and unpack it in place edit conf/tomcat-users. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2009-02-27-gas-no-gas-abadie-pizza-please/ Fri, 27 Feb 2009 00:49:00 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2009-02-27-gas-no-gas-abadie-pizza-please/ Well this makes no sense: Me: “Hi, your letter said I needed to arrange a visit with you to check the gas safety of my flat.” Them: “That’s right, what’s your details?” *gives them* Me: “There’s no gas supply in the building, but apparently you have to come see that in person yourselves.” Them: “Yes, that’s true. …. OK, we’ll send you a letter with the appointment details.” Me: “Uh, I can’t just do any time, it needs to be arranged. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2009-02-25-holocaust-deniers/ Wed, 25 Feb 2009 17:21:00 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2009-02-25-holocaust-deniers/ Somewhat unpleasantly, I’m a vague acquaintance of a couple of holocaust deniers (in the sense that I’ve been in the same place as them once or twice). Really weird people: They always bring it up at parties. Seriously, what? If I were a terrorism expert, I’d tend to keep off the subject at parties, since people might see it as a little sensitive. Even if I was just a huge fan of He-Man or something I’d probably only mention it if we were talking about 1980s kids’ TV. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2009-02-21-javascript-off/ Sat, 21 Feb 2009 18:20:00 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2009-02-21-javascript-off/ cdfrey: the fact that you’ve disabled JavaScript in your browser automatically qualifies you as irrelevant for anyone designing a modern user interface - sorry. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2009-02-21-dear-everyone/ Sat, 21 Feb 2009 00:14:00 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2009-02-21-dear-everyone/ If you have a blog, and you ask questions in blog entries, have some way to leave comments, won’t you? https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2009-02-19-all-tv-should-be-like-this/ Thu, 19 Feb 2009 00:05:00 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2009-02-19-all-tv-should-be-like-this/ https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2009-02-18-things-i-discovered-yesterday/ Wed, 18 Feb 2009 18:43:00 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2009-02-18-things-i-discovered-yesterday/ Installing Firefox in an OpenVZ container can make you lose /dev/null OpenSolaris sleep(1) needs the network to be up People are injecting foreskins into their face Dubai is really screwed https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2009-02-18-audacity-is-frustrating/ Wed, 18 Feb 2009 02:01:00 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2009-02-18-audacity-is-frustrating/ You might think that recording and then splitting it into separate audio files based on silences between each track would be easy to do - sadly not. Aside from crashing a few times and failing to recover properly, I’ve been hit by these enormous frustrations: despite claims to the contrary, even 1.3.7 does not correctly alter labels when you modify the audio. That means there’s no way to Truncate Silence without re-doing all your labels! https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2009-02-13-openpty-and-forkpty-avoid/ Fri, 13 Feb 2009 01:56:00 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2009-02-13-openpty-and-forkpty-avoid/ After dealing with more code that gets it wrong I was reminded of the numerous reasons why openpty() is such a broken API. The prototype of this “convenience” function is this: int openpty(int *amaster, int *aslave, char *name, struct termios *termp, struct winsize *winp); Now, sin number one should be obvious: the interface isn’t const-correct. You’re passing in the winp values, but there’s no indication of that. Worse, you’re doing the same with termp. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2009-02-11-review-board-review/ Wed, 11 Feb 2009 05:09:00 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2009-02-11-review-board-review/ I was bored so played around with Review Board a little more, including installing it myself. Things seem to have got easier to install, at least to some degree. You can use easy_install, though at least for CentOS 5.2, you’ll need to install a newer version of setuptools first. It’s also far from automated, missing out basic dependencies like pysqlite2, patchutils, and even patch itself. Discovering these can be, and in my case was, rather tedious work. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2009-02-06-my-real-dad/ Fri, 06 Feb 2009 18:01:00 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2009-02-06-my-real-dad/ My favourite Wondermark for a while. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2009-02-03-begone-trailing-spaces/ Tue, 03 Feb 2009 17:05:30 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2009-02-03-begone-trailing-spaces/ I read my work email with mutt on a Solaris 9 box. For a while it's been irritating me that when you attempt to cut and paste, it will include trailing spaces on each line instead of stopping at the last "real" character. Some Googling suggested this was because of the lack of the BCE attribute in my xterm-color terminfo definition. Rather than learn how to compile terminfo entries (I've done it before, but I don't want to learn again! https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2009-01-31-xml-rpc/ Sat, 31 Jan 2009 17:39:00 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2009-01-31-xml-rpc/ I’ve only just read the XML-RPC spec. I knew it was simple, but I didn’t know it was stupid. Seriously, no parameter names? Only 32-bit integers? And no “NULL”? WTF? https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2009-01-28-harold-wobble-wedges/ Wed, 28 Jan 2009 19:16:00 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2009-01-28-harold-wobble-wedges/ Talk about unnecessary. JUST USE SOME NEWSPAPER. Sheesh. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2009-01-26-opensolaris-2008-11-as-a-dom0/ Mon, 26 Jan 2009 21:28:17 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2009-01-26-opensolaris-2008-11-as-a-dom0/ UPDATE: the canonical location for this information is now here - please check there, as it will be updated as necessary, unlike this blog entry. As a final part to my entries on OpenSolaris and Xen, let's go through the steps needed to turn OpenSolaris into a dom0. Thanks to Trevor O for documenting this for 2008.05. And as before, expect this process to get much, much, easier soon! I'm going to do the work in a separate BE, so if we mess up, we shouldn't have broken anything. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2009-01-09-asa-to-rule-on-the-existence-of-god/ Fri, 09 Jan 2009 16:28:00 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2009-01-09-asa-to-rule-on-the-existence-of-god/ I think atheists and believers alike should agree to abide by the Advertising Standard Agency’s decision, when it comes - agreed? https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2009-01-08-religulous/ Thu, 08 Jan 2009 17:46:00 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2009-01-08-religulous/ After sitting through Expelled, I felt the need to cleanse my intellectual palate. Thankfully I had Bill Maher’s Religulous to watch. Coming across like a mongrel of Borat and An Inconvenient Truth, it’s an alleged documentary, played for laughs. And chunks of it are indeed very, very funny - the Cannabis Ministry guy comes to mind. Consisting mainly of Maher tracking down the more comedic elements of out-there religion, it’s a wonder he https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-12-21-my-stuff-of-the-year/ Sun, 21 Dec 2008 19:53:00 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-12-21-my-stuff-of-the-year/ Yes, it’s a pointless end of year list! In no particular order. Much of this stuff is by no means new in 2008, but it’s all new to me in 2008. Sailor Jerry’s Old news to most by now but the popularity of combining this vanilla-flavoured rum with coke and ice has yet to wane. FFV Imported via a visit to Helsinki earlier in the year, Fisherman’s Friend Vodka (both its name, and its recipe) took the world* by storm, and continues to delight. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-12-11-opensolaris-2008-11-guest-domain-on-a-linux-dom0/ Thu, 11 Dec 2008 17:45:35 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-12-11-opensolaris-2008-11-guest-domain-on-a-linux-dom0/ My previous blog post described how to install OpenSolaris 2008.11 on a Solaris dom0 under Xen. This also works on with a Linux dom0. However, since upstream is missing some of our dom0 fixes, it's unfortunately more complicated. In particular, we can't use virt-install, as it doesn't know about Solaris ISOs, and later on, we can't use pygrub to boot from ZFS, since it doesn't know how to read such a filesystem. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-12-10-opensolaris-2008-11-as-a-para-virtual-xen-guest/ Wed, 10 Dec 2008 14:24:00 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-12-10-opensolaris-2008-11-as-a-para-virtual-xen-guest/ UPDATE: the canonical location for this information is now here - please check there, as it will be updated as necessary, unlike this blog entry. As well obviously working with VirtualBox, OpenSolaris can also run as a guest domain under Xen. The installation CD ships with the paravirtual extensions so you can run it as a fully para-virtualized guest. This provides a significant advantage over fully-virtualized guests, or even guests with para-virtual drivers like Solaris 10 Update 6. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-11-05-bbc-news/ Wed, 05 Nov 2008 18:45:00 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-11-05-bbc-news/ They’re using the phrase “a sense of” even more than they used to. They refer to “the sense of jubilation” in the Democrat camp, or “a sense of taking stock” amongst Republicans. Practically every other sentence uses this moronic phrase. There’s a real sense of lazy journalism at the BBC. On the “moronic phrase” note: “Yes We Can” is just about the stupidest campaign slogan ever. Also, the election coverage on the BBC was surprisingly biased. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-11-05-you-did-it/ Wed, 05 Nov 2008 04:01:00 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-11-05-you-did-it/ Dear America: well done. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-10-29-apostrophe-abuse-overload/ Wed, 29 Oct 2008 17:49:00 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-10-29-apostrophe-abuse-overload/ Argggh! https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-10-23-christian-voice-kooks-on-the-atheist-bus/ Thu, 23 Oct 2008 13:38:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-10-23-christian-voice-kooks-on-the-atheist-bus/ “People don’t like being preached at.” !!! “But in a twist which will have Christians in gales of laughter, the advertising campaign…is to be stuck on bendy-buses.” May I suggest first that said Christians perhaps need to get out more, and second that “gales of laughter” doesn’t seem like a very Christian response? “fellow humanists, not known for their generosity, wouldn’t stump up the cash.” Aren’t you guys looking a little silly now? https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-10-22-more-broccoli-news/ Wed, 22 Oct 2008 21:56:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-10-22-more-broccoli-news/ I’m not sure why this loathsome stuff is so much in the news these days. You might not think it loathsome. Think again. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-10-22-programmatic-vnc-password-setting/ Wed, 22 Oct 2008 14:50:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-10-22-programmatic-vnc-password-setting/ I had this problem recently: I was generating automatic VNC passwords via /dev/urandom, and needed to obfuscate them. Stupidly, vncpasswd is only interactive, and I wasn’t in any kind of mood for hacking up the sources. A co-worker kindly pointed me to the solution: printf “%s\n%s\n” “$PASSWD” “$PASSWD” | vncpasswd /tmp/vncpasswd In my head, the use of getpass() means this couldn’t work, but it does. It doesn’t appear to be on Google, so I thought I’d mention it. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-10-22-mccain-understands-small-business-growth-he-was-one/ Wed, 22 Oct 2008 03:05:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-10-22-mccain-understands-small-business-growth-he-was-one/ Since I can’t vote, I may as well trivialise the election by laughing at McCain say things like “Obama’s supporters are saying some pretty nasty things about Western Pennsylvania lately. And you know, I couldn’t agree with them more. I couldn’t disagree with you. I couldn’t agree with you more…” Doddery old fool. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-10-22-building-opensolaris-isos/ Wed, 22 Oct 2008 01:44:28 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-10-22-building-opensolaris-isos/ I've recently been figuring out to build OpenSolaris ISOs (from SVR4 packages). It's surprisingly easy, but at least the IPS part is not well documented, so I thought I'd write up how I do it. There are three main things you're most likely to want to do: build IPS itself, populate an IPS repository, and build an install ISO based on that repository. First, you'll want a copy of the IPS gate: hg clone ssh://anon@hg. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-10-20-what-took-you-so-long/ Mon, 20 Oct 2008 23:25:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-10-20-what-took-you-so-long/ They’ve finally invented wireless power. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-10-19-democracy/ Sun, 19 Oct 2008 17:05:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-10-19-democracy/ Vote obstruction may yet decide the outcome of the US election. Scary. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-10-17-ha-ha-ha-ha/ Fri, 17 Oct 2008 15:53:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-10-17-ha-ha-ha-ha/ Why aren’t there any headache tablets in the jungle? Because of the continuing policy of price-fixing cartels within the pharmaceutical industry, making it nigh on impossible for decent standards of helathcare to operate in the developing world. More. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-10-15-vinyl-space-again/ Wed, 15 Oct 2008 16:02:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-10-15-vinyl-space-again/ After Habitat stupidly stopped selling the storage I was using for my records, I finally found something suitable for the size of my flat: These are i-cubes. Not the most beautiful storage in the world, but I have expansion room again! https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-10-15-following-the-us-elections-from-the-uk/ Wed, 15 Oct 2008 00:24:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-10-15-following-the-us-elections-from-the-uk/ I’ve never paid anything like this kind of attention to US politics before, and I’m most certainly not alone. Everyone here in the UK is talking about it. It’s not just the hatred engendered across the world as a result of the Bush years that’s causing this though. I think it’s mostly a combination of the huge gulf between the presidential candidates this time around, plus the pantomime nature of the Palin-McCain campaign. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-10-14-for-shame/ Tue, 14 Oct 2008 01:54:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-10-14-for-shame/ I finally conceded and set up mutt at work to be able to read HTML email. Perhaps it’s time to move into management. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-10-13-turning-off-offensive-youtube-popups/ Mon, 13 Oct 2008 20:16:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-10-13-turning-off-offensive-youtube-popups/ What the hell are they thinking? These awful popups have actually genuinely achieved a new low: even pop-unders and nefarious crap like that have an obvious way to dismiss the advert. Apparently it’s also OK to just plaster them all over the content so you can’t even see it. You go to the arrow at the bottom right and click “Turn Off Annotations”. These are Annotations in the “Ministry Of Love” sense. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-09-19-dear-clever-types/ Fri, 19 Sep 2008 00:32:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-09-19-dear-clever-types/ Can you please hurry up and actually release a decent A4 e-book reader? You guys are so close… I will pay stupid money. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-09-18-greg-kroah-and-canonical/ Thu, 18 Sep 2008 13:59:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-09-18-greg-kroah-and-canonical/ I can’t quite get over how arrogant his talk was. If you’re not sending in kernel patches, that means you’re bad and all your developers should get jobs elsewhere, apparently. Things like HAL aren’t “Linux plumbing”, and if you contribute to that, or GNOME in general, tough luck, since other operating systems can use it. GCC, binutils, and X.org are OK though, because, well … just because. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-09-06-what-new-horror/ Sat, 06 Sep 2008 19:23:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-09-06-what-new-horror/ As I just noticed on the TV advert: Universal Pictures will release a special sing-along edition of the hit movie musical Mamma Mia! in selected theaters nationwide I’ve thought of a worse thing than this though: a “wit-a-long” version of Sex And The City. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-08-29-infoworld-software-has-bugs/ Fri, 29 Aug 2008 00:09:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-08-29-infoworld-software-has-bugs/ Oi noi! https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-08-27-awful-awful-music/ Wed, 27 Aug 2008 20:17:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-08-27-awful-awful-music/ Dave Stewart’s American Prayer makes we wish I was a Republican[1]. And I don’t even live in the US. Whittaker: stop it. George from Seinfeld: stop it. Stewart: I told you a long time ago. This is almost as bad as Roger Taylor’s Nazis (at the very least, read the lyrics, if you haven’t - awesome). [1] a little bit https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-08-23-at-last-some-honesty/ Sat, 23 Aug 2008 13:04:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-08-23-at-last-some-honesty/ Things I never expected to read in a prominent Intelligent Design blog: Sorry if I’m offending anyone but these people disgust me. They’re all like “I believe in rational inquiry, science, and bearded thunderers who live in the sky and worry about my immortal soul”. Please. Choose one or the other but not both. So there you have it. If you’re a Christian you’d better not be an ID proponent, and vice versa. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-08-22-raymond-chen-its-not-christmas/ Fri, 22 Aug 2008 02:26:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-08-22-raymond-chen-its-not-christmas/ In March of this year, a customer wrote, “I have attached a Word document that describes the problem.” (Hey, here’s an idea: Why not describe the problem in your email message?) The Word document contained a screenshot. The screenshot was of an email message. The email message contained a screenshot. Bonus remark from the customer liaison: “Once you open the document, you may need to zoom it further to read it. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-08-17-pulseaudio-and-volume-controls/ Sun, 17 Aug 2008 17:03:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-08-17-pulseaudio-and-volume-controls/ For those wondering how on earth to access an underlying real device when PulseAudio is enabled (yes, both alsamixer and pavucontrol only show one mixer control - brilliant!), you can do this: alsamixer -c 0 Of course, this behaviour isn’t documented anywhere. I don’t know how people are supposed to discover this. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-08-12-hitler-liked-some-good-music-you-know/ Tue, 12 Aug 2008 20:46:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-08-12-hitler-liked-some-good-music-you-know/ In case you needed another fatuous reason for supporting Obama, here it is: Obama’s Top Ten tunes versus McCain’s. Apart from the U2 stumble, not bad at all, Barack, not bad. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-08-08-ticketline-rss-feed/ Fri, 08 Aug 2008 00:57:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-08-08-ticketline-rss-feed/ Ticketline, my favourite less-evil-than-Ticketmaster online ticket agency, have finally got added some RSS feeds. Though, they do seem rather flaky. In fact, the website is currently refusing to return any data at all to me. Hmm. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-08-06-showers-onboard-emirates-a380/ Wed, 06 Aug 2008 21:18:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-08-06-showers-onboard-emirates-a380/ Almost makes flying civilised. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-08-06-this-will-be-dreadful/ Wed, 06 Aug 2008 21:05:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-08-06-this-will-be-dreadful/ In addition to Gerardis, who produced “I, Robot,” Jeff Vintar, who penned the screenplay to that film, was attached to pen the “Foundation” screenplay. I, Robot was at best an awful film. The Foundation film will most likely be worse. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-07-30-orson-scott-card-is-a-dick/ Wed, 30 Jul 2008 20:17:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-07-30-orson-scott-card-is-a-dick/ The first and greatest threat from court decisions in California and Massachusetts, giving legal recognition to “gay marriage,” is that it marks the end of democracy in America. So says Orson Scott Card. Shame; I enjoyed the “Ender” books. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-07-29-direct-mounting-of-files/ Tue, 29 Jul 2008 22:28:27 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-07-29-direct-mounting-of-files/ As part of my work on Least Privilege for xVM, I worked on implementing direct file mounts. The idea is that we'd modify the Solaris support in virt-install to use these direct mounts, instead of the more laborious older method required. A long-standing peeve of Solaris users is that in order to mount a file system image (in particular a DVD ISO image), it's a two-step process. This was less than ideal, as many other UNIX OS's made it simple to do: you'd just pass the file to the mount command, along with a special option or two, and it mounts it directly. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-07-29-another-victory-for-superstition/ Tue, 29 Jul 2008 16:24:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-07-29-another-victory-for-superstition/ Sikh girl wins bangle law battle I’m sure there’s some legal argument that makes banning all jewelry, religious or not, “discrimination”, but I doubt it’s a sensible one. I wonder if they could add a watch face to it instead. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-07-29-hah/ Tue, 29 Jul 2008 15:44:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-07-29-hah/ This one for the doubters (you know who you are): Likelihood of me being MALE is 100% https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-07-12-writing-python-properly/ Sat, 12 Jul 2008 14:33:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-07-12-writing-python-properly/ What are people’s approaches to writing Python correctly? The library documentation basically doesn’t document the set of exceptions the routines can throw, which makes it very difficult to catch the right things, and do the right thing[1] (for example). What do people do to deal with this problem? [1] on that note, if you’re writing a command line tool in Python, please catch KeyboardInterrupt and exit quietly. Drives me crazy! https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-07-07-mercurial-corruption-again/ Mon, 07 Jul 2008 04:41:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-07-07-mercurial-corruption-again/ It’s somewhat disappoint that Mercurial is still corrupting repositories when you interrupt MQ operations. Relatively easily recoverable for me this time, thankfully. I’d still like to see hg backup from the OpenSolaris SCM project get merged upstream though :) https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-07-02-pure-python-plugins/ Wed, 02 Jul 2008 03:17:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-07-02-pure-python-plugins/ After some searching and asking around I didn’t find any good explanation of the simplest way to implement plugins in Python. So, for posterity’s sake, here’s my solution. I’m sure there’s a better way: I’d love to hear your suggestions. First, the requirements. The code cannot have knowledge of how the plugins are named (.so files, .py, package dirs, etc.). I don’t want to hard-code the list of plugins, as this defeats its dynamic nature altogether. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-06-19-cake-of-awesomeness/ Thu, 19 Jun 2008 18:41:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-06-19-cake-of-awesomeness/ Best cake ever. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-06-16-amusing-prank/ Mon, 16 Jun 2008 22:58:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-06-16-amusing-prank/ An amusing prank. I love how they get back in, as if that’ll somehow help. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-06-10-getting-decent-stack-traces/ Tue, 10 Jun 2008 23:41:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-06-10-getting-decent-stack-traces/ Reading through this bug is seriously depressing to read (until Michael Matz steps in). It was always complete madness to strip symbols from shipping binaries; it was always madness to disable the frame pointer too. (The debuginfo trick is an excellent solution to the problems of source-level debugging, by the way, it’s just taken way, way, too far). This is why you have to install a 1Gb debuginfo RPM in order to run OProfile on the kernel. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-06-09-i-am-neurotic/ Mon, 09 Jun 2008 16:36:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-06-09-i-am-neurotic/ My favourite quote from I Am Neurotic: “Everyday, at 7:47 am or pm, I always say Boeing, after the Airplane, and I don’t know why. I’ve gotten into a lot of trouble, and I even say it in my sleep.” https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-06-06-us-tv/ Fri, 06 Jun 2008 16:51:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-06-06-us-tv/ It’s already extremely difficult to watch US TV, with adverts every 7 minutes, and massive animated station idents taking up half the screen, but this is particularly obnoxious: It’s as if they want you not to watch. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-05-28-t-shirt-indecision/ Wed, 28 May 2008 00:03:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-05-28-t-shirt-indecision/ This T-shirt: yes, or no? https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-05-27-weezer-and-youtube/ Tue, 27 May 2008 14:37:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-05-27-weezer-and-youtube/ I only got most of the videos in this music video: but it’s still good. The song’s not up to much though. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-05-17-the-new-underground/ Sat, 17 May 2008 21:11:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-05-17-the-new-underground/ Is CHRISTIAN electronic music the new underground? “It used to be that all of the good new music was in the rave scene and then would trickle out into the internet and store shelves. Now when I look for traditional electronic music anywhere, I find that the music seems generally boring or has too much of a political or sinful feel." I hate that traditional electronic boring, political, or sinful music too. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-05-15-nintendo-and-undersupply/ Thu, 15 May 2008 19:22:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-05-15-nintendo-and-undersupply/ I’m getting more than a little bit tired of Nintendo playing its bloody games. Yes, we get it Nintendo, your stuff is popular. Now, please make enough copies of Mario Kart and Wii Fit to sell them. It’s not even Christmas. Mario Kart isn’t even in shop charts. I’ve been past several shops selling Wii stuff recently (Game, supermarkets, etc.) and most of them don’t even have any *mention* of Mario Kart. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-05-14-noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo/ Wed, 14 May 2008 20:36:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-05-14-noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo/ America, how could you? https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-05-10-smirking-cat-murdered/ Sat, 10 May 2008 17:56:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-05-10-smirking-cat-murdered/ This is a weird story already, but that illustrative photo, and especially its caption, are just plain bizarre. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-05-09-gnome-terminal-titles/ Fri, 09 May 2008 01:58:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-05-09-gnome-terminal-titles/ This finally annoyed me enough to find a solution. If I set a title on a gnome-terminal tab, then it gets forgotten next time I log in. Aside from the GNOME default to not save your session (whuh?), the problem is this: on Fedora, /etc/bashrc forces PROMPT_COMMAND to set the xterm title. This wouldn’t really be a problem, if I could disable setting of dynamic titles in gnome-terminal preferences. However, gnome-terminal thinks that a manually-set (Terminal->Set Title) title is somehow “dynamic”, so if you do that, you can never set the title to anything else. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-05-08-dear-software-authors/ Thu, 08 May 2008 04:13:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-05-08-dear-software-authors/ Another request for sanity please. If I’m running a Linux distribution less than 6 months old, it should be feasible to install your software without installing random -svn versions of your dependencies. If it’s not, I’m not going to bother trying out your software. That means I definitely won’t be fixing any of your bugs, and I’m pretty sure I’m not alone. That means you lose out. Yes, this means you, Review Board. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-05-07-amd/ Wed, 07 May 2008 22:55:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-05-07-amd/ I really don’t understand why, but AMD’s current problems are upsetting me. It really does make me feel bad. I have no idea why I care. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-05-07-blogs-sun-com-rss-feed/ Wed, 07 May 2008 01:45:21 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-05-07-blogs-sun-com-rss-feed/ For reasons beyond my ken, blogs.sun.com doesn't actually list an RSS feed anywhere I can find, but it's at http://blogs.sun.com/main/feed/entries/rss. Update:: it's now grown an RSS icon. Thanks! https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-05-07-kraken-botnet-infiltration/ Wed, 07 May 2008 02:22:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-05-07-kraken-botnet-infiltration/ If you had the ability to cleanse 25,000 infected zombie home computers, would you? https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-05-05-rietveld/ Mon, 05 May 2008 20:36:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-05-05-rietveld/ Google have released rietveld, inspired by their internal code-review tool. The video about Mondrian made it look pretty (i.e. incredibly) useful for code review. The released version already looks pretty nifty. webrev works great for my day job, but it would be awfully nice to be able to store comments too. I’d love to see rietveld get adopted, though there’s some tweaks I’d like to see… https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-05-04-tyler-rejecting-jesus-means-youll-go-to-hell/ Sun, 04 May 2008 01:48:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-05-04-tyler-rejecting-jesus-means-youll-go-to-hell/ “That’s stupid! He can’t put me in hell, because I’m a god, just like Jesus!” https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-05-01-what-do-java-and-neil-young-have-in-common/ Thu, 01 May 2008 01:26:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-05-01-what-do-java-and-neil-young-have-in-common/ They’re both at JavaOne. It makes me want to go. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-04-29-skynet-is-cute/ Tue, 29 Apr 2008 16:30:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-04-29-skynet-is-cute/ Awwww: https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-04-29-a-tale-of-3-consoles/ Tue, 29 Apr 2008 14:21:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-04-29-a-tale-of-3-consoles/ The big three consoles, scaled according to how much hardware oomph they pack: And now in terms of 2007 sales: Yays for Nintendo. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-04-28-brazen-broccoli-bandit/ Mon, 28 Apr 2008 15:22:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-04-28-brazen-broccoli-bandit/ This guy is an urban hero. If he’s destroying it, that is. If he’s just eating it, he’s a bit weird. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-04-25-our-ecosystem-rocks/ Fri, 25 Apr 2008 01:41:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-04-25-our-ecosystem-rocks/ Awesomely bad from Microsoft: If that’s really supposed to be Bruce Springsteen … well … no. It makes my overlord’s song, “The Power Of Sun”, seem really, really good. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-04-24-rumour-has-it/ Thu, 24 Apr 2008 15:58:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-04-24-rumour-has-it/ That Haddaway is making a comeback. With a single. Featuring Dr. Alban. That’s right. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-04-23-zaitcev-you-can/ Wed, 23 Apr 2008 21:09:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-04-23-zaitcev-you-can/ zaitcev: I know you’re not entirely serious, but I don’t know why Ted’s post has put the dampers on anything. Fact is, it’s still open source, you can still fix things, and you can still get them into the main codebase. Or fork. Even better, you’ve been through SMI code review, so you’d be super familiar :) Ted’s post is wrong in many ways of course. It didn’t take 3 years to get a distributed SCM for the sources out there. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-04-23-facebook-grew-a-stupid-bar-at-the-bottom/ Wed, 23 Apr 2008 14:00:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-04-23-facebook-grew-a-stupid-bar-at-the-bottom/ No, Facebook, I’m not going to use Facebook Chat. Piss off. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-04-23-life-imitates-art-stuff-of-nightmares/ Wed, 23 Apr 2008 01:47:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-04-23-life-imitates-art-stuff-of-nightmares/ Compare and contrast: versus: Time Warner Delivers Modem Cockroaches. It’s weird enough when the imaginary becomes real. When it’s Chris Morris, it’s genuinely terrifying. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-04-21-ha-ha-says-nelson/ Mon, 21 Apr 2008 17:46:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-04-21-ha-ha-says-nelson/ It’s Monday, and that means it’s time to point and laugh at religious people again. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-04-18-xvm-under-the-hood-seg-mf/ Fri, 18 Apr 2008 14:57:01 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-04-18-xvm-under-the-hood-seg-mf/ An occasional series wherein I'll describe a part of the xVM implementation. Today, I'll be talking about seg_mf. You may want to read through my explanation of live migration and MMU virtualization first. The control domain (dom0) often needs access to memory pages that belong to a running guest domain. The most obvious example of this is in constructing the domain during boot, but it's also needed for mapping the shared virtual guest console page, generating guest domain core dumps, etc. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-04-18-the-most-unwanted-song/ Fri, 18 Apr 2008 11:18:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-04-18-the-most-unwanted-song/ The Most Unwanted Song. I’m in the office, so haven’t actually heard it yet. I’m sure it’s awesome though. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-04-16-play-distance-diagram/ Wed, 16 Apr 2008 15:36:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-04-16-play-distance-diagram/ Via Bruce Schnier’s blog: Says it all I think. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-04-10-finally/ Thu, 10 Apr 2008 23:36:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-04-10-finally/ Towards a Practical Theology of Peer Review it’s good to finally see some rigour in theology. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-04-10-centaur-technology/ Thu, 10 Apr 2008 19:20:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-04-10-centaur-technology/ Via davej: “There are no managers at Centaur. Instead, employees report to Centaur founder and President, Glenn Henry”. There are 85 employees there according to Google. It sounds like living hell to me. Maybe all of those people are both really competent and really nice, but I find it a bit difficult to believe. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-04-09-dear-threadless/ Wed, 09 Apr 2008 02:18:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-04-09-dear-threadless/ Dear Threadless, isn’t it really, really stupid that it’s impossible to see the designs in your T-shirt lists? https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-04-08-diana-fan/ Tue, 08 Apr 2008 16:36:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-04-08-diana-fan/ What I find most surprising about this guy: is not that he spent 6 months of his life listening in on the Diana inquest with stuff scrawled over his face, but that he’s not a Diana conspiracist! https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-04-08-open-source-windows-like-open-source-solaris/ Tue, 08 Apr 2008 01:32:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-04-08-open-source-windows-like-open-source-solaris/ etbe: I’m confused by your comments in that opinion article - were you misquoted? How did “advised by your lawyer not to look at code” become “OpenSolaris isn’t FOSS” ? BTW, whenever you ask a lawyer a can-I question, they’ll always tell you no :) I’m presuming you’re not willing to share the details of this legal opinion. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-04-08-three-armed-beyonce/ Tue, 08 Apr 2008 00:23:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-04-08-three-armed-beyonce/ Three-Armed Beyonce Is Not Amused. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-04-07-lazy-ad-exec-scum/ Mon, 07 Apr 2008 14:32:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-04-07-lazy-ad-exec-scum/ OK, maybe scum is a little over the top, but I really do hate how lazy advertisers are. Current bone of contention being this advert: Now, whilst I don’t think the Mighty Boosh crimping thing is at all funny, it’s still really annoying they would blatantly rip it off like this. Just as bad is the Berocca ad. Their player doesn’t seem to work, but it totally rips off the infamous OK Go video: https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-04-07-dear-television/ Mon, 07 Apr 2008 00:25:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-04-07-dear-television/ Probably the best short programme there is: Dear Television. I love the natural eccentricity of the type of person who would not only write to the BBC about some minor thing about a TV programme, but choose as their bone of contention the parking practices of fictional police drivers. Annoyingly it’s not on iPlayer, or even anywhere else. Bah. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-03-30-chess-boxing/ Sun, 30 Mar 2008 18:18:00 +0100 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-03-30-chess-boxing/ Chess Boxing. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-03-28-stupid-dogs/ Fri, 28 Mar 2008 00:40:00 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-03-28-stupid-dogs/ Occasionally, people try to tell me that dogs aren’t stupid. They are. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-03-26-rick-rolling/ Wed, 26 Mar 2008 19:44:00 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-03-26-rick-rolling/ Rick-rolling: Finally, Rick Astley speaks. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-03-26-oh-my/ Wed, 26 Mar 2008 03:56:00 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-03-26-oh-my/ “The fact that you can use Control-click to open URLs in Gnome Terminal is not very discoverable.” dgh, I think you might have revolutionalarised my life! https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-03-25-self-knitting-lamp/ Tue, 25 Mar 2008 00:27:00 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-03-25-self-knitting-lamp/ I’m not that bothered about lamps in general, but lamps that can knit themselves are quite good: https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-03-24-how-not-to-benchmark/ Mon, 24 Mar 2008 19:01:00 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-03-24-how-not-to-benchmark/ No, I’m afraid it’s not sensible to attempt to benchmark OS performance by running it as a VM. Please don’t (unless you’re damn sure what you’re doing). https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-03-23-armageddon-technik/ Sun, 23 Mar 2008 19:18:00 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-03-23-armageddon-technik/ This video will most likely give you terrifying nightmares, but at least they’ll be really cool nightmares. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-03-20-fujiya-miyagi/ Thu, 20 Mar 2008 17:25:00 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-03-20-fujiya-miyagi/ For some reason only just now getting around to listening to Fujiya & Miyagi album, though I’ve got a couple of their 10"s. They’re on Tirk, which obviously means they’re great by default. If you like LCD Soundsystem or !!!, or whatever, and that, go get the album. I liked it so much I bought it twice. Admittedly by accident, but still. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-03-19-new-portishead-video/ Wed, 19 Mar 2008 21:18:00 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-03-19-new-portishead-video/ New Portishead video: Machine Gun. Sounds like a ghost DJing dubstep. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-03-19-inbox/ Wed, 19 Mar 2008 20:59:00 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-03-19-inbox/ My musical inbox is getting a little out of hand: The pile of CDs in the background is especially daunting. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-03-18-how-to-create-a-running-gag/ Tue, 18 Mar 2008 13:37:00 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-03-18-how-to-create-a-running-gag/ How To Create A Running Gag, courtesy of one of the few webcomics I like, Basic Instructions. I feel like I know the characters in it personally. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-03-18-when-things-explode/ Tue, 18 Mar 2008 04:24:00 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-03-18-when-things-explode/ When Things Explode is a new site about Manchester music, although it’s currently only a blog. Looks like it’ll be good. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-03-17-and-im-lost-in-confusion/ Mon, 17 Mar 2008 16:57:00 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-03-17-and-im-lost-in-confusion/ I’ve moved my blog to blogspot.com, so I can add pictures and the like without having to bugger about too much as I did on Advogato. Just back from the US. Somehow I spent 3 weeks there last time without noticing my hotel was practically next to Rasputin Music. Anyway, I finally did this time on Saturday morning and thankfully had time to do some shopping. At the exchange rate, the 2-disc 12" of Underworld’s Jumbo was a particularly good buy, though I was most excited over this: https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-02-01-dtrace-on-xenstored/ Fri, 01 Feb 2008 17:09:21 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2008-02-01-dtrace-on-xenstored/ DTrace support for xenstored has just been merged in the upstream community version of Xen. Why is it useful? The daemon xenstored runs in dom0 userspace, and implements a simple 'store' of configuration information. This store is used for storing parameters used by running guest domains, and interacts with dom0, guest domains, qemu, xend, and others. These interactions can easily get pretty complicated as a result, and visualizing how requests and responses are connected can be non-obvious. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2007-12-18--opensolaris/ Tue, 18 Dec 2007 03:27:53 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2007-12-18--opensolaris/ When OpenSolaris got started, #solaris was a channel filled with pointless rants about GNU-this and Linux-that. Beside complete wrong-headedness, it was a total waste of time and extremely hostile to new people. #opensolaris, in contrast, was actually pretty nice (for IRC!) - sure, the usual pointless discussions but it certainly wasn't hateful. Recently I'm sad to say #opensolaris has become a really hostile, unpleasant place. I've seen new people arrive and be bullied by a small number of poisonous people until they went away (nice own goal, people! https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2007-12-06-xen-compatibility-with-solaris/ Thu, 06 Dec 2007 23:01:49 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2007-12-06-xen-compatibility-with-solaris/ Maintaining the compatibility of hardware virtualization solutions can be tricky. Below I'll talk about two bugs that needed fixes in the Xen hypervisor. Both of them have unfortunate implications for compatibility, but thankfully, the scope was limited. 6616864 amd64 syscall handler needs fixing for xen 3.1.1 Shortly after the release of 3.1.1, we discovered that all 64-bit processes in a Solaris domain would segfault immediately. After much debugging and head-scratching, I eventually found the problem. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2007-10-23-opensolaris-xvm-now-available-in-sx-ce/ Tue, 23 Oct 2007 13:22:38 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2007-10-23-opensolaris-xvm-now-available-in-sx-ce/ Build 75 of Solaris Express Community Edition is now out, and it includes our bits. So go ahead, install build 75, select the xVM entry in grub and play around! We're still working on updating the documentation on our community page; in the meantime, you have manpages - start at xVM(5) (and note that the forthcoming build 76 has much improved versions of those docs). You might be wondering if your machine is capable of running Windows or other operating systems under HVM. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2007-08-01-automatic-start-stop-of-xen-domains/ Wed, 01 Aug 2007 00:41:24 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2007-08-01-automatic-start-stop-of-xen-domains/ After answering a query, I said I'd write a blog entry describing what changes we've made to support clean shutdown and start of Xen domains. Bernd refers to an older method of auto-starting Xen domains used on Linux. In fact, this method has been replaced with the configuration parameters on_xend_start and on_xend_stop. Setting these can ensure that a Xen domain is cleanly shut down when the host (dom0) is shut down, and started automatically as needed. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2007-07-18-solaris-xen-update/ Wed, 18 Jul 2007 23:29:07 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2007-07-18-solaris-xen-update/ After an undesirably long time, I'm happy to say that another drop of Solaris on Xen is available here. Sources and other sundry parts are here. Documentation can be found at our community site, and you can read Chris Beal describe how to get started with the new bits. As you might expect, there's been a massive amount of change since the last OpenSolaris release. This time round, we are based on Xen 3. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2007-05-24-python-and-dtrace-in-build-65/ Thu, 24 May 2007 19:20:01 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2007-05-24-python-and-dtrace-in-build-65/ A significant portion of the Xen control tools are written in Python, in particular xend. It's been somewhat awkward to observe what the daemon is doing at times, necessitating an endless cycle of 'add printf; restart' cycles. A while ago I worked on adding DTrace support to the Python packages we ship in OpenSolaris, and these changes have now made it into the latest build, 65. As is the case with the other providers people have worked on such as Ruby and Perl, there's two simple probes for function entry and function exit. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2007-02-21-booting-para-virtualised-os-instances/ Wed, 21 Feb 2007 15:41:37 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2007-02-21-booting-para-virtualised-os-instances/ Whilst I'm waiting for my home directory to reappear, I thought I'd mention some of the work I've done to support easy booting of domains in Xen. For dom0 to be able to boot a para-virtualised domU, it needs to be able to bootstrap it. In particular, it needs to be able to read the kernel file and its associated ramdisk so it can hand off control to the kernel's entry point when the domain is created. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2006-11-23-64-bit-python-in-nevada-build-53/ Thu, 23 Nov 2006 22:19:11 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2006-11-23-64-bit-python-in-nevada-build-53/ Coming to you in build 53 of OpenSolaris is 64-bit Python, which I worked on with Laszlo Peter of JDS fame. This means Python modules can make use of 64-bit versions of libraries, as well as 64-bit plugins. You can run the 64-bit version of Python via the path /usr/bin/amd64/python (on x86). This path isn't quite set in stone yet, so don't rely on it. This facility didn't previously exist on any OS, so we had to make some innovations in terms of how Python lets modules build and load. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2006-07-15-save-restore-of-mp-solaris-domus/ Sat, 15 Jul 2006 01:52:22 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2006-07-15-save-restore-of-mp-solaris-domus/ In honour of our new release of OpenSolaris on Xen, here's some details on the changes I've made to support save/resume (and hence migration and live migration) with MP Solaris domUs. As before, to actually see the code I'm describing, you'll need to download the sources - sorry about that. Under Xen, the suspend process is somewhat unusual, in that only the CPU context for (virtual) CPU0 is stored in the state file. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2006-04-13-fun-with-stack-corruption/ Thu, 13 Apr 2006 17:27:53 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2006-04-13-fun-with-stack-corruption/ Today, we were seeing a very odd crash in some xen code. The core dump wasn't of great use, since both %eip and %ebp were zeroed, which means no backtrace. Instead I attached mdb to the process and started stepping through to see what was happening. It soon transpired that we were crashing after successfully executing a C function called xspy_introduce_domain(), but before we got back to the Python code that calls into it. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2006-02-14-a-brief-tour-of-i86xen/ Tue, 14 Feb 2006 18:20:51 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2006-02-14-a-brief-tour-of-i86xen/ In this post, I'm going to give a quick walk through the major changes we've made so far in doing our port of Solaris to the Xen "platform". As we've only supplied a tarball of the source tree so far, I can't hyperlink to the relevant bits - sorry about that. As our code is still under heavy development, you can expect some of this code organisation to change significantly; nonetheless I thought this might be useful for those interested in peeking into the internals of what we've done so far. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2006-02-14-live-migration-of-solaris-instances/ Tue, 14 Feb 2006 00:46:55 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2006-02-14-live-migration-of-solaris-instances/ Today we released our current source tree for our Solaris Xen port; for more details and the downloads see the Xen community on OpenSolaris. One of the most useful features of Xen is its ability to package up a running OS instance (in Xen terminology, a "domainU", where "U" stands for "unprivileged"), plus all of its state, and take it offline, to be resumed at a later time. Recently we performed the first successful live migration of a running Solaris instance between two machines. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2006-01-17-generating-assembly-structure-offset-values-with-ctf/ Tue, 17 Jan 2006 01:44:16 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2006-01-17-generating-assembly-structure-offset-values-with-ctf/ The Solaris kernel contains a fair amount of assembly, and this often needs to access C structures (and in particular know the size of such structures, and the byte offsets of their members). Since the assembler can't grok C, we need to provide constant values for it to use. This also applies to the C library and kmdb. In the kernel, the header assym.h provides these values; for example: #define T_STACK 0x4 #define T_SWAP 0x68 #define T_WCHAN 0x44 These values are the byte offset of certain members into struct _kthread. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2005-11-19-resource-management-of-services/ Sat, 19 Nov 2005 20:00:36 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2005-11-19-resource-management-of-services/ SMF introduced the notion of a service as a first-order object in the Solaris OS. Thus, you have administration interfaces capable of dealing with services (as opposed to the implicit service represented by a set of processes, for example). It doesn't seem very well known, but as Stephen Hahn mentions, this also applies to the resource management facilities of Solaris. A service can be bound to a project (as well as a resource pool, which I won't go into here). https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2005-11-18-reducing-ctf-overhead/ Fri, 18 Nov 2005 16:02:49 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2005-11-18-reducing-ctf-overhead/ CTF (Compact C Type Format) encapsulates a reduced form of debugging information similar to DWARF and the venerable stabs. It describes types (structures, unions, typedefs etc.) and function prototypes, and is carefully designed to take a minimum of space in the ELF binaries. The kernel binaries that Sun ship have this data embedded as an ELF section (.SUNW_ctf) so that tools like mdb and dtrace can understand types. Of course, it would have been possible to use existing formats such as DWARF, but they typically have a large space overhead and are more difficult to process. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2005-01-05-visitorville/ Wed, 05 Jan 2005 01:59:57 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2005-01-05-visitorville/ According to VisitorVille, nearly half of web users within Sun are using Windows. Seems a bit suspect. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2004-12-15-committees/ Wed, 15 Dec 2004 22:31:14 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2004-12-15-committees/ Marvellous comment from Ian Hixie, over in the infamous Mozilla bug 25537: > Keep in mind the old saying that a committee is a life form with six or more > legs, but no brain. This is no committee, it's a meritocratic elite dictatorship. In fact, listening to everyone's input, such as yours, is what would make this a committee. I agree that committee-driven design creates poor products. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2004-10-26-john-peel-dies/ Tue, 26 Oct 2004 13:20:29 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2004-10-26-john-peel-dies/ John Peel dies aged 65. Pretty terrible news. John Peel was an excellent radio DJ, with an obvious passion for music. He was utterly hapless at putting the records on at the right speed, and it was all part of the charm of his show. I always kept meaning to listen to his R1 show more often, and now I don't get the chance. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2004-09-19--home/ Sun, 19 Sep 2004 02:47:12 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2004-09-19--home/ I've not been able to access my homedir (and hence my work mail) all day. I suspect this was a planned outage I've forgotten about, but it's still a big problem. And what kind of planned outage lasts all day? https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2004-06-15-blogs-sun-com/ Tue, 15 Jun 2004 00:56:11 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2004-06-15-blogs-sun-com/ A comment on IRC: so, is the whole blogs.sun.com thing a place for employees to vent their inevitable frustrations, but in a place where absolutely no one will ever see them and thus they can't cause any damage whatever? How very perceptive :) Roller seems to be a bit of a PITA. There's no trivial way to preview a post, for one. You have to save a draft, then "Edit" the draft, then post it properly. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2004-06-15-there-s-your-linux-desktop/ Tue, 15 Jun 2004 00:36:09 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2004-06-15-there-s-your-linux-desktop/ Micah Abbott complains that there isn't an internal push for people to use JDS/Linux on their desktops. I suppose they missed the "JDS challenge", an effort to install JDS as much as possible. Also ISTR there have been a few JDS install-fests. Micah: the date/time bug has long since been fixed (it's bug 4852615). And I'm afraid that Mozilla is no less crash-prone on Linux than it is on Solaris (believe me. https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2004-06-07-alas-poor-advo/ Mon, 07 Jun 2004 18:36:42 +0000 https://movementarian.org/blog/posts/2004-06-07-alas-poor-advo/ Since it seems that Advogato is down, with no signs of it returning, and my current hosting isn't suitable, I'll probably end up blogging here (translation: unimportant rant every three months).