Toxic Elephant : Archives for June 2007

Zurich

blog@matijs.net (matijs) — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 21:12:00 +0000

So, I’m reading Steve Yegge’s latest, and he drops some not so suble hints to the reader that they should apply at Google. I talk about that to my wife, how working at Google would definitely be nice, but that it would mean moving from Amsterdam (the Netherlands) to Zurich (Switzerland), because that’s where Google is in Europe. And then she says:

Zurich has the best zoo in Europe.

People Ready

blog@matijs.net (matijs) — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 20:27:00 +0000

First, what the hell does Microsoft’s slogan people ready even mean? The campaign’s site seems to think it means you need people to run a business. Well, I don’t see any businesses around run by small rodents, so I guess they’re right. That’s some vision

So, what’s this about? Some bloggers got paid for writing about people ready, and people got upset. Now, some defend themselves saying they didn’t endorse anything, and some defend themselves saying of course it’s an ad box (whatever an ad box is).

Well, I don’t think this looks like an ad, and it may not be an endorsement of a Microsoft product, but it is an endorsement of a Microsoft campaign. Oh, and look at the right of the page. It says “Click here to submit your own People Ready Business story”. So, that pretty much suggests that the content on the left was also submitted the same way. But of course, it wasn’t.

Luckily, at least one of the entries seems to have been written while drunk.

People readiness is something only people that are ready for people to be ready can be ready for.

All this via Mark’s translation.

Finally, back to the meaning: “people ready” means ready for people, right? Just like HD ready means ready for HD. Well, sort of anyway. But no, it means the people are ready. See?

Campaign lame.

A song

blog@matijs.net (matijs) — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 23:38:00 +0000

Today, at seven months and nineteen days of age, Sophia spontaneously performed her first song. It went like this:

Ba ba baa ba baa, ba ba baa ba baa.

(The bas are short, the baas are long). The piece was performed at a constant pitch. I’m still working on the correct rhythmic notation; it’s pretty complex.

Years from now, we will say: We were there at her first performance.

How to compile TV output into the latest X.org ati drivers on Ubuntu

blog@matijs.net (matijs) — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 12:58:00 +0000

The Problem

You have built a home server slash PVR that you want to hook up to your twenty-year-old television. You have gone to several shops to buy a graphics card that actually has open-source drivers for its TV output functionality (i.e., the ATI Radeon A9250). You have dodged salesmen trying to sell you something else (“No, but here is its successor the NVidia so-and-so.” “Uhm, no thanks.”). You finally succeeded by ordering it over the Interweb (and probably should have done that in the first place). Now you want to patch the driver shipped by Ubuntu to actually get TV output working.

The Solution

You will need a patch based on the TV output module from the GATOS project. You can get the latest-but-not-late-enough patch from megahurts.dk. Before proceeding, edit the patch, removing the patches for Makefile.in. Later in the process, you’ll have to deal with some rejected patches. Alternatively, you can download a cleaned-up version for driver version 6.6.3.

[Update Nov 13, 2007: The TV output module has been sort-of incorporated into the X.org driver, and Ubuntu Gutsy ships that. The problem is, it does not yet automatically detect that you have a TV hooked up, so you need another monitor to let X start without erroring out and to type in some xrandr commands. Not ideal. You can however just recompile the driver-plus-patch from Feisty and it will work fine.]

Get the sources for the ati driver (currently, version 6.6.3):

apt-get source xserver-xorg-video-ati

Install the build dependencies. I always just consult the debian/control file, but you should be able to just go:

sudo apt-get build-dep xserver-xorg-video-ati

[Update Dec 26, 2007: You also need autoconf and libtool:

sudo apt-get install autoconf libtool

They are needed for the autoreconf stap later in the process.]

Change into the directory just created:

cd xserver-xorg-video-ati-6.6.3

Prepare the quilt patch system:

fakeroot ./debian/rules prepare

Copy the patch into the patches directory:

cp /path/to/the/patch patches/200_tv_output.diff

Append the line

200_tv_output.diff

to the file patches/series.

Apply all the patches:

fakeroot ./debian/rules patch

At this point, if you’re using the original patch, it will not have applied cleanly. Run quilt push -f to force it to be applied. After fixing the rejections, run quilt refresh to make a new patch. You may also have to run quilt refresh if you’re patching a different version of the driver and the line numbers have changed.

Next, reconfigure, clean, build:

fakeroot ./debian/rules autoreconf
fakeroot ./debian/rules clean
fakeroot ./debian/rules binary

And of course, install the resulting package. All done.

Subversion and tagging

blog@matijs.net (matijs) — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 14:50:00 +0000

I’ve been using svk for a while now, but I keep bumping into problems with the whole concept of tags being just copies.

The problem is this: In my mind, a tag should be a symbolic name for a particular revision on a particular branch. In subversion (and hence, svk), it’s not. To use a tag in place of a revision, you first have to do svn info to find the corresponding revision number, and then use that in your svn diff or svn merge or whatever.

Subversion should have had a smarter client from the start, one that emulates tags and branches and hides the implementation detail that they are ‘really the same thing’ from the user.

As it stands, subversion has no tagging.

It’s all very annoying.

Outage

blog@matijs.net (matijs) — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 13:13:00 +0000

Last week, I did some work on my website, upgrading to the latest Typo trunk and Rails 1.2, and changing from mod_fcgid to a Mongrel cluster.

Last Friday or so, I rebooted my server. Unfortunately, I had neglected to make the Mongrel cluster start at boot. So for the past weekend, all you have seen here is a Service Temporarily Unavailable message.

Sorry.