Installing Gentoo

I'm currently installing Gentoo Linux 2005.0 onto the 500MHz that recently crashed. So far I have been through Red Hat 7.3, 8.0, Mandrake 10.0-10.2, and Ubuntu 5.04. I figured it was time to give Gentoo a try. Unlike most other distros, which prepare downloads in pre-compiled binary packages, Gentoo does everything from source. For a stage 1 install of the operating system, you first run a live cd, then use the compiler on the live cd to compile the gcc compiler. Quite literally everything on the computer has been compiled by the end user (for a stage 1 install). It is not terribly difficult, as scripts do most of the work for you, and there is a step-by-step handbook available online. I read the first couple pages in the book yesterday, and started the install process this morning. It took me from 8:30 to 11:00 to step through the initial set up phase (that includes about an hour of downloading stages and portage info). I basically read the manual off my Pentium 4 while doing the install on my Pentium 3. At around 11:30 I started my stage 1 compilation, and when they say it takes a long time, they mean it. On my Pentium 3 500MHz with 256MB of RAM, it wasn't until 2:00 that I got a compilation error. Turned out that there was a "bootstrap comparison failure" with the file gcse.o from the gcc package. Googling didn't turn up much, and most of the solutions out there were to do a make clean and then try again. So I changed my compilation options from the very aggressive -O3 optimization scheme to the relatively aggressive -O2, and set it back to work. It is now 5 hours later, and I'm still waiting for it to finish. I've always wondered what it would be like to have an entire operating system compiled specifically for my architecture. No longer will I be using i386 binaries, but instead will have -march=pentium3 -msse -mmmx -mfpmath=sse specifically for my Katmai CPU. It will be exciting. I think I will also try out Fluxbox as my window manager, though I'm whimping out and keeping the GTK and QT libraries around. I hope I can get past stage 2 before I have to go to bed, as stage 3 will probably take a day or two to compile through. Windows XP doesn't seem like such a long install process in comparison!

Babbage Failing

The machine that I had in residence is getting closer and closer to retirement. Today I rebooted it (after 22 days uptime) to switch over to a new kernel I installed a couple days ago. Upon attempting to start, the kernel panicked with the following:
"kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(0,0)"
According to Google, this is commonly caused by hard disk drivers not being loaded into the kernel (eg. raid, serial ata, and reiser). Seeing as how I am using ext3 on parallel ATA on a pretty standard motherboard, I think it is highly unlikely that Ubuntu doesn't have my drivers compiled into the kernel. I have been known to have hard drive problems in the past. Put in Ubuntu Live, backed up some stuff, then started playing around to see if I could fix it. I decided to try running Memtest just to see what it would have to say. I've never seen Memtest return an error on my hardware before, but this time I'm looking at around 60 bad memory blocks around the 86MB area of my ram. Judging by NCIX, the going rate for PC133 ram is about 4x that of everything else. It would cost me around $100 to replace the ram in Babbage, while a new computer can be had for around $350. With the unreliability of the whole machine, I'm thinking I should just get something new for September. I will use Babbage until August, and buy a computer then, hoping that new computers come down by a couple price points. My next machine will also be fully researched for Linux compatibility in the hardware.

Sorry for any spelling mistakes, I'm typing on qwerty again.

Systm - MythTV

Well, another episode of Systm is out, and this time they check out MythTV. If you've always wanted a TIVO (which runs Linux, btw), but enjoyed tinkering yourself, and didn't want to pay the annual subscription fee, check out this video. I know Carl would like to see it, if only he weren't on dialup.

I've given thought to building my own MythTV box or Freevo box. It would be a fun project, but I just don't see it happening any time soon. Of course I would just have to go with DVI, Audigy, and IR remote, but all those fun toys add money. I've never used a TIVO, but I have used Windows Media Center (took me 2 minutes in the local FutureShop to crash Media Center), and I think that Linux-based systems can kick the pants off of the Win MCE. The MAME plugin for MythTV alone kicks butt (playing thousands of old arcade games on your television).

Why, oh why, doesn't systm have an RSS so that I can be notified of the next episode?

Open Formats - Why Aren't They Popular?

Steven Garrity has a nice little three part series on why open formats aren't popular, and why they are having problems getting adopted.
The Catch-22 of Open Format Adoption,
Part 1: Music
Part 2: Instant Messaging
Part 3: Office Documents

My thoughts on Part 1: Music
He does make a very good point about how people associate mp3 with free, when it actually is not. Lame (Lame Ain't an Mp3 Encoder) is the most popular mp3 encoder, used by about 99% of the music ripping underground. It is, however, technically illegal. There are patents held by Motion Pictures Experts Groups (MPEG) members, and these members require licensing fees to use mpeg 1 layer 3 (mp3) technologies. Should the FBI and the courts in the States (and any other country that has patentable software) start cracking down and actually start enforcing the law, then people who rip music would have to start using Nero, Adobe, or some other encoder that must be paid for. For the record, the open source Lame is also orders of magnitude better than the reference encoders, so don't think that paying for the encoders will get you better quality; forcing Lame out of the equation will actually reduce quality of rips. The same thing goes for XviD. Despite being open source, it is still covered by patents, and is illegal to distribute in compiled form (I don't know where Koepi and Nic live, but should they be in the States, they are breaking the law for providing us with an excellent video encoder in binary format). Steven pretty much hits the nail on the head as to why Vorbis hasn't been adopted, although I believe that Winamp comes with Vorbis support out of the box.

Part 2: Instant Messaging
My brother, who is in middle school, recieved his year book today. The theme: Mount Slesse Messenger (a play between the school's name, Mount Slesse Middle School (MSMS), and Microsoft Network Messenger (MSN Messenger)) The front of the year book says "welcome msm" at the top. In the center is a little green blob man, just like that little green MS guy, wearing a muscle shirt with the school logo. Beside the guy is a button that says "Sign In .net", with the exact same colour scheme, font, and format as the MSN Sign In button. The entire year book is done up to look like MSN Messenger, with just enough changes to prevent copyright or trademark legal action from MS Canada. I also went to the school's year end assembly (to film my brother playing in rock club), and saw the unveiling of the year book. To initiate the unveiling, the student said, "what do we use almost every day?" Within a split second a girl from the back screamed "MSN!" This is very interesting to me as a person familiar with the Internet. MSN quite literally stands for 'Microsoft Network". It started off as an ISP that MS was using to gain market share from AOL. It has since extended to a set of services offered online by MS, from the ISP to the web portal "msn.com" to the MSN Messenger program. To a 15 year old girl, however, MSN has no connotations to a service provider. It doesn't represent a news site or a web search (Google for that one probably). For 15 year old kids in Western Canada, MSN has it's own urban dictionary definition of "gossiping with friends when you should be doing homework." Those three letters mean simply that, and the kids don't care about openness, or what company provides it, or how Yahoo! is more popular in another part of the country, and AOL IM is popular in another place, while SMS is the thing in Europe and Asia. Changing protocols would be very difficult because practically everyone here uses MSN. As Steven says in his article, you can use a multi-protocol client, such as Gaim. I use Gaim to log in as both "javaman1138@hotmail.com" and "tiosc@jabber.com". You can also view in Jeff Waugh's Project Topaz presentation from Guadec how he really got a girl interested when he said that Gaim can support MSN and Yahoo! and AOL all in one window, and all on Windows. Despite the capabilities of Gaim and Trillian to use multiple protocols, it is unlikely that there will be a massive migration. I have yet to meet another person using Jabber.

Part 3: Office Documents
Here is one closed format that I can't figure out how it became so popular. Winamp and MSN Messenger may be free, but when someone sends you a MS Word .doc file in an email, you need to run out and spend $400 at a computer retailer. Even with Dell and other OEMs selling reduced price boxes with a new system, how is it that everybody ended up having this expensive piece of software? Is pirating more prevalent than I thought? I'm not saying that OpenOffice should have been more popular, but why did people spend so much money on Office when there is a perfectly crappy piece of MS software called "Wordpad" that comes with every Windows box? What and when exactly was Corel WordPerfect killed off? I mean, MS Office is $399, while Corel's Office is "only" $299. Since when did people enjoy paying $100 more for an office suite? Why don't the kids use the bundled Wordpad like they do the bundled Media Player and bundled Internet Explorer? Could OpenOffice take over with its low low price of only $0?

My mom has to make changes to the school's parent advisory council constitution. This file was created in MS Word in 1997, and has not been edited since. When I save the file, I plan on saving the revised file in OpenOffice 2.0's OASIS .odt format, OpenOffice's MS Word .doc export filters, PDF, and HTML, with a text file explaining why there are all the formats. I wouldn't expect another edit to be made for another seven years, and I want to make sure that the file is still readable the next time that should happen. I rip my audio CDs in Vorbis and try to do everything in an open-source patent-free way, but I know not many do, and it is I who will have to adapt when someone sends me an email with an attachment.

MusicBrainz

In an effort to organize my music collection a bit better, I decided to try out MusicBrainz. Normally, I would have done all the music research myself, but that was taking far too long. So I went back to the site that Ian had mentioned a long time ago, and gave it a shot. The system basically makes a "fingerprint" of the audio using a short clip of the waveform and the clip length. This means that it can be a different format (MP3, Vorbis) and still get the same fingerprint. The theory is that many people have submitted known-good fingerprints which can be looked up. The program will then change your id3 tags and rename the files based on the information in the database. For my music collection it successfully tagged around 6/7 of my music. Around 1/2 of the remainder had a "fingerprint collision" which means that more than one song in the database have the same fingerprint, and you need to pick which one is the correct one. For the rest of the songs, it plain old didn't know what they were.

For the most part, the program worked out well. The program actually picked out some pieces that I had attributed to the wrong artist. There was perhaps two false positives (out of around 1000 songs) that I had to go back and change. Most of the user required selections were easy, such as picking the first option in the list. The program seemed to have the most difficulty with classical music. This is understandable, as there are different versions of the same song (Boston Philharmonic vs. Philadelphia Philharmonic playing Beethoven's 6th), and many songs can sound the same if you pick too small a sample (long stretches of violins holding a single note). Selecting the proper information for a classical song is no easy task, either. When scrolling through the list of albums for someone like Tchaikovsky, it is difficult to find an album that will have a song that matches the song on the hard drive, as different CDs have cut classical compositions at different points (eg. I have a Swan Lake excerpt that has Act II - Scene I, II, and III all in the same mp3 file, but most CDs have the scenes split up into different tracks).

It's times like this (organizing my mp3s and tagging them properly) that I wish more programs had support for Unicode and internationalized text. MusicBrainz isn't standardized themselves, as they have Kanno Yoko's name as the original Japanese Kanji (菅野よう子, for those who can read it), while a song from the Spirited Away soundtrack is listed as "A Summer's Day", when I've always known it as "Ano Natsu He". Firefox can handle Asian script, while Rhythmbox (default player for Gnome) cannot. I guess there has been a lot of work done on i10n and i18n standards, but it is up to the programmers to implement the capabilities. When you're developing applications, just keep in mind that less than 50% of the Internet uses English as the mother tongue.

Burgers For Sale?

Today I spent most of the day by volunteering over at the local middle school. They were having a BBQ fundraiser for the Parent Advisory Council, so I helped in the setup, handing out burger patties, and cleaning up. Unfortunately for the fundraiser it was raining today and the kids weren't in a very "BBQ" mood. There are now lots of burger patties and buns left over (some hotdog too), which the parents may have to "buy back" from the PAC. If you want to buy some burgers, I may be able to talk to my mom, and you could buy some burgers at a (slightly) cheap price. Tonight's dinner is going to be: hamburgers and hotdogs.

GTK+ 2.6.8

The GIMP Toolkit (GTK+) hit 2.6.8 today, with the release announcement over here. This is mostly a bug squashing release, so most of you won't be interested. There is one feature that I'm looking forward to, however, in the file chooser. The first point on the changelog states: * GtkFileChooser - Don't select first row in SELECT_FOLDER mode [Christian Neumair]. This isn't really a bug fix as much as it is an annoyance fix. Here's where I see it: when using File Roller to decompress files I downloaded, I want those files to go into my home directory, so I click the "Home" quicklink in the file dialog. This should put the currently displayed directory into the home directory, and let me decompress there. What it actually does is put me in the home directory and automatically select the first item (usually a folder) in my home directory, and I can't deselect it. This results in decompressing into some directory that I don't want the files to go into. My workaround is to select the "Filesystem" quicklink, then go into /home and then select adam. Now I should be able to open the file dialog, select the "Home" quicklink, and decompress straight to my home directory.

Now I just have to wait for the libs to hit the Ubuntu repositories. This is one thing I don't like about precompiled distributions - you're always playing the waiting game.

Ubuntu Artwork?, San Andreas, Heading Out To Oliver

Sorry about the lack of posts recently, but that would be an accurate description of how eventful things have been around here lately. Got out and did some gardening today. I have also been learning about using GnuCash (accounting for Linux) (which requires the old GTK 1, which isn't very Ubuntu friendly). So many things I would like to learn over the summer, yet it feels like there is so little time.

Some of you may remember the old Ubuntu artwork controversy from October of last year. This featured models who were showing off a little too much skin for some people (PG 13 perhaps). Today Jeff Waub, GNOME hacker, linked to a very interesting possible splash screen. This is only a joke, and you will need to be 18 or over to see the artwork (not work safe!). It is over at Alvaro's blog.

Got Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas today. That is a massive game, shipping on DVD, and sucking up 5GB for the full install. My machine only has 256MB (once there was a time, children, where 256MB was more than enough), and it gets around 5 frames per second, with everything on low. I have actually determined that it is a RAM bottleneck issue, and turning off all audio clears up enough RAM to push the graphics up and maintain around 20 frames per second. If you want to play this game, you'll definitely need more than 256MB system RAM. Other than that, it is a nice game, with much more to explore than VC or Liberty City. I'm letting Kevin do all the missions, then I just step in and play with the new goodies and areas he unlocked.

Tomorrow morning I'll be heading out to Oliver, near Osoyoos. Going to a garden wedding on Saturday afternoon, so hopefully the weather will be nice. I'm hoping the drive up and back will also be nice. I'm not driving (we're carpooling with some friends), but I would like to take some nice photos with my camera of the mountains and scenery. I took photo down in Washington that would have been perfect, only it turned out blurred due to the movement of the car. Had I stopped the vehicle and used a tripod it would have been a great desktop background. Now I'm mad that it didn't turn out, and I'm determined to take more photos in hopes of getting more really good desktops.

Playboy Mirror

Now here's a cool site for you: mirrors.playboy.com. Turns out that playboy.com, the site of Hugh Hefner fame, is hosting mirrors of projects like Perl Archive, FreeBSD, Apache, Fedora, Firefox, and Thunderbird. mirrors.playboy.com is actually an official mirror to download from at the Firefox website. The site is completely work-safe, with the exception of the domain name, should someone look over your shoulder, or the system admin look through the proxy's logs. You can read more about it here.

Was there this much upset when Apple switched from Motorola to IBM?

Subversion Testing

So, I've been playing around with Subversion today. Okay, not really playing, trying to figure out how to get it set up. Tonight into tomorrow is when I get to play around with it. I would like to get a real versioning system set up by the time I am back in school, not just for myself, but so that the rest of the computer science students also have a playground to put their stuff. Right now, you can check out my Subversion repository using standard http and a web browser. Just point your browser towards http://70.70.60.128/svn. To do real svn checkouts or commits, you need a real svn client and a password. If you want to get full access to the server (who would want to do that?!?) email me. I would like to try my hand at the administration stuff, in prep for September. The server can't be guaranteed, of course, so don't put anything critical up there.

Today http://ca.archive.ubuntu.com/ went down for a couple hours, so I switched over to http://archive.ubuntu.com/ for my repositories. I wonder what happened.

NVIDIA Linux 7664

At around 2:30 this morning, NVIDIA posted their latest Linux drivers, 7664, for IA32, AMD64, and Solaris x64. New features include OpenGL 2.0 support, Xinerama + OpenGL support, GPU clock manipulation, support for Quadro G-Sync, and support for the GeForce 6200 AGP. You can check out the drivers here, read the readme here, or go to the forums here. Not too many people over at the forums have used and commented on it yet, but as they wake up to find new drivers, the comments should start pouring in.

One thing people will certainly be commenting about is the removal of support for "legacy" GPUs. NVIDIA, up until this date, has always had a "unified driver architecture", meaning that the same driver executable download would work for everything from a GeForce 256 up to a GeForce 6800. They have had this feature for as long as they have been making video cards, on both the Windows and Linux platforms. These latest Linux drivers, however, have taken out support for RIVA TNT, RIVA TNT2/TNT2 Pro, RIVA TNT2 Ultra, Vanta/Vanta LT, RIVA TNT2 Model 64/Model 64 Pro, Aladdin TNT2, GeForce 256, GeForce DDR, Quadro, GeForce2 GTS/GeForce2 Pro, GeForce2 Ti, GeForce2 Ultra, Quadro2 Pro.

For once, I'm lucky to have a lower end "MX" card, as my GeForce 2 MX 400 is still in the supported list, while the higher end GeForce 2's have been sent to the driver scrap yard. I did a check on the Windows drivers for NVIDIA, and all their cards are still supported, so it looks like Linux is the only place where they have defined these legacy cards. Will Windows drivers hit the chopping block next? Will my GeForce 2 MX still be supported in the next round of driver releases?

MS Office's New XML

Microsoft has released some info on the new XML file formats they are planning for the next Office (to be shipped around Longhorn time, and still called Office 12 internally). These are the same formats that raised concern, and got them okayed, by the government of Massachusetts. The very same XML formats that they claim will be open for all to see and use and develop, but are strangely covered by patents that MS doesn't want to clarify on. Scoble was as giddy as a school boy on prom night all day, as he waited for the 21:30 time that he was allowed to post about it (when his NDA expired). Without further ado, an interview, with Brian Jones, one of the Office XML developers. These new XML formats will be available in the next Office, as well as through patches for Office 2000/XP/2003.

They are touting it as a great thing, something that will revolutionize the way we handle our document formats. We can have proxies automatically strip out macros, to prevent viruses from travelling. We can have search programs search through documents in many smart ways (search for author, search for creation date, search for the word "antitrust"). Anything you can imagine doing with an open document that has been marked up in XML is now do-able. (I'm thinking about the creation of a .docx -> .odt converter). For those who don't know, OpenOffice.org, Abiword, and just about every other major open source office suite has been using XML in zips for years now. As for the searching within our files, don't forget about Beagle, which is a very young project, and is still in development. Beagle is to Linux what Google Desktop Search and the Microsoft Desktop Search (unreleased, and not the official name) are to Windows. I imagine that Microsoft will get many APIs out and many of their own plugins out for IIS and Exchange server, so that many cool things can be done with the new formats. Can open source stay one step ahead?

Summer of Code

Start your emacs! Google is doing a code bounty-style program for students, and calling it the "Summer of Code". Here's how it works: Google has paired up with 8 open source groups (like Ubuntu and Apache). Students can browse a list of software projects that need to be done (a menu editor is on Ubuntu's list!), and the students submit an application before June 14th to Google to write a program. Google and the participating organizations will determine if the application will be granted (200 slots are available). If a student is approved, they will recieve $500USD to get them started. On September 1st, all the students hand in their projects, and the participating organizations look at the work. If requirements were met, the student recieves another $4,000USD. Open source coding will be done, and students will be paid $4,500USD for their work.

http://code.google.com/summerofcode.html

It's times like these I wish I knew more C++, and how to write code for larger projects. Damn! But it's still cool to see this being done. I was surprised at how many students in UBC.CS still use Internet Explorer (Asians/East Indians seem to use IE, while the caucasians seem to be more into the open source stuff).