Redhatter’s Web Blog

Well, 2007 is slowly drawing to a close. As I write this, I’m lying on my bed, winding down for the evening, I can’t help but think back over this year.

For me, 2007 was great academically. I hit some quite high scores at uni, and even this semester, managed to score a 7 in an engineering subject. 7s for me are very rare, and usually only occur with IT subjects — the subject this time around was on communications between embedded systems — specifically, it centred around an Allen Bradley SLC5/03 PLC, and a Rabbit Semiconductor RCM4000-series 8-bit microcontroller.

Amongst other things at uni, this year really drained me. Gentoo took a major back seat, along with many projects I’ve been working on, and my entire focus was on getting through the semester. My stress levels this year got to dangerously high levels, to the point I was at the brink of suicide. The only thing that stopped me, is that for better or worse, I’m needed, and there are things I need to do before I disappear off the scene.

Now that the university year is over for now (except for the mugs doing a summer semester), I’m able to relax somewhat. I was away from home for the last 5 days, sporadically jumping online via a dialup link to check on things. I worked on stuff that pleased me for once.

I did some testing for Gentoo whilst I was at it. My laptop wouldn’t dial out to the internet for some reason, but I soon discovered, the Lemote Fulong I took with me, worked fine. By disabling the getty on ttyS0 (I normally have it for when I use the box headless) and plugging a 56Kbps PSTN modem in, and using KPPP via X-over-SSH (xorg-server 1.4 segfaults, there’s some patches I need to forward-port), I had an internet link up first go. Hence, net-dialup/ppp got a bump. Sadly I had to USE-mask atm, because that needed net-dialup/linux-atm, which isn’t yet stable. If I find a way to test this, I’ll do so, and mark it stable too.

Looking around though, I see I’m not the only one feeling the pressure. Gentoo 2007.1 has been delayed this year quite significantly, with most of the people involved having other issues to contend with. In the developer community as a whole, everyone seems to be on edge. In fact, everyone seems to be on edge. No idea what the cause is, it’s just something I’ve noticed.

Now… 2007 as I say is almost over. Presently, boxing day will be over for me in less than 2 hours. My hopes for 2008…

• I hope linux.conf.au goes well for all involved. Mark Kowarsky has done a lot of work to organise Gentoo’s presence at this event. Sadly, I won’t be involved (lack of funds and time prevent me from attending) but I’ll try to help out from a distance.
• I hope that over this new year period, people get a chance to unwind and relax a bit. Some de-stressing is badly needed IMHO, and should help ensure everyone is ready for the new year.
• I hope that university for me, will now start to taper off a bit as I enter my final year. This year sees a reduction from 48 credit points a semester, to 36, which should leave me more time to dedicate to each subject, and therefore less stress & anxiety.

For the next few days, I’ll be uncontactable, as I’ll be out of mobile range camping at Gibraltar Ranges National Park (northern NSW, half way between Glen Innes and Grafton on the Gwydir Highway). It’s a nice spot, away from technology. See, as much as I like computers, I also like to run away from them for a little while.

Those who are travelling long distances, I wish you all a safe journey. Take it easy on the roads, there’s no point in rushing to a funeral. Here in Queensland, our christmas/new year road toll is already one death higher than it ought to be, and while I really do hope it doesn’t increase, my gut feeling is that it probably will. Take it easy though, and the chances of you becomming another statistic are greatly reduced.

I may not get a chance before the new year to make another post. So whatever you’re doing…

I wish you all, a happy 2008.

Well, it’s that time of the year again, and I for one will be going bush like I normally do between Christmas day and the new year.

As far as Gentoo/MIPS is concerned, I’ve still got to get around to rebuilding my Qube2… I’ve tested my MIPS1 builds and everything seems to work, but I’ve been slack on my MIPS4 builds.  That said… the delays in this release seem to be Gentoo-wide, as everyone seems to have been caught on-the-hop.

From this Friday morning (before 10:00AM UTC+10) until Boxing day, I’ll be away from home, sporadically online via PSTN dialup to check for emails.

I’ll have my Qube2 and one of the Lemote boxes with me, so I’ll be able to do some package testing at least, as well as work on a LiveUSB image for the Lemote systems.

After boxing day, I’ll be in Gibraltar Ranges National Park, on the Gwyder Highway, halfway between Glen Innes and Grafton.  No mobile phone reception or phone services of any kind there… so if you need me for something please get in touch before then, or it’ll have to wait until I get back in the new year.  And no, I won’t be bringing any desktop or laptop computers with me.

This year has been very trying on my patience.  The stress levels have been quite high, and I’ve been quite apathetic in regards to Gentoo’s issues as a result.  I’m hoping 2008 will be a better year — for all of us.

Well, once again I’ve got a bee in my bonnet … and once again, it’s Microsoft that I’m whining about. This time, it’s not the office suite that “Works” by name (but not by nature), but rather, their pathetic excuse for file system management.

I’m sure most people have heard of the FAT and NTFS file systems. I’m sure that NTFS has some nice features. I’m also quite sure there’s a reason why FAT is so popular on flash drives, when better alternatives exist for this role (such as JFFS2). But one thing I hate about BOTH file systems, particularly on their reference platform, is their ability to fragment files.

As some of you may already know, I do a lot of network administration work for Asperger Services Australia who run a network of 5 Windows XP-based workstations hanging off a Gentoo Linux server. Sadly, Windows XP is a necessity on this network, as they require Microsoft Office to communicate with government departments (who haven’t yet seen the light that is ISO26300, but that’s a rant for another day), and they also use MYOB for their accounts (in the absence of decent open-source accounting software configured for Australia’s rather complicated tax laws, I’m happy for this to continue).

The maintenance is generally not to bad. However, over the last few days, I’ve been doing some much needed work just before I get whisked away to work in some distant location. Part of this, is file system defragmentation.

Now, feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t seem to recall too many issues regarding fragmentation on any legacy Unix systems. Either the problem was ignored, or it didn’t exist to any significant degree — otherwise I’m quite certain that there’d be tools alongside fsck to defragment a file system. I don’t see any for EXT2/3, ReiserFS, XFS, JFS, HFS/HFS+, FFS or UFS (in its various forms). Some filesystems, like HPFS, I even seem to recall in the OS/2 Warp 4 install, it mentioning how HPFS doesn’t need to be defragmented, since space gets automatically allocated before writing begins on a file. Which is ironic that NTFS should be suffering from fragmentation so bad, because Windows NT did, back in v3.x days, use HPFS as its native filesystem. Therefore I ask this question:

Why are Microsoft operating systems so lousy at managing file systems?!

C’mon guys, you’re supposed to be the market leaders. Where’s the bloody leadership? Why can’t you develop a file system driver for your operating systems that prevents, as much as possible, any fragmentation of the disk? I can understand if the disk is just about full, needing to fragment a file, but even then I notice other file systems manage fine… but why does this need to happen on a practically empty disk?!

I spose I should show you the horrors that greeted me yesterday and today. Below, are the fragmentation reports generated from one of the boxes I look after. Admittedly, I don’t think I’ve ever ran defrag on them in the year or so this particular one has been in service — I didn’t think it’d be a problem with a mostly-empty disk. I was wrong (the full reports can be viewed here, and here):

Volume OS (C:)
    Volume size                                = 29.28 GB
    Cluster size                               = 16 KB
    Used space                                 = 9.34 GB
    Free space                                 = 19.94 GB
    Percent free space                         = 68 %

Volume fragmentation
    Total fragmentation                        = 13 %
    File fragmentation                         = 26 %
    Free space fragmentation                   = 0 %

Volume APPS (D:)
    Volume size                                = 45.23 GB
    Cluster size                               = 4 KB
    Used space                                 = 912 MB
    Free space                                 = 44.34 GB
    Percent free space                         = 98 %

Volume fragmentation
    Total fragmentation                        = 21 %
    File fragmentation                         = 42 %
    Free space fragmentation                   = 0 %

21% fragmentation on a disk that’s 2% full?! WTF is going on? Microsoft’s OS is so lazy, it fragments files in a partition that’s so empty, it could duplicate the files another 49 times over. If they’re concerned about performance when appending to files, then why not leave a 1MB growing space or something? There’s plenty of space — use it wisely.

I’m not sure what the strategy is in various file systems out there, but I’m sure it wouldn’t be hard for Microsoft to take a look at how it’s done, and implement it in their own systems. It can’t be too difficult, because almost everyone else seems to handle the situation fine.

I guess it’s just another example how the Redmond-based slap-dash software company continue to rip us off and hobble the IT industry.

Hi,

A number of people prefer IM contacts over more traditional means such as IRC or email, which is fine. I’m flexible, and happy to accommodate such modes of contact. But if you send me a message — please ensure your client is “Online” and not set to “Invisible” or similar settings when you message me. I ignore messages received from “offline” clients.

The best protocol to use for IM when contacting me is Jabber/XMPP — everything else I use via a gateway on XMPP.  Likewise, the best protocol for voice chat is SIP (I use Ekiga at my end) as that works on both the MIPS boxes I use, and the x86 boxes — but I can accommodate Skype if desired.  MSN works, but due to the fact I access it via XMPP, I’m not able to use any of the advanced features (file transfer or voice chat) offered by MSN.

For those who are wondering how to contact me via instant messengers and/or VoIP, contact details are listed on my devspace homepage.

I had a bit of a crazy idea today. Some would think I had a little too much spare time on my hands … but maybe there’s a point to this insanity.

Many of us have old computers laying about. Now, “old” is a subjective term. As goes the Weird Al song, “All About the Pentiums”…

You say you’ve had your PC for over a week?
Throw it away man — it’s an antique!

(Well, that’s how I remeber it… I might be paraphrasing a little.)

Not everybody needs a fancy box to do simple tasks. Pentium-class systems, and high-end i486 systems make quite decent X-terminals. As slow as early 486s and 386s are, they still are useful in situations where you just need a router or DHCP server (for example) to service a small home network.

I’m planning to put my 386 into active service. My Qube2 sits in my laundry, which is great. It’s cool, it’s a headless box with no need for direct interaction.

But interacting with the serial console is a pain, I have to get my laptop out, and plug it in. Thus I probably don’t do as much kernel testing as I should.

The 386 should be fast enough for this task — all it needs to run, is sshd and minicom. For a single user. Gentoo using uClibc sounds like an ideal platform. Why?

• Minimum bloat: I merge what I need, and nothing more
• uClibc is targetted at low-memory, low-processing-power computers
• Gentoo gives me fine-grained control regarding what features I enable and disable.

Now the box is rather slow booting Gentoo. If I boot root-over-NFS, it takes about 30-35 minutes. I can reduce this to about 20 minutes when loading from a local HDD (narrow SCSI, as it happens), but I haven’t got far installing it due to problems with flakey disks. The kernel reports a BogoMIPS reading of about 3.9~4.2 when running at full-speed (33MHz), and about 1.6 with the “turbo” feature disabled.

Once I get it going however, it should simply be a matter of re-merging dropbear sshd (the default one in the Gentoo/uClibc stages dies with a SIGILL), merging minicom and a bootloader, and voila.

Any updates can be done via a chroot on a faster box, then the binaries shipped to the 386. Bootup time isn’t an issue, since the box can just sit there running — 386s don’t chew that much power.

This is quite low down in my priorities, at the moment I’m concentrating more on getting Gentoo/MIPS 2007.1 out the door, hopefully with some newer netboot images for Cobalt, and maybe some first ever boot images for Loongson.

But after that, I may look at what the Gentoo/Embedded people have (particularly GNAP) and see if that can be adapted to suit the needs of older computers.

I see no reason why this can’t be done — I’d much rather see the code in Gentoo streamlined to work better on older computers, than to see the specs increased, as this streamlining benefits all — not just those with few CPU cycles to spare.

The following is a bit of a rant, involving my beef with one of Microsoft’s lesser known products, the “Works” productivity suite. More specifically, its interactions with a certain HP DeskJet 2360 (IIRC) printer.

A friend of ours does treasury work for a small business. The business owns a Dell laptop (reasonable spec machine) running Windows XP, and they’ve recently bought a HP Deskjet 2360 printer to go with it. The accounts are done in Microsoft Works 8 Databases. The business sells home-made goods such as knitted rugs, various forms of artwork and other hand-made products.

The accounts database basically stores each sale made — linking that back to the individual who produced the article being sold. The database produces invoices to be sent to each of these people, listing the items sold, the total revenue generated from their goods, and the amount they get (less the commission). Pretty simple stuff.

For reasons unknown, this decided to break a few weeks ago. The machine stays disconnected from the internet almost 100% of the time. Here’s the symptoms:

• When we try to print via the HP printer on the laptop in Microsoft Works, the application crashes, sending a crash report to Microsoft.

• The HP printer, works flawlessly in every other application.

• If we install Microsoft Works on a second PC with its own printer — we can print successfully.

• If we then connect the HP printer up to the second PC, install the drivers, then try to print, Microsoft Works crashes in the same manner as on the laptop.

Microsoft Works, when using the HP printer, crashes regardless of the content of the document. Create a new spreadsheet, type some random gibberish in two adjacent cells, select File->Print, and bang, down she goes. This is ludicrous, as the printer works with everything else, and Works works with any other printer. But this combination of printer and application causes problems.

We’ve tried installing updated drivers from HP’s site, with no success. We’re downloading updates for Microsoft Works, in the hope that may fix the problems, but I’m not holding my breath. This product would have to be one of the few products whose name is an oxymoron.

Microsoft Windows is such a soup of proprietary code mingling about, I’m amased anything works. Why they don’t dump their antiquated print system and use CUPS like everyone else (even Apple uses it) is a mystery. (I’m sure it’s doable on Win32.) There’s no excuse for these peculiar interactions — I’ve never had these ridiculous problems under CUPS.

In the meantime, I have OpenOffice 2.3 downloading for Windows and Linux. I had a play with OpenOffice Base (version 2.0 and 2.1) and it seems that should be able to do the same thing as good, if not, better than their present suite. It’s worth noting that the database is used much like a spreadsheet presently, thus doing a proper relational DB design will be beneficial.

I can’t quite figure out how to get the reports generated by OpenOffice.org to work the way I want… I can customise them to a certain degree, but once I try to do anything fancy, the whole lot breaks. Maybe the Sun Report Builder is the answer here — I’ve got it downloaded, but I need OpenOffice 2.3 to use it (and that’ll be another hour or so).

I’ve never done this sort of thing with OpenOffice in the past — I’m very new to this. Ordinarily, I’d just make a Perl script to connect to a DB of some form (or parse CSV data), take a LaTeX template, substitute the necessary data in, compile each LaTeX document as PostScript, then use GhostScript to whack them all together in a single document. I can’t however, do this under Win32, and especially can’t expect computer novices to do that. Hence why I’m looking at doing this in OpenOffice. In short though, this is going to be an interesting challenge.

Update:

I’m pleased to report, that OpenOffice 2.3.0 (I realise 2.3.1 is just out) is doing the job nicely. The comment that the OpenOffice Base application I had set up, was easier to use, and I feel, will be more scalable than the system they previously used. OpenOffice Base+Sun Report Builder, is definitely a worthy consideration when you wish to set up a database-driven report generator that’s to be used by computer novices.