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May 31st, 2009


07:21 pm - analyze-x86
Ward Poelmans has sent me an update to the analyze-x86 script which has been floating around forever to add support for SSE4.1, SSE4.2, and SSE4a instruction sets.

dirtyepic@halo ~ $ ./analyze-x86 /usr/lib64/libx264.so
Checking vendor_id string... GenuineIntel             
Disassembling /usr/lib64/libx264.so, please wait...
i486:  229 i586:    1 ppro:  415 mmx: 13319 sse: 3362 sse2: 4012 sse3:  292 sse4.1:   32 sse4.2:    0

This binary was found to contain the cpuid instruction.
It may be able to conditionally execute instructions if
they are supported on the host (i586+).

/usr/lib64/libx264.so will run on Intel Core 2 Duo (Penryn) w/ SSE4.1 or higher processor.


You can grab it from http://dev.gentoo.org/~dirtyepic/bin/analyze-x86
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May 3rd, 2009


01:31 am - Wintersleep - Laser Beams
one day laser beams will cure my sight
negative five
that's pretty much blind
i want to see things you know

stare so deep into the laptop light
sip your coffee and stare
like you got something to say
but you can't say it, cause it just ain't there anymore
a vague premonition flexing its might
converse with absolute time, and space
and time, and space, and time and space
and nothing really matters anymore

you can't say it, don't ever say it
it's not tangible, it's not even relevant
a warm hand, a short skirt
a soft blanket, a trusty appliance
a 57 in mathematics and science
an oxygen mask
they'll stick it and they'll never come back
they'll never come back, they'll never come back anymore

are you with me and am i wrong?
your silly old songs
do they mean anything or am i just wrong?
am i just wrong?  am i just wrong?
how did i ever get so goddamned dumb?
a foreign lick from a familiar tongue
it's not one you love
but it's familiar enough

mouthful of teeth chewed up and spit on the ground
when i speak are my words just white naked sound?
carelessly rendered and scattered around
random, animal, clumsily stitched together
forever alien and forever altered
flowing in absolute time, and space
and time, and space, and time and space
and nothing really matters anymore

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April 27th, 2009


04:31 pm - Bored?
Are you tired of laying around the apartment, wishing you had something fun and productive to do?

NOW YOU DO!

We have 400* open bugs assigned or CC'd to maintainer-needed in bugzilla. Many of these are easy fixes, like packages not respecting CFLAGS, or CC hardcoded, or missing dependencies. You (yes, you) can earn the admiration and respect of your peers** simply by fixing _one_ maintainer-needed bug per day. How much easier could it be? And, in a limited time offer, if you go as far as to find a maintainer or herd for a maintainer-needed package, you'll receive a miniature Larry the Gender-Confused Cow bobblehead absolutely free of charge***.

Act now, repoman is standing by.






* okay, 399.
** okay, just me.
*** okay, not really
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April 16th, 2009


11:43 am - updates
i wrote my route survey final today, the last one. this semester was a lot rougher than the last one and i really had to work at it. after missing a week early in the year due to the worst flu i've had in ten years, and then my grandma dying a month or so later, i was perpetually a class or two behind. and when i'm stressed i don't sleep, so that meant missing more classes. in the end i think i did alright though. i think i passed at least, but my high eighties average is going to take a big hit. oh well, two more weeks of field camp and then i'm back to work in Yorkton.

gentoo-wise, due largely to the efforts of loki_val, darkside, and fauli, we got GCC 4.3 stable on the major archs. i've been running 4.4 on my laptop for a few months now and things are moving nicely. the gcc-porting overlay is filling out thanks to Daniel J, who keeps throwing patches at me.

i stopped reading g-dev around March-ish. i poke my nose in every once in a while but for the most part i just ignore it. it was just getting me frustrated and then i'd end up yelling at someone and feeling bad. i really have nothing to contribute besides arguments and bikeshedding so i figured i'd just leave it to the experts.

one thing i do want to work on now is getting maintainer-needed cleaned up. we have 750 orphaned packages in the tree, many of which look like they can be herded. once that's done i want to go through the remainders and kick anything redundant, broken, unmaintained, or old. it's amazing how much crap we have that hasn't been touched in years. flameeyes' tinderbox runs have turned up a bunch of broken junk that i've never even heard of before.

of course, the problem is knowing what to kick and what to keep. gentoo-stats would be awesome here, if it existed, to tell if anyone is actually using this stuff. right now the best we can do is mask it and wait til someone complains, which is painful for everyone involved. i guess we can wait another 3 years until someone implements it or we can buckle down and bear it.

other than that, business as usual. i still wish people would fix their damned testsuites, but i'm not holding my breath. i'm really looking forward to the git migration, not because i like git but because i really really hate CVS. EAPI 3 has some promising stuff in it, as long as it doesn't get debated into mediocrity by the gentoo development process(tm). etc etc..
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April 2nd, 2009


01:02 am - We Are the Same
Attention: The new Tragically Hip album is absolutely incredible.


That is all.
Current Mood: [mood icon] bouncy

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March 12th, 2009


10:23 pm - the tragically hip - locked in the trunk of a car


they don't know how old i am, they found armor in my belly
from the sixteenth century. conquistador i think
they don't know how old i am, they found armor in my belly
passion out of machine-revving tension
lashing out at machine-revving tension
brushing by the machine-revving tension

morning broke out the backside of a truck stop
the end of the line, a real rainbow-likening luck stop
where you could say i became chronologically fucked up
put ten bucks in just to get the tank topped off

then i found a place, it's dark and it's rotted
it's a cool, sweet kind of place where the copters won't spot it
and i destroyed the map, i even thought i forgot it
however every day i'm dumping the body

it'd be better for us if you don't understand
it'd be better for me if you don't understand

and i found a place, it's dark and it's rotted
it's a cool, sweet kind of place where the copters won't spot it
and i destroyed the map that i carefully dotted
however every day i'm dumping the body

it'd be better for us if you don't understand
it'd be better for us if you don't understand
it'd be better for me if you don't understand

let me out...

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February 27th, 2009


08:08 pm - dollhouse
i finally got the time to sit down and watch the two first episodes of Dollhouse (whedon's new show). the pilot was middling, as most can be, but the second episode really ramped it up. if they can keep the plot fresh and dushku can handle the hefty acting requirements, they might just have something.

now, the big question is, how do we keep Fox's grubby hands off it?

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February 8th, 2009


08:49 pm - Big Wreck - Blown Wide Open
so i'm all surrounded
by the things i thought i'd put away
and i'm all surrounded
by the things i thought i'd put away
and there's a pile in my closet
that's where i threw some yesterday
maybe under the rug
that's where i swept some the other day

so the mess is drawing forces
outside i hear them say
just come out with your hands up
so we can blow you away

and i walk out the door, get blown wide open
by the things i'd put away
and i wasn't even armed, just blown wide open
now the mess is where i lay

so i'm all surrounded
by the things i thought i'd put away
so i'm all surrounded
by the things i thought i'd put away
and if i'm a slob
well i never looked at it that way
irresponsible
well you're not the first to say

but i told her i'm sorry
i never wanted it this way
yeah, i still need her
but the mess won't go away

and i walk out the door, get blown wide open
by the things i'd put away
and i'm out on the porch, just blown wide open
now the mess is where i lay

yeah blown wide open
blown wide open
blown wide open
blown wide open
the gun's still smoking
blood keeps flowing
blown wide open
blown wide open
where's she going

all surrounded..




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February 7th, 2009


11:59 pm - Modesta McKinley
Back in 2005, my grandfather, Robert McKinley, was losing long battle with cancer. I was also quite sick at the time - a long bout of chronic chest pains, depression, and sleeping pill addiction, and had recently lost my job and moved home. So I ended up spending quite a lot of time with him and my grandmother - either just going for coffee, or taking them to doctor appointments, or the hospital. After he passed away, my grandma really needed someone to take care of her, and I was happy to fill in. My grandma was always very dependent on my grandpa, and it was very hard for her to suddenly be alone. With _great_ difficulty, we got her moved out of the acreage they had spent their lives in and into town. It took a lot of time and effort (mostly on the part of my mother whose strength always continues to impress me), but she eventually became self sufficient. I still spent a lot of time with her. We were regulars at the A&W where she always made me take her for hamburgers, after which we would sit and she'd tell me stories about when she was a little girl (they were always the exact same stories every time but I always enjoyed them). She would call me several times a week after she accidentally pressed the wrong buttons on the TV remote and couldn't figure out how to turn it off. Sometimes I swear she did it on purpose to get me to take her out for burgers but I never let on.

She was humble to a fault, and never wanted anyone bothering about her. So it was a surprise when one of her friends phoned my mom to tell us she had be fighting a nasty cold for some time and was getting worse and should see the doctor. My mom took her up to the hospital to get looked at last Friday night. She was admitted into intensive care, slipped into a coma, and passed away the next morning.

It was quite a shock for all of us, because it happened so fast. Just a week before, my uncle had been visiting her from BC, and she had seemed completely healthy and happy. I'm still not quite sure what to make of it.

It might sound bad, but I'm glad she went quickly. I've had to watch both my father and grandfather get slowly destroyed by cancer, and I'm pretty sure that's the way I'll be going too, barring any random space-station-toilet-seat incidents. It sucks. It really really sucks. I wish everyone could be spared that crucible.

But I will still truly miss her.

Modesta McKinley
Dec 27, 1929 - Jan 31, 2009
Rest in Peace
Current Mood: [mood icon] sad

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February 1st, 2009


12:08 pm - gcc-4.3.3 and broken libtool archives
There were some improvements made recently to the libtool archive (.la) handling in toolchain.eclass recently for longtime favourite bug #125728. Unfortunately, a typo slipped in that resulted in broken .la files getting installed when upgrading GCC. This happened at the same time that 4.3.3 was added to the tree, so a potentially large number of people may hit this.

This only affects packages linking against libgomp or libsupc++. The error looks like this:

-8<---

/bin/sh ./libtool --silent --tag=CC   --mode=link x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-gcc
-std=gnu99  -fopenmp -march=core2 -O2 -pipe -Wall -W -pthread -no-undefined
-dlpreopen ltdl/dlopen.la  -Wl,-O1 -Wl,--hash-style=gnu -Wl,--as-needed
-lfreetype -lz -o ltdl/libltdlc.la  ltdl/loaders/ltdl_libltdlc_la-preopen.lo
ltdl/ltdl_libltdlc_la-lt__alloc.lo ltdl/ltdl_libltdlc_la-lt_dlloader.lo
ltdl/ltdl_libltdlc_la-lt_error.lo ltdl/ltdl_libltdlc_la-ltdl.lo
ltdl/ltdl_libltdlc_la-slist.lo ltdl/lt__strl.lo 
/usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu/4.3.3/libgomp.la: line 41:
libdir/usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu/4.3.3: No such file or directory
libtool: link: warning: library
`/usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu/4.3.3/libgomp.la' was moved.
/usr/bin/nm: '/usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu/4.3.3/.libs/libgomp.a': No such
file
x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-gcc:
/usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu/4.3.3/.libs/libgomp.a: No such file or
directory
make[1]: *** [magick/libMagickCore.la] Error 1

--->8-


If you run into this error, simply rebuild gcc. While 4.3.3 is the most common version to be affected due to the timing of the version bump, any gcc version built on Jan 28 may be affected.

Any currently open bugs concerning this problem can be marked duplicates of bug #256636
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January 31st, 2009


07:03 pm - Graphite
I've added support for the Graphite loop optimization framework that will be released in GCC 4.4 to my svn ebuild. Graphite requires two external libraries - PPL and CLooG-PPL. The former is in portage and the latter can be found in my overlay.

I haven't done any testing except to make sure it builds properly, and I'm not planning on using it myself, so you're on your own if you break something.

Enjoy.
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January 6th, 2009


07:35 pm - yay and boo pt. 2
i started my first programming class today. we're learning VB.Net.

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January 5th, 2009


05:38 pm - yay and boo
ahh. finally got the laptop fixed. now i just have a wee bit of catching up to do.


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December 28th, 2008


06:25 pm - obligatory xmas post
Yay, exactly what everyone wants to read, another xmas post.

Too bad, i'm doing it anyways.

Xmas kind of sprung itself on me this year, or rather i wasn't paying attention as usual and December just went and ended on me. Shopping was done on the 23rd while driving home. Despite that i managed to get everything i was looking for. We had xmas at our house this year and it was pretty nice - about 20 people and way too much food. I ended up with some very nice DVD's and some much welcomed new clothes.

Altus dropped off a seriously expensive and hardcore winter parka and a nice bunnyhug ("hooded sweatshirt" for you non-Skatchewainians). I guess they're trying hard to keep me around. I've already agreed to go back to work for them this summer for an as-yet-undetermined signing bonus and a decent pay hike. I may still decide to stay with them for my co-op work term later in my fifth semester, but there are a ton of other companies that would pay much more, probably even cover my full tuition, so we'll see.

I decided to park the beater I've been driving and take the new car that I've been trying to sell the last six months back to MJ with me, and in the process of emptying it out I found my old O2 in the trunk. Just for the hell of it I decided to mess around and see if i could figure out what killed it a year ago. After it defrosted and i wiped everything down and pieced it back together, I plugged it in and to my surprise it booted! Well, kinda - for some reason it goes into init 6 as soon as it hits init 3, giving me a nice reboot loop - but the hardware itself seems fine, the disk is intact, i was able to start kde, etc. by interrupting the boot and bringing everything up manually. So if I can figure out what's screwed in the startup sequence I might be back in business.

But for now I'm going to play Persona 4, watch my new MST3k DVD's, and enjoy some time off.

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December 15th, 2008


06:15 pm - package testing
Recently, Diego brought up a subject that I've been meaning to talk about for a while.

Besides arguing at people on mailing lists, the majority of my time in Gentoo is spent on gcc-porting work; basically, making sure that the packages in the tree build with the next upcoming GCC release. Right now we're working on getting stable ready for GCC 4.3 (huge thanks to everyone that's helped w/ this), and I've also been building the tree with 4.4. As I've mentioned here before, the 4.3 transition has been a bit of a bitch, and judging by Patrick and Diego's efforts that even now continue to unearth packages that are broken by 4.3 (and even 4.2 and 4.1(!)) we still have a long way to go.

Generally with 4.3, broken packages are immediately obvious as the vast majority of errors happen at compile time (usually missing header includes). For whatever reason, however, with 4.4 I've found the majority of issues I've hit have not exposed themselves during the compile, but later at runtime. Because of this, I've become increasingly dependent on package testsuites to catch these errors. Unfortunately, the state of FEATURES=test has been and continues to be a pet-peeve of mine - more-so now than ever.

I keep a running list of testsuites that are known to be broken so I can disable tests on a per-package basis with an ugly hack*. I don't have access to my laptop at the moment, but last I remember it was over 40 pkgs. I have 19 masked here on the desktop but I'm in the process of rebuilding it as a stable box and don't have a lot of stuff installed yet.

Now I don't mind finding these and filing bugs. The more of this stuff that gets fixed, the less trouble for me and for everyone else in the long run. But I do end up spending a lot of time chasing down failures, determining if they're caused by GCC or some unrelated error, checking if they've been reported or not, seeing if it's an upstream problem or something Gentoo-specific, tracking down patches, etc. etc. On my first run of building @system with 4.4, I ended up with ~15-20 failed testsuites. After I spent a couple days weeding out the failures already reported and filing bugs for those that weren't, I was left with 2 packages that were actual errors caused by GCC 4.4 - glib and flex (and a handful of stuff broken due to glib).

This can get kinda frustrating.

I'm not sure what the point of this post is, except to rant I guess. It would definitely help if people took testsuites seriously (though this has gotten much better over time). If your testsuite fails, report it upstream. If it's Gentoo-specific, fix it or RESTRICT tests if you can't. Run with FEATURES="test" and report the failures you find. I think the end result of doing these things will be a more robust and stable tree, which is good for everyone.

Every so often someone starts a thread on g-dev about enabling tests by default. But until these tests actually /work/ they're worse than useless - it just perpetuates the idea that testsuites are pointless and encourages people to turn them off.

Enabling them for the dev profiles on the other hand...



*
kali ~ # cat /etc/portage/env/media-libs/gstreamer-0.10.21 
FEATURES=" ${FEATURES}"
FEATURES=${FEATURES/ test/}

Zac has shown me a nicer approach in bug #44796 that I haven't gotten around to scripting yet.
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December 13th, 2008


03:50 pm - frickin freezing
-39C currently and according to the almighty oracle (weather.ca) tomorrow will be -44C. i really hope i make it to my survey final on monday. at least the heat in the apartment is working today (so far).

still no laptop. i bought a universal adapter kit that said it was compatible w/ the Lenovo T series, but no dice. they must have changed the design. i'm thinking my best bet is to just order one from Lenovo themselves, unless someone knows of an AC adapter that works with a Lenovo Thinkpad T61.
Current Mood: [mood icon] cold

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December 9th, 2008


05:35 pm - gone
offline until i can find a replacement ac adaptor for the laptop. if you need me to see something, send it to gmail. i can check that at school.
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December 6th, 2008


07:23 pm - très epic
http://www.playauditorium.com/

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December 2nd, 2008


03:47 pm - almost done
last week of classes before finals. looks like i get done relatively early this year, home by the 18th.

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November 22nd, 2008


10:43 pm - closest book meme
sure, why not.

* Grab the nearest book.
* Open it to page 56.
* Find the fifth sentence.
* Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
* Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.


Page 56 doesn't have five sentences so, this is from page 57.

"While anarchy can often turn a humdrum weekend into something unforgettable, eventually the mob must be kept from stealing the conch and killing Piggy."

America (the book)
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