I'm insane

I agreed to adopt 70 packages from kmr. Most of them are unlikely to ever get updated again, but just rebuilding them will already take quite a while.

I'm still uncertain if I should go to LSM2005 or Debconf-5, I'm leaning towards LSM2005 because it is in car-range and I would like to meet the other lispers. But their website is rather bad... On the other hand: Helsinki is rather nice...

fosdem 2005

I could manage to catch a few debian talks at fosdem today. As traditional Matteo had a bad evening and just after I left there was another little crisis. Still I managed to see 'Porting to Debian GNU variants: Targetting POSIX instead of GNU/Linux' which was interesting to see how people deal with a slightly broken standard that is not ANSI X3J13. Then the composition of the audience changed for 'The Debian Women Project'. It was a nice talk that gave some interesting ideas and opinions about a movement that seems to deserve my full support. Then came 'Free as in DFSG: an exploration of Debian's views on free software'. I actually feared this talk, maybe due to the harshness of debian-legal. But in the end it turned out that in real life debian developers seem less incendiary then in email and I think a fairly balanced view was presented. This gives me some degree of hope that we will exit the current issues without traumatic events.
Then I joined an old colleague for a talk about creating a stable 2.6 kernel from Alan Cox. This was an interesting talk, not only because he is a good speaker and liked the subject, but mainly because it confirmed my general idea that the new 2.6.x kernels are not for general consumption anymore. The kernel developers depend on the fact that most people will use kernels from distributions. This is not good as it will increase the fragmentation of the kernel. It also means that the debian-kernel group is getting more and more important.

How low can we go?

After restoring the backup the portable will not go on the network with the ethernet connection. The wifi works. Ethernet not. Note that the broken portable was fixed by replacing the motherboard.
Now can anyone tell me why I spend hours fixing this problem?
Hint: I use MAC address filtering.
Hint: the ethernet interface is on the motherboard.
Sigh.

Fixed problems day

The thinkpad got repaired. It still does not see the PCMCIA cards I insert, but at least the DVD works again.
Yesterday I had to restore a file for my wife and the firewire drive also br0ke in XP. So I searched and on this page was a discussion of this bug. It seems the PL3507 controller has a history of "issues". In XP you get a delayed write failure. In Linux just tries to reset the drive and fails. At this location there is an updated firmware (it can also be found at the site of the manufacturer, but that is a JavaScript hell).
Anyway I updated the firmware and now it "just works"! :-)
Now to restore the thinkpad from my backups...

Useful iso 8601 tool

When trying to convert people to start using ISO 8601 a very useful tool in the ISO 8601 implementation page that lists code for a myriad of languages.

sync ; sync ; sync

I managed to get a picture of me in the blogger.com profile, so if you want to scare small children you know where to look :-).

I should decide to what conference I try to go this summer. There is debconf 5 in Helsinki (note the title "See you in hel") which is July 10 to 17. Or I could go to LSM 2005 which is in Dijon (much closer) and from July 5 to 9 and is in general a hotbed of Common Lisp activity. I'll wait a little more until the programms pan out, but after the Danish disaster of last year I doubt I can convice my wife to go to Helsinki. She wants Calabria :-).

I made almost no progress with the lazy memory allocation in sbcl. I think I know where the problem is, but I don't have enough time to check it out :-(. Also I wonder why nobody seems to care about this problem. What do you do on a 64 bit machine, do you start by allocating 2**41 bytes? Does the OS permit this? What does root think of this? Or do you want to have to select at startup how large your image might become? If not, you need lazy allocation.

Found the USB problem

I've been having USB problems with my own kernels recently. Now I found why. If you cannot use your USB memory stick, in my case my Iomega stick with 2.6.* and you get the message "uba: device 9 capacity nsec 0 bsize 512". It could be because you enabled BLK_DEV_UB. If you do the ub driver kicks in and it seems to dislike memory sticks with avengence. The debian images have this disabled already.

Now I only need to find out why my configuration causes the transfer to the PL3507-based 1394 bridge doesn't work my my kernel and does with the debian image. Sigh.