Present Perfect

brain loss Had a big set of yet-to-commit diary entries but lost it in my laptop's upgrade. sigh :)

Tango

A few months ago my tango partner asked me to perform with her in some college show they were doing. At the time I said yes without thinking too much about it. Afterwards, I started regretting this as it meant we had to practice a lot and put together a choreography all by ourselves.

Two weeks ago though we performed it three times and I must say it felt pretty good to be able to dance well on stage in front of a few hundred people. It's a new experience, but definitely one I wouldn't mind doing over.

Well, we promptly did last weekend at a demonstration of the dance school, but that was with ten other couples, so it wasn't nearly as exhilarating :)

Red Hat Linux 9

I ended up getting fed a reviewer's copy by a friend a week or two before the release. I tested it a little back then, but didn't have much free time to really try it out. At this moment I've already upgraded my laptop to the final Red Hat Linux 9 (which seemed to have a small set of packages upgraded from the review copy).

Well, it looks even nicer than 8.0. It's great to see both GStreamer and nautilus-media included ! I don't know how to put the feeling in words, but it feels good to say the least. It also feels bad because people will probably find bugs in it now.

new router

To cut down on our electricity bill, which is *huge*, Kristof bought a new second-hand PC to serve as both firewall, development server, backup server and kitchen music machine. It's a Duron 800 Mhz with 256 MB ram and 20 GB disk, for less than 300 Euro. Great bargain. We quickly fitted it with a 80 GB disk we had lying around and I went on to configure the machine, migrating configuration stuff from the two previous machines.

crossroad

While installing this machine, I decided to rebuild crossroad using mach for Red Hat 9. Crossroad is a small perl system I hacked up that allows you to easily generate combined sets of iptables rules which is handy when you're dealing with multiple interfaces or multiple port rules and so on.

One nice thing about it is that it integrates smoothly into Red Hat using standard service scripts.

As a by-product of installing it, I fixed a few small bugs (see below) in crossroad as a result, and the new 0.1.2 version can be downloaded if you're interested.

autoconf

The resulting crossroad RPM that I first built had a bad crossroad script because configure didn't find the iptables and sysctl binaries. I had this entry in configure.in:

 AC_PATH_PROG(IPTABLES, iptables, no, $PATH:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin) 

which is pretty much identical to the example in the info pages, save for the brackets. Digging through the resulting configure script, I noticed that the last argument was used as the argument to a for loop. So I replaced the colons with spaces and it works.

I was pretty sure this used to work before, so I mailed the address in the info page and got a confirmation that something was wrong since 2.49 in half an hour. It's an uneasy feeling when you find out that tools you rely on to always magically work pull out the rug from underneath your feet.

fdisk labels

After rebooting this new server, things started to act really weird. The wrong partitions got mounted, /home was gone, wrong swap partition, ... I scratched my head again for a few minutes, because I was pretty sure it was loading the newly installed system.

Then I figured out that it managed to boot from the right partition, but then mounted LABEL=/ and LABEL=/boot, which were in parts served from the OTHER hard disk I put in the machine, which contained an old installation.

Running df confirmed that I had been running partitions from /dev/hdb, while a lot of my system had in fact been loaded from /dev/hda (this probably happens right before the root device remount as read-write)

This is not the first time I got bitten by fdisk labels. I understand why they could be useful for new users, but whenever you try to do something slightly more complex they fail spectacularly.

GStreamer

Ronald is putting together a stable release, 0.6.1. I feel bad for not being able to help out much at this point due to lack of time because of work ... And I also feel bad about being a pain in the butt by commenting on some of the things that happen that probably shouldn't happen. The sort of stuff you learn to avoid after doing a few releases of things. It's like seeing somebody else take care of your baby I guess. Not that GStreamer is my baby, but I've come to grow attached to being responsible for having good releases.

On the plus side, both my talk and Ronald's talks for GUADEC got accepted. I need to get started on writing the actual code I want to show ...

Brighton

Going to the (I've been told) lovely coast city Brighton in the UK. wardv is living there now and we're going over there with a bunch of friends and visit him. Four days without computers, woo !

brain loss Had a big set of yet-to-commit diary entries but lost it in my laptop's upgrade. sigh :) Tango A few months ago my tango partner asked me to...