mkp's blog 2007

Beautiful Evidence

Thu, 27 Dec 2007 00:00:00 EDT

Vanessa gave me a wonderful Xmas present this year: The 4-book Edward Tufte set.

I inhaled Beautiful Evidence in less than a day. Awesome!

I'm a ConVeRt

Wed, 05 Dec 2007 00:00:00 EDT

I recently wrote an article on data integrity for an enterprise magazine. For almost two decades I have been using LaTeX for my "word processing" needs. However, this time I needed a bit more control over the layout.

I know most of the quirks in LaTeX by now. But it's somewhat frustrating that the project seems to have stalled. So I decided to check out ConTeXt which positions itself somewhere between raw TeX and LaTeX.

ConTeXt turned out to be quite a bit heavier to deal with in terms of document setup and design. But in the end I saved a ton of time that I would have otherwise spent working around LaTeX' deficiencies in multi-column handling and floats. And flow charts were a breeze.

So, yes. I'm a ConVeRt!

Norleans

Thu, 15 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EDT

Just got back from the SNIA Technical Symposium in New Orleans where we had the kickoff meeting for the Data Integrity Task Force.

I hadn't been to the Big Easy for almost 9 years and I have to say the change was astounding. Didn't really know what to expect after Katrina, but amazingly the place had really been cleaned up. I felt safe no matter where I went and the streets were much cleaner. A major downside was that my hotel was right on Bourbon St. and the karaoke bars kept me awake all night.

The biggest disappointment was the jazz. Or rather complete lack thereof. There was no jazz to be heard anywhere. I got 60 seconds of exposure walking past Preservation Hall. And that was it! Lame! I didn't have time to hit Frenchman St. on this trip but I sincerely hope something cool was happening there...

Another Tribute

Fri, 09 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EDT

Canadian music legend and fabulous jazz organist Doug Riley passed away in August. To pay tribute to the man and his music we had Jake Langley in town for a couple of shows at Upstairs.

POW!

Thu, 08 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EDT

I received a prototype disk array for my lab this week. The array sucks so much power I had to get a separate circuit put in. And it looked like the thing would outjuice the APC MasterSwitch 7900 power relays I use to control my equipment. It also seemed like a waste to use an 8-port relay to control a single device. So it was time to revive my old Blackbox Pow-R-Switch relay which has 3 switched 10A @ 120V ports.

Way back during my tenure at Linuxcare I wrote a program to control the PSS' highly arcane interface. A quick look at the program revealed it to be very broken. And instead of fixing it, I wrote a script to control the relay using powerman. This way the PRS integrates seamlessly in my existing lab infrastructure. The powerman script is available here: prs.dev.

Bump City

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EDT

Vanessa, Thierry and I drove to Ottawa to hear Tower of Power. Same venue as 4 years ago and pretty much the same lineup. Man, 40 years and those guys still got it...

Another Jimmy Smith Tribute

Fri, 26 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EDT

Last night we did a repeat of last year's Tribute to Jimmy Smith with the Altsys Jazz Orchestra. Vanessa shot some authentic footage of me blowing on The Preacher.

Harvest

Mon, 22 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EDT

It's awfully nice to have a vegetable garden...

Soekris net5501 and Disk DMA

Thu, 11 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EDT

Upgrading my main development server is always a challenge because the machine also controls my lab infrastructure (power relays, console server). Every time I upgrade the kernel I need to muck with out-of-kernel serial drivers. Back in May I made my life easier by fixing the Digi Edgeport USB driver and submitting the changes upstream. But obviously it will take a while before the fix shows up in a the enterprise kernels. And I also have an 8-port PCI serial card with a driver that needs some serious love.

I have been using Soekris boxes for various things for many years and they've always been great and stable little wonders of engineering. In an attempt to decouple the console server functionality from my the build box I decided to buy a couple of net5501 boxes.

When the 5501's arrived I quickly loaded Linux and was very disappointed with performance. Despite a 500 MHz CPU with 512 MB RAM these boxes were crawling. Turns out the BIOS was broken and therefore IDE DMA did not work.

Being the impatient type I wrote a driver to work around the BIOS issues. The driver fits into the libata framework in later kernels. It has been submitted upstream and is also available here. Now the net5501 is nice and snappy!

Update: S�ren subsequently released a working BIOS for the net5501. But my driver is still valid because unlike pata_amd.c it uses correct timings.

Recently added to list of things I'll never do again

Thu, 09 Aug 2007 00:00:00 EDT

Item 2478: Laying brick patio.

After Hours

Fri, 06 Jul 2007 00:00:00 EDT

Jazz magically happens...

Return of the Danish BBQ

Mon, 02 Jul 2007 00:00:00 EDT

Muahahahahaha!

Ottawa Linux Symposium & Jazz Christmas

Thu, 28 Jun 2007 00:00:00 EDT

Vanessa went to Ottawa a few days for her dragon boat competition. And this week is the Ottawa Linux Symposium so I came down for a few days ago to participate in the discussions. Good to see Zach, Alice, Ryan and everybody else again.

On Tuesday night after the conference Vanessa and I went to see Toots Thielemans. Earlier this year we got Between a Smile and a Tear as a gift. It's a wonderful movie and it was great to see Toots perform live with Kenny Werner.

Tonight we went to see our good friend Dr. Smith perform at the festival. After the show we went out for dinner with him and his drummer, Anthony Pinciotti. We also brought Uncy Art along. Here he is, stylin' it with Anthony at the restaurant.

Tomorrow the jazz festival starts in Montreal and our nightly jam is on as always...

Terminal Tribulations - A case study in how not to develop software

Tue, 23 Jan 2007 00:00:00 EDT

Almost a year ago I opened a bug in bugzilla about how the (then) newly added close buttons on tabs severely impacted the usability of of the gnome-terminal. It is trivially easy to accidentally close a session when clicking on a tab to select it. *poof* Away goes your data.

Apparently it's more important to have the clickety user friendly close buttons on display than it is to fix a severe usability issue like that. And it appears to be the plan to eventually come up with some sort of heuristics to determine whether it's safe to close a tab or not. Meanwhile the users of the application will just have to suffer the consequences in the holy name of User Interface Guidelines.

Now that's an interesting software development methodology. Add the GUI button first. Solve any functional effects it may have on users of said application at some undetermined time in the future.

If I prioritized like that at work, I'd be out of a job!

I think it's great that the Gnome people are working user interface consistency. But it is a very immature development methodology to put interface consistency above user data safety.

There are several reasonable suggestions from many people posted in the bug ticket. There's a patch to remove the offending close buttons. And yet, today a new version of gnome-terminal was released. I'm glad to report that absolutely nothing has been done to alleviate the problem.

Thankfully I'm smart enough to patch the gnome-terminal I am running...

Digital Recorder Done Right

Sat, 20 Jan 2007 00:00:00 EDT

For many years it's been common practice for musicians to use a MiniDisc Walkman to record rehearsals, live performances, etc. When my old MD recorder died a few years ago I bought a new one. Which turned out to be a Hi-MD variant and consequently a veritable DRM nightmare.

First of all, despite being a USB device I could not transfer the recordings off of the MD player digitally. Yes, that's right. I recorded something using the analog microphone input and our friends at Sony still would not allow me to transfer my own performance off of the device digitally.

This obviously let to an outcry and eventually Sony laxed the DRM fascism and allowed analog recordings to be uploaded. Alas, their proprietary SonicStage Windows crapplication is required to do so. No Linux or Mac support. Wonderful. So I've been transferring my recordings to computer by way of sampling analog playback. Welcome to the digital media lifestyle!

The analog, realtime transfer means that I have a lot of recorded material from old shows lying around. Yesterday, I finally got around to transferring the recordings from Vanessa's CD release party. Those are two years old!

So I decided that the time had come to ritually sacrifice the Sony Hi-MD Walkman and get a digital recorder that didn't try to enforce braindead DRM schemes on my music. And obviously ease of use and Linux support would be great.

I read up on the various models on the market and ended up getting the Roland R-09 because:

it had gotten good reviews wrt. sound quality
it is small and compact
is has replacable batteries (unlike the M-Audio offering)
industry standard, readily available media (SD)
per-song selectable sound quality (MP3 and WAV)
Roland puts the full documentation online so you can look for caveats before you buy

But here comes the good part: There's no DRM crap. It looks like a standard USB drive. I can plug it into my Linux box using a regular USB cable (or insert the SD card in a reader). I can copy MP3 and WAV files off of it using standard commands. No proprietary protocols or tools needed. And here's what blew my mind: I could upgrade the firmware by putting a new firmware image on the SD card. No special upgrade application needed. That is fantastic!!!

I wish more manufacturers would make OS-agnostic devices like this. Yay, intelligent design! (Quite possibly the only time you'll ever hear me use that phrase).

Thanks to Roland for doing the right thing. And don't buy anything Sony. But you already knew that...

PS. My only gripe with this device is the lack of a Kensington security slot. It would be fantabulous if I could lock the recorder to the organ during the set breaks...

Dish Sorcery & Retro Gaming

Sat, 13 Jan 2007 00:00:00 EDT

My inlaws gave us the best Xmas pressie ever this year. Something I never thought I'd own. And something which I considered appliance extravaganza. But I am now a convert. I have seen the light! A dishwasher is a fantastic device and I absolutely love it! My kitchen hasn't been this orderly for years. And those who know me can testify that I run a tight ship...

Over 10 years ago I borrowed Simon the Sorcerer from my good friend Esben. However, I have never really had a machine capable of running it. Today, while waiting for cross compilers to build, I finally completed this fantastic game thanks to ScummVM. A few months ago I also relived my Amiga days through Monkey Island 1 & 2.

Meanwhile elsewhere Vanessa is having no end of fun playing Super Mario World...

Why don't anyone make witty adventures and cutesy platform games anymore?

Contemporary (oh, how I hate that word) games are lame. Who thought all this texture-mapped 3D crap was a good idea? Really. Come on! It looks like shit! When I want a high level of realism I leave the house! The outside looks much nicer than anything your 1GB NVidiot card can render.

Off to find Curse of Monkey Island on Ebay...

Happy New Year!

Mon, 01 Jan 2007 00:00:00 EDT

The last couple of months have been extremely busy. After the Jimmy Smith tribute we went to a family birtday in Edmonton. Then we put on a show with the great Oscar Stagnaro.

In early November Vanessa and I flew to Europe for a week of hard-earned vacation. We had two wonderful days in Amsterdam and then went to Denmark to celebrate my mom's 60th birthday.

My sister visited us for a week after we returned to Montreal. And when she headed for New York to visit a friend, Vanessa's sister came and stayed with us for a bit. So we've had a full house.

Meanwhile I've been extremely busy with work. It's great to be in a crunch, and it's great to be busy!