Category: Uncategorized

My Thinkpad X200s is playing up, in that it will no longer suspend and sometimes the wireless stops working until I reboot. The suspend issue looks like an issue with the Thinkpad TPM, but that’s meant to be resolved, and I could have sworn it was previously working while I was still running this kernel.

I checked the workaround was enabled (it is). Blacklisting the modules or disabling the Security Chip in the BIOS causes it to sleep, but not wake up. Someone suggested upgrading the BIOS firmware, but I’ve always been wary of doing this, I’ve bricked machines before.

Anyway so that I can put some computation that suspends in my bag, I installed Fedora 15 on the Dell Inspiron Mini 1012 I have. The machine itself is a little slow, but GNOME Shell runs pretty well. The trackpad drivers have improved too. Less weird jumping around and two finger scrolling.

Managed to crash the Fedora installer twice, it crashes when it tries to delete extended DOS partitions (automatically or manually). Had to delete my old Meego-created partition tables by hand for it to work.

It seems there are no utilities around to localise currency (correct me if I’m wrong, I’m writing in C), so I’m having to write my own. Regardless of the system localisation, I want to be able to refer to a currency (for which I have the currency code) in a localised way.

Thus, what I’m looking for is for your 3-letter currency code, how do you refer to positive and negative numbers? For example, in AUD it would be “$1.25” and “−$1.25”.

My former employer, Fugro Seismic Imaging, is looking for new R&D staff for their office in Perth, Western Australia.

The team there is approximately half a dozen people, generally open-source experienced, who are primarily developing graphical front ends to geophysics applications (there’s also some other stuff, in general it’s pretty cool). You’ll almost certainly have to know C. Knowing any of C++, Python, Perl, GTK+, Qt or Fortran also a benefit. You don’t have to know any geophysics, but knowing a bit of maths and physics helps. You’ll easily pick up what you don’t know as you go along.

Pay and conditions are very good. FSI have previously provided sponsored work visas for skilled applicants looking to work in Australia.

If you’re interested, send your CV to the chief geophysicist, Kelly Beauglehole.

Thought I’d share some useful git aliases with people. These can go in your ~/.gitconfig.

[alias]
    branch-name = !git branch --no-color 2> /dev/null | sed -e '/^[^*]/d' -e 's/* \\(.*\\)/\\1/'
    export-branch = !git format-patch --stdout $1 > ~/Desktop/`git branch-name`.diff

git branch-name (based on an idea from Jon Maddox) will print the name of your current working branch. For example:

[danni@adelie empathy]$ git branch-name 
ft-warning-644062

This can then be used to create another alias, git export-branch which will export the current branch from the named branchpoint to a format-patch called ~/Desktop/branchname.diff. For example:

[danni@adelie empathy]$ git export-branch gnome-2-34
[danni@adelie empathy]$ ls ~/Desktop/*.diff
/home/danni/Desktop/ft-warning-644062.diff

Update: thanks to David in the comments for a much more reliable approach to get the branch-name:

branch-name = !git for-each-ref --format='%(refname:short)' `git symbolic-ref HEAD`

Due to tiredness with Firefox eating all my memory, getting out-of-memory killed for eating all of my memory, getting kind of slow (probably because it ate all of my memory) and an annoying layout bug in one website (which strangely didn’t appear on any other machine using Firefox except mine); I have decided to give Chromium a go (also, Melbourne is currently full of Google Chrome ads, this may have contributed to my decision).

Initial niggle was that it doesn’t seem to have a concept of minimum font size exposed in the UI. You can edit a config file to solve this, which is significantly less annoying than the extension that resizes your page 5 seconds after it loads.

Most of the extensions I use are available for Chrome, except I haven’t found an analogue for the very useful highlighter extension.

Got back from linux.conf.au on Saturday afternoon. Sore and tired. Here is a brief roundup of my conference.

Monday

Spent the day at the Haecksen mini-conference. Gave my talk on the GNOME Outreach Programme for Women (yes, I will upload either my notes, or link to the video when it appears). Favourite talks for the day were Noírín’s on open source disaster and emergency management software and Donna’s. [You can learn about and contribute to Donna’s campaign to Digitise the Dawn here.]

Went to the Geek Girl Dinner in the evening. There was a paper plane competition. My plane performed woefully poorly.

Tuesday

I didn’t actually make it to the conference on Tuesday, because I spent the entire morning in a brainstorming meeting, which didn’t finish until after lunch. I decided to use the rest of the day to visit a friend.

I would have liked to have heard about Publican, the publishing tool Redhat use for their documentation. I wonder if it could be adapted to publish the Telepathy book.

Wednesday

The keynote talked about the IPv4 address exhaustion. Very doom and gloom. I can’t help but feel in the immediate term this will mostly affect people in the developing world. Maybe the take-away point is buy your iPhone now, while it can still be allocated an IP address.

Learnt about Intel’s new GLSL compiler, multi-core scalability in ext4 (interesting take away points for multithreaded userspace programming too), and how technical documentation is written at Redhat. Also attended two X/graphics talks. These mostly seemed focused on history, not really a clear vision of what happens next.

The Professional Delegates Networking Session (at the Maritime Museum) was enjoyable. Giant woks for cooking noodles. Surprise Australia Day fireworks. I didn’t go on any of the boats.

Thursday

Keynote was on the history of sendmail. I have to admit, I don’t really know if the history of projects is that interesting for a keynote address. I’d rather know what the future was going to look like. Learned that the keynote speaker and I are going to appear in the same book.

Advanced C Coding was actually just a show off of CCAN and I didn’t actually learn any new coding tricks. I went to Dave Airlie’s talk, but due to tiredness (did I mention I was staying with a one-year-old?), I can’t tell you what it actually contained.

Made a last minute decision to go to the LBGT lunch, this turned out to be a planning disaster that involved a 20 minute, uphill walk in the sun. It ran over, cutting into the next sessions. Between this, existing tiredness and now exhaustion, ended up writing the rest of the afternoon off and going back to the flat to nap prior to the dinner.

The Penguin Dinner was quite enjoyable. The vegan option was really tasty (entrée, main, dessert). I want to try and recreate the entrée.

Friday

Friday’s keynote was the disappointing one I mentioned earlier. Take away point is that Facebook is evil because it keeps your data locked up and they know all about your social network. Not sure how using an open system to store your social network would somehow prevent people who run servers from mining information from it.

Wanted to see Carol Smith’s talk, but the room had packed out by the time we got there. Sarah Sharp’s talk on open source gardening was probably a highlight of the conference for me. Part of me wants to replicate her garden watering system, although I think first I might still try my low-tech solution. The part of Tridge’s talk on reverse engineering USB device drivers was quite interesting.

~

Flew home Saturday morning, so I didn’t see any of the open day.

Was amused to learn that next year’s conference is in Ballarat. I wonder how some people are going to feel about landing in Melbourne, then having to take a bus to Southern Cross train station and then a train to Ballarat (Metlink informs me the total trip takes 2-2.5h).

Overall I had an enjoyable week, but an exhausting one. I enjoyed the company of the people I was staying with. I met some new people, who were pretty cool. I talked about rollerderby and the queerness of different shoes. Was really impressed by the Brisbane busway system. Helped someone debug telepathy-gabble.

Thanks as always to Collabora (my employer) for letting me go 🙂

The linux.conf.au anti-harassment policy states:

Harassment includes:

• sexual images in public spaces

Yet Friday morning’s keynote, Mark Pesce, progressively violated this policy, starting with comic sexual images and culminating with a soft-core, lesbian bondage photograph.

Sorry, a “PG-13” rating does not excuse this behaviour. Yes they were wearing lingerie, it’s still pornographic. And for those who are going to continue to insist it wasn’t: the porny presso bingo card (via Skud).

Update: the chief linux.conf.au organiser made an apology for this morning’s keynote during the closing ceremony.

Perhaps someone can help me out here.

In January I switched from Optus to Virgin Mobile on my mobile phone. Optus 3G on my phone tended to work quite reliably, but on Virgin it tends to get backed up or just drop my packets from time to time. Tracerouting (via mtr) seems to suggest it’s a problem with Optus’ IP network¹, where it will begin to drop packets between two routers on that network.

Googling comes up with other people complaining about this on Whirlpool, but nothing that looks like a solution. Has anyone else run into this? If so, how did you resolve it?

[1] Even though Virgin Mobile is carried on Optus’ phone network, I was surprised to see IP addresses from Optus’ IP network.

I am going to be in Brisbane next week for linux.conf.au (thankfully the town didn’t flood as badly as some places).

I’m speaking at the Haecksen miniconf on Monday morning at 11.55 (just before lunch) on the GNOME Outreach Programme for Women.

Linux.conf.au marks the second anniversary of my working for Collabora, who are also paying for me to go.

You might have seen the t-shirts around, there are quite a few (twenty!) Collaborans at GUADEC this year.

Like a game of bingo, see if you can spot them all: Gustavo Noronha, Travis Reitter, Youness Alaoui, Felix Kaser, Guillaume Desmottes, Nicolas Dufresne, Jonathon Jongsma, Olivier Le Thanh Duong, Eitan Isaacson, Marco Barisione, Tomeu Vizoso, Cosimo Cecchi, Olivier Crête, Danielle Madeley, Sjoerd Simons, Rodrigo Novo, Senko Rašić, Thomas Thurman, Philip Withnall and Louis-Francis Ratté-Boulianne.

There are also all twelve members of Collabora Multimedia here.

Collabora is hosting a beach party on Thursday, starting from 7pm. Word on the street says there will also be ninja t-shirts available at some point.