Colin Charles Agenda

Last few days (probably week+) have been mighty interesting. I’ve been doing everything on OS X on hermione. Its not a screamer, and I’ve seen OS X slow down to a crawl too, with heavy swapping eventually (well, 384MB of RAM isn’t anything to shout about). Having two screens, has certainly made me more productive I think - enjoying every bit of spread resolution so much so I think I might need to get another LCD screen or something. Only thing running on Linux for production use is Evolution, which I’ve got to find the time/energy to fix to Thunderbird (which seemed to have decided after the last OOM error, it would remove some of my follow-up entries).

But its not all been a bed of roses. Learning curve exists, I filed my first Apple bug today, at #4270650 - Podcast download schedule should not be fixed, instead it should allow a variance. Not having a public Bugzilla, is annoying. And the bugzilla report format is so much more intuitive (rather than me having to enter all the fields manually, like Summary, Description, etc.)

And today, Apple replied. Saying it was a known bug, and they’re looking into it. And yesterday, I got myself my new screamer, with 1.5gb of RAM… Sure, I didn’t get the hard disk upgrade I wanted, but thats okay for the moment. I’m happy to announce that some snapshot of rawhide does install on this machine, so yeah, Fedora can run on the latest iBook G4’s.

And looking at more great marketing ideas, MySQL is giving away iPod Nano’s or even trips to the MySQL conference, all for filing useful, reproducible bugs. This is something I definitely want to talk about for Fedora Marketing (re BugZappers, which has taken a bit of a chill since Jack’s at school).

Oh, caught Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo and The Dukes of Hazzard over the weekend. All fun. Did the Melbourne Showgrounds visit, and the Tulip Festival visit last week (pictures up on Flickr later…)

• Some cool Nautilus file manager scripts and GNOME Power User Tools. When time permits, or if someone else is interested, these should really get packaged for Extras. Also, posting to flickr using Nautilus is nifty. A useful resource is the GNOME ISV Guide - with tools like Sabayon, and more gconf customisations, I can see this being a very, very useful resource.
• San Francisco was the usual fun. Oakland was far out, but go BART. We toured the Mission District on Wednesday, and tried to run a tour on Thursday for various sites in San Francisco. Seeing Fisherman’s Wharf after about eleven years, things don’t seem to have changed. Topic is from the fortune cookie that I kept.
• The craze with Harry Potter is out. I pre-ordered the last book, and till today, a year later, still haven’t read it. So I’ll have to marathon the two at some stage. So, its not only churches that don’t like you reading HP, its also rms.
• Finally catching up with mail (thanks to the rain, humidity and heat outside), and there’s some new things in Maemo land. For starters, python 2.4 is now available. And there’s also a MaemoWiki. Also, since Fedora is big on Eclipse, there is a Laika Scratchbox plugin available. While I haven’t tried making a package, I’m unsure if it will work on Fedora or not without a Debian chroot or something.
• At the Desktop Developers Conference 2005 I learnt a few new things - how to use inotify with gamin (its now in rawhide kernels too), Eclipse Trader might be useful for stock trading, Unicode is important, Rasterman believes that “Bling bling is much more important than functionality”, and Hubert has been lied to, many a time :) More to the point, I learnt more about digital imaging, and its something that’s of interest lately (I want my RAW working, and cataloging, backing up, and manipulation via The GIMP, etc.).
• Glad to see its not just dwmw2 or me running FC-4 on the Pegasos II. We clearly need a new yaboot (basically with svenl’s patches), and we don’t have anaconda working (neither does ydl), and I definitely need to update the fedora ppc document.

• Unfazed, IBM pumps Power chip program.
• I hope I don’t become boozie (yes, watch One Tree Hill and you’ll understand that term). Ticked off and coffee tumbler became well, a tumbler.
• I kickstarted Fedora Marketing. Brain dump. Mailing list. Greg re-jigged Fedora LiveCD - lets try for something before FC-5.
• I can understand jwz’s switch. OS X is truly beautiful. And jbj promises RPM too. Sure I like Evolution for mail, but most of everything else simply just works on the Mac.
• Mac mini for Fedora Core 4 warning - you need to use linux video=ofonly during bootup. Using radeon (the default) will blow up in your face. This also means, for the xorg.conf, you want to use “fbdev” rather than “radeon”. Everything else, the Installing Fedora Core on the Mac mini article still apply.
• Caught Hitch and The Pacifier. Both were actually quite hilarious.
• Inconsistency detected by ld.so: rtld.c: 1192: dl_main: Assertion `(void *) ph->p_vaddr == _rtld_local._dl_sysinfo_dso’ failed! - thats what I get when trying to run scratchbox. So no Maemo on FC-4 for me, yet.

So, the venerable Steve Jobs said Apple is switching to Intel from PowerPC, which he summed up nicely: “Remember, you all develop on this platform not because of the underlying architecture, but because OS X is just so good”. Okay, that might’ve just been a little paraphrased, but the audience in general were all very gusto.

He confirmed that OS X has always been running on x86 without any issue. It was designed to be cross platform from the start (this can more or less be viewed as the case thanks to Darwin x86). But of core importance is that folk need to use XCode if they want to get their OS X working on both PPC and Intel; otherwise this wonderful Universal Binary support will not exist. And then, for apps that still require PPC to run (and are not Universal Binaries), there’s Rosetta, which will translate the PPC instructions to x86, on the fly without performance drop.

Reasoning is units for performance per watt, for the future roadmap. In 2006, Intel is poised to give 70 units/watt, while PowerPC will give only 15 units/watt. Turns out he mentions nothing about cooling, the use of fans, etc. What about Altivec? Or even how the ads and performance benchmarks constantly used to berate similar software running on x86 (Photoshop performance comes to mind - at least 50% faster on a Mac and what not). A lot remain unanswered currently, but I guess more will unfold over the week.

Where does this leave Linux PPC? Besides IBM or Pegasos hardware, Apple wants the transition to happen by 2007; it however should launch its first Intel-based computer by next year. Does this also mean that I can buy the next version of OS X and run it on any run-off-the-mill x86? Mmrm

• I tried to bake a chocolate banana cake on Sunday. Twice. Both were failures. First was mush, second was hard as a rock. Butter related failures, I think. Todays two durian cakes turned out okay, with the tops being a little burnt.
• 10 weeks of Alpha is over, and I graduated from that, quite gladly. In my little testimonial, I mentioned how crazy the last ten weeks of life have been, but how I’m still having an inkling to not lose faith, which is surprising seeing the crap that’s landed on me. I wished everyone else attending the next session to hopefully, have a better time.
• Sent mom off yesterday. End of the month of parents being around. I actually feel sad. Oh well, departure halls tend to do that to you, maybe.
• mpackage.org has been setup. Now all we need is a team. Pix has done all the legwork of sorting out the web/mail/lists. Dexter Ang is the hero that registered the domain. It seems to be sensible that we have: build system, svn/cvs (some form of revision control) and less repositories, so talking to Anvil (okay, Dams) and it’d seem that we should have an “mpackage team”, but still get heavy lifting distributed. mock looks like what we need to use for a distributed build system. I’ve started asking folk at #mono if anyone’s into Fedora packaging, next to target the mono lists… Want to make it clear this is all for Fedora first - I’m hoping for more contributors, etc. to crop up for RHEL/Centos/etc… if possible. Seems a time/contributor issue is what keeps livna only building for Fedora as well.
• Fedora Marketing next. Its not low hanging fruit anymore. Its happening, and its real. Now to define it a lot further. Ideas appreciated, and we do have a list - fedora-marketing-list@redhat.com. We really ought to work hard for the next 6 days, as Debian and Fedora get released on the same day. Whoote!
• MyOSS Magazine Edition 2 is out. I’m really pleased with how Ow has taken on the task, pretty much by himself, to make this a great mag. So go read it. mag.my-opensource.org
• Rawhide’s kernel from today still hates the Mac mini framebuffer. And parted still doesn’t like my disk on the iBook G3. For future reference, ./pdisk -l /dev/hda will give you useful output. FWIW, I think we need to package pdisk (as fdisk on ppc is not of any use).

Groan. The 20050526 rawhide PPC tree is misbehaving. iBook g3 doesn’t seem to want to get installed - parted keeps on whinging at me (#159047). Which really seems to have been the 2nd time such an issue appeared - dkl encountered one about two weeks back too. On the Mac mini, I’m faced with the screen just going blank a little after yaboot gets kernel parameters (#159050. Coming so close to release time, I’m worried… Paul’s taken a stab at the inclusion for PPC release notes - all looking good.

So, Trinity College dumped Debian for a bunch of G5’s and Tiger. And the part that saddens me is that they won’t be using OpenOffice.org on OS X.

I have taken an affinity to financial software, and Linux offerings. Xinvest will not compile with GCC4 (it could do with some cleanups). Currency_Converter is a useful shell script, that needs to be patched to remove annoying IRC relation, and it becomes a nice console app afterward. Couldn’t get getquotes to work as Finance::YahooQuote seemed to fail a test with my rawhide snapshot. phpfin and essential budget seem like candidates for review; next up is mastering GNUCash.

So here’s my dilemma. I’m downloaded the DVD image for OS X Tiger (because my mailing still hasn’t arrived). I do not have a DVD burner. Anywhere. Now, how can I install this over the network? Target disk mode will not be useful for me, but NetRestore might help, except I need a generic OS X installation around somewhere (it seems to suggest 10.4, Tiger, which I don’t have!). If this was Fedora, I could just burn the boot.iso, and loopback mount the image! Any Mac heads know a solution? I don’t mind an ugly OF based solution either; except I can’t boot the dmg via tftpboot? Update: The mailing arrived. Of course, I decided to do a nice clean reinstallation, so I repartitioned. Guess what? No sight of 10.3 on disk means 10.4 won’t install. Urgh, nowhere on the DVD does it say “upgrade”.

Looked at some Extras failures, after Jeremy kicked off a rebuild. Most of the PPC related ones have attached logs to them now, and some made it to a post-it note as “solving hopefuls”. Low hanging fruit might best be ExclusiveArch’ed. Also noticing a lot of PPC related inquiries going to fedora-test-list, rather than fedora-ppc list - this needs to change! In other news, I’m playing around with the wiki for Supported Power PCs - i.e. whatever we support well, or we don’t support, should be listed here on a colloborative wiki page.

Was looking into buying a PDA - either a Tungsten E2 or some other offering from Palm. Now it looks like I’ll just wait, save up, and buy the Nokia 770, and get on with maemo. Its so nice to make sure you have something that always “just works” - not to say that Familiar isn’t just working at the moment (the upgrade from 0.72 was so welcome).

Bought a firewire cable today - the iBook G3 got Tiger installed via Firewire target disk mode. X11 can get installed that way too, but XCode2 wouldn’t. Weirdness. Got nice e-mail from the asiasource folk, and there’s the AsiaSource booklet, written by Frederick Noronha thats a worthy read as well.

• Some shell magic (courtesy of mkj, a while ago): sed ’s/[^,]//g’ matrix - that counts all the commas in a line to see if they match up. Real useful for matrices in Mathlab.
• I can understand davej’s issues with heat in the room… mine’s no better, and its almost approaching winter; pray tell what I do during summer!
• Let’s all support our man Rex, in saying that not publishing a SPEC file is a GPL violation. The thread for reference.
• Apple looking at Intel chips? Now that’s absolute crack. I hope this isn’t the crap they announce at WWDC2005. What else will I run Linux/ppc on, anymore? Big iron IBM hardware? Pfft.
• Eugene came down from Brisbane last night (Monday). Ended up meeting up with Mark, Dylan, Chu, Anne, having some good nasi lemak and some wonderful Max Brenner chocolate later. As always, its fun to have a chit-chat with the rest of #bangsar, even if its only the Melbourne chapter that managed to meet up :P
• Dinner. Very awkward, very silent, what joy. *must stop torturing self*
• I’m going to be writing the FC-4 article thing, similar to what we did for FC-3. Anything pressing, now would be a good time to e-mail suggestions down my way. I know the docs team already sent a semi-snippet of what’s important for the next article.