I’ve been poking on and off at the idea of getting a second frontend for MythTV.  I already have my Mini-ITX all setup in my living room, but since I also have a TV in my bedroom as well, I’d like to get one in there as well.  The problem is, I’m not really sure if I’d use it, so I don’t know if I want to jump into spending the $600 to $800 to buy all the hardware.

I never thought I’d really use my other one either, and it actually wasn’t until a few months after I set it all up completely that I finally started playing with it.  That’s a bit of an odd thing about me — I enjoy the challenge and the possibility of setting something up more than using it.  Practicality really does take about the third or fourth position on the list of priorities when it comes to setting something up.  Filling a void is usually number one.

Since this idea costs a lot of money, and it’s not something I can throw together lightly, I want to experiment a bit first, and see if I’ll ever actually use the thing before committing.  My first frontend actually came together quite by accident — I had both the motherboard and the HTPC case, but for some reason I had it in my mind that they would never work together because of the cabling or something.  One day it dawned on me that maybe I should actually try, and when I did, it came together great, and I’ve been using it ever since.

Interestingly enough, though, once I got it working, I still wasn’t interested in playing with it … something was always missing.  But since I got my main objective complete, I was happy anyway.  It wasn’t until a few weeks later that I took a closer look at what was stopping me from using it, and I realized it was all the navigation issues that I had with mythvideo, which I patched.  Now I use it on a regular basis — it’s great to have a lot of media on demand and nicely categorized and accessible.  It’s still not perfect, but at least now it’s more of a software issue than hardware.

I actually like the setup so much, in fact, that I’m thinking about cancelling my cable TV altogether and just watching stuff from my library.  That kind of reinforces the idea of getting a second frontend, though.

So, the idea I have so far is to find a cheap frontend that I can play with to see if having a second frontend is even worth all the hassle.  That’s easy enough … it’ll cost me less money, and while it won’t be elegant, I’ll at least be able to see if it’s something I’d actually use or if I’m just looking for a project to play with.

I also have some spare parts that I can put things together, so that makes things helpful.  Unfortunately, I also have the kiss of death whenever it comes to hardware, and everything I touch inexplicably stops working sooner or later for some reason.  I don’t know why, but apparently it works doubly effective when it comes to sound cards.  The onboard sound on my Mini-ITX board died, and I have no idea why.  Well, no idea other than it’s a VIA chipset.  There’s room for one PCI slot, so I put an older SoundBlaster in there, which works great.  I’d much rather have that slot open to use something else …. say, a PCI nvidia VGA card that’d put out a much better picture than the cheap VIA one, but whatever.

I have an extra desktop, which is an old ASUS amd64 motherboard with an nvidia chipset that has worked really well for me.  In fact, I think it was the first 64-bit computer I put together way back in the day.  Somehow, the onboard audio died on this one too.  I have no idea how it happened here, either.  I found a computer store nearby my house that sells used computer parts, so I went there and found an old PCI sound card for only $10.  I bought that, figuring that the older it is, the better it would be supported in Linux.  My bad luck paid me a visit again though, and I managed to find one of the few cards that ALSA never supported.  Whoops.  So now I’m back to square one when it comes to audio.

I could try buying another PCI card, or I can try and find a USB sound device instead.  I’m a bit nervous about those, as I worry that something might happen where either ALSA has issues with it or there is just some small latency that would drive me insane.  Plus, I’m factoring in even more money to support an old piece of hardware, that could instead be invested towards a newer machine which I know would work flawlessly.

I went on Craigslist to see if I could find any cheap sound cards, and instead I found a cheap computer.  I picked up a Gateway Pentium3 for $20.  It has an Intel chipset (sound, VGA) and an onboard NIC (3com).

Ah, crap, I just realized something.  I thought I’d save all this money, after all … $20 for a whole new box instead of just a sound card, but I’m gonna have to get a new PCI video card with S-Video out, which is gonna cost me another $40 anyway.  Dangit.

Oh well, maybe I can use the box for a noisemaker for New Year’s.  The hard drive sounds like someone threw a cat in the washing machine.

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On Christmas Eve, a special present arrived from UPS: the HIS Radeon X1950 Pro I purchased on eBay. For the week prior to Christmas I removed the discrete nVidia 7600GT and ran off the integrated nVidia Geforce 8200 chip in my motherboard. Utter pain!

Drawing the screen, whether compositing was on or off, was painfully slow. Running any kind of game was out of the question. UT2004 was impossible. I managed to gain a bit of 2D speed by adding GlyphCache and InitialPixmapPlacement options to xorg.conf, but the desktop was still slow as molasses. Made using the computer quite painful. I can personally verify all the reports that nVidia's drivers for the Geforce 8000 series suck balls are quite true. The only thing I gained was being able to run the framebuffer console at 1440x900, my monitor's native resolution. The Geforce 8200 supports this framebuffer mode; the 7600GT only supports up to 1024x768. Not that it matters once Xorg is launched. Anyway, that was a miserable failure, so I was really happy when the HIS Radeon card showed up.

To be honest, I spent a few more bucks on it than I'd like. With shipping, it was about $51. But I figured this could be a tech toy for the next several months. After this fall's debacle with that HIS RadeonHD 4670, I picked up an older R500 card for half the cost, and this one is at the top of the line for its generation. It should have been an upgrade on my nVidia 7600GT even with the FOSS drivers. With all the documentation ATI has released, the developers of the FOSS driver (xf86-video-ati in my case) were able to get working 2D and 3D acceleration some months ago. So, emboldened by all the articles and forums posts over at Phoronix on the exciting things happening to the FOSS Radeon/Xorg/Mesa stack, I gave it a whirl.

The Good

1. There is indeed 3D acceleration. It's partly usable.
2. The 2D acceleration is the fastest of any chip I tried, faster than even the 7600GT with the proprietary driver. Once I switched from XAA to EXA acceleration, it was even faster!
3. Running at my monitor's native resolution at the framebuffer console is possible.
4. It was nice to be able to remove all proprietary kernel modules.
5. The whole desktop stack loads a bit faster, with less modesetting flicker.
6. 3D performance is actually better with the FOSS drivers than it is with ATI's Catalyst (fglrx) driver.

All the stuttering and lockups I'd run into with the RadeonHD 4670 card a few months ago? Yeah, I now believe those weren't hardware issues at all, but shitty, shitty fglrx driver code. I ran into the exact same thing when trying to use fglrx with the X1950 Pro. UT2004 was a constant stutter-fest. Absolutely unusable. When it comes to the proprietary vs. FOSS drivers for usability, there's no contest. FOSS wins across the board.

The Bad

1. Keywording 70 packages or so in package.keywords is a tedious chore. I was after the latest X-server, Radeon, and Mesa updates, which necessitated moving to ~arch for most of the required X packages.
2. I can't switch virtual terminals. The monitor shuts off if it's running on anything but VT7 once X is loaded. Apparently I'm not the only one to experience this issue with this card.
3. Poor 3D performance. I had to turn down all settings to minimums in UT2004, though I kept the resolution maxed. And even with all the minimizing, framerates grew pretty choppy throughout the game. Though the R500 performance has come a long way in the Radeon driver, it's still nowhere near the level offered by my 7600GT and the proprietary nVidia driver. I dunno if the RadeonHD driver would offer any improvement; it shares a large part of its codebase with the Radeon driver.
4. The "gotchas" involved with switching from the proprietary nVidia driver to anything else. If you switch from one proprietary driver to an open-source driver, or a proprietary (nVidia) to proprietary (ATI), you'll have to manually delete a few libGL files, as the symlinks get shattered in a way that eselect doesn't know how to handle. Let's hope that bug gets fixed soon.

The Ugly

1. The fan. I think the video card's fan may have been damaged in transit. I took out the card after just a week because the noise from the fan was so damned annoying. Now, it's not that it's particularly loud; it's not all that much louder than the system fans (which are pretty quiet even when at max). No, what really grated on me was the hideous noise character of this fan. I've asked for some help from folks in the know, so we'll see where this goes. Too bad too; it uses the same IceQ cooler that the 4670 uses, and the 4670's cooler was amazing. I couldn't hardly hear it no matter the load on the card. It had a smooth, pleasant noise character, blending right in with my system fans at low RPMs.
2. Running into the ALSA and OpenAL updates at the same time I was trying to upgrade my hardware and its drivers. ALSA cannot compile. Bug still not fixed.

The new OpenAL version seems to be from a different upstream, one who has no idea what he's doing as far as documentation goes. I had a working config file for .0.0.8, and 1.5.304 broke it. There's nothing but an extremely sparse sample config to suggest what to do. No matter what I put in the new .ini-style config file, I couldn't make it pick up my microphone. When it finally did seem to be able to identify plughw:0,0, it then petulantly died with the message that the requested buffer size was too large. Based on IRC logs I found via Google, upstream suggests that's ALSA's fault, not OpenAL. Whatever, man. All I know is that the previous versions of OpenAL have always worked regardless of my ALSA version. The new one doesn't. So I added 1.5 to package.mask and downgraded. Presto, working microphone. Just the thing for the upcoming UT2004 tourney.
3. Spending $50 just a week before ATI releases the long-awaited R600/R700 programming documentation. Yeah, I'm kicking myself a bit. I'm wishing that I still had that HIS RadeonHD 4670, something that should have better performance than even an X1950 Pro, no matter which drivers are used. But as it is, the FOSS driver devs don't really expect to get a working driver with any kind of OpenGL acceleration for another few months. Approximate feature parity with the R500's current driver codebase is expected in another 8 months or so. So it'd be a long wait, but one that I'm starting to think is worth it.
4. Did I mention the fan? I can't stick that thing back in the case until I've found a cheap solution to silencing the beast. It's not worth pouring a lot of money into it. I mean, if money is being tossed about, I may as well pick up a silent low- to mid-range 4000 card off NewEgg (again).

* * *

The X1950 Pro is currently stored in the closet. I'll dig it out again once I find some solutions to various bugs. Or when more 3D performance improvements are merged. I'd like to use it for UT2004 as well as general desktop work, but I need better 3D performance. And I need to fix that fan! Maybe I can find a decently priced Arctic Cooling Accelero S1 rev 2 someplace.

I'm also really looking forward to the coming KMS and GEM support for R500 cards, hopefully that will all be merged into the 2.6.29 kernel. Just a few more months . . .

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So I finally got around to updating my kernel on my thinkpad to 2.6.28, the latest release from kernel.org. I’ve seen nothing but good things so far.

• My media keys work again! Sound and Brightness keys are now actually working properly with Gnome. I don’t know if it is an exact result from the new kernel, but either way I am happy.

• I can still suspend. I usually screw up my kernels each release so I can’t suspend to ram or wake properly. WiFi seems the same, was hoping for some improvements but I can’t see any for now.

I still don’t see the added benefits of GEM yet. Perhaps some of my stuff is not upgraded to a new enough version to use GEM. I assume this because glxgears still says

Failed to initialize TTM buffer manager. Falling back to classic.

Meh, I guess I can wait awhile longer for my Intel graphics to stop sucking massively. I just wanna play starcraft but it craps out on “Blah Unsupported visual” even though an earlier X/mesa/driver combo worked.

I’m also pondering the venture into using EXT4 on my / partition. I don’t know how to proceed though. Does one run tune2fs from a livecd or can one do it on the running system? I assume livecd is required as one will need to fsck before mounting EXT4.

I plan to try EXT4 following this advice. Any comments or suggestions before I take to the leap to EXT4 would be appreciated.

I just wanted to let anyone who has not spotted it already know that I am going to Camp KDE in January! I am really looking forward to it and hope to be able to talk with lots of developers and users. I will be giving half of the talk about KDE and Distros. Specifically Gentoo, but also adding my viewpoint as a downstream consumer of KDE.

I am not officially talking about Avogadro, Kalzium and all the work I have been doing there. Unfortunately there was not enough time in the schedule to fit that in too. I would be very happy to talk to people about it, and will have slides, videos and screenshots with me. So, if you are interested and we can find a corner of a room let me know!

I am registered, have flights and a room booked. So much to do - I did all that weeks ago but only just found time to announce it.

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After our move to use Git and GitHub to host our repository I got thinking about ChangeLogs. Having a version controlled file, where you manually add details about what the version control system should be recording seems like it should not be necessary. I searched and couldn't find a solution that generates ChangeLogs in the style we prefer, which is a variant of the GNU ChangeLog.

So I wrote a quick Python script to try and accomplish this task. It may not be the prettiest Python code as I have never written more than five or six lines of Python before. ChangeLogs always seemed to be the biggest source of merge conflicts whenever we would work in branches, or just all be working at the same time. This is why I think it is necessary to automatically generate something like this that can be generated with source tarballs.

I called it gitlog2changelog.py and it has all of the basics down already. It may not be the most general script but works pretty well for us. I need to add some extra parsing for file creation/deletion so that we can add the + or - in front of the file names. Is there a general need for this? Are there better scripts out there that I dd not spot?

2008-12-29  Tim Vandermeersch <email@protected>

  ∗ libavogadro/src/pluginmanager.cpp: replace getenv(...) with
  QProcess::systemEnvironment()

  ∗ libavogadro/src/elementtranslate.h: Replace "A_DECL_EXPORT extern ..." with
  "A_EXPORT extern ..."

  ∗ CMakeLists.txt: use /MD compiler flag for MSVC

2008-12-28  Marcus D. Hanwell <email@protected>

  ∗ libavogadro/src/molecule.cpp, libavogadro/src/molecule.h,
  libavogadro/src/python/molecule.cpp: Lots of documentation updates,
  reorganised the functions and grouped in Doxygen tags. Some minor changes
  too, more are needed for const correctness.

  ∗ testfiles/multicubes.cube.gz: Removed from our source as it is the same
  size as all the other files put together. May be we should provide a more
  extensive sample of files in a separate distribution.

  ∗ libavogadro/src/engines/bsdyengine.cpp: Ported to use the new bond position
  functions.

  ∗ libavogadro/src/bond.cpp, libavogadro/src/bond.h: Added functions to
  retrieve bond positions, still need to implement the mid-point function.

  ∗ libavogadro/src/bond.h: Documentation updates.

  ∗ libavogadro/src/python/bond.cpp: Added missing Atom include.

  ∗ libavogadro/src/atom.cpp, libavogadro/src/atom.h: Documentation updates,
  added member function groupings and a destructor.

  ∗ libavogadro/src/atom.cpp, libavogadro/src/bond.cpp, libavogadro/src/bond.h:
  Added some atom accessor functions to the Bond class. This should make using
  bonds easier. Fixed assignment order in Atom constructor.

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Actually I was intended to send this to LKML, but just before I was about to send I found there was already some discussions about this: http://marc.info/?l=linux-sparc&m=122956478603612&w=2. So instead I decided to just post it here.

To make long story short, please take a look at these two files first:

http://sourceware.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/libc/string/endian.h?rev=1.10&content-type=text/x-cvsweb-markup&cvsroot=glibc
This file will become part of /usr/include/endian.h.

http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=blob;f=include/linux/byteorder.h;h=29f002d73d989c577f0e79a8100d6fb7e0abb188;hb=bc2aa80e18a1b43ea2b8066500006b729c4ba4a7
This file will be /usr/include/linux/byteorder.h

Obviously, this test in linux/byteorder.h will fail:

Yay, exactly what everyone wants to read, another xmas post.

Too bad, i'm doing it anyways.

Xmas kind of sprung itself on me this year, or rather i wasn't paying attention as usual and December just went and ended on me. Shopping was done on the 23rd while driving home. Despite that i managed to get everything i was looking for. We had xmas at our house this year and it was pretty nice - about 20 people and way too much food. I ended up with some very nice DVD's and some much welcomed new clothes.

Altus dropped off a seriously expensive and hardcore winter parka and a nice bunnyhug ("hooded sweatshirt" for you non-Skatchewainians). I guess they're trying hard to keep me around. I've already agreed to go back to work for them this summer for an as-yet-undetermined signing bonus and a decent pay hike. I may still decide to stay with them for my co-op work term later in my fifth semester, but there are a ton of other companies that would pay much more, probably even cover my full tuition, so we'll see.

I decided to park the beater I've been driving and take the new car that I've been trying to sell the last six months back to MJ with me, and in the process of emptying it out I found my old O2 in the trunk. Just for the hell of it I decided to mess around and see if i could figure out what killed it a year ago. After it defrosted and i wiped everything down and pieced it back together, I plugged it in and to my surprise it booted! Well, kinda - for some reason it goes into init 6 as soon as it hits init 3, giving me a nice reboot loop - but the hardware itself seems fine, the disk is intact, i was able to start kde, etc. by interrupting the boot and bringing everything up manually. So if I can figure out what's screwed in the startup sequence I might be back in business.

But for now I'm going to play Persona 4, watch my new MST3k DVD's, and enjoy some time off.

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The next layman version has been released and fixes a few minor bugs:

• layman -L: better use of screen real estate for source URLs (#251032, submitted by Martin von Gagern)
• Execute subprocesses in a shell. (#235165)
• layman/overlays/git.py (GitOverlay.sync): app-portage/layman - 'layman -S --quiet' yields "git: 'pull-q' is not a git-command." (#247964)

Hi all…

Well, after a long hiatus, I’m working on new stages for the Gentoo/MIPS port.  These new ones will be based on uClibc, and are a compliment to the existing glibc-based stages.  At the moment, the initial seed environment is still being cross-compiled from my i686 host, and for now I’m focussing on mipsel but will soon turn my attention to MIPS.

These stages initially will not operate with a page size of 16KB or more, so unfortunately aren’t much good for Lemote users (I’m working with the uClibc people on this) but Cobalt and SGI users will soon once again be able to use uClibc as their system libc.  The new stages will be based on uClibc 0.9.30… which is yet to be keyworded.

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Open letter to Minister Stephen Conroy regarding the proposed internet filter.

Over the last year, we’ve heard a number of people step up, complaining about this proposal, and what it will mean in terms of freedom-of-speech, and internet speeds.  I also heard a rumour that mentioned the blocking of peer-to-peer traffic.

Now, it is very noble of the government to be that concirned with the issues involving pornography and other objectionable material, that they are pushing forward with developing and introducing this filter to the masses.  Others have already pointed out many of the ethical and technical issues with the proposal, which I note, to date, are still not addressed.

The latest proposal however, has been to block peer-to-peer traffic.  I strongly urge those in the government to carefully consider the consequences before taking on such a drastic action.  Ignoring the fact that Bit-Torrent and similar protocols can, and are, used for legal purposes (such as distribution of open source software) as well as for piracy… a lot of other peer-to-peer protocols exist, that many people expect to be able to use freely.

Consider the following applications/protocols:

• Skype
• MSN Messenger
• Ekiga
• Yahoo! Messenger
• TeamSpeak
• EchoLink
• IRLP
• IRC DCC
• VNC
• RDP
• SIP (most VoIP systems)
• Hamachi
• … etc

All of these, rely on peer-to-peer traffic to operate, and are used lawfully.  Blocking SIP could be disasterous to our telecommunications, since many people rely on this protocol as their primary home phone service! Such a move could proove highly unpopular with the voting public, and deadly to businesses that rely on VoIP services.  In a time of global economic crisis, is this really what you want?!

It is true that many of us absolutely hate it, when a politician breaks an election promise.  However, we are more than too happy to forgive politicians for breaking such promises, when such promises are mearly implementing bad policy.  I urge this government to consider the above, in addition to the comments made by others on this topic, before going ahead with such disasterous propositions.

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I got a donation of a Lemote Loongson 2F box somewhere around July this year and have been working on it in my spare time since I got it.

The other day I made a summary about what I have done so far and posted it on Lemote's bbs. The links is http://www.lemote.com/bbs/viewthread.php?tid=20134
My work involves toolchain, kernel, xorg-server MIPS or Loongson support and userland library/application gcc 4.4 patch.

The most prominent achievement so far is an N32 ABI stage3 (well, actually just a tarball, not made using catalyst) optimized for Loongson 2F with MIPS PLT support. It is actually not that easy as you would've imagined, N32 has many problems as you can see from the above posted link. I posted it on Lemote's bbs along with some instructions of how to use it: http://www.lemote.com/bbs/viewthread.php?tid=20125

According to some testers, performance of some applications in this system has an up to 30% increase comparing with the performance of the same apps in system Using O32 ABI without optimization for Loongson 2F and MIPS PLT support.

I have just got laid off by my former employer (however no need to worry for me, new jobs will find me soon), that means currently I have a lot of time doing things I'd like to do, like Loongson. Now I am still working on the problems I have encountered so far, currently xulrunner for N32 ABI, which will lead ultimately to firefox on MIPS N32 ABI userland system.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/xptcall_FAQ
http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla/source/xpcom/reflect/xptcall/porting.html
I wish I could finish it before 2009 comes, ;)

The free software projects for media playing did a good job in the past on supporting a wide variety of formats. From the common to many very obscure formats, current versions of the free software mediaplayers were usually able to play them. Today it's even common to suggest vlc for Windows users if they can't play unusual media formats.

Though there were a few exceptions, the most notable probably the long-time missing support for many of the Real formats. While these are rarely used today, many archived videos in the Internet still rely on it. For example, many german television stations provide real video files on their webpages.

Recently and without much public notion, ffmpeg first got support for RV40, some weeks later also for RV30. This fills a long time gap in free software support for video formats. ffmpeg is used by all major free software video players (vlc, xine, mplayer), so you should get the support within some time in all of them. For now, it's quite easy to checkout mplayer from subversion and build it on your own.

Want something to try out? Here's a video from Desert Planet in real format.

The only gap I know of a format that really got usage in the wild and that is not yet supported by free software is WMA3.

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For all the forumites, bloggers, wikifolks, mailing list members, bugzilla commenters, and general Gentoo netizens:

Please stop spreading bad advice such as ebuild foo digest. It does not exist. Digests have not been present in the Portage tree for a year, ever since the tree was converted to Manifest2 format.

If you've made a local modification to an ebuild, patch, or added anything else to your local overlay and need to make Portage aware of the changes so the package can be properly merged, do not use the "digest" command. Use "manifest" instead. For example:

ebuild foo-1.0.17.ebuild manifest

Digests have been dead for a long time. Please don't encourage bad practices.

This has been a December public service announcement. Thank you for flying Gentoo Air, and please enjoy the rest of your Christmas!

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After some discussion on IRC the Avogadro Project has moved its version control over to GitHub. Our new repository can be found here. Most of us are old Subversion users, and a few of us started out with CVS. I think we are still getting our head around the workflow but feel it is worth the effort for all the advantages the move will bring.

There are some great visualisations from GitHub. I have always loved the speed of Git when compared to other version control I have used. It is also great for adding in bigger changes and not having to halt development in other areas for fear of merge issues. We shall see over the coming months how positive the move was, but I am confident it will be. I have been using Git locally through git svn for over a year now I think.

For those who might wonder, the conversion was not totally automatic. The branches and tags git-svn leaves you with are not Git branches and tags. It basically required me to manually create the branches and tags. So for our repository I ran the following,

mkdir avogadro-git
cd avogadro-git
git svn init https://avogadro.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/avogadro --stdlayout
git config svn.authorsfile ../avogadro/authors.txt
git svn fetch

At that point I went and grabbed a coffee, took care of the dog...

git remote add origin git@github.com:cryos/avogadro.git
git push origin master

This got us most of the way there but lacked all of our tags and branches. I found that none of the push options worked as the tags and branches needed to be made into full Git entities first.

git branch -a (show all the branches)
git branch 0.8 0.8
git branch 0.6 0.6
git branch primitive primitive
git tag -f 0.6.0 tags/0.6.0
git tag -f 0.6.1 tags/0.6.1
git push --all origin
git push --tags origin

After all that we have our tags as Git tags and our branches as Git branches. You can browse them and clone the repository. A few of us have been experimenting and everything looks good. Adding current developers as collaborators enables them to push directly to the repository. There are also some web interfaces that allow for pulling from forks.

So if all goes to plan now, there will be no more commits to our old Subversion repository. We have preserved all of our history and I made sure the author metadata was improved. Hopefully this will make our development process more streamlined. We appreciate any and all tips, this looks like a good guide to keeping a fork in sync, pushing and pulling where necessary.

Now back to coding - we want to get a new release out!

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That is totem playing an ogg in a Gnome desktop in KVM on my 32bit-userland image.  It works!  Woo hoo!

Now all that’s left is to try it on real hardware, and figure out why the kernel fails to build.

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I have been using Git and Git SVN for quite some time now. It took me a little while to get into Git and see what all the fuss with DVCS was about. Now I find myself enjoying using Git more and more when it is the only version control in use in a project.

Git SVN is certainly a great compatibility layer, and it has allowed me to use Git as my version control system locally without requiring that the projects I contribute to switch. I had heard lots of good things about GitHub, but had not found the time to check it out until Geoff showed me Avogadro after he had pushed it to GitHub. There are some great stats and it looks like is has some great features. I was originally put off by the 100MB limit on storage as it seemed a little low.

When I got home yesterday evening I started playing with it and ultimately made three Avogadro repositories - the third one looks like it is the charm. I had not been worried about importing author metadata previously as I had just been using it locally, but after reading this short guide to migrating to Git I had all the tools I needed. A short trawl through our mailing lists, web pages and history to update author information and I had a shiny new Avogadro git repository.

I am still getting the hang of how all this works. I have added several other committers it matched up as collaborators, but did not spot what exactly that means yet. I was able to get CIA working in our IRC channel, pushed some changes and even synced up a commit from this morning. So I think all is well and I will likely keep this repo up to date with our development. It only has trunk in it, but shows photos of your friendly Avogadro developers and a really nice visualisation of development over time. I think it should open up with the latest stats first, but other that that am impressed. It complements some of the ohloh analysis quite nicely too.

Now can we all please move our source over to some kind of Git repository please!

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As part of a miniseries, I'll describe the insides of the more common Alphas. Nothing too technical, just nice pictures and a word or two regarding the pitfalls and unique features of the Alpha machines I have access to.

The images in this post are rather small. If you'd like to have a peek at larger versions of them, you can browse the gallery.

First in the series is my trusty Compaq AlphaStation XP1000. Here it is, with the front door closed:

Note that it's about the size of a midi tower, but way heavier. I guess it's close to 15kg in all. And there's not much hardware in it: aside from the necessities just a few extra PCI cards, one disk and two CD-Rs. It's also relatively short (in depth) for a midi tower. How that turns out to be of disadvantage, we'll see later on.

Here's the back side of the unit. As you see it has one Ethernet port, two USB connectors, Line/Headphone in/out, PS/2 mouse and keyboard, two serial ports and a parallel port. At the bottom right are the PCI cards: one 53c895, an ELSA GLoria II, a cheap PCI audio card and a cheap Ethernet card. Audio and Ethernet I added because the default ones work sort of ok, but those two work way better. The same goes for the 895 vs the on-board ISP logic SCSI HBA. The two blanked slots on the left are for purposes unknown to me. As we'll see later, there is little to support any cards there, so I suspect it's intended for additional ports that don't fit the PCI/ISA slot back-end. Also note at the top left the indentation and two small slot blanks. On a PWS 500au, which has a very similar case, those two are used for the audio and network connector boards. Finally, the power supply you see at the center is not anything compatible with an ATX or AT power supply, at least connector-wise. It's rated at 300 Watts when running on 230V.

This class of workstations opens to the right, that is, opposite of the common PC case. At the top there is the CPU board (more on that later), left middle are the two CD-R drives and floppy drive. At the middle right there's the power supply and below it a cage for two 3.5" hard drives. below all this are the PCI and ISA connectors and the on-board connectors for IDE, SCSI, Floppy etc.

As you can see, the whole case is rather cramped. The sheet metal barrier between the middle and lower parts has a rather small hole for cabling, so it's always fiddly to install more than just a hard-disk and a CDR. Also, the rear end of the CD-Rs is quite close to the power supply and hard drives, so it's very easy to cinch cabling. On top of that, access to the PCI and ISA cards is rather difficult, especially if you have cabling going to one of the cards (as I do).

From the top, we see the CPU fan (black rectangle at the front) and air duct (grey) and the CPU right behind it. Behind that are the memory banks. Obscured in this picture is the chipset, we'll see that later on.

The CPU board slides out horizontally as you can see here. Note that while the levers help pulling the board out, they do nothing for pushing it back in. You have to be extra careful to get it to seat properly. At the top center you can make out the NVRAM battery. It's easily accessible and of a readily available type. You can also see the two holes in the CPU heat sink. Those provide access to two hex nuts that hold the sink in place. The bolts are part of the CPU packaging.

The CPU board from the rear end. The four metal-plated chips on the right are the chip set (memory controller etc.). Those chips run very hot (by spec). I've measured them running at up to 65C under full load.

This concludes our tour of the XP1000. As you can see, the machines while nice to work with from the software/OS side are not ideal if you swap around hardware a lot. Especially the drive cages could have used more room around them. Still, I like the machines. They're built like tanks and the fans still are the first ones the machine came with and there is no rattling or grinding.

The XO is hitting mainstream UK TV! The laptop will be reviewed on The Gadget Show, 8pm on Monday 22nd December, on Five.

Update: It got rescheduled at last minute. It’ll hopefully be aired after Christmas.

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Switching from TextMate to vim or emacs has been a trend on the rise. I'm riding the trend too, and it feels pretty good.

Coming from TextMate, there were a lot of things I missed. There were a lot of things I didn't even realize existed.

This post is meant to help folks who are trying to make the same switch. It isn't going to be the most extensive resource, but should point you in the right direction.

Oh, and just as a warning, one thing I've notice about reading vim resources is that they usually assume a certain level of familiarity with vim, and I don't think this will post will be any different. If something is over your head, well, that gives you a new area to learn about :)

Resources

A Byte of Vim: This ebook starts at the very beginning, and walks you through pretty much every day-to-day type editing you're likely to encounter. I've been using vim for several years, but I must have been using it pretty poorly, because I learned a lot from it.

Google: Seriously. Whenever there was something I didn't know how to do, googling for vim <insert thing here> worked nearly every time. Sometimes it took a few incantations.

Vim Wikia: In said google queries, this wiki showed up about 50% of the time. Lots of great tutorials, walkthroughs, and tips.

7 Habits For Effective Text Editing 2.0: Bram Moolenaar, one of the main authors of vim, gave this talk at Google. One of the takeaways I had from this is that it doesn't matter which editor you use, as long as you are using it effectively. If you do something that feels repetitive, stop, find a better way, and then start using it. In another way, constantly refactor how you use your editor to improve efficiency.

Friends, Coworkers, and Family: You probably know some people using vim. They make a good resource as well. I primarily tap them as a resource for how they are using a particular command/plugin, or how they are achieving a particular goal. Be sure to do some research first, or you might get hit with a letmegooglethatforyou.

Plugins

vim is amazingly extensible. There are also a lot of clever folks across the tubes. As a result of this, there are a lot of great plugins out there to assist your editing.

These are the plugins I'm using, and I'll include any tweaks or mappings I'm using. These would go in your ~/.vimrc

rails.vim: For me, it's all about being able to navigate around your project. For example, while editing a controller, you can easily switch to the functional test, or from a model to the unit test, and vice versa (:A). If you have your cursor on a render :partial, you can easily navigate to the partial (gf). This is only a sampling of what it can do though.

NERD Commenter: Lets you easily comment out code. I made command-/ comment out code, kinda like in textmate.

" bind command-/ to toggle comment
" requires NERD Commenter to be installed: http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1218
nmap <D-/> ,c<space>
vmap <D-/> ,c<space>
imap <D-/> <C-O>,c<space>

NERD Tree: File navigation using a directory tree. I setup \d to toggle it being visible.

" bind \d to toggle file browser
" requires NERDTree
nmap <leader>d :NERDTreeToggle<CR>

autoclose.vim: This will automatically close things like quotes, brackets, parantheses, etc. I've found it to be a little buggy at times, so I'm considering dropping it, or finding something else. YMMV.

bufexplorer.vim: vim keeps track of all the files you've edited, and has ways of navigating between them (:bp and :bn for example). bufexplorer gives you a much more visual way of do this. It displays a window with all the files you've edited, you navigate to the file you want, and hit enter, and whoops, editing the file now. By default, it binds to \be.

endwise.vim: Kind of similar to autoclose, but more for structures you'd encounter while programming, such as if statements and class declarations.

fuzzyfinder_textmate: This is the texmate equivalent of 'Go to File'. Pull it up, and start typing a filename. I bind it to \t (command-t opens a tab in MacVim).

" binds \ t to textmate-style fuzzy finder
map <leader>t :FuzzyFinderTextMate<CR>
let g:fuzzy_matching_limit=60 " this seems to help performance
let g:fuzzy_ceiling=20000     " I have some projects with a lot of files...

allml: Gives you some ways to interact with the various HTML-like code that various programming languages / frameworks provide, like shortcuts to create <% %> in ERB

matchit: vim has builtin support for 'bouncing' between parentheses using the % key. matchit extends it further to work with things like if blocks, class declarations, etc.

gist.vim: Post stuff to Gist.

snippetsEmu: Emulates textmate snippets. I've found I don't actually use this as much as I would have thought.

surround.vim: Tools for 'surrounding' your text. For example, add quotations, switch it to paraentheses, etc.

taglist.vim: vim has support for browsing by 'tags', which is to say, by method name, class name, etc. taglist gives you a way of seeing tags in the current file. It brings up a new window, which you can browse to the tag you want, and then automatically navigate to it. I've tried to make it act like 'Go To Symbol' in textmate. \T toggles the taglist, it gets focus, and then goes away after you navigate to something.

" binds \ T to taglist (sorta like textmate apple-shift-t)
map <leader>T :TlistToggle<CR>
let Tlist_Show_Menu=1
let Tlist_GainFocus_On_ToggleOpen=1
let Tlist_Close_OnSelect=1
let Tlist_Compact_Format=1

ack: Unfortunately not a packaged plugin, but you can just drop the code snippet (the second, updated one) in ~/.vim/plugin/ack.vim. This lets you search for stuff in your current directory, and gives you a way to browse the results. Kinda like textmate's 'Find in Project'. I made \F start the command off for you.

" \F to startup an ack search
map <leader>F :Ack<space>

Sagelike advice

These are bits and pieces I've picked up along the way.

TextMate-like functionality

Not textmate specific, but you can map stuff to the command key in MacVim using M. For example, <M-/> would be command-/

If you have problems with fuzzfinder_textmate being able to find the Ruby classes, I found just placing fuzzy_file_finder.rb in ~/.vim/ruby fixed the problem.

Insert hashrockets (=>) while in insert-mode, just like in TextMate:

" bind control-l to hashrocket
imap <C-l> <Space>=><Space>

Indent and unident with command-[ and command-]:

" bind command-] to shift right
nmap <D-]> >>
vmap <D-]> >>
imap <D-]> <C-O>>>

" bind command-[ to shift left
nmap <D-[> <<
vmap <D-[> <<
imap <D-[> <C-O><<

Switch to different tabs using command-1 through command-9:

" open tabs with command-<tab number>
map <D-1> :tabn 1<CR>
map <D-2> :tabn 2<CR>
map <D-3> :tabn 3<CR>
map <D-4> :tabn 4<CR>
map <D-5> :tabn 5<CR>
map <D-6> :tabn 6<CR>
map <D-7> :tabn 7<CR>
map <D-8> :tabn 8<CR>
map <D-9> :tabn 9<CR>

Simplify window navigation

vim supports splitting a window vertically and horizontally, and then navigating between them. The default way kinda hurts my hands. Let's reduce it to \s to split horizontally, \v to split vertically, and \w to cycle to the next window.

" window splitting mappings
" split vertically with <leader> v
" split horizontally with <leader> s
nmap <leader>v :vsplit<CR> <C-w><C-w>
nmap <leader>s :split<CR> <C-w><C-w>

" Make it way easier to switch windows (<leader>w)
nmap <leader>w <C-w><C-w>_

Gleefully stolen from James Golick's dotfiles.

Other stuff, with less explanation

set nocompatible          " We're running Vim, not Vi!
syntax on                 " Enable syntax highlighting
filetype plugin indent on " Enable filetype-specific indenting and plugins

set incsearch             " Incremental searching
set hlsearch              " Highlight search results once found:
                          " http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Highlight_all_search_pattern_matches
set number                " can has line numbers?
set cursorline            " highlight the current line the cursor is on
set showmatch             "sm:    flashes matching brackets or parentheses
set smarttab              "sta:   helps with backspacing because of expandtab

Fin

Whew. That was a lot longer than I had anticipated. Be sure to leave a comment if you have a question, or have better ways of doing any of this.

The time has come! Our release engineers have been refining their automated builds of the minimal CD and stage3 tarballs, and the first builds are uploaded to our mirrors. Select your favorite mirror and navigate to the /experimental/ directory. Under the x86, amd64, ia64, alpha, and sparc64 architectures, the autobuilds directory contains stages. So far, minimal CD images are only available for x86 and amd64.

We're still working to add automated builds for ppc, ppc64 and hppa as well as CD images for architectures lacking them. We built the stage3 tarballs from the latest stable packages. Fresh builds will show up every week, although sometimes we might skip a week if build problems crop up.

Because these builds are automated, they have not been rigorously tested as the old releases. Occasionally, you might run into problems. If that happens, just try a file from a different week.

Please try out these new builds and leave your feedback on the forums. As always, please report any bugs on Bugzilla.

Happy holidays!

Discuss this!

Ben de Groot contributed the draft for this announcement.

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been working on getting 32bit-userland working on Gentoo amd64.  It’s at least partly working now;  it boots, you can log in, and I’m in the process of emerging gnome.

However, it’s not a smooth road.  I had to use catalyst to make my own stages.  No amount of massaging or editing or copying or screaming got me from a 64-bit stage3 to a 32bit-userland.  In addition, there’s something wrong with my toolchain somehwere.  I can’t build sandbox, for example, and had to use a binpkg from my 64-bit system.  Also, the kernel fails to build it’s config programs, so I can’t configure a kernel.

Finally, there are a number of broken packages; that is, packages that detect in some way or another what bitness they think you’re running and then use ASM coded for that.  This, obviously, fails.  Fortunately, this is so far only 3 packages: glib, libgcrypt, and mesa.  We’ll see how many more I hit before I get a working system.

Just a note: I’m not posting any of my profiles yet.  It’s not yet working, and it’s not for faint of heart.  If you are really interested, give me a ping on IRC and I’ll see if I can help you.  Otherwise, just wait until I can lick it into shape.

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In a previous post, I spoke about new ebuilds for X2go client and server, a GPL remote desktop solution that's based on NX technology, but in a different way compared to nxserver. With lots of help from Joachim Langenbach in bug #249600, I'm glad to say now that ebuilds in the NX overlay for both client and server work fine, and will probably moved to portage soon (ldap management ebuilds will probably wait a bit longer in the overlay, as I cannot test them for now).

For pros and cons, X2go does not need a special "nx" user on the server, you can use your ssh private key (as you log in directly as your real user), both client and server are GPL are not limited in number of connections, remote mounting of directories is easy (via sshfs/fuse), administration of the server can be done via kde control panel elements (including ldap accounts, if you use it). However x2go requires a running postgresql database on the server, does not support VNC/rdesktop proxying or shadow sessions, and some of the nice advanced features seem reserved to dedicated thin clients setups (like saving your session on a usb key, ...).

Anyway, if you're curious to try it, 'layman -a nx' and then emerge either x2goclient or x2goserver depending on which computer you are

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So I have recently been playing with Java a great deal and recently learned how to parse XML with it. Java is a bit overkill for a multitude of small projects or scripts I want to develop however, so I have decided to scratch my python itch once again.

Googling around and looking at the python docs I didn’t really see an example that I could easily follow or adapt. So in the end I took a recent Java project and converted the XML part of it to python to bring life to this little example code.

GBug is a tiny little python app that uses DOM to parse XML from the Gentoo Bugzilla and provides some simple information about the requested bug number. I believe the example is pretty clear, although I wrote it in just a few minutes so it could be done better. I hope someone finds the example useful.

#!/usr/bin/env python

# Licensed under the GPLv3 by Kenneth Prugh [ken69267@gmail.com] (C) 2008

# DOM example adapted from one of my Java projects which displays info about
# the desired bug from the Gentoo Bugzilla

from xml.dom import minidom
import urllib2

class gbug():
    def getValueForTag(self, Element, tag):
        NodeList = Element.getElementsByTagName(tag)

        Element = NodeList.item(0)

        return Element.firstChild.nodeValue

    def getBug(self, bugID):
        self.bugID = bugID

        bugURL = urllib2.urlopen("http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?ctype=xml&id="+ \
                bugID)

        doc = minidom.parse(bugURL)

        Element = doc.documentElement

        bugNodes = doc.getElementsByTagName("bug")
        bugEL = bugNodes.item(0)

        print "Description: " + self.getValueForTag(bugEL, "short_desc")
        print "Reporter: " + self.getValueForTag(bugEL, "reporter")
        print "Created: " + self.getValueForTag(bugEL, "creation_ts")
        print "Status: " +  self.getValueForTag(bugEL, "bug_status")
        print "Assigned to: " + self.getValueForTag(bugEL, "assigned_to")

main = gbug()
input = raw_input("bug #: ")
main.getBug(input)

Sample Output:

    ken@t61 python % python gbug.py
    bug #: 216776
    Description: dev-java/smack-3.0.4 version bump
    Reporter: ken69267@gentoo.org
    Created: 2008-04-07 21:34 0000
    Status: NEW
    Assigned to: java@gentoo.org

Download gbug.py

At work, I am often busy with quite a few projects. Yet, at times, I have no outstanding tasks because all of my tasks can only start when an event has occurred (like a server which is made available, or a budget that is approved) or another task has finished.

To keep track of my work, I write an extremely simple task manager: an XML file (for the data), XSL file (for the rendering) and HTML/CSS file (to render and use the browsers’ XSL capabilities). I call it taskviewer due to lack of more imagination ;-)

It is a simple manager with no user interface for managing it at all - so you’ll need to edit the XML file yourself. However, the HTML/CSS file, together with the XSL file, renders the content of the XML file in such a way that you have a nice overview of your tasks.

It’s “features” are simple:

• keep track of events you are waiting for
• keep track of a tasks’ dependencies (events or other tasks)
• get an overview of tasks that can immediately start versus that are blocked, waiting for its dependencies to finish

There is an example available online with some hypothetical data.

If you know of a simple program (preferably java or one available for both Windows and Linux) that has similar features (especially tracking tasks depending on certain events), please do tell me. I’ve looked at tools like taskjuggler but couldn’t find one that remains simple yet has these features.

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Hi all… figured I better update everyone on what’s happening on the MIPS front.

Kumba has been working on newer kernel ebuilds to support various platforms, specifically IP30, which has been troublesome of late. At present, the best kernel revision to use is still 2.6.23 on Cobalt, Loongson 2E and O2.

Another alternative, is to download your own kernels from the Linux/MIPS website (not kernel.org), and research the patches needed to get things running yourself… in fact… Lemote Loongson 2E, Cobalt Qube2 and SGI Indy/O2 users should find minimal to no patching is necessary as the vast majority of changes have already been accepted into the mainline kernel.

Stages… there have been no further stages built at the moment from the 2008.0 ones. Partly because some of us have been just too busy. I’ve started to make inroads into a uClibc-based set of stages however, having got a uClibc-0.9.30 toolchain built the other day targetted at mipsel-unknown-linux-uclibc. It is hoped a workable environment can be constructed in the coming months that may turn into a new set of stages available for this platform.

Desktop Applications… have been lagging quite a bit. I have some patches for Thunderbird 2.0 that gets things rolling again… and may just work for big-endian MIPS (which was broken at last check) but due to lack of time, I haven’t been able to investigate further. A similar set of patches got Firefox 3.0 partially working… more work needs to be done.

My own status… I’m not planning on leaving anytime soon… just been extremely busy. As it is now, I’m passed my 8:00PM bed time (need to be up at 4:00AM tomorrow, currently it is 8:35PM AEST), so I’ll leave it at that.

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One of the Songbird developers wrote a good blogpost about the problems that distros meet when trying to support Songbird, an open source iTunes competitor. The post concentrates on Ubuntu, as one of the most popular distros, but the concerns raised there in essence are the same for all distros. We have our own bug open for this new package, and it’s not really going anywhere. For us a similar compromise as for other distros exists: we do have a songbird-bin ebuild in Sunrise overlay.

But nobody wants to maintain an extra copy of xulrunner, or backport Songbird’s patches to the system xulrunner (which is used by Firefox among other packages). The whole idea seems very Windows-like to me: take existing packages, patch them to bits, mash it together with your own application into one big binary package. This is certainly not the way things are normally done on the Linux side of things.

I would urge the Songbird developers to work with upstream (Mozilla in the case of Xulrunner) to get their patches accepted, or some other kind of solution to make Songbird and vanilla Xulrunner to work together nicely. That would make it a lot easier for us, and any other Linux distro, as well as the BSDs, to import this package into our official repositories and give it proper support.

In the comments to that post you can read that OpenSuse and Fedora have the exact same problems. With such a unanimous voice from the distributions, I would say the ball is now in Songbird’s court, if they care about Linux support.

Quite a few people have reported problems building icedtea6 or needed dependencies on our IRC channel and as the build is quite resource intensive, Caster has now made binary builds for icedtea6. The package is available via layman using:

layman -a java-overlay
emerge icedtea6-bin

The binary package should also make it easier to bootstrap the from source build. The binaries are built in stable chroots so they should run for our stable users too. Please report any problems to https://bugs.gentoo.org with [java-overlay] in the subject. For amd64 users this should be the easiest way to get a 64 bit browser plugin.

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As an FSFE fellow, I got interviewed for their webpage.

You can read it here.

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Today, after roaming the earth for 21 years depending on someone else to cook my food for me, I made a giant leap: I cooked my own meal. Right from buying groceries to cleaning up the dishes afterward

Here’s a picture of the modest beginning:

It looks a lot more delicious than it really was: just boiled vegetables with garlic bread - dressed with salt, pepper and a dollop of butter - rather bland for an Indian tongue. But, oh well, it’s a start

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Now for the second set of statistics. These aren't directly useful to mirrors in estimating their traffic, but instead gives a good overview of how our mirroring setup works internally, and now much traffic is involved in the fan-out stage. Distfiles are the main content moved around by this system, but it is also used for the other directories for releases, experimental and snapshots.

A very quick overview of the existing setup:

1. Developer uploads new distfile directly to dev.gentoo.org.
2. The master-distfiles box pulls from dev.gentoo.org hourly.
3. The master-distfiles box checks every ebuild, and downloads missing distfiles from their primary URI if they do not exist. The daily distfile report is also created at this point.
4. Every hour, the cluster master of ftp.osuosl.org pulls the latest content from master-distfiles. (Averages 240MB/day of traffic).
5. The OSL FTP cluster master (in Oregon) pushes to it's slave locations in Atlanta and Chicago.
6. All distfiles mirrors pick up their content from one of the FTP nodes - Internet2-connected hosts are directed via DNS to an Internet2-connected slave for performance.

Each of the distfiles mirrors has about 140-160MB of upstream traffic every day (including both the new files and the rsync overhead for scanning). If there are no files changed, the rsync traffic for a directory scan is 1-2MB. While this isn't a lot of traffic, it's very spiky, as mirrors tend to be on fast links.

The new weekly builds from the Release Engineering team will probably be adding another 1.3GB per week, staggered as one arch per day.

I got a small subset of the logs from the OSU FTP cluster for processing some of these statistics. They cover the 24 hour period of 2008/08/07 UTC. It does not have data of which traffic went via Internet2, and I've grouped the sources by country code (using IP::Country::Fast from CPAN).

[1] One Greek mirror was excluded from the traffic and counts, as this was their catchup sync with 7Gb of traffic after some hardware-related downtime.

As a bit of analysis, I think that more than half of our mirrors (Europe, Middle East, RU) would benefit from having a box to sync against in Europe.

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I was doing some statistics about Gentoo mirrors to see about future plans, and thought that the indirect crowd that read my blog via the various aggregators might be interested in numbers.

These are the traffic for boobie.gentoo.org, which is a newer box in the official rsync.gentoo.org box directly maintained by the Infrastructure team. Hardware specs are 2x Xeon 3050 @2.13Ghz, 4GB RAM. Disk is mostly irrelevant - the rsync workload is served purely from RAM (tail-packing reiserfs, backed via loop device pointing to a file on tmpfs).

Inbound traffic is spiky, but does not exceed 10Mbit by more than a little bit - we can the inbound rsyncs from the rsync1 master to 10Mbit. Outbound traffic varies between 4Mbit and 9Mbit, with an average around 6-7Mbit.

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I just finished updating and pushing mplayer-resume-1.6 into the tree.  I’ve actually been sitting on the update for a long time, just never got around to releasing it.

There has only been a small change — the script will check mplayer’s exit code to see if it died on something.  I added it since I hit a bug on my frontend where some files wouldn’t resume, and it would delete my resume point anyway.  Kind of annoying.  This update fixes that, and really, that’s it.

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I’m working on cleaning up some planet stuff again, and for Planet Larry I made a small policy shift — if your feed is spitting out partial feeds, I’m not gonna accept it anymore.  Currently it only affected like two people, I think (unless I missed someone), so if you wanna get back on … fix it.

I realize it’s a small case of me shoving my own preferences down the pipe, which is something I avoid as much as possible.

If I’m going to add on one more asinine policy requirement, I figure it’s fair that I take one away as well, though most people probably don’t notice or care about this one. I prefer to have the blogger’s name show up as the blog title, and have in just about every case (minus one) forced them to be that way.  But, I’ve changed my mind there as well, so if you want to customize the name on the feed, I can do that for you.

An example would be that my blog (wonkablog) shows up in the list as Steve Dibb (my name).  So, if you wanna change it from displaying your name to something else, just drop me an email.

And, as always, more bloggers are welcome to sign up.

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