As Linux-Mag points out (Gentoo Optimizations Benchmarked) using gcc optimizations for "omg, teh speed" is not all that practical. Sure, I'll add some compiler flags here and there as long as I am compiling everything anyway but I don't consider that a feature of Gentoo Linux.

I actually prefer Gentoo for the package management and customization via USE flags (even with the headaches that they cause sometimes).

Reading the Blu-Ray review for Up, I would take this statement and drop in Wall-E for the movie, and the same would be true:

"Up brushes against the stratosphere with a dazzling, picture-perfect ... transfer that boasts more breathtaking spectacle and stunning scenery in a single shot than many high definition presentations deliver in two hours."

I can't comment on Up since I don't own a copy, but I can say the same holds for Wall-E.

Watching a Pixar movie on Blu-Ray made every single hedge I ever had about the format completely disappear.

Recently, Aaron Plattner from NVIDIA announce libvdpau 0.2, which a wrapper for driver specific VDPAU implementations. You may have noticed that nvidia-drivers shipped a libvdpau.so library for a while now for apps to link against while placing their actual implementation in libvdpau_nvidia.so. Newer ebuilds of nvidia-drivers will no longer install libvdpau.so, nor any of the headers and install will rely on this being installed. Other applications, like MythTV will instead depend on x11-libs/libvdpau.

In addition to this change, there’s a new package called vdpauinfo in the tree. Some people might know it from the NVNews forums as vdpinfo. However, Aaron got the author’s permission to add it to freedesktop.org and rename it to vdpauinfo to match the library.

Miro described itself as Open-source, non-profit video player and podcast client. It's actually somewhat a swiss-knife for videos if you are using video sharing services (like youtube or dailymotion), following podcasts and downloading videos via bittorrent.
Miro lets you do everything in one place. You can directly search for a video, download it and see it locally. Then you can organize your videos whatever it comes from and remove them when you want. To me, it's sound like the equivalent of songbird for videos.

Miro is also known for it's "Adopt a line" campaign which consist of paying 4$ per month to adopt a line of code and support the project. An innovative idea which seems to work.

So, bug 131527 is now fixed and Miro is known as media-video/miro in Gentoo's tree.
Try it and report bugs !

My Linux based Networked Media Tank (NMT), A PopCornHour A-110 normally only allow clients in the same subnet as the NMT to mount NFS exports. If you somehow need to change that, here is how to do it.

First you have to install telnet or dropbear SSH to have console access to the PCH.

I didn't quite find any convenient way to edit files on the PCH, so I'm just using FTP to download, edit on the laptop, upload and move into correct place.

Log in to the PCH:

cp /mnt/syb8634/etc/nfsserver.sh /share/


Download and edit it with your favourite FTP client (default username and password combo ftpuser:1234).

Add the following three lines just before the reload function. Do remember to remove the leading +:

then
/usr/sbin/statd > /dev/null 2> /dev/null
fi

+ #Hack to change IP restrictions of NFS mounts
+ echo "/share 192.168.2.0/255.255.255.0(rw,sync,root_squash,anonuid=1001,anongid=1001)" >> /etc/exports
+ exportfs -a
}

reload()
{

Likewise you can change reload if you want.

Remove the file from /share before uploading:

rm /share/nfsserver.sh


Then upload it with FTP.

Move it in place and restart the service:

mv /share/nfsserver.sh /mnt/syb8634/etc/nfsserver.sh
chmod 755 /mnt/syb8634/etc/nfsserver.sh
/mnt/syb8634/etc/nfsserver.sh stop
/mnt/syb8634/etc/nfsserver.sh start


Mount and enjoy:-)

I had this genius idea about using sshfs with rtorrent. I thought that this use case would fit best in situations where you have good bandwidth but not much diskspace, such as my linode VPS (review). So, I'll attempt to share my findings in this regard.

If you are not familiar with rtorrent. You just need to know that it is a powerful, lightweight bittorrent client. It has a "watch" feature that watches a directory for new torrents, and obviously it can put downloaded files in a specified location. I tried both of these with sshfs.

First, I was having trouble with rtorrent just 'freezing' up when I put a torrent file in the sshfs accessible watch dir. I didn't quite know what was wrong here. Research led me to rtorrent bug 322 and that sshfs did not support filesystems without mmap properly. Darn. More research led me to a recent kernel commit that looked promising. Low and behold, reboot my host with 2.6.31.x kernel and rtorrent works with sshfs watch and destination directory. Yay.

Well, not so fast...

The performance is quite poor with the destination directory on sshfs. This is to be expected because now your download speed for torrents is limited to the download speed of your final destination. But, rtorrent was only giving me a sustained speed of 1/4 of that demonstrated with a simple file copy to the destination. I speculate that this is from the rtorrent overhead or maybe fragmenting? Not sure exactly and I don't care. My solution to this was to use the rtorrent "move on finished" feature that downloads the file to local disk and then moves it to sshfs destination after it is finished. Amazingly, this works quite well.

My testing scenario was the following:
-79MB Gentoo 2008.0 install cd torrent. With the complete sshfs solution, it took ~6 minutes to download (to the sshfs destination) and then 5 minutes to check the hash. So, roundtrip of 11 minutes from start download to seeding. With the on_finished solution, it took 1 minute to download (to local disk) and 1 minute to check the hash and move to the sshfs destination. For a roundtrip of ~2 minutes from start of download to seeding.

In conclusion, this isn't the perfect solution because you impose a large bottleneck into the mix and unintended I/O activity on the local disk. However, it works for me and what I am doing. Maybe it will give someone else some ideas in the future.

http://cia.vc/stats/author/eva

My CIA profile went from about one commit every 17.35 housr to one every 16.56. The difference does not seem big but the calculation is diluted on about 6 years due to a KDE dev sharing the same nick. This amounts to 158 commits tonight.

~arch is now at about 85% of completeness for Gnome 2.28.1, a few commits are missing due extra complexity (hey it still took my 3 hours to do that). Beware that this release still has a few rough edges, especially policykit migration buts. So if you get cut, please come to bugzilla but do not expect sweet words and attention if I see comments like "dude why do you keep on breaking ~arch". It's ~arch, beat it.

Today is a special day--it is the twelfth birthday of the greatest kid in the entire world! I just wanted to wish you a very Happy Birthday buddy, and I hope that this upcoming year brings you the most happiness, joy, and fortune possible. Even though we haven't been able to spend time together lately, I'm always thinking about you. I love you Noah, and always will.



This kitten made me think of Ms. Cleo. I hope that she is keeping you company, and that she serves as a reminder in the same way that the note you wrote me does. It never leaves my side.

|:| Zach |:|

In this podcast I talk about my progress learning Bash for Gentoo ebuild development.

LINKS:
Bash By Example
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-bash3.html
Linux Command Line and Shell Scripting Bible
http://xrl.us/bfzigo
Learning the Bash Shell
http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596009656
Gentoo Tools
http://devmanual.gentoo.org/tools-reference/index.html
Sed By Example
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/articles/l-sed1.xml
Bash Guide
http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashGuide
Grep
http://www.panix.com/~elflord/unix/grep.html
Awk
http://www.grymoire.com/Unix/Awk.html

irc network freenode channel #linuxcrazy

Download

Benjamin wrote a comment on my last post, and I'll share my answers here because those questions come up every now and then, so it's better to try to inform everyone. (That and I never write on this blog, so this is a perfect excuse to do so)

If you assume compile problems, why is that thing unmasked?

Xorg-server 1.7 is not getting stabilized, it's just getting unleashed onto unstable. Unstable means exactly that. Of course we try to do our best and we won't release something we know will break. The idea behind unstable is for users to test the new and shiny stuff before it hits stable.

If you don't want to help fix bugs, use stable. It's as simple as that.

I've always been irritated by the way the xorg team handled masked/unstable/stable releases, as even rc's were unmasked at times.

Releases in X-land are tough. The numbers almost mean nothing. For instance, the last stable version in the 1.5 series was 1.5.3-r6. And despite the apparently stable version number, it currently has 80 patches to make it run smoothly.

On the opposite side, the current stable server is 1.6.3.901-r2, which is indeed a "pre point release" only has a couple patches. And 1.7.1 doesn't have any patches.

So don't let the version number fool you, they mean almost nothing.

As for what we put in portage, well X is a complex piece of software. It used to have more than a million lines of code and it's been getting some tough love these last 2 or 3 years. And up until recently, drivers were a mess. I had shivers every time a new driver was released : "How many systems will this break?" was a question I asked myself over and over.

There are probably a lot of people who put the xorg-server in package.keywords because they needed/wanted feature X/Y or because it fixed some bug for them (it did for me). So now I get a release that possibly breaks build in unstable?

Again, unstable is for power users who are not afraid of filing bug reports if something breaks. We try to make sure that things don't break every day, but Gentoo being a source distro with billions of possibilities (USE flags, CFLAGS, arches, packages, ...),you can't reasonably expect us to try every possible combination.

So we ask for you help (via bugzilla) in return. Gentoo is a community distro, after all.

So there, that's it for today, I hope y'all know a bit more about how we manage X and unstable packages.

Last night I installed UT2004 on my laptop, after not playing it since June. The laptop in question is an older ThinkPad R61i, with an Intel X3100 graphics chip. I know -- not the best for gaming. However, most online reports I found indicate that it's acceptable for such an old game as UT2004, so I figured it'd be worth a shot. The Intel graphics drivers have made a lot of progress in the last two years, especially on the 3D front, right? Right?

Kinda. After reducing all settings to "low" and dialing back the resolution to 1024x768 (native is 1280x800), the game is playable, but with very uneven framerates. Looking toward the middle of a map, or anyplace with a lot of action, introduces a good stutterfest; frames are down to between 8 and 18FPS. I enabled a few extra options such as pixel shaders and VBOs in UT2004.ini to add a bit more performance, but it's still marginal.

I'm rather disappointed. I'm not having nearly as great an experience as other Linux users, and certainly not as good as the Windows gamers who've benchmarked Unreal on this hardware. However, I did also catch the huge xorg-server 1.7 update as well, so maybe there have been some performance regressions since 1.6. It makes it a little hard to determine the areas that could use tweaking. I don't have anything special in my xorg.conf, just a default resolution. It's possible there's a setting I'm missing.

I'd like to try UT2004 on my desktop workstation, which has a RadeonHD 4550 card, but all reports indicate that even the latest git checkouts of the open-source drivers still don't work with Unreal. Apparently the game can't even launch, much less run at playable speeds. But as rapidly as the drivers are maturing, I'm hoping this'll be fixed in a month or so. Call me optimistic.

* * *

It looks like Abiword 2.8.0 was released today, so I wrote an ebuild and made it available in my devspace. I've been hand-writing these things for awhile. It took quite a bit of research to determine what went into the 2.7 betas, and now I'll have to do another overhaul of the 2.8 ebuild to account for the new plugin system. There's no longer a separate abiword-plugins package; they're all distributed in the base 2.8.0 archive. This means there will be a lot more tricky configure checks and USE flags, which sucks from a flexibility standpoint. Keeping the plugins in an external package was much simpler, so I'm a bit disappointed by this upstream decision.

Still, right now you can download and install Abiword 2.8.0 using my ebuild. While it needs a few cleanups, it will get you set up with a fully functioning basic Abiword install, though the only available plugin (as shown in the "Plugins" dialog) is .odt support.

This new version launches much quicker than 2.7.10, and it seems to have fixed all the rendering errors and even the crashes that happened with basic operations. Basically, you can click stuff now without worrying.

Cleaning up my ebuild is a long task, thanks to those darned plugins. Patches welcome, or I suppose you could always just wait and see what ends up in Bugzilla.

Yesterday, I wanted to see if I could rip a Blu-Ray disc using my PS3.  I really want to get a BD-ROM drive, but they are so expensive still, and since I can install Linux on my PS3, I figured maybe I'd try and save myself some money and see if I could manage to get one ripped and decrypted.  It actually worked, which surprised me.  Ripping the disc was the simplest thing in the world, but the key on the movie I tried (Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory) was too new, and currently only AnyDVD has support for it.  I'd love to buy a copy of that, but it only runs in Windows, and it's really expensive.  Instead, I'll just have to wait for the keys to pop up eventually on the doom9 forums.

The first step, though, was getting the PS3 to run Linux.  I took the shamelessly easy way out (and I don't regret it either) and installed Xubuntu.  I won't go into details about how I got Linux on my PS3 since that's well documented.  I will say that I remember quite vividly now why I can't stand binary distros.  Bleh.

The BD filesystem is UDF.  Providing you have a recent kernel (2.6.20, I think) with UDF v2.5 support, you are good to go.  I mounted a remote share and just dumped the disc to an ISO file onto my desktop.

$ cat /media/cdrom0 wonka.iso

That was the easy part.

The hard part was trying to get it decrypted.  I had to use Java tools (bleh) to get to the source.  There are three applications you need.  And if you hate digging through forums and using download services, then I've got direct links for yah:

• aacskeys-0.4.0c.tar.gz
• bdvmdbg-0.1.5.7z
• dumphd-0.61.tar.gz

For Gentoo, you'll need to install the JDK to build the aacskeys library and binary.  I just emerged dev-java/sun-jdk and it worked for me (I know absolutely nothing about Java, but my stabbing in the dark miraculously worked).  You'll also need a runtime environment to actually execute the stuff, and I emerged dev-java/sun-jre-bin and that worked fine, too on my amd64 box.

For aacskeys and Gentoo, you'll need to apply this patch that I cobbled together from what I found on the doom9 forums to get it to compile.  It just fixes the Java include directorys for the Makefile.

Now, I'm still a bit fuzzy about what each program does, and whether you need all of them or not, so I won't go into a lot of detail.  What you want to use, though, is the dumphd program.  But to use it, you'll need to copy the aacskeys library and a file from the bdvmdbg package as well into the path or same directory as the dumphd program.

Once you have that, you can just run dumphd.sh and it'll fire up a simple little GUI telling you if it has all the libraries it needs.  Then you just specify the source and destination, and aacskeys will see if it has a working key to access the disc.

I can't really give much more detail than that, since I'm so new to this.  Suffice it to say, if you read the accompanying README doc that comes with each one, you'll get along just fine.

It took me a long time last night to get just one disc ripped and transferred over my subnet to try it out, and by the time I managed to get it mounted (mount -o loop -t udf wonka.iso /mnt/udf) and access it, it was pretty late.  The keys I had didn't work for my disc, and I didn't want to try the whole procedure over to try another disc.

Anyway, good luck if you try it.  One thing that impressed me is how much simpler it was than I thought it'd be, but what a pain it was trying to figure out where things went wrong.  The doom9 forums are a good resource, but not exactly the best place to find clear, concise information for a beginner.  That part was frustrating.

Personally, I don't think it's worth the hassle right now, the way I did it.  I'll get a BD-ROM sooner or later so I don't have to transfer the content over the network and can instead just test it directly.  But, I started out to see if I could at least get a copy of the ISO and get the tools running all without Windows, and I can.  So, that's progress right there.

It's out there now, available in ~arch. Like always, you'll need to rebuild your drivers, just look-up the command given by the server's ebuild (use eread if you've lost the output).

This release took a little longer to unmask not because of the server (it's a nice change). It's because a lot of headers were moved around from library packages to proto packages and vice versa. The ABI of X libraries has not changed, but I'm pretty sure there will be compile errors in some packages.

If that's the case, please file bugs in bugzilla.

Thanks for reading this public service announcement.

Edit: There will not be a package.keywords list for stable users. Xorg-server 1.7 is intended for ~arch users only, at this moment. And all bugs from stable users will be closed INVALID. We will start creating lists when we want to stabilize it.

I've been having a slew of issues running Apache on my Linode VPS, which I'm still trying to pin down, so in an attempt to offload some of the usage, I'm now going to use Feedburner to provide the RSS feed for Planet Larry.

I know I've played with Feedburner in the past, and kind of flip-flopped on whether to use it or not, but this time I'm sure I'm gonna stick with it.  It's better for users, since they will always have a feed available (whether I have issues or not), and it's better for me since I can offload that part of the network traffic, which is actually quite a lot.

I've already updated the feeds and my apache config to do a permanent redirect, but if you want the feed URLs directly, here they are:

• Planet Larry: http://feeds.feedburner.com/planet_larry
• Larry the Universe: http://feeds.feedburner.com/universe_larry

Sorry for the inconvenience.  It seems like everytime I post about Planet it's bad news or maintenance.  Believe me when I say that it aggravates me far more than it does you.

Specifically, the issues I'm having is that Apache is sucking up all the available RAM, of which I only have 360 megs on my account.  It's then rolling over to using all the swap space as well, which only slows things down even more.  I've just started playing with tweaking the MPM configuration a bit, and I'm still trying to find a reasonable solution for my configuration.

In the past, the Linode had been seizing up occassionally, and I'd normally just reboot it and get on with my life.  Recently, I installed monit (an awesome app), and pinpointed that the issue seems to always be with apache.  Now, I'm just trying to narrow it down even  more from there, but offloading the RSS feeds seems like a good step to take anyway ... I get gigabytes of traffic per month just on that, believe it or not.

I'm toying with the idea of setting up lighthttpd instead, but I really prefer apache, and would rather set it up to behave in a low memory environment instead.  So, for any downtime in the near future, chances are it's just me tweaking something.  At least now, thanks to monit, I have a much better idea of when something goes wrong.

Oh, one other tweak I've made is that the planet script itself is more robust as well.  That thing used to run out of control, but I've made some changes that will ensure that if it runs away, at least it won't bring down the system.  I also started playing around with the idea of writing my own feed parser to replace the Planet software completely, and it looks like it's going to be much simpler than I imagine.  I haven't actually started down that path yet, since I have bigger projects to complete, but I'm actually enthusiastic that it'd be far, far simpler than I imagined.

Okay, so you're going to be able to stream Netflix on your PS3 soon, blah blah blah, that's all in the news right now.  However, I'm skeptical as to the connection here, and the way this is being deployed.  Namely, why is this add-on feature provided through a disc instead of being integrated into the PS3 firmware?  I have a simple theory: Sony doesn't want to kill it's little baby, the Playstation Store, that sells and rents movies, and is instead making getting Netflix a bit of a speed bump.

Of course, this is all theory since the actual product isn't out yet, but hey, I like a good mystery.

Before I go on, though, here's the sources of the actual news that everyone is feeding off of.  I know when I'm looking for details I hate reading everyone's interpretation of it in an attempt to get a spin on what it means -- which, of course, is exactly what I'm doing.  At least I'm linking back to the source.

• Netflix Blog: Netflix Coming to PS3
• Netflix Press Release
• Playstation Blog: Netflix Coming Soon to PlayStation 3
• Netflix Opt-In Screen

Okay, so, there's three things I find suspicious here about the whole thing:

1. The Playstation blog entry is written by Netflix, not Sony.
2. You need a disc to use it.
3. Sony said back December of '08 that it was focusing on its download service.

My take on the whole thing is that Sony doesn't like it, but they are allowing it, albeit grudgingly.  Using the Playstation Store is a ridiculous experience in DRM that only makes renting movies easier by being able to download them instead of going to the store.  It manages to duplicate the nasty elements of high prices, limited availablity, and poor choice of selections.  Netflix's library isn't that great *right now*, but I'd still rather pay $9 a month to stream as much as I want for one month, versus $5 for one movie limited to a 24-hour viewing period.

Anyway, my big question is, why isn't it part of the PS3 firmware, similar to how it works on the Xbox 360?  Dunno.  Again, I don't know if the disc is a one-time install, or if you need it everytime you want to use the service.  The press release leaves out those details.  In fact, all it says about it is that "Initially, watching movies instantly streamed from Netflix via the PS3 system will be enabled by a free, instant streaming Blu-ray disc that is being made available to all Netflix members."  When they say "initially", I imagine that means that it's not going to be that way forever.

They also say, "Netflix members simply slide the disc into their PS3 systems to reveal movies and TV episodes that can be watched instantly" so I assume that you do have to have it in the box to watch it.

Either way, I guess I'll find out next month if I get my own disc to play with.

The reason I'm watching this so closely though, is because short of the Roku, nothing has come close to delivering a worthy UI to watching Netflix on the TV (that I own ... No 360 for me).  I've written about the Netflix plugin on Tivo before, which is downright embarrassing, so I'm really hoping that the PS3 one will more than make up for that.  I would really hate to have to use the disc every single time, though, since that would really make me lose interest in using it on a regular basis ... and the conspiracy theorist in me thinks that that is exactly what Sony is hoping for.

I'm starting to notice a curious trend, that I enjoy writing a lot of my blog entries on a Monday morning.  For some reason, that's the time I'm most interested in writing anything at all, and I generally have a slew of topics to pick from.  Today's no different, it seems.

I haven't written one of my posts about recent watching habits in a long time, so I thought it'd be a nice revisit since I've seen a few things again that aren't really deserving of posts in of themselves.  I'll ramble them off in whatever manner I even remember them.

Astro Boy

I ended up seeing Astro Boy, unexpectedly, on opening night even, at the theater ... and I loved it.  The more I think about it, the more I realize how much I liked it.

I was *extremely* skeptical about seeing this one, because of it's manga background ... something that has proven time and time and time again, that I just don't have a passing interest in.  I just don't have the brain for it, I guess, which in some ways is keeping me from becoming a first-class art / entertainment geek.  Ah, well.  My tastes are in a world all their own, that's for sure.

But I remember seeing the trailer, again, about a week or so before the movie came out, and I thought, "Huh, this actually looks pretty good!"  And I liked it.

The story was really simple, and, the best way I can describe it ... almost ... well, simple is the best way to put it.  The story doesn't take any weird, random tangents, instead almost following a direct storyline of the events without any diversion or discussion.  It was actually quite refreshing to see the story neither dumbed down or trussed up.  With one exception, each of the characters was consistent all the way through.  It was just good.  I wanna go see it again.

Oh yah, and every scene with the RRF is just hilarious.

Surrogates

I had been waiting to see this movie for a long time, ever since I saw the trailer for the first time.  I just knew I was gonna enjoy it, regardless of how bad it might turn out to be.  I wasn't quite sure what to expect, since it was a sci-fi action / thriller with Bruce Willis, which could go all kinds of directions.  As far as action movies go, it was rather tame ... hard questions about society aside.  That surprised me.

The story itself was weak, which would probably explain why I haven't heard much about it, good or bad, or in reviews and what-not, but the concept it portrayed -- people living their lives artificially -- struck me on a number of levels.  I kept thinking about the many analogies of how our society does that anyway, through the Internet, through virtual escapes of any kind (video games came to mind).  It was just really, really cool.  It also raised a lot of points of you never know who is behind the artifical mask, either.  For someone who gets really sucked into the virtuality of second lives sometimes, and suffers from the after-shocks of trying to use it as an escape during hard times, the film really hit me, and I enjoyed it quite a lot.  It's definitely not going to be a popular theme with the masses, but I liked it a lot.  I wish the story was better, though.

Calling Philo Vance

Now this is an old movie (1940).  I recorded a bunch of Philo Vance movies on my Tivo when TCM aired them a while ago, and I just now got the urge to watch some old movies this weekend, and I found this one.  It was a little odd.

I had a little hard time following it because, apparently, this is a staple character of movies back in the day, and this was the first film I saw him in after he'd already starred in quite a few films and radio shows.  I imagine it would be like stepping in to watch the 14th of 20 Sherlock Holmes films, never have knowing the man or his methods before, and wondering what the heck is going on and why it's interesting.  That's exactly how it was for me, here.

I'd heard of Philo Vance, only in passing, since I've seen his name before in my attempts to collect old time radio shows.

The movie itself moved at a really clipped pace, and Philo solved the murder almost as quickly as he found the details.  Anyway, it was a bit strange, but I love watching old movies so it was still fun.

There's a couple of reasons I don't encode my video.  One of them being that, everything I encode myself, I can just notice the drop in quality.  However, with the right parameters and the right codec (x264) I can get it looking really nice, and I can hardly notice a difference.  It comes at a bit of a tradeoff, though.

Here's a snip of a sample ffmpeg output I generated last night:

$ time ffmpeg -y -i movie.vob -r 30000/1001 -acodec copy -croptop 60 -cropbottom 60 -s 720x480 -aspect 16:9 -deinterlace -vcodec libx264 -vpre hq -crf 15 -threads 0 movie.mp4

FFmpeg version SVN-r20371, Copyright (c) 2000-2009 Fabrice Bellard, et al.
built on Oct 25 2009 14:09:56 with gcc 4.3.3

Input #0, mpeg, from 'movie.vob':
Duration: 00:29:43.93, start: 0.280633, bitrate: 6492 kb/s
Stream #0.0[0x1e0]: Video: mpeg2video, yuv420p, 720x480 [PAR 8:9 DAR 4:3], 9000 kb/s, 59.94 tbr, 90k tbn, 59.94 tbc
Stream #0.1[0x80]: Audio: ac3, 48000 Hz, 5.1, s16, 448 kb/s
[libx264 @ 0x1c64530]using SAR=32/27
[libx264 @ 0x1c64530]using cpu capabilities: MMX2 SSE2Slow
[libx264 @ 0x1c64530]profile High, level 3.0
Output #0, mp4, to 'movie.mp4':
Stream #0.0: Video: libx264, yuv420p, 720x480 [PAR 32:27 DAR 16:9], q=10-51, 200 kb/s, 30k tbn, 29.97 tbc
Stream #0.1: Audio: ac3, 48000 Hz, 5.1, s16, 448 kb/s

Stream mapping:
Stream #0.0 -> #0.0
Stream #0.1 -> #0.1
Press [q] to stop encoding
frame=43411 fps=  7 q=-1.0 Lsize=  767982kB time=1783.95 bitrate=3526.6kbits/s

real    103m29.692s
user    155m46.121s
sys     8m0.649s

Which brings me to the second reason I don't encode stuff ... time.  Seven frames per second, on my fastest box at home, heh.  For a 30 minute video, it took a very long time.  The video looks great, though.  I can still notice a drop in quality when there is text or titles on the screen, but that's the exception.  The size was almost exactly 50% the original (1.4 GB to 750 MB).

The backstory for this particular video though, was that it was presented in letterbox, and I wanted to re-encode it so I didn't have to make a pan & scan config for just that file on my box.  So, I cropped the black bars off the top and bottom and resized it.

One small annoyance I have, is that all DVD source video always shows up as 59.94 frames per second when being probed by ffmpeg, and I have no idea why .... every single one of them does that, and it drives me nuts, since all the NTSC DVDs are going to be 29.97 or variable frame rate.  So, I have to specify to encode the new video to 29.97, otherwise, it will encode it to 59.94 by default and nearly double the size.

Also, I'm only doing a one-pass video encoding, ironically because I don't like waiting.

I have little interest in encoding my video, because my boxes are so slow, but at a savings of 50% in storage space, the idea always keeps me curious.  Unfortunately, because I'm so picky about quality, it takes a long time to find something that I like, and even longer to encode everything.  On top of that, I have little to no interest in buying a faster computer right now, so I just kind of shrug the whole thing off.

I can't deny that the video looks very nice, though.  Kudos to x264 and ffmpeg.

http://dev.gentoo.org/~eva/gnome/gnome-2.28.0.html

Just added gnome-2.28.1 ebuild to the overlay, only had to keep two dependencies down. Since we are now finished with gnome-2.28 core, time to squash bugs, there is quite a number of them already, if you want to participate, just visit the overlay status/TODO or status/BUGS files, or visit gnome 2.28 official release tracker bug

Played with gnome-shell, kind of nice but still needs applet work done as I can't use gnome-globalmenu applet anymore and I'd like to keep to vertical space real estate. Plus I don't like the actual replacements for notification area and clock applet, they do less. I bit worried about speed in activities menu as well, it's damn slow on my Core2@2.2Ghz which I can't understand.

Also worked on some other ebuilds like geoclue, emerillion and seed, not easy on downstream packaging so delayed until further notice.

So, after being completely betrayed[1] by Ext4 not once, but twice, I decided to evaluate my FS options for /home .

• FAT* are not an option, neither is NTFS.
• Ext2 is primitive and HFS/HFS+ is just not Linux.
• JFS is nice, but (atleast parted) doesn't support grow/shrink.
• I've used XFS before, and found it to be more reliable than Ext4. However, deleting dirs with thousands of small files is too slow (a common operation when compiling)
• ZFS would've been an option if my earlier experiences with ZFS-FUSE weren't so horrid.
• Did not even consider NILFS. It's too new, and I don't know much about it.

It ended up being a choice between the reliable Ext3, or the new-fangled Btrfs. Why Btrfs? Because I've been using it as my Gentoo Distfiles and Portage tmpdir since v0.16, and found it to be the /most/ resilient to power failures of all my partitions.

I ended up selecting Ext3 for /home, but let's see why.

What's missing in Btrfs:

1. Growing the filesystem to the "left" of the partition. The error message when you try this is cryptic (common in btrfs-progs). However, since for other FSes this essentially involves "move to left and grow to right", I suppose the "move" part is what's missing in btrfsctl.
2. Pathetic ENOSPC handling. It either throws an ENOSPC at around 75% or when the metadata space fills up. Not sure which, but it's supposedly fixed for 2.6.32.
3. Volumes once created cannot be deleted. Again, fixed in 2.6.32.
4. Parted doesn't support editing/creating Btrfs partitions. Support for detecting it was proposed recently; but, I still don't see it in either "master" or "next". This is not a Btrfs problem, but certainly affects whether I'd use it.
5. There were other minor irritants (with btrfs-progs, mostly), but those will go away with time

Ext3 might have bad performance (especially w.r.t fsync), but atleast it's more reliable. In conclusion, I'll use Ext3 in data=ordered mode for /home till 2.6.33 is out; and then I'll convert my Ext3 partition to Btrfs and forever be happy :}

Well… it has been a while… No, I haven’t gone AWOL, just been busy with other things for the past few months.

I’m now in the process of updating my MIPS boxes so that I can resume testing packages. I now have a stable kernel on my O2 (I nicked Debian’s kernel image… to install you just run ar x on the .deb, then unpack the data.tar.gz created into your /) and can seriously look at the userland.

First priority will be developer-related tools that I know well and can test quickly… Subversion is one that I’ll probably tackle, since the version we currently have keyworded is masked. Ditto for git. I’m sure I’ll find other things to get started on, but those two will make doing everyhing else easier.

I’ve also started on some new profiles. People can have a look at http://git.longlandclan.yi.org/?p=gentoo-mips-profiles.git or clone the repository at git://git.longlandclan.yi.org/gentoo-mips-profiles.git to give them a try. When I’ve given them a good thrashing and am satisfied, I’ll look at merging them into the tree, but for now, this is my staging area.

Hopefully with a stable base system upcoming, and new profiles, then I’ll look at new stages, and get this show back on the road.

You are running a stable x86 system (at least almost, and for the core components like kernel, system set and X)? Great, we are looking for your help. If you want to try out the following packages and report back (even if everything is running smooth) to me (fauli AT gentoo.org) or the team (x86 AT gentoo.org), we would be happy. Stabilising so many core compontents that might render you system unusable is a big thing, so a lot of testing is appreciated. The packages in detail:

• sys-fs/udev-146-r1
• sys-apps/util-linux-2.16.1
• sys-fs/e2fsprogs-1.41.9 and sys-libs/e2fsprogs-libs-1.41.9
• sys-apps/hal-0.5.13-r2
• sys-apps/usbutils-0.82
• sys-fs/mdadm-3.0
• sys-fs/lvm2-2.02.51-r1

Thanks in advance to everyone who cares

Attention Gentoo Community,

After numerous bug fixes and enhancements the Ten Team would like to encourage everyone to try out the 10.1 release.

A FAQ is available to assist you. We have also started a thread in our Forum. Please post any BUGS you encounter.

Please download the latest testing release for your architecture Gentoo Ten Live DVD 10.1 x86 | Gentoo Ten Live DVD 10.1 amd64.

Thanks for your continued support,

The Gentoo-Ten Project

David Abbott contributed to the draft for this announcement.

As promised, here are some pics from FDC09! Michele Tameni, Fabio Erculiani (me), Vincenzo Di Massa and Yusef Maali (new, “honoris causa” Sabayon developer) on these.

Recently, I've noticed some behaviour by package maintainers that really annoys me. I'm talking about the way stabilization requests are made. Normally, a package maintainer opens a stabilization request bug (STABLEREQ) detailing which version(s) of which package(s) he wants the arch teams to test and stabilize.

Another closely related request which suffers from the same problems I'll detail below are keyword requests. Those are pretty much the same as STABLEREQ, but for "~arch" instead of "arch". Also, the testing required usually is not as strict as that for STABLEREQ for obvious reasons.

For simple packages, neither usually causes problems. For complex packages, this may mean that dependencies need testing and keywording, in some cases five to ten packages on top of the one requested. Unfortunately, some package maintainers have taken up the habit of just dumping the request for their package in bugzilla without checking what dependencies might be needed. Checking the dependencies also involves which versions of the dependencies actually work, which ones are stable (yes, this might mean talking to other package maintainers!).

Another related gripe I have is being pushy with time frames when stuff should be tested and stable and when trouble comes up (test suite fails etc), completely ignoring the bug report the arch team files for half a year or longer.

This kind of added workload (of rather dreary work, to boot) is what makes arch testing so tedious sometimes. Not to mention the burn-out it causes. Not getting any positive feedback (from either users or other devs) doesn't help, either.

Guess I'm turning into a grumpy old dev. But still, try to be a bit nicer to the arch testers, mkay?

PS: Note that there are very positive counterexamples, too: the emacs guys always provide test plans, the security guys are always nice to work with, too. And of course several individuals who are just nice to work with.

It is with great pleasure that I announce the release of Avogadro 1.0.0. After many years of work we have released what we consider to be a stable Avogadro release on Mole Day, which seems appropriate given the projects's name. There are still some rough edges, but I think this is a good release. With your help we can fix bugs in the release while working on new features in trunk.

What better time to look back to the beginnings of Avogadro. There was a blog post made today by Sourceforge about Avogadro detailing a little of that history. I have also made a code_swarm movie visualizing the history of the Avogadro project. There have been quite some changes in that time both at a project level and a personal level.

I would like to thank Google for sponsoring me for a GSoC project in the summer of 2007. Also Geoff Hutchison for giving me the opportunity to work with him at the University of Pittsburgh on interesting computational and visualization projects. Then there is my new employer, Kitware, who have provided me with an exciting opportunity to push scientific visualization and cross platform development to its limits.

To finish off a great day, my wife has informed me my new espresso machine has arrived! I am going to Camp KDE in January too!

I received a phone call this evening that will undoubtedly change the course of my life from this point onward. A dear and trusted friend, indeed more like a brother, decided to take his own life this morning. He had been hurting a lot lately, and we talked often about his struggles. However, over the last few weeks, he seemed to be getting better. He was involved in another musical, and when I asked him about it, he had nothing but good things to say; his positive mentality toward the arts had returned. He was the greatest musician I had ever met, but to mention that one talent of his would be wrong as it would lessen the impact of all his other qualities.

Mike, we had some amazing times over the last decade. We played some great music, showed each other new artists, watched some quality films, had a blast at many plays, discussed all the issues of the times, danced with philosophies both familiar and foreign to us, pondered the emotional ups and downs of life, laughed at our own fallacies and shortcomings, discovered new places and new ways to look at old ones, and confided in one another the depths of human existence. I will never forget these times, and for the remainder of my days here I will regret not being able to talk you into sticking it out in order to create thousands more.

May you find the peace for which you were searching, and if you can part with some, please send it back here for the rest of us.

Goodbye my dear friend, and may we meet again at another time to catch up.

With love,
Zach

I had to spend a few hours trying to get Machinarium(flash required) running on my laptop the other night. Turns out the solution was too easy:

  # USE=32bit emerge -av www-plugins/adobe-flash

Damn.

PS. if you like old-school adventure games, puzzles, or desolate post-apocalyptic cityscapes populated by melancholy anthropomorphized robots (yay), you could do worse than support Linux gaming by dropping 20 bucks on this fine piece of work.

Well, I finally broke down and created a blog. I’ll mainly be posting Gentoo-related stuff here, assuming I remember to update it.

That's not the first post about elog, previously Gilles (eva) posted an excellent entry about that (he was a slightly angry probably ). All these entries are published in order to warn users and they have its importance...So based on that fact it would be really nice if users start reading them

Last week, I did read at least 4 bugs about a problem due the newer version of shared-mime-info (which includes a new database format)... If you as users would read your elogs, guess what? Yes you would find the solution in elog messages.

Important...why ?

When a developer has a important message to deliver to a set of users for a given package, usually he uses elog (elog is logged => no excuses..).
Consider the previous example with shared-mime-info, you will have a lot of problems when you try to open some files (typically gnome/kde startup) which would have not happened if you have a look at your logs.

awesome... but how I can read them ?

That's seriously simple :

1. If you're a geek who loves GTK+ based applications (like me ) have a look at elogviewer
2. Use eread (c.f: man eread)

But for our sanity and peace in our souls "READ THEM" before you post a bug .
That will help us a lot, by implicitly reducing the number of useless bugs, and in this way, we will not have to repeat things 50 times.

have fun with gentoo

edit: many thanks to scarab for typos & grammar

Again today I was hit by Stunnel's excessive logging behaviour, causing my log files to grow rapidly with messages like:

stunnel: warning: can't get client address: Bad file descriptor


Which is caused by my Wifi going offline, I fail to see why Stunnel should log hundreds of lines each second if the network is unavailable....

In my five minute search I couldn't really see how I could get Stunnel to change logging behaviour, without disable logging alltogether.

However I finally figured out how to suppress repeat messages with Syslog-ng, like Metalog did back in the old days when I used that. Stunnel from 2.1.1 and up has a suppress(X) option that is not documented very good. With the suppress option Syslog-ng will apparently suppress repeat messages in X second intervals. You can use it simply like this:

destination messages { file("/var/log/messages" suppress(30)); };


So with a bit of luck I should not be hit by Stunnel logging again.

Having been a crazy ‘zen-sources’ user,  I really miss those kernel patches nowadays. So I took up the bug 288512 and zen-sources are again available for all Gentoo users[1]
I haven’t committed them yet on portage tree because I want to ensure that they are safe enough for everyday usage. So until then, you can get them via a new overlay hosted on github

• git clone git://github.com/hwoarang/zen-sources.git

or via layman

• layman -a zen-sources

Special thanks to Brandon Berhent for providing the initial Gentoo ebuilds, and for developing the zen-sources

Thanks Brandon

Have fun with your brand new kernel sources[2]

[1] http://github.com/hwoarang/zen-sources

[2] http://www.zen-kernel.org

I just got finished watching The Voyage Home on Blu-Ray.  It was nice.  I haven't seen that movie in too long, that I can remember.  I think my interest is fading though.  I stopped the movie at least four times that I can recall to go and do something else.  That's actually pretty common for me, to leave a movie and come back later (which is why I loathe Blu-Ray's lack of universal resume play), but for a movie I like so much, it's a little odd.  Comparatively, I think I watched all of Star Trek III through non-stop.  Oh, well.

The movie was good.  I wasn't really paying attention the video this time though.  It was nicer, though, than the DVD.  One thing I managed to notice this time around is that while they did a good transfer, they didn't bother cleaning up the material at all.  That is, the age of the special effects really shine through when it is shown in such clarity (and in fact, I can remember noticing some of them when I watched it in the theater as a kid ... that's one thing I'm proud of, I got to see all the Star Trek movies since IV on the big screen when they were originally released).  They could have cleaned it up a bit, but didn't bother.  Again, I'm gonna gamble and say that they will probably have an "improved" release version in a few years or so.

I think I need to give the Star Trek movies a break for a bit.  I'm running out of steam.  Well, that, and I hate watching movies knowing I'm gonna review them later.  Sometimes it makes me watch them more critically instead of being able to enjoy it.  That wasn't the case this time though.

Alright, I'm tired, and it shows, so I'll just end it there.  It may be a while til the next Star Trek movie though.  I just checked my queue, and it's Insurrection.  I actually liked that one, too.

I love this movie.  This underdog of a Star Trek film ranks high with me for a lot of reasons.  For one, the whole thing is mostly just kind of a slow-moving backstory, going into character depth quite a lot.  Sure, it would have made a good episode, but it's drawn out, and done well.  It's not as exciting or thrilling as the others, but it stands as a good drama.  I love it.  And watching it on Blu-Ray was great, too.

The colors in this one reminded me a lot of watching The Motion Picture.  I noticed this time, that the most vibrant colors are always present when they are docked somewhere, either at the space station, or the interior shots of the ship.  That's where the variety is and it really shows off how crisp and clean the transfer is.  It just looks great.

This was also one of those films that just kept taunting me, wishing I had a better surround sound system (in fact, I bought a new center speaker this weekend, but I had already watched and sent back the movie.  Doh!).  I really liked the score ... heck, I love everything about this movie.

The Search for Spock can best be described as filler material.  It bridges the story of bringing Spock back to life immediately after he died in Wrath of Khan, and it also is the launching point for the events in The Voyage Home.  In fact, that's the part I like the most -- that Star Trek II through IV are all one big story, told sequentially and chronologically in order.

I should get Star Trek IV either today or tomorrow from Netflix.  I can't wait for that one, either.

My verdict for this one though would definitely be to buy.  It was so good.  The colors were great, and smooth, and vibrant, and it just looked like a well done upgrade.

In the true spirit of “the Sabayon Way” and its extraordinary crew, on the behalf of the staffers available there, I think I can say that it’s been quite a few days of madness (read: fun) at FDC09 in Florence ( “Festival della Creatività 2009“). We showed off how Linux Desktop is alive and Linux Gaming possible hands down introducing Sabayon and its backend projects to those interested. Our stand was always busy and people had a lot of fun playing the greatest Open Source games available for GNU/Linux such as World of Padman, Nexuiz, Wesnoth, Frozen Bubble and so forth. Thanks to Loading Lab, we will be able to feed you with photos and videos hopefully soon. For the braves, just search for “#fdc09″ tag on Flickr (or if you are not lazy, go through all the official photo set here).

So, let me rest a bit and flush out some backlog, more during the next few days.

Yeah, this bug is back again. Turns out the code that fixes the paths in gcc's own .la files was broken on new version installs. This means that everyone in stable that updated to gcc-4.3.4 and anyone in unstable that updated to 4.4.2 in the last week or so should resync their portage tree and rebuild gcc now.

See https://bugs.gentoo.org/283761 for the poop.

We won't be doing a revbump because this wasn't version specific. It just sucks that no one noticed the problem until a new version was released.


edit: if you're still getting errors when building, such as

  /bin/grep: /usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/4.4.1/libgomp.la: No such file or directory
  /bin/sed: can't read /usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/4.4.1/libgomp.la: No such file or directory
  libtool: link: `/usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/4.4.1/libgomp.la' is not a valid libtool archive

where "4.4.1" is the previous version of gcc you upgraded from, run

  # fix_libtool_files.sh <old gcc version>

The last news I wrote about the Ebuild mode for both GNU Emacs and XEmacs is some days old and covered version 1.10. Meanwhile we added some functionality that will greatly improve your user experience. All detailed changes are to be found in the shipped ChangeLog file, but I want to give a rough overview about the most important features and the main contributor.

• faster and more elegant code (ulm)
• a manual in Info format (fauli), see C-h i under section Gentoo or Emacs, needs fine-tuning, patches welcome
• support for GLEP 42 news items (ulm)
• add skeleton support for ebuilds/news items from scratch (ulm)
• keep eselect mode in sync with eselect features (ulm)
• keep keywords in sync with eclasses and adding new ones, like mono and kde4 (fauli)
• reinstate compatability with GNU Emacs 21 (ulm)
• support for eblit files (ulm)

Now I want to move the spotlight onto the skeleton modes: Pressing C-c C-n in an empty file with ebuild extension, or whose file name matches the GLEP 42 requirements for a news file, will guide you through the creation of a new ebuild. You are asked for the needed items and with the tab key you can often choose from a list with sane entries. Especially news item creation gets easier as this is a seldom task for developers and thus error-prone while being a good measure to communicate important changes to users.

Ok guys, buckle up, I've finished reviewing Gnome 2.28 ebuilds except for the gnome-shell stuff. Now Gnome 2.28.1 is expected on wednesday so we can start bumping like crazy to be half-decently on time this time (feels like we'll never be done with the catch-up). There are still quite a few problems with packages as noted in my papers and files under status/ in overlay but upgrade experience should be smoother.

If you are about to test the overlay, please keep us posted on your problems (or your non-problems too) by contacting us on #gentoo-desktop or by filling bug reports. Thanks again to everyone who kept the overlay updated during 2.27 cycle.

edit: fix typo thanks to remi.

I got a chance to see Where The Wild Things Are last night, opening night ... I was really excited about this film.  From watching the trailer I thought, oh man, this looks cool.  A story about a little kid that just doesn't adjust well growing up, and is having a hard time.  That's what I figured anyway.  And the movie followed that theme, a bit, but for the most part ... it was just weird, and I have no idea what just happened.  At the same time, though, I can't get it out of my head at all.  It was very impressionable.

The human part of the story was really incredible and very moving, and they could have made a movie just out of that part, it was so well done and they were on a great roll.  When he sails off to the island and finds the monsters though, things just get weird.  I won't get into details because I don't want to spoil it for anyone, but suffice it to say, it was not what I was expecting in the least.  The general feeling I got the whole time was confusion.  I was sitting there thinking, "what the heck is going on?  and why?"

So, I'm not really sure what to say about it, much less figure out what my opinion is.  I thought it was a bit too .... serious, and a bit disturbing at times.  I dunno.  Weird.  Go see it, though.  Everyone else seemed to enjoy it around me.

Edit: Read Roger Ebert's review.  I generally agree pretty closely with what he writes, and in this case, he puts exactly what I'm trying to say into words much better than I do.

Disclaimer: Please correct me if you know better. Thank you.

Back in KDE 3 I’ve been using WIN+D repeatedly to minimize all open windows (”show desktop”). In KDE 4 the “show desktop” feature seems to have been replaced by “show dashboard” (CTRL+F12), which is quite a different thing and not what I want.

As missing the minimize-all hotkey started really bugging me I invested a little time to find out if this is really the end. Luckily it’s not though I can only present a workaround rather than a “real solution”.

The easiest (only?) way to assign global hotkeys to programs in KDE 4 is adding an item to the KDE menu. So if we had a program/command to trigger a toggle on “show desktop” we were done. I found a tiny Bash script to do that:

#!/bin/sh
target=on
if xprop -root  _NET_SHOWING_DESKTOP | fgrep '= 1' ; then
    target=off
fi
wmctrl -k ${target}

(requires xprop and wmctrl, i.e. x11-apps/xprop and x11-misc/wmctrl in Gentoo)

Put that in a file called toggle-show-desktop.sh or so, make it executable and add a KDE menu entry for it:
(The Menu Editor can be found in the contect menue of the “KDE button” also know as Application Launcher Menu.)

My next post/rant on KDE4 will probably be about the removal of vertical gradiants as desktop backgrounds. No, I don’t wat to do that with Gimp. Seems like I’m the only one ever having used it. Anyway…

I've been prodding at the concept of the new network script in OpenRC-0.5, and I'm at a loss to try and see why Roy has decided to toss the old network config system away. The new system doesn't have a lot of capabilities, and most significantly totally loses the ability to restart a single interface without affecting the rest of the system. If it's just for a rewrite, then I'm not too worried, but unless all the functionality is still there, I'm worried we are going to move backwards with it.

At the same time, I don't think many people are aware of how powerful the "old" network configuration mechanism is. The net.examples file is only the start, once you start mixing in the pre/post calls, there's a lot of power. It's capable of some feats that I don't see used even in certain parts of the Gentoo documentation^[1]. I've put together some of my gems of conf.d/net, and if you have some, I'd love to hear them. Leave a comment or email me the scripts, along with a description.

Configurations available

• Easy to maintain HE.net (Hurricane Electric) IPv6 tunnels - Download
• Running two ISPs at home (basic multi-homing) - Download
• "Enterprise" multi-homing setup, with 4 paths to the Internet - Download

Hosting

I've also started a bit of storage in my Gentoo webspace for these collected works of network configuration, with a bit more documentation.

Notes

1. The Gentoo docs have this for IPv6: Gentoo IPv6 Router Guide, Tunnel Configuration. You could bring it up manually, or you could just take the IPv6 config above and use it straight with your variables filled in. Volunteers welcome to help merge that config into the Gentoo IPv6 documentation.