In work I’ve discovered a number of problems when accessing open source code repositories that are using SVN or GIT. Attempts to access a number of repositories just fails with a connection failed message.
After some time of getting these, and finding some repositories working, I noticed that the common attribute for those repo’s that were accessible, was that they were via http. Now that might be fine, but there is a reason for the repositories to have their own protocols, in that they are tuned to be more efficient at transferring the necessary information. In addition not all sites make the repositories available over http in additional to the native format.
Obviously the core problem here is with the corporate firewall blocking outbound requests over certain ports. Perfectly understandable, but sometimes just a little unhelpful when you need to be able to access various upstream repositories when working with open source to check for bug fixes in the code.
After several problems in accessing some git repos that didn’t have http equivalents I did some searching and found the following website http://www.emilsit.net/blog/archives/how-to-use-the-git-protocol-through-a-http-connect-proxy/ which described how you could use socat to create a tunnel that allowed access to git repositories without having to find one that permitted access over http.
Just picked up a DVD recorder for the TV, yesterday. Personally I have pumped for the most kitted out, but my girl friend is more rooted in real life and points out that most of the feature rich ones are still quite expensive.
Looks a nice piece of kit, and seems to be reasonably good €129 (Dec 2008). Have yet to try out the recording features, but it already does one thing that I really wanted, play region 1 DVD’s. Of course I did have to unlock it to do that.
Why Unlock?
Probably a question used by legal people to suggest that it’s somewhat illegal. Basically region locking is only present to allow for artificial control of markets and to try and prevent the natural economic laws of supply and demand from equalizing prices all over the world. You’ll hear sometimes the arguments that people in some regions can’t afford the true price and so the publishing houses need to be able to sell them for cheaper there. That’s a load of crock, if they don’t make money from it, they won’t sell them. It’s always been a question of how much they can jack up the prices in the regions where something is known to be popular.
For me, the main reason is that the selection of anime made available as region 2, is pretty dire. Since I use Linux and watch a lot of my DVD’s on the PC, I had built up a collection of region 1 anime that has not been released in region 2 (or at least has not been made available within the shops that I have access to). Thankfully Linux is capable of completely by passing the region codes on all DVD’s, not to mention able to skip sections that the DVD producers are obliged to force you to watch. You know the parts, the copyright notices, the Dolby Digital snippet, etc. Once you’ve seen one, you don’t really want to watch any of the others.
Well, this weekend was just fantastic. In the middle of looking a new apartment to move in with my girlfriend, my lovely BMW ‘93 318IS Coupe decided to have a stroke. While on the dual carraige-way, a rather large cloud of white smoke appeared out the back of the car. Uh-oh, stopped the car, checked the radiator and oil caps. Nuts, some milky white fluid on the oil cap, classic sign of coolant getting where it shouldn’t get to.
Previous weekend I had just bled the coolant and topped it up, and was midly concerned about the amount that went in, ~2l (took 3l really, but about .5-1l ended up on the ground underneath the car). Obviously that’s a bit of a concern, 2l is a lot of coolant to loose from a car that has a capacity of 6l for coolant. Looked around for a leak, thinking, ‘this is something that I need to get looked at soon’.
Step forward a few mornings and the car is starting on the rough side and then smoothing out, kind of like a smoker sitting up in the morning and hacking their lungs out until they get the first fag, although I was hoping it would be less fatal.
Obviously that all came to a head with the white smoke.
Plan is to toe the car to a garage and have the presure test done on it’s engine to confirm, and then if it really is the HG, time to add a massive new project to this site on how to dismantle your engine and put it back together again.
So I decided to splash out a bit and replace the old 19″ CRT radioactive source that I used to call my monitor. I’m sure my eyes are grateful for the change. Initially I decided that I wanted a 24″ replacement, I figured there was no point spending a lot of money upgrading unless it was going to be a significant upgrade.
However, after a little advice and some searching I finally settled on a Dell 2408WFP, and I’m one very satisfied customer. It has just about every connector under the sun! VGA, DVI, HDMI, S-Video, Composite, DisplayPort, I doubt that I’ll have any problems with compatibility anytime in the future.
I’ve very impressed with the depth of black, and also the contrast between dark and light colours. The only negative point appears to be some tearing of the current output, however I haven’t worked out what the cause for that is. It is easier to see this by watching a comparison of the boot sequence running on both my old and new monitors at the same time.
Vim has been my editor of choice for a while now. I’m not going to get into the whole emacs v’s vi debate, just take it that I prefer a modal text editor and vim suits my needs. So I’ve never seen a need to go and learn emacs.
Once of the little problems that has annoyed me for a while, but I’ve never gotten around to trying to do anything to solve it, is where when copy and pasting code from one file to another, vim automatically increases the indent on each line. Turning something that is nicely formatted with various tabing/spacing set into an unreadable mess.
Spend a little time over the last few days trying to sort out my email client. I wanted it to show me when I had new email in the various folders. Why? Because I use procmail to sort my mail when it arrives into various folders, otherwise I would never be able to keep as much as I do .
There were also other problems that I felt that using imap would fix, such as locking so that if I open the mail folder using another client using imap, it would detect that it was already being accessed. This used to bug me when using the web interface horde/imp for email and when mutt was doing direct file access. Accessing the mailbox over imap in imp, even if it was just a search would result in the mailbox going read only, so any changes made by mutt were discarded.
Thankfully that’s all taken care of by switching to using imap with mutt. It also means that I can use mutt from my home PC to directly read email on the mail server, rather than having to open a shell first and start mutt remotely.
Have been meaning to try this out for a while now, basically because once you get the html code separated out from the PHP it becomes much easier to see what’s going on and change the style and layout of the web pages.
Easier because the PHP scripts basically become shorter, and changing the layout of a few variable place holders in html files is a damn sight easier than moving about chunks of code.
Smarty and Flexy appear to be two other template engines that may prove interesting for use with PHP if I ever work on any other more extensive web development projects.
Well I’ve finally managed to have my blog appear with my own personal domain , but boy was it fun trying to get here. And it’s also highlighted some interesting gotcha’s when requesting domain registrar to point your domains elsewhere.
So now I have darraghbailey.com, which points to this blog. But it wasn’t entirely straight forward. Upon registering the domains I discovered that register365.com didn’t appear to have any mechanism to allow you to change where they pointed to. That would be something that is nice, even if it needed to go through an approval process. It appears that they are working on a lot of features for the user control panel since it lacks a great deal of functionality. Just trying to pay for your domains via the CP is impossible. On the plus side, the support team at register365 is very responsive, so it’s not really all that big of an issue.
Well after a great deal of exploration, I isolated a bug in wine’s CreateProcessW function that results in a invalid argv being sent to target programs in certain cases.
This was interesting since it was my first real foray into the wine code base, and showed that printf is still very much the staple of any coders debugging diet .
If the wine project is of any interest to you, go ahead and have a look at bug 10618 , it shows that even without a good knowledge of a large projects code base, you can still learn and debug a fairly well hidden bug if you are willing to just follow through.
Next steps are to write some conformance tests to confirm what the correct behaviour on Windows actually is. This appears to be a corner case bug, and it will be interesting to see how Windows decides if it has reached an escaped quote or a quote preceded by a slash. Yes there is a difference .
However before I start submitting patches, I need to make sure that my employer signs off on me sending code into this project provided I work on my own time. It’s an important check for anyone to do, otherwise you could find both the project and yourself on the wrong side of a legal suit.
Well after that post yesterday, I decided to try testing the suspend/hibernation functionality using the Open Source drivers rather than nVidia’s proprietary ones. Low and behold it worked!
Success, or maybe not, since I’m not happy that I lose a fair bit of screen real estate in the switch to the other drivers, not to mention the lack of ability to play games that require hardware accelerated graphics. Now the graphics card in this machine is much to write home about, but without using NVIDIA’s drivers, its basically impossible to play just about anything that uses graphics. Unless I’m going to stick to something like Falcon’s Eye.
So the search goes on for the solution with NVIDIA’s video drivers. Obviously that is the main culprit in not being able to resume from hibernation.
Of course I did have to unlock it to do that.