Planet Larry

Google Chrome: So why is it better than Opera again?

2008-09-05T03:21:04Z

Of course by now Chrome, Google’s latest we-did-it-just-because tangent, has been splashed over the net’s headlines like so much eggshell white paint. Nice to look at for a while, but you get tired of the sameness of it. Is it really quite as world class as the press thinks? After convincing Google’s download site to let me download it even though I was running Win2k and not the arbitrarily-blessed XP or Vista, I started to give this doohickey a whirl. And then I realized that the new kid on the block whose features everybody’s spasticating over borrowed most of those features from Opera.

Now, I’ve used Epiphany for years, I’m not an Opera user, but a good chunk of Chrome’s advertised features have been in Puccini’s favorite browser for a while. Speed Dial thingy? Opera. Address/Search bar mechanics? Opera. History Content Search? Opera. Minimalist look with tabs above the address bar? Opera. Not to bash Chrome too much, but credit where credit’s due, a lot of this stuff ain’t new, people. So stop acting like Chrome is the greatest thing since sliced mushrooms.

The major features we’re left with are (1) Tab sandboxing, (2) New JS engine, and (3) Web app enhancement

Alright, so tab sandboxing is kinda nice, but not enough to make me want to switch browsers at the drop of a hat.

The JS engine, by all accounts so far, is indeed blazingly fast, beating Opera, Webkit/Safari, and Firefox by large margins in pure JS operations. Apparently Opera can meet or exceed Chrome’s performance in DOM operations, however. But about the most intensive (and only) JS application I use is GMail, and here the other contenders are plenty fast enough for me.

“Web app enhancement” so far as I can tell, means you can create a desktop shortcut to open the page in a dedicated window. Okay. I’m not detecting any tectonic anomalies here. Supposedly you will be able to use certain webapps offline, but doesn’t that kinda defeat the whole purpose of a webapp?

Now, the pluses. The UI, as you know by now, is pleasantly streamlined. They carry this a bit too far in the options menu though. It is fast however, and, it gets good marks for being unobtrusive, the GUI app’s prime requisite.

I don’t totally dislike it, but realistically what we have here is an open-source Opera clone with some tweaks to make it tie in with Google’s products. No more, no less. Depending on whether the Linux port turns out well, and whether any WebKit changes get pushed back upstream, I might actually use it more. But it’s not going to change browsing as we know it.

Google Chrome

2008-09-04T19:47:20Z

Of course just as I post about Web 2.0 browsers Google releases their own take on a Web 2.0 capable browser, Chrome, based on the Webkit rendering engine but with a whole new JS engine called V8. Too bad It isn't available for Linux. I would love to test its apparent speed. From reports posted online it is about twice as fast as the current Gecko JS engine. I wonder how well it performs vs Squirrelfish and how well it will perfrom vs Tracemonkey.

This announcement only confirms my belief that Webkit and Gecko will be the future of Web 2.0. With Chrome Webkit will be firmly entrenched in the Web 2.0 discussion if it fairs as well as most Google technologies. Gecko will also continue to be a part of the discussion because of their Tracemonkey JS engine and because Firefox extensions and technologies like Mozilla Prism have the ability to replicate and build on what Chrome achieves.

iotop, see what makes your computer crawl

2008-09-04T11:13:55Z

If you have used a unix-y operating system for a while, you probably know the command top which shows you a list of the running processes and how much CPU they are using. It's a simple way to find out which of your programs should be killed to give your processor time to breathe (though I do prefer htop [homepage] which just looks nicer).

Now it's not always CPU usage that makes your computer crawl, it can also be too much IO (Input and Output mostly to the harddisk): When your processes want to write a lot of data to the harddrive and the drive just isn't fast enough all have to wait (if you have to rely on your harddrive for swap you instantly see why this is very problematic). Of course you can always guess who's responsible, but sometimes you hear the harddrive work without knowing what is responsible and here iotop comes to the rescue.

You can see which process uses how much of your harddrive capabilities so in case one goes berzerk you can just kill it. It's a really useful tool to debug problems with your machine so that next time you hear your harddrive spin up you don't have to guess who's responsible.

Django 1.0

2008-09-04T09:06:06Z

For those always hesitating to dive into Django because "things were always changing" or "there is no 1.0 release it's not mature" can now knock themselves out with this awesome web framework for "perfectionists with deadlines": Django 1.0 is released.

The new docs are even better than the old docs where, so start reading the tutorial already

Of tomatoes and programming languages

2008-09-04T02:46:00Z

When we purchased our house, there was a semi-neglected little garden in the back yard. It had been planted in the spring but pushed down in importance as the house was put up for sale during the summer. Having grown up with a three quarter acre gar

A thought about vimrc’s

2008-09-04T02:35:58Z

Paludis 0.30.0 is out!

Well, make that multiple thoughts actually. Despite this post following a Q&A format, there aren’t really many answers following.

Q1.) What kind of security risks can you potentially have because of your vimrc?

Q2.) What goes in your gvimrc as opposed to your vimrc and does it matter?

A1.) Now. I do not claim to any sort of expertise what so ever in security of any kind. To perfectly honest with you 99% of the time its the least of my concern. As long as my wireless router is encrypted and other trivial (yet potentially life (finacanlly speaking) saving measures) matters are dealt with I forget security is ever even an issue and continue life as usal. Which is probably very similar to how your average Joe runs his computer world too. “I have my Windows Updates, I’m secure enough.”

What brings this is on is a series of scripts I found today for Vim. One of which asks you to put your logon names and passwords to servers in your vimrc. The point of which is so that vim can login to your database, and then download the list of tables which is then used for autocomplete. It actually works really well, but after I implemented it, it occured to me vunerable I felt. I never reallly considered my vimrc secure, much less the rest of my harddrive. Even I know one of the first rules of computer security is you shouldn’t really be writing down your user name and passwords. So keeping a huge list of database usernames and passwords in my vimrc doesn’t sound safe. What do you think?

A2.) I’ve never really seen and documentation regarding what excatly goes in what. A lot of times you can stick everything in both or either and achevie the same effect. On rare occassions I have found myself stumped though. Pouring over documentation and checking my code again and again and again only to find out that it needed to go in the other. Hence my current two line gvimrc. So while I was working on my gvimrc for my Mac tonight I had to go to the net to remind myself how to set the window size when I stumbled upon a sample gvimrc that had all kinds of stuff in it. Things like no toolbars, no scrollbars, gui font. Stuff that everyone I know puts in their vimrc. So the question begs really, why have both if you only need one? And if you need both, why does a majority of stuff work in both instead of one or the other? Something doesn’t feel right to me there.

Enjoy the Penguins!

Constant Disk I/O - What’s Taking All Disk Resources?

2008-09-03T17:54:43Z

Recently, I updated my system and some other applications on my laptop and I found that some program on my system began gobbling up huge amounts of disk-activity. I looked at Gnome’s system-monitor and found that extremely unhelpful. Yeah, I could discovered what was taking the CPU and Nice readings but neither of these told me what was causing all the spin up activity of the hard-disk. This may not be a big deal for modern disks but for old computers it brought it to a halt and kept it that way minute(s) at a time. An easy way to monitor programs use of disk-activity is to use block dump.

First set block dump active in /proc:

sudo sh -c "echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/block_dump"

Looking at the syslog now will tell where resources are going:

tail -f /var/log/syslog

Looking at this I discovered that Firefox-3.01 was taking all the disk resources:

Sep  3 12:18:23 partridge-ibook kernel: kjournald(2443): WRITE block 7152 on hda11
Sep  3 12:18:23 partridge-ibook kernel: kjournald(2443): WRITE block 7160 on hda11
Sep  3 12:18:25 partridge-ibook kernel: firefox(3655): READ block 2234472 on hda9
Sep  3 12:18:29 partridge-ibook kernel: firefox(3655): READ block 649144 on hda9

For some unknown reason Firefox-3.01 was reading and writing to the disk far more than Firefox-3.0-beta5 was. What an incredible disappointment. Firefox-3.01 literally made my laptop come to a complete halt. This is incredibly disappointing because the beta version performed alot better with very little I/O activity.

I looked this up a bit but never really found the answer. Firefox uses fsync to save data (history, bookmarks) during a session, sometimes excessively. Because of inherent problems with fsyncing and the ext3 filesystem not much can be done with it. Fsyncing can be disabled by entering a Preference Name “toolkit.storage.synchronous” in “about:config” and inputting a value of 0, but this didn’t fix the problem. It turns out that Firefox-3.01 just uses alot more memory and re-allocates memory a good deal more often, so swap is being used and paged about every 2 minutes and can take minutes to finish. Unfortunately, a Firefox-3.0-beta5 ebuild is no longer in portage.

Turning block dumping off is the opposite of turning it on:

sudo sh -c "echo 0 > /proc/sys/vm/block_dump"

Looks like back to Epiphany for me, or heck, who knows, maybe Google Chrome will be stable soon!

Thanks to vor for the tip.

Enjoy the Day!

my ip with zenity

2008-09-03T17:47:00Z

just a small tip (again). this one came out of a hellug forum thread. its only use is to find out my current internet ip (especially when i host a diablo2 multiplayer game :P) in a graphical way.

#!/bin/bash

IP=$(curl -s http://checkip.dyndns.org/ | sed 's/[^[:digit:]\.]//g')

zenity --info --text="IP: $IP" &

it also demonstrates how beautiful zenity is :)

with not so much dependencies:

qdepends zenity
gnome-extra/zenity-2.22.1: >=x11-libs/gtk+-2.10 >=dev-libs/glib-2.8 >=gnome-base/libglade-2
>=gnome-base/libgnomecanvas-2 >=dev-lang/perl-5 app-text/scrollkeeper >=dev-util/intltool-0.35
>=sys-devel/gettext-0.14 >=dev-util/pkgconfig-0.9 >=app-text/gnome-doc-utils-0.10.1
>=gnome-base/gnome-common-2.12.0 >=sys-apps/sed-4

Perception of the unknown

2008-09-03T11:54:29Z

Yesterday, while I was working on a Linux server, setting some services up properly, someone came in. It was kinda lunchtime and I had started a few longer running processes so we started talking about this and that.

Since I was "semi-working" I kept one eye one my open terminal window to see if things were OK or if I'd have to fix something (you know the drill) when the other guy, who's not a computer person, asked: "And all that stuff does really make any sense to you at all?"

It's a great example for how people often perceive the unknown: When we look at something we have absolutely no clue about, we often don't break it down into its parts to understand it, we see it as one solid thing that makes no sense.

Experts completely grok some thing. Someone trained understands most of it and someone with a little experience in a similar area will probably be able to make some kind of educated guesses what means what or will be able to derive a few things. All those cases show how people can properly partition that huge bulk of information in front of them to follow the divide and conquer strategy: You don't get the complete thing at once but as soon as you partition the problem you understand the parts which leads to finally understanding the whole thing.

The untrained mind often cannot properly divide things so they stay big, incomprehensible and in the end somewhat scary. The impulse is not to try to find parts to understand but to run away from it: "I just don't get math.", "I never understood any of the computer stuff", "I just can't write."

Those are all the same issues: A problem in front of the speaker is not being properly compartmentalized and therefore stays completely opaque with no simple part that would allow a first approach.

It's important to realize that, when you want to explain something, you first have to make sure the person you are talking to can properly compartmentalize the topic at hand. Somebody who has never really done anything useful in a terminal will not understand what you do, he'll just keep copy'n'pasting crappy lines from the Ubuntu Wiki (yes that was a cliche ).

What did I do? I showed the other guy how to look at a terminal and after a while he realized that one thing was kinda like a progress bar, that another thing told me which object the machine was working on.

I destroyed the magic that only big and scary blackboxes can have but next time he won't look at me like I was a crazy person typing secret spells into the keyboard.

Good Free Open Source Software for your Mac

2008-09-03T02:43:45Z

Because I’m not as hardcore open source as Stallman that I only use hardware and software that is open source I have an Apple laptop and I use OS X on it. I, to be frank, I have no qualms with my Mac. It is light weight, feels like it is of good build quality, and to be honest OS X does what I want it to do. Nothing more, nothing less really. Hell, the kernel is open source (some of it anyway), and there is plenty of open source software for it that I like better than they’re Linux alternatives in many cases. Something I never really thought I’d say, but oh well…

Chat Client

Adium - Its like Gaim, in fact it uses Gaim’s back end, the only thing is though, its better than Gaim in my opinion. Its prettier, runs quicker than Gaim does on my Linux box, and that pretty much sums it up.

IRC

Colloquy - I can’t pronounce it, but I like it. Its pretty (notice a trend?). And it functions exactly the way I want it too. Mac software, for all the reasons you might hate it, much akin to its closed source cousin Windows, all tends to follow the same usage and ui patterns. Something I’ve been wishing Linux would do since I started using it.

Text Editor

MacVim - Its like Vim, only native Mac. Can’t go wrong there. I keep running into things that won’t work out my vimrc (which I need to update badly, sorry) but other than that, you can’t really go wrong here. And as far as I can tell the guy doing the brunt of the work here is super nice and willing to at least discuss your suggestions if not attempt to implement them.

Office

OpenOffice.org - For now anyway. There are more open source alternatives that use the truly open source parts of OO.org and rewrite the rest from scratch, under an open source license of course, but I haven’t tried any of them yet and can’t, in good faith, recommend them to someone else. If you not a die hard though, MS Office is the still the best thing going for your term paper. Sorry, but its true.

Mail

Thunderbird - Yeah, Apple parades their mail program around like its the greatest thing since sliced bread, and it is okay, but its okay at best.

Web Browser

Firefox - No surprise. I’ve tried a lot of browsers in my day. From the CLI only to the latest and greatest. You name it, odds are I’ve tried it. That includes the new Chrome browser from Google. Despite it all though Firefox still reigns king my book, regardless of platform.

That pretty much sums it up. I don’t think I really use any other software on my Mac on regular basis. Sometimes I fire up Xcode (close source) but even it relies on GCC (open source). So if you count that than so be it. Other than that, enjoy the whatever Mac’s little mascots are.

Enjoy the Penguins!

Not Holding Breath for Chrome

2008-09-02T20:49:49Z

I read the Chrome comic on Monday. It goes into technical detail in describing what their justification was for creating Chrome. By and large I think they succeeded: on the whole, Chrome doesn't appear to be a case of not-invented-hereism. They really do have some different ideas of how to do the browser, both technically and in the UI.

So yesterday I knew two things: Chrome was going to be crossplatform and the 30pg+ comic that went into some detail didn't say how they were planning to do that or anything about their UI toolkit.

So after poking at the code for a bit, it comes to no great surprise that crossplatform wasn't a big concern from the start. Currently the Linux version doesn't actually run, according to its website. And their UI toolkit choices might indeed have been based on some NIHism and are certainly not the most Linux or OS X friendly. Given how easy it is to create a crossplatform app if you make the correct early decisions, this is a bit frustrating.

They use Skia, a graphics library for Android for basic image display. And they have "Chromium Views" which mostly seem to be used to abstract between XP and Vista. It could theoretically be extended and used for crossplatform abstraction (just what the world needs - another xplatform api).

And why not Qt? "Existing UI toolkits for Windows are similarly unsatisfying, with limited widget sets, unnatural aesthetics, or awkward programming models. " Doesn't jive with my experience of Qt. But I guess I'm a bit partisan.

I do think that promising cross-platform support might have been a bit disingenuous of them, time will tell for sure. I suspect that if Linux desktop users do see Chrome, it will most likely be in the form of existing browsers incorporating some of their technology or ideas.

SATA after the install

2008-09-02T12:54:20Z

Windows always got a bag of fun stuff to keep us busy with. But sometimes the fun is over and you need to reinstall it from scratch. As my Laptop was running with the original install since quite some time now, I guess it’s time to clean up.

So let’s get to work by inserting the windows cd which boots fine until the disc selection shows up. No discs detected. Huh? What the hell happened? - The laptop got SATA discs and those were invented way after the initial release date of Windows XP.

But a peek into the bios eases the situation: there is a compatibility mode for the hdd controller which makes it possible to access the hdd with the default ide drivers.

Now the setup runs fine and everything is installed. But we are not ready yet as we still need to getBi rid of the compatibility mode for the hdd for a nice speed gain. Reboot, Changing the bios settings and…? Right, a bluescreen. Windows dislikes it if it’s loosing its hdd which forces us to use plan B:

The drivers for our SATA Controller is in the Intel Matrix Storage Manager, available from the intel website. Unpacking it is quite easy: setip -a -P”c:\intelstuff”. But that’s not all we’ve got to do. The package got a drivers folder that contains a file named iaahci.inf which we’ll be using as the driver descriptor for feeding it the device manager. From there we update the IDE controller’s driver. Using ‘Have Disk’ and pointing the assistant to the iaahci.inf file will present us a list of ‘possible’ drivers.

Don’t be scared of windows complaining about that the driver isn’t made for the device - remember: we’re still using the compat mode - so windows doesn’t know better. If you pick the right driver, windows will boot fine after the requested restart. If you have chosen the wrong one, you’ll be presented a fine bluescreen.

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Desktop screenshots

2008-09-01T21:00:38Z

I've been using this theme forever and I'm thinking of changing it, so I wanted to grab some screenshots before I did. I have bandwidth to kill anyways, so enjoy my 3.5 MB PNGs.

My KDE color scheme is here, my QTCurve config is here, my Konsole theme is here, my Vim colors are here, the icons are Buuf, and I uploaded those wallpapers.

I really need to re-upload all the screenshots I took over the past 5 years. That was always one of the more popular sections of the site, for whatever reason.

Feed the beast

2008-09-01T17:19:45Z

So I did that thing I mentioned in my last post, with the aggregation. The front page now combines RSS feeds from my blog, gallery, and wiki, and my page on Delicious in addition. More to come, likely.

Also, hooray for others making an edit or two to the wiki. Friend codes (thanks, Nintendo, for the most annoying online experience, by the way), but more interestingly, Dan has touched the CthulhuTech section a little bit, which I’ve been negligent in updating. But thanks for that, and stuff. There are CthulhuTech things I’ve been meaning to put up that I have yet to.

Also, the front page has reminded me of how much MoinMoin’s RSS feed sucks. I wonder if I can replace that…

Money does not equal money

2008-09-01T15:15:57Z

Mission 24: STRENGTH©

We live in globalized times with the internet bringing people closer together each day. Italians shop in the US, Mexicans have some guy from Japan send them stuff and Australian contractors work for German companies.

All this looks like great opportunities all over the place: More jobs for contractors and more offers for people wanting to buy services or products. But as usual it ain't that simple.

I live in Germany which is in the EURO-zone: Many European states replaced their own local currency with one currency for all of Europe (except a few party poopers obviously ) which is actually really cool. When I drive to the Netherlands I can just shop with my money and the one European currency has a much bigger relevance internationally that the single currencies we used to have had.

The problem is: With the Euro being strong and the Dollar losing value it's actually making it harder for Europeans to work internationally. I could get buttloads of jobs but since they pay in Dollars it's actually not worth it most of the time (of I end up being way too expensive). As we can see here: For people trying to hire contractors it's a great thing, they'll always find someone who will do it for very little money (and usually after a few months someone like me has to come in and clean up the mess). It's a buyer's market and a market for people that live in a place where life is cheap.

The second aspect we live with is again a matter of exchange rates: It's obvious that when I buy stuff from the US I'll have to pay more for shipping that someone who lives in the US or maybe even Mexico or Canada. I'm fine with that. What I'm not fine with is companies treating Europeans (and other people, the issue is similar in other non-US-Dollar zones, as far as I heard) like dumbasses: Take one culprit, (Cr)Apple.

The 13-inch, 1.6GHz MacBook Air is available to US customers for $1,799.00. In the German shop I'd have to pay 1,699.00 Euro. A fair price would be (google calculation) 1,236.76 Euro. The German customers pay 460 Euro extra; that's 669.11$! I mean how the hell do they transport those things? Do they hire a single jet for each thing? (Yeah I know the US version is without added taxes, and I was to lazy to add those few bucks on top of it, but it wouldn't really change anything.)

(Cr)Apple is not the only company doing this, you'll see it all over the place: Just replace $ with Euro and make that the price. Often it's actually cheaper to have some US store send you stuff to Germany than to buy it here.

Now I see that some things are being localized or whatever but is a German Keyboard (in the case of laptops) really that expensive?

I'm getting more and more annoyed by this when I see how hardware in some places is being kept artificially expensive. I guess (as much as I hate it because it is obviously not the best of the ecology) I'll just start buying more and more stuff in shops in the US, even after taxes and whatever I'm being charged extra I'll end up with cheaper items in the end.

It's one of those typical things when it comes to "globalization" (I hate the word): Everybody claims they want fair competition and whatnot but everyone just thinks it's reasonable to overcharge somewhere since everybody's doing it. Welcome to the cartel.

This post has been brought to you by the "incomprehensible-rant-about-things-that-won't-change-by-ranting" department.

Sisu and typing unicode in GNOME

2008-08-31T23:48:26Z

I have decided to finally make a serious go at trying to learn the Finnish language properly. The eventual aim is to be able to read (sing?) the poem Kalevala in its original Finnish.

Finnish has three more letters than the English alphabet: ä and ö are used in Finnish words, while å is hardly ever used, i.e. in Swedish loan words or names, such the Åland island in the Finnish Archipelago Sea which is perhaps not the best example as it is called Ahvenanmaa by Finnish speakers.

My laptop has an English keyboard, so I need a way of typing these extra letters in. Going through the graphical menu 'Accessories' and then to 'Character Map' is a bit of a chore and slows town typing and the spontaneity of it.

So there are keybindings to type in foreign (unicode) letters. They are outlined in an Ubuntu wiki page called GtkComposeTable. That page explains two approaches. The first way is to type the unicode values.

To do this you type Ctrl+Shift+U then while keeping hold of the Ctrl+Shift, type the following code for each letter:

ä	e4
ö	f6
å	e5
Ä	c4
Ö	d6
Å	c5

Typing in random codes is as unintuitive and distracting as using the character map. So there is a second approach. This I have not yet got my head around.

So there is a key called diaeresis (¨), which on the British keyboard is got by using Alt Gr and the left square bracket, so: AltGr+[

Now there is a key called 'compose', which by default is the right control key (RightCtrl). So we should be able to get an 'ä' using some combination of the following keys:

RightCtrl a AltGr+[

By bashing these keys randomly, I managed to occasionally get an ä, the same with ö also. However, I don't really get it.

Something I might explore is whether I can bind some easier and more rational key combination to ä and ö. E.g. AltGr-a and AltGr-o,

This is far as I have got so far. If anyone has any tips or has a better idea, please let me know.

Discuss this post - Leave a comment

Web 2.0 Browser shootout

2008-08-31T21:16:09Z

When I hear "Web 2.0" I think about the next generation of interactive, networked interfaces. Some of these new interfaces will not be attached to a browser at all but many will remain browser-centric, or will at least will be rendered using W3C standards. There are a lot of technologies like Flash and Silverlight that are helping to drive Web 2.0 forward but ultimately the oldest form of client side automation, javascript, is and will continue to be the preferred solution because of its entrenched usage and frameworks like AJAX and JSON. Adding to this is the recent javascript improvements from the Webkit team and the Gecko team. Soon we will be processing javascript at near native code speed.

As you can see from my previous javascript benchmarks the current leader is Gecko when it comes to performance of a stable release rendering engine. Webkit does very well in the SVN version and will be an excellent javascript performer when the current Squirrelfish implementation is stabilized. From the benchmarks released for tracemonkey we will see even greater improvement in javascript when xulrunner 1.9.1 is released. That is estimated to be about 3 months out at this point. Currently 64 bit is not supported as I figured out in an attempt to test tracemonkey performance. Opera seems a long way from Gecko and Webkit when it comes to javascript performance but the browser itself is featureful and Opera produces an excellent mobile browser which will only become increasingly important in years to come.

The next important piece to the Web 2.0 puzzle is standards compliance. This has become increasinly important as more browsers have shown up on the average users' radar. Mac users have Safari (Webkit), Opera and Firefox (Gecko), Linux users have Gecko browsers, KHTML from which Webkit is derived, and Opera, Windows users have Opera, Safari, IE, and Firefox. As you can see only IE is not cross-platfrom. The Unix version of IE died a long time ago and the Mac version more recently but there is no recent version of IE that is supported on another OS other than a Microsoft one. On mobile devices a variety a browsers are offered. Opera is offered on many different platforms. Gecko and Webkit, being open source can be ported to many different platforms and have already been ported to some. IE stands alone again as a MS only product. For this reason I think that IE has a limited future in Web 2.0. Not everything runs a MS OS and this isn't going to change in the future in fact I think this fact is only going to become more pronounced as mobile devices become more popular.

The infamous Acid tests test W3C CSS compliance. The current test is Acid3. It tests CSS3 compliance. Browsers are on their way to achieving Acid3 conformance and in fact a previous SVN build of Webkit passed the Acid3 test but current versions do not. Here is how the current Webkit scores:

Unfortunately at this point Midori (using Webkit) crashes in addition to failing Acid3. The current unstable Xulrunner (Gecko) doesn't crash and make it farther in the test but the visual results aren't quite as good:

The unstable version of Xulrunner produces better results while still not passing:

Opera does okay but still isn't there yet either:

Testing IE with Acid3 shows similary half baked solutions but I don't have the results to show because I don't have Windows on this computer. It makes it to 71 with all gray boxes before it quits, much like the current Gecko engine. Regardless I think IE is going to have very little to do with the Web 2.0 revolution compared to other browsers simply because it is not cross platform.

Taking into consideration both javascript performance and acid3 compliance only Webkit and Gecko seems ready to take on Web 2.0 full force. They both have excellent javascript speed and are getting to acid3 compliance quicker than other browsers. Opera is a good browser but I think they might be better served working on Webkit and integrating it with their web browser than continuing their own engine. This would save resources to work on other aspects of the browser while retaining an excellent browsing experience. Gecko has made huge strides and continues to do so. In the future I think we will be talking about Webkit vs Gecko as opposed to IE vs Netscape like we did over ten years ago. Ultimately both engines are going to drive Web 2.0 development much more so than the alternatives.

Website tinkering

2008-08-31T20:40:39Z

Taking a lazy Sunday to play around with the website. Finally installing Planet, which I plan on making my front page once it’s ready — the idea is it can assemble all of my RSS feeds, so the front page has a rolling view of everything I’ve deemed important enough to promote, like the blog, but for all of my updates.

After that I don’t know what I’ll do, but on the list is fixing some minor CSS quibbles here and there.

Oh, and on a totally unrelated tangent, I haven’t beaten Final Fantasy IV (DS) yet, but I’ve gone and picked Etrian Odyssey back up, trying to get everything completed.

DIY Openstreetmap Slippy map

2008-08-31T19:42:09Z

It has been long since my last post. Too long. I won’t fill you up on all the things I have done. Or maybe I will in other posts. But today I want to talk about openstreetmap.

As you might (or might not) know openstreetmap aims to provide a free (as in speech) map of the world. You can help by adding or editing the map. This is what I have been doing the last couple of months. Mostly fixing roads or adding new cycleways. Now of course cycling is good exercise. And it feels good to contribute to a free world map. However the real kick is seeing your changes of your work!

This can be seen on the main website. However that is only updated once a week. There are several other tile servers that serve a part of the map. These servers are generally updated more often. However when you use a tile server you are can’t change the rendering. So how great would it be to create your own rendering?

Check out my wiki entry. Of course it is a wiki so add all improvement you can think of.

PyCon UK Rambles and Statistics

2008-08-31T14:14:57Z

Python West Midlands

Yesterday was the Python West Midlands Technical Meeting. The night before I had arrived just arrived back in the UK, so I was a bit bleary eyed.

The group started about two years ago. After I learned Python I wanted to meet with other Python users in the area so we could share knowledge and have fun. So eventually I started a mailing list and website and put out a request to some local Linux group mailing lists for others to join me.

Before I know it I had a dozen people on the mailing list, then two dozen, then three. We then managed to have meetings in real life, we started off with evening pub meetings as the main thing, but later this turned to technical meetings one Saturday a month.

PyCon UK

One of the first people to respond was a guy called John, who quickly became my co-conspirator and co-leader of the group. He already had an idea to run a national UK Python day. Now we had a group of people, we could turn that idea into reality. I was thinking of the name "Python Saturday".

There had been previous Python events in the UK such as a Python track at the ACCU conference, so John estimated that there would be 80 people who would come to such a day. I was more sceptical, I estimated 60 people, 20 from Python West Midlands, 20 from London Python and 20 from everywhere else in the UK. We were both very wrong, this was clearly an idea whose time had come, we ended up with 200 delegates!

When the call for talks went out, and John had emailed all his Python friends, we had more talks that we could reasonably fit into a day, so we expanded the event to two days, then we expanded that to two rooms at once, lastly we expanded to four rooms of talks on the Saturday and three rooms of talks and one room of 'open space' on the Sunday. This was PyCon UK 2007, and it was a surprise success.

The Bennett incident

There were of course some mess ups, the Friday night social was a bit of a disaster, the place we had chosen was completely unsuitable for such numbers and the chef had a row with his manager and stormed out just before we had arrived, meaning there was no food! We were stuck with a terrible dilemma, people would we arriving (hungry) at the pub all night from around the UK and beyond so we couldn't change the venue, yet food was needed for many dozens of hungry geeks.

We tried to fix it by getting everyone to contribute a fiver and then buying food from a nearby Thai takeaway, this was a bad idea because firstly we didn't have any serving implements, so could not separate food into x portions, secondly it became a huge scrum, meaning the food was really hard to distribute. In the end the PyCon UK Treasurer saved the day by authorising us to buy a second round of food using money from the conference budget, so we raided John's wallet and we made sure the takeaway packed the food into separate portions. Despite such things, the treasurer still managed to break even, absolute genius, I have no idea how he got so much out of such a small budget. Hopefully, the delegates managed to get on and chat with each other, while the organisers pulled their hair out.

Although the Bennett incident was caused by a disappearing chef, the root of the problem was that a social meeting expected to have a small group had a very large group instead. Not knowing how many delegates you are going to get is the main problem of conference organisation. Plans laid for 100 people, fall apart with 200. Plans for 200, fall apart if you only get 100. After doing this a few times now, I think the answer to is pick the number you want before you start, and then declare the conference full when you hit it.

PyCon 2008

So last year was the practice, this year we would like to think we know what we are doing! We also opened bookings very early with a large early-bird discount, this not only enabled us to get a good idea of numbers, but also to put some money in the bank to pay the bills and deposits that we needed to pay for. Yes this year we have a bank account! Last year we ran the whole conference using John's credit card. We have also managed to get an impressive list of sponsors, so the conference finances are secure, we have a firm foundation to build on.

We far more talks and events than last year, and I am pretty confident that we will meet or beat last years attendance. However, due to the sponsors and more organisational experience, we can comfortably grow a little and still not have to declare full.

Python West Midlands August Meeting

Anyhow back to the last Python West Midlands meeting. This time we did a bit of organising for PyCon UK, thankfully this year we have some friends elsewhere in the country to help us, but much of the practical work is still done by Python West Midlands.

One onerous task that we had been putting off was typing in the feedback forms from last year. As vice-chair of the organising committee I had a lot of other things to do so first, however some other members of the group gritted their teeth and typed out all the returned forms, before I know it they had typed my share also, so lucky bastard that I am, I escaped, cheers to everyone who did the hard work, while I sat on my arse sending emails.

We had 108 forms returned, and they contain lots of interesting comments. Of course whenever you ask the people for their views, some a bit unrealistic, some are mad and some have absolutely fantastic ideas. It is the latter that hopefully will make the typing worthwhile.

You can read the full results here.

As well as questions about what they thought of the conference, they was some interesting statistics about the 108 Python programmers who replied to the questionnaires:

Firstly, we asked them how much experience they have with the Python programming language:

Secondly, we asked about what kind of programmer they are.

In retrospect, it would have been nice to have "I use Python in Open Source projects" as one of the options.

Lastly, we wondered what Operating Systems the programmers worked on:

As you might expect, Linux is very popular among this sample of programmers. I wonder if that is the same in the wider Python world, or whether people with the type of personality to get involved, meet with their peers and contribute, are the same personality type as people who are willing to use an open source operating system?

I wonder how our delegates compare to the Python world generally?

Discuss this post - Leave a comment

Ten steps to programming the make controller in Linux

2008-08-31T07:12:22Z

First go here if you have no idea what I am talking about.

Step 1

Get the Make controller kit ;) Get the power supply too, it's more convenient than connecting the USB cable.

Step 2

Get the Olimex jtag-usb-tiny from Sparkfun Electronics . It's the cheapest way to get started, trust me! Also get a
USB cable A to B while you are there. You will thank me later.

IPv6

2008-08-31T06:04:56Z

Not too long ago, after reading yet another "the internet is dying! We're running out of address space and it's all coming by November 2010 according to Cisco!" I realized that, "hey waitaminute - that's just about two years from now. That's... soon."

So I setup IPv6 for the machines I own. I still depend on IPv4 simply due to IPv6 not being available... well, most anywhere. At least not natively.

A big part of the reason that we don't have IPv6 in more places is because... well, circular dependency here, but because it isn't around. I can't plug my laptop into any other ISP's line and use IPv6 natively, and even if I could, the chances of the average home grade router working with it is about two.

Out of thousands.

So to get around this, IPv6 in IPv4 tunnels are used. They do exactly what their name implies: tunnels IPv6 data within IPv4 packets. The downsides to IPv6 tunneling are latency/overhead and... your ability to keep your IP addresses. If you don't have native IPv6, then your current hosting provider or ISP won't be the one giving it to you - meaning you get to get the IPs from a third party company. When your hosting provider or ISP turns IPv6 on, what are the chances that you'll be able to reassign entire blocks of IPv6 address space? Probably not too great. If you've got Comcast as your home ISP, I don't think that your tunnel broker is going to happily move your address blocks over to Comcast's control - at all.

While the latter point is generally a deal breaker for a lot of people, in the long run, I don't care. IP address reassignment happens all the time. There's no rule stating that you must drop your tunnels once you get native IPv6, and there's no reason why it would be overly problematic or painful either. Simply bring up the native IPv6, change the DNS records, and drop your tunnels a few days later.

With this knowledge in hand, I went poking around the vast area known as the Internet and selected Hurricane Electric's IPv6 Tunnel Broker. What really sold me (for free, that is) on using HE for my tunnel was really twofold: one, their views on IPv6 (which boil down to "we'd really like to be in business when IPv4 is exhausted, so we're going to deploy native IPv6 everywhere, provide a tunnel broker for free for anyone and everyone, and we're going to do it three years before crunch time") and two, the fact that it was free.

In selecting HE, I also got full reverse DNS control, selection of the closest HE router to my server, full control of a /64 subnet and a /48 subnet (by request, which I requested), the possibility of adding three more /64 subnets and three more /48 subnets to my account, and full operating system support (with instructions for setup with linux-net-tools, iproute2, *BSD, OSX, Solaris, Windows XP+, and Cisco).

Not bad for $0. I'm a happy customer (and a potential customer should I ever need colocation/dedicated servers).

I setup my account with HE, logged in, and was presented with simplistic instructions on how to setup my CentOS server.

ip tunnel add he-ipv6 mode sit remote 209.51.161.58 local 64.22.124.36 ttl 255
ip link set he-ipv6 up
ip addr add 2001:470:4:b2::2/64 dev he-ipv6
ip route add ::/0 dev he-ipv6

I created a new 'sit' tunnel named 'he-ipv6', with remote endpoint 209.51.161.58 - coming from 64.22.124.36 - and then turned the link up. Easy enough. Then I added my /64 allocation to the newly created tunnel, and pointed the default route through that tunnel.

Wait a minute. That's it? I'm IPv6 enabled already?

[kyle@averageurl ~]$ ping6 ipv6.google.com
PING ipv6.google.com(2001:4860:0:1001::68) 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 2001:4860:0:1001::68: icmp_seq=0 ttl=55 time=327 ms

Yup...

From there, I requested a /48 subnet so I could allocate a few full /64 subnets to my house (a /64 for my LAN, wifi, and secondary wifi), brought some more tunnels up, and then from my desktop...

kyle@ksb ~ $ ping6 ipv6.google.com
PING ipv6.google.com(2001:4860:0:2001::68) 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 2001:4860:0:2001::68: icmp_seq=1 ttl=54 time=325 ms

And now my desktop is IPv6 enabled. Go ahead, ping6 2001:470:d82b:ffff::2! You'll hit my home desktop. Then ping ::3 - my Vista box. Yup, that's right! My windows box is also on the IPv6 network. :fffe::2 would be my laptop on the wifi. The entire :fffd::0/64 subnet (and corresponding wifi AP) is unused currently, but perhaps once I decide to upgrade my router's software and play with wpa_supplicant that will change.

But why did I do this? What did I gain? Well, for starters, it was really fun to use HE's Looking Glass to run a traceroute to my desktop...

Tracing the route to IPv6 node 2001:470:d82b:ffff::2 from 1 to 30 hops

  1     2 ms   <1 ms   <1 ms 2001:470:0:32::2 
  2    76 ms   75 ms   75 ms 2001:470:0:35::2 
  3   103 ms  103 ms  103 ms 2001:470:0:4b::2 
  4   103 ms  103 ms  103 ms 2001:470:0:8c::2 
  5   148 ms  148 ms  148 ms 2001:470:4:b2::1 
  6   234 ms  236 ms  238 ms 2001:470:d82b:ffff::1 
  7   234 ms  233 ms  233 ms 2001:470:d82b:ffff::2

... while it sits behind my IPv4 NAT router. And then my Vista computer, and then my laptop connected to the wifi. Then I got to go take a look at The KAME project and check out the dancing turtle. It turns out that Google's IPv6 site also has an animated logo.

But in the end, I can now access all of my computers from behind NAT, without actually using any NAT - at all. I could drop the IPv4 addresses from some computers and still retain access to them, full access. This may prove to be both a blessing and a curse, but given time, we'll see..

(And yes, I know I shouldn't be using ::1 for my routers, that'll change soon enough.)

Interview with a new Linux user

2008-08-31T05:53:06Z

After countless, endless hours of nagging on my part, my girlfriend finally put Linux on her laptop. I thought it would be interesting to hear what a long-time Windows-using non-programmer thinks of Linux (Kubuntu in this case) after a few weeks of use. So I interviewed her. Read on. My thoughts and conclusions are at the end.

Q1: How would you describe your level of expertise or skill level when it comes to computers in general?

A: I think I'm better with computers (at least Windows) than the majority of my classmates (I'm starting third year accounting next week). I know my way around the internet, I'm decent with programs like Office and GIMP, and I know how to fix most problems that affect me as a lay user. As for Linux, I would know how to look for help, but I probably wouldn't understand it yet.

Q2: You used Windows for a long time in spite of my constant pestering. What kept you from using Linux until now?

A: A few years ago you tried to get me to use Gentoo. I was younger, and apparently Linux in general was more difficult to use, so I got frustrated pretty quickly. A lot of my reluctance was from remembering that time. I was also worried that I might do something wrong and lose all my schoolwork. At least in Windows I know it wouldn't be directly my fault if that happened (disregarding the fact that I'm slow at backing things up).

Q3: You decided to use Kubuntu. Why did you pick that distro instead of another?

A: I heard it was easy for Windows users to pick up. It's also the one you have on your laptop, so it's easier to get tech support.

Q4: Why did you pick KDE instead of Gnome, XFCE, or some other desktop environment / window manager?

A: I don't remember. Something about having multiple wallpapers on multiple desktops and being able to make them change randomly whenever I want. There might've been other reasons, but that one is the most enjoyable so far.

Q5: How hard was it to install Linux? Compared to Windows?

A: It was about the same.

Q6: How hard was getting everything set up the way you like it after Linux was installed? How long did it take you?

A: There's always a lot to set up on a clean install of anything. It took me a few days to find something I'm comfortable with. I mostly just ripped off your setup because I liked it, though, so that made it a bit easier. Getting SKIM to work was quite difficult, though, since I couldn't find good instructions for my version of Kubuntu (or Kubuntu at all, really). I think I just ended up making you fix it.

Q7: Does Linux have any features or applications you really enjoy, that Windows is missing? Can you do anything in Linux that you couldn't do (easily) in Windows?

A: Even just doing a small amount of image editing yesterday, I'm beginning to see the appeal of multiple desktops. I also like how easily it's detected various wireless networks so far. The package manager is pretty nice too. I wouldn't have a Gmail checker if you didn't write one for me, but the one you wrote is better than the one I was using before.

Q8: Do you miss anything from Windows? Is there anything you could do in Windows that you can't do (easily) in Linux?

A: It's easier to install programs in Windows than it is to install non-package programs in Linux. I still don't know the difference between a source and a binary. I don't miss playing games too much, since I'm more of a console person. But I do miss OtaClock. The default clock is boring and not cute at all.

Q9: How comfortable are you with using a command prompt?

A: Not very. I know how to chmod things, but that's about it. I need to look for a guide for basic bash commands that explains them in plain English.

Q10: How do you like the general look and feel of the Linux desktop compared to Windows?

A: It's a lot nicer looking overall. I like being able to use all the Buuf icons easily. At first I was resistant to using anti-aliased font, but it's growing on me. Windows displayed aliased fonts so nicely, and I still kind of miss it.

Q11: You have a dual-boot set up. What do you still plan to use Windows for?

A: I have a couple games that don't work in Linux. I also use my laptop for school, and my university is dominated by Windows, so I feel comfortable having it around for compatibility purposes if I ever need it.

Q12: It's been a few weeks since you switched to Linux. How has it been overall? Do you plan to stick with it long-term?

A: Overall it's been about the same as Windows. Something about Vista still creeps me out, so it feels good using an OS that doesn't feel evil. I like being able to get pretty much any program I want free and on demand.

Here are some Linux programs I know you've used... tell me something you like and something you dislike about each one.

Dolphin It's minimalistic, but it doesn't have the view options I like.
Konqueror I can get all the info on a file that I need just by mousing over it. It took me a while to figure out how to both display thumbnails and then sort them by size or date, though. I'm quite obsessive about collecting and sorting pictures, and in Windows that was how I used to see which pictures were new or duplicates.
Gwenview It finds duplicate pictures for me, making the above method obsolete. It even finds similar pictures, which is pretty intersting. So far I can't think of anything I don't like about it.
Amarok Win-B is my friend. There's too many unnecessary features for me, though. I don't care about album art or smart playlists. It's good that I can just ignore them.
Kopete It has custom themes. I really like the Metal Gear theme you made. For some reason I can't figure out how to make our text different colours, though. The text is different for my friends who use the real MSN, but for you it's the same colour is mine, so it's harder for me to read.
Kate It's like tabbed Notepad. I'm one of those people who actually likes Notepad, since I don't do much coding at all. I can see where Vim is better, but Kate is fine too.
KDE as a whole When it's set up properly, it looks really nice. The amount of stuff I needed to change to get it to look nice was quite overwhelming, though.

Thoughts and conclusions: I used to try to push Gentoo on people, and that was a mistake. Gentoo isn't for everyone. A bad experience can kill people's opinions of Linux.

It's a lot easier to make a big switch to a new operating system when you have knowledgeable people to back you up and help you out. This is one area where Linux shines: There are a LOT of people willing to help newbies. The community aspect of Linux is by far one of the best parts of using it. We're all doing this because it's fun and Linux people like to share the fun with others.

Is Linux ready for the desktop? I think so; I think it has been for a while now. A Windows power-user can find a lot to like in Linux. There are a lot of features and apps in modern desktop Linux that offer a lot of things many people would find very appealing if they only knew they existed.

Webkit vs Gecko Javascript performance

2008-08-30T20:45:24Z

If you haven't noticed I have a fascination with bleeding edge software. One of the pieces of software I have been following since its inception is the GTK port of Webkit. It is an excellent browser engine that is just as capable if not more so than other major competing engines. One of Webkit's strong points is javascript performance. The Squirrelfish javascript engine that was introduced a few months ago offers incredible performance.

To prove my point I tested the latest Webkit from subversion againt Xulrunner-1.9 using two different javascript tests. The first test is I used was Celtic Kane's Javascript speed test. I ran the test a couple dozen times on each browser. The Webkit based Midori browser scored an 89ms (lower is better) for its best case while the best I was able to acheive with Epiphany on Xulrunner was 255ms which makes it over 2.5 times slower. In fact Midori's worst time wasn't even close to Epiphany's best time. I took screenshots of the two best times I achieved. On the left are the results for Webkit/Midori while on the right are results for Gecko/Epiphany.

The second test I ran was Webkit's own Sunspider Javascript test. It is a much more complete javascript test and takes several minutes to complete. Again Webkit outshines Gecko in the Sunspider tests but the results are much closer. Webkit's javascript engine, Squirrelfish averages about 1.5 times faster than Gecko's engine. Webkit results are shown in the FROM column while Gecko results are in the TO column.

It seems this is all about to change. Firefox 3.1 is supposed to include a new and improved javascript engine called Tracemonkey that outshines Squirrelfish. It is not yet complete so it is hard to tell how much better it is actually going to be but preliminary tests show some amazing results. When I get a chance to test it I'll post another comparison.

With all the improvements going into both the Gecko engine and the Webkit engine it should make web browsing on either platfrom a much better experience. I do have to give the Mozilla foundation credit for Gecko. I was starting to prefer a Webkit based GNOME environment over embedded Gecko but Xulrunner-1.9/Firefox-3 was a very good release and the next release is only going to be better. Things are really heating up now in the browser wars again.

Tracemonkey javascript performance

2008-08-30T20:45:09Z

I thought that my comparison of the latest Webkit vs stable Gecko wasn't fair so I decided today to create an ebuild to fetch the latest xulrunner so I could test Tracemonkey. I had to tweak the ebuild a little (other than fetching with mercurial) because xulrunner would not compile with lcms enabled. I created another USE flag that toggles lcms. With this and some modification to the patch tarball I was able to build the latest xulrunner.

Here is my ebuild:

/usr/local/portage/net-libs/xulrunner/xulrunner-9999.ebuild

This ebuild requires the xulrunner.conf from the original ebuild files.

Next I launched Epiphany and typed "about:config". I searched for "jit" and then toggled "javascript.options.jit.content" to true and restarted my browser. Then I proceeded to run Celtic Kane's javascript speed test and the Sunspider Benchmark. Celtic Kane's test didn't show much of an improvement over the old javascript engine and didn't come close to Squirrelfish's performance. The result was a paltry 23ms decrease in time.

Maybe the Sunspider Benchmark would be different. Here is the comparison of the old Gecko JS engine and Tracemonkey. The old engine is under the FROM title and Tracemonkey is under TO.

We see some significant improvements over the old engine but we see some regression too. The overall picture shows us a slight improvement. Next let's compare Webkit's results to Tracemonkey. Here we have Webkit in the TO column and Tracemonky in the FROM column. Get ready for an all out browser war!

Yikes! That's disappointing. For all the noise we've heard about Tracemonkey these were not the results I was expecting. Squirrelfish is still eating it for lunch. I guess it's a good sign that Mozilla's numbers are improving but I have yet to see the performance they claim. There could be many reasons for this and I'm sure things will only improve but as it stands now I cannot achieve the kind of numbers I've seen put up on the web about Tracemonkey.

UPDATE: Apparently JIT cannot yet be enabled in 64-bit browsers so that is why perfromance is so close between the new Tracemonkey JS engine and the old one. When that changes I'll post a real performance comparison.

a coder’s bookshelf

2008-08-30T16:22:08Z

What is this obsession people have with books? They put them in their houses - like they’re trophies. What do you need it for after you read it?
- Jerry Seinfeld

I think it’s because reading a book takes a lot of effort, and we want to get credit for it. Reading a big book takes considerably longer than anything else you might do for “fun”. And then you can point to it and say, “look, this is what I know”.

I have a bunch of computer books, a lot of them from college, that I’ll probably never toss out even though I’m unlikely to ever re-read them. Meanwhile, I can do what a lot of people are doing and put them on display. “Look, I must be really clever, I have all these books!”

Frankly that’s all they’re good for after I’m done with them.

Windows XP SP3

2008-08-30T16:12:59Z

I installed XP Service Pack 3 today. Two things happened: First of all, XPize, the nice little program that tweaked the look and feel of XP to something a bit more…. modern, does not work with SP3. This is confirmed; and after the XPize project apparently has been death for a while, signs look good that [...]

Fun Updating With Gentoo

2008-08-29T20:55:52Z

I just thought I'd jot down an experience which may be of some benefit to others, even if only to provide a few laughs.

About 3 years ago, I built my brother a computer and he was just as sick of Microsoft as I was, so I told him about Linux. He wanted it, so I installed gentoo on his box for him. I updated it probably 2 or 3 times in the ensuing 3-4 months, and soon thereafter didn't worry about it anymore. It kept chugging on, doing everything he needed it to do.

about 2.5 years later, he pings me saying, "Yo, I think I could use an update to my boxes", and I thought, "okay...".

I wasn't about to think it would be an easy task, but I certainly thought that gentoo would be equipped to handle it.

It did handle it. Barely.

The update from Gnome 2.15 to 2.22, as well as the rest of the system, was at best, extremely painful. It took me about 16 man-hours to get everything working right. Just to give you an idea, there were 2 screenfulls (around 30) of ebuilds blocking other ebuilds. One was linux-util, which makes it impossible for you to *ahem* boot your computer should you turn it off without replacing it. Yeah... It was fun.

By the time I was done, I didn't want to even think about thinking about gentoo for weeks.

Moral of the story? Make sure you keep your gentoo boxen at least month-by-month up-to-date, unless you enjoy pain.

Oh yeah... And don't install gentoo for friends or family unless they know how to update their boxes themselves. :)

fotoxx ebuild

2008-08-28T20:03:00Z

not a long time ago kargig posted a fottox ebuild. a new release is out and some details of the compilation process were altered, so i decided to update the ebuild.

you can find it here:
http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=235961

Thinkpad T61

2008-08-28T13:46:29Z

Turns out that I could run MacOSX on this laptop, I can run the installer (a client wanted to test it on my machine). Now how can I make this laptop feel clean again?

On the other hand: I could write a complete, fair and unbiased (as it is my usual style ) review of the abomination that is OSX. But I wouldn't wanna kill my pretty Gentoo installation so that hack stays away. But seeing OSX boot was kinda funny I have to admit.

SSH through proxy/intermediate host

2008-08-28T13:12:31Z

Since I’ve been developing some stuff for a private intranet (read: web-interface for managing stuff), which runs in their internal network I’ve found myself SSHing into the router/firewall and then into the host I’m developing on. This itself being bad enough, it was even more annoying when you wanted to copy File X from Host A to Host B, where you always had to go through Host C.
Well, no more! After some time fruitlessy searching the web, I stumbled onto this easy solution involving everyone’s favorite: netcat! The way to do it with OpenSSH is really straighforward and transparent, the only dependency you have is that netcat is installed on the proxy-host (the one in the middle). Just put this into your .ssh/config:
Host internal1 internal2 ProxyCommand ssh firewall.domain.com nc -w 1 %h %pAnd then simply use ssh internal1 from your local host (yeah, even if internal1 is a DNS-name only known by the firewall).
The nice side-effect of this is that you can also use stuff like svn+ssh://internal1 transparently (git too, but in my case it was svn).

Vim Line Number Colors

2008-08-27T22:47:17Z

I have been using some other writting tools for coding at work and such and I’ve discovered a nifty feature I really like but can’t seem to find for G/Vim. I want to say it was Visual Studio.NET 2008 where I saw it but I can’t swear to it. Either way though I can’t find a screenshot of what I saw, so I will my best to describe it.

I would like a script that will allow me to change the color of every 10th line number. Well actually, I would to be able to adjust how many lines it skips, but 10 is a nice round number. So for example:

1  This is
2  Syntax
3  Highlighted Code
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12

I hope that helps. If anyone knows if such a plugin exists, do share!

Enjoy the Penguins!