AdamW on Linux and more (Posts about Baseball)

2-1

2009-04-15T20:49:49Z

So I'm posting this in the Red Hat category despite it having nothing at all to do with Fedora because you guys all need more hockey in your lives. And also to rub it in Greg's face. I'll hook you up with a link to the Canucks team store later, Greg!

Canucks win 2-1 in the first game of the first round, and that was one of the best one-goal wins all season. What I liked: absolutely top-class defensive commitment and execution, the entire set of defenders just put on a clinic tonight. They were outstanding from start to finish. Great offensive pressure from the third and fourth lines. The Sedins - aggressive and threatening all the way through. Mats Sundin playing smart and tactical and creating a few chances. And Luongo, of course.

What I didn't like: too many penalties, too many pucks played in front of our own net, and Sundin not playing hard enough. Pretty small list, really. Just a great, great game that really shows why we have a chance to go far this year.

One other thing I like - obviously it's too late for Don Cherry and he's gone to bed. No Cherry on the Vancouver HNIC coverage - thank Christ for that. The man's a twit.

Greg's Canes were juuuuuust squeaked out 4-1 by New Jersey, with a slim slim margin of 39 shots to 19. Close one there, Greg! Tough luck.

In case anyone cares, I pick the Penguins to beat the Flyers pretty easily (5 or 6 games), Red Wings to roll over the Blue Jackets, Caps to beat the Rangers in 6 or 7 - yeah, New York won tonight, but not in a way to inspire much confidence - I have to pick the Blackhawks to beat the Flames because as every Vancouver kid knows, FLAMERS SUCK, and I really have no frickin' clue between the Sharks and the Ducks, but it'll be a fun series to watch. And to go out on a limb for one series - Habs will beat the Bruins. You heard it here first, oh yeah. (That and the Habs are my second team, great team and incredible fan base).

Game on!

More techno-fiddling

2009-04-06T17:29:57Z

So today was another day of poking at my shiny stuff. I re-flashed my phone with the awesome Titan Reloaded ROM, which is a tweaked and optimized Windows Mobile 6.1 build with the HTC TouchFlo interface that showed up in later models. I also upgraded the radio firmware and installed WmWifiRouter, which makes a Windows Mobile phone act as a wireless router, sharing its data connection. Which is pretty freaking awesome, and a nice easy platform- and device-independent way to do tethering. Of course it eats battery on the phone, but still, it's pretty damn cool. I'm using it now. The upgrades also enabled the GPS functionality built into the Titan but not enabled in the stock OS (or the firmware/radio I was using before).

Again makes me appreciate how useful it is that the Windows Mobile platform and HTC hardware are pretty open and tweakable; some of this stuff you can't even do on Android yet, even though it's supposedly so open, because no-one's figured out how to talk to the radios at a sufficiently low level. Titan Reloaded is also just an impressive piece of work, it makes it feel almost like a new phone.

Whelk, meet supernova

2009-03-10T16:36:50Z

I just saw the Dutch baseball team (yes, Dutch readers, you have one!) beat the Dominican Republic (stacked with MLB all-stars) for the second time in a week. That's so ridiculously improbable I don't know where to start. Good on 'em. Great team play, amazing pitching.

Intel GMA 500 (Poulsbo) graphics on Linux: a precise and comprehensive summary as to why you're screwed

2009-01-30T19:45:36Z

So, poking around idly on Google this morning, I came across the interesting fact that there is, in fact, a native Linux driver for Intel GMA 500 - Poulsbo - graphics on Linux.

Don't get excited, though. It's not like it's actually any use.

That was the summary. Here's the gory details...

As I wrote in my previous post, the GMA 500 is not really a follow up to all the previous Intel chips. It's a bit of Intel's platform with a PowerVR (those of you who've been breaking crap as long as I have may remember PowerVR as an early contender to 3DFX and NVIDIA; they've since scurried off into niche markets) chip slapped on top of it. So it's basically a whole new architecture that needs a whole new driver.

Aside from the Vaio P and a couple of other systems, there's one significant machine with the GMA 500 chip in it: the Dell Mini 12. Why's it significant? Because Dell ship it with Ubuntu.

So, yes, there's a native driver. Intel, Dell or some combination of the two contracted out to Tungsten Graphics to write a driver for it. This is presumably because Tungsten have been supporting PowerVR chips for a long time, so they know their way around the hardware. So, the driver was written, and included in the special-sauce version of Ubuntu that Dell uses, and also in Ubuntu Netbook Remix. It was even developed under the auspices of the Moblin project at first, and you can find the code in Moblin git - X.org driver, kernel module. Where it hasn't been touched for eight months.

This is the first clue that all is not well. Up to that point it all looks fairly straightforward, but after that it rapidly goes to the dogs.

Trying to get the thing to work on a modern distribution, the first thing you notice is that it's messy code. The kernel driver consists of a copy of about half of drm, with all sorts of stuff included and built that doesn't really need to be. And it's not remotely in sync with current drm. All it really ought to be is a few files which should have rapidly been merged into Mesa upstream. There's even a comment in the code that shows the authors are aware of this, saying that one fairly trivial change should be done before the code is contributed upstream. But the change hasn't been done to any Tungsten-, Dell-, Intel- or Ubuntu-sourced version of the code I can find, so it's still a mess languishing in its own repository.

The second thing you notice is it doesn't build with any kernel post-2.6.24, due to that issue and a couple of others.

The third thing you notice, if you're lucky, is that it's not even really the latest version of the code, and this is where things get really odd. As I mentioned, the copies of both the X driver and kernel module in moblin.org git have not been touched for eight months. However, squirrelled away in dank corners of the Ubuntu empire, you'll find rather later versions of the code. It has eventually been figured out that the latest version of the X driver code is this one, if you combine the 'upstream' tarball (which is not, in fact, available anywhere 'upstream' that anyone I know of can find) and Ubuntu patch in that directory. The latest version of the kernel module code is stuffed in Ubuntu's Miscellaneous Kernel Modules tarball - this one.

The further you dive down the rabbit hole, the odder things get. The X driver seems to depend on a proprietary firmware file, called msvdx_fw.bin, for...something. Apparently it's needed for 3D acceleration and video playback acceleration to work. You can download this file from a post in an extensive and frequently messy and/or downright ill-informed Ubuntu forum thread on the topic. And, as far as I can tell, nowhere else. It also seems to depend on a supplementary X driver, Xpsb, for the same things - without both the firmware and Xpsb, 2D video playback acceleration and 3D acceleration don't work. I don't know where the heck you find that. The source trees definitely don't build it.

Some of this is documented - in passing, seemingly more as an example case than anything else - here. A page that's just sort of lying in the Ubuntu Wiki. Again, I only found it through the giant forum thread. The associated Launchpad project is listed as 'Approved', since May 2007, but 'Not started'. With no other information.

So, anyway. I picked my way through this bizarre minefield and then tried to get the fricking thing to work.

First I hacked up a patch for the kernel module myself to make it build, not really knowing what I was doing. But it seems to more or less work. When it loads, it gives me a native resolution framebuffer. Out of interest, trying to start X with the fbdev driver at this point gets started and shows the grey dithered "X is starting up now" screen, but then hangs the system with caps lock and scroll lock lights flashing. Interesting result, but not what I was really looking at anyway.

Later on, while trying in vain to find some combination that would work, I found that Olivier Blin of Mandriva has been poking at this stuff, as he has a cleaner patch to make it build against 2.6.27 in his personal scratch directory: here. So I tried building with that patch instead of my own hack. They seem to work about the same.

Then I poked about at the X driver. It expects to build against various headers from the version of drm in the kernel module source, not the system copies (or at least not the system copies on Fedora 10). It also expects a particular xf86mm.h, which I pulled out of the relevant Ubuntu libdrm-dev package - so already having to hack stuff up here. With that and a few other minor tweaks, I got it to build.

But...yeah, it doesn't work. With the newer version of the X driver from Ubuntu, it fails with a "could not mmap framebuffer (invalid argument)" error, almost immediately on trying to start X. With the older version from Moblin git, it just freezes on X startup. The system's still running - I can power it off clean with the power button, it shuts down properly - but X doesn't start and I can't see a console either. There's just a text cursor frozen at the top left of the screen. The last lines in Xorg.0.log are:

(II) Primary Device is: PCI 00@00:02:0 (WW) Falling back to old probe method for psb (II) Debug: psbProbe

Okay, so after a whole day spent bashing around at this crap, I can very confidently and conclusively say, it's utterly broken. By the looks of it, you can get it up and running, with a bit of futzing around, either by running Ubuntu Netbook Remix or running Ubuntu Hardy and forcing the Netbook Remix packages onto it - see the forum thread for details on that. But with any modern distro, it just doesn't look like it's going to work.

This is really silly, because the code is obviously 99% basically there and working. It just needs the people who actually know the code and the hardware to put it in the right places and not random obscure undocumented repositories, submit it upstream, and keep it up to date. But because, for whatever reason, the Intel, Tungsten, Dell and Ubuntu folks can't get their fingers out of their asses and actually provide the code in a sensible, sane and open way, few people even know it exists, no-one's seemingly working to keep it going with newer kernels, X.org and libdrm, and no-one has a freaking clue how to use it. And every Linux user with this chipset is getting screwed.

It's not good enough, guys. Just get together, fix the freaking code, and get it in the kernel and X.org so distributions can make it just work and everyone will be happy. Thanks.

Sigh.

2008-09-28T09:02:28Z

So, after today's baseball, the only thing I have to say is...

go Red Sox.

Mets? Mets? Who are they? They play ball?

Review of Flash in The Register

2008-06-20T15:13:01Z

I was happy to be able to get a review of the new 2008 Spring Flash into The Register, one of the biggest U.K. tech news sites - sometimes writing lots of nitpicking letters to journalists pays off, who knew :). Of course, it was good that their reviewer liked it - that always helps...

Spent the afternoon watching a Canadians game at Nat Bailey. Sitting ten feet behind home plate with a nice cold Granville Island beer and looking out over the outfield wall at Queen Elizabeth park is, in my opinion, reason enough not to want to live anywhere else for a long, long time...

of course, we lost the game, but hey, you can't have everything!

Strange

2006-05-29T09:50:24Z

Baseball's a strange world sometimes. Recent goings on with the Mets:

First, we make a low-risk trade for a veteran pitcher (Jose Lima). He has past success (1998-1999 in Houston, pitched over 230 innings each year, 37 wins combined, ERA under 4) and a poor recent record (2005 in Kansas City, only 5 wins with an ERA of 7). He comes to New York, makes a few questionable starts (three starts, 14.1 innings, 18 hits, 8 walks, 10 strikeouts, 3 losses and an ERA of 8.79 - marred by some horrible umpiring) and is more or less hounded out of town by a lynch mob.

Fast forward a couple of weeks.

We make a low-risk trade for a veteran pitcher (El Duque). He has past success (several good seasons with the Yankees, though only going over 200 innings in one season, plus his famous post season run) and a poor recent record (9 wins and 9 losses in 2005 with the White Sox, only going 128 innings, ERA 5.12; 2 wins and 4 losses in 2006 with Arizona at an ERA of 6.11). He comes to New York, makes a questionable start (5 innings, 5 hits, 3 earned runs, 3 walks, 7 strikeouts, over a hundred pitches, ERA 5.40) and is promptly wreathed in laurels.

The only difference? The offence and bullpen picked El Duque up and the Mets won his start; they (and that terrible umpiring) let Lima down and we lost all his starts.

Like I said. Strange world.

Sucks.

2006-05-04T09:05:02Z

So I lost the first round of the Coquitlam Open 3.5 yesterday 7-5 6-2, mostly due to some extremely dodgy calls on the part of my opponent. First up, I'm serving 30-40 down at 1-1, second serve, a ball from the next court rolls onto our court, he stops play to send it back, then doesn't call a let (this is a standard rule of courtesy in tournament play). I'd already done the same for him in a previous game. I stood there and looked at him for ten seconds, he didn't say a word. I promptly double fault. OK, so he just forgot, it happens. Fine. Then at 5-5, 40-30, I hit a point-winning first serve: good deep serve into his body, he parries it with a backhand that hits the net. I take a step towards the bench, and he calls a let. Uh...no. It wasn't a let, first of all. SECOND of all, you do not call a let AFTER you've hit your return and watched it hit the net. On the changeover he makes up some lame excuse about the floodlights not illuminating the net on our court (what the hell? They're exactly the same as the lights on every other court). Finally, in the next game (so he's serving at 6-5), 30-40, I hit a clean forehand passing shot that lands right on the baseline and he calls it long. I was standing at the net (I hit the shot after he hit a drop shot), so I saw it land very clearly; it's not possible to call the far baseline if you're standing on your own baseline, but from the net, you can see it easily. He goes on to win the game and the set. Three blatantly bad calls on game or break point: that's more than a coincidence. I don't know why people play like that, I really don't. I've never made even a close call in a tournament game, I follow the proper rule of always giving your opponent the benefit of the doubt. Does it make people feel like they've accomplished something to win like that? :\ I've got my first match in 3.0 today, I'm bloody well going to win that one at least.

So, in other news - sorry I've not been posting lately - work has mostly been tied up with finishing off Inside #2. Also Helio is back and fixing Kiosk's KDE bugs, yay. I also received a box of 50 nice printed copies of Mandriva One to give away to reviewers, new users etc: cool stuff. Unfortunately they're pressed from the early version of the ISO (the one distributed to Club members), not the final updated version, but still cool.

Yesterday I got my shipments from Amazon and YesAsia - the final series of Red Dwarf (which I remember mostly sucked, but you have to have the whole thing...), and a couple of albums, Salyu's Landmark and Mika Nakashima's Glamorous Sky. The Salyu album is gorgeous, just like the recordings she did as Lily Chou-Chou for the movie All About Lily Chou-Chou: she has such an intoxicating voice. The packaging is cute, too - the lyrics are included, not as one booklet, but as a set of individual picture cards.

The Mets are still winning. What the hell is up with that? Of course, there's bad news too: Victor Zambrano did his usual trick; just as almost everyone was finally agreeing that once and for all, yes, definitively, he DOES suck, he pulled his one good start of the spring out of his top hat and thus secured his presence on the starting roster for another few months while the argument starts up again. Sigh. I'm amazed he manages to keep fooling people like this: it's been going on long enough that people should have worked out by now that a stinky pitcher who manages to reliably pull off one good game every two months is still a stinky pitcher, just a frustrating one. Dump him already.

Believe

2006-04-07T19:11:32Z

Team W L PCT GB New York 3 1 .750 - Atlanta 2 2 .500 1.0 Washington 1 2 .333 1.5 Florida 1 3 .250 2.0 Philadelphia 0 4 .000 3.0

OK, we're only 2% of the way through the season. But when you're a Mets fan, you take what you can get...

Life in general

2006-02-14T00:30:58Z

Hmm, time for a general-y update.

The best thing to happen lately is that the weather suddenly got much better - it stopped raining last weekend and hasn't started again yet. Thus I managed to play tennis six days out of seven last week, which was nice (if rather tiring and, by Sunday, inducing nasty cramps in my right leg). Had one rather intense game with my nemesis, who I still couldn't manage to beat (6-7, 4-6), but I did manage not to collapse at many points (4-5, 5-6, 0-4 in the tie break, 0-4 in the second set) and served ten aces, so at least some positive stuff. I really, really need to beat him some time, though. It's annoying. Other than that, I won just about every other game I played, which was nice.

Have been quite scarily healthy lately, as well. Yesterday night we went to a tiny Korean place just up the street for dinner - they had no other business and it felt like we'd just been invited to dinner, they kept plying us with unpaid for bonus dishes and meticulously cut oranges and things. I had a traditional mixed vegetable dish which was very nice, and Sammy had something seafood-y which was also apparently good. And the oranges were great. We'll have to go back. Saturday night was another time we decided we wanted to go somewhere new, so after driving around for a bit (we were with a friend who has a car) we ended up at a (fake) Japanese place in Kitsilano which was unreasonably cheap (the prices were already a little cheaper than regular Japanese downtown - say $6 for a noodle dish - but after 7p.m. there's a 40% discount!) and excellent. And tonight Sammy made vegetable chowder. If I eat any more vegetables I may actually explode. I've also been eating more bananas lately. If it weren't for the 48 ginger cookies I baked the other night it'd be all healthy eating, but that'd never do...:) Of the new music I mentioned last time, I'm definitely liking Bloc Party, the Jimmy Chamberlin Complex (best solo Pumpkins album yet, actually), Modest Mouse, and the surround-sound Yoshimi (which is just eye-popping at times). The Decemberists stuff is nice but not as good as the albums (at least not yet), Bright Eyes is also OK but really just another live album with nothing massively special on it, 29 is pretty good but I preferred the Cardinals stuff - more fleshed out, with better production - and the Dears album is pretty decent but not quite as good as the second one.

Today I bought a USB phone handset for my PC - basically it works as a second soundcard which you can configure Skype or some other voice / video program to use, then using them is just like using a regular phone and there's no more fiddling around with the mixer settings and microphone configuration on your main soundcard. Definitely worth dropping a few bucks on, and it works perfectly with Mandriva (I just plugged it in, snd-usb-audio was loaded, and it popped up as /dev/dsp1 and ALSA soundcard #1 - reconfigured Skype and Ekiga to use the new device and everything was good. Excellent.)

We had a party for one of Sammy's friends who was leaving Vancouver recently - I uploaded the pictures to the Gallery. The restaurant (Japanese 'fusion') was odd - almost no vegetarian stuff on the menu so I just got them to make me some yakisoba which was fine, but the others ordered the ten-course menu, which really didn't add up to much food (one of the courses, I kid you not, was a leaf on a plate) but, to compensate for it, was liberally supplied with heavy ingredients (the 'fusion' part, I suppose) which (according to Sammy) kind of ruined the taste and left you feeling full but not satisfied. There was also an obnoxious caucasian waitress who obviously believed herself to be the only white person ever to have learned Japanese, was unreasonably proud of this, and had decided it was sensible to broadcast the fact by screaming everything at the top of her lungs in fluent but rather poorly accented Japanese. (Every time someone came through the door, no matter where she was in the restaurant, or if there was already someone at the door welcoming them, she would without fail emit a piercing yodel of "O-KYAKU-SAMA DESU!!!!!" which resonated my skull perfectly. Augh.) Still, we managed to have a good time anyway.

That should be about everything, I guess. Just to fill out the final possible category, I should mention it's only a little more than a month to the start of spring training, and this season's Mets lineup looks like being the best for a long time. Woop. Could be an interesting season.