Blog Archive: August 2017
More PayPal pain
Finally I've found a cheap amplifier for my office, a Samyang San112 for $30, with pickup in Sebastopol. Paid for it with PayPal and received an unexpected message: Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2017 00:19:37 -0700 From: [email protected] To: Greg Lehey <[email protected]> Subject: Your payment to ebayseller is pending This transaction is pending. In accordance with our policies, we review certain transactions to make sure they don't pose any risk to us or our customers. Your payment is currently under review. We will complete this process within 72 hours. Please note, this review involves this transaction only and does not affect the use of your PayPal account for other transactions.
Understanding fisheye lenses
Wide angle lenses have been occupying my thoughts for a while now. How do you represent things wider than a normal angle of view? There are many projections, foremost being the rectilinear, now called gnomonic , just to confuse you. The confusion is not made any easier by the relationship between image projection and map projection. Then there's a spherical projection, which for some reason Wikipedia doesn't even describe. My understanding is that that's the projection used by most fisheye lenses. Hugin has a plethora of other projections, most of them uninteresting. One of the useful ones is cylindrical projection, a hybrid of rectilinear gnomonic projection in the vertical direction and spherical in the horizontal direction.
Affinity: not a bug!
After my fun with Serif Affinity Photo a couple of days ago, I added to their forum page: There's another reason: you will get this message if you use Affinity via Remote Desktop. It appears to be a bug: I can start Affinity from a local display, then move to remote desktop without stopping Affinity, and then continue on the remote desktop. A bug? We don't have no steenking bugs, as the reply from Serif staff said: By doing it that way round, you start the application normally, which passes the checks, and then start remote desktop which disables DWM whilst the application is running.
Large Companies Considered Harmful
Theres a plausible case that capitalism per se isnt the problem. Concentration is: Variations range from too big to fail to good old-fashioned monopoly. Its painfully obvious that the acquisition of one monster telecom or bank or airline by another does neither their customers nor the economy as a whole any good. Its tough to write anti-monopoly law, because how do you quantify market power? However, you can quantify size. So lets use that as a club to bash away at the problem. Specifically: Pick a number X, and pass legislation decreeing that no company can have more than X full-time-equivalent employees.
Party Discipline: a novella set in the world of Walkaway
I wrote the novella Party Discipline while I was on my grueling US/Canada/UK tour for my novel Walkaway, last spring. Today, Tor.com publishes the tale, in which two seniors at Burbank High confront their uncertain future by planning a “Communist party” in which they take over a defunct factory and start it up again, a... more
Bing: invasion of privacy
I don't use euroa, my Microsoft laptop, very much. Today I brought it to the dining table to help discuss our menu for the following week. Started firefox and got a home page: bing. I don't use bing at all. My home page is local on eureka. How did I end up with bing? I can only assume that some update reset my home page. I consider that criminal. ACM only downloads articles once.
Serif Affinity photo software
I'm always on the lookout for photo software that will fit into my framework and allow me to do things that I can't with my existing software. GIMP should be a contender, but it's so difficult to use that I keep it only for emergencies. And of course there's Photoshop, which was once unattractive because of its price, but which has been made all the more unattractive by the new subscription model. Recently I've heard great things about Serif Affinity Photo, like this one, but also personal recommendations. OK, might be worth trying. It seems that I already had a mail address for Serif, so tried that.
Olympus GPS logs
Over the last few days I've spent quite some time investigating GPS logs from Android devices. But Olympus has its own OI.Share application that also does GPS tagging. Where does it store the logs? Finding files is the usual problem with consumer digital devices, and today I was unsuccessful. While looking for them, found this page, apparently official, containing information about the app that I haven't found elsewhere. And, of course, it's at least partially incorrect: Before taking any photos, turn the switch on the Home screen to On to start logging.
More GPS fun
On my way into Ballarat, saw this at the front gate: By chance the map is oriented with north upwards. The correct direction was via Grassy Gully Road, to the south-east and just visible at bottom left in this view, and it's about the only way out of our area. Yes, I can drive the length of Progress Road, turn left into Rozenstein Road, left again into Bliss Road, left again into Stones Road, and then right into Grassy Gully Road, a distance of about 3.3 km.
Another GPS visualizer
Did some more half-hearted searching for software to display GPS logs, and came up with GPS Visualizer. At first it looks very complicated, but maybe that means it offers functionality that wikiloc doesn't. One way or another it looks like a can of worms. ACM only downloads articles once. It's possible that this article has changed since being downloaded, but the only way you can find out is by looking at the original article.
Uses for smart watches
After our discussion of smart watches recently, it was interesting to note this statistic about the uses to which people put their smart watches: All sorts of things. How can anybody possibly read email on a watch? The mind boggles. The most important use is conspicuous by its absence: telling the time! ACM only downloads articles once.
More Misery
On the way home, drove down Misery Creek Road in Enfield again for a few more photos. The total distance from the Ballarat-Colac Road to Berringa is about 7.5 km, but it seems that the most interesting stuff is between Ballarat-Colac Road and Orchid Track, only about 2 km away. That also makes it much closer to return home. More photos of what I'm sure is the Grevillea bedggoodiana, still not quite in flower, but with a surprising number of flower spikes: I also came across a couple of other plants that I hadn't noticed last time.
Visualizing GPS logs
I now have two GPS logs of my journey along Misery Creek yesterday. How can I visualize them? Went looking on Google, and as expected, found a number. The first I came across is wikiloc (which my fingers insist on spelling wikilog ), which allowed me to upload a logfile (from flachmann.lemis.com, my tablet). The map is visible here, but I still haven't had time to play with it, and it's not clear that it's the best choice. At the very least I need to find out how to edit things better than their almost non-existent documentation explains. And it would be nice to compare the track recorded by talipon.lemis.com (my phone).
UFS or ZFS?
I've been using UFS for nearly over quarter of a century, during which time it has been polished, bugs removed, performance improved. I have a good feeling about it. But our continual power failures bring home that it recovery is really fsck based, meaning lots of time lost on days like today. Yes, there's a journalling option, but it never seems to have caught onprobably old fogeys like myself help thereand I'm not convinced that it's as reliable. Every time this happens to me, people on IRC get up on their hind legs and chant ZFS! ZFS! . And yes, it's probable that I'd be better off with ZFS in this particular case.
Power failure! fsck! fsck!
Woke up round 5:50 this morning to discover that the power had failed. Really? Looked outside and saw the LED on the water pump still running. Into the garage to the fuse box. All breakers on. Out to the meter box. Meter dead. Clearly we no longer had power. But why was the LED on? It normally fails (understandably) with the power. My best guess is that it was not a total power failure, and that some residual voltage remained, sufficient to run the LED, and presumably nothing else. The power came back at 7:17, and I went out to restart the computers.
See you at Burning Man!
Tomorrow, I’m turning off my email and hitting the road for Burning Man, where I’ll be giving three talks, and I hope to see you there: at 4PM on Weds, Aug 20, I’m speaking at Palenque Norte at Camp Soft Landing; at noon on Thursday, Aug 31, I’ll be speaking at my home camp, Liminal... more
More GPS insights
I had my GPS receivers enabled when I went down Misery Creek Road, of course. In the process I discovered a number of things. First, a step back: how do you interface a GPS receiver to a program? That looks like a variant of a typical operating system task: the operating system presents the receiver as a device, and the program reads it. If it wants to reconfigure the device, the operating system should mediate. After leaving Napoleons, I checked my devices. The tablet was working fine. I had set tracking on the car navigator, but it seems that it forgets that when it powers down, so I had to restart it.
More GPS fun
The trip into Ballarat gave us the opportunity to get a more detailed GPS log, this time with log delay set to 0. The result? <trkpt lat="-37.560112" lon="143.8601387"><time>2017-08-21T05:38:25.142Z</time><src>network</src></trkpt> <trkpt lat="-37.5601136" lon="143.8601253"><time>2017-08-21T05:38:29.171Z</time><src>network</src></trkpt> <trkpt lat="-37.5601124" lon="143.8601356"><time>2017-08-21T05:38:33.167Z</time><src>network</src></trkpt> <trkpt lat="-37.5601019" lon="143.8601346"><time>2017-08-21T05:38:37.087Z</time><src>network</src></trkpt> <trkpt lat="-37.5601095" lon="143.8601355"><time>2017-08-21T05:38:57.655Z</time><src>network</src></trkpt> <trkpt lat="-37.5601092" lon="143.8601309"><time>2017-08-21T05:39:01.564Z</time><src>network</src></trkpt> <trkpt lat="-37.5600957" lon="143.8601412"><time>2017-08-21T05:39:05.469Z</time><src>network</src></trkpt> Again, src is network . What does that mean? The coordingates show that we were outside The Good Guys, which is correct. So what network does it mean? And why is there no speed information in the log file? The other thing to note is that the log entries are roughly every 4 seconds (with a noticeable gap in the middle).
FORTRAN history
There was a discussion recently on the Unix Heritage Society which diverged towards FORTRAN, discussing why it was such a horrible language. I had input on that: I think the arithmetic IF was put into FORTRAN because it was easy to implement with the CAS instruction. It doesn't make much sense from a mathematical point of view. ... my guess is that the authors of FORTRAN were looking for the cheapest solution, not the fastest one. For decades to come, the fastest solution was assembler.
Understanding GPS locations
As of yesterday, I wasn't much closer to establishing the cause of my GPS location inaccuracies. One photo was interesting. Here the complete photo, then crops: That was taken with my Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II, which normally records local time. But exiftool's -geotag function adds information. Here the tags, bold from exiftool: Modify Date : 2017:08:19 14:38:59 Date/Time Original : 2017:08:19 14:38:59 Create Date : 2017:08:19 14:38:59 Date Time UTC ...
Enlightenment Technology
Around 1500, the levels of technology and productivity in Europe and Asia were not dramatically different. But by 1700, Europe had leaped ahead and, by the twentieth century, mostly come to dominate the world; the labels Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution are commonly applied. A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy, a 2016 book by Joel Mokyr asks Why? and tries to answer. I encountered many jewels of insight and erudition in this book, which however is difficult, a rough read; Im not entirely comfy recommending it. But itd feel wrong not to pass a few jewels along, and in a couple places add perspectives that I think will resonate among geeks.
GPS positioning
House photo day again today, and finally I remembered almost everything. I just forgot to adjust the bracket correctly. I think I really need that checklist... Fortunately I was close enough, and the only photo that didn't work was this one: Why that? That wasn't parallax: the cord moved between individual images. With masking I can improve on it, but not completely eliminate it on the left: And the GPS locations?
Building NetBSD, continued
I've received mail from coypu, an email ID without a matching real name (domain removed to avoid spam) about my trouble building NetBSD. He made some suggestions, reminding me that NetBSD has also abandoned the simple build mechanism of the last millennium, and now uses a script called build.sh. One of his build suggestions: ./build.sh -U -u -j 4 -m amd64 -O ~/myobjdir tools ./build.sh -U -u -j 4 -m amd64 -O ~/myobjdir kernel=GENERIC Problem: it doesn't work for me. RTFM time, which shows that build.sh is required for crossbuilds, and the old make build is still supposed to work.
Another new GPS navigator
Di Saunders has bought a GPS navigator to help her find her way here. It didn't work: she couldn't work out how to program it. It's a NAVMAN MiVUEDRIVE FHD, as the web site claims, though I think that includes gratuitous shouting on the part of the WEBMASTER. She paid $200 for it, far more than I have ever paid for a navigator. What does she get for it? A considerably smaller display (but bigger than the one on her iPhone; that's why she bought it). Free monthly map updates, 1080p video camera and a G-sensor to record the direction of impact during a collision.
Postal services in the Internet Age
Three years ago I wrote an essay about The Internet in 2034, and I've been watching things develop since then. 17.5% of the time has already passed! One of the things that I predicted, and which I'm still very sure will happen, is the transition from on-site to off-site purchases. That implies more emphasis on transporting these goods. Somehow, though, that isn't going according to plan. Transporting goods is getting slower, not faster. A while back Australia Post raised prices and slowed down deliveries. Today was a case in point: last week, after 3 days of trying, I finally purchased a new battery for my Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II.
Goodbye ache
The name ache goes back to the early days of the FreeBSD, decades ago: it was the user ID for Andrey Chernov, one of the first developers. He died yesterday, a couple of weeks before his 51st birthday. Of what? We don't know, but it seems to be related to osteoporosis, not exactly a common complaint for a person in his position. In a recent mail message he wrote: Sorry, I can't be constructive for some unknown time, because I broke my leg yet again, due to osteoporosis.
GPS tagging: done?
So now I have GPS tagging working relatively well, and I can modify my scripts to take it into account. In the process, I also modified the scripts to read in photos from the cameras. Previously I added author information to the raw files, but now I'm just adding it to the converted files. This has two advantages: first, it maintains the integrity of the raw file (just as it came out of the camera, which can be important for some broken software, such as DxO Optics Pro ), and secondly it's a lot faster. And tagging is simplicity itself, as I noted a couple of days ago.
Debugging in Practice: dgsh Issue 85
Fixing an insidious bug in the new Unix directed graph shell dgsh allowed me to demonstrate in practice 10 of the 66 principles, techniques, and tools I describe in the book Effective Debugging . Almost all steps all documented in the corresponding issue and commits . Here's a detailed retrospective.
Interesting maps
Over the last few days I've come up with a couple of interesting maps. The first is a submarine cable map that gives some idea of how communications get round the world. It may also be interesting to consult if one of the fails. The other is an antipode map, more fun than anything. ACM only downloads articles once.
GPS tagging: done!
Today, while walking the dogs, I remembered to take my mobile phone with me, and logged the locations of my photos. And how about that, tagging Just Worked. It's so much easier than using OI.Share. Here's the procedure: At some time, set the camera time accurately. OI.Share will do this if you connect the camera to the phone. Then you can disconnect again. Take photos as normal, ensuring that the phone is nearby.
Olympus TG-5 Tough Waterproof
I found myself vacation-bound to Queensland (thats the top right corner of Australia) and the itinerary included beaches and coral, specifically the Great Barrier Reef, which is dying. I like to photograph the places I visit, and the Olympus TG-5 is getting lots of buzz in waterproof-cam circles, so I got one. The manual says that when its been in the ocean, you should give it a ten-minute freshwater soak. Camera geekery The Oly TG tough cameras have been underwater stalwarts for years, and the -5 differs from its predecessors notably in shooting RAW, offering 4K video, and having fewer megapixels, for better low-light sensitivity.
More GPS tracking insights
Mail from Michael Hughes this morning telling me about exiftool's built-in GPS tagging. And of course I took my house photoswithout taking the mobile phone with me. There are so many small details in setting up for taking those photos that I almost think a checklist is a good idea. I suppose I should get used to carrying the phone with me whenever I take a camera. The other thing that interested me was time synchronization. When is it done? The sensible thing to do would be when the phone connects to the camera for any purpose. But the other (non-exclusive) possibility might be to do it when tagging.
EXIF GPS tagging: done!
As planned, spent some time looking for alternatives for GPS tagging photos today. It didn't take long: exiftool has built-in GPS tagging. That's particularly good news, since I use it anyway, and the whole thing is easily scriptable. I'll try it with my house photos tomorrow. ACM only downloads articles once. It's possible that this article has changed since being downloaded, but the only way you can find out is by looking at the original article.
Cameras and GPS
Going in to Ballarat was an opportunity to try more GPS logging with the camera. Fired up my old Android tablet and started installing stuff on it. Surprise! OI.Share didn't want to install: the device is not compatible, it says. Why? I've run it on this tablet before. The whole thing is silly. One issue, of course, is that OI.Share uses GPS navigation, which won't work without the corresponding hardware support. But a phone or tablet without GPS could still work as a remote viewfinderif only they would let it. What's wrong with my tablet now? While installing GPS Status I discovered that the tablet doesn't have a compass.
Online shopping, the wrong way
I've had my Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II for over 5 months, but I haven't bought a spare battery for it yet. In the past after-market batteries appeared within a month or two of the camera, and for the Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark I I received new batteries within three weeks of getting the camera. But it seems there's more intelligence in the BLH-1, and so far nobody has come out with a lookalike. That's a pity: the lookalikes cost round $20, and the originals starting round $100. But it's about time that I got a second one, so on Sunday I decided to buy the first one available for $100 or less, including postage.
Telstra: There can only be one
Petra Gietz along today, it would seem to visit the dogs: While she was here, I took a look at her phone to establish whether her new SIM card had been activated. I failed in that due to lack of coverage, but looking at the phone brought a surprise: Please turn off WiFi [sic] in your settings to get the latest data usage . What a declaration of bankruptcy!
Evidence that Go makes it easy to get up to speed
Some recent PRs to the DNSControl Project casually mentioned that this was their first time writing Go code. That's amazing! When was the last time you saw someone say, "here's a major contribution to your open source project... oh and I just learned this language." (and the PR was really darn good!) I think it is pretty rare and one of the special things about Go. Part of Go's original vision was to make it easy for new people to join a project and make contributions. This was important internally at Google, since engineers hop projects frequently. This also benefits open source projects by making it easy to dive in and participate.
Evidence that Go makes it easy to get up to speed
Some recent PRs to the DNSControl Project casually mentioned that this was their first time writing Go code. That's amazing! When was the last time you saw someone say, "here's a major contribution to your open source project... oh and I just learned this language." (and the PR was really darn good!) I think it is pretty rare and one of the special things about Go. Part of Go's original vision was to make it easy for new people to join a project and make contributions. This was important internally at Google, since engineers hop projects frequently. This also benefits open source projects by making it easy to dive in and participate.
Display Git's and Current Directory on Terminal Bar
I typically have more than ten windows open on my desktop and rely on their names to select them. Being a command-line aficionado, most of them are terminals. I have them configured to display the current directory by setting the bash PROMPT_COMMAND environment variable to 'printf "\033]0;%s:%s\007" "${HOSTNAME%%.*}" "${PWD/#$HOME/~}"' . The problem is that the directory I'm often in has a generic name, such as src or doc , so the terminal's name isn't very useful.
Burbank! Ill see you tonight at 7PM at the Buena Vista library
My Walkaway book-tour is basically over, but I’m taking a little victory lap tonight at my local library, the Buena Vista Branch of the Burbank Public Library. Hope to see you there!
More GPS insights
Why did OI.Share stop logging GPS data, although it was switched on? No idea, but possibly because it lost signal. That's no excuse, of course: it should just have logged the fact and continued when the signal returned. As it was, I turned logging off and then on again, and then it continued. No idea whether the two occurrences are connected. Then off round the garden looking at what GPSLogger showed me. Almost no updates; I could walk the 50 m from the house door to the front gate without it showing any different location. That's clearly not OI.Share's fault. Time to try with my old Android tablet.
Understanding GPS logs
On Saturday I finally got some sense out of GPS tagging with OI.Share, and also discovered something about the log format. I even installed a C library of conversion routines. When I went to Geelong yesterday, I turned on GPS reception and OI.Share logging, in case I took any photos (I didn't). But when I got back, the log was empty, something that so surprised OI.Share that it hung with a blank screen, and had to be stopped. Why didn't it log anything? Have I forgotten some magic handshake? So when I went to Enfield today, I enabled another logger with the descriptive name GPSLogger.
Visiting Petra
Off to Enfield this afternoon to visit Petra Gietz, who needed help with her ISP changeover. She had had an account with Telstra which covered Internet, (VoIP) telephone and mobile phone. She changed her Internet and landline phone to Aussie Broadband a while back, but Aussie's mobile phone packages are more expensive than I like, so (also on my recommendation) she bought an ALDI SIM card. But she was puzzled by the heavy data usage on her phone, so I decided to check whether her router was still accepting 802.11 connections. I made the mistake of bringing euroa, my Microsoft laptop.
GPS logs, finally!
So finally I had my GPS logs where I could look at them. In the process, ran across a mail message from Gmail: my logs had finally come through, though I didn't see them in my Gmail list. Either way, they're rather strange: $GPGGA,015152.594,3748.0184,S,14345.0758,E,1,00,00.00,0.0,M,0,M,0,*5d^M $GPRMC,015152,A,3748.0184,S,14345.0758,E,000.0,000.0,050817,00,*1^M $GPGGA,015558.495,3748.0050,S,14345.0652,E,1,00,00.00,0.0,M,0,M,0,*50^M $GPRMC,015558,A,3748.0050,S,14345.0652,E,000.0,000.0,050817,00,*c^M $GPGGA,015758.493,3748.0087,S,14345.0535,E,1,00,00.00,0.0,M,0,M,0,*5c^M $GPRMC,015758,A,3748.0087,S,14345.0535,E,000.0,000.0,050817,00,*6^M $GPGGA,015958.491,3748.0260,S,14345.0603,E,1,00,00.00,0.0,M,0,M,0,*5d^M $GPRMC,015958,A,3748.0260,S,14345.0603,E,000.0,000.0,050817,00,*5^M $GPGGA,020158.491,3748.0224,S,14345.0492,E,1,00,00.00,0.0,M,0,M,0,*59^M $GPRMC,020158,A,3748.0224,S,14345.0492,E,000.0,000.0,050817,00,*1^M $GPGGA,020358.495,3748.0172,S,14345.0573,E,1,00,00.00,0.0,M,0,M,0,*51^M $GPRMC,020358,A,3748.0172,S,14345.0573,E,000.0,000.0,050817,00,*d^M $GPGGA,020658.510,3748.0286,S,14345.0651,E,1,00,00.00,0.0,M,0,M,0,*53^M $GPRMC,020658,A,3748.0286,S,14345.0651,E,000.0,000.0,050817,00,*3^M $GPGGA,022912.855,3748.0312,S,14345.0647,E,1,00,00.00,0.0,M,0,M,0,*57^M $GPRMC,022912,A,3748.0312,S,14345.0647,E,000.0,000.0,050817,00,*b^M What's that? Hambier's blog tells me that they're NMEA 0183 format sentences , probably the native format of most GPS receivers. The $GPGGA sentences are fix information , in other words information specifying time and location.
OI.Share GPS logs
What else does the OI.Share Geotag function do? It shows a list of logs, back to front: What can you do with them? It's obvious, isn't it? Otherwise it would be documented. But it's not obvious to me. Press on on of the blue buttons on the left hand side and you get a display that is presumably intended to be a map: But that's more than puzzling.
GPS tagging revisited
Today was house photo day, and I finally wanted to GPS tag the images. I've spent some time trying to get my head round the details of Olympus OI.Share's GPS tagging. It's a modern system, so of course it's not documented. I'll try to document it at some later stage. What I've found so far is: the bottom panel of the main display offers Add Geotag : That's more than inaccurate. If you turn the slider ON , it enables GPS logging, no more.
Walkaway is a finalist for the Dragon Awards and is #1 on Locuss hardcover bestseller list
Dragon Con’s Dragon Award ballot was just published and I’m delighted to learn that my novel Walkaway is a finalist in the “Best Apocalyptic Novel” category, along with Daniel Humphreys’ A Place Outside the Wild, Omar El Akkad’s American War, Declan Finn and Allan Yoskowitz’s Codename: Unsub, N.K. Jemisin’s The Obelisk Gate, Rick Heinz’s The... more
Understanding mouse issues
My problems with the Logitech M705 MARATHON mouse continue despite my attempts to limit it by software. I need to look more carefully into the logic to understand how the daemon works, but two things are clear: Not everybody can suffer from these problems, or Logitech would be out of business. On the other hand, it happens with multiple mice, so it could be a software issue. The problem appears to occur when the mouse moves from one screen to another.
Raspberry pi again
My lack of success with installing NetBSD and OpenBSD got me wondering: what about Raspberry pi? I was given one a few years ago, but I never used it. Is now not the time? The FreeBSD Wiki page was noteasy to understand. It seems that I need two partitions (MBR and FreeBSD), and there are ready-made images on the FTP site, though not at the address specified on the page. But what's on the image? Do I still need hooks? Downloaded the image, which has xz compression, and copied it to the SD card: === root@eureka (/dev/pts/8) /src/FreeBSD/ISOs 133 -> xzcat FreeBSD-11.1-STABLE-arm-armv6-RPI-B-20170727-r321617.img.xz | dd obs=64k of=/dev/da5 2097152+0 records in 16384+0 records out 1073741824 bytes transferred in 12603.412285 secs (85195 bytes/sec) 3½ hours to copy 1 MB!
Learning about photo drones
I've been tempted several times to play around with photo drones, but it looks like a can of worms. My one attempt wasn't exactly successful. This article, currently the first and only part of a promised three-part series, looks helpful. ACM only downloads articles once. It's possible that this article has changed since being downloaded, but the only way you can find out is by looking at the original article.
Trying OpenBSD again
My experience with NetBSD was somewhat underwhelming. But how about OpenBSD? I was never a member of the OpenBSD team, and thus have used it even less. But it's worth a try, if only to compare it to NetBSD and FreeBSD. Once again a tiny image, leaving much space on a CD-ROM. The install programs don't seem to have changed since last time I looked at them, which must have been over 10 years ago. They're decidedly primitive by modern standards. At least it didn't trip over SMP. Partitioning the disk still believes in CHS geometries. It recognized the NetBSD partition, and offered to create a second partition that overlapped.
Building NetBSD
So the install image on kimchi doesn't understand something about SMP on the board, and I have to boot manually every time. Sure, I could probably find a knob to tweak to turn it off by default, but it makes more sense to bring the system up to date and be able to use SMP. So after checking out a source tree, I did a make build. Not what I expected: install ===> tools/gmake make[5]: Entering directory `/eureka/home/src/NetBSD/cvs/src/tools/gmake/build' /eureka/home/src/NetBSD/cvs/src/tools/gmake/../Makefile.gnuwrap:5: *** missing separator. Stop. make[5]: Leaving directory `/eureka/home/src/NetBSD/cvs/src/tools/gmake/build' *** Error code 2 Stop.
Audio equipment and pumps
I got the timing of my physiotherapy appointment wrong and left an hour early. What to do? Started to turn around, and then decided to do a bit of looking round Ballarat. Not a good idea. Went to The Good Guys and JB Hi-Fi again looking for cheap amplifiers, maybe special offers, but there was nothing at all at The Good Guys, and JB Hi-Fi still didn't have anything below $300. Why are these things so expensive? At The Good Guys I found some cheap Mini Hi-Fi units for round $100, including CD player and loudspeakers, and some even had RCA sockets.
Exploration
So once again I have a NetBSD, kimchi.lemis.com, currently with two issues: despite installing MySQL, I can't find the header files needed to build my weather station software software, and it hangs on boot unless I disable SMP. Decided to address the second problem first. Where do I get the system sources? There's a program called sysbuild that I hadn't heard of before, but it's not overly convincing: === root@kimchi (/dev/pts/0) ~ 15 -> sysbuild sysbuild: E: No command specified Type 'man sysbuild' for help === root@kimchi (/dev/pts/0) ~ 16 -> man sysbuild man: no entry for sysbuild in the manual.
A use for mouse button 9
Quite frequently I need to reformat paragraphs in my diary. Simple: position somewhere in the paragraph, and execute the Emacs function fill-paragraph. But when you do that 100 times, it becomes tedious: Move to the next paragraph, maybe with the mouse. If with the mouse, click. Press M-q, which executes fill-paragraph. Clearly something to automate, so I wrote this little function and bound it to mouse button 9: (defun mouse-select-and-justify () (interactive) (mouse-set-point) (recenter) (fill-paragraph) ) But it doesn't work.
NetBSD revisited
I can't corner my USB problems with FreeBSD, so how about a different BSD? It's been some time since I ran NetBSD, but my recollection was that the USB stack is more mature. So downloaded an ISO, all 390 MB of it, and installed. It hung on boot! But it had a couple of unexpected boot options: boot without ACPI, boot without ACPI and SMP. When I disabled both, it ran fine. The installation doesn't seem to have changed much in the last 15 years, but the package system has. Still, it was close enough to the FreeBSD version that I was able to install my base packages without any issues.
Ease of installation and debug symbols
I've been writing software for FreeBSD for well over 20 years now, and the time shows. The simplistic attitude we had in those days no longer suits modern times. A case in point: my modifications to moused. I wanted to run it under a debugger, but how do I generate executables with debugging symbols? Simple, it's the -g flag to gcc clang. But how do I set it? The canonical method is via CFLAGS. But that's created deep in the bowels of the Make system. OK, RTFM. But there's nothing there about creating debug executables. OK, UTSL. Nothing in /usr/src/Makefile about it, just this: # For individuals wanting to upgrade their sources (even if only a # delta of a few days): # # 1.