This is a good summary of the build-up to the Australian election:
The world needs more animated news. For people unfamiliar with Australian politics, there is barely any exaggeration in that clip. Also, the Sex Party was actually a reasonably good choice if you look at their policies.
Not that I get to vote in any of this… I am proudly not an Australian citizen!
Guess which team was the only one to be undefeated at the “Soccer” World Cup? That’s right… New Zealand!
(We did not win a game either but that is not the point.)
Lets look at the release dates of Super Mario Galaxy 2 around the globe (according to Wikipedia)…
But Australia is in the same Wii game region as the EU… the release is exactly the same. So what the hell Nintendo! You are lucky that the game will be awesome so I can not protest.
The delay from the North American release data is something I have learned to live with, as EU region releases are always delayed (supposedly due to having to do the translations). But at least when the Smash Bros Brawl release date in Australia was four months behind the North American release, the EU suffered along with us.
As Dan has already posted about, pacman-3.4.0 has been released. There are a bunch of new features that I am really enjoying.
Firstly, when updating it database, pacman will only extract the new entries. This is similar to what Xyne’s rebase script does (without all the extra output). I had not realised how awesome this feature was until I updated my chroots this morning. It speeds the process up immensely. The chroots using pacman-3.4 extracted the [extra] repo database with a barely noticeable pause while those using pacman-3.3 took a while.
The other feature that I am enjoying is the addition of a functional ‘which’ to the file ownership query. In the past, to find the owner of a binary in my path I would do something like pacman -Qo $(which makepkg) or provide the full path manually. Now pacman will search for binaries in your path automatically, so this is achieved with pacman -Qo makepkg.
Installing packages with pacman -U
And makepkg also received its share of upgrades. It now automatically exits on build/packaging errors in PKGBUILDs so there is no more need to have “|| return 1” after the commands. Package splitting has improved with pkgver, pkgrel and arch now being able to be overridden and being able to only build subsets of a split package.
Of course, many other features made it into this pacman release. As always, many changes will hopefully never be noticed by a user (e.g. checking a package architecture matches the system architecture before installing, a major rewrite of the pacman bash completion, overhaul of tests in makepkg, more configurable library stripping during packaging), but all these are very useful contributions. See here for a more detailed summary of the changes and the git log for all the details of changes.
A pacman-3.4.0 package is currently in the [testing] repository for Arch Linux. We all know pacman releases are bug free (as the two patches already in the 3.4.1 queue can attest), so look forward to it being in a [core] repo near you in the not too distant future.
Saw an infomercial for Australia’s biggest ISP (Telstra BigPond) today and learnt something amazing. The “expert” talking to the presenter said something like:
People do a lot of things on-line these days. Watching movies, checking emails, browsing…
I was a bit taken back… People use the internet for checking emails? I have been doing it wrong all these years!
As is becoming widely covered, the GCC Steering Committee and the FSF have approved the use of C++ in the GCC codebase. This is not a particularly sudden decision… I originally saw this proposed by Ian Lance Taylor on his blog a couple of years ago. He also has some good slides about how using C++ would be benificial. There was a gcc-in-c++ branch that corrected incompatibilities flagged by -Wc++-compat, but I think this is mostly merged and there is now an experimental --enable-build-with-cxx configure flag. So I think that this decision comes at no real surprise to anyone involved.
I think this is a great idea! Why? Because if the compiler is written in C++, then the compiler developers have more motivation to make C++ compilation faster. This is good for me as C++ is my primary choice for a writing in a compiled programming language. So this is a win for me.
Is it a win for GCC? I know some people (especially Linus Torvalds) think using C++ for anything is a major disaster. In fact, despite being a C++ proponent, I tend to agree… 99% of people who propose the usage of C++ for something are wrong. Many of the complexities in C++ have no place in most projects and too many C++ programmers feel the need to use the entire C++ toolset. Let be honest, the curiously recurring template pattern and template metaprogramming have no real place anywhere but in academia[1]. But (single) inheritance and the STL do provide what I have seen people try to replicate in C many times. Using C++ as a C with classes is not really that different from C but it can be much simpler to write.
There are some obvious cases where changing to C++ in the GCC codebase would be of great benefit. Take a look in gcc/vec.h in the gcc source.
/* The macros here implement a set of templated vector types and
associated interfaces. These templates are implemented with
macros, as we're not in C++ land. The interface functions are
typesafe and use static inline functions, sometimes backed by
out-of-line generic functions. ...
That is screaming out to be replaced by a std::vector. There are other examples where simple inheritance is mimicked using a slew of (un)defines and switch statements. Some of these are so complex, I wonder whether there will be any performance loss due to the introduction of virtual function calls. Certainly, it will be a win in terms of maintainability.
[1] Although in combination you get the expression template paradigm, which allows you to build a really nice numeric vector class that unrolls all loops at compile time and does not suffer from virtual function overhead, making it as fast as manually programming the vector arithmetic in C but much more convenient to use. Then you go back to using std::valarray which is close enough…
I was having issues with attachments only being partially downloaded in Thunderbird from an IMAP account on a MS Exchange server (2003 I think). Turns out I ran into a very old Thunderbird bug (filed 2001-07-24). MS Exchange by default does not return the actual size to the IMAP4 command “FETCH RFC822.SIZE”. This is deliberate as it provides a nice perfomance advantage.
So… like a good Linux user I should once again blame Microsoft software for being broken? Not this time. It turns out section 3.4.5 of RFC 2683 (IMAP4 Implementation Recommendations) says that the RCF822.SIZE value should only used for things like providing estimates to the user and not for allocating buffers and the like. Bad Thunderbird!
The work around is to go to Preferences > Advanced > Config Editor… and set mail.server.default.fetch_by_chunks to FALSE. Old emails will need to be redownloaded to fix the attachments.
The fan control on the MacBook Pro under Linux is not the best… I would say it does not work at all but I once saw the fan speed increase slightly on its own so it appears to do something, sometimes, according to some logic I can not figure out.
It turns out that taking “manual” control of the fan is quite easy. A simple
echo 1 > /sys/devices/platform/applesmc.768/fan1_manual
sets the fan to manual mode. Then you can adjust fan1_output in the same directory to set the current fan speed. Do not get confused with fan1_input, as that is strangely the actual fan speed! The minimum and maximum speeds are given by fan1_min and fan1_max. If the minimum speed is reported as 0 or 1, ignore it. For MacBook Pros with Core 2 Duo processors the minimum fan speed should be 2000. The maximum fan speed is 6200.
So now that we know how to control the fan, we just need some sort of algorithm to choose what the fan speed should be based on the temperature. The MacBook Pro has a whole bunch of temperature sensors, but the ones that matter are for the processors as they are always the highest. These are found in /sys/devices/platform/coretemp.{0,1}/temp1_input (you may need to load the coretemp module). Montoring these during basic usage shows the average temperatures of the two processors is around 40-45C during idle, 50-55C with basic web browsing and 60-65C when watching a HD movie (at least in warm Australian ambient temperatures).
To save battery on a laptop, I think that the fan should not come on when the computer is doing anything less intensive than watching a movie, so I set that fan to kick in at 65C. This coincides with what Mac OSX does. From OSX, it appears that the fans should hit full speed at 80C and the speed builds up exponentially to that point. The formula I use for changing the fan speed when the temperature is increasing is:
temp <= 65:
speed = max(current_speed, 2000)
65 < temp < 80:
step = (6200 - 2000) / ( (80 - 65) * (80 - 64) / 2 )
speed = max(current_speed, ceil(2000 + (temp - 65) * (temp - 64) / 2 * step))
temp >= 80:
speed = 6200
When the temperature is decreasing, I prefer to keep the fan going slightly longer to force the temperature down to low levels as quickly as possible. I push it back down to 55C using this formula:
temp >= 80:
speed = 6200
55 < temp < 80:
step = (6200 - 2000) / ( (80 - 55) * (80 - 54) / 2 )
speed = min(current_speed, floor(6200 - (80 - temp) * (81 - temp) / 2 * step)
temp <= 55:
speed = 2000
Here is a graphic of what that looks like (red = increasing, blue = decreasing):
Grap the source code here. It assumes two processors and a single fan (not true for all MacBook Pros…). For Arch Linux users, there is also a PKGBUILD and daemon (mbpfan) for ease of use. I am lazy, so there is very little error checking in the code. It works for me but use at your own risk…
I recently got a 13″ Macbook Pro (5.5) and of course need to install Arch Linux on it. So here goes a log of my install experience. I am not going to cover everything, as there is already basic instructions on the Macbook page in the Arch Wiki and all over the net.
The basic specs are:
More details as I deal with getting individual components working…
Installation: The install went fine using the latest test iso (2010.04.19-core-i686). The only “trick” was to change the partition table from GPT format (to msdos) before entering the installer. Luckily, parted is included on the install CD so this was simple. Also, install GRUB on the partition holding /boot instead of /dev/sda. There was no need to do anything with rEFIt as many guides prepared me for, but I think that is because I did not dual boot.
The final stage is to boot the OSX install CD and run:
bless --device /dev/disk0s2 --setBoot --legacy --verbose to speed up the boot time before you get to GRUB (3s vs 20s).
Video: This has a NVIDIA GeForce 9400M card, so a pacman -S nvidia and nvidia-xconfig then we are basically good to go.
Screen Brightness: There is mbp_nvidia_bl in the kernel, so you think that would work but no… Any changes made to the backlight level appear to be registered (and gnome-power-manager gives me a nice on-screen indicator that changes are being made) but the brightness stays the same. The Mactel PPA for Ubuntu contains a nvidia-bl kernel module which does the job. Grab the PKGBUILD here.
Keyboard Backlight: Using pommed is supposed to make this work and it did to an extent. The only issue was roll over from almost completely dimmed to fully on that made disabling the keyboard backlight impossible. Instead, I am just adjusting it manually using:
echo 255 > /sys/class/leds/smc\:\:kdb_backlight/brightness(TODO: write a script using this to bind the adjustment keys to.) In OSX, this would automatically come on in low light conditions but I have no idea how to approach that.
Touchpad: This “works” out of the box, although is completely broken as far as I am concerned. I quickly found out that a major touchpad use is to click with your thumb and then use a finger to select text or move/resize a window, etc. That does not work as touching your finger after the click with the thumb is interpreted as some sort of multitouch event. A patched bcm5947 module fixes this (but is a hack and is unlikely to be included upstream…). Grab the PKGBUILD here.
Wifi: It has a Broadcom BCM4322 802.11a/b/g/m wireless card. That does not work with the b43 driver, so requires broadcom-wl driver. Grab the PKGBUILD here.
Suspend to RAM: Worked out of the box. I was only required to tell xfce4-power-manager to use it.
Webcam: Used the isight-firmware-tools package to extract the firmware from the file that I remembered to grab from OSX before wiping (or perhaps used google to find…) and restart.
Sound: Installed alsa, ran alsaconf and everything worked. Shortcut keys required setting up.
Keyboard: Ignoring the lack of Home/End/Page Up/Page Dn keys, the thing that most annoys me is that to by default the “action” functions take preference over F1-12. I use F1-12 a lot more that the action keys. So these need to be swapped (TODO: do this…)
Bluetooth: Untested. I have no real use for this at the moment…
Apple Remote: TODO
I was shopping for a book online with a major book retailer today when I came across an interesting entry in my search results (screenshot). An ebook that is “Currently Unavailable Online”!
I struggle to explain such a thing… Do I need to go into the store to buy the ebook? If so, how would they give it to me? Or have they just run out of copies to let people download? This could all be some conspiracy by the Australian publishing mafia to maintain their stranglehold on book sales. Maybe the website had a monthly transfer quota and they were approaching their limit. People in Australia know all about how exorbitant excess internet usage fees can be.
Anyway, I am glad I already have that book in printed form. Otherwise I may have been forced to investigate further and who knows where such and investigation would have lead.
