that’s whacked

keegen returns

Thursday, Jan 17. 2008  –  Category: Football

espn has a great op-ed piece on the second-coming of keegan.

my favourite line…

Yes it’s a romantic appointment, yes it is an almighty gamble, yes it’s a soap opera and yes, it is very Newcastle United. But we love it.

dd-wrt

Wednesday, Jan 16. 2008  –  Category: Computers, OpenSource

Like most geeks, I’d heard of dd-wrt. But, I’d never used it… mostly because I had two excellent WR850g Motorola routers whose stock firmware allowed me to setup a WDS network with the two devices.

Lately I’ve been going through the house trying to find unnecessary things to unplug (yeah yeah, those PG&E ads running late night on Chinese TV are starting to influence me I guess), so my thoughts turned to the two routers. The main reason I have two of them is to ensure I had enough signal coverage in all parts of the house. I started googling for mods I could do, and lo and behold… it turns out that dd-wrt is compatible with the WR850g too.

Damn. Well, I have two of ‘em – so what the hell. I flashed one of them up to the dd-wrt v2.3 SP2, and upped the transmit power to 80mW (from the default 28mW, and it’s plugged into a high gain antenna) and the one router provides excellent coverage throughout the entire house now, and I can happily unplug the second router.

Now my aim is to bring that second router with another high gain antenna down to my parents house which also had crappy wireless coverage and hopefully remedy that.

republican or democrat?

Wednesday, Jan 16. 2008  –  Category: Quotage

those of you who know wendy and i know that i’m a pretty liberal democrat, while wendy is a somewhat confused republican. i say confused, because every now and then she breaks out with hilarious quotes like the following…

over dinner we were talking about oakland’s latest tragic shooting that left a 10 year old boy paralysed by a stray gunshot.

wendy: see?? that’s why i’m republican. because people have too many freedoms. like those fuckers who shot the poor boy. people think they deserve all these freedoms. it’s so messed up.

me: huh? republicans are the ones who think we need more “freedoms”, including the right to bear arms like those guys who shot the boy.

wendy: well. uh. there’s other stuff too.

better living through open source

Tuesday, Jan 15. 2008  –  Category: Linkage, OpenSource

i came across osliving a while ago (and actually emailed the author to see if Songbird could be listed), but hadn’t visited the site in a couple of months. i stumbled across it again yesterday, and wow – it looks great. his redesign is really nice… very nice clean simple layout, with immediate clear navigation and categorisation.

props to andrew on a site well done.

sb on os @ shdh, giving up for the night

Sunday, Jan 6. 2008  –  Category: OpenSolaris, Songbird

well. i got to the point where it segfaults now. 11:45pm. i think i’m calling it a night.

[stevel@grommit:dist] 554$ ./songbird
Segmentation Fault (core dumped)
[stevel@grommit:dist] 555$ mdb core
Loading modules: [ libc.so.1 libuutil.so.1 ld.so.1 ]
> $c
libc.so.1`_lwp_kill+0x15(1, b)
libc.so.1`raise+0x22(b)
libxul.so`__1cNnsProfileLockSFatalSignalHandler6Fi_v_+0xe6(b, 0, 80461c4)
libc.so.1`__sighndlr+0xf(b, 0, 80461c4, fceaf2cc)
libc.so.1`call_user_handler+0x2b8(b, 0, 80461c4)
libc.so.1`sigacthandler+0xc2(b, 0, 80461c4)
libmozjs.so`JS_BeginRequest+0x34(81543d8)
libxul.so`__1cXnsScriptSecurityManagerEInit6M_I_+0x7e(8162c78)
libxul.so`__1cXnsScriptSecurityManagerYGetScriptSecurityManager6F_p0_+0x57(
8046568, 81442a8, fdecc4d0, 0, 8046568, 81116bc)
libxul.so`__1cbIConstruct_nsIScriptSecurityManager6FpnLnsISupports_rknEnsID_ppv_
I_+0x33(0, fe2f29f0, 8046568)
libxul.so`__1cQnsGenericFactoryOCreateInstance6MpnLnsISupports_rknEnsID_ppv_I_+0
x1e(81628d0, 0, fe2f29f0, 8046568)
libxul.so`__1cWnsComponentManagerImplbACreateInstanceByContractID6MpkcpnLnsISupp
orts_rknEnsID_ppv_I_+0x121(8111678, fdd7c9e4, 0, fe2f29f0, 8046568)
libxul.so`__1cWnsComponentManagerImplWGetServiceByContractID6MpkcrknEnsID_ppv_I_
+0xfb(8111678, fdd7c9e4, fe2f29f0, 80465ec)
__1cOCallGetService6FpkcrknEnsID_ppv_I_+0x52(fdd7c9e4, fe2f29f0, 80465ec)
__1cYnsGetServiceByContractID2f6kMrknEnsID_ppv_I_+0x25(80465fc, fe2f29f0, 
80465ec)
__1cNnsCOMPtr_baseZassign_from_gs_contractid6MknYnsGetServiceByContractID_rknEns
ID__v_+0x26(804664c, fdd7c9e4, fe2f29f0)
libxul.so`__1cUmozJSComponentLoaderKReallyInit6M_I_+0xdc(8154338)
libxul.so`__1cUmozJSComponentLoaderKLoadModule6MpnMnsILocalFile_ppnJnsIModule__I
_+0x11b(8154338, 8154228, 80468c8)
libxul.so`__1cWnsComponentManagerImplVAutoRegisterComponent6MpnMnsILocalFile_rnI
nsTArray4nODeferredModule___i_I_+0x2b4(8111678, 8154228, 80469c0, 0)
libxul.so`__1cWnsComponentManagerImplWLoadLeftoverComponents6MrnKnsCOMArray4nMns
ILocalFile___rnInsTArray4nODeferredModule___i_v_+0x89(8111678, 80469bc, 80469c0
, 0)
libxul.so`__1cWnsComponentManagerImplMAutoRegister6MpnHnsIFile__I_+0x354(8111678
, 0)
libxul.so`NS_InitXPCOM3_P+0x55a(8046e44, 8090438, 8046ba4, fe2ee038, 33)
libxul.so`__1cSScopedXPCOMStartupKInitialize6M_I_+0x4b(8046e44)
libxul.so`XRE_main+0x14ae(1, 8047ce4, 80903f8)
main+0x769(1, 8047ce4, 8047cec)
_start+0x7a(1, 8047da4, 0, 8047daf, 8047dbb, 8047dcb)
> 
[stevel@grommit:dist] 557$ 

sb on os @ shdh, part trois

Sunday, Jan 6. 2008  –  Category: OpenSolaris, Songbird

[stevel@grommit:dist] 509$ ./songbird
ld.so.1: songbird: fatal: relocation error: file /export/home/stevel/sb/trunk/compiled/dist/components/sbMetadataHandlerTaglib.so: symbol __1cDstdIios_baseJ_Loc_init2t6M_v_: referenced symbol not found
Killed

okay – so it didn’t quite segfault.

still.

disappointing.

sb on os @ shdh, part deux

Saturday, Jan 5. 2008  –  Category: OpenSolaris, Songbird

whew. wow. that was messy.

songbird builds successfully now w00t.

i’m debating about whether i should just call it a night and head home feeling good, or if i should go ahead and try running it only to be disappointed by the inevitably segfault.

sb on os @ shdh

Saturday, Jan 5. 2008  –  Category: OpenSolaris, Songbird

(that’s songbird on opensolaris at super happy dev house)

got here about an hour and a half ago. so far my numbers are: 1 coffee consumed 1 coke consumed 2 beers consumed 1 songbird repo checked out 1 xulrunner repo checked out

and more importantly 1 xulrunner binary built (thanks to triskelios’ patch – and some patch cleaning up since some of the SB patches have been committed to recent xulrunner trunk)

i never thought seeing:

[stevel@grommit:bin] 505$ uname -a
SunOS grommit 5.11 snv_75 i86pc i386 i86pc
[stevel@grommit:bin] 506$ ./xulrunner
Mozilla XULRunner 1.9b3pre

Usage: xulrunner [OPTIONS] xulrunner APP-FILE [APP-OPTIONS...]

would get me so excited.

3 days into 40

Friday, Jan 4. 2008  –  Category: Songbird

3 days into our Top 40 project and we’ve already got 5 completed extensions, 4 more under testing, and 16 more in development or claimed. Not bad for only 3 days in!

We’ve even got developers looking at how to mod their extension to take advantage of Songbird features as a media player to extend it even further.

Everyone working on the top 40 is doing a rockin’ job, and we’re definitely getting noticed. Check out these four blog posts for a mere sampling.

I’m totally psyched we’re picking up all this momentum, and I’m definitely looking forward to our DevCamp (Facebook, Upcoming) in a few weeks when I can meet some of y’all in person.

If anyone is going to be at SuperHappyDevHouse22 this weekend — I’ll be there, and would love to hack on some Songbird stuff with people.

death at Cathedral

Friday, Jan 4. 2008  –  Category: Outdoors

Oakland climber dies descending Cathedral Peak

A bit late, but I only just found out about this from the SuperTopo monthly email. A bummer to hear about, to be sure – especially with them having already ascended, and descended and only being a mile and a half from 120.

I have my own love-hate-hate relationship with Cathedral Peak having tried to climb it 3 times and only been successful once. Indeed, two summers ago we got stuck in our own late-afternoon Tuolumne-special storm, though early August is considerably more forgiving than mid-November.

Jesse and I have planned to tackle Cathedral Peak again this summer. I’m hoping to bump my success rate from 33% to 50%; but we’ll see… I know I’m bringing a barometer and will be pushing for an early morning, early summer start.

Sigh. It’s always a little unnerving to hear about someone dying on a route you’ve climbed… worse yet when it’s a route you’re planning to climb in the near future. My sympathies go out to Noble’s family and friends. At least he died doing something he loved.