diary

It looks like the iwl driver is slightly broken in the 2.6.26 release - connections will drop-out after 10 seconds or so.

The workaround for this is to enable the config option CONFIG_IWL4965_HT.

After going through the magical approval process, I now have a spufs git tree published on kernel.org.

If you're looking to try out the latest work on spufs, just do a:

[jk@pokey ~]$ git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/jk/spufs.git

As with other git repositories on kernel.org, there's a gitweb interface to browse the tree.

Of course, if you have any bug reports/requests/comments about the code in the spufs.git tree, feel free to email me at jk@ozlabs.org, or the Cell/B.E. open source development list at cbe-oss-dev@ozlabs.org.

... because the linux.conf.au 2006 hackfest is coming up soon.

The prizes have just been announced - first prize is a Dual G5, second is a 15" PowerBook, third is a Mac Mini. This year, the hackfest will be run as a single four-hour session, with questions/tasks available at the beginning.

I've recently been playing with the mergefb options with the radeon x.org driver, to allow a semi-hotpluggable external monitor on my laptop. MergeFB is great - I can now use a larger external monitor when it's available, and resize the desktop to just the laptop panel when it isn't, all without having to restart X.

Previously, this used to be a bit of a problem; if I used another display at work (combined with the laptop panel to create a larger desktop), then using the laptop without the monitor left a large chunk of the desktop un-viewable. Because of this, I ended up having to restart X (having to close & reopen all running applications), or not use an external display at all.

There are some (quite technical) details here about the mergefb configuration.

I released the first version (0.1) of Patchwork a few days ago. Patchwork is the new (open source!) version of the patch tracking system originally written for the Linux PPC64 mailing list - it 'catches' patches that have been posted to a mailing list, and lists them on a web page for the project's maintainer to track.

Since then, I've released version 0.2, which has MySQL support (in addition to PostgreSQL) as well as a few parser and documentation improvements.

Check out the setup for linuxppc64-dev over here. Also new: freshmeat.net project page.

I've recently discovered the KDE audio player amaroK (which, by the way, is the freaking business - I won't reiterate why) . One of amaroK's features is integration with audioscrobbler, a music database. In short, amaroK can send your currently-playing track to the audioscrobbler database, and using that data combined with that of others, can link you to other artists/songs that you might like.

The whole thing sounds a little wierd on the privacy side of things, but their website appears to have a decent privacy policy, and the anonymous data is available under a creative commons licence (neat!).

Oh, and here's what I like.

Interesting reading - this usenet thread, from 1992, where Andrew Tanenbaum states that Linux is obsolete, and the microkernel has won.

It's also interesting that a major argument is that the Linux will be limited by the popularity of the x86, implying that it will be bound to that (failing!) architecture. ls /lib/modules/$(uname -r)/build/arch shows a different picture nowadays.

One of the more memorable quotes:

Of course 5 years from now that will be different, but 5 years from now everyone will be running free GNU on their 200 MIPS, 64M SPARCstation-5.

I've just set up another instance of my patch tracking system for linuxppc-dev and linuxppc-embedded, to go with the original one for linuxppc64-dev.

Next step is to clean the code up and get IBM approval to release the source

dcop is KDE's access-to-everything tool, which most KDE apps export some sort of interface to. For example, to ask the KWeatherService the current temperature in Canberra (which has station code 'YSCB'):

[jk@b4 jk]$ dcop KWeatherService WeatherService temperature YSCB
12°C

or to get the currently playing track from noatun:

[jk@b4 jk]$ dcop noatun-8897 Noatun title
[The Aphex Twin] - Polynomial-C

or make kmail check for new mail:

[jk@b4 jk]$ dcop kontact KMailIface checkMail

Handy for scripting!