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Firstly, I've started tagging photos that I've used as backgrounds before here.
First-and-a-halfly: posting to WordPress from WebKit nightlies is still broken. Firefox on OS X. Yuk.
Secondly! Last weekend was the GNOME Developer's Summit; Matt and Robb and I went. We stayed at Matt's house again, which was excellent and convenient as always! The first day involved a talk from two of the awesome guys working on gobject-introspection (which is also a cornerstone of our project), which cleared up some of my fuzziness about introspection and their implementation (to some extent).
We (Robb) talked to Mark a little bit that day, and explained our plans (which I have yet to detail here, and won't today!). More about all that later...
Seed release later this week, after the planned gobject-introspection release. Yay for Seed! I'll write more about it after the release, post the tutorial I'm writing, etc. Pay no attention to the tutorial in SVN; I haven't gotten a GNOME SVN account yet, so none of my updates are there... we just switched to SVN from a Bazaar repo @ Launchpad, so all of our commit history is missing too... oh well. In any case... all will be fun!
P.S. Intervalometer is waiting on PCBs from BatchPCB, so it might be a while!
P.P.S. Registration soon (the third)! Looking at... Programming Languages, Graph Theory, Models of Computation, Multivar, Engineering Processes, Electronic Circuits (that'll get me through the end of Junior year CS and a little further... also not taking Typography this semester because apparently the teacher is... not... optimal... and everyone)
P.P.P.S. Robb's going to be working for litl starting next week. Yay for an NDA with your roommate :-P
I'm going to be moving tomorrow, so this machine is going to go down sometime later tonight, and will be back probably tomorrow night.
I can't wait to get back to school :-)
Ahhhh! It's been a long time since I last posted, but I'm back up and running for good, now (there'll be another 24 hour outage when I move to RPI, but other than that, we should be good!).
I've replaced Trinity with a nice new machine, built from a bunch of parts I bought (all from Newegg, of course).
I initially tried OpenSolaris (which Mike is succeeding with), but between the package manager needing a serious amount of help and my general inexperience with a rather different OS, I had to go back to Debian. So, no ZFS for now, maybe next summer.
Here's what's what in the new computer:
2.53 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo (E7200)
2GB DDR2 RAM
2x750GB Western Digital Caviar SE16
all in a cute little Shuttle case (the K48). I had to later acquire an extra SATA cable and a ATA-to-SATA power cable (to get data and power for the second drive), but that wasn't a problem...
The stock Intel fan sucks, as everyone has already noted, but Arctic Cooling's fan simply doesn't fit in the small case! (so don't spend extra money on it... just... make the Intel one work!)
The most awesome bit: I get 106MB/s writing to the disk (and 60MB/s over AFP over Gigabit Ethernet, or about 80MB/s over SAMBA). Mike and I discovered that Apple's SAMBA client is broken: I get about 2MB/s with SAMBA on OS X, but 60MB/s with AFP on the same system, and 80MB/s with SAMBA on Linux on the same machine. So, simply put, don't use SAMBA from Leopard.
My PowerMac G4 seems to have stopped working. Luckily, Dad brought a G3 B&W home from our neighbor's a few months ago, so check it out!:
What with crooked disks and a 300MHz CPU, the chances of this being a lasting solution are somewhat slim; I'm going to replace Trin with a small homebuilt machine (based off a Shuttle box)...
Also... this is running inside a chroot off of the Debian 4.0 install CD, so if it goes down... don't look at me :-)
Digg Reddit
Recently, an unknown number of first-revision Santa Rosa MacBook Pros began exhibiting issues with their onboard video cards. After a reboot, or on wake from sleep, the machine refuses to acknowledge the presence of a display, either internal or external. From that point on, the computer never regains its displays — not after a reboot, etc. Subsequent debugging indicates that the machine is misidentifying its NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT card as the MacBook's Intel X3100 card. This issue is known to affect at least 50 people — a group of affected users has formed a Google Spreadsheet in order to document and organize cases.
AppleCare is recommending replacing the logic board, which some have gone through with, only to have the machine return to an unusable state shortly afterwards. Compounding the issue is the fact that this problem has arisen only shortly after the expiration of the default warrantee on these machines (this issue seems to only affect machines shipped around June, 2007), thus causing the logic board replacement to cost upwards of 400$ for those who did not purchase extended warranties. If you are experiencing the issues detailed below, please add yourself to the spreadsheet and visit our thread on the Apple Support forums, so we can get a reasonably accurate count of affected users.
Symptoms & Notes
- Blank screen, both on the internal and external displays
- The computer boots; it is accessible over the network or with Screen Sharing
- Target Disk Mode works (this can be used to backup user data!)
- ioreg and System Profiler both report an Intel X3100 video card, which is incorrect
- Affects people even with MacBook Pro EFI Firmware Update 1.5.1 installed (which was released to fix a similar problem, introduced in Firmware 1.5)
- Seems to be independent of any software updates, hardware changes, etc.
There are a great number of potential fixes floating around on the Apple Support forum thread. These include PRAM/NVRAM/PMU resets, firmware restores, changes in memory configuration, deleting Safe Sleep files, etc. However, none of these appear to be permanent fixes; apparently, even replacing the logic board is not a permanent fix, at least for some!
Someone has mentioned the disabling/deleting Boot Camp might fix things. Replacing my machine's logic board seems to have worked, at least so far!
Last night, I was having a slight issue (mouseDragged: only got called once for each entire drag). I talked to some people on IRC who suggested spaces might be the culprit (?!?), so I checked, but it was off. So, I rebooted... since then, I haven't gotten video back... Mac OS comes up, I can log in, get to a terminal, and "say" things (this was how I was debugging before I got SSH on), but the display never comes up for real... not an external display either.
So, if people need to get ahold of me, either call me, or make your subject line really blatant so it stands out on my phone. I'm going to set up my old PowerBook tomorrow, get evas and Xcode and textmate running... but I really need to find out how to get Kaylee back! Any ideas?
One nice thing would be to be able to get a hardware listing from the command line. Anyone know how? There's no lspci or anything... (EDIT: I had forgotten about ioreg!) But none of my 3 operating systems nor rEFIt get the video card up...
LATER
So... apparently some people think Firmware Update 1.5 is the culprit — there's numerous other people on the Apple Support forums with the same problem, but they say 1.5.1 fixed it! I already have 1.5.1, and have no way of reflashing/trying to go back to 1.4/whatever, because Apple only seems to support going forward with firmwares.
I'm also beginning to wonder if it's really reasonable for it to be the firmware, since I would have installed 1.5.1 when it came out, in late April! Which leads me to believe it might legitimately be a bad "logic board" (Apple's terminology for motherboard, which just so happens to include a soldered-on Core 2 Duo)... I just really wish it were something else, because that's mighty expensive to replace, my warrantee having expired less than a week ago. Literally. Amazing, right!?
Evas development can go on, I'm going to steal time on Amy's iMac when she's not using it, booting from Kaylee's disc with Target Disk Mode. That at least will prevent me from going through the hassle of trying to get everything working with reasonable speed on this PowerBook G4, which I'll use, I guess, when I'm not here... or something!
I guess I should feel lucky that this wasn't a data loss issue, but I'm not happy! Also, I hadn't realized how much the change from this machine to Kaylee was ... so. much. better. *WANTS MBP BACK SOON, PLZ*
FRIDAY
My machine's now at Smalldog, and is apparently getting shipped to Apple to get the logic board replaced. It had better not happen again, is all I'm saying...
Also Apple (of course) refused to extend my now-6-days-expired warrantee. Oops.
I was just working on various things when I noticed a slight problem with my computer:
Yep. See that nice bar at the bottom? That's all I've got left. And this is pretty cleaned up. Up there at the top is my Aperture (left) and iTunes (right) libraries, consuming approximately 55% of my disk. Yeah.
Not entirely sure what to do! Time for a purge? *do not want*
Of note: the three title characters are not related in any way, except they were all a part of my day yesterday!
Firstly, and most-excitingly, thanks to Google, and mom, and dad, I purchased a Nikon D80 today! I simply cannot wait until it gets here... I've managed to read literally hundreds of pages of reviews and such and I'm very excited and happy and can't wait to see what it can do. Soooooooo excited — can'tcha tell?! The D80 replaces the Nikon Coolpix 8700 (don't immediately shrug it off because it's a Coolpix — for a point 'n shoot, that camera is astounding!) that Aunt Vivian graciously handed down to me a few years ago (first picture I still have appears to be from May 6, 2006, so pretty much exactly 2 years). That day was unbelievably important to me, because — before that, I'd never had a usable camera of my own (Kodak PalmPix for the IIIxe does not count!), and I'd just been handed something that would stay more or less attached to my hip for the next two years, recording countless memories (really, my memory is somewhat sketchy, so the pictures from this camera provide a great deal of my memory for me!) — almost 4000 pictures that I kept, in the end! (probably 10x that in total, because I use burst mode a lot!) So, while I most certainly have to thank Vivian for it, I'd say that it and I had an excellent run, especially through APAD'07 and all! This (outside a nursing home in Waterloo, ON, Canada) is probably the picture from this camera that gets the most 'wow's, but if I had to pick a favorite, I'd come back with about 150 pictures!
Second thing! I've got a much more stable, git-based workflow for working on Evas now, and I've even gotten the framework of the Evas-Quartz (without GL) engine sitting there! This is where the bulk of the summer's work goes, so I'm glad to have sat down and gotten that worked out. In addition, rectangles, polygons, and lines draw and animate properly! It was really awesome the first time I got the rectangles to draw, despite the fact that moments later they were animating over top of the window decorations... Text is working, to some extent, but I'm currently using an unacceptable text API (the built-in CoreGraphics one) which is so underpowered that it doesn't even support Unicode. I've got to move to ATSUI, but that involves reading lots of documentation and learning things I've never had to deal with before. I suppose that's sort-of the point of this, though, no? That might be tomorrow's job, since I know I'm not going to get much work done whichever day my new camera comes! EDIT: apparently there's a new CoreText API in Leopard. I think I'll use that instead!
The last bit — the Ma Bell bit — is that either AT&T recently added, or I recently noticed, the ability to download your call data in CSV (per-month). This meant I could clean up my call data grapher quite well (no more screen scraping means it actually works now — they broke it in January!)... so here y'all go. Figure it out on your own! My graph is below the jump!
So I've just finally managed to get my machine up and running again! Took a few days to backup, reload (triple booting Leopard, Hardy, and XP), and copy stuff back down (that's still going on, but I've got my music back so I'm happy!).
Odds and ends: Hardy is another level of spit and polish above previous releases, for sure. They're not quite there yet, but it's still wonderful compared to Windows! Year of the Linux desktop: 2 releases from now.
Robb seems to think that synchronizing releases of lots of Linux software to a unified release schedule (a la Mark Shuttleworth's latest blog post) would be a really positive thing. I can see it, but we also discussed whether this would lead to an even lesser difference between distros (as we've been seeing anyway), and what the 'distribution' would actually come to mean in a world like that. Obviously per-distro patchsets won't go away, though I wonder if maybe they wouldn't decrease in size... everyone being coordinated, not just on a schedule, but also with more general communication, would almost certainly lead to lots more patches being pushed upstream (and probably, bad patches *ahem* being caught earlier)...
We generally concluded that distributions would probably converge, but allow for competition, mostly in the areas of integration/artwork/customization/reasonable defaults... but would a bunch of distros, like we have today, manage to exist without really competing on legitimate technical merit?
I dunno :-)
Looking around at the things we're supposed to do in preparation for the start of Google's Summer of Code, I found that we have a GSoC planet; this, of course, meant it was time for me to set up a blog! I imagine I'm going to end up using this for lots of random stuff besides GSoC, but that's the inspiration for getting over the initial hurdle of getting Wordpress installed on my painfully questionably-supported PowerMac G4 desktop running Debian (my 'server').
So — in short — if you're here, you either know me from school, GSoC, or you're family, most likely. A quick introduction — I'm in my freshman/sophomore summer; I go to college at RPI, mostly in CS and Physics (though we'll see how much physics actually gets done...). My Summer of Code project involves porting the Enlightenment Project's Evas library (and bits and pieces of other libraries) to Mac OS X, so that applications built on top of the EFL platform will run natively on OS X. That's the plan, anyway! We'll see how it goes, but no matter what it's going to be lots of fun!
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