Planet FreeBSD Complete

Florent Thoumie: Banshee hits FreeBSD Ports

Florent Thoumie — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 12:04:09 +0000

I’ve had a local half-baked port of banshee for quite a while now. I’ve finally made the extra effort to make it a bit cleaner. This is basically the minimal set of features you can get, there’s no iPod support, no MTP support either. There are probably some rough edges, but now it’s there and people can test it.

Have fun!

Warner Losh: Sandbox

noreply@blogger.com (Warner Losh) — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 06:30:00 +0000

I debated writing about this. After all, it isn't about hacking code. Instead, it is about hacking together a sandbox. It is about making stupid design choices and then over engineering "solutions" to those problems. It is a cautionary tale about doing the design right from the start and sometimes "free" lumber costs a lot in time and effort. So, I wanted to make a 4'x4' (just a little over

Remko Lodder: The eindhoven trip

Remko — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 19:22:39 +0000

So after almost a year I was in Eindhoven again yesterday. I needed to go there to attend a planned teammeeting from collegue’s near Rotterdam and collegue’s within Limburg, this was the most accessible point for all of us.

The meeting itself was interesting, though rephrased things that I already heared, but it was fun to see the other people from the Networking Management team that I never saw before. I hope that we can meet up again some day and chat a bit more. The meeting went through a bit long, and we left the compound late in the evening. I remember leaving around 19.00hrs from the compound to drive homewards, where I arrived one and a half hour later (traffic was actually coorporating this time. I normally took the A58 to drive homeward, but I took the A2 instead).

One thing that amazed me is that I noticed several Snow car’s while I drove to the facility’s within Eindhoven. Not one but three Snow car’s were spotted that day, interesting to see so many cars around the same place

Onward to the next meetings and the rest of my project for the Telco Provider

Diomidis Spinellis: UMLGraph Version 5.1

Diomidis D. Spinellis — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 17:28:32 +0000

Over the summer two articles presented UMLGraph to the masses. Paul Duvall wrote on IBM developerWorks an article titled Automation for the people: Pushbutton documentation , and Meera Subbarao published on DZone Javalobby another piece on how to reverse-engineer source code into UML diagrams . In addition, I received a number of interesting patches and contributions. As a result I decided it was time to release UMLGraph version 5.1.

Matteo Riondato: Authors

Matteo — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 15:14:37 +0000

Italian literature from the period 1944-1960 is full of treasures mostly unknown to the majority of Italians.

Vittorini, Fenoglio, Gadda, Calvino: they’re all masters.

Warner Losh: Low hanging fruit

noreply@blogger.com (Warner Losh) — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 06:47:00 +0000

Tonight was low hanging fruit night. I went through all the PRs that had "pccard" or "cardbus" and committed the easiest of the fixes. When I did this with USB last year there were maybe 50 of them I committed over the course of a few weeks. For PC Card and CardBus, there were maybe 5 or 6 that I was able to commit. And a similar number of stale ones. Unlike USB, there's only a few PC Card

Przemek Witaszczyk: WANTED: PIC driver...

vi0 (noreply@blogger.com) — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 07:01:00 +0000

Finally, I've managed to fix all (at least up till now..) broken OF calls, and the kernel went further, to the place where devices are attached. Among them, there should be a PIC driver, which is missing... After adding the ofwbus driver which I got from Andrew, I've constructed a PIC driver skeleton from the sys/powerpc/powermac/hrowpic.c. The PIC was found to resist on the ofwbus3, and the attch method fails to allocate memory (nice screenshot on my wiki http://wiki.freebsd.org/Porting_FreeBSD_to_Efika_(PPC_bring_up)). Now I have to mutate the old mac driver to obey the mpc5k2 will... I've also created a new folder in the p4 branch, where all the stuff concerning MPC5200B will be stored. It's called ... mpc5k2 :)

Remko Lodder: FreeBSD Also prepares 6.4 release

Remko — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 19:16:35 +0000

Several hours after 7.1-PRERELEASE name had been created within 7-STABLE, not branched!, 6.4 had also been named for the time being from 6-STABLE. That means that that branch will also soon split into 6.4-RELEASE (the final branch) to continue for the release. As well as for 7.1.. NO PANIC! It will all be over soon, and you can use a brand new release

Philip Paeps: Counting down

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 18:38:00 +0000

Another two workdays and I'm off to Canada for my hiking trip. I'm looking forward to it. It always amazes me how much last minute crap creeps up when you're trying to count down to a holiday in earnest.

Yesterday, I biked looksaus' damn uphill street the wrong way twice. If that's not good fitness, I don't know what is. That bend halfway is death. Really. The fact that I can survive that twice in one evening (panting like a dying whale the first time, slightly less so the second) is a good sign.

Borrowed a large backpack from Bram via looksaus. Now I just need to fill it.

The tent fits very nicely, as do clothes, hiking shoes and the other paraphernalia of an outdoorsy existence. I'm a bit dubious about my sleeping bag. It's ancient and fairly heavy. I wonder if these are being made of lighter materials these days. With the criminally low dollar, I might decide to buy a new one when I raid the Vancouver branch of MEC (whose domain name amuses me) when I get to that side of the world.

While in the ophthalmologist's waiting room last night (I'm very happy that man gives appointments at times of the day which are compatible with my mode of life) I made a small list of things I'm likely to forget. The list now spans four post-it notes. Double-sided.

Getting to the airport on Friday morning (at 05:00 godsdammit!) will be an interesting challenge too. Public works are being simulated around the area where I would take the bus, so I have a nice twenty-minute practice hike with all my luggage. Yay. Not.

Counting down, counting down.

Still looking for hiking companions too.

Neil Blakey-Milner: Introducing TechGeneral

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 14:14:41 +0000

Since April 2003, I've maintained this web log as a mixed-bag of posts about technology, about work, about my travels, about politics, and about books, movies, games, and other forms of entertainment.

Since just over a week ago, all my technology thoughts will be appearing on my new technology web log, TechGeneral.

Likely topics on TechGeneral are:

open source (or Free Software, if you prefer),
scalability,
security,
the Python programming language,
technology events I'm interested in and/or attend,
becoming a better developer,
finding/hiring developers and other technology workers, and
motivating and getting the most out of them.

I'll continue to maintain this web log, focusing on other topics:

books, games, movies, and other entertainment,
events I'm interested in or attend,
travel inside and outside of Cape Town,
experiences with people and organisations,
random opinions on topics such as politics, and
that blogging about blogging thing.

I've realised that the people who read my technology posts (predominantly outside of South Africa) probably don't care much about the other stuff. The people who read my other stuff (predominantly inside South Africa) probably don't care all that much about the technology stuff either.

I hope this split helps improve the subjective signal to noise ratio for those who follow what I have to say.

[ The equivalent posting on TechGeneral is the first one, Welcome to TechGeneral. ]

Warner Losh: Summer tree cleaning

noreply@blogger.com (Warner Losh) — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 07:02:00 +0000

As you may know, I'm a user of the p4 side repository to do large code development. With the switch to svn, I wasn't sure I'd still need to do that, so I let my trees there go for a while. It is clear to me that I'll need to use p4 a little while longer. So, I cleaned up my newcard tree. Why do I need to cleanup at all? That's a good question. You'd think that you'd only have code cooking

Coleman Kane: blog:2007:susan_eisenhower_ditching_republican_party - created blog entry about susan ...

cokane — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 03:38:50 +0000

susan eisenhower ditching republican party

Any political party with a history has legendary heroes. For the Republican party, one of these is President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was the 34th President of the United States of America. Last week, his daughter Susan Eisenhower wrote an article for The National Interest online, on why she is voting for Barack Obama, and declaring her intent to leave the Republican party for good (and register as an Independent).

The story is here: http://www.nationalinterest.org/Article.aspx?id=19618

politics, obama

Eric Anholt: eee 901 wireless updates

eric@anholt.net — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 20:52:42 +0000

I got a lovely little eee 901 for work. It mostly seems like a useful machine, except for the position of the right shift key which is a disaster. (Placing my fingers on the home row, I've hovering over the up-arrow instead of shift. Hilarity ensues when trying to type '~' in the terminal or working on spreadsheets in any way).

However, the wireless driver isn't integrated into the kernel yet, and the old driver tarball is already broken on 2.6.27 release candidates. I was having a hard time finding who was working on it or where the code was. So, I cobbled together the patches I found wandering around the internet, and put up a git repo:
git clone git://anongit.anholt.net/git/rt2860
Don't expect this repo to necessarily get updated, but it'll probably get you going if you're on 2.6.27-rc2 or so today.

Martin Wilke: KDE4 Summary

Martin — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 20:32:57 +0000

A few weeks ago we committed KDE4 to the ports tree. All and all, we can say, it works well for everyone. We got few reports about problems that we could reproduce and a lot that were user problems. We are really happy overall. KDE 3.5.9 was committed a few days later. Most of the work was done by lofi [...]

Martin Wilke: Fresh Blood for our KDE Team.

Martin — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 20:22:33 +0000

On Friday I have received an approval from portmgr@ to allow Max Brazhnikov (makc) to join the Developers Community as a ports committer. He’s done a great work submitting new ports and a lot of KDE4 work, so it’s time to reward him. I’ll lead his first steps as ports committer and will be responsible for his possible errors and receive [...]

Remko Lodder: Tommorrow Eindhoven

Remko — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 18:17:53 +0000

Tommorrow I am heading over to Eindhoven at some point during the day. I need to get there for work. The telecom provider is sending me and the teams around me towards the city of Eindhoven for a teammeeting. It had been some time ago that I was there.

Remko Lodder: FreeBSD prepares for 7.1-RELEASE

Remko — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 18:15:04 +0000

As some might have seen already on the cvs-* mailinglists, we have started the preparations for the 7.1-release build. That means that the 7-STABLE branch is renamed to 7.1-PRERELEASE and finally gets branched at some point after which it will be 7-STABLE again.

DO NOT PANIC if you read this in your kernel after updating today. It’s nothing to worry about. We are trying to get a new release out soon, please headsup for that. Bring along your towel if you are really afraid

Diomidis Spinellis: Saving the Editor's History

Diomidis D. Spinellis — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 13:32:22 +0000

I recently spent a few days writing some tricky bit-twiddling code to implement a radix tree . I found myself making many programming mistakes, and I thought it would be interesting to study them, examine their contributing factors, and think how each of them could be prevented.

Warner Losh: T-Mobile Dash experiment

noreply@blogger.com (Warner Losh) — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 07:42:00 +0000

I have two cell phones. One of this is my iPhone, made by Apple and running Apple's version of FreeBSD. The other is the T-Mobile Dash. I usually use my iPhone, but this weekend I was using the Dash to see how well it worked. It was no better or worse than the iPhone in the one area that I'd hoped it would be better at: call quality. In the process of trying it out, I discovered the uipaq

Eric Anderson: Sicko

anderson — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 03:49:42 +0000

I just finished watching the movie ‘Sicko’. Makes me sad to see the United States in is such a poor position health care wise. Why does Cuba have a better health care system than USA? That makes no sense, and it pisses me off. Why are the healthcare companies destroying our nation? Is it worth the money? I guess it must be.