Dan and I spent a good three hours on AIM today tracking down why building e2fsprogs broke on his machine but not mine. Both were running Panther and had the XCode 1.1 tools installed. But, Dan would always get compiler errors while my build went without a hitch.
Well, for reasons too gory to explain here, I had gcc 3.1 set as my default compiler. Dan had the default 3.3 compiler as his selection. This was the root of the problem. e2fsprogs and some other utils were being built with the '-traditional-cpp' flag passed to the compiler. Turns out Apple changed the meaning of the flag with gcc 3.3 (with only a minor notice in the release notes) and it now causes weird errors when pre-comp headers are used (which is pretty much everywhere in OS X). Removing this one flag let the build proceed without incident. Doh!
The upshot is, ext2fsx builds fine on Panther now (with gcc 3.3 and 3.1). I also added all external dependencies (apple stuff) to the CVS tree so the project is completely self-contained now -- and there is a new XCode project file. Finally, the project is now self-hosting/building. Today, I compiled the whole thing on my FW400 50GB ext3 partition -- with indexed directories active. Compiling is a good filesystem stress test as lots of temporary files are created and deleted, plus the buffer cache is exercised with all of the data being read and written.
So, lots of progress this weekend. Nothing end-users will care about, but it's progress nonetheless.
The Democratic presidential candidate ads have calmed down in the past week (now that there are really only two of them left). However, I've been seeing quite a few lately for senatorial candidates in my state (Illinois). A point in all of the Democrat ads, some more so than others, is the repeal of President Bush's so-called "tax cuts for the wealthy". This statement in ads from educated and supposedly knowledgeable candidates irritates me to no end. Our tax system is based on a graduated scale. The higher your income, the more you pay (as a percentage and monetarily). For instance, at some income level the marginal tax rate jumps to 28% (from the base of 15%) and at a higher income yet, it jumps to 32%. Given this, isn't only fair that a tax cut be graduated as well? Yes, of course it is. The higher your tax rate, the bigger your tax cut. If we had a flat-tax system, then these Democrats would have a valid point, but as it is they are appealing to the oldest trick in the book: rich people are evil. It's a modern day version of the Robin-Hood tale.
I don't agree with some of what President Bush has done: signing the Patriot Act, imprisoning American citizens without due process, and dragging out the Iraq war, but I do agree with his tax cuts. In general, I believe he is a better President than Clinton (who signed into law the DMCA -- arguably the worst law of the past fifty years), and a better candidate than Senator Kerry.
Today, I decided to tackle a problem/lack of feature in iTunes that has been annoying the hell out of me. I've written a custom Cocoa app (for my own use) to update my blog, my iChat status, and my mail signatures with the currently playing iTunes song. This works really well. The problem is, I'm burning CPU cycles by pinging iTunes every thirty seconds to get the current song info. It's a very wasteful and ineffecient method.
Wouldn't it be great if iTunes used the Distributed Notification events built into OS X to notify any interested application that the track has changed, or the player has paused or stopped? Yes, it would be great. Of course iTunes does not do that (why?) -- until now. I spent a few hours hacking up the iTunes SDK example code to send notifications (using CoreFoundation) for when iTunes starts playing, changes tracks, pauses, resumes, or stops altogether. I wrote a quick CLI util. to print the events out as they are received, and it seems to work pretty well. My next step is to adapt my custom app to use these notifications.
Of course, this plug-in probably violates the terms of use for the SDK, so I don't think I can publicly release a binary, but if anyone wants the code, shoot me an e-mail.
I received my Perfect Circle tickets in the mail today. As I said before, I can't wait for this concert.
My mother wanted to someone to go with, so for the third time, I saw "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King" today. It's a good movie, but three times is too much for me. Every ten minutes or so I noticed one of the many inconsistencies, outright mis-tellings, or flagrant omissions (the whole end of the ROTK book!) from Tolkien's epic battle between good and evil.
Why do directors always think they can do a better job of telling a story than the author of a book? If it was simply a matter of time, these changes could be forgiven (perhaps), but there are at least two things that show Jackson wasn't thinking of time, only of how he could make the story "better": 1) The whole Arwen/Aragorn love-affair. In the book it received at most one page (not counting the appendices), yet Jackson expanded Arwen's role greatly. This time could've have been devoted to stories that were actually in the book, such as Tom Bombadil or the routing of the Shire. 2) As for the routing of the Shire, Jackson has been quoted as saying something similar to "I didn't like it, so I didn't even shoot it." IOW, he has the balls to think that he knows better than Tolkien. How supremely arrogant. The routing of the Shire is an important part of the overall story, it was meant to convey the knowledge that no matter how removed you are from evil or how little it affects your daily life, in the end no one can escape the touch of evil.
Do yourself a favor, read Tolkien's books, then read them again. You can then appreciate how much better the movie adaptations could have been. If "The Hobbit" is ever made into a movie, I only hope that Peter Jackson is not involved.
A little over a week ago, I said that Windows users should move to another OS. Well, it seems now that another serious hole in Windows has appeared, Gartner Research agrees with me (although they were much more subtle about it).
A serious question: if you're a Windows user why in the world do you continue to use it? It's clear Microsoft doesn't give a rat's ass about it's users, so why do you keep using their product? Is it the hassle of moving to another OS? Maybe the lemming effect: since every one else uses it you have to also? I really want to know. (And the "lack of software" myth isn't a valid reason -- unless you spend more than half the time playing games, or you are in a vertical market.)
Ext2 1.1.1 is now available. It fixes the panics I mentioned earlier, as well as a bug in the pref pane.
I finally finished reading Michio Kaku's Hyperspace last night. (An Ext2 for OS X user was kind enough to get this for me from my wish list.) This book is denser than Stephen Hawking's books: The Theory of Everything and A Brief History of Time. All three books pretty much cover the same topic (string theory and the origins of the Universe), but Professor Hawking's books are definitely more "user friendly" for the lay person. Hypersapce goes into more depth concerning the theories and history behind superstring theory, including references to abstruse -- unless you are a theoretical physicist or mathematician -- theorems that throughly nonplussed me in some cases. Overall though, this book is excellent, and I would recommended it over Hawkinig's books if you can handle glossing over some of the math.
Ahhh, the joys of writing kernel drivers...
After three and half hours of debugging, umpteen reboots, and hair pulling I can't afford, I've tracked down a stupid mount panic in the Ext2 for Mac OS X driver that I just started experiencing today.
While doing some drive recovery for a user, I also tracked down another panic today. Luckily, this one should have only happened if there was a physical disk error.
Version 1.1.1 will be out soon to fix both of these.
Just saw on Slashdot that SCO has filed their 2nd Amended Complaint. What's different from previous complaints is that this one actually includes references to code they say was purloined from their UNIX® IP. Miracles never cease.
Looks like JFS (which IBM wrote), some real-time clock stuff, and kernel traps are the culprits. They expect to find even more in discovery. I'm not anywhere near qualified to say if the code is suspect, but I still believe SCO is simply trying to make a last hurrah before going the way of the Dodo.
I just ordered my Perfect Circle tickets. They are appearing at our local venue on April 18.
A Perfect Circle is kind of a super-group I guess -- Maynard James Keenan from Tool and James Iha from the Smashing Pumpkins (a recent addition to the band) are the two most famous members. They have a Tool-esque sound, but more melodic and not quite as heavy. If you've never heard their music, you are missing out.
I really despise Ticketmaster, but since they are a monopoly there is nothing you can do; either buy the tickets or don't go. I usually choose the latter. I saw Queensryche in October of last year, and that was my first concert in over five years.
The price for this show wasn't too bad: $27.50 per ticket, plus a $2 building charge. Of course Ticket master adds a $5.55 per ticket "convenience charge" plus another $2.10 on the total for an "Order Convenience Charge" (from the Internet). That's about 20% of the ticket price. It's price-gouging at it's worst, but like I said, with a monopoly there's nothing you can do.
Bitterness aside, I can't wait for this show. It is going to be excellent.
Relating to my earlier post on MyDoom, I've found an interesting article on the source of my increased SPAM; email gateways that find a virus/trojan attached and then mail the "author" a reply saying "you've sent a virus". Problem is, MyDoom and friends spread themselves using addresses from the infected victim's address book, and not the address of the victim. So all of the victim's contacts get spammed from these over-zealous Email gateways. I still believe the root cause is the crap spewed forth from Microsoft, but if these email gateways were changed to silently quarantine the virus, a lot of unnecessary email could be avoided -- and my filters could take a much deserved break. :)
(Thanks to Dan K for pointing me to the article.)
Lou Dobbs had a bit tonight on the "Exporting of America". In case you've been under a rock for the past couple of months, this refers to the wholesale exporting of high-paying IT jobs to countries such as India, Russia, and China. Mr. Dobbs' interview was rather one-sided, as he interrupted the export consultant quite often, but he got the hard points across very well. Foremost: how do American workers compete with someone half-a-world away who can work for 1/10th of their wage? They can't. And since those countries don't have anywhere near the standards in labor and environment that America has, they have an advantage not in knowledge, but in economics. Workers overseas can survive (and in fact live quite comfortably) on the annual wage of the average American fast-food slinger still living with his parents.
There is a Wired story on this issue too; it goes into some depth, and is more balanced than Lou Dobbs. I think the conclusion is still the same though; how can you tell an educated, experienced individual to put their life on hold (including family) and go back to school for "re-training"? IT workers are always re-training and re-inventing themselves; they don't need to go back to school for more of the same -- unless this country is going to be entirely composed of middle-management. Of course, at some point there won't be anyone left to manage.
Be forewarned, this is a rant.
Over the past few weeks, I've seen my SPAM rise from three-hundred messages a day to a peak of eight-hundred. That's right, eight-hundred messages in one day. Unbelievable. And what's the reason for this increase? Why clueless Windows users who continue to use a bug-ridden and insecure OS of course. It seems the cycle repeats itself every few months; a new virus comes out for Windows and the whole Internet community suffers.
My question is, why do people keep using the garbage that Microsoft panders to the unsuspecting user? I think most people are fairly smart, so why after years of continually being infected (or affected) by viruses are the majority of computer users still using Windows? I'd say that eighty percent of Windows users don't need Windows. They don't run vertical market applications that require windows, they just browse the web, read e-mail, and listen to music. These tasks can be accomplished with any OS. Go to the store, plop down seventy bucks for Suse Linux and you'll be on your way to a much more enjoyable computing experience. (Knoppix Linux is also a good choice for those new to Linux and lets you get into the action just by burning a CD and re-booting.) Another option; buy a Mac. You'll get a beautiful GUI on top of an industrial strength, UNIX® like operating system -- and you can run Photoshop, or even Microsoft Office (if you must).
In the last couple of days, my SPAM has dropped to between four and five hundred messages a day. So I guess MyDoom is abating for the moment. But, my SPAM filters are primed and ready for the next invasion.
I saw the trailers for SciFi's Dragon Storm last week and set my VCR to record it. Well, I got around to watching it, and let's just say that I feel robbed of the sixty seconds it took to program my VCR.
I watched ten minutes and stopped the tape. Pure and utter drivel; the acting was horrible, and the effects awful. (How many times can you show someone being "blown up" by a fireball and hurled in a slow-motion mid-air flip? Answer: A lot.)
I was hoping for something better, but was sorely disappointed. This seems to be an ongoing trend with SciFi's original movies (excepting the Battlestar Galactica re-make).
From Slasdot: Tinkering with modified WRT54G firmware
This looks pretty cool. I bought a WRT54G a few months ago to use with my new Al PowerBook. I've always wanted a local DNS server on the thing so I can reference my local LAN hosts easier. Looks like this may be a solution eventually (they say DNS is coming).
Of course, I don't know if I'm intrepid enough to install something like this. Technically, it could turn the router into a $100 paperweight.