number 9

Happy New Thing. 

 So anyway, Adam Leventhal found out AAPL hamstrung DTrace w.r.t. certain apps on Leopard (iTunes at least).  Cue inevitable Slashdottian outrage.

When source code gets released under a license everyone (so long as they follow those terms) gets to port, extend, or shout about how your license isn’t free at all really. They can even choose to ignore you, or to provide really shitty implementations. None of the above makes them ‘evil’.

Some of OS X is open source, some is  proprietary, and some is riddled with DRM. iTunes is in the last category. It’s Apples main cash cow; if it was reverse engineered they’d lose a competitive advantage, scare their movie/music business partners away, and the terrorists would win.

OSX ships with a full toolchain and part of that is Instruments - a GarageBand-like frontend to DTrace. It’ll probably be the first contact with DTrace a lot of coders get. I’ve only tinkered with it, but right away you can see why it’d make DRM fans twitchy. Running iPhoto under Instruments let me see down into the Cocoa API calls. I now know how atomic preference changes are implemented at the system call level.  Basically, it’s fucking great.

It was really nice of Apple to give it out for free, just like it was nice of Sun to give us DTrace, ZFS and NFS. Telling either company how they should release any of those products makes you a bit of a deRaadt in my book.

I’ve now officially taken all the shit I’m going to from Typo.

• a seemingly dead codebase
• rubbish antispam
• takes an age to post comments
• takes even longer to delete spam comments (see above points)
• have a cronjob to restart it 4 times a day

(The last point seems to be standard practice for plenty of commercial software I’ve babysat over the years, but I’m not having it here).
To be fair, a lot of the issues are down to running this on a $12/month hosting account – I’ve had to turn off a lot of features to save memory.

I’m in the middle of migrating from Textdrive → Joyent anyway and I refuse to replicate this shambles on the new box.

The plan is to switch over to Wordpress (yes, it’s PHP, but I don’t intend to hack the code at all).

I’m going to pull all the articles over by abusing the RSS feed, so anyone on a reader might see a few (hundred) duplicate posts in the next day or two. Will do my best to preserve permalinks and comments, although tags might go south for a bit.

I’m on Ubuntu for most stuff (though I escaped from GNOME a while back). Here’s a question:

Why does totem think it can play any content at all?

Whenever I go to a webpage with quicktime/real/anything video, it pops up “Totem could not play ‘fd://0’”.

Totem, we know. As we’ve established, you are fucking useless. The only shame is that you persist in trying.

Mplayer can play any video format ever, from the command line, with about 30 alternative output mechanisms for audio and video (watching star wars in an xterm is highly recommended).

Rather than put this in the base, Ubuntu decided it would be more fun to have me
alternate between swearing at ‘plugger’ and resorting to ‘view source’ and wget.

So, if you’d like to watch video on ubuntu, you need to:

1. enable the ‘multiverse’ repo
2. sudo apt-get update
3. sudo apt-get install mplayer mozilla-mplayer
4. sudo apt-get remove totem-mozilla

Then go to the mplayer site ,download the right ‘Binary Codec Packages’ for your architecture (these work on any UNIX). It untars to make a folder called something like:
’essential-20061022’ – rename that to /usr/lib/win32 and you’re done.

No idea how to get quicktime and realplayer to do the same,

DISCLAIMER: As I said , I only run openlink so I can serve NFS (samba and netatalk are too slow for fullscreen video over 100Mbit). If I was running samba and/or appletalk I would probably not have had a problem.

That said: if you setup NFS on your linkstation, NEVER EVER EVER (ever) backup using the web frontend.

I’ve been backing up my other machines to the LS for a few months.
I got a fast/cheap/quiet/lovely Seagate 250Gb disk and thought I’d backup using the UI (openlink is a superset of the official firmware. I stupidly thought this would be ok.).

Plugged in the disk. It took the LS about an hour to build what looked like an ext2 filesystem on it.
I should have started running at that point.

The backup script on the LS is called do-backup.pl (I would upload a copy, but someone might stumble across it and I don’t want that on my conscience).

Whoever wrote it made the decision to allow clients read-only access to shares while they were being archived. Which would be cool, except the way they do that is essentially:

1. chmod -R 555 $SHAREDIR
2. cp -R $SHAREDIR /mnt/usbdisk/`date`
3. chmod -R 777 $SHAREDIR

I’m paraphrasing. But only slightly. Key features are:

• it makes no attempt to remember/restore the old perms. This does horrible things to an NFS share. I’m (charitably) assuming it doesn’t fuck up samba/appletalk too badly.
• every file on the share is made executable before it even does anything (’chmod ugo-w -R …’ would have the same effect and be slightly less stupid)
• every file in the share is world writable when it completes
• cp??? (Google returns patches that at least use rsync)
• this is a CGI. The only user feedback is a blinkenlight on the USB disk
  (I’m using 50Gb, it was 45 minutes in before I sshed to see what was going on)
• Samba and Appletalk support readonly shares (NFS does too, but I forgive that as it’s not part of openlink)

This rant is mainly due to the death of the eMac the next morning¹. I was left with a backup of the LS I didn’t trust and a ‘good copy’ of all our digital photos that had been tampered with. It took a lot of work I could really have done without to make sure that the permissions were sane.

What’s really to blame² is shitty filesystems that force developers to hack around their lack of features (snapshots in this case). I’ll go into more detail when I’ve calmed down

The Linkstation is still a great piece of kit as far as it goes.

In my case, it’s gone on amazon marketplace.

¹ yes, I’m aware of the repair program . No, my serial number isn’t in the list.

² no. not the guy who puts important things on firmware written by people who run off with paypal donations . definitely the filesystem. definitely.

I got CUPS working just in time.

Ceri found a load of 3D printers . I knew this was amazing for prototyping in polymer, but some people are printing metal in 3D.

You can already rent time on a hardprinter, design stuff in CAD and upload it.

The kit isn’t obscenely expensive – any biggish company should be able to afford one. Think of the potential:

• IKEA could put Allen keys on their website for you to print off.
• the post office could go and piss up a rope
• as of yesterday, budding Reanimators can also print organs (for that ‘just buried’ freshness).
• unspeakable things can crawl out of such a portal and pour themselves into your lungs

- oh sorry, didn’t I mention Dennis Hong and his work on ‘whole-skin locomotion’ robots ?
That’s a bit of a mouthful, so let’s just call it a fucking ROBOTIC SHOGGOTH.

Have a look at the video. At first glance it may resemble a dild cucumber skidding across the floor, but don’t be fooled. The last few seconds clearly show it squirting itself through a hole and trying to chew his fist off. Eldritch as fuck.

Brings new meaning to ‘Internet Worm’.
All your workgroup printers spitting out A4 saying ’PwnZored!!!!’ is one thing, but when they start spawning entities hellbent on your destruction, it’s time for a service pack.