Moving innovations

Kicking up beech leaves and listening to the sound that makes is part of the full Autumn experience for me. This weekend I got ample opportunity to do so in the forest between Spa and Stavelot. Two nice days of hiking, with generally nice weather, although a little bit on the cold side, especially on the Fagne de Malchamps. Still, no rain, which is a huge improvement over our track record of the past few weekends, and even a faint bit of sunshine late on Sunday.

We followed the GR5 from Winamplanche to Stavelot, staying there overnight, and walking back to Spa through a route we made up ourselves. Making our own track worked out pretty well, with some nice sights along the way. Good fortune that hunting was on Saturday this weekend, so the forest we needed to cross was open to the public on Sunday. Wonderful autumn atmosphere all around us for the most part, and the Fagne de Malchamps looks impressively bleak.

We stayed in the Hotel d’Orange in Stavelot. The building has been a hotel for 7 generations but unfortunately this doesn’t really translate well into the decor. Some touching up and some subtle modernazation could really benefit the place. Still, we had a nice stay there in a clean room and friendly hotel staff. We had dinner at the Pizzeria Figaro in Stavelot, and that comes highly recommended. Nice relaxed place to eat with some great food.

The first week of skiing for this coming winter is now booked. I’ll be on the slopes in Tignes February 9-16. We’ll be staying in Les Brévieres, so I’ll have ample opportunity the ski down Sache again, the first black slope that messed with my head and where I needed some strong peptalk to finally get down. That was a loooong time ago, though, and I’m sure I’ll fare much better this year.

I do plan to go for at least another long weekend or perhaps a week, but I’ll make plans for that and/or jump in the car when the time is right, possibly even before Christmas if there is going to be a decent amount of snow. We’ll see… I’ll keep my eyes peeled on the snow-forecast.com predictions.

I’ve slowly been going deaf in the last few days. On the desk in my study is a new 19" rack-mounted server which will soon become Winkwaves’ main web server, and its fans are making a racket. I’m glad it will be in the data center soon, but for a while it seemed like that would never happen.

When the server arrived earlier this week I thought it’d be a matter of simply popping in a Gentoo minimal install CD, running through the installation steps, and be done with it. So I popped in the CD. Rebooted the machine. Nothing happened. No boot disk present. Please press any key. Hmm. Popped the CD into another machine and it booted just fine. Lots of tinkering with the BIOS resulted in exactly the same situation. The machine was pretty eager to boot over the network, though. So, in the spirit of adventure and learning new things I decided to make it happy. Followed the instructions and rigged dhcp and tftp servers on my laptop. Succes! At least now the machine booted and showed that it could run a Linux kernel.

After some creative use of disk partitions and shuffling stuff on a too-small USB stick, I finally got to the point where I should be able to boot off of the harddisk, but again the dreaded ‘No boot disk’ message. My mind, devious as it can be, linked this failure to the problem of not being able to boot from the CD.

Time for a BIOS update. Intel had already posted two updates since the one I had on the board, so perhaps that would fix things, even though the very summary release notes didn’t seem to hint at a fix. After updating the BIOS I could again boot from CD, but still not from the harddisk. That should have been a red flag that perhaps this was an unrelated problem, but I didn’t see that at the time. It wasn’t until some time later that I finally realized, thanks to a lilo message, that the boot partitions weren’t flagged as active (ie. bootable). Not setting this flag works fine with the ASUS boards I’ve been using thus far, but the Intel board is a bit more strict. Anyway, set the active flags, and: success!

Now the machine runs fine, and it sure is quick to compile stuff. I did had to use the e1000 network driver from Intel, because the e1000 driver that is in the Linux 2.6.22 kernel isn’t new enough to recognize it. I didn’t play around with the other hardware such as video and audio since this will only need to work as a server anyway.

Finally, we got this server from HPS Industrial. They delivered right on the day they said they would and gave us a good price as well.

Whenever I mention to people in the Netherlands that I like long-distance hiking on paths stretching a few hundreds of kilometers, most of them invariably will mention the Pieterpad. I’m not exactly sure why, but there is something about this particular path that makes people remember. Perhaps it is the fact that is stretches from the far north of the Netherlands way down to the very south. Or that it was one of the first to get a lot of publicity. Or perhaps it just has a nice name.

In any case, I never really walked on it, apart from a few small stretches where it overlapped with the Pelgrimspad, and as a way of getting to the GR5 near Maastricht. Until last weekend, when I finally walked my first stretch, from near Doetinchem to Spijk. The weather was great for walking. Well, apart from the first hour where it rained quite hard, but we solved that by getting coffee. This part of the path crosses through a small part of Germany that protrudes into the Netherlands, so this was an international day of hiking.

I’m at home on a Sunday afternoon as I’m writing this. The weather is nice, with big clouds and an odd patch of blue, which makes it easy to dry out my camping gear on the balcony. It’s all still wet from what was going to be a weekend of camping and hiking in Belgium. We decided to leave there early this morning instead of hiking for another day, as the rain forecast was for 20mm of rain to fall in the course of 6 hours. That kind of downpour crosses the border, it’s where the fun ends.

It’s not that I wasn’t prepared as I got some new hiking gear. I got the Haglöfs Fusion jacket partly to take with me to work when going by bike and partly for hiking trips with a chance of rain. It did get a good workout on Saturday already, when we had some heavy rain in the first hour, and so far I love this jacket. Wears great and is easy to pack. The one thing that drives my crazy though is why there is a piece of velcro on the hood. Can that be used to fold the hood away? If so, I’m at a loss how to do that.

I’ve also retired my old backpack after years and years of heavy duty. A few minor annoyances have been building up while using it over the years, and I took the opportunity to correct them with a new backpack: Osprey’s Stratos 32. After two days of hiking I really love this pack. It’s large enough to stow quite a bit of stuff when travelling, but small enough to wear it as a daypack. It’s got a bunch of nice features that make it a treat to use such as the special side pockets for water bottles, the zippered side pockets for maps and books, and bungee loops on the back to easily attach stuff to the backpack.

As for hiking: we did manage to get a good day in on Saturday with only an hour of heavy to light rain at the beginning. The area just east of Liège is pretty heavily populated and the path took us over a bit too many paved routes for my liking, but it also ended right next to our campsite which made shuffling the cars a bit easier.

The premise of Giver is something that appeals to me: it will allow you to easily give files to others. It uses avahi to determine other Giver users out there and allows you to easily share files with them without messing with any configuration. Having this up an running would be useful for me in several situations, especially if someone would create a MacOS X port.

So I naively thought I’d just whip together an ebuild for it so that I could play around with it. That was before I knew that Giver is written in C# and uses some not-yet-released bindings for libnotify and dbus. Uhm, wait, does it depend on notify-sharp or notify-sharp. Trying them out in order I found out it’s actually the latter, but NDesk’s version depends on NDesk’s not-yet-released DBusSharp bindings.

At this point I thought that someone in Gentoo must have already worked on this, but Google was of no help in part because the now unmaintained .NET bindings in D-Bus GIT are also called dbus-sharp in many cases. If only I could easily search the overlays on overlays.g.o… But wait, that’s possible! Thanks to the people in #gentoo-dev I was pointed to eix, which can also use a remote index consisting of most of the stuff covered by layman and overlays.g.o. Just run update-eix-remote and all those overlays are at your disposal without having to install them first.

ecatmur’s overlay contains an ebuild for dbus-sharp, but it was for an older version and has some issues. To make a long story short I’ve created ebuilds for dbus-sharp, notify-sharp, and giver. They can be found in my personal GIT overlay.

Oh, and Giver? It works as advertised. You get an icon in the notification area which opens into a window showing all Giver users on the local network. Dragging a file or a folder onto a user offers the files to that user, who can then accept or decline. Simple, no fuss.

Update: Andreas Proschofsky also wrote ebuilds for giver and its dependencies during GUADEC. Since his ebuilds were a bit nicer than mine he has folded my improvements into his versions, and I recommended to use the ebuilds from his overlay for now.

Yesterday I ran into Steev’s email about the removal of virtual/x11 and checked the dev-ruby packages for any occurances. After fixing those I noticed that several people where fixing packages all over the tree and I decided to join in and have a bit of fun poking around ebuilds I’d normally never see. As a nice side effect I learned a few new things about Gentoo as well.

Although I had heard about keychain I never really looked in to this, but with the amount of commits we were doing yesterday entering my GPG passphrase quickly became tiresome. While configuring gpg-agent to deal with this keychain was pointed out to me as a way to manage both ssh-agent and gpg-agent. I finally realized the one big benefit that keychain would bring to me: no more passphrase-less keys for stuff like cron-jobs!

One of the things that we noticed as we were removing the virtual/x11 stuff is that there are plenty packages that have a lot of old ebuild versions around. Some people are of the opinion that this doesn’t hurt, but the kind of cleanup we did yesterday shows that it does hurt for such maintenance activity. I’ve fixed a number of packages where only the old versions contained references to virtual/x11. Why are these still in the tree… Sure, it makes sense to keep an older version around while stabilizing a newer version, but only for a couple of months at the most. When I asked whether we have a QA tool that might be showing which versions of a package could/should be deleted, I got pointed to earch and was disappointed to find that this basically shows the same information as packages.g.o, but without the nice layout. So, if this tool exists I’d be happy to hear about it, and otherwise I might have to try writing something myself.

For the very few people who use my i-mode RSS reader, it’s back online.

This weekend I’ve committed two experimental ebuilds to the emacs overlay. I’d be happy to get feedback on them, so if you are using XEmacs and feeling adventurous, head on over to the overlay and give things a whirl.

First up is an ebuild for XEmacs 21.5.28, the latest upstream beta version. This version is not ready yet for general consumption but it does have some nice new features that may still be worth it. Personally I’m still fighting the new Xft-based font system, so for real work I’m using 21.4, but otherwise 21.5 appears to be as stable as 21.4 is. Note that 21.5 is not slotted, so it will remove 21.4 from your system. Also note that 21.5 bytecode is not fully backwards compatible with 21.4, so you’ll have to take care in downgrading. I don’t expect this ebuild to be moved to the main tree any time soon.

For those of you doing Gentoo development work with XEmacs I am happy to introduce the app-xemacs/gentoo-syntax package (formerly known as ebuild-mode, but never released for XEmacs). It should work fine with both 21.4 and 21.5, and again I’d love to get feedback on it. Many thanks to the Emacs herd for all their work on this. After I’ve gotten some feedback on this I will move it to the main tree.

My broadband is up in my new home. Dialup didn’t seem so bad, but now I really notice the difference! More later, but here’s already a picture taken from my new study.