Archive for the 'Rants' Category

About box 2.0

You want to revitalize a dying, inactive free software project. How do you proceed?

  1. You write code, contribute, get involved in the community, get in touch with the previous developer(s) to try and join the team or take over the project. Failing that, you fork the project, because this is how free software works after all. Then, once you’ve got something to show, you start talking about it;
  2. You set up a new forum, brag about it on the old one, arrange with the previous lead developer to make sure you can use the name and logo, then open a twitter account so users can follow the new forum’s setup process minute by minute.

There’s this saying about opensource/free software that says the logo and about box are the very first (and only) things that work in new/young projects (and sometimes that’s also true for more “mature” projects, as we all come to know).

Choice 2 above is the About Box 2.0. Unfortunately, that’s the way a handful of people choose to revitalize mt-daapd/Firefly Media Server. Of course, not one among them can code or has actually got a clue about the current codebase.

FAIL of epic proportions. Facepalm.

Why oh why…

… did FAI switch to that stinking pile of shit known as live-initramfs?

Things that were possible before aren’t possible anymore due to the extreme brokenness of live-initramfs. Nothing that can’t be fixed by some heavy-handed patching here and there, but what a waste of time.

Not happy. Hammer time.

Antec PSU suck

How not to start your day, from the all-hardware-sucks department.

For years, I’ve been struggling to keep my machines quiet. I’ve miserably failed for years, and pretty much gave up once I realised that the quiet parts I was looking for just did not exist. Last year, I finally found what I was looking for:

  • big, heavy, quiet case from Chieftec (with room for 8 HDD and their own dedicated 90mm fans (up to 3) and room for 2 120mm case fans);
  • über-engineered fans from Noctua (finally some guys took a shot at engineering fans, happiness \o/);
  • fanless (except for the emergency fan) PSU from Antec (Phantom 500).

I’ve been very happy with this hardware for both my workstation and my filer. Well, until today. No need to mention that this hardware is not exactly cheap, but the price is right for the quality.

So, wake up today, do random things, grab my TomTom, unplug it from the workstation it’s sucking its power from, do things, plug it back in the USB port so it won’t draw its battery. This is how it went:

  • plug TomTom into USB port;
  • notice the LED is blinking, and it should not;
  • erupt a mental “WTF?” and simultaneously hear *clac* *pffzziiouuuu*;
  • unplug TomTom;
  • replug TomTom, notice the LED is blinking again;
  • look at the machine, notice it’s gone down;
  • check the PSU and erupt a verbal “WTF?!” noticing the LED on the PSU is not lit.

Check machine temp, PSU temp, attempt to restart PSU, check UPS, check cables, replace power cable and bypass UPS. Admit defeat for this round and accept the PSU as dead. Pull out the machine, rip out the fscking damn PSU.

Grab the tools, crack the PSU open. Notice bulging and leaking capacitors.

Yes, this PSU is anything but cheap, yet it uses el-cheapo chinese capacitors. Antec, you suck, big time. For the past decade everybody in the industry has known that el-cheapo chinese capacitors manufactured after 1999 are total crap, using an electrolyte that isn’t actually one because its formula was stolen by industrial spies who got totally PWNED and ended up stealing a bad formula.

(If you need a reference, google for “singing capacitors”. Note that singing capacitors can also happen with good parts used in a crappy electronic design. Like that 100 Mbps D-Link switch over there, or that Sony-Ericsson mobile phone charger. Hmm. Not everybody can hear it, I do.)

A healthy, young capacitor should not bulge nor leak. A capacitor that leaks, bulges or sings is a crappy capacitor and needs to be replaced with a quality part ASAP. I’ve been routinely replacing such capacitors on my older motherboards (manufactured between 1999 and 2001) in the past years. I’ve not had the problem in ANY of my el-cheapo PSU, and did not replace any capacitor in any of them to date.

Fortunately, the machine did not suffer any further damage, nor did the TomTom. Everything is up and running again with a spare PSU. I’m now going to replace the fscking capacitors on this PSU, replace the fuse, probably R&R a couple of high-voltage transistors too (they have a tendency to fry before the fuse blows out) and get it back up and running.

Then I’ll do the same with the other PSU in the filer, because that machine has 8 disks attached, so draws more power and hence is much more vulnerable. Fuck you Antec.

HAL is crap, film at 11

Joey,

I think your whole post only applies to HAL.

Fact is, DBus lets you know through a dedicated signal that you’ve been disconnected from the DBus server; at that point, you cleanup the connection and try to reconnect. Works for me.

Now, the fact that HAL (and/or libhal, it seems) provides no way of handling this situation cleanly is obviously a major bug.

I’m not a great fan of all the desktop crap that’s being promoted and hyped lately, but I am positive about DBus. DBus provides the mechanisms to handle a DBus restart properly, HAL (and pretty much everything else) doesn’t use them, blame HAL, not DBus, for this one.

As for the “DBus should never be restarted”… I have no idea why the DBus upstreams would think that, but that also wouldn’t be the first time distributions disagree with upstreams about what is good and what isn’t. The good news is, this is all free software and we can fix it without upstream’s blessing.

If somebody out there really believes that it is OK for applications to crash/exit when DBus is restarted, then I don’t have the words.

I won’t even mention the new behaviour of the DBus init script in Sid.

Fix your DBus-using applications

You maintain an application that uses DBus? Better yet, you are upstream for an application that uses DBus?

Then, please:

GET OFF YOUR ASS AND HANDLE DBus SERVER DISCONNECTION/RECONNECTION INSTEAD OF CRASHING

kthxbye.

TomTom: “Internet standards do not apply”

In June last year, I bought a TomTom GPS device. Their use of Linux on the device was a clear plus in their favour, but it was only that, given that overall they’re the best devices available.

Unfortunately, the TomTom HOME software that is needed to manage the device is not as good as the device itself.

An account on their website is needed for updates and the online shop, and as I usually do, I used an email address in the form jb+something@jblache.org. That’s a trick most of us use to trace back the origin of spam, usually revealing that some company sold its customer database. I’ve been doing that for years.

I was quite happy that the website did not reject the address as being invalid; that’s something that happens everytime the random web developer maintaining the site decides to start “validating” email addresses, for some value of email addresses.

For the following 8 months I’ve been using this address as the account login (don’t really have the choice, anyway) with the TomTom HOME software. Last month, the v2 of the said software was finally made available for Mac OS X.

Where the v1 used to accept my email address, the v2 would now reject it. You guessed it, Joe Random developer decided to start validating email addresses in TomTom HOME.

I reported the regression (and here, something must be said about their infamous support website), with pointers to the relevant RFCs. In the following email ping-pong, they managed to:

  • Pretend the password was the problem. I have to say here that the software displays a big red “invalid email address” next to the email address field as soon as I enter the + character. No mistake possible here.
  • Send me my login and password, in clear text, when I never asked for that. That also means they’re storing passwords in clear text. IT’S 2008 FOR FUCK’S SAKE! STOP STORING CLEAR TEXT PASSWORDS, DAMMIT.
  • Pretend their email platform is the most secure in the world. Ever heard of SSL? TLS? Clearly not.
  • Pretend it’s not a regression in the v2 of TomTom HOME. We’re not speaking the same language, it seems.
  • Pretend the email address is invalid. No surprise there, but it’s clear they did not bother reading the fucking RFC.

Last but not least, their last reply was: “we found that the standard does not apply to us. Please change your email address for a valid one.”

Now, I’m left wondering: does the GPS standard apply to TomTom devices? I truly hope so.

SSH scan from my-debian.org

Jan 26 11:26:35 arrakis sshd[2515]: pam_unix(ssh:auth): authentication failure; logname= uid=0 euid=0 tty=ssh ruser= rhost=my-debian.org
Jan 26 11:26:38 arrakis sshd[2515]: Failed password for invalid user myra from 88.151.100.103 port 53744 ssh2

Note the rhost in the first line: my-debian.org. And, indeed:

% host my-debian.org
my-debian.org has address 88.151.100.103

Whois tells me:

Registrant ID:DI_6983786
Registrant Name:Czibulya Gergely

LART, anyone ?

Dear bloody spammer^W^WAndrea Infurna

Spamming every @*.debian.org email address you can find to advertise your new website related to free software is not a good idea. At all.

If you know this person IRL, please make heavy use of the cluebat on him.

kthxbye.

ATI drivers suck

I am still trying to get the ATI drivers to work properly with my X1600 Mobility card.

And things are only getting worse.

I still cannot get the crt1 output to work, although the driver detects the VGA monitor connected to it. Enabling both lvds and crt1 doesn’t cut it. No, really, it doesn’t fucking work. No signal, no nothing.

But now I am getting segfaults every time I try to use a multimedia player, be it vlc or xine, even when explicitely using a good old x11 video output (ie, no XVideo), and the machine won’t resume anymore after a suspend to ram when fglrx is loaded.

Gee, instead of releasing such crappy drivers, can’t you just release the specs ?

Moreover they won’t accept bug reports from me because the machine is a laptop.

Morons.

{X,}Emacs and PHP : I’m tired.

I’m getting increasingly tired and frustrated by the inability of {X,}Emacs’ php-mode to properly indent a mixture of PHP and HTML.

Mixing HTML and code inline was, like, a feature of PHP. And the fucking mode can’t deal with it. Tired of that shit.

Found mmm-mode and HtmlDeluxeMode on the Emacs wiki. Sort of worked in XEmacs, but the cure is worse than the disease. Doesn’t work at all in Emacs. (on a Sarge system)

Still looking for a solution. At that point, using another editor is an acceptable solution, but it must not require X. If you’ve got any suggestions to share, do not hesitate to mail me. Vi vs. Emacs trolls don’t count ! :-)