Recent Blog Entries

I think it speaks for itself.

So, I am watching the Republican National Convention tonight, and I saw the Homage to 9/11. How disgraceful of the RNC to reach back to 9/11 with a purely cynical, self-serving stage show, abusing the memory of those who died on September 11, 2001. I can't even begin to explain how shocked I was that this was going on. I thought for sure they wouldn't go there. So, the party leadership reveals who they are to the American people: Shameless opportunists who will use any device to get ahead. I have boycotted all of the Hollywood recreations of September 11, 2001, including the numerous movies about United flight 93, out of a sense of respect and dignity for those who died. This is a sad commentary on the real values held by the Republican Party today, and a far cry from the party of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Goldwater, and, yes, even Ronald Reagan.

I hope that all of you readers can find the time to write to your Republican, Democratic, and Independent representatives and candidates to voice your outrage at what a terrible offense has been committed to the memories of those dead in the Sept. 11 attacks, and the brave soldiers and unfortunate civilians that have died in the fighting since.

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

Dear Civilized World,

I want to express my great apology with the comments of our ”elected” leader yesterday during the G8 summit. I would like to inform you that we here in the United States do take pollution very seriously and, at the local and state levels, we are very committed to reducing the amount of pollution that we generate. We were quite offended and surprised by George's remarks at the meeting on Thursday, and we can assure you that he will be dissuaded from such outbursts in the future. The problem is that while George was growing up in the pristine bubble of the Bush dynasty, he never really got to see or experience pollution first-hand, and is currently still confused about what pollution really is. We in the USA apologize again for his insulting jest, and want to express that we find absolutely no humor in being the world's second-biggest polluter (yes, George's account of things are a bit dated, we'll make sure that we assign someone to read such reports for him in the future).

Sincerely,

Coleman Kane (on behalf of the population of the United States of America)

I received my XO from the OLPC Foundation last month. It is a pretty neat little device, and I'm still learning all the little pieces that the bundled applications have to offer. I joined up with their developers network to see about contributing. Recently I actually managed to get the Sugar interface building under FreeBSD. I still need to do some work to get it running, it seems, as the python sugar shell doesn't seem to want to run (it silently exits, with no error code).

I've just put up a gitweb at http://www.cokane.org/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi. Currently it houses my local FreeBSD changes, and two branches to track HEAD and RELENG_7. It was a snap to set up and now it is quite helpful for providing numerous patches I've had on my site out to others.

If you're in the United States, you probably are aware of the upcoming election cycle. Lawrence Lessig, of Creative Commons and Electronic Frontier Foundation fame, has teamed up with Joe Trippi to found the Change Congress movement. This announcement may be belated to some who've been following the project, who are aware that it has been around for over a month.

For the rest, I'd like to point out that the project has recently picked up a lot and begun opening up some of the community participation systems that were hailed in the beginning. I recommend it for all of us computer science, engineering, and IT types that may tend to stay out of the process…

• Link: http://www.change-congress.org

Hans Reiser has been found guilty of murder in the first degree today. Many of us know him as the author of the ReiserFS filesystem. The trial was notable for its controversy and Reiser himself for his numerous personal quirks.

• Link: http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/04/reiser-guilty-o.html

Recently, I've been getting myself more familiar with the FreeBSD kernel internals, and some new features brought along with FreeBSD 7 (and 8-CURRENT, which I typically run). I've been picking at the kernel sources to convert places where timeout(9) is used into callout(9) implementations of the same logic. This should remove extra use of the Giant-lock and improve concurrency in the long-run. Most recently, I have converted the if_ndis device to use the new callout(9) API. If you're running -CURRENT and use the NDISulator, I would ask that you give it a try and email a report back to me of how well it works (or doesn't) for you.

I put together a page for the work here: callout-conversion

Recently, seahorse decided to refuse to operate when GNOME 2.22 was merged in. This was due to FreeBSD lacking unprivileged access to mlock(2) and munlock(2). I've got some patches up on a section discussing this: mlock-support. There are patches to fix Seahorse so that it doesn't crash just because there is no mlock(2) support (bad behavior), as well as a kernel patch to make unprivileged access available on your machine.

I'm giving a talk on build Free/Open Source Software for Windows for the CenralLUG chapter of The Greater New-Hampshire Linux Users Group. It will discuss my experiences, and overview of the dissimilarities and similarities between Win32 and traditional BSD, UNIX, and GNU/Linux-based systems. The focus is on getting an environment set up so that all development happens on a non-Windows system using GCC, and avoids having to maintain Windows-specific development environments.

• The scheduled date is: 07 Apr 2008 at 7PM
• The location is: Concord, NH

The announcement is here (with more details): http://mail.gnhlug.org/pipermail/gnhlug-announce/2008-March/000553.html

One of the more frustrating aspects I've had with autotools is the lack of parallel support in the SUBDIRS support. Recently, I decided to try my hand at rewriting some of the auto-generated recursive rules to see if I could rectify this while still maintaining my organizational and hierarchical project layout.

What I found was remarkably simple. I add the following rules to the bottom of any Makefile.am that employs SUBDIRS, and make sure to remove the . from the SUBDIRS list. This allows gmake to properly perform the build in parallel across the contents of SUBDIRS.

This assumes two things:

1. There are no interdependencies between the SUBDIRS
2. The top-level directory (.) depends upon all of the SUBDIRS

.PHONY: $(SUBDIRS) .

.: $(SUBDIRS)
        echo "Making $(TARGET) in $@"
        $(MAKE) -C $@ $(AM_MAKEFLAGS) $(TARGET)-am

$(SUBDIRS):
        echo "Making $(TARGET) in $@"
        $(MAKE) -C $@ $(AM_MAKEFLAGS) $(TARGET)

$(RECURSIVE_TARGETS):
        @target=`echo $@ | sed s/-recursive//`; \
        $(MAKE) $(AM_MAKEFLAGS) TARGET=$$target .

Today I wrote up a quick article discussing how to deal with the DVD region codes problem under FreeBSD, for your DVD drive. If you are one of the people who cannot seem to get your DVD drive to play a movie in FreeBSD, chances are that your drive's region code has not been established yet.

Read on for more information.

My friend Shimon recently posted a blog entry discussing our project to build a computer science AP lab out of a bunch of surplus hardware (no local storage!) and a GNU/Linux shell server so that we could actually take the Computer Science AP course during our senior year at our public high school in Cincinnati. This still remains one of my proudest achievements of all time as well.

Link: http://rura.org/blog/2008/01/27/proudest-non-software-hack/

So, a few months ago, some random guy contacts me to notify me that the domain cokane.net has not been renewed, and is about to expire and offers their services to help me pick it up. Not wanting to spend some extra money beyond the ~US$9 to buy the domain, I just never bothered responding. I did, however, keep an eye on the domain as it expired. Some time after it became available (I wasn't really on top of it) I did manage to snatch up the domain. So both of them point to my webpage now, and maybe I'll do something different with the new one at some point in the future.