Eric’s Blog

Holy crap.

For a long time, I wanted  to be able to run NCID to send caller ID information to my squeezebox, to my MythTV box, to my laptop via growl and NCIDStatusBar, etc - but the hangup was a decent modem.  PCI WinModems are largely useless; I have no desire to run binary blobs even if I happen to find one somewhere that works.  External serial modems are a possibility but it’s another AC adapter brick, more cables, and heck my server doesn’t even have a serial port.

So I was very pleased to find that Conexant has a new usb chipset (CX93010 + CX20548) which implements the USB CDC (Communication Device Class) standard.

I bought the Rosewill RNX-56USB modem from newegg.com, and with a minor patch, it’s all working beautifully. I find it a bit funny that in the age of fiber to the home, there’s finally a usable hardware modem again.

I signed up for the Windsource program with my utilities provider to basically buy wind power for all the electricity used in my home. When it started, I had to pay a premium for this. Recently, though, that premium was offset because the normal “fuel surcharge” was subtracted from the bill (my fuel - wind - is free!). And this month, the fuel surcharge was $0.55 more than the wind surcharge - which means, my wind power was a whopping $0.55 cheaper than all the coal-burning atom-splitting customers out there.

Not much, but I’ll take it!

I searched long and hard for these duplicate code finders, so putting them here for my own reference, now, and hopefully others will find them helpful.

• cpd
• simian
• duplo (and here)

Useful for finding duplicated/cut-pasted code in large projects.  For example, this patch dropped 60 lines of duplicated code!

WTF?

So I have this bug where kernel config A goes fast; kernel config B goes slow.  They are insanely different.  Where to start?

I’m trying this approach.  I diffed the two .configs, then used a  neato tool called splitpatch to break that patch into 100+ smaller patches, one per hunk.  Put the .config into a git repo and applied all the patches (used guilt to import them; probably there is a more straightforward way) and now I’m using git bisect… We’ll see how it goes.  Unfortunately “make oldconfig” wants to modify the .config a bit each time so it won’t be perfect, but hopefully this will get me there.

So, the xfs filesystem really prefers to use 64-bit inode numbers on large filesystems; btrfs would like 64-bit inodes and ext4 is considering it as well.  Is the world ready for this?  not yet.  Running a tool written by Greg Banks over the binary directories in all x86 Fedora Rawhide packages, it comes up with:

4070 29.1% are scripts (shell, perl, whatever)
6598 47.2% don't use any stat() family calls at all
1829 13.1% use 32-bit stat() family interfaces only
1312  9.4% use 64-bit stat64() family interfaces only
 180  1.3% use both 32-bit and 64-bit stat() family interfaces

I need to correlate this with packages that actually use the st_ino stat field, but a spot-check so far includes postfix and sendmail.  :(  But, we have the technology, we can fix it!

On edit:  ugh, I forgot to scan the libraries.  It’s worse than I thought.

Actually BEFORE calling for dsl service, connect the dsl modem to the outside network interface box. It’ll save time on all the requests to put a filter here, move the modem there, the vague warnings/threats about how man oh MAN this is gonna cost you if it turns out to be a house wiring problem… bleah.

Update: yeah, the problem was on the pole. Go figure.

Yay, now why did this take so long?  Autorescan for the SqueezeCenter (unfortunately not for the SlimServer) uses Linux’ iNotify to avoid the tedious manual rescans.

Haven’t actually tried it yet, but man, this should have been there from the beginning!

Got a new PS2->USB adapter, USB ID 0e8f:3013 and it works much better. It’s a no-name thing I found from an Amazon vendor, USB ID lists tell me it’s made by “GreenAsia”

input: USB Game Pa as /class/input/input1
input: USB HID v1.00 Joystick [USB Game Pa] on usb-0000:00:1d.0-2


Things generally work, though the range seems very short and occasionally buttons stop working - but I chalk the latter problem up to FoF so far, because if I reconfigure it, it magically starts working again.

I’m not sure what the range on this thing is supposed to be, but if I’m more than a few feet away from the receiver, things start getting dicey.  I still should just get a wired controller and be done with it.