Month of August 2005

Time for another monthly placeholder entry. No Lisp lately; my employers have been making me actually work for a living for the past few weeks, and my non-work time has been occupied with stuff I can't talk about yet. I'm sure that wasn't in the contract...

Round up for the month of July:

• July 3rd: 24 heures du Mans rollers: a relay race around Le Mans Circuit Bugatti. Entered as part of the LSST Team 2, came 137th of 595 starters (or 138th morally, if you accept that the Team Bont disqualification was a con). It's a 4.3km circuit; my average lap time was 9:20 and best was 8:45 or so, which I'm pretty happy with. More here (registration may be required, I've had cookies for that site so long I can't remember which bits are public). Next time don't buy the £10 Tesco Value tent, it's pants.

• July 7th: not killed by terrorist attacks. Not able to get to work either: so it goes.

• July 9th - present (something of an ongoing process still, this) : moved house. New flat is in Bethnal Green, which is near enough work that it's an easy skate and near enough central London that it's also a pleasant skate. (Skating in Leytonstone was mostly an exercise in being beeped at and pulled out on by car drivers who'd clearly never seen a skater before). New flat is still however looking a bit bare, as too much of my stuff is still in boxes in the old place waiting for an opportunity to move it (see "work", above)

• But at last I have internet at home again (ADSL from ClaraNET: staff deal) and almost have wireless to go with it. I got a Netgear DG834DG bcause it looked cute and cheap and is supposed to be quite hackable (it runs Linux) which I thought might be fun. However, in the two or three days since my adsl service was actually switched on it's frequently stopped wirelessing for no apparent reason, forcing me to plug my laptop in using a cable in order to find out that there's nothing in the logs to indicate why. Gah. Looks like some amount of hacking may be a necessity, then, not just a fun spare-time project. As if I have any spare time right now anyway. (Yes, I've already tried a firmware upgrade: no joy)

• On the other hand, it could equally well be the laptop at fault, I suppose. Since I upgraded every part of it at once (Debian from a version old enough to have XFree86 to current unstable, the kernel to whatever I could find, then some abortive mucking around with pcmciautils and udev which I later had to revert because it doesn't actually work usefully yet) I have no hibernation support and the machine is prone from time to time to spin the disk continuously while refusing to respond to M-C-backspace, M-C-F1, Numlock, or anything else that might usually be a "hey!" signal. I can see why people buy Macs: because Apple don't have an "unstable" version for public release ...

• Today: (or technically yesterday). Registered and booked flights for the Berlin Inline Marathon. With any luck I might actually have some speedskates by then and will be able to bend my ankles more than Crossmax usually allow.

I've been playing with Google Maps. The link you see there is notable less for what you can see (though the satellite view is kind of neat) as what you would be able to see if you - for example - were to type 'javascript:showMarkers()' into the url bar immediately after visiting it. Probably only works in Mozilla-derived browsers, or at least has not been tested in anything else.

Anyway, that's where I'll be leading 100-odd skaters (some odder than others, I have no doubt) on Sunday afternoon.

In the process I noted quite a lot of one-way streets that are incorrectly marked in Google Maps, which is a shame as it does rather reduce the usefulness of said tool for skate route planning of this kind.

It would be nice if it measured distance: that will be forthcoming. Yes, I do know about the gmap pedometer, but that only allows the last point to be edited, whereas this thing allows intermediate points to be moved/inserted/deleted - and is a bit easier to get the data out of in useful format.

Sadly, rain stopped play. Or at least, the forecast threat of it was serious enough that we cancelled the Rollerstroll (no link as web site is a useless Flash thing) yesterday and instead went out for an impromptu skate down by the river and then up and down Pentonville Rise. Happily in a way we did get rained on, thus vindicating the "no go" decision for the official skate.

New skates! Currently borrowing a pair of these attached to these: only been out on them twice and they do seem to require a significantly different technique than xmax. Which is not a surprise, really. If I haven't shredded my feet in the next few days - and all the signs so far look promising; a certain amount of ankle rubbing on the left boot that will go away when I manage to get the frame aligned properly - I will be making an offer for the boots (and then have to get some frames of my own for them, but that's a fairly straightforward deal).

After some hacking with Venkman and the Microoft Script Debugger, my Google Maps hack now seems to work in IE as well as Firefox. Firefox won't print polylines when I ask for a hardcopy, though, which is annoying.

What else? A full factory reset of my DG834G seemed to improve wireless stability a lot, but it still manages to drop off the net after about five days and I still don't know why. Changing the frequency from the admin interface was enough to kick it back into life. Also even when it does work, something is not right with the DHCP: the router's DHCP server issues addresses with a 12 hour lease, and either it refuses renewal requests or Linux doesn't make renewal requests, so ... gah.

"The suspend is killing me", said Arthur testily.

Actually, the suspend is a lot better than it was. It seems that the good bits of Suspend 2 are supposed to be being read by other people and slowly merged into the less-featureful swsusp code in the baseline kernel. So I decided to try that and see how far it's got, and it already works better than suspend2 did. My usb phone is still broken, but after some investigation and a fairly brutal patch I have suspendable wireless at least.

I just had to reboot my computer after a Lisp program wedged it.

Well, I guess that needs a little qualification. The Lisp in question was librep, the librep interpreter was also running my window manager (Sawfish), and the program was (read-line). And the computer wasn't totally wedged (it carried on playing my MP3s) but wouldn't listen to any keyboard input or focus changes, nor even to M-C-F1 or M-C-Backspace, making it rather hard to regain control. So if I had another machine here I could probably have sshed into it, but I haven't, so there.

Still, if one of the supposed advantages of Lisp is the ease of interactive experimentation and debugging, (and I think I've said this before), Sawfish is not it.

Context: still flushed from my success in getting 90%-working suspend-to-disk, I thought I'd make the machine's power button activate it instead of having to su root and echo stuff into obscurely named files in /sys. That worked quite well once I'd accounted for my script getting run multiple times on each button press. Then I decided to make the volume buttons work too, and that's where I started playing with sawfish. Maybe it's time to try Eclipse again.

!/bin/sh
 /etc/acpi/powerbtn.sh
 Initiates suspend-to-disk when the power putton has been
 pressed.  Note use of background process and locking: button 
 seems to send two events (up and down?) each time it's pressed,
 and we only get called for the second after the script has returned
 from the first.
( if lockfile -r0 /tmp/.acpi-suspend-lock; then
 echo 'platform' >/sys/power/disk
 echo 'disk' >/sys/power/state
 rm  /tmp/.acpi-suspend-lock
else 
 echo 'Ignoring second suspend attempt'
fi ) &
exit 0;