cvs.telent.net is down at least until I return to work and sweet-talk#

Thu Dec 30 16:19:59 2004

Happy 2005#

Sun Jan 2 23:17:26 2005

Happy 2005. I could do the end-of-year roundup, but my lisp hacking exploits this past year have been infrequent enough that the last twelve months diary entries are short enough not to need summary. Or I could do predictions for next year, but I tried that last year with results which were on the whole undistinguished. So, well, let's just qspeculate on what I'd like to do this year:

1. Something with McCLIM, probably involving GPS tracks. That's CLIM application programming, not McCLIM internals hacking, as far as I can avoid it. (More on CLIM later; I had a useful conversation with Andy Hefner yesterday, so we'll see if I can write up the conclusions without misrepresenting him too badly)

2. SBCL-wise, (i) replace fd-streams with something I can understand and have some reasonable confidence in, (ii) whatever other thread/runtime-related stuff imposes itself on me. If it sounds like I'm winding down a bit on SBCL here, I must point out that (a) realistically, I did that already, (b) it works pretty well these days, and with all the other people hacking it doesn't really need my further meddling. I reserve the right to change my mind on this if Apple bring out a laptop that I like (small, thin, light, 1024x768 and feel free to leave out the cd/dvd player to assist in these aims) and can afford (cheap, and ideally also cheap), because then I'll need threads on PPC.

3. Finish my texinfo translator and hack up some useful texinfo warp-to-symbol-documentation infrastructure stuff for asdf/circle/slime/thingy.

4. Follow the progress of Climacs with interest. Apart from anything else, it's the most likely vehicle for using lisp at work that I'm going to see for a while.

5. Buy and/or make (how hard can it be? please don't mail me about jwz's plumbing store special, I've already seen that) some bookshelves, and reclaim some parts of the floor in here that I haven't seen for most of a year now.

6. Skate a marathon.

7. Skate a marathon in a time I'm not ashamed of (although I haven't decided what this time will be yet)

8. Start cycling to work again.

9. Spend more time with my guitar (another pursuit which suffered in 2004). Perhaps even learn to play it ...

loaclhost.telent.net (a.k.a cvs.telent.net) has a very ill hard disk#

Thu Jan 13 22:52:26 2005

I had certain problems at the weekend with computer suppliers: most#

Wed Jan 19 00:26:26 2005

I had certain problems at the weekend with computer suppliers: most notably Simply, who told me on the telephone that thay had lots of cdroms and disks in stock for collection from their London branch, then in person when I got there (admitedly an hour or two later) that they only had 160Gb drives only one kind of cdrom - not the cheap one.

So I mail-ordered instead. Nice new SATA drive arrived today; expected tomorrow, a controller card to use with it. I've already scanned the old disk - on finding that the partition table was unreadable anyway I thought I might as well whack it in a PC and see what I could get - and the good news is that the corruption was entirely confined to the start of the disk (root partition and swap) and didn't affect any of the interesting stuff (cvs repositories, home directories, etc) - once I'd found the start of /export, it restored cleanly onto the new disk. So, with any luck I should have it all running again soon and back on the net next week. Fingers crossed.

Not been writing much here lately (as, obviously, you can tell easily): when I have been doing/thinking about Lisp-related stuff, it's been about a replacement streams system for SBCL. But I barely have anything written down yet, never mind implemented. Oh, and the ALU Wiki is going to die unless someone does something, but I've had no responses of any kind to that message yet, so that shouldn't be a big deal.

Today's neat software: dd_rhelp, and dd_rescue, on which it depends.

Debian has defeated me once again#

Thu Jan 20 23:57:37 2005

Debian has defeated me once again. I have the ambition, one day, of doing a fresh standard debian install that doesn't involve stopping halfway through to monkey with modules or an unsupported PXE or untarring the base system where it's not supposed to be and using a chroot or ...

Today's alpha install has not satisfied that ambition. I can't make the machine boot the unstable rc2 debian-installer netinst image from CD, so I had to do a floppy install. It's 2005 and I just had to buy a new box of floppies - how wrong is that? There isn't, as far as I can see, any floppy images newer than woody for Debian Alpha, so I ended up installing that and apt-get upgrading. It still hasn't reached the point where I find out whether the SATA controller is recognised, because it's still building the 2.6 kernel that I hope will contain the relevant driver.

In the process of writing this entry, I just realised that I forgot to apply the -ac patch to said kernel before building it. Bother.

loaclhost.telent.net (a.k.a cvs.telent.net) boots#

Sat Jan 22 16:35:22 2005

Host: scsi0 Channel: 00 Id: 02 Lun: 00
  Vendor: IBM      Model: DDRS-34560W      Rev: S97B
  Type:   Direct-Access                    ANSI SCSI revision: 02
Host: scsi2 Channel: 00 Id: 00 Lun: 00
  Vendor: ATA      Model: HDS722580VLSA80  Rev: V32O
  Type:   Direct-Access                    ANSI SCSI revision: 05

:; sudo hdparm -t /dev/sda

/dev/sda:
 Timing buffered disk reads:   38 MB in  3.03 seconds =  12.55 MB/sec
:; sudo hdparm -t /dev/sdb

/dev/sdb:
 Timing buffered disk reads:  124 MB in  3.05 seconds =  40.70 MB/sec

I'm hacking threads for SBCL AMD64#

Sun Jan 30 00:19:50 2005

I'm hacking threads for SBCL AMD64. I've only just started on it, but there a couple of things I think I've decided on:

• The AMD64 sort of has segment registers insofar as %fs and %gs still exist. However, glibc is using %fs for its tls, and %gs is reportedly slower because the kernel uses it for something. So, as we have some GPRs these days, let's use one of them as base address for our thread data (specials &c)

• The original decision to use clone() instead of pthreads was largely made on not on any objection to the pthreads interfaces, but more on the basis that LinuxThreads (the then-current implementation of same) is/was pretty bloody awful. We no longer have to care about that, mercifully: NPTL is supposed to be actually quite good. So, let's see if we can use standard(ish) interfaces where appropriate.

Of course, there's still a big gap between "uses some pthreads interfaces" and "runs everywhere that pthreads does". Purists will point out that the pthread_t may be a non-integral type (e.g. a structure) and we shouldn't be comparing them with each other; I will respond by pointing out that we're still using POSIX RT signals, and (at least for the moment, until I can work out whether the pthreads locks are adequate) futexes. Which probably ties it down more effectively portability-wise than any weird architecture that uses a struct for pthread_t.

So far after an evening's hacking it compiles host-1 and target-1, then bails out very early in host-2 as I still haven't done any of the lisp stuff: need VOPs for set, bind, unbind, symbol-value etc.

Oh, before I forget: if you are running a highly loaded site on Araneida with a mod_proxy in front of it,

ProxyIOBufferSize 131072

Hot property#

Wed Feb 2 10:45:33 2005

Hot property

From: Daniel Barlow <dan@telent.net>
Subject: [OxLUG] GPG key revocation

For anyone who'd signed my GPG key, please be aware that my laptop
was stolen at the weekend, so don't trust it any more.  The revocation
cert below has been sent to the keyservers.

-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.5 (GNU/Linux)  
Comment: A revocation certificate should follow

iHAEIBECADAFAkIAkncpHQJsYXB0b3AgY29udGFpbmluZyBzZWNyZXQga2V5IHdh
cyBzdG9sZW4ACgkQHDK5ZnWQiRP18QCfZNMnZyOzdKon3mRKjt6EBn8WpwEAniE/
9qsy51ZzLlHbFyKellFpMas1
=U0GC
-----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----

For information, I claim that my new key is

:; gpg --fingerprint 1297D4B5    
gpg: NOTE: old default options file `/home/dan/.gnupg/options' ignored
pub  1024D/1297D4B5 2005-02-02 Daniel Barlow <dan@telent.net>
     Key fingerprint = 13D7 02AD 8665 27E0 8F71  5326 776F D7C0 1297 D4B5
sub  2048g/DE0A0FD9 2005-02-02 [expires: 2010-02-01]

but of course I don't expect you to believe that without the whole
face-to-face authentication hassle, so ...
[...]

If you see me, feel free to ask for a copy of my fingerprint

There has also been some AMD64/pthreads progress, btw#

Wed Feb 2 10:53:05 2005

There has also been some AMD64/pthreads progress, btw. It now gets as far as creating a core, and dies early in cold-init with some `4 is not a list' error that I haven't fully figured out yet.