Shadowmaster’s Blog - Miscellaneous

Rent-a-Mod

nospam@example.com (shadowmaster) — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 16:33:00 +0000

The Wesnoth users community has always been rather special compared to other gaming groups. The forumers are usually civilized, they respect the Posting Guidelines, rarely start heated discussions on their own, and follow our moderators and developers’ orders and recommendations.

The development team, our current moderators and I are usually around to help with any thread requiring moderation. Such a pacific community doesn’t require maintenance work like that very often, not counting the insatiable spam generators that never stop coming to attempt to plague the forums with cheap search engine-feeding signatures and gratuitously large ad-posts.

However, a rather recent phenomenon is that of Rent-a-Modding. There are some members who seem to think, consciously or not, that forum moderation works by following a tight set of rules resulting in mechanical procedures fitting every possible situation, derived of course from our Posting Guidelines. Other users attempt to answer to forum posts authored by newbies, by guessing what a developer or moderator would say in such situation, or by copying past moderator reactions.

The behavior I’m describing here is commonly known as backseat-modding, and as Urban Dictionary puts it (mature/NSFW language), they are, effectively, a pain in the ass for actual mods and admins, but it’s not because they look like wannabe-mods, but because most of the time they are doing it wrong!

As I was saying, moderators don’t really follow strict rules to decide how to react to a particular situation, since every situation involves completely different contexts which depend a lot on the poster’s background and past behavior — there is, after all, a reason for handpicking Forum Regulars who might fit the job. This is what makes Rent-a-Mods annoying in the first place, since they can easily give out a really bad impression of our community and standards, scaring away newcomers and spreading bad words about us in other corners of the ’net.

Taking a wild guess of what a Developer will say to a poster regarding a specific development issue, such as Wesnoth’s future plans, or why problem X has not been fixed yet, or why feature Y is apparently never going to be implemented, is also a really Bad Thing™ since it wastes our time correcting the spreading misinformation before it gets stuck in people’s heads. There has been a lot of random guesswork regarding recent problems such as the supposed GNU General Public License violations by the iPhone/iPad port creator and distributor, or why a complaining poster has been banned from the multiplayer server(s) — hence we had to ban both to keep things orderly and avoid the development of useless time-consuming arguments.

In case I’m not getting my point across:

DON’T DO IT. IT’S NOT USEFUL FOR ANY OF THE INVOLVED PARTIES. LET THE MODS DO THEIR JOB.

Thanks for reading. I’m fairly certain that this post might not provide a clear enough answer for cases such as this, but I don’t feel like writing a longer and thorough rant at this moment.

The problem with partitioning: Part II

nospam@example.com (shadowmaster) — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 06:34:00 +0000

Not very long ago, I posted an entry regarding some arguably bad installation decisions when I partitioned bluecore’s hard disk for installing Debian. Some weeks ago, I finally decided to risk it all and fix those problems, with the guarantee that if I screwed up like I did multiple times in the past with other installations, I could just restore from a rsnapshot backup stored in the external hard disk I bought earlier this month.

The real dilemma was settling for a new, permanent scheme, keeping performance in mind more than protection against physical or logical failures since I can just put my backups to use nowadays. Part of this dilemma involved choosing the right partitioning tool, after having really bad experiences both with the fdisk tool for Linux, and command-line based GNU parted.

This time I chose the smallest tool that fitted the task, also making sure I would feel comfortable with it previous to doing the real thing, by trying it out with VirtualBox’s help: the GParted Live CD, built around a minimalistic Debian Sid-based system with the GParted front-end on top of a small X server with the most complete toolchain for doing all sorts of funky operations on partitions containing some of the most popular filesystems, such as Ext2, Ext3, Ext4, ReiserFS, NTFS, FAT12/16 and FAT32/VFAT.

Although its X server is not accelerated and the default Fluxbox config doesn’t have opaque window moving disabled as it should, it’s a pretty neat tool for modifying unmounted partitions with the help of a friendly GUI, avoiding all the hassles and risks involved in toying around with the disk containing rootfs and other important filesystem on a running Linux installation — the impossibility of changing rootfs’ parameters and geometry in any way when the system is online is also eliminated with this procedure.

Continue reading "The problem with partitioning: Part II"

Approaching Spring

nospam@example.com (shadowmaster) — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 01:03:10 +0000

Plum blossoms, the false hope of life
Rain, the reflection of infinite sadness
The sky, the unique embodiment of loneliness
A dog in the shadows, the instrument of Death.

Update, and a thorough analysis:

This piece of text that only a foolish one would dare to call a “poem” happens to be my first serious poem-y output ever in my life, and I got the inspiration — if you want to call it that — from staring at the light rain this Wednesday around 3 to 4 pm at home, with the cloudy sky lingering above, a plum tree in front of me with new blossoms, and a dog in the shadows looking at me directly to my eyes, in an improvised kennel after murdering one of our cats while we weren’t at home — in particular, one who was pretty smart, if not a little bad tempered. She was, nonetheless, one of my favorites, and the other cats and I still miss her.

I’d say that the gorgeous view in front of me reflected more than just my emotional state at that particular moment, but instead something I’ve been trying to cope with for years already. Being a technology freak as I am, I rarely stop for a single moment to look at the wonders nature has to offer. In this opportunity, watching myself reflected in this rare scenario was a priceless experience, and it made me discover this hidden “poetic” side of myself, alleviating my hopelessness.

The original piece I muttered in Spanish follows:

El ciruelo en flor, la falsa esperanza que es la vida
La lluvia, el reflejo de mi profunda tristeza
El cielo, único e infinitamente amplio, la representación de mi infinita soledad
El perro en las sombras, el instrumento de la Muerte, que tanto temo.

Although my first revision of this post presents us with the piece at the start, it’s not a 1:1 translation to English, mostly due to the omission of all first-person references:

The blooming plum tree, the false hope that is my life
The rain, the reflection of my deep sadness
The sky, unique and infinitely vast, the representation of my infinite loneliness
The dog in the shadows, the instrument of Death, which I fear so much.

It’s very unusual for me to share my feelings with anyone else (not really having anyone else in the first place), but maybe it’s something I need to do more often. The last verse conveys my authentic fear of death — not as something that I don’t want to face at the end of my life, but as something that can harm me while alive, taking away those who I love the most. While this has probably been my sentiment for years already, I had never externalized this and other feelings.

Thanks to everyone who’s put up with this brief moment of emo-ness.

Curiosity killed the cat

nospam@example.com (shadowmaster) — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 01:45:54 +0000

People’s curiosity has no limits, particularly when it comes to Wesnoth add-ons.

In order to reproduce a bug, I had uploaded and removed a test add-on from the add-on servers for 1.8 and trunk several times, yet it seems I forgot to remove it the last time. This hasn’t stopped people from downloading it out of morbid curiosity, although nobody has dared to ask me about it on IRC or the forums. Certainly not news to me, since this is exactly what happened with it the last time prior to its removal.

As of this writing, the 1.8 version has had 949 downloads, as it can be seen in the screenshot above. You’d think an add-on with a description of “FOO” and a misspelled title would not attract anyone to try it, but this principle doesn’t work in practice. Had the add-on contained code to break all other add-ons, people would still not get the idea, I guess. Then again, I’m talking about users who often mistakenly download the source code tarballs and then ask how to install Wesnoth on Windows or Mac OS X.

This is what I get for forgetting to remove this kind of stuff. Thanks Gambit for pointing it out to me this night.

Full system backup in progress!

nospam@example.com (shadowmaster) — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 20:21:32 +0000

Finally, now that I have a 2 TiB external hard disk drive, I can start making regular, complete backups of my dear laptop. With rsnapshot fully setup after experimenting for a while using Bluecore’s own internal hard disk as target, a full copy of all major filesystems, and a partial copy of my /home — filtering useless crap for now, to avoid including caches and such — as of this writing the system is being backed up. Considering that it resides within a 250 GiB hard disk, of which 28 GiB are allocated for the preinstalled copy of Windows Vista, this couldn’t have been a better investment.

The next logical step is backing up Greycore and Blackcore’s hard disk contents, in particular the latter since its hard disk is already dying, and many blocks near the end of the drive are unusable.

After finishing Bluecore’s backup, I intend to send it to technical support if possible, to solve the issues with the noisy fan, partially stuck touchpad buttons, excess of dirt and lint inside the case and beneath the keyboard, loose screen panel articulation, … so yeah. And I also need a new, better battery (although the current one got better!). I’d probably consider just replacing the whole damn thing, if it weren’t that I already feel comfortable using it, and that we recently invested money on a laptop for my father — which happens to be completely useless, but whatever.

Besides, I didn’t buy an extra 2 GiB RAM module to throw it away with the laptop.

(Granted, I could just use Bluecore as a backup laptop by itself, but really, it’s hard to get rid of it since I’ve had better experiences with it than Greycore, despite all the problems derived from using AMD/ATI hardware.)

I’m also considering relocating and resizing partitions since my current configuration isn’t really optimal anymore, now that I have an use for those 250 GiB.

Kernel modesetting on Linux: Godsend, or imminent catastrophe?

nospam@example.com (shadowmaster) — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 03:59:28 +0000

Not very long ago, I had a rather frightening experience that made me reconsider my testing practices of the increasingly popular Kernel Modesetting (KMS) support for various ATI Radeon chipsets on Linux. While I couldn’t determine exactly what happened back then, I’ve now got another similar story of KMS-related bugs that can cause permanent damage to your hardware.

My Wesnoth-UMC-Dev collaborator and personal friend of mine, Espreon, owns a Dell Inspiron e1705 laptop which ships with an ATI Mobility Radeon x1400 graphics controller. This is in contrast to my HP Pavilion dv5-1132la notebook (bluecore) which has an ATI Radeon HD 3200 (RS780-based) controller.

Espreon’s laptop is now damaged and unusable after some minor testing of KMS + Gallium3D drivers. The screen simply doesn’t work anymore.

I feel the need to carefully and meticulously analyze our stories since the KMS-enabled Radeon drivers are slowly becoming a standard amongst X.org-based Unix distributions including Debian GNU/Linux — Squeeze (6.0) is going to ship with a configuration apt for running on Radeon controllers in KMS operation without any user intervention. This is not to be unexpected since the KMS stack is clearly superior in terms of security and stability to the Xfree86/X.org based device drivers since it doesn’t require such things like making the X server’s executable setuid root, and allowing direct access to the host’s memory, video BIOS, etc. from a userland application.

But, is it really worth the risk? Is KMS really well-tested and safe enough to feature in stable mainline Linux kernels and in major general-purpose system distributions such as Debian? Let’s take a look at our personal experiences with the new graphics subsystem and drivers which are due to become mainstream around the end of this year.

Continue reading "Kernel modesetting on Linux: Godsend, or imminent catastrophe?"

Bluecore, greycore and blackcore

nospam@example.com (shadowmaster) — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 07:06:00 +0000

Often on IRC I refer to my computers by their unique hostnames, which I also use to differentiate their Linux kernel configuration sets, optimized for every individual machine.

Many get confused with this because the names aren’t very descriptive of these machines, so here’s some technical background and history for every one of my technological pets.

Continue reading "Bluecore, greycore and blackcore"

Why Yahoo sucks

nospam@example.com (shadowmaster) — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 07:54:10 +0000

It seems that one of the big guys of the Internet can’t keep the spambots at bay.

Espreon and I have been receiving this kind of garbage in our Gmail inboxes for quite a while already. They aren’t classified as spam for obvious reasons, but they are really annoying nonetheless. How come a company with that much money doesn’t set-up some kind of smart protection for their service forms? I’ve never seen this kind of crap from Google, and I hope to never do. This people, is why I use Google.

(Notably, I’ve received 4 of these so far, one every month until now.)

Google Chrome and a conspiracy theory

nospam@example.com (shadowmaster) — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 05:28:42 +0000

I just found out that Chromium (browser) has been in Debian experimental and Sid for a while.

I'm currently tracking Squeeze and pulling some packages from Experimental, in particular Iceweasel 3.6, which feels much more stable to me than its counterpart in Testing, version 3.5 — which will probably have to remain in the upcoming Stable release as explained by one of the package maintainers.

(Granted, I'm a fool who doesn't care about security because I don't visit unknown odd sites at all. If it weren't for this, you'd say I should not be pulling packages from Experimental, but I am, fully understanding the risks!)

Despite I can see other packages from Experimental in my package manager, including a localization package for Chromium, I can't see Chromium itself, which is really odd. I have Google Chrome installed and I pull it from Google's repository because…because it added itself to apt's sources after I installed it for trying it out last year — which unfortunately reeks of Internet Explorer's old “integration” thing that started with IE 4, frankly. I mean, why didn't it even ask me about adding the source? Is it modifying other parts of my system's configuration without my consent? What the hell, Google?

Rant aside, this is a strange coincidence, which could be related to a mirroring issue in any case, but I don't rule out the possibility that Chrome is somehow banning Chromium from my package manager. Alternatively my laptop might be possessed by some evil spirit that wants me to leave Debian's free-as-in-freedom packages for evil “Big Brother” software suites. Uncanny?

(For the Google lovers and haters in the audience: I'm perfectly fine with using Google stuff, mind you. My main email account is from Gmail, my preferred only search engine is Google's, I also use Google Maps, Google Earth, and this memory/method call profiling suite of sorts that Sirp recommended to me. I also use Google Translate and reCAPTCHA. So, no, I'm not really bothered by Google Chrome's additions, but I'm really mildly pissed off at their decision to change my package manager's sources without asking me through debconf or something.)

My software preferences

nospam@example.com (shadowmaster) — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 02:32:26 +0000

Sometimes people (especially Windows users) ask me what I use for some common task in Linux. These are my software preferences when working on various environments; your mileage will definitively vary.

Continue reading "My software preferences"

Twitter

nospam@example.com (shadowmaster) — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 02:39:05 +0000

Finally, the trap that is social networking has caught me.

I have joined Twitter as ShikadiLord (since “shadowm” and “shadowmaster” were already taken ) mainly because of Frogatto, which also has presence in Twitter now.

Let's see if I make use of this thing. To make things easier for me I'm using Choqok, a micro-blogging client for KDE SC 4.

Yays.

More RAM at last! (or, the side-effects of patching the ACPI DSDT)

nospam@example.com (shadowmaster) — Thu, 27 May 2010 21:33:00 +0000

Today I bought and installed another 2 GB of RAM from my HP Pavilion dv5-1132la laptop while on an errand to buy a new laptop for someone else — it ended up being a HP Pavilion dv4-something in case you are wondering.

This means that I can not only run Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows 98, OpenSolaris 2009.06 and Debian Lenny on VirtualBox all at the same time now, but I'll also be able to compile Wesnoth faster now that I can take advantage of the dual-core AMD processor without running out of RAM and getting excess swapping to disk during the build!

It didn't work quite well at first, though. Problems occurred when I started enough processes to consume over 2 GB of RAM:

BUG: Bad page state in process VirtualBox  pfn:6febe
page:ffffea000187b990 flags:4000000000800000 count:0 mapcount:0 mapping:(null) index:0
Pid: 4323, comm: VirtualBox Tainted: G       A   2.6.33.4-bluecore263-preempt-suspend2 #1
Call Trace:
 [<ffffffff81086a48>] ? bad_page+0x102/0x115
 [<ffffffff810882a2>] ? get_page_from_freelist+0x3b0/0x517
 [<ffffffff810884f6>] ? __alloc_pages_nodemask+0xed/0x588
 [<ffffffff810884f6>] ? __alloc_pages_nodemask+0xed/0x588
 [<ffffffff810a0b2a>] ? __vmalloc_area_node+0xea/0x10a
 [<ffffffffa021d514>] ? rtR0MemObjLinuxAllocPages+0xd8/0x1cc [vboxdrv]
 [<ffffffffa021d630>] ? rtR0MemObjLinuxAllocPhysSub2+0x28/0xde [vboxdrv]
 [<ffffffffa022a7dd>] ? g_abExecMemory+0x1ddd/0x180000 [vboxdrv]
 [<ffffffffa022ad78>] ? g_abExecMemory+0x2378/0x180000 [vboxdrv]
 [<ffffffffa022d2b0>] ? g_abExecMemory+0x48b0/0x180000 [vboxdrv]
 [<ffffffff8102cc1c>] ? cpuacct_charge+0x54/0x76
 [<ffffffffa023b2f4>] ? g_abExecMemory+0x128f4/0x180000 [vboxdrv]
 [<ffffffffa023d28f>] ? g_abExecMemory+0x1488f/0x180000 [vboxdrv]
 [<ffffffffa023d7bb>] ? g_abExecMemory+0x14dbb/0x180000 [vboxdrv]
 [<ffffffffa02316da>] ? g_abExecMemory+0x8cda/0x180000 [vboxdrv]
 [<ffffffffa0218ded>] ? supdrvIOCtl+0x1241/0x20f8 [vboxdrv]
 [<ffffffffa021ce22>] ? rtR0MemAlloc+0x90/0xb4 [vboxdrv]
 [<ffffffffa02152a7>] ? VBoxDrvLinuxIOCtl+0x114/0x18e [vboxdrv]
 [<ffffffff81028440>] ? pick_next_task_fair+0xac/0x112
 [<ffffffff810ba422>] ? vfs_ioctl+0x23/0x93
 [<ffffffff810ba92d>] ? do_vfs_ioctl+0x429/0x46d
 [<ffffffff810aeff3>] ? fget_light+0xc3/0xe8
 [<ffffffff810ba9ad>] ? sys_ioctl+0x3c/0x5c
 [<ffffffff81001f2b>] ? system_call_fastpath+0x16/0x1b

While at first I thought it was a problem with the new RAM module itself (either that or damage on the old module, which is occupying the formerly free slot) I quickly suspected of the Linux kernel configuration instead because of several ACPI-related errors in the boot log.

reserve_ram_pages_type failed 0x6febe000-0x6febf000, track 0x10, req 0x10
ioremap reserve_memtype failed -16
ACPI Error: Could not map memory at 000000006FEBEE70, size 7 (20091214/exregion-180)
ACPI Exception: AE_NO_MEMORY, Returned by Handler for [SystemMemory] (20091214/evregion-475)
ACPI Error (psparse-0537): Method parse/execution failed [\_SB_.PCI0.TOM_] (Node ffff88013f8605d0), AE_NO_MEMORY
ACPI Error (psparse-0537): Method parse/execution failed [\_SB_.PCI0._CRS] (Node ffff88013f860430), AE_NO_MEMORY
ACPI Error (uteval-0250): Method execution failed [\_SB_.PCI0._CRS] (Node ffff88013f860430), AE_NO_MEMORY

After running some memory test utilities and getting no problem reports I recompiled another kernel (blessed be ccache, by the way!) without my patched DSDT which I needed for getting thermal zone readings with Linux. I might have mentioned before that this laptop has a special rule in the ACPI DSDT to not allow any operating system other than Windows Vista (even the particular version) to read the temperature status.

As I suspected, all the boot errors went away after rebooting to an unpatched/untainted kernel, and right now I'm using 3678 MB of 3707 MB (damned graphics controller) without hitting a “bad page.”

I'm not sure why the patched DSDT caused this little mess, but I'll check what happens if I repatch it now, using the current “original” DSDT.