mark mazurek

From the department of “do you have nothing better to do?”, I found another project. It was observed that Fedora lags behind other distros in the number of people fixing and patching the kernel, and I guess that our strict “upstream-first” policy may be partially responsible. We have to continue to be a good Linux citizen, and we need to have patches going upstream. However, putting brakes on trivial patches in Rawhide turns people away. Writing a patch is easy, pushing it upstream is harder. Which is where we can help.

To test if a pile of random patches actually attracts contributions, I decided to create a track of Rawhide kernel, which accepts all sorts of garbage, as long as it boots on my laptop. The idea is to stay very close to the official kernel, and thus let people switch back and forth easily. Xen, of course, is a big issue, but we’ll see if I need to have it permanently disabled in this track.

The approach initially reminded me of something called “FOLK” (Feature Overloaded Linux Kernel), only it’s more like Chris Wright’s -stable branch, with emphasis on fixes. I use the tag “-volk” for it, like a -folk with a German hint.

If nothing else, it’s a good excuse to learn git. I tried BK and git before, and it always seemed that for a normal developer, an SCM was entirely useless (with one exception: looking up the history). I can continue doing all my work just with patch and diff. Git is only needed when I start churning patches, and manage someone else’s patches.

It is possible to see a whole disc of Shana, 4 episodes, while a Fedora kernel RPM is being built on x86_64.

The real story is somewhat more involved. The build ran out of space, because someone changed rpm to use _tmppath instead of _tmpdir, and so a definition in my .rpmmacros became ineffective. Or maybe _tmpdir is only my fantasy, a memory of a variable which never existed. A bug in rpm scripting is real though: it does not stop the build when cpio runs out of space. I only noticed it because I left “tail -f build.out” spinning in a terminal. So, the build was restarted when I was somewhere in ep.2. Nonetheless, it takes hours on a 3GHz Pentium D.

Shana so far seems quite different from Zero no Tsukaima. I know what all those simpletons were thinking, who commented how “ZnT is just like Shana”. Significant structural similarities exist. But you know, my microwave has a CPU, and my server has a CPU. Is one “just like” another?

It was mentioned elsewhere how Shana is a tragedy whereas ZnT is a comedy. But also, ZnT is a far more… “fit”. It also has superior art and animation, IMHO. Oh, and airplanes. Can’t forget that.

I think I’ll finish Shana when 4th disc comes out, and it seems like a good show, but somehow not a masterpiece.

I have a fied box with a Firewire card. I plugged my iPod Video in and it said: “FireWire connections are not supported. To transfer songs, connect the USB cable provided. // Press Center to dismiss”. I knew it had to happen sooner or later. What a relief though.

In the epilogue of Stellivia, I heard Ren to say: “何で片瀬さんもこんな朴念仁に｡｡｡”, which means approximately: “And why did Ms Katase [fell in love] with such bokunenjin…”

I only recognized the word because I . It’s fairly uncommon, and the only one of my dictionaries which lists it is Obunsha (you thought that “jin” in it were “人” too, didn’t you).

It’s so rare, that I can’t tell if “bokunenjin” is a real life word, but I think that I ran into anime Japanese finally.
Every native speaker I asked says that “the future” is “shorai”, whereas in anime it’s invariably “mirai”. What I mean is, “mirai” is a word, you can find it in a dictionary. was going to use it to name some component in Fedora build system at one point. But apparently it’s not a real life word.

I heard a lot before that anime Japanese is not like the Japanese Japanese, but until now I caught no instances of it.

Another netflixed title, Mai-Hime is not off to a good start. So far it was breasts, breasts, breasts, and more breasts.

Did I mention breasts? Oh, and monsters. Monsters which steal bra and panties. I understand that anime is not supposed to make sense, but there are limits.

Animation is way too cheap for a big production. And the worst is, I hate when creators visibly cut corners. One thing is to have the animation basic. It can be artistic, even breath-taking (like in Fuujin Monogatari [, ]). And another thing is this:

What is up with the el-cheapo 3D backgrounds? My laptop can ray-trace better! Cheepskates. And the face is a blob. Thanks for keeping the nose at least, losers. The screencap of the girl trying the bra for the first time above is a still art. If they animated the whole show like that, I might’ve liked it. But that was too hard for them.

Finally, the voicework tends to go down the toilet every time voices get raised. Which happens a lot, naturally.

I’m going to stick with the show for now, but it’s very much on probation.

At LCA I had an opportunity to play with OLPC.

The first impression is how slow and unresponsive the software feels. I am no stranger to retrocomputing, being a happy owner of a 486/75 laptop which I haul to conferences to scare people with a Microsoft 802.11b card. I have FC-4 on it installed (well, almost… our rpm requires NPTL despite lying about being an “i386″ RPM, so I had to build my own no-nptl rpm before upgrading; nonetheless, the rest is stock). The saladish green “B1″ OLPC is a far faster system, but it feels worse in places. I suspect that the combination of factors may be responsible, but the major issue is with Sugar not providing any busy-state feedback (hourglass is so traditional, can’t have that).

So, when the system is so slow, I wish to know if it’s normal or abnormal. But I can’t (unless I get into console, which I did not know how to do). The inability to know what is happening in the system when it obviously bogs down is very disconcerning. Windows XP at least has Ctrl-Alt-Del thingie.

I predict that the answer from OLPC crowd is going to be “you are not a child, so shut your pie hole”. Well… Don’t underestimate children, I would say. They’ll hate you too.

The fact that the touchpad is unusable on B1 does not bother me one iota. I dealt with many engineering test samples before, so I know how it goes. It would be much worse if poor cable routing affected DRAM.

The rest of the machine is just as good as promised. The mechanical design is on the level of iPod. Fit and finish is far better than expected. Screen is fantastic, and yes I love the outdoors compatibility. I can see it driving my Software-Defined Radio from the middle of Black Rock, the kingdom of dust and sun. I’d hack it a car adapter, with a DC/DC converter if necessary. So, I’d love to get one — commercially.

I did not participate in the project thus far at all, but once OLPC leaks into commercial distribution, I’ll be looking for it. Unfortunately, I do not see the project itself embracing it by licensing the rights to Dell, so there’s a danger of someone making poor quality knock-offs. Getting saddled with one of those would be bad.

This blog is syndicated in a few places, and always my official stance was “syndicate at your own risk” and “don’t come to me if you don’t like the content”. is different though, because the decision is taken by individual blog owners there. I have the responsibility. Conversely, readers may assign “interestingness” ratings, and thus exclude bad diaries from their reading list. The missing link here is the feedback. I don’t know what ratings others see and thus I don’t know what advogaters think (In theory at least. I practice I know that mecha musume is not in keeping with the spirit of Advogato).

As it turns out, an undocumented way exists to read ratings seen by others, by entering the report URL (I have a sample at my page). They key is to guess on representatives. Raph’s report shows me locked at level 8, so it’s no use. So here lies the problem. Scanning randomly, I see my rating sitting around 8 anyway. Either I am not reading it right, or Advogato turned from Free Software site into general discussion site. I expected about half of those bothering with ratings to try to mod me below the default treshold of 3, and it’s just not happening, evidently.

When I saw the list of aces at and examined the , my first thought was: “Where is Saburo Sakai?” The answer is actually obvious: Mio Sakamoto represents him. She has the eyepatch!

The Russian girl is handed a short stick in several ways: she’s got a badly botched name, a ficticious aircraft name, and a generic weapon. She is also the youngest of the bunch (only 13, and thus younger than Yoshika, the protagonist). The ability to foreigners to mangle Russian names never ceases to amaze me. To start with, “Sanya” is a diminutive form, not used as recorded name. Anglosphere adopted russian female dimunitives as proper names, and that’s fine. For example, I have a friend whose wife is called “Tanya”, and I had a New Zealander classmate in a local college called “Natasha”. But it’s not how a supposedly Russian origin character would be called. And of course, “Sanya” is male only. A girl could be called “Sasha” by close friends, but not “Sanya”. Mrs. Litvyak’s name was Lidiya, but I guess that was too hard for Japanese to say and they didn’t know how to mangle it. In other instances, they took male names and turned them into supposedly female equivalents, e.g. Charles “Chuck” Yeager became Charlotte Yeager. Don’t ask why they didn’t treat us to Sasha Pokryshkina.

Mig-60 is rather unfair, considering that Erica Hartmann flies a Gustav and Charlotte Yeager gets to zip in a Mustang. Why not use MiG-3? Dumb. Also, by Russian tradition, fighters (and one-seater strike aircraft) receive odd sequence numbers, and bombers receive even numbers. If MiG-60 existed, it would be a bomber. Not giving Sanya a ShKAS I can’t understand either. Although since Russians applied rockets to Japanese in 1936 with good success… Institutional memory?

Another strange Japanese fetish is the firm belief that American women have big boobs. Exibit A is Charlotte Yeager, who’s first size is the biggest by far. Good grief. Is there no fetish not touched in these 8 minutes? Maybe yaoi. They even have nurses, albeit as NPCs. Crazy people.

Aiport in Sydney provides free (as in beer) internet access through kiosks, at least in theory. They even run Linux.

In practice, the kiosks usually are inoperative. The most common failure is user locking the kiosk with whatever the GNOME offers to lock it. I was unable to see a menu for it, so I presume it’s a common key combination of which I’m not aware, like two shifts together or something. Or it may be an inactivity timer. At any given time, 50 to 70% of screens are locked. Once locked, they can’t be unlocked, or at least not very easily.

The only way to rewive the kiosk that I found was to press and hold the <Alt><SysRQ>B. For some reason, only holding it down for a few seconds works. With the SysRq magic, getting access became that much easier. While poor fellow travellers queued to surviving screens, any number of broken and unusable stations were at my disposal.

Well, almost were. It did not quite work, because whoever configured these abominations chose Opera. And it turns out that the Sydney Opera (please pardon the pun, heh heh heh) crashes 20 seconds into a Gmail session. No ifs or buts, it just does. Once it crashes, nothing restarts it, and I have to use the SysRq trick to get the station back. Joy! I was so incredilous that I tried getting to Gmail no less than 5 times before I reconsiled myself with the fact that the crash was no glitch.

Not sure if I should applaud the efforts of whoever provided this free Internet access or what. Truth to be told, for-pay providers often were worse. At least in Sydney, most websites (except Gmail) worked. But this is how Fiji greet international travellers:

Curiously, every one of the four available stations exhibited a different malfunction. An hour later, I observed a gullible guy who bought a WWW access voucher before checking if it was actually worth anything. Dude, there was a reason why they posted a sign “no refunds on WWW access”.

I just saw Strike Witches on Youtube, after reading about it on . It’s only 8 minutes long, and is mind boggling. Agree with Astro that the most amazing thing is the musical score, although perhaps you have to be my age and had seen too many black and white movies to get the full effect.

The cheesiness if it was palatable, but you know… It’s a good thing. Never do things by half, go all the way.

So, my next ambition in this life is to watch .

Liked: Can’t tell. Too shocked with awesome.
Rewatch: Too scary to contemplate.