Fedora 14 64-bit Flash Problems
Its rather old news, but rather new to me. There is a known bug with the 64-bit Flash plugin when used in Fedora 14. When playing back certain Flash videos, the bug produces regular high-pitched beeping noises, as though there is some odd clipping issue. The culprit of the bug is a recent upgrade in glibc's memcpy(). I'm seeing a few hacks and patches being thrown around in the bug report, but for now, I'll probably just stick to running 32-bit Flash in a wrapper.
And again, here's the bug report.
Mirror, Mirror, Who’s the Oldest of Them All?
I'll admit, that my Arch updates haven't exactly been occuring with religous regularity, but I never allowed more then a month at most to pass between full system updates on my Arch machines". But today, when I decided to do a full update I was surprised to find that all my packages were already update. Especially since I remember seeing the same message on the last update. Some digging through my log files revealed that the last time one of my system updates actually updated something, was in August of last year. Which means that four months have passed without my system actually being updated. Oh sure, I issued a system update command pretty regularly every few weeks, but no packages were ever updated.
This is Not Good.
Some more digging was required, and it was revealed that the mirror I've been using, mirror.cs.vt.edu/pub/ArchLinux, hasn't been synced to the Arch repository in a very (very) long time. This is also Not Good. But perhaps even more worrying then Virgina Tech's laxness, is my laxness and unawareness. How could I have not notice that various programs on my laptop were several versions old, or that my system upgrades were never doing anything!
So I am doing a massively huge upgrade right now, and I fully expect it to wreck serious hell on my system. But at least that's better then walking around completely oblivious to the various known security holes on my laptop.
Cheating on Slow-Start
I just saw this, Ben Strong's observation of how some websites are playing with TCP slow-start's initial window size to get better page load times. Its good to see that some people are pushing to get the protocol changed to allow for bigger initial window sizes. An initial window size of 3 is a little small given the amount of bandwidth now avaliable and the stronger reliability that you see in the tubes these days.
Classess, and Stuff
Its been a distressingly long time since I last blogged, but thats OK because I'm the only one that cares. My numerous lamentations now aired out, we move onto the good stuff (or bad stuff, depending on your point of view...)
So this last quarter, I found my digital design course consuming an inordinate amount of time, and with each passing week the amount of time I spent in lab per day increased at a logarithmic rate (logarthmic, because there are only so many hours a person can spend in lab before there simply ceases to be hours in the day). The premise of the class was quite simple: spend the first few weeks going through cookie-cutter labs whilst learning the ins-and-outs of the tools and VHDL, and then spend the rest of the quarter builidng your own personal project on a FPGA. My group of three proposed to create a system where a user could drive an iRobot Create by mimicking driving motions in front of a camera, an idea perhaps less ambitious then other groups in the class but nonetheless quite daunting. Unlike Microsoft's super-amazing-funtastic-galactic-awesome Kinect, our system made no use of fancy infrared projectors. Instead, we simply required the user to wear blue gloves or grip a stick tipped in blue, and place their foot over a piece of green cloth. Take a look at our demo:
You'll notice also, that on the disply we drew solid bounding boxes over the blue and green objects in the frame.
This was done almost entirely on the FPGA and was written in VHDL, with only communication over serial port handled by the PPC405 CPU. So yeah, it took a really long time.
Me and Tex
Someone once told me that all the "cool kids" use Latex to write up all their technical documents. Due to my desperate desire to be part of the cool crowd, I immediately began reading through Latex tutorials. At the time, the only formal document I was working on was my resume, so I rewrote my resume in Latex, and because I wanted to have lots of fancy formatting, it took me a surprisingly long time to write it up. The end result was a resume that looked pretty decent, and one very annoyed college student who decided that Latex was far too aggravating to be used on a regular basis for such trivial things like lab reports or resumes. So for the longest time, my resume was the only document I used Latex for.
Now lets put the way-back machine in reverse and jump forward one year, to last week, when I was typing up my linguistics homework in VIM. We were working with sentence trees (think back to your automata/algorithms class, where you used a formal grammar to show that a string is an element of a language) and unfortunately, there is no good way to draw graphs, or much less trees, in plain ASCII text. Lucky me, Google-fu revealed that there are numerous Latex packages that will allow a writer to knock together some pretty spiffy graphs. Long story short, it took me a really (really (really (really))) long time to write up my linguistics homework using Tex. I was up till 4 AM, and most of that time was spent making sentence trees. Granted, I spent a pretty good chunk of time relearning Latex, learning how to use some crazy packages I found out in the Internet, and going "Ooooo! Look what I can do!"
Ooooh! Pretty tree!
The end results: the loveliest homework assignment I've ever turned in, and one tired college student.
Funny story, the next day, I wrote up my algorithms homework in Latex. This week, I wrote part of my circuits lab report and my new linguistics homework in Latex.
I run Linux almost exclusively and its often quite difficult for me to create nice looking documents with fancy charts, tables, and nicely notated equations, because quite frankly, Open Office just doesn't cut it when I need to make stuff look nice. Not only that, but I still haven't bothered to install Open Office on my laptop. The end result is that I write most of my lab reports in Microsoft Office on the school computers. Now I'll admit, I do bash on Microsoft on occasion, but I actually enjoy using Microsoft Office 2010. Office's new equation editor is simple to use and it creates really pretty looking equations, and the graphs now have nice aesthetically pleasing colors and shadows (unlike the old-school graphs). So really, there hasn't yet been a reason for me to seek out an alternative to MS Office. Until now of course.
Latex allows me to create epically awesome, professional grade documents in about the same amount of time as it takes in MS Office. Some tasks are actually faster because I don't have to fight the editor program, which usually thinks it knows better then me. I can now also work on my documents from the comfort of my own desk, or on my laptop while I'm chilling in the hallway between classes. Plus, documents marked up in Latex just look better in general then your typical MS Word doc, due partially to more consistent formatting rules and a more structured layout.
So join the rest of us cool kids! Jump on the Latex bandwagon! After all, how could something created by Donald Knuth possibly be bad?
Project Backlogs
I'm a little disappointed in myself for having so many little half-baked projects floating around. But I do however have a particular project thats been mostly finished (and then forgotten) for a while now; its a python audio converter program that tries to maintain similar file size and quality to the original file, when performing a conversion. It should be hitting the tubes in a few weeks when I finally have some time away from marching band, and administrative tasks that I really don't want to bother with.
Also still currently in the works, is my Google App Engine project. But we'll just have to wait and see how that one turns out...
The World’s Most Interesting Intern
And just like that, we return from an incredibly long four month hiatus, something this blog has never seen before...
Guess I'm a little late to the party, but I figure that its still worth talking about. Throughout the summer, Cisco Systems intern Greg Justice has been releasing a bunch of videos where he claims to be the world's most interesting intern, and surprisingly, he's managed to gain a remarkable amount of popularity and even inspired numerous video responses. I don't know Greg personally, but like him, I too am a Cisco summer intern at the San Jose campus (along with a few hundred others). Here's a few of his videos:
- http://blogs.cisco.com/news/comments/i_am_the_worlds_most_interesting_intern/ (this was the first one)
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TphCCh5iuTU
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKZk7Xlhvsk&feature=channel
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-87j7xWJUdw&feature=channel
Quite frankly, I'm amazed that he's managed to garner so much attention, since his videos aren't exactly gut-busting hilarious, but rather, just simply amusing. But of course, lamer things have somehow managed to gain more popularity on the inter-webs (I'm looking at you double-rainbow-man). I'm not going to make a case that I'm the world's most interesting intern (I know I'm not) but as my internship at Cisco draws to a close, I figure it might be worthwhile to at least mention some of my experiences this summer.
The work has been intellectually interesting, which is more then I can say for some of my previous internship experiences, and I'm happy to say that I was not relegated to the post of code monkey, although I did pump out a fair bit of code. Whether or not I made a positive contribution to the company as a whole, I cannot truly say, since some of the aspects of the product I'm working on are not set in stone and if product specs change again my make may have to be discarded. Overall the work environment is fairly nice, the other engineers highly intelligent and helpful, and the management friendly and unobtrusive, so I cannot complain about this summer. My greatest fear, as a software engineer, is to be left in an uninspiring occupation, banging out unoriginal code for rarely used and uninteresting programs. I fear that I may become an out-source-able code monkey. It is often felt that large companies, like Cisco, that have literally buildings filled with engineers, are often prone to relegate their engineers to excruciatingly boring and tedious code-monkey-like tasks, and treating them like cheap, interchangeable workers in a factory. But I'm happy to say that this was not the case for me. So high-fives all around...
Also, might I just say, that the laptops they gave us interns (not to keep of course), are insanely powerful. Which is a little odd considering that we do almost all our development work on the servers, which are even more powerful.
My Time with Arch
I've been a proud and content Arch Linux user for a little over one year and nine months now, far longer then I've spent with any other Linux distribution. Arch put a happy end to my constant distro-hopping lifestyle, and I've been so pleased with its simplicity and performance that I've spared nary a glance at any other distribution over these past 21 months. But in more recent times, I've been having some disagreements with my Arch system and so I've slowly started reverted to frequenting the old haunts of my distro-hopping days (i.e. distrowatch.com, and other such distro news sites).
Stability has always been a much touted feature of Linux in general, but some distributions lay a greater claim to that attribute then others. Arch in particular has tended to be slightly more bleeding-edge then other distros, sacrificing stability for the newest features; packages are updated in the repository as soon as new versions are released and with a relatively minimal amount of time (extremely minimal compared to other Linux distros like Debian) spent in testing in an Arch environment, just enough to ensure that the packages don't completely break the system. While this strategy has its benefits, namely that it allows users to get the latest and greatest software right when it comes out, it comes at the cost of stability (and security to some degree). And the more packages that I've added to my system, the more I've started to notice just how unstable Arch can be.
I generally run "pacman -Syu" to do a full system update at least every week, and I try not to let my system stay without an update for three weeks at the longest, so in general I'll stay pretty well up-to-date. But it has not been uncommon, that after performing a full update, that my system completely locks up or goes completely nuts. Take for example, just a few weeks ago, when a full system update made my Arch Linux partition completely unbootable and required that I boot a live CD and futz around in the configuration files. When my laptop was finally usable again, I had to mess around some more with my wireless drivers to get them working again. And lately, after my most recent system update, I've been having some problems where my laptop will occasionally freeze up and become totally unresponsive to everything except a hard reboot, and system logs show no behavior to be out of the ordinary. Of course, not all of the breaks in Arch have been this bad. About four months ago, a system update made it so that I could no longer hibernate, a problem which was easily remedied by a quick visit to the Arch wiki and a few short commands. Sadly, the list of weird errors goes on (although its not that long).
Two years ago, when I was moving off of Debian testing, Arch's bleeding edge packages were quite welcoming, but not that I've matured a little bit, I don't care as much about the latest features (Lets face the facts, the programs I've been using the most these past few weeks, have been vim, GCC, SVN, and Zoom). My first priority these days, is getting shit done. And if my laptop decides to go bat-shit-crazy now and then, it seriously hampers my ability to work properly. I don't mind a few bugs now and then, and I could probably even live with a rare kernel panic, but sometimes I get the feeling that Arch is maybe just a little too bleeding edge for me.
I mentioned earlier that another one of the costs of having the latest and greatest software, is security. A lot of the newest software releases tend to be not as well hammered out and therefore are slightly more prone to have security holes. I'm only a slightly paranoid Linux user, so while the lack of security is a little worrying to me, its not a huge deal breaker. Arch's lack of solid support for more powerful RBAC security modules like SELinux or AppArmor has also been a little worrying to me. I would love to be able to slap on some powerful RBAC policies on my laptop to give me greater piece of mind, but Arch's normally awesome wiki is a little lacking in help (although it seems that reccently, the SELinux page has gotten a little more meat to it).
This next point is a rather silly and illogical thing to hold against a distribution, but I feel that it needs to be said because its entered my thoughts a few times in the past year. Whenever I go in for an interview, I generally try to play up my Linux expereince (which is not incredible, but still fairly impressive enough). The logical question for an interviewer to ask of course, is "what distribution(s) do you use?" As soon as the words "Arch Linux" comes out of my mouth, I can see the interviewers knocking some points off of my interview. People always assume that Arch is just another one of those random "edge" distros that is basically just an Ubuntu/Fedora knockoff with some sparkles thrown in, and no maybe how much I explain it to them, I know that they don't respect an Archer as much as they respect a Slacker. So yeah, I'm a little shallow, but I do care about what people think about me, especially in interviews. A part of always wishes that Arch was just a little more mainstream and a little more well known.
So I've taken some pretty mean shots at Arch, but my comments shouldn't be miscontrued to indicate that hate I Arch. Quite the contrary in fact, I've loved using Arch. My old Arch review enumerates out more clearly the points of Arch that I really like, but I'll list them out here quickly.
- Fast! - Compiled for i686 and lightweight with no extra cruft thrown in
- Clean - there is nothing on my Arch system that I didn't put there
- Simple - things tend to be very straightforward and elegently simple
- Awesome documentation and user community - Arch's comprehensive wiki is in my opinion, one of its strongest selling points, also the forums are quite helpful.
- Rolling updates - its nice not to have do some big update every six months...
All the reasons that I first came to love using Arch still hold true, its simply that as time has worn on, I've changed a bit: I don't care as much for bleeding edge features, stability and security have become bigger issues, and I've started caring about what other people think about me. So I've been asking myself, "is Arch still for me?" And I think the answer might be no. I purchased a used IBM Thinkpad reccently, and I don't think Arch is going to be my first choice for it.
It seems like its time for Arch and I to "take a break" in our long relationship. But don't worry Arch, its not you, its me.
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