I just had an interesting experience flying from Waterloo, IA to Minneapolis. I am sure anyone flying from an small airport has had the same experience but it is unique in mine. I guess I have always gone between cities; even the few turboprops I have flown were between San Diego and LA. And the “small town” of Lihue is a major tourist destination.
The Waterloo airport is a small regional one: two gates, one small baggage claim, one airline, one floor, and one check-in counter. Not only was there no line to check-in, the attendant only showed up to take my bag. This was the return flight for the flight down from Friday. Just after everybody got off, they opened the security check point and took everybody through. There was barely a line. And then immediately boarded the flight. I think the ticket agent was the same women who checked IDs at the security checkpoint.
The plane was a [Saab turboprop](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saab_340). The plane had three seats across, one and two, and 12 rows. They had us all sit in the back for balance reasons. The copilot was also the cabin attendant and gave the safety briefing. He even read off the individual connecting flights; he had everybody’s names and itinerary. I think we took off early since all five passengers were on-board. The flight was only 40 minutes long.
I am in the Minneapolis airport waiting for a flight to Waterloo, Iowa where I will see my brother and family. This is the second time I have traveled with my laptop and it is very handy while waiting in the airport. I can read email, chat with friends, and catch up on reading blogs. I can even connect to work and fix bugs. The Portland airport is even better since they provide free wireless. In Minneapolis, I paid $8 for the day.
Connectivity is a public good and free connectivity is even better. But there will always be locations where there isn’t connectivity. Currently, this includes flying. Online applications will always have problems with areas of poor connectivity. Instead of always-on web applications, a better model is email where it is possible to download messages and work offline. It is better to be online to have immediate communication and to be able to access email from anywhere.
I am writing this on Fedora Core 6 running on my MacBook. In general, it works pretty well with a few problems. The wireless works great with the madwifi drivers from [livna](http://rpm.livna.org/fedora/6/).
The biggest problem is that suspend and hibernate don’t work. Suspend seems to work but does not restore. Hibernate suceeds with the most recent kernel but that kernel does not boot reliably.
I hadn’t noticed that I wasn’t running at the ideal resolution, 1280×900. 1080×768 looked a little squished. I had to switch to the ‘intel’ driver for Xorg for the graphics to work at the ideal resolution.
I just installed the compiz compositing window manager. The flipping effect when changing desktops is a nice touch even though it is a little blurry and jumpy.I understand what people were talking about with the wobbly window effect.
The Mighty Mouse is not detected automatically by the Bluetooth system. I have to run ‘hidd –search’ and occasionally restart the hidd daemon. The scroll ball only works in one direction. Unfortunately, moving the scroll ball horizontally scrolls vertically.
I voted today. For those who don’t know, everybody in Oregon votes by mail. They sent me my ballot a week or two ago. I filled it out yesterday and mailed it today. Last election, I forgot until too late to mail the ballot and had to drop it off at a collection center on election day.
The election, I voted a straight Democratic ticket. For the House, I voted for the incumbent. For the State House, I didn’t even have a choice. I wasn’t sure about Kulongoski for governor since he hasn’t been impressive and the Republican Ron Saxton sounds like a moderate. But I’ll take a boring D over an moderate R. I voted no on all but one of the propositions, the prescription drug benefit. The rest sounded dubious or bad (like the parental notification for abortions) and I always vote no on propositions if uncertain.
I have produced [Jigdo files](http://znark.com/fedora/jigdo/) files for [Fedora Core 6](http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FC6ReleaseSummary). [Jigdo](http://www.atterer.net/jigdo/) is a program which can produce ISO images from the constituent files and a description. It uses a .template file which contains the description how to compose the image from the files and the missing pieces, and a .jigdo file which describes where to find the constituent files.
It allows downloading the packages from the mirrors which can be faster and easier than getting the images and producing the images from them. It is also more useful to keep the package repository and then produce the images as needed. I know some people keep the images and then mount them to get the files.
One thing I noticed is that the the disc1 and DVD templates are much larger than they should be. The cause is the repodata directory in the images is different than the one on the mirrors. My guess is that the output of createrepo is not deterministic; the contents seem to have different ordering but the input packages are the same.
I am flying to the Bay Area tomorrow for a long weekend. I am going down for my 10th reunion at Stanford. I am really looking forward to seeing friends who I haven’t seen in a while. It will also be interesting to see the area after not living there for a few years.
For my fifth reunion, I still lived in the place I lived as a grad student. It was close enough to walk or ride to campus. I was also unemployed at the time which wasn’t impressive.
I got [mt-daapd](http://www.mt-daapd.org) running on my Linux desktop where all my music files are. I found a [patch](http://hamadha.com/mt-daapd/mt-daapd-stable-avahi.diff) to make it work with [avahi](http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/Avahi) and [instruction and RPMs](http://www.terrysoucy.ca/index.php?/archives/17-More-Audio-Streaming-Goodness.html).
The only problem is that iTunes does not support streaming Ogg files. The [QuickTime Components](http://www.xiph.org/quicktime/) do a good job of local Ogg playing but I guess iTunes does its own thing with streaming. It is supposed to be possible to setup transcoding so the server streams WAV instead.
UPDATE: Only development snapshots of mt-daapd support transcoding. And they support FLAC. But they don’t support Avahi and the patch does apply cleanly.
I hate CPAN maintainers who don’t respond to bugs. I have been putting in bugs for problems I find in various CPAN modules. For some, I have even put in patches which fix the bug. The result has been complete silence.
I don’t expect maintainers to drop everything and fix the bug. I would hope that they would at least send an acknowledgement that they have seen the bug and might work on it. A snarky “that is not a bug but a feature”, “it has been fixed in the latest release”, or “you are an idiot, do this instead” is better than silence.
If you post a module to CPAN, you have an obligation to maintain it. I suspect fixing bugs is more beneficial to the community than writing new, cool stuff. Even if it is really boring. The user has an obligation to report bugs if they encounter them so the maintainer is not in the dark. One big advantage of open source is that the user can provide a fix or at least a test case. The maintainer’s responsiblity is to apply the patch if it is suitable. Not let it sit there gathering dust.
The best example is [bug 27](http://rt.cpan.org/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=27), a major limitation in URI which is only 5 years old. People have even provided patches.
Also posted at [use perl](http://use.perl.org/~iburrell/journal/31032).
I got the wireless working on my MacBook under Fedora rawhide. The MacBook includes an Atheros chipset which needs the [madwifi](http://madwifi.org) driver. The madwifi driver can’t be included in the base kernel or distribution because it includes a binary HAL which isn’t open-source.
Unfortunately, the madwifi driver did not compile cleanly on the Fedora development kernel. First, the Fedora kernels are currently 2.6.18-rc4 but they are versioned as 2.6.17. There is code in the driver which detects 2.6.18 but that doesn’t work with the mislabelled version. Also, madwifi uses the config.h header which was replaced by autoconf.h but is finally deprecated in 2.6.18. I submitted a [ticket with patch](http://madwifi.org/ticket/845) to get this fixed.
I wanted to install the kernel modules as RPMs instead of from source. [livna.org](http://rpm.livna.org) has madwifi packages for FC5. With some patching, they are suitable for building with the [kmod scheme](http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/KernelModules). This involves building packages for each kernel release, variant, and architecture. I only build for the i686 standard variant. The command line looks like:
rpmbuild -ba –target=i686 –define “kversion 2.6.17-1.2586.fc6” –define ‘kvariants “”‘ madwifi-kmod.spec
I have put the packages I built at [my Fedora package directory](http://znark.com/fedora/). Installing the packages from the rpm command-line can be tricky because multiple versions are installed at once. Doing an upgrade will remove the version for an old kernel.
Upgrading the module versions requires installing the new version for installed kernels and then removing the old versions. Yum is supposed to handle this.
Getting the wireless working once the module was installed was a snap. I used NetworkManager and it just worked. It detected the wireless network and switched to it when the Ethernet cable is removed. It prompts for the WPA password.
I had an idea that the graphical Fedora installer would be okay (or could at least be used with a mouse) even if the keyboard at the console was duplicating keypresses. Instead of trying to do a network install, I burned the FC6 Test 2 DVD. I went quickly through the text dialogs. The graphical installer was fine, although the mouse was jumpy and slow probably because I used the “noapic” kernel parameter.
The install went smoothly. Fedora booted up without any problems. Lots of things just worked. The display was autodetected to the right size. The trackpad worked. The Fn key works as modifier. A few things didn’t work out of the box. The wireless card will require third-party drivers. The internal sound isn’t working. It sleeps but doesn’t resume. My Bluetooth Mighty Mouse works but only after restarting the hidd daemon.