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Welcome to Orb Graffiti, a place for me to write daily about life and computers. Contrary to popular belief, the two are not interchangeable. EMAIL - I publish email sometimes. If you send me an email and you want privacy or anonymity, please say so clearly at the beginning of your message.. |
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September 16, 2002 - Updates at 0800 EDT
Good morning. Short shrift time, I fear. I'm running late, not feeling well, and generally harried. LinuxMuse is up and running well - that's a good thing, since I've just put up a new article about Mandrake and Red Hat in the new beta ring. Go check it out if you have a moment. Oh, and I managed to get around to updating the home page for this place recently too. Now it reflects current reality and employment status and such. I really need to get going, I should be at work rather than just getting ready to go. Sheesh, I sure hope I start feeling better soon. See you later!
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September 17, 2002 - Updates at 0600
Hullo. I'll be back in a few hours. I've got a dentist appointment this morning at 0700, and while it turns out I'm not working today, it'll be convenient when I am. His office is walking distance from my office. But I need to hop a shower and get on the road. See you around midday.
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September 18, 2002 - Updates at 0730
Good morning. Sorry not to have made it back here yesterday. I started working on an additional article for LinuxMuse sometime in the afternoon, figuring it would take just a little while. Then I could post something more in here. But either the inspiration never hit me, or I forgot. I suspect the latter. I do have the new article up at LinuxMuse, though. Is that enough of a consolation prize?
It turns out that I didn't have to line-stand at the motor vehicle department yesterday, because all the parties concerned have lost their respective bits of paperwork. So instead I've got phone-ear from trying to coordinate between the MVA and Bank of America to start over in the process of getting title to the Lemon transferred out here to Maryland. This is going to be a soap opera, I fear.
On the various health fronts, there's a bit of news. Dentally, I've got the broken tooth still to fix, that'll get taken care of right after my cleaning next month. Back-to-back dental appointments, oh fun! Also there are several small areas that need a touch of tuning up, so that's a separate appointment later next month. As to how I feel right now ... not great. I've been experiencing an assortment of symptoms of lower gastro-intestinal problems for the last three days. I suspect something viral, and I think I've probably turned the corner on the bug, but I'm really washed out.
I have a Mailman installation to do for a work client today, as well as walking someone on the West coast through a Citrix client install. Should be fun, possibly distracting, and I'd best get to it. In the meantime, the Gentoo 1.4rc1 installation I started on Garcia last night is continuing to run nicely. I'll let you know how that goes as events unfold. See you around.
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September 19, 2002 - Updates at 0730
Good morning. I've whacked my way through the email this morning already, only about 100 messages to survey and dispose of, one to save for later reading/action. And while I'm tired yet, my distress from earlier this week appears to have departed, leaving me to recover my health on my own hook. That's OK. This was some sort of virus or another, I'm quite sure. But then I like to whine...
But really, I shouldn't. The world is in nasty bloody shape overall. And even within the relatively cushy world of the Daynoters, there are those with more troubles by far than I. Chris Ward-Johnson (the venerable Dr. Keyboard) has finally caught up on a month of posts, and described in detail the flooding that wiped his part of France nearly clean, killing and rendering homeless many in the process. Meanwhile, on this side of the pond, the talented John Dominik continues to look for work in a tough market (and keep up good spirits), having been made redundant at his old firm shortly after joining the ranks of home owners.
There's good news, too, of course. Bob and Barbara Thompson have signed to do a third edition of PC Hardware in a Nutshell. This is the definitive work on the topic, and if you don't own a copy, rush out to your favorite book seller and buy one. I use it for reference for my own purposes (personal and professional), as well as to make knowledgeable statements to friends and associates who what to know what to buy. Dr. Jerry Pournelle is working hard with Niven on Burning Tower, which I am eagerly awaiting. And he's finished recently a new compendium of Falkenberg tales, called the Prince. I've got that one on my read list. And my buddy Tom Syroid has got more tutorials up on the IBM DeveloperWorks site and in the works than I can count.
By the way, there's a new face making an appearance. Mike Mills is responsible for having introduced me to the people I work for today: Larry and Cheryl Johnson of The Nerds Group. Mike is also my co-worker, but he has a permanent gig at one of our client sites, so I don't see him more than once a week or so. Something I'd managed to miss entirely before yesterday was that Mike is also journalling (or blogging, or daynoting ... whatever) at the MikeM site. It looks like Mike is coming up on three months of relatively continuous content, so we're not just talking about a flash in the pan here. Check him out when you get the chance!
I would make fun of George Bush, who "won't get fooled again" (a couple of days ago he badly muffed a "Fool me once..." statement in a speech), but I just haven't got time. Besides, I really wouldn't want his job. Also, I'm over my time limit, the trash and recycling need to get out to streetside, and then I need to get to work. Have a lovely day!
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September 20, 2002 - Updates at 0710
Good morning. It's a bit late for me to be just starting a post, since I have to drive across two counties to get onsite this morning. So I'll keep this brief. I completed installing Gentoo 1.4 Beta on Garcia yesterday. That is, I started the X and KDE 3.1 Beta installation running night before last and it wasn't done yet yesterday morning, but it was by the time I got home. A few quick steps to configure X, setup my home directory, and I was flying.
KDE 3.1 is gorgeous. It's fast, new and improved. It's also a beta, so of course I was able to stress a couple of applications right into the ground. I have more testing to do as well, but it's looking good, folks. The other big difference in Gentoo 1.4 is that it's using GCC 3.2. The API (ABI) is claimed now to be stable, so new editions in the series shouldn't require recompiling your whole system for a while. That's good for distributions other than Gentoo. Recompiling the whole system is, however, a way of life in the Gentoo world.
I guess I'll be going. If something comes up, then I'll pop in to say so. See ya!
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September 21, 2002 - Updates at 0845
Good morning and happy Saturday! I'm now building Gentoo 1.4 plus KDE 3.1 beta on Goldfinger (the dual Athlon box). Started last night, now I'm emerging KDE. By sometime this afternoon, it should be ready to rock and roll. I also took advantage of the time to actually make use of the CDROM backups and wiped the whole drive down to bare metal. I wanted a larger root partition to take advantage of the ccache program. ccache is a tool that preserves pre-built C and C++ objects. Then on later compile runs, if the pre-compiled object is unchanged from the prior run, it is used instead of recompiling. This basically means that only the changed bits of a new source tree get recompiled. Then the objects, new and old are linked into a new binary. I've never built a system from the ground up using ccache yet, so I have no actual experience to relate to you. More when I've done some testing.
So, while my latest workstation chortles away installing itself, I've got around the house and yard chores to do in preparation for dinner guests tonight. Larry, Cheryl, Judy and Jim are joining us for salmon and assorted other goodies. I'm drooling already and we haven't even bought the salmon yet. But I need to get busy. More later if I finish early. TTFN.
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September 22, 2002 - Updates at 1020
A good time was had by all. We got the outside and inside spruced up enough to be presentable, then did the same for ourselves in time to receive our guests. The influence of Sally meant that the main topics of the evening revolved around pets, embarrassing pet stories and so on.
Dinner was scrumptious. Salmon for the main course, with herb/butter rice, stir-fried mixed vegetables with ginger and garlic, a couple of different salads, and something chocolatey/rasberryish from the Cakery up the street. Wow! Marcia worked really hard on all of that. Basically, I just grilled the salmon and that was my contribution to dinner. Aside from eating, of course. But that goes without saying, doesn't it?
The Gentoo install on Goldfinger went relatively painlessly. As I left it yesterday morning, I'd just typed emerge kde and walked away. I checked in on its progress every once in a while, as my chore-filled day continued. At one point, the install bailed out on building the KDE Multimedia package. I wasn't terribly surprised, as I have fairly aggressive optimizations setup for compiling, in my /etc/make.conf file:
CFLAGS="-march=athlon-mp -O3 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer \
-ffast-math -funroll-loops -fforce-addr -falign-functions=4"
I changed those to a fairly basic set:
CFLAGS="-march=athlon-mp -O2 -pipe"
Then I typed emerge kdemultimedia to build just that group of programs with the reduced optimizations. Then I put the long string back in place (actually just commenting one, and uncommenting the other) and restarted the emerge kde process. A few more hours finished things up nicely. With dual Athlons, even counting the restart due to KDEMultimedia, it only took about nine hours to build all of X, Qt, KDE, associated applications and the bits of Gnome that those pull in with them. That's pretty good.
The fun bit is that, in the future, rebuilding the system with updated sources should go very much faster indeed due to ccache. What's that, you ask?
NAME
ccache - a fast compiler cache
SYNOPSIS
ccache [OPTION]
ccache [COMPILER OPTIONS]
[COMPILER OPTIONS]
DESCRIPTION
ccache is a compiler cache. It speeds up re-compilation of
C/C++ code by caching previous compiles and detecting when
the same compile is being done again.
And ccache rocks. This incredibly useful utility was written by Andrew Trigell of Samba and Rsync fame. Fundamentally, it preserves all the output of a compilation process. At a later date, should I recompile the package, any modules that are unchanged aren't actually recompiled. Instead ccache steps in and puts the compiler output up. If a source module has changed or isn't in the cache, then ccache runs the compiler, yielding the output and caching it for future use. How well does this work? I rebuilt the Qt libraries while I was typing the last few paragraphs, timing the process:
goldfinger root # time emerge qt
. . .
>>> x11-libs/qt-3.0.5-r2 merged.
>>> Recording x11-libs/qt in "world" favorites file...
* GNU info directory index is up-to-date.
real 3m9.199s
user 4m1.920s
sys 0m38.470s
goldfinger root # /usr/bin/ccache/ccache -s
cache hit 741
cache miss 0
called for link 19
not a C/C++ file 1
unsupported compiler option 26
no input file 1
files in cache 56866
cache size 511.9 Mbytes
max cache size 6.0 Gbytes
That's right, I "built" Qt in a shade over four minutes. You can see from the ccache statistics (which I zeroed out prior to that run) that I hit on 741 cache objects. Pretty neat. And the difference between with and without for this tool is even more pronounced the slower your system is. While it won't make your initial installation of Gentoo any faster, it'll make any subsequent updates generally much, much faster. Install ccache as soon as you can in the install process. I did so immediately following the emerge system step.
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Visit the rest of the DAYNOTES GANG, a collection of bright minds and sharp wits. Really, I don't know why they tolerate me <grin>. My personal inspiration for these pages is Dr. Jerry Pournelle. I am also indebted to Bob Thompson and Tom Syroid for their patience, guidance and feedback. Of course, I am sustained by and beholden to my lovely wife, Marcia. You can find her online too, at http://www.dutchgirl.net/. Thanks for dropping by.
All Content Copyright © 1999-2002 Brian P. Bilbrey.