The Geekess Jul 2008 http://sarah.thesharps.us Linux, bicycling, open source, gardening, amateur rockets, and other seemingly unrelated hobbies. en Folksonomy plugin fix http://sarah.thesharps.us/2008-07-26-05-52.html Jamey helped me debug a PyBlosxom plugin problem this morning. The Folksonomy plugin was throwing errors when it was asked to generate an RSS feed for a specific tag (e.g. http://sarah.thesharps.us/tags/pyblosxom/index.rss).

The lighttpd error log showed this:


Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/cgi-bin/pyblosxom.cgi", line 96, in ?
    p.run()
  File "/var/lib/python-support/python2.4/Pyblosxom/pyblosxom.py",
    line 203, in run
    blosxom_handler(self._request)
  File "/var/lib/python-support/python2.4/Pyblosxom/pyblosxom.py",
    line 984, in blosxom_handler
    defaultfunc=blosxom_file_list_handler)
  File "/var/lib/python-support/python2.4/Pyblosxom/tools.py",
    line 759, in run_callback
    output = func(input)
  File "/home/sarah/blog/plugins/folksonomy.py",
    line 482, in cb_filelist
    return getEntriesForTag( tag, args )
  File "/home/sarah/blog/plugins/folksonomy.py",
    line 492, in getEntriesForTag
    for entry_location in entrymap[tag]:
KeyError: 'open source/index'

The code that generates the string to search the tag entry list wasn't stripping off the "/index" part of the URL. The patch Jamey wrote is here. I should send in the patch to the author too...

]]> What I'm doing with LPC right now http://sarah.thesharps.us/2008-07-26-04-23.html Last night I sent out an email with notes for our last Linux Plumbers Conference planning meeting. It had a list of todo items for everyone. I added my own items to my remember the milk list, and then I decided to explore the publishing/sharing features. My LPC todo list is now publicly viewable (published). Check it out if you're interested in what I'm doing on LPC right now.

If more LPC members were on remember the milk, we could have a shared list of all todo items related to LPC planning, and each LPC member could finish, postpone, or add items to the global list. It's kind of like having a bugzilla with assigned bugs. I think it would allow us to see which LPC planning committee members are overloaded, and which are slacking off. "Bob, I see your todo item for getting a quote on 100 devil ducks has been overdue for two weeks. Do you need help with that?" I don't want to force LPC members to use a new tool, but I think it would be a great idea.

Eh, who am I kidding? I'm just writing this blog entry so I can avoid my own todo list. ;)

]]> Dispelling a Linux Myth http://sarah.thesharps.us/2008-07-25-18-55.html Over the past week, I've run into two different people who expressed the same thought, "Linux lacks support for a lot of devices." I told them that this was a myth, and the Linux Driver Project has proven it is a myth.

Today I had an idea for a way to dispel this myth. I think someone should post a video of them walking into Circuit City, buying a random device, and walking out to their car. The video shows them configuring it on a Linux box and testing it. Then they would return the device and buy a new device. Buy, configure, return; repeat as necessary. The devices and configuration notes could be posted on the Linux Drivers Project wiki.

Now to find a decent videographer, buy a GSM data phone plan (for downloading packages and drivers in the car), and find some funding for devices that are non-returnable. In my copious spare time, of course.

]]> Five projects I've been procrastinating on http://sarah.thesharps.us/2008-07-15-21-00.html We all have projects that have been pushed onto the back burner, or even shoved into a closet to be dealt with "later, when I have time". Every once in a while I get freaked out by all the crap I'm not doing. To purge my guilty conscious so I can finally work on one of these projects this evening, I present my list of "dusty projects":

  • LPCUSB This is a small open source project to write a slave-side USB stack for the NXP LPC2xxx ARM microprocessors. We want to use this for the rocket, but the code needs to use interrupts instead of polling and support isochronous transfers. I actually ran into Bertrik, who started the project, on the LessWatts IRC channel today. He gave me commit access a year ago and I haven't touched it. Ouch.
  • usbfs2 I've talked a little about this project before. The rewrite of usbfs has been put on hold until I can work through Zach Brown's aio patches. They make my head hurt, and I've been avoiding them.
  • Sunbird and RTM integration The official Remember the Milk plugin to integrate your todo list with Mozilla's calendaring software, Sunbird, lacks offline support. If I have an internet connection why would I use Sunbird? Someone posted on my old livejournal, asking me to keep them informed of my progress on writing a GCal backend for this. Uh, yeah, the project never made it past the initial blog post explaining the problem.
  • Switching to mbsync I've been wanting to read email on multiple laptops for a month now, which means my current fetchmail setup isn't going to cut it. I need to use IMAP instead of POP3, but I've avoided touching that project with a ten-foot pole. The Gmail interface is good enough for me right now.
  • Enabling better PM on my eeepc I haven't used powerTOP to optimize my eeepc power consumption yet. The batteries last about 2.5-3 hours with the wifi enabled, but I suspect I can do better. I also haven't fixed the problem where the laptop doesn't actually turn off when I power it down. Arjan told me it might be a BIOS bug, and Brandon suggested it was the intel sound module. I haven't checked either of these yet.

That's enough of a list for now. I could dig more dusty projects out of my brain, but that would stop me from working on any of them. I think I'll tackle the hardest one, which is reading Zach's aio patches. Good luck with your own "dusty projects".

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