blogless fortnight

27 May 2006 Phew, its been 2 weeks since I last blogged something.

Let's see what happened since then.

I went to SANE2006. It sucked. I should remind myself that if I want to go to a conference, the conference should have a minimum level of technical content.
SANE2006 is more a conference to give doctorate students a chance to present their papers and not a real conference.
The only thing I truly liked about the conference, was the social event. A BBQ at the beach where everything is free ? Yeah, count me in :)

I began the week by compiling the latest kernel (2.6.16.17) and a couple days later 2.6.16.18. I'm glad to say that my compilation scripts are working nicely.
At work, compiling a new kernel takes about 5 minutes for each platform. The kernel for my laptop takes 32 minutes to compile. But then again, the latter has all modules enabled (except for ATM, which gives an error due to a bug in the Makefile), fglrx module and LIRC modules.

More info about that can be found here. I decided I will try to keep up with the latest kernel releases and provide packages for everyone to download. One thing I should include in the future is the Grsecurity patch.

Thursday was a holiday. Keeping in mind the sucky weather we seem to have these days (rain all the time), I took home some toys on wednesday evening. I had an IP Camera (D-Link DCS-2100+), a 3com USB wireless adapter (officeconnect 11g) and a D-link DW-122.

The IP-camera only works in Windows because there is no decoder for H.263/H263 (yet?) in linux. I was able to track down a security camera of the same type on the internet though (google rocks). I believe it's still up.

I couldn't find a driver for the 3com USB adapter, but I found that the DW-122 can work under linux... if I get a specific driver for it.
Meh.

So anyway. I spent some time working with LIRC again (It hadn't worked ever since my previous laptop was stolen and I was starting to believe the infrared port on this laptop was broken).
LIRC now works. I can read and (more importantly) send out infrared signals.

Yesterday was spent almost entirely researching DRBD. I was impressed with the contribution of DRBD in OpenSSI, but not so much impressed with DRBD by itself.
After setting it up in VMWare, I noticed that I could mount the device on only 1 machine at the time. A real disappointment :(
This means that we will most likely not use DRBD (0.7) on our servers. DRBD8 should provide active/active support (meaning the device can be mounted and used on 2 systems at once). But DRBD8 is still in development...
Not having to look into DRBD anymore also means my Server Installation CD is practically completed and I can start deploying new servers and replacing old ones.

Yesterday after a dinner, we went to see X-Men 3. There were a lot of special effects, which was nice. But the overall impression of the movie was a bit... disappointing. Just to piss you off, Dr. Xavier, Scott (Cyclops) and Jean Grey all die in this movie. So sad...

Right now, I'm recharging my car-battery (again) and reading the OGRE3D documentation (again)