Monthly Archives: November 2010

MythTV 0.24 for FreeBSD

The new MythTV 0.24 is now out for a week and no call for testers has yet been done. I'm sorry for that but there are a few more details that have to be fixed first and I am at the BSDDay in Hungary over the weekend so don't expect a call for testers of it until late November. But it basically works so i can already show you a few screenshots of it.

Screenshots: http://home.bluelife.at/images/mythtv-0.24/

I've also spend some time getting mythplugin-mythvideo working correctly with metadata download. Looks quite nice to me.

MythTV 0.24

Bjoern Zeeb Awarded International Itojun Service Award

FreeBSD developer Bjoern Zeeb, who recently completed the FreeBSD Jail Based Virtualization Project, has been awarded the Itojun Service Award. From the press release:

The second Itojun Service Award was presented today at this week’s Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) meeting in Beijing, China. Bjoern A. Zeeb received the award for his dedicated work to make significant improvements in open source implementations of IPv6. IPv6 is the next generation of Internet protocol that will help ensure the continued rapid growth of the Internet as a platform for innovation.

First awarded last year, the Itojun Service Award honours the memory of Dr. Jun-ichiro “itojun� Hagino, who passed away in 2007, aged just 37. The award, established by the friends of itojun and administered by the Internet Society (ISOC), recognises and commemorates the extraordinary dedication exercised by itojun over the course of IPv6 development.

“For many years, Bjoern has been a committed champion of, and contributor to, implementing IPv6 in open source operating systems used in servers, desktops, and embedded computer platforms, including those used by some of the busiest websites in the world,� said Jun Murai of the Itojun Service Award committee and Founder of the WIDE Project. “On behalf of the Itojun Service Award committee, I am extremely pleased to present this award to Bjoern for his outstanding work in support of IPv6 development and deployment.�

The Itojun Service Award is focused on pragmatic contributions to developing and deploying IPv6 in the spirit of serving the Internet. The award, expected to be presented annually, includes a presentation crystal, a US$3,000 honorarium, and a travel grant.

“This is a great honour, and I would like to thank the people who recommended me for the award and the committee for believing my work was valuable. I never met Itojun but he was one of the people helping me, and I have the highest respect for his massive foundational work,� said Bjoern A. Zeeb. “As the Internet community works to roll out IPv6 to more and more people all around the globe, we also need to help others–developers, businesses, and users–understand and use the new Internet protocols so that the vision Itojun was working so hard for comes true.�

Each Internet-connected device uses an IP address and, with the number of Internet-connected devices growing rapidly, the supply of unallocated IPv4 addresses is expected to be exhausted within the next year. To help ensure the continued rapid growth of the Internet, IPv6 provides a huge increase in the number of available addresses. And, while the technical foundations of IPv6 are well established, significant work remains to expand the deployment and use of IPv6.

IPv6 was developed within the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the Internet’s premier standards-making body responsible for the development of protocols used in IP-based networks. IETF participants represent an international community of network designers, operators, vendors, and researchers involved in the technical operation of the Internet and the continuing evolution of Internet architecture.

Sometimes everything changes…

I have been wanting to write for aeons but I just couldn’t find the time, sometimes
everything in your life changes, and I have never expected that it could happen to
me. Few months ago I wrote a post that I received a job offer in Kuala Lumpur.
I was very happy with the offer and I’m giving my best shot at it, but there were
times when things just didn’t work the way I wanted. Fortunately I am surrounded with
people who have always tried their best in supporting me and keeping everything
in place. I hope everything will be fine.

I have also found a new luck of my life. Erms.. I guess I should call her THE luck of
my life hihi. At the moment I am preparing everything so that I can stay with her :-) .
So far all is good and I’m very happy here. Looking forward to a bright future ahead.

First PC-BSD 9.0 Alpha Snapshot Available for Testing

Kris Moore has just announced that the first testing snapshot is available for download (both 32 and 64 bit versions). You can help us make 9.0 an awesome release by trying out the snapshots (there will be many between now and the first beta some time next spring) and providing feedback about any bugs you find. Since these are testing snapshots, it is recommended that you try them out on a spare system or using a virtual environment such as VirtualBox. If you're planning on trying out all of the new desktop environments, you should use a virtual machine of at least 2

First PC-BSD 9.0 Alpha Snapshot Available for Testing

Kris Moore has just announced that the first testing snapshot is available for download (both 32 and 64 bit versions). You can help us make 9.0 an awesome release by trying out the snapshots (there will be many between now and the first beta some time next spring) and providing feedback about any bugs you find. Since these are testing snapshots, it is recommended that you try them out on a spare system or using a virtual environment such as VirtualBox. If you're planning on trying out all of the new desktop environments, you should use a virtual machine of at least 2

Are USB memory sticks really that bad?

Last week my ZFS cache device — an USB memory stick — showed xxxM write errors. I got this stick for free as a promo, so I do not expect it to be of high quality (or wear-leveling or similar life-saving things). The stick survived about 9 months, during which it provided a nice speed-up for the access to the corresponding ZFS storage pool. I replaced it by another stick which I got for free as a promo. This new stick survived… one long weekend. It has now 8xxM write errors and the USB subsystem is not able to speak to it anymore. 30 minutes ago I issued an “usbconfig reset� to this device, which is still not finished. This leads me to the question if such sticks are really that bad, or if some problem crept into the USB subsystem?

If this is a problem with the memory stick itself, I should be able to reproduce such a problem on a different machine with a different OS. I could test this with FreeBSD 8.1, Solaris 10u9, or Windows XP. What I need is an automated test. This rules out the Windows XP machine for me, I do not want to spend time to search a suitable test which is available for free and allows to be run in an automated way. For FreeBSD and Solaris it probably comes down to use some disk-I/O benchmark (I think there are enough to chose from in the FreeBSD Ports Collection) and run it in a shell-loop.

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TeXLive 2010 on FreeBSD

I definitively have a lack of time at the moment. Since this blog last entry is about Hey guys, I have just pushed TeXLive 2009 in the freebsd-texlive project, I guess I have to take the time to write this short post:

One month ago, I pushed TeXLive 2010 to the freebsd-texlive repository. Moreover, because portshaker is now in the FreeBSD ports tree, installing bleeding-edge TeXLive on FreeBSD has never been so easy!