Geek on Two Wheels

I’ve finally installed cgit onto my public git repository.

Of the branches in xf86-video-radeonhd, lut and r5xx_pm are mine, while master is simply a copy of upstream. I don’t recommend you clone my repository: clone upstream, then pull a branch instead. lut is complete, and waiting to be pulled upstream, and r5xx_pm is on-hold indefinitely at the moment.

I will make my OpenID server implementation available here as well, once I put it under source control. (No, it’s not, yet. Yes, stupid move.)

More projects to follow, hopefully.

Windows has something in the registry called Image File Execution Options. The idea is to be able to have the process launcher replace one executable with another—like a debugger—, control some run-time parameters, and generally do things to the executable via registry options.

Now, let that sink in for a little bit…

Good job, Microsoft.

Hackers that know me personally may have noticed my praising of Git. Today, I came across an article talking about what the author calls the Tangled Working Copy Problem, and how git copes with it. The article is a good read, regardless of your source code management taste.

Aside from highlighting some useful features that are afforded by distributed VCSs, the article also exposes how weak Subversion can sometimes be, no matter how magnificent it may seem compared to CVS.

If you haven’t made the leap and embraced the distributed VCS model, I highly recommend at least trying it. Git, Mercurial, Bazaar, whatever: just pick one up, and do some development with it. You may never go back to subversion again.

My good friend Allen over at antipode has recently decided to say a few words about the new Firefox 3 address bar.

I, for one, agree with him. I love it, and have gone to relatively great lengths to keep it.

An obvious rebuttal to the nay-sayers is that URLs don’t always share the same prefix as what is actually available at the address. And, although I’ve become trained to memorize the former instead of the latter, it always annoyed me that I had to.

gianttip? cad-c? apfo? No, what I want are “Order of the Stick“, “Ctrl-Alt-Del Comic“, and “One Piece Manga“.

In this day and age, I don’t want to care that the URL is moofs.com instead of moof.com, or .net, or actually baz.co.tv/content/random/moof—what I want is “Clarus the Dogcow“, and it’s about time computers started doing what we mean instead of what we say.

Old habits are hard to break, but there are some habits worth breaking. Should we all go back to driving flywheel-less manual transmission cars with no power steering, too? (Me, I prefer paddle shifters)

It’s also useful for bug squashing! (or, バグつぶし, as the locals would say*)

I have been using the beta releases of Firefox 3.0 for quite some time now, and have become very reliant on some of its new features. Beta 4, however, presented an interesting challenge: it refuses to start.

After failing miserably to locate the cause of the problem on Google, one lead finally lead me to a Japanese blog on Linux mentioning a problem with newer Firefox trunk builds having issues with uim. It was just a matter of another two hops through a Japanese Mozilla bug tracker to locate an upstream fix in uim.

An upgrade to uim-1.4.2 later, the Fox is up and jumping over lazy canines once again.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some One Piece to re-read.

*I have no idea if anyone actually says this.

Followup on an previous post:

The source code for the sources in question are available here: Brother printer CUPS wrapper source code.

For some reason I couldn’t find it before. It would appear that Brother had recently reorganized their Linux driver pages, so it may have been delinked in the shuffle.

Updated 2008-02-27: installation from this ebuild seems to break for certain files due to some missing files. Use at your own risk. I will be working on a better version which should do away with the binary blogs in the CUPS wrapper completely.

It’s no secret that I have issues with Brother’s Linux printer drivers and their programming practices in general.

Last night, my HL-2040 laser printer went on the fritz, refusing to print anything other than test pages and diagnostic information, prompting me to once again descend into the pit of despair where RPMs rule, good code locked up to rot, and DYI IT guys like myself try to hang onto whatever shred of sanity we find.

Long story short, I created an ebuild package for the HL-2040 driver. You can download it from below:

Ebuild for Brother HL-2040 CUPS driver

To install the ebuild, simply extract it to an overlay directory of your choice; the tarball already contains a manifest, and has the correct directory hierarchy. Unmask (currently keyworded ~x86; change as required), emerge, add the printer in CUPS, and you should be good to go.

Please see HOWTO: Installing 3rd Party Ebuilds over at Gentoo Wiki for general instructions on using external ebuilds.

Subject: brcupsconfig3 source code

When downloading the CUPS wrapper for my HL-2040 printer, I noticed that only the GLP2 license is presented to me.

According to the license, a distributor of a GPL-licensed software package must also provide source code for all executables in that package. As the source code for the executable ‘brcupsconfig3′ is not included in neither the .rpm nor .deb packages, can you please send me the source code or point me to where it can be obtained?

Thanks.

Now, we wait…

Update on the Brother MFC-420CN situation:

The Perl CUPS wrapper is done, and seems to be working fairly well, at least for just simple printing using only the default options.

On the SANE side, things are less than ideal. Despite finally being able to cleanly compile the brother and brother2 back-ends against the latest sane-1.0.18 sources, there are problems with required functions not being properly defined, and hence unusable.

For those that care, the Brother binary SANE drivers don’t work because sane-1.0.17 did not have a workaround that allows multiple processes to access the same USB device simultaneously. This is required for multi-function printers, where the usblp will reserve device at boot time, causing SANE to always receive a BUSY status when querying for the scanner.

Although both sane-find-scanner and scanimage -L now successfully detect the MFC-420CN scanner, actually attempting to execute a scan results in an “Invalid argument” error. Apparently, one or both of the USB printer (usblp) and mass-storage (usb-storage) modules conflict with sane when it comes to device access.

The good news, however, is that, upon closer inspection, the brother2 sane backend is actually fully open sourced. Not surprisingly, it has portions of SANE’s code packaged with it as well, which may or may not be compatible with my installed version of SANE. Consequently, it looks like I’ll be spending the next while re-packaging the source package so that it compiles and links on my Gentoo system in a less stupid way.

Wish me luck.