But anyway. Not that much happened last week. It rained like hell last Wednesday while I was getting off the bus, but the rain kept up for only about half an hour. There were various work things. Went to see “The Avengers” on Sunday, and that was pretty good. There were a whole bunch of references to obscure things from the comic books, which is always kind of fun. When Thor and the Hulk were fighting, the Hulk couldn’t lift Mjönir, even though the Hulk is stronger than Thor, because only those who are worthy can lift Mjölnir. And Tony Stark referring to the Avengers as “Earth’s mightiest heroes, that sort of thing,” because that’s been the tagline of the Avengers comic book for a very long time.

Robert Downey, Jr. is basically the perfect person to play Tony Stark. Tom Hiddleston was great as Loki. You had to suspend disbelief, especially for the invisible flying aircraft carrier, but whatever.

And then on Monday, things were pretty normal for most of the day, then several people thought that 4:15pm was a great time to ask for really complicated things and say, “Something’s been screwed up for about 48 hours, can you fix it right now?” Sigh. . . .

Got plenty of stuff to do in the next week. Bunch of work junk. Going to the Free Software Stammtische tomorrow, which should be interesting as I haven’t been to one of those in a while. Stephanie and I are going to a classical concert (playing music from “The Legend of Zelda” video game series; yeah, whatever) Saturday night, and seeing the Braves play the Diamondbacks Sunday afternoon. I don’t know how much time I’ll have to fool around with graphics card drivers in between doing all of that stuff. But anyway, things are not boring, which is sometimes a good thing. . . .

So Stephanie picked up the chicken, and when Steve got here, we all attacked it like starving Chihuahuas on a side of beef. Well, maybe a little less messily. It was pretty good. Then I showed Steve my attempts to get TV-out working with the nouveau driver, and was partially successful. I made the mouse cursor disappear again, though. Oops. No matter. Then we spent some time on Rock Band 3, and Stephanie wrote down a bunch of people’s individual scores so we could keep track of how we were doing from week to week.

Thursday: More work stuff. I got a few useful things done. I didn’t get any response on the stuff that I thought everyone wanted to hear from me about. I microwaved some hearty peasant fare leftovers for lunch, and people said, “Wow! That smells really good!”

Started reading The City and the City on the bus ride home. So far, it’s a police procedural set in a fictional Balkan city with some decidedly weird things going on. Interesting, but I’ve barely scratched the surface of it.

And when I got home, I started playing around with the nouveau module. Apparently, if you put the line Option "HWCursor" "off" into your xorg.conf , any attempt to change anything with xrandr will cause X to die. I thought this’d be a quick and easy way to work around the disappearing cursor problem. Nope. Further fiddling made me think there’s something unexpected/wonky going on in the interaction between SDL’s mode switching, xrandr, the nouveau driver, and possibly the NV44 videocard I’ve got. This is annoying, but workaroundable.

Work wasn’t all that fun. Garrett’s peeved at the company and the whole development process, and said as much during today’s meeting. It doesn’t really matter to him; he’s quitting and moving to California.

I got TV-out working (mostly) on my Linux box, using the nouveau module, by dint of experience and reading stuff from the European Monks. The TV was sort of working, but there was no color and its vertical hold was off. I saw “mode: PAL” in the output from xrandr -q, which made me think, “Hey! My TV’s an American TV, so it doesn’t do PAL. It only does NTSC-M. So. . . .” And then I found that there was no way to change the TV-encoder parameter from userspace, and no way to modify the nouveau module’s parameters since I’d built the silly thing into the kernel. So: Edit the right part of the kernel code so the default TV encoder’s NTSC-M, rebuild kernel, reboot with new kernel, and the TV-out immediately starts working fine. Grrr.

Not everything’s perfect though. I somehow made my mouse cursor disappear while trying things out. This isn’t insanely terrible, but I had to restart X to get the dang cursor back.

Also did my state taxes. Don’t know why it took this long for me to get around to it.

Also also, I got a message late last night from somebody in Britain saying, “We’re looking for blogs without advertising on them, because we want to put text ads on them, and we would give you a yearly fee for this.” Not sure whether to do that or not. Money’s nice, but advertising in general really annoys me, and I’m not sure I want to subject people who read this to ads.

When I got home, I spent some more time trying to deal with my nVidia card’s TV-out. This is what I found after trying the 3 Xorg drivers available: (nvidia’s binary-only, nv is Free and has a long history, nouveau is Free and a lot newer.)

nvidia: TV-out works great, so does accelerated 3D. However, there’s inescapable graphics corruption that occurs at random and is really annoying.

nv: TV-out doesn’t work at all, and there’s no 3D. However, there’s no graphics corruption ever.

nouveau: TV-out sort of works, and with more time, I might figure out how to make it actually work right. 3D is slow, and there’s some graphics corruption, but it’s much less prevalent and less annoying than with the nvidia module.

Not sure what to do with all this. I may end up asking the nouveau devs for help. However, if corruption is happening in 3D with both nouveau and nvidia, it may be that my graphics card has had some sort of hardware failure, and no fooling with software will fix it. (Been There, Done That.) The card’s 5.5 years old—which is positively ancient in graphics card terms.

Apparently, Stephanie’s installed Ubuntu on an older laptop she had. I think Steve and I have had some sort of influence on her. Of course, she might try to use Unity and say, “AAAAGH! This user interface is terrible! I hate it, and I’m never listening to you about operating systems or desktop environments ever again!”

Saturday, not that much. Stephanie made seafood ramen for dinner. Then we watched “In a Better World”, which was a bit depressing, but interesting nontheless. No American movie studio would’ve ever approved that script. This sort of points out the real problem with the oligopoly that controls the movie business; they want things that make money right now, and so they ignore things that are important and/or could make money in the future. This will bite them in the ass in the long term, because they will ignore whatever the next big trend is in favor of doing something conservative and remaking a random 1980s TV show for the Nth time.

Sunday had regular, normal things. I fooled around with getting TV-out and OpenGL working on my machine, since it’d been about 18 months since I’ve tried that. It mostly worked—I’ve still got some weird artifacts. (This is partially my own fault for using a superannuated nVidia card instead of the recent ATi cards all the cool people are using.) Then, I made dinner, ate it, and dealt with Moira meowing a lot. Anyway. Back to work tomorrow. . . .

Monday was back to work. Five tons of things had happened. I didn’t get much of a chance to work on anything new, because I was busy fixing all the stuff that had broken and I didn’t get a chance to fix while on furlough.

And I found a package in the mail on Monday. It was a couple of books, from Teh Nacho. YAY! Books are always nice to get. The City and The City should be neat, whenever I can get around to reading it. (China Miéville is a Marxist, but he can write good fiction. . . .)

Tuesday, I had to suffer through a really pointless 2.5 hour conference call while trying to field plaintive requests from people who didn’t really know what they needed but wanted it all right now. Then there was another 2 hour meeting, followed by a protracted session of trying to fix an inexperienced coder’s badly specified problems.

After I got home and had dinner, I tried an experiment: I installed the latest and greatest new VPN from work. This is the 3rd VPN that they’ve used in the 3.8 years I’ve been with the company—which is a bad sign in itself. It also has the worst functionality of all of the VPNs they’ve used. Several things that my team absolutely requires are completely impossible with the way the new VPN’s set up. I don’t know who’s in charge of deciding what to use, but whoever it is is apparently a complete dumbass. I’ve heard that they switched to this new VPN because it was cheaper than the old one, but that really doesn’t make any sense, because Free as in beer and speech VPN software for all major platforms exists. If the VPN problems can’t be solved—and soon—then this’ll cost the company a significant amount of money. I have a feeling the people who make decisions either don’t know about this, don’t care about this, or are incapable of understanding this.

Had Rock Band 3 on Wednesday with Steve and Stephanie, and played more songs on Hard. Stephanie was highly caffeinated, so she sang a lot. Steve didn’t think he could make it that night, but was able to. Thursday, Stephanie and I went out to eat at a nearby Mexican restaurant. This was pretty good, and not all that expensive.

At least I wasn’t on call, and I managed to get a few things done, like updating a bunch of stuff on a bunch of machines and fixing a script that writes out a bunch of stuff. I updated the Tux On Ice patch for kernels 3.2.1 through 3.2.11 page with additional info and such.

I also found that you can’t have a /usr separate from / any more without doing silly things with initramfs, which made me just a bit annoyed on Friday night. I’ve had a separate /usr on my desktop for 12 years, without using initramfs. I don’t like using initrd/initramfs, because it’s yet another thing that has to be messed with and can go wrong. I don’t think the arguments in the previous link make a whole lot of sense, actually. Who cares about how Solaris does things? Also, having /usr shared across multiple machines via NFS only makes sense if you have an NFS server that never goes down. I’ve found that directly-connected IDE/SCSI/SATA disks are actually more reliable than your average NFS setup.

But anyway, thanks to work furloughs, I’m not supposed to do anything at all for work from 2012-03-18 to 2012-03-25. It’s sort of like an enforced vacation without pay. Maybe I’ll have some time to relax, do some reading, play some video games, and just do nothing over the next week. That’d be nice. . . .

Friday, I had the day off work, since I was on call the previous week. This was fun. I slept in, made good coffee, catered to Moira, and did some reading.

Saturday, I’d planned to go to the Renaissance Faire with Stephanie, Zach, and Sarah. This worked out well, but it sort of took all day. There was a whole lot of traffic. Stephanie and I got there about 10:30am, and we spent some time looking around before watching our first show, Lord Zarko’s Hypnotist Show. Lord Zarko explained a bit about hypnotism, then asked for volunteers. I volunteered to be hypnotized. (I’ve been hypnotized before, at a U of M show in 1996, and that worked well and entertained the audience, so I figured it’d work again.) As in 1996, I was a pretty good hypnotic subject. Zarko did several routines, but the best one was probably one where he had the woman to my left believe that I had pinched her butt, and had me act as though that was the funniest thing ever, while she became quite upset. (I never touched her, of course.) Zarko made it up to the woman a bit later, when he had her believe that she hadn’t seen her husband in six months, and then had her run to him, jump on him, and kiss him like she hadn’t seen him in six months.

Stephanie was in the audience through all of this, and she took a bunch of pictures. Zach and Sarah actually saw the last few minutes of the show. So we met them after the show was over, and then went to get some lunch. After that, we wandered around, looking at all the stores and crafts places. Zach wanted some tea, so we found some. Stephanie wanted to see Neidfyre the violinist (since we’d seen her a couple of years ago.) We did that. And after that, we just walked around some more. We left the faire at about 4:30, leaving Zach and Sarah there, since they’d gotten there later and wanted to look around some more.

Sunday, I did some fooling around with Tux On Ice, since the maintainer is busy, and doesn’t have time to do some stuff. I put together a Tux On Ice kernel patch for the 3.2.x kernel series that should work properly, though I’ve only tested it for 3.2.1, and only on the x86-32 architecture. Anyway. It is through small enhancements like this that progress is made in the open source world. . . .

Wednesday, someone did a DROP DATABASE on a production database that was in use. Fortunately, this wasn’t one of the insanely important databases. We still had to scramble for the backups and retrieve the stuff between backup and drop with mysqlbinlog. This took longer than it should’ve, but nobody had a dang cow about it—possibly because I’ve been through this particular rodeo before, and knew what to do to get it all back up.

However, Steve had to work, so Stephanie and I had Chinese food and Rock Band 3 with just the two of us. We tried to play and sing a bunch of songs on Hard. This worked out better than I expected, though we weren’t doing any of the really difficult songs.

Thursday was relatively quiet at work. I may have finally solved an annoying and stupid problem that’s been going on for a while, but I didn’t have enough time to really test it out, and I’ll be off tomorrow. This’ll be nice. It feels like it’s been a while since I’ve had a day off. Not sure what to do besides sleep in, but I’m sure I’ll think of something. . . .