In February word came down that AdTech (the group in IBM that I worked in) was being dissolved and we all had to find new places to work. In late March I moved to Software Group, working in the Massachusetts Design Studio with Louis and Alister the other authors of the now infamous Drupal series on IBM’s developerWorks . By the way, we finished that series: Part 13 , Part 14 and Part 15 .
After about a month or two I decided that the MA Design Studio wasn’t the right place for me so I started looking outside IBM for a new job.
I am happy to report that I am now working for VMware in the Cambridge R&D office and have been since mid-June. I really enjoy my work and the move has been great. It turns out that Kyle was also looking at VMware so I encouraged him to come to Cambridge and talk to some people. I am happy to report (you should have seen his blog post earlier) that Kyle made it to VMware and has just finished his first month.
I was also re-elected President of the GBC/ACM which is great. Hopefully we’ll roll out the new web site soon. The current one is a little sad.
I think that’s it for the updates. I’m sure I forgot some stuff, like moving to a new town and new apartment. It is amazing how a change like that can impact your quality of life.
Anyway, my November 2007 resolution is to post a blog entry at least once a month.
]]>
We released the source code for the entire project in November under the Eclipse Public License .
My part of the project originates from my work on the LSID project. I had been working with a lot of RDF metadata while maintaining the Perl LSID development stack and realized that (back in early 2004) that a clean, useful and relatively bug free RDF framework didn’t exist. It turns out that a number of people shared my concerns and were independently creating their own ad hoc Perl libaries for RDF processing.
]]>We released the source code for the entire project in November under the Eclipse Public License .
My part of the project originates from my work on the LSID project. I had been working with a lot of RDF metadata while maintaining the Perl LSID development stack and realized that (back in early 2004) that a clean, useful and relatively bug free RDF framework didn’t exist. It turns out that a number of people shared my concerns and were independently creating their own ad hoc Perl libaries for RDF processing.
I started to collect my various RDF manipulating Perl scripts from my LSID work and began to organize them in to a framework that I called ODO . ODO is an acronym for “Ontologies, Databases, and Optimizations,” which are the three items I was most interested in experimenting with at the time. They were also the three categories of functionality I couldn’t find in the existing Perl RDF libraries.
ODO is still evolving and I have some more features to push out but right now it supports:
Each of these items is built inside the ODO framework so it is possible to extend and enhance the library over time without breaking applications (hopefully!).
I have some more components of the library to push out over the next few weeks. I am in the process of making the POD available on the IBM Semantic Layered Research Platform web site and will write some demo applications soon!
]]>We conclude the article with a “gift” to the Drupal community: support for IBM DB2 Express-C. Hopefully someone will take our work and finish it for later versions of Drupal .
]]>We conclude the article with a “gift” to the Drupal community: support for IBM DB2 Express-C. Hopefully someone will take our work and finish it for later versions of Drupal .
]]>Discuss them on our developerWorks forum or drupal.org !
]]>Discuss them on our developerWorks forum or drupal.org !
]]>We are making progress on parts 7, 8 and 9. If all goes well they should be released in October. Writing 1 article is time consuming; writing an entire series is challenging.
I decided to treat myself to a new toy for all my hard work: a Nikon D80 . I got the kit with the 18-135mm lens and I have already put it to good use when we were in Salem. The camera is outstanding and I am looking forward to getting the SB-600 flash and a nice Crumpler backpack for the camera and m
]]>We are making progress on parts 7, 8 and 9. If all goes well they should be released in October. Writing 1 article is time consuming; writing an entire series is challenging.
I decided to treat myself to a new toy for all my hard work: a Nikon D80 . I got the kit with the 18-135mm lens and I have already put it to good use when we were in Salem. The camera is outstanding and I am looking forward to getting the SB-600 flash and a nice Crumpler backpack for the camera and my laptop.
]]>Hopefully people will find these tutorials valuable; we have been using a lot of the information contained in these tutorials to help people in the office get setup with Drupal and Eclipse.
]]>Hopefully people will find these tutorials valuable; we have been using a lot of the information contained in these tutorials to help people in the office get setup with Drupal and Eclipse.
]]>Check out the discussion on Drupal.org!
]]>Check out the discussion on Drupal.org!
]]>mplayer -ao pcm filename.mp3. You should now have a audiodump.wav file.mplayer -ao pcm filename.mp3. You should now have a audiodump.wav file.Basically, the RAZR V3 needs to have mp3s at 44.1kHz, 64kbps and under 200kb for it to be used as a ringtone. Once you have the file, you need to upload it to the phone using moto4lin. Connect to the phone and place the file in /a/mobile/audio/.
Change your phone to Silent and then delete MyToneDB.db and TempToneDB.db. Power cycle your phone.
Once your phone is back on, change your phone to something other than Silent and then browse for a new ringtone. You should see the name of the uploaded file.
]]>I stumbled upon Open Web Design because I was hacking my WRT54GS with OpenWRT. The OpenWRT web interface uses a layout from Open Web Design and it prompted me to check out the site.
I found that many of the example layouts can be adapted to a Drupal theme in about 10 minutes. My new theme is much better than the old one – it was a bit embarrassing to have such an ugly site for so long.
Anyway, not too much going on, I am in the process of working with the Greater Boston Chapter of the ACM. I am on the strategic planning committe and am running for President! GBC/ACM Members should make sure their dues are paid up and come to the June 15th meeting and vote. See the Real Times for information about the candidates.
]]>I stumbled upon Open Web Design because I was hacking my WRT54GS with OpenWRT. The OpenWRT web interface uses a layout from Open Web Design and it prompted me to check out the site.
I found that many of the example layouts can be adapted to a Drupal theme in about 10 minutes. My new theme is much better than the old one – it was a bit embarrassing to have such an ugly site for so long.
Anyway, not too much going on, I am in the process of working with the Greater Boston Chapter of the ACM. I am on the strategic planning committe and am running for President! GBC/ACM Members should make sure their dues are paid up and come to the June 15th meeting and vote. See the Real Times for information about the candidates.
Now that my site looks much better I’m going to keep it updated with what I’m doing. My first order of business is to get the static pages describing me and my software up instead of a smattering of blog entries.
]]>Anyway, I am readying the web UI framework I created for the OpenWRT proejct. They didn’t have one when I originally started but now they have an "alpha" one that doesn’t have all the functionality of the original Linksys firmware images. I am almost ready for a first release, targeted for Friday, so watch this space for more information!
]]>Anyway, I am readying the web UI framework I created for the OpenWRT proejct. They didn’t have one when I originally started but now they have an "alpha" one that doesn’t have all the functionality of the original Linksys firmware images. I am almost ready for a first release, targeted for Friday, so watch this space for more information!
]]>EXT3-fs error (device dm-0) in start_transaction: Journal has aborted
It's not exactly that error that causes the problem, apparently its a page allocation failure. I don't know, I'm never around when it happends and all I ususally see is the above error in my really long dmesg buffer.
A little background is in order, I am using CentOS 4.2 with ext3 and lvm support. It's the default install for a 'Workstation' computer in the graphical installer. CentOS is the 'Community Enterprise OS' which is based off of the RHEL source RPMS. The CentOS people do a good job rebuilding the packages and I have been very happy with my experience. I don't use RHEL because I have to pay $179 dollars for it. Just to let you know, I can purchase Microsoft Windows XP for less than that! Please! RedHat I don't need to be able to call you for support, I can read your Bugzilla Bug 149088 about my problem. In fact, Google found it for me - it was even at the top of the search results. I can also implement the 'fix' which is to basically not use the Enterprise Linux kernel (the EL series) and use the FC4 'community' kernel. This fix isn't sanctioned by RedHat by the way, it serves to solve the bug reporter's problem and isolate the problem to the EL kernel itself.
Scary stuff that the 'Enterprise' package is inferior to the 'Community' package. Even more scary, the bug was opened on February 18, 2005 and I can reliably reproduce the error on my system. All I have to do is run some disk benchmark tools or do use an application that exercises the disk such as running qmail and receiving several hundred emails (mostly spam).
I am currently downloading the CentOS 4.2 RPMs from the CentOS 4.0 rescue disk so that I can reinstall the files that were corrupted and lost during the fsck. I have to use 'rpm --force --noscripts' to install them because neither the rpm command nor yum has a 'reinstall' command line option.
In any case, I think RedHat needs to rethink the decision to make RHEL a non-mainstream distribution. They have plenty of smart people working for them but just not enough of them and I doubt they could afford the numbers needed to catch all of these issues and fix them.
I wonder how long it would have taken for this to be fixed in Fedora? Isn't RHEL supposed to be based off of Fedora or just the 'idea' of Fedora?
commit 541e316aed6f7d6efeb427a88645c2a8f61418d6]]>
Author: Stephen Evanchik <evanchsa@gmail.com>
Date: Mon Aug 8 01:26:18 2005 -0500
Input: psmouse - add support for IBM TrackPoint devices.
Signed-off-by: Dmitry Torokhov <dtor@mail.ru>
commit 541e316aed6f7d6efeb427a88645c2a8f61418d6]]>
Author: Stephen Evanchik <evanchsa@gmail.com>
Date: Mon Aug 8 01:26:18 2005 -0500
Input: psmouse - add support for IBM TrackPoint devices.
Signed-off-by: Dmitry Torokhov <dtor@mail.ru>
I have been really busy lately so I haven't had much time to work on the TrackPoint driver. It seems to have found its way in to the -mm kernel tree which makes my life easier.
I have become obessed with making my SFF PC quiet and reducing the amount of electricity we use in our apartment. The need for quiet comes from a noisy fan. I want to find a place that sells the Vantec 60mm Stealth fan and grommet as well as some noise dampening material. I don't want to have them shipped seperately as I'll pay way too much. I also ordered a kill-a-watt tool that I can use to measure the amount of electricity devices use. I plan on testing my PC at idle, full load and, on ACPI S3 which is Suspend to RAM or STR.
]]>I have been really busy lately so I haven't had much time to work on the TrackPoint driver. It seems to have found its way in to the -mm kernel tree which makes my life easier.
I have become obessed with making my SFF PC quiet and reducing the amount of electricity we use in our apartment. The need for quiet comes from a noisy fan. I want to find a place that sells the Vantec 60mm Stealth fan and grommet as well as some noise dampening material. I don't want to have them shipped seperately as I'll pay way too much. I also ordered a kill-a-watt tool that I can use to measure the amount of electricity devices use. I plan on testing my PC at idle, full load and, on ACPI S3 which is Suspend to RAM or STR.
Which brings me to the relatively exciting thing that happened tonight: I finally got Suspend to RAM working on my iDEQ 200V. I needed to do a couple of things before everything just worked. First I needed to upgrade the BIOS. I was using a BIOS from September 2003 which forced me to turn ACPI off entirely. With the November 2004 BIOS version ACPI works flawlessly. The next thing is that STR works great with one tiny resume problem. It turns out that some BIOS implementations fail to repost the video card's BIOS and as a consequence the video card is never reinitialized. The Linux kernel can't do anything about this because the BIOS sets up the video hard and hands it off to the kernel at boot time. In order to fix this you need to use vbetool to repost the BIOS. One small issue is that this program really messes with your video hardware which means you shouldn't try this with X running on your screen. If you switch to a console then it works great. I created a script to process power button events which works like a charm.
Here's my /etc/acpi/actions/power_btn.sh from CentOS 4.2:
#!/bin/bash
#
# Stephen Evanchik <evanchsa@gmail.com>
#
# Licensed under the GPL
#
# ACPI S3 (Suspend to RAM) for Biostar iDEQ 200V
#
# Power button has been pressed, now:
#
# 1. Blank the screen
# 2. sync the file systems
# 3. chvt to tty 1
test -f /usr/sbin/laptop_mode || exit 0
test -f /usr/local/sbin/vbetool || exit 0
test -f /etc/sysconfig/power_btn || exit 0
. /etc/sysconfig/power_btn
if [ -f /var/run/console/console.lock ]; then
XUSER=`cat /var/run/console/console.lock`
su -l -c "xscreensaver-command -activate" $XUSER
fi
chvt 1
sync
echo -n "mem" > /sys/power/state
/usr/local/sbin/vbetool post
/usr/local/sbin/vbetool dpms on
if [ -f /var/run/console/console.lock ]; then
XUSER=`cat /var/run/console/console.lock`
su -l -c "xscreensaver-command -deactivate" $XUSER
fi
chvt 7