Wednesday, March 15, 2017

Since I started at Red Hat, I tried using Wordpress for my daily blogging needs. This proves difficult. This is not the right tool for a variety of reasons, if only because I have to leave Emacs to edit it, and I can't customize my keyboard shortcuts or formatting macros the way I need them.

So I finally return to my trusted old Blogmax, a blogging mode for Emacs. I will be using this primarily for my own private notes, as it is way more convenient and practical than any web-based tool I have tried to use so far. Also, since there is a local copy of everything, it makes it much easier to grep trough my notes.

One of the reasons is that I'm doing most of my work in Emacs anyway. So it makes more sense to copy-paste code to/from Emacs than any other location. It saves a lot of round trips to the mouse. Blogmax.el also has nifty shorcuts for example to paste a link.

Let me just be very clear: those are notes for myself and myself only. You are free to read, there's nothing secret in it, but there's nothing interesting either

I will transfer some of the old stuff back here for convenience, and shutdown the old redskincat blog.

Mesa build

Reconstructing Mesa with same options I used before (Red Hat Bugzilla 1426549) fails, I get a sad face and a button telling me to log out that I can't click. So I had to restore my snapshot.

Found build log for Mesa in Brew, thanks Christophe F.

./configure --build=i686-redhat-linux-gnu --host=i686-redhat-linux-gnu --program-prefix= --disable-dependency-tracking --prefix=/usr --exec-prefix=/usr --bindir=/usr/bin --sbindir=/usr/sbin --sysconfdir=/etc --datadir=/usr/share --includedir=/usr/include --libdir=/usr/lib --libexecdir=/usr/libexec --localstatedir=/var --sharedstatedir=/var/lib --mandir=/usr/share/man --infodir=/usr/share/info --disable-asm --enable-selinux --enable-osmesa --with-dri-driverdir=/usr/lib/dri --enable-egl --disable-gles1 --enable-gles2 --disable-xvmc --with-egl-platforms=x11,drm --enable-shared-glapi --enable-gbm --disable-opencl --enable-glx-tls --enable-texture-float=yes --enable-gallium-llvm --with-llvm-shared-libs --enable-dri --enable-xa --with-gallium-drivers=svga,radeonsi,swrast,r600,r300,nouveau,virgl --with-dri-drivers=nouveau,radeon,r200,i915,i965

I have to disable the radeonsi, r600 and r300 Gallium drivers, which require LLVM. I don't know how to install LLVM on that configuration. There is a mesa-private-llvm-devel package that shows with yum search, but it refuses to install it.

After these changes, it is now possible to boot. Time to check if I can use this patch from Marc-Andre.

The patch does not apply cleanly. Investigating.

Apple bugs are getting annoying

Mail.app: Too many open files bug

Ran into the "too many open files" bug again. This time, I knew it was Mail.app. I'm filing a bug with Apple.

(A few hours later) Could not even log back in. It rejected not just my password (which I doubt I would type incorrectly 5 or 6 times), but also the Apple Watch unlock. Selected "Switch Users", was met with a single choice, "Guest user". Wow.

Had to reboot the Mac. How annoying. I feel back in the day where it was good practice to reboot your computer every day just to cleanup its internal mess.

Safari hangs in Active Domain

The dinechin.org domain is managed by Active Domain. They recently changed their interface (domainpanel.com). It used to be extremely simple and efficient. Adding or removing DNS records or email aliases took me seconds.

Now, you have to wade through click after click. It looks fancy, but it's disorganized, inefficient, and globally very crappy. But the most annoying thing for me is that it won't let me edit DNS entries any more. My browser hangs.

It's really a Safari bug, but it trips every single time. It's incredible to think that Active Domain would overhaul their web interface without checking that it works with the default web browser on Macs.

Fine tuning CSS layout

Spent a little too much time fine-tuning the CSS layout for this blog so that it looks OK on most devices.