I’ve not seen google wave yet, but here are my impressions based upon reactions from those who have.

Phase 1: HEY WHO HAS A GOOGLE WAVE INVITE THEY CAN GIVE ME?
This begging phase increases in popularity as more people actually get on the site.

Phase 2: THIS IS COOL, BUT WHAT THE HELL DO I DO WITH THIS ?
Turns out that the “I have something you don’t” novelty wears off quickly when people realise they didn’t actually need it.

Phase 3: HEY WHO ELSE IS ON GOOGLE WAVE ?
Belief that others may be able to enlighten them, and get them out of phase 2.

Phase 4: HEY THIS IS PRETTY USELESS.
Followed by neglect and forgetting they even have an account.

I’ve yet to see anyone praising google wave, but I’ve seen a lot of people go quickly through the above phases. I’m sure there are some people reading this through planet.*.com using it. Is it really “all that” ? Or is this google app going to be the next orkut ? (Remember when everyone thought that was the future? Ah, 2003 I miss you).

(This post isn’t actually me in phase 1. I couldn’t care less, and will probably skip straight to phase 4 when it goes public).

Despite having been around for seven years now, I still see a common misconception surrounding hyper-threading. People look at /proc/cpuinfo, see ‘ht’ in the flags line, and think “hey, I don’t have hyper-threading, /proc/cpuinfo is wrong!”.

But this isn’t the case. The ‘ht’ flag doesn’t signify the presence of hyper-threading or not. It signifies the presence of the ability to say yes or no as to whether the processor has any siblings. Basically “If I call this cpuid function, can I trust the results?”. This cpuid function is present in all intel processors since the Pentium 4.

So seeing a cpu with ‘ht’ in the flags, but no siblings is perfectly normal, and has been for all this time, but some people just don’t seem to get it.

First off, thanks to everyone who commented on my last post, or sent email expressing concern etc. Much appreciated. Though it did make me feel like I was in an episode of house, with the number of diagnosis’s I got from everyone who had had something similar, or known someone, or known a doctor etc.

So I had my head scanned last friday, and got the results today. It showed up nothing of concern. (Which shot down the majority of the suggestions I got from people, Dr House would not be impressed with you). While a clear report in some ways was a relief as it ruled out so many things, in other ways it was annoying because I still didn’t know for sure what has been going on with the headaches over the last month.

The current theory is that I’m suffering from cluster headaches. The symptoms sure do sound familiar. (Right down to the cute graphic, though mine is the right eyeball mostly). So I got a prescription today for some naproxen and imitrex. The latter reminded me why high-deductable insurance is a bad idea. $149 for a months worth. Suck.

Hopefully they will at least make the pain manageable. How long I’ll have to take them for is currently unknown.

Tomorrow, I should have been getting on a plane, and flying for 19 hours to Japan for the Japanese Linux Symposium, and Kernel Summit. Unfortunately, I’ve had to cancel those plans, and won’t be attending either event due to some unexpected health problems.

A few weeks ago, for no obvious reason, I went blind for 30 minutes. During this time, what I saw was a very distorted version of the world. The stripes on the crosswalk in front of me appeared as animated swirling zig-zag shapes for example. Needless to say, it freaked me the hell out. I stood still in downtown Boston for a half hour, too afraid to move, in case I stepped out in front of a bus or something. Slowly, my vision began to return, followed by the worst headache I’ve ever had in my life. Some reading later made me realise the symptoms were not entirely unlike a migraine. I thought I’d had migraines in the past, but compared to this, they were just ‘bad headaches’.

I went home, took some painkillers, and slept. For nearly 18 hours. That headache has been with me almost constantly the last month. Most days I wake up and the whole side of my head is numb and tingling. Constant nausea. Tinnitus. Dizzyness. Photosensitivity. Excessive tiredness. I’ve actually lost track of all the various symptoms I’ve experienced the last few weeks.

I hadn’t had an eye test in nearly 10 years, so I figured that would be a good place to start. I had one last week, and was told my vision was almost perfect, and I didn’t need anything corrective. The only thing of concern, was that apparently my right pupil is larger than my left. Which can be a sign of absolutely nothing to worry about, or it could be a sign of neurological issues.

I had also scheduled a visit to my doctor, which happened two days later. After telling him the various symptoms and what the eye doctor had told me, he was sufficiently concerned that he decided I needed my head checked out. So later this week, I have a CT scan to look forward to.

So that’s why I won’t be in Japan. Right now, I’m hoping it does just turn out to be ‘just migraines’, but I’m really bummed to be missing kernel summit. It’ll be the first one I’ve missed since 2000.

I’m MC’ing the boot/init miniconf next week at the Linux plumbers conference in Portland, and a slot has become available that I don’t have anyone to fill.

If you’re going to be there anyway, and you have something to talk about that may be relevant (other talks lined up include dracut & upstart) then let me know, and I’ll get you added to the speakers list.

My current 10 year british passport was due to expire next February. Given that I’ll be needing to do another US Visa renewal at some point in the next 6 months, I figured I’d get a new one a little early. (They add on the remaining time to the new passport).
If I was still living in the UK, the whole process would have been fairly trivial. For people living outside the UK however, the experience was frustrating to say the least.

My options were..

1. Fly back to the UK, apply for new passport, wait weeks for them to get around to it. (Suboptimal due to the ‘being away from home for a long time’ thing).

2. Mail my passport to some facility in Washington, DC along with an extortionate fee, where it would be kept for ‘a few weeks’, and then returned to me along with a new passport. (This option just gave me the creeps for unexplained reasons).
3. Fly back to the UK, and do a ‘same day’ visit to the passport office in London, and pay extortionate fees. (This is the option I ended up taking).

So the same day passport thing.. First you need to make an appointment. If you’re living outside the UK, this is the first hurdle you fall at. Someone in their wisdom decided to make this a free number that can’t be called from overseas. Thanks to an intermediary, several round-trips, I got an appointment made. Well, sort of. You can’t make an appointment more than 2 weeks ahead of time, and I had a specific set of dates in mind, to coincide with a trip back to the UK for other reasons. So my intermediary called back 2 weeks ahead of time, and was told to pass on a list of things I would need to bring.

• A reference number.

• An invitation letter
• 2 bills as proof of my address in the US
• A letter from my intermediary saying that I was staying with him while I was in the UK
• 2 of his bills to prove he lives at that address.
• A filled out web form available at http blahblahblah

All straight forward enough I guess. I hit up the web form. “If you are traveling in the next 4 weeks, don’t use this form, go see the British consulate”. Sigh.

So I made my way to the British consulate in Boston. Only to find they’d already closed for the day. At 12.30. Turns out they’re only open for 3 hours each day. So after the weekend, I went back again, earlier this time. I enter the building, and the place is deserted. There’s no receptionist. Or any means to indicate “HEY THERE’S SOMEONE HERE WHO WANTS TO SEE SOMEONE”. So you pace around waiting, hoping that someone will eventually come out of one of the locked doors. 20 minutes pass, and someone finally appears. I explain my predicament, and I get a blank look that just tells me how the rest of the conversation is going to go.
“We don’t do anything with passports. We can’t help you” was the short version. I left there with the helpful advice of “just turn up at the interview and explain”. Having experienced dealing with such institutions when I lived in the UK, I wasn’t particularly hopeful with this strategy.

So I arrived in London a day early, and hit up a post office, on the off-chance I could get a form from them, and it would be the right form for my situation. (Short answer: It was). The next day I make my way to the passport office. I arrive a good 30 minutes early just in case. Only to find that they won’t even let you into the building more than 10 minutes before your appointment. So I waited outside. (Tip for anyone who stumbles across this who might also want to get a new passport: Get an afternoon appointment, there’s a pub across the road, which will at least make the waiting more bearable. There’s not a great deal else to do nearby).

Once I’d been let in, I went through an xray scanner, and then saw someone at a desk to get issued a number to wait for. The conversation went something like this ..

“Appointment letter”
“I didn’t get sent one. But it’s ok, I have the reference number”
“But you need a letter”
“Yes, but you didn’t send me one”
“Without a letter, you can’t see anyone”
“But the letter won’t tell you anything other than my reference number”
(variations on the above until finally he reluctantly agreed to take my reference number)
“ok, my number is 4, 8, 7, ..”
“whoa, whoa, it’s supposed to be 4, 8, 9, ..”
“well it isn’t, and this is the number I was told”
“But it’s supposed to have a 9 in it”
“Well, mine doesn’t. It’s 4, 8, 7, …”
“it’s not going to work without a 9 in it, it’s the wrong number”
“well try it anyway”
“It won’t work”
“Please, try it.”
“*sigh*”
“4, 8, 7, …”
(My name appears on the screen as if by magic)

Once I had my magic ticket, I waited upstairs for a few minutes before being called, where I was interviewed by someone who never asked for any of the bills or other paperwork that was requested. Instead, she was more concerned with knowing “what do I have to do to live in america?”. She then spent a while staring at my photographs for my new passport, looking at me, squinting at the photographs, looking at me, and coming up with lines like “I don’t think the background is white enough” “your eyes don’t look right” “how long ago were these photographs taken?” “I think the computer is going to reject them”. She seemed to be pushing to try and get me to use their photo booth to go take more photographs, without even having tried the ones I submitted. “try them anyway. if they don’t work, THEN I’ll get new photographs” “*sigh*”.

I made a point about them not slicing through the visa pages on my old passport. They showed complete indifference, which made me worried. At no point was I asked for the bills, or proof of address documentation.

I paid my extortionate fee, and was told to come back in four hours. After getting some lunch, and wandering around for a few hours, I returned, and my old passport still had its visa intact and I had a new passport waiting for collection, complete with biometric bullshit.
They had a machine that you can use to scan the rfid chip with. It has this blurb about how it doesn’t contain anything other than what the computer shows you. Just how trusting do they expect people to be? (Or maybe I’m overly cynical).

Since my earlier post on why VAIO’s suck, I’ve noticed a number of hits from people googling for how to enable hardware virtualization on Sony machines.
I’ve not tried this myself yet, but this guy seems to have had some success using an EFI application on a usb stick.

Create Digital Music has an interesting post up today by composer/musician Kim Cascone in which he details how he switched both his studio setup and his live performance machine from a Mac to a netbook running Ubuntu.

It’s always good to see success stories, though there are a number of takeaway points from his write-up. One obvious thing is that basically no distro gets JACK integration ‘just working’ out of the box. I’m not advocating it be started always (except maybe in a ‘multimedia production’ spin of Fedora maybe. After all, not every user is going to be an audio content creator. Regardless, a big step forward would be having it start on demand when programs that need it get launched for example.

Then there’s the real time kernel. I’ve back and forth’d in email with Peter Kirn CDM’s editor quite a bit recently about the rt kernel. It’s still a fairly large diff outside of the mainline kernel. This has made it hard to integrate into Fedora. We try to avoid packaging additional flavour of the kernel where we can avoid it, just due to the increased workload each build causes (increased buildtime, increased space on mirrors, increased bugs…) Also, it occasionally lags behind mainline by a few weeks, which means it’s not really feasible for rawhide.
Hopefully the -rt maintainers have a strategy for eventually getting all the remaining parts merged, but I don’t think it’s going to happen any time soon. Until then, people who need -rt will find themselves either patching it in themselves, and foregoing kernel support from their distro, or choosing a distro which chooses to package it.

Anyway, I found it an interesting read, and was expecting it to be a lot more “linux fails” than it was, and ended up being pleasantly surprised.

I’ve a number of other thoughts on Linux as a music creation platform, which I’ll go into another time, as this post is starting to ramble.

The majority of modern CPUs that support CPU scaling now use a common driver (acpi-cpufreq). Judging by the search queries that hit my blog, and the amount of mail I get on the subject, there is a failure mode of this driver that many people are hitting, that there isn’t a great deal of information on.

The failure mode looks like this:

$ modprobe acpi-cpufreq
FATAL: Error inserting (/lib/modules/…/kernel/arch/x86/kernel/cpu/cpufreq/acpi-cpufreq.ko): No such device

Not particularly informative. We don’t spit out anything helpful to dmesg either. So what is the cause of this problem?
In many cases, /proc/cpuinfo shows the cpu supports speedstep (the ‘est’ flag). The answer in nearly all of these cases is.. The BIOS. The ACPI tables in the BIOS list which P-states a particular CPU supports. If your CPU was manufactured after your BIOS was written, you’re probably going to be out of luck. Sometimes, there are BIOS updates on the motherboard manufacturers website that will add support for newer processors. Sometimes we aren’t so lucky. In these cases, we’re out of luck, there’s nothing we can do.

There is another possibility for the error message above: kernel bugs. We have introduced bugs in the ACPI interpretor in the past which have broken parsing of the P-states on some platforms. These kinds of bugs tend to get noticed very quickly, and fixed in equally short time, but it’s worth making a point that it’s important to be running on the last kernel version before reporting bugs.