hesa’s blog

GNU Xnee: Workaround for Xvfb bug

Saturday, November 29th, 2008 | Free Software, GNU, GNU Xnee, Software, Uncategorized, geek | 2 Comments

I have been trying to automate some profiling (with gprof) by running some apps in Xvfb and record/replay with Xnee. Problem is, Xvfb crashes. In order to spot the bug I set up a less complex enviroment

Here’s the set up:

Terminal 1: Xvfb -ac :22

Terminal 2: export DISPLAY=:22 ; while (true) ; do xterm -e sleep 2 ; done

After executing some five or six programs Xvfb crashed. After some purely non scientific investigations it turns out that

1. the bug happens less often when I run Xvfb through gdb (see below)
   
2. Xvfb goes down with a seg fault in FreeColormap

Hmmm, colormap….. How about if we lower the colors in Xvfb? Yes, that’s it. Now, let’s move forward. To stress Xvfb a bit more, I have a new setup to test before I go on with Xnee’s automated profile (and coverage of course) tests:

Terminal 1: Xvfb -ac -screen 0 640x480x16 :21


Terminal 2: export DISPLAY=:22 ; while (true) ; do xterm -e sleep 2 ; done

Terminal 2: export DISPLAY=:22 ; while (true) ; do xdpyinfo ; xwininfo -root ; xset r on; done

…. after 1743 program executions I feel I am beginning to see a good enough work around.

And for those interested in the gdb printout, enjoy:

Program received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
[Switching to Thread 0xb7c2fa10 (LWP 18983)]
0×08156e2b in FreeColormap ()


GnuPG: commiting files again

Saturday, November 22nd, 2008 | Free Software, GNU, GnuPG, Software | No Comments

After a rather (read very) busy period, main focus have been FSCONS, I am again commiting files to projects as I should

Started to commit files to the swedish translation of The GNU Privacy Handbook.

Great to get started again…. and thanks to Stian for helping out

Naming computers, two more names

Tuesday, November 18th, 2008 | Music, Software | 32 Comments

I’ve been using composers to name computers for a while. So far:

Allan Pettersson - allan

Bela Bartok - bela, bartok  (Yes, he named two)

Dimitri Shostakovich - dimitri

Johan Sebastin Bach - bach

and now two new ones:

Alfred Schnittke - schnittke

Luciano Berio - berio

Comments on quality and comparing Free Software with proprietary

Monday, November 17th, 2008 | Free Software, Software | 2 Comments

In an aricle (Swedish only!) in a swedish computer mag a lawyer (refered to as an expert) says that proprietary programs are better in quality than free ones.

Let’s analyse the article a bit.

– Det krävs en morot för att man ska anstränga sig ordentligt. Om den stora inkomstkällan står och faller med kvaliteten på koden tror jag att man anstränger sig mer, säger hon.

In English the important thing would be something like.

… If the main income is depending on the quality of the code I think one strains more.

Is money the only incentive? A happy customer sure is an incentive for me. Well, well, let’s pretend it is. OK, what does this have to do with the type of license? She explains:

Öppna program brukar nämligen ofta vara gratis och de företag som utvecklar sådana satsar i stället på att dra in pengar på kringtjänster som support, utbildning och anpassning. Det leder bort fokus från själva mjukvaran.

Which would translate into (stripped down):

.. foss companies usually get their money from support, education and adaptions. This leads focus away from the software itself.

First of all, I would say that most companies make money from support, education and adaptions. Regardless of the license of their product. But let’s look at her argument for a while. Why would this lead away focus? There’s no answer to that.If I have a crappy product out there (under GPL and publically available) will notice some one will notice and they will either fix the crappy code and patch the product or they will provide an updated and forked product. If the product was proprietary no one would have known about the crappy code. If that’s her argument, that no customer will notice about the crappy code, she’s right in advising people to close their products. But looking at it from an end user point of view, I sure like to see the source code and have the four freedoms. But she speaks about code quality. No, I don’t understand from what she draws her conclusion.

…. well well well, time to go to work.

But before I leave I must say it’s kind of funny that the journalist points out that the second person in the article is working for an “Open Source” company. A bit like saying he is biased. In the article it doesn’t say that the lawyer used to work for Microsoft or that she’s also a member of Svenska föreningen för upphovsrätt (SFU) as is MIcrosoft.

btw, she never says hoe she measures code quality, but I guess she is backed up by a research Perhaps by one of them Swiss reasearch institutes that research in shampoos.