Hi! I'm Paul.

The Iron Lion's Weblog: Source Package Recipes: Are They More Addictive Than Crack Cocaine?

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 16:28:58 +0000

Yes. Yes they are.

I'm crap at packaging. My mind has never really grokked all the packaging things. Also, I make packages, and then they quickly get out of date as I continue to work on the upstream part, and so then there's this big hill to get over when I actually need to package it again.

Enter source package recipes. It's what Aaron Bentley and I have been working on for the past 6 months. Basically, take two bzr branches, put them together using a recipe, and make a source package (and eventually a binary package) out of them.

My first recipe got built into a binary package two days ago, but I just noticed it.

Now I want to package everything.

The Iron Lion's Weblog: Dear Ubuntu Community - Thank You

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 16:12:53 +0000

I plug my new gadgets in. They work out of the box.

I want to install and play with a new piece of software. I don't have to search the net for that software.

I want to write new code. I'm up and running pretty quickly.

I want to buy new music and put it on my music player. I can certainly do that.

I want to contribute back to my OS. Kind people help me do that.

I just wanted to take a minute and say thank you to everyone that works on Ubuntu, from helping new users to writing code to testing code and filing bugs. You make me forget about my OS enough to get my work done. Thank you.

Paul Hummer is Awesomery: Top 5 Albums for Wandering In Prague

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 23:35:00 +0000

Last weekend, I had the opportunity to just walk around in Prague and take pictures and take in the scenery. It was great. What I found even better was that the albums I had chosen to listen to while wandering around seemed to fit exactly with the places and people I was observing. Thus, here's the list I have made of the top 5 albums to wander around in Prague to.

The Format - Dog Problems - The day was sunny, and people were happy, and as I stood in the square that only a week before had been the scene of a large public viewing of the 2010 World Cup, I was amazed that people were walking to the beat in my earphones. People were kissing each other in time with the songs. I must mention that the Snails EP might have also gotten mixed in here somehow, because I remember hearing that acoustic version of Tune Out.
fun. - Aim and Ignite - This rode the coattails of the Format, but it brought a bigger happiness to my overall feeling as I walked toward the castle in Prague. It put a spring in my step, and as I stopped to take pictures over the river, it just seemed to fit.
Keane - Perfect Symmetry - I never actually made it to the castle. A combination of Keane's new album and the amazing architecture on the way had me stopping to take pictures and thinking about art and writing songs and getting lost and hoping I wouldn't find my way back home. This album actually repeated twice, and much of at least one run was consumed while I sat in a small garden and watched people walk through.
The Postal Service - Give Up - The fact that this album was on my phone was probably fated specifically for my walk home. I stopped on the way home to eat some sort of meat hanging on a stick (I thought it was a pork knuckle, but after actually having a pork knuckle, I have no idea what it was; probably horse). I watched the exodus of a wedding leave a gorgeous church building and head out to wherever the party was going to start. As I listened to "I have to speculate that God Himself would make us into corresponding shapes like puzzle pieces," I couldn't but think "that's surreal."
Lydia - Illuminate - The next day, I got out and walked around a bit more. The rain slowed me down and kept me from wandering too far. Lydia's music gave me this haunted feeling as I walked around Wenceslas Square in the rain. This album actually played through twice as well, since I walked around the museum at the same time, looking at statues that were older than my country.

Alright, a close runner up here is Boys Night Out's "Trainwreck." I was feeling a bit ill on the first day, but it seemed to have a good balance of energy for me. I was actually reading in the litlle garden previously mentioned as I listened to this album. It's usually a bit emo for me, but is also a really strong album.

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The Iron Lion's Weblog: Tarmac 0.3 Released (and then 0.3.1 shortly after)

Sun, 18 Jul 2010 20:21:31 +0000

I was entirely happy to happy to announce a new version of Tarmac, 0.3. In fact, I was so happy that I went again and immediately did another release of Tarmac, Tarmac 0.3.1. Tarmac 0.3.x series brings a whole slew of fixes, including fixing more than half of the bugs filed against Tarmac. In fact, there are no more bugs with a higher importance than Low currently (ideally, people use the software and find more for me to work on).

Tarmac is a tool for automatically landing branches that have been approved for merge through the Launchpad code review system. It uses the Launchpad API to find these branches, and has a variety of features to automate their merge and management.

Tarmac 0.3 is also a complete re-write of most of the system. Notably, this means that Tarmac can be used on branches that aren't the development focus. I'm sure this will make Ted Gould happy, but the real reason I did this was help in the managing of all those official source package branches on Launchpad.

The Plugin architecture has also been reworked a bit as well. Since I spent so much time writing documentation for Tarmac, I realized how icky it was to write plugins. If you have plugins from 0.2, you'll need to port them to 0.3. You'll also need to port your configuration to Tarmac 0.3.x, since the configuration has changed a bit.

The final big thing to notice is that Tarmac is getting entirely more entwined with bzrlib (because it's such an awesome library even outside of bzr) by stealing it's command code. Tarmac is only one script now, and the first argument is the actual command.

You can find Tarmac 0.3.1 here. I'm working on packaging it now (although I'm really slow packaging, mentoring desired).

The Diarrhea of Paul: My Top 5 Musical Influences For Writing Music

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 00:23:41 +0000

So, I think I've finally settled on the 6 songs that I'm going to polish up and release as an EP. It's been a long time since I've put out music to the world, and for some reason, I'm a little reluctant to do it (my stomach churns at the excitement and dread at the same time).

As I listen to the raw scratch tracks (of the pure crap) that I've laid down, I finally hear the influences of the most random groups ever in my music. Seriously, I didn't realize I was such a sponge to the stuff I listen to. I am also self-centered (and obnoxious), and I have blog, so I can add to the noise on the internet by listing the top 5 influences I hear in my music.

LCD Soundsystem -Yeah, this should be frakkin' obvious. Actually, there's a song that I wrote almost a year ago that sounds exactly like "All My Friends." When I heard it, it pissed me off to no end, but I've come to grips with that fact that the song is a wash.
Lydia - This is one I didn't expect. Lydia is really ambient-ish and, in the words of John Cusack in "High Fidelity," it's "music I can ignore." The Hammond organs seem to just have become part of my brain. Specifically "Stay Awake" sticks with me for its dynamics and harmonies.
Elton John - I really thought my piano influence would really come from The Format, Jack's Mannequin, fun., Augustana, or Mae. Not so. It's definitely Sir Elton, which is odd, because I think it's been a while since I've listened to him. One thing that goes without saying (but I'm saying it anyway): No one gets pop/rock like Elton John.
Matt Costa - I can tell I was listening to a lot of Matt Costa when at least two of the songs I've selected were written. One of the songs specifically has that resolved haunting sound like "Astair" has in its intro. His music has this incredibly content sound, like a happiness no matter what the situation is. If I could capture that, I feel like I would have accomplished my goal in writing music.
The Get Up Kids - I don't think I can ever shake this one. Much of my musical development happened as a teenager to the wonderful sounds of TGUK. There are few memories that I have of 1997-2005 that can't be jogged with one of their songs. However, my favorite songs now are very different than my favorite songs then.

A quick runner up would be The Gaslight Anthem. There's this silly indie sound to the "American Slang" album that I usually don't like, but it's also a very organized sound, so at that point, it doesn't annoy me anymore...

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The Iron Lion's Weblog: If You Can't Open It, You Don't Own It - My Talk at Ignite Fort Collins 5

Tue, 22 Jun 2010 03:03:42 +0000

Last week, I gave a talk entitled "If You Can't Open It, You Don't Own It" I thought the contents of the talk would go well on this blog, and I so wanted another opportunity to self promote (or something).

The Diarrhea of Paul: Return to Shop Class - Compost Bins

Tue, 22 Jun 2010 02:59:29 +0000

Frame complete

Last week, Angel gave her Ignite talk about compost. Mo and I have been composting (terribly) for a while now, but we don't really have any organization to it. It's become a hassle, and so we really haven't kept up with it. Angel's talk, however, inspired me to make some bins to hold the compost, and find ways to make it easily turnable.

I went and bought some (super) cheap lumber and some chicken wire at the Home Despot. The bins I made were 2'x4'x2'. The first iteration probably cost about $5 in materials and took about 30 minutes to make, although I think I'll iterate a few more times before I find the final bin size and structure. This first version basically has 4 2' 2x2s for the corners. I then screwed 1x6s to the sides to get a good box shape. I then wrapped the frame in chicken wire, which I stapled to the wood.

In the next iteration, I'd like to put in a set of 1x6s between the top and bottom 1x6, drill a hole in the short side of the middle 1x6 and stick a spit through it with tines on it. That way, I can turn the pile without needing a pitchfork or a rake or anything.

In the morning, I'm going to put a clear piece of plastic over the top to see how it affects the heat of the pile, and see whether or not thinking about using a piece of (plexi)glass on top to make sure the sun really beats down on the pile.

Finished product

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The Iron Lion's Weblog: Ubuntu, An Arm board, and I Walk Into a Bar...

Mon, 07 Jun 2010 05:51:59 +0000

This post is mostly for me to remember what I was doing when I sit back down to deal with this next weekend. However, since I spent so much time trying to aggregate tons of information from all over the net on how to use these tools, I thought it might make for a good blog post. Also, I'm kind of hoping someone can give me some pointers in making this better.

Earlier this week, I found a purpose for my Beagle Board. Out of my requirements, it satisfied them all, including running Ubuntu. I've been toying with it for a while, and it had Ubuntu on it when I picked it back up this weekend to hack on it. The one thing that I found though was that I wanted a bit more customization than the default Ubuntu install (the keyword here is "wanted").

My ultimate scenario for creating an image is to use Qemu to test my images as I build them, and make sure I have everything available. Testing each image on the actual hardware is a bit time consuming. I want to minimize the size of the image, which means installing only the needed packages, but there are some custom packages I also need to install. Once I had everything set up the way I wanted, I'd create a squashfs partition with my OS and I'd be done.

So this weekend I embarked on the process of making my own Ubuntu image for my Beagle Board. I started off using a tool called rootstock. rootstock makes arm images using debootstrap. It ended up being a huge pain to actually get it working the way I wanted to.

I know debootstrap pretty well, since I do all my Launchpad development in a chroot, and sometimes the Launchpad environment requires me to kill my chroot and start over. Since I was pretty comfortable with it, and I knew it would do exactly what I wanted (and ironically, is used by rootstock), I started down that route. I created a bootstrapped Ubuntu with debootstrap --foreign --arch=armel lucid bootstrap http://ports.ubuntu.com The problem I ran into was that the --foreign part meant that the bootstrap was only the first stage, and I couldn't complete the second stage without ARM hardware or a bootable QEMU ARM instance. Ugh...

After struggling with that (because I'd exhausted all of my knowledge, and the internet is really sparse on my exact needs), I stumbled across an undocumented script called qemu-debootstrap. Documentation is nonexistant, and there's no man page for the script, but qemu-debootstrap --help returns E: I'm just a debootstrap wrapper; please see debootstrap --help. That made sense, but still didn't tell my what it did. Open source is great though, so I just read the source. qemu-debootstrap takes all the debootstrap flags, and adds --foreign, but then also copies in some needed qemu binaries and runs the /debootstrap/debootstrap --second-stage script that completes the debootstrap process.

At this point, my process was this:

dd if=/dev/zero of=arm.img count=2000000 - Create a 2GB(ish) file
mkfs.ext3 arm.img - Format the file to ext3. In the end, I'll use squashfs, but ext3 gives me flexibility for now, and means I don't have to build a custom kernel just yet.
mount -o loop arm.img /mnt - Mount the image at /mnt
qemu-debootstrap --arch=armel lucid /mnt http://ports.ubuntu.com - Here's the good part. Make a filesystem with the basic Ubuntu installation.
umount /mnt - Unmount the image.

The file arm.img is now ready to be booted in qemu. So now I run qemu-system-arm -M versatilepb -cpu cortex-a8 -kernel <kernel-of-my-choice> -hda arm.img -m 256 -append "rootwait root=/dev/sda devtmpfs.mount=0 raid=noautodetect rw".

It boots in Qemu. Hooray! Unfortunately, it seems to crap out after finding the image and trying to run it. udev dies, then plymouth dies, and I get no debugging messages either in the Qemu window, or the pty terminal. I'm still not sure what's going on, but I've at least got something booting now. I'm now digging through the Upstart debugging page, and seeing if I can find out what's going on. Regardless, I have an image that I can now work with. It'll be nice when I can boot it into Gnome, but that's for next weekend, right? :)

The Diarrhea of Paul: Tonight's Marley Report

Tue, 11 May 2010 04:31:51 +0000

Sanding the bus

Tonight I spent a few hours sanding on Marley, my '77 VW Transporter. I've been sanding all the body down to bare metal to make sure there isn't any rust that I am not dealing with. If you're familiar with restoring old cars, you'll know that rust is the #1 enemy. I've been pretty lucky so far in the rust/cancer area. Tonight that changed a bit.

After (finally) getting the sliding door off, I started sanding the back passenger section of the bus. It's a mostly flat section, so I thought it would go pretty quick. It didn't... I'm finding that my bus has more curves that I originally thought, and the disc sander doesn't do contours all that well.

The big thing I found is that as I got to the bottom of the bus, there were rust spots hiding under the paint. I've sanded out most of those spots, but as I got back around to the engine compartment, I found that the rust got worse. In fact, it goes all the way through the body of the bus. Dangit...

This basically means I'll have to hope my welding skills are up to snuff quick enough that I can replace large body panels easily. There is a section of body steel underneath the engine door that I knew needed to be replaced, but I didn't think it had spread there.

I'm also finding that my 4 hour division of tasks really isn't accurate. Sanding is really tedious and boring and takes a long time. There's the blue paint, some sort of orange paint underneath it (which I thought might be the OG color, but I don't think it is now), and then a pretty hard primer. I believe, however, that the sanding will be the most tedious part of this whole project, and that once it's done, everything else will go quickly.

I plan on having the bulk of the sanding done this week and get a coat of self-etching primer down in most the places that I'm not going to have to weld.

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The Diarrhea of Paul: 5 Video Games I Want To Pay For Again (In Downloadable Form)

Wed, 14 Apr 2010 17:24:52 +0000

The common consumer trend right now is to take everything from my childhood, reboot/re-release it, and somehow I fork over the dough. It's true. Look at things like "Where the Wild Things Are," "Transformers," and "GI Joe" movies. I hear they're also working on He-Man and Thundercats movies. Add Voltron and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to that list and you have the whole Pantheon of my Saturday mornings.

This truth is most apparent with the existence of the Wii Virtual Console. The Virtual Console is the only reason that I turn on my Wii as of late. I own all the old Zelda games, the Mario games (Mario 2 FTW), and two games my brother and I played religiously together: The Secret of the Mystical Ninja and Zombies Ate My Neighbors (it's the most fun when he comes over and we sit on the floor in front of the TV to play...)
So I was thinking about all the other games I want to see released on the Virtual Console or PSN or XBLA or whatever. Here's my top 5.

Aero the Acro-Bat

Aero the Acrobat - I don't think we ever actually owned this game, but I'm sure we rented it enough times to own it. It was really hard, but for some reason I loved it. I never actually beat it, so I really need closure.
Michael Jackson's Moonwalker - This game was re-dong-culous. Michael Jackson had his own video game, where he had to go save blonde (seemingly cute) cheerleaders. I also never owned this game (I never owned a Sega Genesis). This kid I knew who had a trampoline and all the really good toys would let me play it whenever I went over to play with him (I was one of those kids).
Dragon Warrior - I got this game for free when Santa got me a subscription to Nintendo Power for Christmas one year. This was my first real RPG. It confused me at the time (I was like, 5), but I remember that I still liked playing it. The series has since been rebranded as "Dragon Quest" and is hugely popular, so it makes no sense that it hasn't been available. Note: Buying a poor kid Nintendo Power is a great way to torture him/her. He/she will never be able to own any of the games that they'll learn all the tips and tricks for. Also, magazines in general are a waste of time, and those tips and tricks are all available on the internet anyway.
Goldeneye - Here's a tricky one. It's a great N64 game. Then Microsoft bought Rare, the company that made it. There's a giant deadlock between Nintendo and Microsoft right now. Heck, I'd be happy to play it with an Xbox controller. Just make it available so I can give you money, okay?
Clay Fighter - Yeah, silly claymation fighting. Still, nostalgia and all that. I want Clayfighter back. I still remember all of Ickybod Clay's special movies. I want to put that memory to good use.

Clayfighter

Yes, I know I can just download ROMs, but that's not really the same experience. Also, it'd be nice if my hat got whiter, not blacker.

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