unsigned long geek = random();

Recently I’ve been trying to customize my vim configuration to try and optimize it for software development. Although I’ve been using vim for many years, I’ve always used a configuration that’s very close to vanilla.

Yesterday I installed Tag List, a plugin that displays and allows navigation to the various tags in the currently edited file(s). It seems to work very well, and supports most languages, thanks to Exuberant ctags.

The screenshot below shows it in action editing some Python source.

459×530 pixels 58.7 kB

There’s been quite a bit of buzz over the past few months about Xgl, the X server architecture layered on OpenGL. Although still in the early stages of development, some code has been released and there are numerous guides explaining how to get Xgl running on a Linux system (the Gentoo Wiki has a good run down of what to do).

Until quite recently, Xgl was only supported on machines that could use the proprietary ATI or NVidia X drivers, which excluded me, as my laptop has an Intel 915DM display subsystem (one of those horrible shared memory systems). This has since changed and the 915DM is now supported. Rather fortuitously, today Jonathan kindly passed along a copy of the latest Gentoo-based Kororaa Xgl Live CD 0.2. When I booted it on my laptop, I was very impressed with what I saw – the performance was good (much better than, for example, the composite extension of X.org 6.9, as I’m using currently) and the eye candy certainly is purrty

It’s quite interesting following the Sun T2000 performance contest. It’s a great marketing plan – generate some buzz about the new server (and the Niagara family of CPUs, and indirectly Solaris 10) by loaning them out for people to benchmark and play with for 60 days. If you publish some good results, you may even get to keep the server.

Some early articles I’ve read:

• Colm MacCárthaigh
• Robert Milkowski

I’d be very curious to see how an enterprise application like SAP ERP or a database like DB2 perform on the T2000. While not applications that one may traditionally associate with a highly threaded, multi-core CPU, I’m sure they’d see similar performance boosts to those seen by web applications. Certainly, any SAP-based application server, with its virtualization of the operating system processes into work processes, would benefit. It’s just a pity the competition and trial offer aren’t available in South Africa.

Something that pleases me about this – it shows Sun’s continued commitment to the SPARC architecture. With their punting of Opteron-based servers of late, I was beginning to fear for the continued survival of what is probably my favourite CPU family.

As part of my ongoing project to get XFree86 working on a NetBSD/alpha system with a commodity PCI video card, I need to do a native build of XFree86. PR 29882 explains why the XFree86 X server is not included by default in the NetBSD release engineering releases, hence the need for my native build.

One slight potential fly in the ointment is that all my NetBSD source trees are stored on my source server and mounted read-only via NFS on the systems that need it. To build XFree86 with a read-only source tree requires a little trickery, but the procedure is nicely explained in the Building XFree86 from a Source Distribution guide (see page 3 onwards). The idea is to create a shadow tree containing symlinks to all the files in the original tree and using that to build instead of the original tree. It’s quick to set up and works very well.

Now to get a decent PCI video card…

As a follow-up to yesterday’s post about XFree86 on NetBSD/alpha, I was pointed in the direction of these two very useful references:

• Digital AlphaServer XFree86 Code
• Tested Good Video cards

It seems like a lot of commodity PCI video cards Just Work(tm) with XFree86 in Alpha systems, but just for safety’s sake I think I’ll stick with one of the known good cards. PCI Radeon 7000s can apparently be had for R300 (about $45) from a local computer reseller – I’ll go and check them out tomorrow and probably pick one up. Getting the card locally will probably cost the same as eBaying one, but it’ll certainly be a lot quicker.

While updating my NetBSD-current source tree, I noticed that X.Org has been imported. Looks like the migration from XFree86 has begun…

Today, in an attempt to reduce the amount of spam that gets received by my mail server, which runs Postfix, I implemented greylisting, courtesy of postgrey. I can’t disagree with those who say that greylisting misuses other’s bandwidth (for the unnecessary retries of legitimate mail), but perhaps that’s a small price to pay.

Another change I made today was to enable certificate-based relaying. It’s the perfect answer for those who need to relay mail for users with dynamic IPs in scenarios where a password-based solution isn’t ideal (for example, when the relay needs to authenticate another MTA rather than a user). There are quite a few guides describing how to setup certificate based relaying, but Petri T. Koistinen’s one is one of the better ones. Small tip – make sure to use the correct CA certificate (the one actually used to sign the client certificate), otherwise relaying won’t work and postfix will spit out errors like the following:
postfix/smtpd[32477]: verify error:num=20:unable to get local issuer certificate
postfix/smtpd[32477]: verify error:num=27:certificate not trusted
postfix/smtpd[32477]: verify error:num=21:unable to verify the first certificate


Yesterday I discovered a neat piece of software to complement my Fluxbox desktop – fluxter. It’s a pager that’s faster than bbpager, can be embedded in the slit and tracks the style of the current theme.

I’ve commited a package to pkgsrc-wip.