aloha btrfs

Last month I converted my laptop to btrfs to get some experience using this new, still experimental file system. The bugs tell the story:

At this point I had a booting, working btrfs system. The bugs seen over the next weeks were strange:

In the meantime, I did some initial work toward supporting btrfs in d-i, writing a basic partman-btrfs. One of the interesting open questions is how best to use subvolumes to split up a single btrfs filesystem. If the installer defines the right set of subvolumes, upgrades to be rolled back, without also rolling back /home and /srv. The remaining parts needed for d-i to support btrfs are fairly tractable, but are waiting until root on btrfs is bootable, and until the filesystem is not experimental.

I gave up on the current experiement when I ran debsums on my laptop. (So that long thread was good for something!) It didn't find any corrupt files. But it did find a lot of md5sums files that were missing. Some of the packages with missing md5sums were upgraded just this week, and the md5sums files must have gone missing since.

I have not seen anything that I can say with certainty was caused by btrfs, and not by some other cause, but since I can't trust the data on this laptop now (although git tells me everything in my home directory is ok), I'm reinstalling it, and saying aloha to btrfs, for now.

Update: #575891 is a bug in dpkg that affects btrfs, and probably explains all the odd things I saw.

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pre to droid

in which the Pre unsuprisingly continues to suck

My Palm Pre was killed by a forced over the air WebOS upgrade. You can't avoid those upgrades, even if you are sure they'll be bad news. The previous WebOS upgrade spared my Debian partition, but lost all other customizations (including Palm Pre privacy fixes), and wasted hours. When I went to use my phone and it didn't even boot, and displayed only "http://palm.com/rom", I knew that was the last straw.

(Shouldn't forcing an upgrade that breaks a working phone to the point that it can't even call 911 be well, illegal?)

switching cell providers in the US: suprisingly doable

I thought about ditching the smart phone and using VOIP, but I seem to have gotten addicted. So I got a Droid. That meant switching cell phone companies.

I've heard a lot about how horrible the US cell phone company contracts are. My experience has me wondering if all that is well... not overblown, but oversimplified. I was half a year into a two year contract. Today I got my closing statement, and I really got out of it with no early termination fee.

The trick seems to be, switch to a different cell phone company. They'll be happy to get you out of your old contract, salivating at the chance of locking you in to a new one. They probably have a script to use when calling to cancel. Or "know a guy". Or claim to know a guy, then just use a script, and get lucky. Given the hard sells and vague promises they tried on me, I assume that these places are where all the car salesmen ended up. Trust == 0. But it worked.

If you're good on the phone, and are looking for a new business idea: Start a business of getting people out of their cell phone contracts, for a reasonable fee and no other obligation. Use loopholes like rate changes. As long as the cell phone companies can raise their monthly rate 2 cents, and 99.9999% of their users accept it, and they make untold millions of dollars, for free, they seem to not care if the remaining fraction use a loophole to get out. Especially if they're able to take advantage of other comanies loopholes to switch over users. So there seems to be a niche there in which one could prosper.

droid first impressions

So now I have a slightly larger lump in my pocket and the Pre is on a shelf, and will either be used for future development and testing of Debian piggyback ideas, or donated to someone like Lennart who can make good use of it.

Compared with the Pre, the droid's hardware is all superior. The keyboard, especially, is great, with arrow keys, and all the symbols I need. At the same time, the phone is bigger, and oddly clunky. But in an endearing way. Only thing I really dislike about the hardware is the "back" button is easy to accidentially swipe while typing on the keyboard.

Compared with WebOS, the Android UI has some clunkiness and non-obvious things. Like the status bar at the top not doing anything when you click on it. And there being no way to close an app. Especially annoying is that this means opening the web browser returns to whatever page I was on last, which is never what I want. The UI is however much, much snappier.

I don't use the Google email, etc services so can't comment on them; I assume the amount of info Google is gathering about me went up by a few percentage points; I've blocked their analytics on my network to knock it back down. (PS: DuckDuckGo now avoids logging IP addresses at all.)

The best thing is the ConnectBot application, which is a very usable shell and ssh client. It's a terminal, in my pocket, which I can easily use for an hour without feeling like my interactions are feeding through a stifling soda straw. Between the keyboard and the app, the Pre has nothing at all that compares.

Under the hood, Android annoys me terribly, with its lack of busybox, its kernel that does not even have the ext filesystem, its hard-partitioned storage, and its general lack of every single thing I like in a Linux system. Compare this with the Pre, which has a package manager, a userspace based on busybox with a full standard Linux stack (all the way up to PulseAudio) and a kernel with lots of standard filesystems, and even LVM. Sigh. It's amazing that WebOS and Android have found such broadly different* ways to suck.

There is significant interest and activity around running a Debian chroot on the Droid. The best tries so far put it on a loop mounted ext2 filesystem (which means you need to get ahold of a matching ext2.ko somehow), living on the FAT formatted SSD. And there are apparently some bad problems with IO to that starving/locking the system, so I have not tried it.

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red letter day for gardening

A truckload of compost was dropped off today.

Went out this evening to put together a raised bed for it, and when I looked up, I saw a wonderful surprise.

I've been trying to catch this groundhog for ages. It's still fat from last year's garden and the whole other contents of the yard, and also, I think, pea shoots that came up recently. But it would not set foot in the trap for any bait, and I had given up (again) and planned to put the trap away this evening. I came out at just the right instant, to confuse the beast, already stressed by the appearance of big piles of dirt, to dodging for the wrong hiding place.

It's now enjoying its new home out at the lake, and I'm looking forward to enjoying vegetables.

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