Brian Jepson’s Weblog

The second Providence Geek Dinner is coming up soon! Read all about it at the Providence Geeks weblog, and please RSVP there if you are coming.

When I arrived on the URI campus in 1987, my idea of style was a leather trench coat and a briefcase. Add to that that I had just let Josh and my sister Shelli shave my head, and I figured I was one weird looking dude. In fact, I wasn’t. On numerous occasions, students just assumed I was the professor and would look at me expectantly until the real professor showed up.

Time passed, and I started to become a fixture: after a stint as a student manager in the Ram’s Den, I moved on to work as a computer programmer in the URI Memorial Union, where I got some amazing experience that later led to a job on Wall Street (more on that later). At the same time, URI became my entire world (a friend of mine had rearranged the letters from a University of Rhode Island sticker to put “Rhode Island is the Universe” on his rear window): I was business manager of the Good Five Cent Cigar, the student daily, an assistant editor on the campus literary magazine, the Great Swamp Gazette, and even started a coffeeshop called the Cafe de la Tete.

I did not want to leave. I had no post-graduation plans.

Then in 1992, the phone rang. About a month before that, I had posted my resume to Usenet, and Frank Grimberg, then of of Prosoft had found it. He wanted me to come work for his company and work as a consultant at JP Morgan at 60 Wall Street. So, leaving in my last semester of college, I moved to NYC with my first wife Pam.

A lot went on between then and now, both in my career and in my personal life. After Joan and I married, I started thinking about that degree. Combining the spousal tuition waiver with some gentle prodding from Joan and many other family members, I set to work. I took a little detour the first couple of semesters: Compiler Design, Precalculus, and Calc I, even though they didn’t satisfy any of my academic requirements toward my Linguistics degree.

I finally wrapped it all up last semester with an independent study under Professor Paul Arakelian. Now I’m thinking about what kind of frame I’ll put around my diploma.

jwz asks: “FileVault: good idea, or performance killer?” I’m not ready to turn my whole home directory over to FileVault, but I love using TrueCrypt on my Windows machines, so I figured I’d try putting some of my files on an encrypted sparse disk image.

It worked great, but then I left it mounted while I was trying to copy some files between FireWire drives, and my machine locked hard (it turns out I needed a firmware update for my Oxford 922-powered FireWire 800 drive).

Well, when I rebooted and tried to mount my disk image, I got “Disk image failed to mount/Corrupt image,” so I’m tossing this experiment down the drain (FWIW, I’ve put TrueCrypt through plenty of crashes, and it never has a problem). I’m glad I use Unison to keep my Mac in sync with several other computers at home, because restoring the files was quick and painless.

OpenSPARC Goals: “To significantly increase participation in processor architecture development and application design by making cutting-edge hardware IP freely available.” Getting the obvious Bart Simpson reference out of the way quickly (how long do you figure before they reword that first bullet point?), I’m wondering how someone like me could hack this? I can’t fab chips in my basement… yet. But Qemu emulates a SPARC. Is there an opportunity for SunSource there? An emulator does not need to be full speed to be useful. (via Smart Mobs).

I tried loading up FC5 test 2 on Virtual PC on my Mac, and the install went well, but the smoke test (rebooting into my new Linux install) failed miserably with some weird errors:

bad: scheduling from the idle thread!
Unable to handle kernel NULL pointer derefence

This was followed by a dialog telling me “An unrecoverable processor error has been encountered. The PC will restart now.”

Per this post on macosx.com, I found a suggestion to use Pentium-MMX as the target architecture instead of Pentium Pro, but the instructions didn’t work perfectly for me. There is a 586 architecture RPM available, but the Fedora installer fails to choose this, and uses the 686 RPM instead.

To actually get the kernel on the target system, I used the Virtual Disk Assistant to create an empty FAT32 disk image, mounted it on my Mac, copied the kernel to it (look for kernel-version.i586.rpm in this directory), and unmounted it.

Then I configured the still-broken Fedora install to use that image as the second disk, put the install DVD into my machine, and booted into rescue mode. I figured I could just chroot to /mnt/sysimage, and rpm -ivh the file I needed. Unfortunately, I got a bunch of errors about the scriptlets, so I had to install it by hand.

First, I mounted /dev/hdb1 (the FAT32 image), copied the kernel over to the root of the boot partition, and then installed it with cpio.

sh-3.1# mkdir /mnt2
sh-3.1# mount /dev/hdb1 /mnt2
sh-3.1# cp /mnt2/kernel-2.6.15-1.1907_FC5.i586.rpm /mnt/sysimage/
sh-3.1# umount /mnt2
sh-3.1# chroot /mnt/sysimage/
sh-3.1# rpm2cpio kernel-2.6.15-1.1907_FC5.i586.rpm | cpio -u --extract

Don’t reboot just yet, because when I tried booting, I got lots of errors from ksign about unsigned modules. It turns out there was one more thing to do: run the post-install scriptlet (which you can find with the command rpm -qp –scripts kernel-2.6.15-1.1907_FC5.i586.rpm):

sh-3.1# /sbin/new-kernel-pkg --package kernel --mkinitrd --depmod --install 2.6.15-1.1907_FC5

Now you’re ready to exit the chroot environment, halt the Fedora virtual machine, eject the DVD, and reboot.

Read all about it at the Providence Geeks blog. Be sure to post a comment over there if you are coming!