Anyways, after replacing the flat tire, we were on our way again. Our route took us from the lowcountry of coastal Carolina across the Appalachian Mountains. Although not horribly impressive as far as mountain ranges go it was still pretty cool. You really started to notice it in North Carolina, but we were in Virginia by the time we started snapping photos:

Turned out we had a second tire burst on the way, the tire on the opposite side of the car as the first, both in the front. Really, extremely annoying. I even took a picture that time:

This time there was a visible hole in the sidewall, but nothing that would indicate what had caused it to have a hole. These tires are almost literally no-name (only a model number is visible on the side). The Goodyear Eagles they were replaced with were not horribly expensive at all so I’ll probably stay away from el-cheapo tires from now on.

Once we made it to our destination 700 miles from home (1127 km for you who don’t have KRunner available to convert…) we found things much more enjoyable:

There’s still a lighthouse at one of the gardens (not sure when it was added, I know it wasn’t there when I was younger):

The children got along fabulously, especially after that nice long car ride:

Emma is on the left, with one of her second cousins:

Ian in particular had a lot of fun. He jumped out of bed at 7:00 am on the day of the reunion and basically was running around keeping all of the adults busy until after dark. It was worth it though — it was unseasonably cold so after his bath he was shivering. I wrapped him in a blanket and sat down and you could actually watch him zonk out. It’s never been easier to get him to bed (and likely won’t be in the future either. :-/).

It was especially refreshing to see Ian having so much fun. Although I don’t think I’ve mentioned it on my blog before, he is autistic. Autism, as best I understand it, is not a simple “mental disease” but an entire range of different afflictions. Many computer-geeky types of probably heard of Asperger’s Syndrome, which is on the spectrum. Less neurotypical is high-functioning autism, then autism, and etc. We’re not exactly sure where Ian will end up on the spectrum. Right now he’s classified with PDD-NOS (Pervasive Developmental Disorders – Not Otherwise Specified) Obviously I’m hoping it will be a “mild” form but it’s hard to tell at this point.

What I do know is I’ll be doing my best to take care of him and help him figure out life as best as he knows how. He’s incredibly brilliant even at a young age, I just hope he can use some of those extra smarts to help him navigate what I can only assume is a very disorienting world…

Emma Pyne was born 12:56 U.S. Eastern time, weighing 5 lbs 12 oz (2.6 kg). She was 18.5 inches long (~45 cm). Both she and her mother are doing well, and hopefully we’ll be able to take her home this Saturday. Now I’ll be off to celebrate. :)

Needless to say my first attempts to make it work in Wine didn’t go so well. I tried off and on over that month and eventually just gave up, playing it on the laptop when I had time. I basically never play it now, as moving over to the laptop is just too much of a hassle.

Last night I decided to try again. It took some 6 hours and probably the most debugging I’ve had to employ over this entire year on a problem, but Victory is Mine! :)

The first problem I had is that after patching the game to the latest version, 1.4x, it required activation (what Stardock uses for copy protection instead of CD copying controls) in order to start. This is normally pretty easy, and you can activate by email even if necessary. But the process always crashed. I first tried copying over the authentication certificate from the laptop but it’s tied to the machine you’re on.

So I then tried bringing down the network interface, running the activation again and trying to get the activation request so I could email it to Stardock. That didn’t work either, as it crashed just before I got to that part.

Getting fed up I decided to use one of the Wine debugging megaweapons, relay tracing. This option causes Wine to mark the entry and exit from practically every single procedure call in Wine, including function name, module, and parameters and return codes. You can filter this all down to just the module you need but I didn’t know where the problem was. 70 megabytes of a relay log later, I had something which I could look at.

It took a bit of deductiveness (i.e. searching for the last place where the serial number is used, which is probably close to the crash location) but it turned out the error was in advapi32, in the cryptographic code. Looking at the Wine source code, it looked like the code was trying and failing to read a required Registry key. But how did Wine install itself without setting up required Registry contents?

I tried running wineprefixcreate (which among other things, sets up default Registry contents) but that didn’t help. Eventually a bit of Google searching for the registry key name (Cryptography\Defaults or something like that) resulted in a hit on the rsaenh.dll in the Wine source, in the DllRegisterServer() function. That looked like it created the required keys. Hmm.

From my past life developing Win32 applications I knew that OLE registration for a DLL was typically handled by running rundll32 and passing the DLL name and entry point (DllRegisterServer in this case). wine has that tool as well so I tried running it and… success at last!

Now GalCiv2 wouldn’t run because it said I didn’t have DirectX 9.0c. I tried following some instructions I found to install DirectX 9.0c DLLs into Wine. It turned out I had to use the rundll32 program again on the wintrust DLL to get the installer to do anything. It would still error out though.

At this time I figured there were probably many DLLs that needed to be registered. So I took the rash action of going to my /usr/lib32/wine directory and registering every single DLL in there.

GalCiv2 still didn’t start up, but that’s because I forgot to undo some of the steps I took in the previously mentioned DirectX 9.0c install guide (namely, using native instead of builtin versions of some DLLs). Once I undid that GalCiv2 started up just fine. I haven’t actually played it yet. It was so late by that point that I immediately went to bed. Now I need to see if the game can actually be played in Wine.

I also wonder what part of Wine is supposed to register DLLs (i.e. installer, on first run, or what?) and figure out why it never happened here.

Sadly I look nowhere near this good nowadays. :)

So after having a Gentoo upgrade break a lot of programs, even after running the revdep-rebuild which rebuilds packages affected by a changed library, I decided that I had to have a way to find out what libraries in particular were causing programs to need to load the affected library. In my case an expat upgrade replaced libexpat.so.0 with libexpat.so.1. Even though revdep-rebuild was supposed to rebuild the affected packages it missed quite a few.

(I would eventually figure out that the reason it messed up is because the lib64 directory is symlinked to lib since I have a 64-bit system. The program would end up linked against a library in /usr/lib64, revdep-rebuild would look for programs linked against the exact same library, but in /usr/lib instead, and then not find it.)

Anyways, after playing around with ldd and discovering that it would not give a nice tree diagram showing what the dependencies of a program was I decided to make a tool that would do so. I call it ELF Library Viewer (elflibviewer on the command line):

If it interests you at all it is available from my software page. It requires Qt 4 and the readelf utility to be installed. It doesn’t really do much error handling (i.e. run it on ELF executables and libraries and you’ll be fine) but it shouldn’t ruin your binaries either.

It is rather Linux-specific at this point as well, but it should mirror the GNU binutils way of finding libraries closely. Instead of searching the ld.so cache it checks ld.so.conf to figure out what ld.so should be caching however. Let me know if this program proves useful for you (or if I’m just reinventing the wheel). Bonus tip: Type the name of the offending library into the search line and hit enter. It will highlight in red all of the libraries which depend on the offending library. It also recursively resolves dependencies, but only the first time it sees a library. It probably wouldn’t be too hard to copy over the dependency tree each time it reencounters a library but I can’t be bothered to implement it.

Most importantly, my wife gave birth early to our son, Ian. He was born 08-Dec-2006, and was released from intensive care on the 20th. Since then, it’s been a whirlwind of feedings, appointments, and trying to sleep around his schedule. :-)

My wife delivered all by herself, and by the time she was to the hospital it was too late for medication so she also got to deliver without pain medication. She then had to take care of everything by herself and still drive an hour south to Jacksonville every day to take care of Ian.

In the spare time I did have I’ve been working on a new dial widget which may be useful for ksysguard in KDE 4.

The code behind the widget can be found at my dumping ground. It requires Qt 4.2, and is Linux-specific in how it reads sensors. So far it includes three, selectable on the command line.

• --cpu: Reads CPU temperature. This requires lm_sensors and even then may not work for you as the scaling factor is specific to my motherboard and libsensors really sucks.
• --net-rx: Displays receive bandwidth on the (hardcoded) eth0 network interface.
• --cpu-load: Display CPU load information (not including niced processes).

One problem is that it takes up too much CPU on my system to be useful as a indication of system status because of all the eye candy but other people report that they don’t have such a problem so maybe it’s just my system being out-of-date.

At this point I still need to update my KDE 4 install so I can port abakus and other of my goodies but now I have less time to do it in. :-/

Finally, congrats to the Indianapolis Colts for (finally) beating the New England Patriots in the playoffs.

So, I update the entry on
kde-apps.org, and when the content page comes back up, what do I see? This is a
screenshot of what I saw. If I were a superstitious man I’d be nervous
right now.

Hopefully nothing bad turns out with this release, Perl has given me enough
problems that I’ve been seriously pondering how to introduce a testing
framework into the script. That would be nice, since I already use a
packaging script for the program, I could just force the script to run all the
tests before doing any of the packaging.

One is named Sabrina, and is rather large. The other is named Boots, and
is rather timid. You can see a few photos of them, graciously hosted by my
University.

Sabrina is on the left, Boots is on the right.

I
swear I don’t know why Sabrina likes licking out of the tub faucet.

She
also likes lounging in various assorted containers.

Regarding Sabrina, she’ll happily lay in damn near anything with at least 3
sides. This includes the bathroom sink, the bathroom tub (when she’s not busy
licking the faucet, that is), the stray Thinkgeek.com box
I have lying around, the shelves in the entertainment center, the cabinets
under
the sink, and oh yeah, my computer chair.

Boots isn’t nearly so weird. She’s just scared of all human contact. I
guess
the previous owner wasn’t a very nice guy, although Boots at least doesn’t
have
any physical deformities as a result.