New fclib and dcflash releases

A few days ago I updated my dcflash project on SourceForge. This is an open source (MIT license) actionscript library, with a data visualization emphasis:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/dcflash/

In particular there is now an AS3 version. In fact the AS2 and AS3 releases currently have only a couple of classes in common. The AS3 classes are mostly for loading images, movies, and setting up slideshows; none of the chart classes from the AS2 version (or the only partially ported and unreleased AS1 library) are there yet. As I say in the release notes, I'm open to offers to port them to AS3. (A look at http://dcook.org/work/charts/ will show you the kind of things in the AS1 and AS2 libraries.)

And now today I've put up a new release of fclib. This is an open source (MIT license again) PHP library. Fairly ad hoc, but naturally lots of internationalization-related classes. The new 0.4.19 release contains some arabic classes, but other than that it is mostly just tweaks and small improvements:
http://dcook.org/software/fclib/

Date comparisons in C++

Just been scratching my head over a code snippet that looks like this:

time_t now=...;
time_t last_tick=...;

struct tm *timeinfo=localtime(&now);
...
struct tm *tick_timeinfo=localtime(&last_tick);
...
if(tick_timeinfo->tm_mday==timeinfo->tm_mday &&
  tick_timeinfo->tm_mon==timeinfo->tm_mon &&
  tick_timeinfo->tm_year==timeinfo->tm_year)return OK;
else return BAD;


I'd realized this was code was always returning OK, even when last_tick was yesterday, a month ago, or even from last year.
Can you see the bug? The above is all you need to know. Answers in a comment. No stamp required.

(To be fair to my bruised ego, the problem can really only be one thing in the way I've presented it above.)

Kudos to the first reply. And I'd be interested to hear how people do date comparisons in C++ more safely.

Screen still going blank! (/proc/mtrr)

I wrote before how my screen keeps going blank, and how it had seemed to get worse after upgrading to software RAID. It has still been doing it, and the past week or so I've been systematically disabling things to see if I can fix it. It still happens, but less frequently, so some combination of things I've disabled may have helped?

But, it does still happen, so I went googling again. I think I may have found something:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=446620
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15360

It seems Intel video driver and/or the linux kernel cope badly with unusual memory configurations. I moved to software RAID at the same time as I moved from 2G to 6G main memory! Here is my /proc/mtrr:

reg00: base=0xd0000000 (3328MB), size= 256MB: uncachable, count=1
reg01: base=0xe0000000 (3584MB), size= 512MB: uncachable, count=1
reg02: base=0x00000000 ( 0MB), size=4096MB: write-back, count=1
reg03: base=0x100000000 (4096MB), size=2048MB: write-back, count=1
reg04: base=0x180000000 (6144MB), size= 512MB: write-back, count=1
reg05: base=0x1a0000000 (6656MB), size= 256MB: write-back, count=1
reg06: base=0xcf700000 (3319MB), size= 1MB: uncachable, count=1

This looks like one of the problem ones from the above bug report. Unfortunately I'm at a bit of a loss what to do with it now. My understanding of the problem is something like main memory and video memory overlap, so when some program uses that memory it kills my video and X dies. My ctrl-alt-F1, breath in, breath out, ctrl-alt-F7 "fix" must reset X?? (Hhhmm, how come I never see problems with any programs having their memory overwritten by the graphics card though?)

Here are my dmesg entries either side of the only mtrr complaint:
[ 142.691737] [drm] Initialized drm 1.1.0 20060810
[ 142.700818] ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:00:02.0[A] -> GSI 16 (level, low) -> IRQ 17
[ 142.700827] PCI: Setting latency timer of device 0000:00:02.0 to 64
[ 142.700880] [drm] Initialized i915 1.6.0 20060119 on minor 0
[ 142.715171] mtrr: type mismatch for d0000000,10000000 old: write-back new: write-combining
[ 143.311587] set status page addr 0x00033000


These are the best explanations I've found so far:
http://www.rage3d.com/board/showthread.php?t=33821469
http://www.rage3d.com/board/showthread.php?threadid=33736241

Both the solutions in the 2nd link talk about modifying the video=... parameter given to the kernel. But I don't have one of them. I just tried throwing it on the end of the kernel commands but the /proc/mtrr output is unchanged, so I don't think it had any effect:
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.24-24-server root=/dev/md3 ro quiet splash nomttr

I've just tried changing Advanced|Chipset|Northbridge|Memory Remap from Enabled to Disabled, in my bios. Main memory has dropped from 6G to about 5.3G, and /proc/mtrr has changed to:
reg00: base=0xd0000000 (3328MB), size= 256MB: uncachable, count=1
reg01: base=0xe0000000 (3584MB), size= 512MB: uncachable, count=1
reg02: base=0x00000000 ( 0MB), size=4096MB: write-back, count=1
reg03: base=0x100000000 (4096MB), size=2048MB: write-back, count=1
reg04: base=0xcf700000 (3319MB), size= 1MB: uncachable, count=1
reg05: base=0xcf800000 (3320MB), size= 8MB: uncachable, count=1

Well, it looks just as dubious to my untrained eye (for starters it still seems to think there is 6G of memory), but at least it is different. Let's see what happens... no screen still goes blank.

What about DVMT mode? http://www.techarp.com/showfreebog.aspx?lang=0&bogno=322
I currently am in "DVMT" mode, with 256M. I've plenty of memory, so let's try fixed mode, with 256M. ...it made no difference to the /proc/mtrr output, and the problem still happens.

(There is also an "ASMT resolution" option in the bios, which is "enabled". Google isn't helping me much here, but some explanation is here and it doesn't seem to be to do with video memory: http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=938473&page=12)

(I've been holding off on posting this for the past week, in the hope I'd resolve the problem. But unfortunately I haven't yet. I guess fiddling with /proc/mtrr directly is needed, but I don't have time to investigate that currently.)

Email on ubuntu (exim)

When I installed real player a few months back I noticed it had installed exim. I thought that highly suspicious - what was real player planning to do behind my back? Well, I thought I'd try removing it today, and discovered realplay depends on lsb-core (linux standards), and lsb-core depends on exim. realplay was innocent.

The magic command to remove exim is:
dpkg --purge --ignore-depends=lsb-core --ignore-depends=mailx exim4 exim4-base exim4-config exim4-daemon-light

But after doing that I changed my mind. As I discovered I couldn't send any email from commandline. Did somebody just say "Duh!". Well I was hoping I could then configure something to tell it to use SMTP directly to my ISP. (Why do I want to send email from commandline? Well, yes to test programs, but much more importantly that that I realized my system has been sending me warning emails and they've been undeliverable, so for instance the daily mail telling me about my RAID problem has not been reaching me...)

Anyway, lsb-core and mailx were screaming at me that their dependencies were missing, so re-installing exim was just a matter of telling them to re-install. Then the key step I had been missing was this:
sudo dpkg-reconfigure exim4-config

Still not easy, but it becomes much clearer if you know that what exim calls a "smarthost" is what the rest of the world calls "my ISP"! I.e. in my case I told it to use a smarthost for outgoing email, no incoming email, and for the smarthost I just looked in my thunderbird configuration for the SMTP server and gave it that address. It also kept asking me for a default domain and I chose "dcook.org" for everything.

Seems to have done the job!

Oh, the raid problem? It is just complaining I didn't set up swap as RAID. This was deliberate, see my original post on raid setup. At the time I wrote that I didn't understand the issues involved regarding RAID and swap. But if the system is complaining I will set it up as raid to make the message go away.

Alternative http logins from firefox?

Open source works on the "scratch-an-itch" principle, and so there should be solutions for the itches that developers have. So I must be using the wrong keywords as I just cannot track down the firefox plugin I need.

When I build a web site I need to login as different users. E.g. a normal permissions users, and an admin-level user. I've input both in, firefox is storing both of them, but it only ever offers me one. Ironically way back when Firefox was called the Mozilla Application Suite it did have this - when two or more usernames had been saved it would pop-up a dialog letting you choose. Firefox 1.5 was a two steps forward, one step back kind of release in that respect. (Of course Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 were both "0.6 steps forward, 0.55 step backward" releases, with the kicker that you need to waste time finding replacement plugins, but that is a rant for another time.)

Help! Please? There must be some firefox plugins that does this simple task.

P.S. I'm also keen to have some function that will allow me to selectively remove certain http authentications, but not the blanket "Miscellaneous|Clear Private Data|HTTP Authentication" option of the Web Developer plugin.