I've had to work with the git version control system extensively in the past few weeks (due to the proliferation of projects I'm involved in that use it.). I found the standard "git status" output to be far too wordy and annoying, and sought a way to improve it and make it more subversion like. "man git-status" helped with this: one can write git status -s to get an output similar to svn status (or svn st for short) and git status -s . to restrict the output only to files below the current directory (and not get the ../… files). Enjoy!

I am sure there is billions or more people who already done that but I needed this quickly for my project and was not feeling googling around :

some time after mandriva 2010.1 has been released, i'm now pleased to report that perl has been updated to 5.12.1, all cpan modules are up-to-date (including padre 0.68) or bugs have been reported upstream... and parrot 2.6.0 is currently building.

the perl 5.12.0 - 5.12.1 upgrade was really smooth: no patch to rediff, reapply, etc. that's definitely a good thing for perl maintainers to have a stable series with only critical fixes going in. i've already said it, but thanks again to p5p!

GUADEC 2010 in Den Haag is going very well so far even if so many people are missing this year. I hope you did not miss the best talk so far! If you don't want to miss other talks, live streams are available on GUADEC website.

The major GNOME announce yesterday was GNOME 3.0 being postpone to the next release, in March 2011.

People seem mostly happy with it and as you can see on the following photo, they still love release team!

Well it's taken me a little time to commit this work, but here it is. This is the fruits of my labour from the KDE Multimedia Sprint earlier this year.

As well as taking part in various discussions, I was able to spend some time cooking up a UI to control the configuration of PulseAudio and the various cards attached.When adding PulseAudio support to the various parts of KDE that need it (Phonon, KMix), there was an important part of the puzzle missing: a card profile selector, and a sink/source port selector. I had always intended to include this functionality somewhere, but the KMix framework didn't really allow for it neatly (I could have created a separate dialog of course but it didn't quite feel right).

The eagle eyed readers may have seen a sneak preview of this feature when looking at the KDE-specific help page I wrote up on the PulseAudio website. So I give you this: the Speaker Setup tab in System Settings.

Speaker Setup GUI

The little icon in the middle is your user icon, so you'll see this differently unless your a weird stalker type and have set your icon to mine :s

The various drop downs allow fully control over all cards that are attached to the system. The buttons on the main pane allow you to test each speaker separately. In order to test the speakers, libcanberra is used. libcanberra is an implementation of the Free Desktop Sound Theme specification. It allows this test to be implemented with minimum hassle and I'm not personally interested in reinventing the wheel, hence the use of this library and the additional dependency.  Some people dislike using libcanberra in KDE (as was apparent from some discussions at the Multimedia Sprint), but I believe the reasons were often personal ones and not related to the usefulness of the code. If someone really wants to factor this out, they can but I have no interest in doing so and will prefer to use the existing implementation whenever possible (and this would include any future implementation I may or may not do with regards to support the Sound Theme Specification in KDE (or maybe Qt) directly)

When a 5.1 surround system is presented, the GUI is obviously a bit more advanced:

Speaker Setup GUI (5.1)

For those naysayers, I've tried my best to ensure that the compile will work fine without PulseAudio installed. It should also degrade gracefully when it is compiled with PA support, but PA is not configured to be used at runtime. The whole tab will simply not be available.

There is still one small problem left in that I don't handle disconnection/reconnection yet. This causes the GUI to crash if the PA server is stopped and restarted. This is not typically something that happens, but it's still something I will fix shortly all the same.

This code is now in trunk (r1154776) so feel free to try it out and report other bugs etc. This GUI is also included in Mandriva Cooker (I did want to include it prior to 2010.1 release, but the timing didn't work out - tho' it probably would have been OK considering the delays that cropped up in the release process). I expect this functionality to be included in any updated/backported versions of KDE for 2010.1.

For reference, in case you didn't spot it yourself, this GUI was heavily inspired by the gnome-speaker-setup utility.

It has been 10 years since I joined a small company called MandrakeSoft at that time.

When I first arrived, I was asked "What do you want to work on ?" and I said "I don't know, I use GNOME at home..." and you know the story ;)

Now is a good time to change, so I'm leaving Mandriva at the end of this month (I'm already off, so don't search me on irc / mail ).

It has been a pleasure to work everybody in Mandriva company and community.

Here are some Mandriva 2010 Spring reviews I found on the web thanks to http://www.tuxmachines.org/ :

• Mandriva 2010 Spring with GNOME : http://g33q.co.za/2010/07/11/review-mandriva-2010-spring-gnome-with-screenshots/
• Mandriva 2010 Spring with KDE :  http://g33q.co.za/2010/07/12/review-mandriva-2010-spring-kde-with-screenshots/
• Ars Technica revizw Mandriva 2010 Spring : http://arstechnica.com/open-source/reviews/2010/07/mandriva-rescued-from-bankruptcy-releases-new-version.ars
• Mandriva 2010 Spring review for newbies : http://mandrivachronicles.blogspot.com/2010/07/mandriva-2010-spring-review-for-newbies.html

The relocation company will help me for finding a place to live, bank account, etc. However I need help for some more technical questions, like which broadband provider (and mobile but this can wait) should I subscribe.

Orange is out of question because of their fair use policy stating that if I use too much my connection (for example by listening to Orange's own Liveradio or downloading large files) they may either reduce the speed or suspend your service and/or possibly close your account.

What a lovely definition of unlimited, and they don't even tell anything about a warning before closing the account...

Currently the shortlist is TalkTalk and O2 (even if it seems some O2 modems need to be rebooted very often to get WiFi back since they updated their firmware to fix a big security issue), but I did not yet check all offers (like Virgin or Sky in case I am eligible).

And what about smaller ones like Andrews & Arnold Ltd which offers static IP, IPv6, ... but has traffic limit and would imply I don't do big checkouts or download iso at daytime (which should be fine except during vacations).

Any opinion on this ?

So, I finally did it – I’ve uploaded a mostly working driver for the Intel Poulsbo (GMA 500) graphics chipset to the RPM Fusion repository for Fedora 13. As of right now, it’s in non-free updates-testing; it’ll be moved to the main updates repo at some point. To install it, set up RPM Fusion repos according to the instructions, then run this command:

yum –enablerepo=rpmfusion-nonfree-updates-testing install xorg-x11-drv-psb

You may also want to do this (it’ll make it work even when a new kernel comes out and Fusion doesn’t yet have a kmod-psb package for it):

yum –enablerepo=rpmfusion-nonfree-updates-testing install akmod-psb

Then just reboot, and usually it should work. Remember, you can get an mplayer build with video playback acceleration support which will let you play HD videos smoothly from my video-experimental repo: details in this post.

If you have trouble, check what kernel -devel package(s) is/are installed. Depending on your exact hardware – many Poulsbo-sporting machines don’t actually support PAE – you may also need to manually install (with yum) the i586 kernel-devel package instead of the i686-PAE kernel-devel package that the dependencies may pull in.

If it works, but 3D acceleration and VA-API support don’t seem to be working, check the permissions on /dev/dri/card0; they should be 666 (rw-rw-rw-). If not, add this section to /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

Section “DRI”
Mode 0666
EndSection

Here’s some system-specific tweaks:

If you want to have an external monitor side-by-side with the laptop display, you’ll want to add a Screen section to /etc/X11/xorg.conf that looks much like the one in this file. You need to combine the dimensions of the displays you’ll have connected appropriately. For instance, I have a 1600×768 panel in my laptop and the external monitor would be a 1680×1050 screen, which would be to the right of the laptop panel. So I add together the horizontal dimensions – 1600+1680 = 3280 – and use the tallest single vertical dimension – 1050 – and wind up with a size of 3280×1050. That’s what I put in the ‘Virtual’ lines in the Display section. If your laptop display was 1024×768 and your external monitor 1280×1024, you’d do 2304×1024, and so on. Then you can configure the displays with gnome-display-properties or krandrtray or xrandr once X starts up.

If you’re using a Sony Vaio P (first generation), you’ll want the kernel parameters ‘mem=1900MB nohz=off’ to make everything work smoothly (this is nothing to do with the Poulsbo chipset, just other quirks of the Vaio P; I’m not sure if they’re needed on the second-gen P).

In case you’re someone who reads my blog but uses another distro, the driver is still packaged in Mandriva and should work out-of-the-box on 2010 and 2010 Spring (you may need to install additional packages from non-free to get 3D and video playback acceleration support, I’m not entirely sure, and I’m not sure how well it works on 2010 Spring). Ubuntu users will want to see this Wiki page and the recent pages of this forum thread for instructions and info. I’m not sure about other distros – do feel free to add info in the comments.

Note that this is entirely something I do in my spare time, and is not an official Red Hat project of any kind. Nothing to do with it is in any way representative of, or endorsed or supported by, Red Hat or the Fedora project.

Edit: I totally forgot to include credits in this post, very rude of me! I’m sorry. Thanks go to Olivier Blin at Mandriva, who did a lot of the work of porting the driver to work with X server 1.7 and later, and to the Ubuntu poulsbo community who did some more work, particularly Yves de Muyter who solved some thorny issues with EXA support. I really just packaged up the stuff other people have made for Fedora.

Since some days, i installed the WPML plugin which allow to have multilingual support for WordPress. You can switch from one language to another one from the widget on the left side, or the links at the bottom of the pages.

• By default the site will be displayed in english. It will contains most of my technicals and Linux/Mandriva related posts
• the french site will be accessible by http://www.linux-wizard.net/fr/ URL. There will have some technicals relating stuffs, but most of the time you will find only my personal stuff.
• Technicals documentations that i will upload to my blog will mostly be in French.

We’ve created a nice program with day (or evening) trips for GUADEC. On monday evening, a visit to Madurodam, on Tuesday an Amsterdam tour and on Thursday a “spouses trip” to Rotterdam. Read all about it here and sign up before Friday the 23rd!

This Sunday at 16:00 CEST we have another volunteer meetup at Revspace The Hague. Be there and help make GUADEC a success!

» Plaats op eKudos

As I said in another post, I was invited to Campus Party Colombia to give a talk about KDE SC 4 and to do a workshop about OpenAM. The event went really well and I had lots of fun the whole week. The talk about KDE, althought I had a LOT of problems to getting it going, it ended very well and attendants liked it a lot. The available chairs were all taken (around 30 - 35) and there were at least four or five more persons standing up watching the presentation. The name of the talk was "KDE SC 4: Breaking Paradigms". I made a little short intro video to start the talk, with the objective of showing attendants what they could spect to see during my presentation.

Here is the video:


During the talk, I did a broad definition of what the KDE Software compilation is and which are their components and applications. Then I started to show each of the Plasma Workspaces, some of kwin's 3D effects, the desktop activities, doing demos of all of that. I also showed some videos of stuff that I didn't had how to demo there, like Plasma mobile running on a Nokia N900 cellphone, Qt multi-touch support and prototype stuff like Plasma Media Center.

After that I did a quick recap of the KDE platform, talking about the main components of it: Solid, Phonon, Akonadi and Nepomuk, explaining their function and how they make a developer's life easier. Here I did some other demos of Nepomuk, like tagging files and then searching for them on dolphin or krunner, saving searches as folders or looking for a recent accessed file on dolphin's time-line.

Next I demo'ed some applications, like Amarok, rekonq, kopete, gwenview, aKular, ksnapshot and yakuake, although I mentioned some others that I coiuldn't show because of time constraints. I also talked about KDE on Windows, for which I had a demo prepared, but as I said before, I had some problems at the beginning of the talk and I had to switch computers at the last moment, leaving my Windows VM on other machine.

And leaving the best for last, I talked about the KDE community: who we are what we have achieved and how someone can contribute in different aspects different from coding (translating, bug reporting testing and promoting), which many times is seen as the only way of contributing to an open source project.

On this link you can find the talk (in spanish).

I want to thank to some users at the KDE forums and kde-promo list, whom gave me some really neat ideas of what to show or how to organize the talk, it was a really useful help :)

The OpenAM workshop went really well too, it was also full and was marked as one of the most attractive talks on Campus Party and because of that, it was broadcasted live over the Internet :) here are the recordings Campus Party uploaded to youtube if anyone wants to watch them (in spanish):

First part:


Second part:


I gave some introduction to what Single Sign On (SSO) is, the problematic it solves in an enterprise, which are the advantages of using a SSO solution, related security concepts like authentication, authorization, auditing and identity federation. Then I presented OpenAM and talked about how it can address all of the problematic that was exposed before, it's installation requirements and demo'ed some of it's features. At the end, the attendants did a workshop that walked them through all the process of installing OpenAM and configuring it to protect a Java web application and doing SSO with another one.

Also on this link you can find the talk (in spanish too).

There were also some really nice talks that I enjoyed watching, like the one from Steve Wozniak (one of Apple's founders) and another about client-side pentesting. You can find all of the talks on Campus TV website.

In conclusion, it was a really fun event and I hope to be invited again next year :D

Brazil's copyright law forbids using DRM to block fair use

Chile becomes first country to guarantee net neutrality

Software Now Un-Patentable In New Zealand

What is your country is doing for you ?

The second release candidate release of KDE 4.5 was released last week and again thanks to neoclust we have packages for Mandriva 2010 Spring since the beginning of this week. Packages for both i586 and x86_64 are available now. Here are the upgrade instructions:

First, Add the KDE 4.5 RC2 repository, for 32 bit systems use the following urpmi command (as root):

urpmi.addmedia kde-4.5rc2 ftp://ftp.kde.org/pub/kde/unstable/4.4.92/Mandriva/2010.1/i586/

You can use another mirror if you want. For 64 bits systems use the following urpmi command (as root):

urpmi.addmedia kde-4.5rc2 ftp://ftp.kde.org/pub/kde/unstable/4.4.92/Mandriva/2010.1/x86_64/

Then update the repositories and download all the packages before actually installing them to make sure that the installation is possible (as root):
urpmi --auto-update --auto-select --test

When all packages finish downloading and you see a message at the end saying that the installation is possible, you can now run the same command without the --test parameter to perform the installation (as root):

urpmi --auto-update --auto-select

After the packages installation finishes, logout and log back in, That's it.

Attention, une fois n’est pas coutume, je vais faire un post très personnel. Donc Linuxiens et informaticiens, passez votre chemin !

Aujourd’hui lors de mon rendez-vous avec ma psychothérapeute, j’ai eu droit a une grande révélation : j’ai un comportement de fille et je suis une fille qui ne se connait pas ! Quelques exemples/preuves :

1. En effet, je suis capable de faire du shopping, et n’ai aucun soucis à faire du shopping avec une fille et même à la conseiller : il semblerait que j’ai très bon goût d’ailleurs
2. Pareil pour la déco, tu veux refaire la déco de ton salon ? demande moi. Je peux même t’accompagner et t’aider à choisir ce qu’il faut. Par contre pour le côté bricolage …
3. je garde un souvenir impérissable des Harlequins de ma mère que je lisais …
4. Je n’ai pas de référence masculine ! Ben oui, j’ai été élevé par ma mère et ma grand-mère. Ma référence « masculine » la plus proche fut le curé de ma paroisse … c’est pour dire !
5. J’aime discuter, parler des problèmes, écouter les gens : en gros je suis la super bonne copine avec qui on peut discuter, se confier et avoir des conseils à la clés ( avec point de vue de mec et de femme en même temps ) !
6. Mon film préféré est et reste Quand Harry rencontre Sally : dans le genre comédie sentimentale. J’ai aussi un faible pour Ghost et Dirty Dancing, mais je préfère La Fièvre du Samedi Soir ne serait-ce que pour la bande son En plus récent, on peut mettre sans problème dans ma short-list Les poupées russes … la scène à la gare …
7. Qu’est ce que je fais lorsque je suis déprimé ? Je m’enfile de la glace ( par bac d’1 Litre ) ou des bonbons ( par boite d’1kg ) …
8. Parfums et déodorants préférés ? Vanille-Fraise ou Framboise en parfum, et pour les déodorants Ushuaïa Grenade, Papaye ou Pulpe de fruit de la passion. Mais pour sauver la face, j’ai un Axe qui traine dans ma salle de bain et que je met de temps en temps …
9. J’avais une big collection de Shojo dans ma bibliothèque. J’ai pratiquement tout revendu il y a quelques années, mais je continue à en lire sur le net …
10. Je suis plutôt du genre : « allez on en discute et on essaie de résoudre le problème », que « vas y laisse moi tranquille, cela me saoule »
11. Je reste un inconditionnel du livre Les hommes viennent de Mars et les femmes de Venus ! Il a même été cité dans Sex & The City. Oui, je regarde Sex & the City, Le destin de Lisa, Un gars une fille …
12. Après Science & Vie, les magazines sur lesquels je me jette dans une salle d’attente sont … les magazines féminins
13. Mes blogs perso  préférés ? Sexactu de Maïa Mazaurette, Leax ‘Adventures, et un tout nouveau blog que je viens de découvrir : Le bocal du poisson

Mais bon ça va, j’ai aussi un côté mec, et non je ne suis pas un métrosexuel ! Mon but, maintenant que je suis célibataire, sera de renforcer mon côté masculin

מועדון הקוד הפתוח התל-אביבי (תלוקס) ייפגש שוב כדי לשמוע את הרצאתו של רם רחום אודות GarlicSim ביום חמישי, 22 ביולי, 2010 ב-19:00 במכללת שנקר ברמת גן (רח' אנה פרנק 12) חדר 300 (שימו לב לשינוי במיקום ובזמן מהפגישות הקודמות - אנו ניפגש ביום חמישי, במכללת שנקר, ובשעה 19:00). ניתן למצוא מפה עם הוראות הגעה באתר של מכללת שנקר. פרטים נוספים, מפות להגעה, וכו ניתן למצוא בוויקי.

הנוכחות בהרצאה היא בחינם ולא נדרשת הרשמה מראש.

במידה שישנן בעיות, אל תהססו ליצור קשר עם המארגן.

סיכום ההרצאה

GarlicSim הינה תשתית עבור הדמיות (סימולציות) ממוחשבות הכתובה בפייתון. היא מהווה פרוייקט קוד פתוח שאפתני בתחום המחשוב המדעי, ובפרט בזה של הדמיות ממוחשבות. בכוונתה להטוות מחדש את הדרך בה אנשים חושבים על הדמיות ממוחשבות, וליצור סטנדרט חדש לדרך שבה יוצרים ומשתמשים בהדמיות.

GarlicSim הינה פלטפורמה לכתיבת, הרצת, וניתוח סימולציות. היא מספיק כוללנית כדי לטפל בכל סוג של הדמיה: פיזיקה, תורת המשחקים, התפשטות מחלות, אלקטרוניקה, וכו. ייתכן שאתם תוהים מה משותף לכל ההדמיות האלה. אנו ננסה לענות על שאלה זו בהרצאה. אנו נראה דוגמאות של הדמיות אחדות ב-GarlicSim ושל כלים שהיא מספקת להרצתן וניתוחן.

אודות המרצה

רם רחום הוא מפתח פייתון. הוא עובד בעיקר על GarlicSim, אבל ידוע גם כמי שיצר את PythonTurtle, על מנת להפיץ את פייתון לאלפי ילדים ומבוגרים ברחבי העולם.

אנו תמיד מחפשים מרצים שיתנדבו לתת הרצאות בנושאים שונים הקשורים לקוד-הפתוח ולמחשבים. במידה שאתם מעוניינים לתת הרצאה, או שיש לכם הצעה להרצאה שמעניינת אתכם, נשמח לשמוע ממכם.

Freecell Solver version 3.2.0 has been released. It is available in the form of a source tarball from the download page. We hope to release a Windows binary soon.

This release implements the --depth-tests-order flag that allows varying the tests' order based on the depth which allows for interesting (and faster) searches. Several new presets : -l the-iglu-cabal , -l foss-nessy and -l tea-for-two have been added , the latter optimised for two freecell deals. There are also several bug-fixes, optimisations and code cleanups.

There are just a few days left for this cool event that many Gnomers are awaiting since time ago. I am absolutely sure that we will have a great time. And as a 'tradition' we will have the football match, so if you love/like this sport please come in and join us. Write your name down in the players list we've got so far.

Are you going to GUADEC but waiting a few more days to be part of this match? Please don't! Do not leave this chance, What do you say? "Yes, I want to be part of this event".

Istanbull, Turkey - 2008

As now I’m using Netbeans, I had issues with key based authentication for CVS project in Netbeans. That’s why I decide to import my CVS project to SVN. At some point, as the SVN repository was on my own personal computer, I decide to move it to a public server I had, but only allow SSH access to it. So here is the procedure to move a SVN repository to another SVN server, and only allow svn+ssh access ( no webdav, no network svnserve access ) under Mandriva.

1. On your old SVN server, you have to dump the entire SVN repository : svnadmin dump /path/to/your/repository > /tmp/repository.svn_dump
2. Now copy the dump file somewhere on the new SVN server. You may want to use scp if your SSH key based authentication is working correctly. For example : scp /tmp/repository.svn_dump user@new-svn-server:/tmp
3. Once done, you may want to delete the dump file on the old server and eventually delete also the old SVN repo
4. On your new server, install the SVN server package and its associated tools : urpmi subversion-server subversion-tools
5. check that svnserve is not started at boot by xinetd. For this check /etc/xinetd.d/svnserve configuration file and check that you have disable = yes as follows : # default: off # description: svnserve is the server part of Subversion. service svnserve { disable             = yes port                = 3690 socket_type         = stream protocol            = tcp wait                = no user                = svn server              = /usr/bin/svnserve server_args         = -i -r /var/lib/svn/repositories }
6. Now create the repository tree on the new server : svnadmin create /var/lib/svn/repositories/
7. Import the dumped repository file in the new SVN repository : svnadmin load /var/lib/svn/repositories/ < /tmp/repository.svn_dump
8. If the importation is successful, now you should ensure that the users connecting with SSH will have write access to the repository. For this add the users to the svn group : usermod -G svn -a user
9. Now add a default ACL for the group to the repository giving read, write and execute ( rwX ) rights to all members of the svn group : setfacl -R -m d:g:svn:rwX /var/lib/svn/repositories/
10. Check that from a remote computer you can list the content of the repository : svn list svn+ssh://user@new-svn-server/var/lib/svn/repositories

Happy coding with Subversion

Ressources :

• Converting a CVS repository to a SVN one with cvs2svn : http://cvs2svn.tigris.org/cvs2svn.html
• Moving a SVN repository to another server : http://www.petefreitag.com/item/665.cfm
• SVN cheat sheet : http://www.abbeyworkshop.com/howto/misc/svn01/
• How to manage different projects under SVN : http://subversion.apache.org/faq.html#multi-proj
• SVN reference book : http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.1/ch01s07.html
• French howto about SVN usage : http://wiki.mandriva.com/fr/subversion
• How to use SVN with Eclipse : http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os-ecl-subversion/
• Guided tour of subversion with Netbeans : http://netbeans.org/kb/docs/ide/subversion.html
• SVN+SSH usage with Netbeans : http://wiki.netbeans.org/FaqSubversionSSH
• Why you should use branches with SVN : http://webmonkeyswithlaserbeams.wordpress.com/2008/08/26/subversion-branch-management/
• Best practices for managing releases with Subversion : http://www.karlkatzke.com/best-practices-for-managing-releases-with-subversion/
• Creating and managing releases branches : http://docs.jboss.org/process-guide/en/html/svn-admin.html
• Notes on branches management with subversion : http://soniahamilton.wordpress.com/2009/02/24/notes-on-branch-management-wit-subversion/

While the default Windows implementation of Freecell only supports playing Freecell with four initial freecells, it can be played with any number of them. In order to make the game more challenging, some people are playing it with a fewer number of freecells.

As of today, the Freecell FAQ says that "With two freecells, there are at least 24,161 solvable deals [in the Microsoft 32,000 deals].". However, at the course of researching those layouts using Freecell Solver (after constructing a solver configuration optimised for solving two-freecell deals), we have found out that more deals can be provably solved.

Below one can find the report about the solvability of 2-freecell deals. The executive summary is that:

1. 25,367 deals were successfully solved.
2. 6,600 deals are provably unsolvable.
3. The other 33 deals are "intractable" - meaning my computer ran out of resources trying to solve them (I limited the range of iterations to 8,200,000, but some of them were killed by the "out-of-memory" daemon earlier).

Solvable

• By using the "tea-for-two" meta-moves preset: 25,143.

• By using -to 01ABCDE : 172.

• By using -l foss-nessy : 38.

• By using the extended range (8,200,000 iterations) -to 01ABCDE scan: grep -l '^This game is solv' *.sol | wc -l yields: 14.

• Total: 25,367.

Definitely unsolvable

• Fully traversed in the atomic moves preset: 6,513.

• Found using grep -l '^I could not solve' *.sol | xargs grep -h '^Total number of states checked' | grep 1200000 | wc -l.

• Fully traversed in the extended-range atomic moves preset: 87.

• Found using grep -l '^I could not solve' *.sol | xargs grep -h '^Total number of states checked' | grep -v 8200000 | wc -l.

• Total: 6,600.

Intractable

• After the atomic scan: 172.

• Found using grep -l '^I could not solve' *.sol | xargs grep -l '^Total number of states checked is 1200000\.' | wc -l

• After the foss-nessy scan: 134.

• After the 8,200,000 range atomic scan:

• Killed by the Out-of-memory Killer: ls | perl -lne 'print if -z' | xargs ls -l | wc -l : 17.

• Reached the iterations limit:

• grep -l '^I could not solve' *.sol | xargs grep -l '^Total number of states checked is 8200000\.' | wc -l: 16.

• Total: 33.

Conclusion and Future Directions

The 33 deals that we could not determine whether they were unsolvable or not are: 891, 982, 3129, 5435, 6090, 7214, 7728, 9034, 11266, 12038, 12064, 13659, 13705, 14262, 14445, 14790, 15804, 15957, 16322, 16462, 17184, 17684, 17760, 17880, 18446, 19671, 19678, 20792, 21779, 26124, 27799, 28188, 29577. We would appreciate any further insights about whether they can be solved or not and one option would be to use Freecell solver to solve them on a 64-bit machine with more memory available than what I have.

In the future, we'd like to work on the "States calculated from the original" feature which should reduce memory consumption considerably, especially on 64-bit architectures. After reading the report of Kevin Atkinson's and Shari Holstege's solver it seems that we can also save space by re-using old positions that have been determined to be dead-ends, so we'd like to explore that. We'd also like to explore using an on-disk storage to store the states / positions such as Tokyo Cabinet. That or we can try adding a bigger swap partition.