Author Archives: Adam

Waiting for power

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Are we so far gone down the electronic entertainment rabbit hole that people have forgotten what else to do?

A few times recently we’ve had power cuts and I’ve observed a number of people sitting there in front of the hi-fi/TV/PC/games console/whatever waiting for it to come back on. Just sitting there. Waiting. Waiting for the electronic entertainment to start again. Sometimes for an hour or 2.

My god. Am I the only person that knows about things called books and other non-power dependent activities?

Windows is Shit

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Shocker 😉

Really, it is. I haven’t used Windows properly in a few months now, I’ve been using Ubuntu. But today I had to. I have to set up an Apache server on a Solaris machine at uni, via ssh. Compile it yourself etc and run it on a weird port that has been assigned to me. Cool. Done. Except it doesn’t look like they’ve allowed access to the port from outside of the uni network so I can’t see my server working unless I’m there. I can do all the set up from home, I just can’t see the results. Nice one.

So I was in uni today and I decided to check it out. Yep, it’s running. There were problems with the permissions so I set about fixing them. I could ssh in to the server and change this but I decided to look at a few other things too. Changing some of the config requires a text editor. This is a university Windows network, I can’t install stuff so I had to use notepad which can’t understand Unix file endings and it turns all Unix files to unreadable mush. Is it that hard to make a text editor that can detect the kind of line ending? Or are Microsoft just being awkward?

Also on these machines, the default browser is unsurprisingly Internet Explorer. Ick. What do you mean, “popup blocker”, “block images from…”? No such luck. Ugly ugly ugly. The Mozilla suite is there, but it’s the whole suite: click… wait… wait… splash screen… wait… wait… get bored… wait… Ping there it is. No Firefox here. In fairness, Firefox probably wasn’t really ready when these machines were installed. The presence of Mozilla is a reasonable improvement over recent years but this isn’t my biggest gripe, it’s the fact that the preferences and bookmarks aren’t persistent. Everytime I log out they disappear. Annoyed.

So anyway, I’m using IE and it sucks ass big time. It takes me ages to do anything because it feels slow, awkward and swamped in adverts. God, how I love Firefox by comparison. Also as I don’t have my own set of bookmarks, I can’t find anything and half of the module links on the uni website point at the wrong place.

Also context sensitive menus have been disabled on my open windows on the taskbar. Can a Windows system be so easily hamstrung by right-clicking open windows in the taskbar? Is there such a disaster waiting to befall Windows 2000 that I’m not allowed to right-click and close my browser windows using their taskbar entries?

I know most of this stuff is just to do with the fact that the uni button monkeys have disabled certain functionality to harden the system and it’s reasonable to expect IE as a default browser and to be unable to install stuff on a organisation’s machine, but damn. I so hated using Windows with it’s uncomfortable feel and crap software choices that I gave up and went home after an hour.

It seems the only thing I could do using the uni Windows machines that I couldn’t do better under Ubuntu at home was use the uni Outlook Exchange webmail faciility. Using Firefox on Windows or Linux means that I have to supply my username and password everytime I want to read an email, open a folder or indeed do anything at all. Even though I save the u/n and pass, it still asks me every time I do anything. Firefox 0.92 and 0.93 were ok if I recall correctly but since v1.0 I’ve had this problem, though I’m told this is to do with the Outlook Exhange server configuration at the uni.

This is as much a rant about the uni configuration as it is about Windows, but I’ll be avoiding the uni computers in future, or at least taking my Ubuntu laptop.

Webcams and PHP assignments

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Hmm I seem to have gone from 3-a-day topic based posts to once every few days, all-in-one posts. Maybe I’m getting lazy, or maybe it’s 3:30am again and I realise that I have something to blog about when really I should go to sleep and wait until the morning.

Well my PHP assignment is going a bit wrong and I have to submit it by 7pm today (today in the after ‘it’s after 00:00am’ sense, not the ‘new day when you wake up’ sense…)

I have to create an Apache Log Viewer thingy which takes user input via an html form for start and end days and times and then produces wonderfully detailed reports on various things from the logs. Which is fine except I don’t really know PHP and I’m a weak programmer. Plus we haven’t been taught more than basic syntax, commenting and variable manipulation in this module.

So, my thing is going ok, we were given an extension because several facilities weren’t working that we were supposed to use and I have all of my form and log file reading working ok except for one thing.

My form values are being POSTed fine across to the results page which does all of the validation before doing any calculations and whatever on them. I can echo them out no problem, except that as soon as I try to assign $_post[“whatever”] to any kind of variable or manipulate it with any kind of function, all I get is the same values every time, no matter what I enter into the form:

01
01
00
01
01
00
00

This is just the output of me echoing the variables’ content after trying to do anything with them. Same every time regardless of what I enter. The first 3 are the start values for day of current month, hour and minutes, the second 3 are the same for end times and the final one is a report interval in minutes. I have to produce separate reports for each interval of the specified size for the time between the start and end times. Apart from all being wrong, the minute based ones are 00 while the rest are 01.

I don’t know what the hell is wrong. All I have done with them before this is check that they are in the right range (day is not less than 1 or more than number of days in the month, minutes between 0 and 59 etc), I can still echo the posted variables correctly after this, as soon I try to do anything else they go weird and I get the same values as above each time.

I need to put them into 2 digit day or time format, eg 00-09 and then 10+ and so on but I can’t touch them because I get the above output, I can’t think why this could be, unless it’s because they’re strings and I have to cast them to ints, longs or some kind of date/time type, but I thought PHP did this for you. It would also be nice to find a checktime function, like checkdate that just checks that your values are valid times and formats them according to your whims. I’ll have to play with strftime more. Until I can solve my weird variable problem and format my days and times to be 2 digit I can’t do any date/time analysis or create separate time based reports, which means I’ll struggle for a D. Shit. Maybe I have this all wrong.

On another note, I’ve been playing with my webcam today. I’ve never really bothered with it much before because I hadn’t had much luck with it under Linux until I started using Ubuntu, even though it is supported. It’s a Philips webcam so how much longer it remains that way I don’t know.

Well anyway, I wanted to record a video clip. Couldn’t. XawTV will display the stream but won’t save it to disk. Back to Windows to give the old driver CD a whirl. Installed the utils that came with the camera way back when and recorded an extremely long clip without a problem, no dropped frames or anything, apart from that I had let it run too long and the software stopped recording at 4GB. It occured to me that this was a home-user product from the Win98 era, quick check on FAT32 file sizes and yep I was right. Max file size is 4GB. Obviously to prevent the software hanging and the OS having to intervene to stop itself going down too, the video capture app cuts the file off at 4GB. Shame, what I wanted to record would have been about 45GB. Don’t know why it didn’t get the max file size from the OS or the filesystem type. Win2k had just come out at the time (ie NTFS – 16 terrabyte max file size). There are no newer versions of this software available either unless I’m paying I guess and it’s an OEM product, probably tied to the camera model like some optical drive manufacturers do with copies of Nero.

So I’ll have to put more work in on XawTV, I’d much prefer to use Linux anyway, Windows was just a case of having to make it work quickly. I just want to be able to use it as a cheap and nasty ‘capture a moment’ type device that is easily portable with no file size problems.

After this I decided to play with setting up a webcam page on my desktop’s Apache server. I’ve been interested by this idea for a long time. I came across some useful links by chance today. I used the webcam utility (can’t find a link, you try searching google for linux webcam utility) and this tutorial and I was up in minutes. Delighted.

Whether the drinkycam ever goes live to the world is another question. I don’t really fancy having my every move publicly available (unless there was money or sex involved…) and I don’t want to have to remember to turn it around everytime I get dressed/undressed, go to sleep, pick my nose, scratch my arse or whatever people do without thinking about it when nobody is around.

In the mean time, I have to go to sleep, have a look at the Video 4 Linux resources and the Webcam Howto.

Night.

Guilt…

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I just discovered that What The Hack, for which I have a ticket, coincides with my girlfriend’s birthday, the first one for either of us since we got together. We’ve not been together that long so I’ve not really known her birthday until recently. Thankfully she’s not laying the law down to me and at least I can try to work out what to do. I’m not sure whether the ticket is refundable or transferrable to someone else but I would feel terrible if I missed her birthday. I think she’s willing to forgive my discovery if I buy her a car 😉

This reminds me a lot of the scene from Trainspotting in the nightclub where Tommy is telling Spud about his girlfriend Lizzy going nuts at him for forgetting her birthday and buying a ticket for an Iggy Pop gig which is on the same night. The scene is intercut with shots of Lizzy in the nightclub toilets talking to Spud’s girlfriend Gail explaining the same situation. The scene closes with Lizzy and Gail returning from the toilet and interrupting Tommy and Spud’s conversation by saying, “What yoo talkin’ aboot?”, they look nervously at each other and reply, “Football. What yoo talkin’ aboot?” to which they smugly respond with, “Shopping.” Sadly this is the penultimate milestone on the road to the end of Tommy’s relationship with Lizzy, the beginning of a downward spiral that results in Tommy becoming a heroin addict like his friends and ultimately his death.

Hopefully the same will not come of me.

Other people’s blogs and my own sanity

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It seems other people are saying more interesting things than me at the moment.

Firstly, Ade went on a course at Microsoft’s UK HQ in Reading on single sign on and *nix to Active Directory authentication etc. Which is something I would like to be able to deploy using free/open tools.

Also Aq reminded me that hotkeys provides similar functionality to lineak. Which is that it makes those extra Internet or multimedia keys on your keyboard do something useful. I’ve used lineak for this before with decent results, but lineak’s gui config frontends are not in Ubuntu at the moment and the lineak team has stopped supporting the Gnome frontend, leaving only the KDE one (or text editor).

He also has an excellent post about the poster campaign by the Conservative Party (aka the Tories, or Tory (singular)) for the forthcoming UK political elections. The Conservative Party are focusing on several contentious issues for their election campaign, one of which is that of immigration. These posters have caused enough outrage that they are being vandalised to great comic effect. Aq has produced a little web app to enable you to create your own Tory poster. Here is mine:

Tory Poster

Disclaimer: No Tories were hurt in the making of this poster and no offence is intended to genuine victims. Humour style a la Doug Stanhope, not to be taken literally and I don’t care about your political opinions, I will not approve any screaming insults in my comments.

This brings up an issue that worries me a lot. With the flames of racial tension being fanned by several highly read, sensationalist tabloid newspapers screaming about the issue of immigration, the Conservative Party, as the mainstream right-wing political party and nearest rival to the governing Labour Party, are attempting to draw in some of the extreme right-wing voters to boost their chances of election by campaigning hard on the immigration issue.

After seeing a fantastic documentary about violent racial tensions between 2nd and 3rd generation British blacks and Asians and also between existing UK residents (black, white or Asian) and new, commonly South Eastern European, North African, Middle Eastern or Eurasian immigrants, such progressively violent racial attitudes trouble me deeply.

As for me, I feel pretty good today, which is surprising given recent events. I’ve been living under a dark cloud for some time, mostly to do with the increasingly insurmountable university workload. I reached critical mass with my project report (aka dissertation) and got to the point where I thought I was on the brink of genuinely cracking up. I’ve decided that if it makes me that unhappy, it’s not worth the pain and have resolved to go and see my personal tutor to see where I stand. This has lifted an enormous weight from me and I feel a lot better. I have yet to see what state this leaves my degree in. Bad probably.

Just as this occurred and I began to feel well again, my girlfriend’s sister moved from Wolverhampton to Huddersfield and I was the transport. After a heavy farewell celebration on Thursday night, four of us went up there on Friday night, went to a club, slept over and the girlf and I travelled back yesterday evening, before showering, eating and watching the Shawshank Redemption which is an incredible film. It was a pretty hectic few days and I didn’t get to just sit and contemplate my future which I really need to do, but I feel better for the break. I just need to figure out where my future lies now.

I’ve always been a pretty steady, level-headed person and this has really shaken me. The value of your own sanity is not to be underestimated.

Hideously disconnected 4am thoughts

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This is going to be random…

First of all I’m in a whirlwind. I have so much uni work to do I don’t know what I’m going to do. After a serious period of inactivity I’ve actually started and made some progress with my uni assignments. The major ones at the moment are my Web Based Information Systems PHP assignment and my dissertation draft report, both conveniently due on 8th April. Shit.

WBIS has been slow since I am pretty much learning PHP from scratch. Thankfully Jono from Open Advantage, Wolves LUG and LUG Radio gave me a 2 days beginners course in using LAMP in January (people looking for a pre-configured version of Apache, MySQL and PHP, Perl and a host of other stuff with a nice installer for Linux, Windows, Mac OS X and Solaris should check out XAMPP). The bad thing about this is that I haven’t been able to make the most of what I learned until this assignment and I’ve pretty much had to start from scratch. Fortunately the one thing that has stuck in my head is the syntax. My knowledge of available functions is pathetic however. I discovered late last night as my girlfriend slept beside me that I have spent about a week trying to use drop down boxes to limit user input so that I didn’t have to faff with various date formatting and then validation, when there is a function that checks if a date is valid called checkdate() which will pretty much (I assume, haven’t had chance to try it yet) take any input and give you a yes or no on whether the input is a date and whether it is a valid date (ie it picks up Feb 29th on a non-leap year). I also spent a day trying to work out how to get PHP to give me the first and last line of a ~500MB log file so I could explode them and work out the first and last date/time entries. In dispair I posted to the Wolves LUG mailing list asking if there were PHP functions similar to the Unix head and tail commands and was informed that I should use head and tail from within PHP. A quick google and there I was with shell_exec(). I’ve been going for a week and I have a week to go, I still haven’t got a D grade :-/ I’ve still got to do all the DNS lookups and chart drawing in PHP and if it it takes me a week to get a web form that doesn’t link to it’s results page yet… I just wish I had someone sitting on my shoulder to assist when I get stuck. It would speed me up by 100% easily. My girlfriend (not computer literate at all) has had to endure hours of relentless ranting about things she doesn’t understand, which usually culminates in me explaining the intricate details of things she will never understand, or need to. I know quite a lot about programming theory for an almost non-programmer and she just looks at me like a light that went out. Poor girl.

Oh, btw the way when I say I have been working on something for x units of time, you should take for granted that this time is liberally sprinkled with cigarette smoking, head scratching and frustrated swearing…

I’m really enjoying this assignment though, I haven’t written any code in maybe 2 years, I’m a terrible programmer, mainly because I’ve never taken the time to sit and learn any language properly, just enough to hack an assignment pass together and forget about. As a consequence I’ve started tentatively rewriting my site in php, I’ll do the lot before it goes live, it’s too big a job to do in public. Just working with the raw code lays bare how bad all of these WYSIWIG web editors are at writing html. I’m a real beginner at this but I can see how bad it is. Bascially Frontpage and Dreamweaver have made paragraph, font, bold and whatever else tags with alignment added for good measure to pretty much every individual item of text on every page. I’ve cut the page sizes (in KB) by around a third while keeping the same layout. Appalling.

The assignment I’m doing means I have to learn to use a language that fits in with my idea of the kind of things I need to know, which is that to be a good Linux sysadmin, I need a scripting language and some decent web coding to start the money rolling in when I finish uni. I think I’m going to have to fix Windows machines for ~£20 a throw when I leave uni so I have some money while I wait for my first proper job. I’m very good at hardware and software issue resolving to be honest. It’s a valuable skill to have.

I have been surprised to see that my html is pretty good, if basic. I’ve never sat and learned html, it’s amazing how much you pick up without noticing. Not that it’s hard of course. I’m certainly no web guy like Jono or Aq though. The good thing about this assignment though is that it will be easily portable to my project as an end-user style log reporting web interface for a black box internet firewall appliance. It will also be very easy to move to different log files so I will be able to display simplified log information for a range of network services to the kind of person that just wants to see if it works and if anyone has done anything nasty to their machine.

My draft dissertation is in a worse state. Because I’ve spent all my time on the PHP assignment, I’ve hardly touched my report and I now need around 8,000 fully researched words in a week. Fuck.

In other news… I bought a V Festival ticket. I went last year, it should be great. I just missed the selling out of the tickets though, we had a power cut and my alarm reset so I didn’t get to the box office, I tried to get one online but they were all sold out so like last year, I had to pay probably a third on top of the retail price to get one from ebay.

I’ve been scan reading some blogs tonight, trying to get my unread count down below 2,000 (I’m subscribed to a lot of Planets). I’ve decided that I should get up to date with some cool Mozilla Firefox extensions, like Google and ebay search extensions. I read some stuff the other day but I lost the link, so I can’t say what. It was a list of cool Firefox search extensions with feature comparisons. If anyone knows what this blog link is please let me know. It mentioned an academic one for searching ACM etc.

I finally wiped the evil that was my OEM Windows XP Home installation from my laptop and installed a preview of Ubuntu Hoary, prompted by the need for mobile tools to do my PHP assignment like Bluefish, gFTP, Apache and PHP to test it in a disconnected environment (ie my girlfriends house). It’s great apart from the installer barfed on my 2GB /var partition while downloading updated packages, so I reorganised the partitions and redid the remaining steps only to see it refuse to install GRUB. I lost about 3 hours to that and had to leave it overnight and finish up in the morning. It’s been great ever since though, I’m using it now. It sometimes feel a little sluggish but it’s a 1GHz Celeron with 256MB SDRAM, so it’s going to feel that way whether I run Windows or Linux.

I have to say, I really like Bluefish and I think gFTP is the best FTP client I’ve used on any platform.

As it went so well and it’s so close to official release time, I upgraded my main workstation from Warty to Hoary, I wanted the newer Bluefish, Gnome and Firefox and also an end to the boot slowing PCI hotplug errors that seem to be common to Warty, along with the ACPI_Power_Off called message that signifies that my machine isn’t going to power itself off. It went ok, there are a few cosmetic issues like a missing Home icon in Nautilus (fixed by a dist-upgrade about 8 hours after this post), a new Debian submenu that I don’t want and a load of KDE packages I didn’t ask for (now removed). The major bitch is that I seem to have done it at a time when various PHP packages including the apache module have been held back and can’t be installed due to dependency issues, so now I’ll have to do my assignment on my laptop until it’s fixed (fixed by a dist-upgrade as above). Xorg, which was my big fear works fine with my ATI card. I can now play Tuxracer and Tuxkart without extraneous polygons making it unplayable 🙂 I also seem to have been infected by Gnometris at a time when I could do with it the least. I had to uninstall Wolf ET and Bygfoot for this very reason. Hopefully the PHP stuff will be ok in a day or 2.

Incidentally someone has taken the last free release of Tuxracer and built on it to make Planet Penguin Racer. Sure to be worth a few wasted hours. As should Thunder and Lightning, a flight sim similar to FlightGear, with added aerial combat.

I still have to decide if I’m more productive in Linux or Windows. I think the main issue is my motivation to do the work, but after moving to Ubuntu as my main OS, I set off at a trail-blazing pace for a few days, citing the joys of Open Office.org‘s turned-on-by-default word auto-completion as a major factor, but I’ve really done little written work since, I’m not sure of this is environmental or just whether I don’t really want to do the work. On this note I have to say I am really looking forward to seeing Open Office.org 2.0 hitting my desktop and hopefully, that of many other people besides.

On the topic of work again, I’m really stuck with the practical side of my project a (Linux) black box Internet firewall appliance, with local network serving (web, mail, Samba, DNS, DHCP etc) capability and web admin interface (yes I am aware of the risks of having a firewall do this kind of thing). All that remains is spam/virus mail filtering (ClamAV and Spamasassin), firewall/NAT, web interface and a specialised kernel. Oh and probably tying fetchmail into the mail system.

The firewall I will probably do in Guarddog, not a problem, I just need to finish the rest first. A kernel and fetchmail I will do at the end if I have time. The web interface is in progress, thanks to my other assignment. The problem I have is that probably since Christmas time I’ve been trying to find a simple to read guide on tying ClamAV and Spamassassin into a Postfix mail system on Debian. There doesn’t seem to be such a document. I’ve read quite a lot (not enough as it seems to be written in Hebrew to my eyes) on the subject and still don’t have a a good understanding of what I have to do. A lot of the things I’ve read seem to be for Red Hat 8.0. And Debian do things differently. I had to abandon Cyrus-IMAP for this reason. Mail filtering is pretty core to my project, I wish someone would just fall from the sky and show me how to make it work, but I guess I’m just going to have to sit and read all of the ClamAV, Spamassassin and Postfix docs and work out what applies and what doesn’t. As if I wasn’t short of time already.

I think all this uni stuff adds up to the fact that I’m in deep shit and if I don’t fail, I’ll be lucky to get a reasonable degree at all. 6 years and �25,000 of graduate debt doesn’t seem worth it for a 3rd class degree and a crap job.

I think I’m near the end now. Aside from uni work, I have no money. Which is bad, I’m having to live off my Barclaycard at a highest-in-the-country ~19% APR. And it’s my best friend’s girlfriend’s birthday this weekend. My friend Lindsay is coming from London for the weekend, Chris wants me to accompany him on a night out, all on the same night and another friend, Rebecca who I used to work with is having a birthday drink on Sunday. Sadly I don’t have enough money for my friend’s girlfriend’s birthday as they’re taking a train to Birmingham (£30 return taxi fair), going for a meal and a night out. I feel bad but I just can’t make my empty pockets stretch to that. My friend from London is visiting her mum for her birthday which I can afford (ie no cost ;)), but I’m not sure if I can stretch to a night out afterwards with Chris or Rebecca. I’m back at uni after Easter on Monday so Sunday night will be panic night. Sorry to everyone who loses out (ie is pissed off at me for not going to their thing), but I just don’t have any money for these things, nor do I have the time to take out to do them. Saturday night is the one night I do take out for chilling (aka partying), but I’ve hardly been out in weeks with the cash shortage, so much so that when I bumped into Chris and Holdsworth almost by chance the other day, they hugged me like a long lost friend and looked at me with amazement that I was in front of them.

On one or 2 final notes. I attended the Wolves LUG meeting on Wednesday briefly, which was cool because I haven’t been able to go for some time. And also, I ought to trumpet LUG Radio Live once again. Linux stuff, Linux people, Linux jokes, getting drunk with Linux people and playing LAN games like Wolf ET are all up for the taking on June 25th 2005 at the Molineux Stadium, Wolverhampton, UK. Tickets are £5, people are coming from as far as France, Canada, Sweden and erm… Wolverhampton to be there. I am, are you? Read the Lug Radio Live forum, people are even trying to help you find a hotel in the area.

Speaking of events, Aq asked me at the LUG meeting if I was planning to go to What The Hack. I certainly am, it will be my first proper computer festival, in the music festival kind of way (ie sitting in a field with a laptop and a load of stoned geeks). I just have to raise some cash.

I think thats it. It’s 5:45am. If you read this before 3pm Friday 1st April 2005, I’ll add all of the links in later… I’ll also probably fix the typos and add all of the other things that my Swiss-cheesed brain had forgotten. I still have about 6 unwritten/unfinished articles waiting to be posted on here, some of which as are actually quite intelligent, unlike this one. This is just a bulk update.

It’s been a while since I last said anything useful on here so, this accounts for the last 2 weeks of blog inactivity, sorry to give it all to you at once, in no particular order and without suitable headings. God help Google when it tries to pull anything useful out of this lot for search results.

Oh, ok, that reminded me, one last thing. The search terms people use that have caused people to read my site and my blog are hilarious and quite impressive all at the same time. The impressive ones are the stuff about Linux, networks and computers in general, I never thought people would actually use them as any kind of authoritive resource (thats not say that they did). The funny ones include ‘Does Posh Spice take it up the arse?‘, ‘Prague Street Prostitutes‘, ‘ ‘most scorpios are murdered‘, ‘hopeless bastard‘, ‘world record ejaculation’, ‘world record for semen swallowed‘ and a worrying amount of hits for ‘ladyboy‘. I might link to the relevent pages when I get up so you can all read it again and see what pages people actually got.

Shit, I just did a word count on this post, about 2,600. That would do for one of my assignments.

I’m going to bed, goodnight 😀

Gentoo Sparc kernel 2.4 Xorg and Sun Type 5 keyboards

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I noticed from the web search terms in Awstats for my blog that some of the hits I’ve been getting is from people searching for help with Sun Type 5 keyboards, 2.4 kernels and Xorg 6.7/6.8 on Sparc(64), in some cases, using Gentoo.

For that reason I’ve decided to make another post on this as I’ve done some more digging around, but still don’t have a solution. The point of this post is to point people searching for this problem at the stuff I’ve found.

It seem this is a known issue with Xorg, 2.4 series kernels and Sun Type 5 keyboards. I refer you to Gentoo Bug 61940. I’ve read the bug report and all of the comments and it seems theres no quick workaround at the moment.

The issue is that for Xorg 6.7/6.8, the old keyboard driver is deprecated and people needing that driver should use the new kbd driver. Unfortunately, the kbd driver doesn’t work properly with Sun Type 5 keyboards.

The best solution seems to be to use a Gentoo 2.6 kernel (apologies if you have this problem and aren’t using Gentoo) but this doesn’t look straightforward (but possibly easier than installing Gentoo in the first place ;)), or compiling Xorg with the deprecated keyboard driver, but I haven’t looked into how to do this yet. I guess it’s just a question of having the time to do it for me. I guess using XFree86 is another option but I haven’t seen this mentioned anywhere, I’m not sure if Gentoo are still shipping it.

In the meantime, I offer a list of Gentoo Sparc links:

Misc Sparc Wiki.
Gentoo Sparc Development.
Gentoo Sparc forums.
Sun Type 5c keyboard Sparc forums thread.
Ferris McCormick (Gentoo Sparc guy).
Ferris’ notes on the keyboard problem (at the bottom).

I aim to make more comments/updates as I work out how to sort this out.

Ubuntu Jingle released

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It’s not great, it’s not pretty but I have finally made the Ubuntu jingle for LUG Radio. To be honest, after all the fanfare thats been made about it, it’s not even very good.

You can download it from here.

Well it’s been a nightmare to produce. 3 soundcards, 5 machines and 3 operating systems have been used during the process (Ubuntu, Dynebolic and ahem… Windows (for testing my soundcard against Linux)). It’s taken me 3 and a half months to get around to finishing it. Mostly due to other commitments, but there was a great deal of hassle with soundcards and machines.

The final version was done under Dynebolic Linux, although the drum track was made under Hydrogen in Ubuntu. It’s a completely open source project. Unfortunately Ubuntu just did not like recording a live voice from a microphone.

Well there it is. It’s done. Maybe sometime in the future I will get around to cleaning it up a bit. The vocal tracks need compressing and probably a bit of EQing as the B’s of Ubuntu tend to boom a little. In fact I just remembered that I didn’t add any echo or reverb so it will sound pretty dry. Perhaps for v 0.2?

In short it’s a bit crap and it’s been a pain in the ass to do, but I did it. At last.

V

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Wow.

Does anyone else remember the V sci-fi mini-series from the 1980s?

Maybe this will bring back some memories:

V

I used to love this show as a kid. I used to have to beg to stay up to watch it, I was about 7 or 8, it started at 10pm and ran for an hour. It really captured me at the time. There was the original mini series featuring the pilot and a second episode, followed a year or so later by the 3 part V: The Final Battle. These were shown in the UK on 5 consecutive nights during the Los Angeles Olympic Games in 1984. They proved so popular that after much pressure, there was eventually a weekly TV series that was never shown in the UK, but by all accounts it was rather poor and cancelled after the first series.

I last saw it when I was 17, a friend of mine had it on video. I came across a video clip last night and did some googling around it. It turns out that the series is still popular and has a quite an active following. The most detailed site at the moment seems to be http://thevisitors.info/ aswell as http://www.the-v-files.com/, Ilana’s V Celebrity Site and this one . It seems that most V sites are garishly decorated…

People are trading props and outfits from the show, it seem the original costume maker is still making the costumes to order (for several hundred dollars). There also appear to be several games based on V. There is a Commodore 64 game unsurprisingly called V (and isn’t very good), a Battlefield 1942 mod and V – Resist or Perish, a graphical adventure game which is as yet incomplete.

I really wish that some games company would see the potential of a proper 3d V game. I used to wish for a good V game, I even intended to write one myself when I was about 14. I imagine the ideal V game being something like a cross between the stealth and problem solving elements of Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Deus Ex, the team elements of S.W.A.T and some network shooter action like RTCW or Wolf ET. Oh and some kind platform portability like RTCW and Wolf ET would be nice so I could play it on Linux.

Another thing that struck me while casually flicking through some of this stuff: some of these guys are real space nerds. Now I’m a Linux guy and there are is a real undercurrent of geeky, daylight fearing, text mode adventure playing, War Hammer card game owning obsessives in the lower echelon of the Linux world and I think quite rightly they get thoroughly derided by ‘normal’ people, but space nerds are another thing completely. Some of the bulletin board posts are signed using alien phrases from the show and they obsess about the fine biological details of the aliens. Someone had to actually point out that it was only a TV alien fantasy.

While I’ve never been a Trekkie or any kind of space geek, I think I could be persuaded to wear a V Shock Trooper outfit as I think it would get me laid by loads of weird space chicks 😉

V Shock Trooper outfit

It also appears that a new version of V, either a remake or a sequel is under development. Maybe I will try to apply some pressure to people like Activision or ID to make a game to coincide.

Soundcards, disk imaging and life in general

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My new Creative Labs Soundblaster Live 5.1 soundcard arrived today and… It works. Kind of. I have sound and no boot errors so thats a good thing. What I don’t seem to have is 5.1 surround sound on my 5.1 surround sound speakers, I just get left, right and bass woofer, all of which are on speaker output 2. Outputs 1 and 3, which are front and left and right rear respectively don’t seem to get any output. Maybe ALSA doesn’t do surround sound or you have to pass parameters to the module or something I don’t know.

The mic input, which is the point of buying a new card, seems OKish, but not perfect. I can hear myself through the speakers, but when recording in Audacity I get the same deeeeeeep, bitty ouput I had on my old Dell machine under Dynebolic when I mounted the hard disk as /home. Imagine a cross between an audio cassette being played back slowly and a video clip that is playing at the right speed but dropping frames like nobodys business. Something like that. Weird. I am optimistic however. The main problem under Dynebolic on my Dell machine was that it only had 128MB RAM and it ran out after about 4 or 5 audio tracks. At least on my main machine I have a GB to play with and should be able to do a reasonable job.

As a side note, Woo from Wolves LUG brought Agnula to my attention the other day. It’s a European Commission funded project to create an Open Source audio and multimedia development platform for both business and consumers. I’ll have to take a look some time when I’m not trying to escape the ever growing list of university work I should be doing.

I spent ages today trying to create a disk image of my laptop so I can just wipe it and install Ubuntu. After all of the aggro I had with Tiny, I’m keen to keep a disk image of the OEM Windows install they did in case they ever give me problems about it again. So, first off, Norton Ghost doesn’t do PCMCIA network cards so I can’t do it that way, so I’m down to my 2.2GB mini USB hard disk. This was kind of ok, just slooooow. Plus the disk images were bigger than the USB disk so I had to unplug the USB disk move it to my desktop, copy the image over and then put it back in the the laptop to get the next part of the image. The pain in the ass was that for the last part of the process, it asked for the first image file, which meant copying the last part onto my desktop, putting the first part back on the USB disk, letting Ghost do it’s business and then copying the image back across to my desktop. This is fine but each transfer took about 8 minutes or so. Nevertheless I made a pretty comprehensive backup set. A little extravagant even.

I made an image of the restore partition, an image of the main partition with my own preferred setup, then one of the entire disk, should anything ever go wrong. The only problem was that the last image took something like 3 hours to create, including the copying process and then when I had to put the first image back in so Ghost could (I assume) write how many image files the whole image spans into the first image, it couldn’t recognise the USB disk again no matter what I did. I had to reboot it in the end and lose the image. I’ll try again at some point when I have time to burn (some time next century).

On that topic, I’m seriously getting snowed under with uni work. I think I might be in serious trouble soon, I’m getting further and further behind and I’m getting really worried. I would have tried one of the open source disk imaging options I listed the other day but I just didn’t have the time to learn the idiosyncrasies of a new piece of software, I needed to get it done, this wasn’t quite the case in the end of course, but that wasn’t the point…

As a final thing, I notice that U-Turn is on TV as I write this. Thats one of the weirdest films I’ve ever seen. The first time I saw it, my friend and I just sat there looking back and forth between the TV and each other going, “???”. We thought it was just shit. Or we had completely missed something and it was in fact a work of genius which we just didn’t get. But we were pretty certain it was the first option and told everyone who would listen. Then I saw it a few years back and it’s actually pretty good, if you can surivive how odd it is. It’s a really weird film crammed with huge names and uncomfortable cinematography. The opening paragraph of the above review captures the film almost perfectly. Weird film…

How to install Linux on a large scale

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I’ve been thinking about this for a while to be honest. I worked in an organisation with around 600 machines for over a year, all Windows of course. A copy of Windows was installed on each type of machine (there were around 5 different types, with all machines within each type having exactly the same hardware), tweaked the settings to make them use the correct settings for Windows domain and the file shares, used Norton Ghost to make a copy of the disk and put it on a server, then used Ghost book disks to drag the disk image over, then change the machine names, set up a domain account and set up any extra peripherals.

We could roll out a machine in 30 minutes tops, mostly unattended and one person could do the whole organisation in about 4 weeks. I’ve been wondering how this would be done in the Linux world. How do you deploy 600 Linux desktops like this?

I vaguely recall Red Hat having a thing where you could perform an installation on a machine and save the setup configuration somehow so it could be used to perform the same installation on other machines in a mostly unattended way, but that means using Red Hat. It seems that there is no open source vendor agnostic tool to do this. Either buy Norton Ghost or use Red Hat.

I read the HOWTO Clone Disk Images on Linux Booted from a Network artcile from The Linux Documentation Project, but it seemed a bit messy.

So I googled and found the following links and articles.

g4u
Patagonia
Mondo Rescue
Dolly and
this Linux Gazette article.

After a quick browse of these projects, I’d say that g4u looks the most like something that would be bearable to use.

I think it would be interesting to look at how to reduce maintenace time too. I think it’s not uncommon to use Linux as a thin client system on larger installations, using something like the Linux Terminal Server Project, like they did at Handsworth Grammar School but it would be interesting to see how thin is practical, what network file systems people use (NFS, Samba, Coda?) for best results and how to handle network logins (do people really still use NIS, how much of a pain is it to synchronize smbpasswd with /etc/passwd on a large multi-user network etc).

I would be interested in hearing from anyone who has experience of deploying Linux on a large number machines, or who has experience of using any of these tools, particularly in comparison to proprietary products like Norton Ghost, Power Quest Drive Image or Acronis True Image.

LUG Radio Bastards!

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The latest episode of LUG Radio came out today, Season 2, episode 10, their 1st anniversary episode. Congratulations guys 🙂 I’m listening to it right now.

As usual it’s a massively feature packed episode, not confined to talking about the Hula Project, LUG Radio Live, GNU Classpath (an open source Java implementation), talking to Jeff Waugh about Kubuntu and loads of other stuff.

Aside from all of this, I am publicly barracked (bare in mind that the last episode got about 14,000 downloads) for my failure to produce the Ubuntu jingle that I promised nearly 8 weeks ago and it is claimed that I blame it all on Linux. Not strictly true.

I blame it on my crap soundcard, on Creative for making 2 completely different Soundblaster Lives and then ALSA for not specifiying that there are is more than one Soundblaster Live, one which works and one which is under development using a different driver – to which end I checked compatibility and not realising there was 2, bought the wrong one. Bleh.

But in the spirit of the show I will take the boiled down version of the facts on the chin. I still haven’t fucking done it.

LUG Radio Bastards!

Ubuntu jingle latest

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As some people may know I’ve been trying to make an Ubuntu jingle for LUG Radio. So far this has been nothing short of painful. If you read this post you’ll see I bought 2 new soundcards to try to finish the job.

In the first instance this was to do with my crappy on board soundcard which seemed to enjoy chewing up anything recorded via the mic and line inputs. My laptop was away being fixed at the time so I tried Dynebolic Linux on my dad’s PC (soundcard wasn’t recognised even though it’s a Creative Soundblaster PCI 16, supported by the es1371 kernel module), on my university project machine (similar problem to main desktop machine – crap quality and crackly), on my laptop when it returned (Dynebolic wouldn’t boot with ACPI enabled and I couldn’t seem to use the sound device with it disabled. Haven’t had chance to install Ubuntu yet) and finally on my old Dell Optiplex desktop machine with an Intel i810 chipset and everything onboard, which has a lowly 128MB RAM and struggled to keep up (uses non-standard RAM so I couldn’t drop in a spare stick). All of the other machines were Via chipsets using onboard sound (except my dads PCI 16 soundcard of course).

Nevertheless, the best sound quality came from the i810 machine, so tonight I persevered and mounted the hard disk (dynebolic is a Live CD), copied the files across from my usb drive (causes stutter when running from it) and ran the project from there.

It went great at first but as I layered the tracks it started to slow down as the memory got used up, so much so that by the time I recorded about 4 vocal tracks (I’m simulating a tribe), the machine became barely usable and the kernel killed the Audacity process so I lost everything I had done in the session. I hadn’t saved it as I was technically testing how well it would work.

As Dynebolic is a live CD and runs in memory, I figured that maybe Audacity was saving some kind of user data in /home which is also in memory so I mounted the home partition of the hard disk as /home to see if that saved me a few MBs.

For some reason all this did was make the recorded mic stream slow, bitty and deeeeeeeep. Not to be denied, I unmounted the partition and remounted it under /mnt/home as it was before. I also tried to turn on the hard disk swap partition as swap space, but this failed as it turns out Dynebolic already does this.

Anyway I decided to try again, this time by saving the project every time I recorded a new audio track. I got to about 6 vocal tracks before it started getting flaky so I exported what I had as a wav and called it a night.

I’m not entirely happy with it, but at least I have a proof of concept. I’ll wait until I have my new Soundblaster and make a proper attempt under Ubuntu. At the moment I won’t post it as I’m not sure if it sounds crap or not, you know when you hear your own voice (and accent in my case) on tape? Terrible…

All Soundblasters are not equal

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Recent readers will know that I bought a new Creative Labs Soundblaster Live soundcard as they seem to be very well supported under Linux, in a bid to finish this goddam Ubuntu jingle for LUG Radio. Well it arrived today and guess what? It doesn’t work properly under Linux at the moment.

It seems that there are two Soundblaster Lives and they use different chipsets. The older 5.1 is known to work perfectly under Linux using the emu10k1 kernel module and the newer 24 bit 7.1 card doesn’t (the numbers refer only to the number of surround sound speakers, not a versioning process like software release numbers).

Before I bought the card I checked the ALSA website which says here that the Soundblaster Live is supported by the emu10k1 module. I also searched Google for Linux support and read this. Sounds fine I thought at the time.

Until it didn’t work. After searching the Ubuntu forums for the SB Live, I read this thread which points out that the new 24 bit SB Live 7.1 uses a different chipset to the SB Live 5.1 and in fact uses the audigyls module which isn’t entirely working and also only available in v1.06 or above of ALSA, which isn’t available in Ubuntu yet. Why is it you only find this stuff after you buy it?

It also seems that the 24 bit 7.1 card is a piece of shit anyway. Rather than do onboard hardware mixing, it palms it off to the system CPU do do all the work and it is this that has made the driver slower to develop as they had to work out how to do this. Now I know that modern computers like mine are powerful enough to handle this, but would you be happy with a software modem if you were expecting a hardware one? Nowhere in the product spec does it say this.

So I had 3 choices:

  • Upgrade to Ubuntu Hoary
  • Compile the latest version of ALSA myself
  • Or forget it and buy a SB Live 5.1

I don’t fancy upgrading to Hoary as I have yet to hear if it works with the version of ALSA in Hoary. I prefer to stick with a stable version of Ubuntu now I’ve moved over full-time.

I don’t fancy moving to a compiled version ALSA as this means I will have to work out how to put the packaged versions of ALSA on hold in apt and risk making a mess of the sound system by compiling it myself.

So I wimped out and found a 5.1 from Scan for £10 or so. Thats something I could really do without to be honest. It cost me £26 or so for the first card at a time when I’ve just found out I am £3 overdrawn and have no money coming in until early April. I had to transfer money off my credit card to cover my bills for the next 6 weeks.

Well, I’ve made a big noise about this jingle now, I seem to be getting some decent traffic because of it, especially when I was linked by Jeff Waugh on Planet Gnome, Planet Debian and Planet Ubuntu. Also I told the LUG Radio guys about it nearly 6 weeks ago and they having been waiting for it ever since. I’ve had quite a few people post comments about it too so I now feel some kind of responsibility to produce something. God help me if it’s shit…

Don’t know what I’m going to do with the SB Live 7.1 just yet. I might try to sell it on ebay or something to see if I can make some money back, or I might keep it and see if a) it works under Hoary and b) if it is actually a better quality card than the 5.1 despite the hardware mixing cop-out.

One day I will learn that knowledge of Linux hardware support is not innate, nor is it as simple as it looks from a kernel perspective. The ALSA people are doing their job (although it would be nice of them to state that the 7.1 is actually a variant of the Audigy LS and not a variant of the SB Live as the name suggests, by listing the 5.1 and 7.1 separately), but it seems Creative have named the 7.1 based on where it fits into their range and not on what chipset it uses.

Bastards.

UPDATE:

After reading a lot of threads about this problem I filed a bug against the ALSA website to get them to point out that the 24 bit SB Live 7.1 uses the audigyls driver and to ask them to specify that the 5.1 and 24 bit 7.1 are different as it just said that the SB Live uses the emu10k1 driver, so as to prevent other drowning souls in the various support forums around the world from buying the wrong card. They have since updated the site to reflect this. Good of them to research this and actually do it.

Of course Hoary is now out and the 7.1 should be supported, but I have yet to open my box and swap the 7.1 in to check…

Pimping Nvu

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There has been talk about Nvu on the Wolves Lug mailing list recently (I still keep forgetting it’s pronounced ‘N-View’, not Un-Voo). Nvu is a redevelopment of Mozilla Composer which got orphaned when the Mozilla Suite was split up into Firefox and Thunderbird.

No doubt, it is the great white hope of WYSIWYG web editors on Linux and other open source platforms. Before I stopped using Windows, it was one of the things where I didn’t know what I would use instead of Macromedia Dreamweaver. I’m certainly no web developer, take a look at my website. Dismal design I’m sure you’ll agree. But the fact is that while I aim to move to proper CMS some time in the future, I don’t care enough about web design to put the effort into doing it all in html by hand in Bluefish or something. My blog is a brain-dumping ground. My website is a link, info and silly email dumping portal for myself and some of my friends. I’m not interested in writing it properly because I don’t have the time. I need a WYSIWYG web editor and a copy and paste function ;).

So I heard about Nvu on the mailing list and took a look. As I said in some pother posts, I started my website in Frontpage Express 5 years ago before I knew anything about web design, then I moved to Frontpage and then Dreamwaver.

Aq, who is seriously (and still an understatement) into his web stuff recommended that Peter Cannon write a review of Nvu as a Frontpage user, being that such a review from himself, a committed and experienced web developer whos uses a text editor, would not be as useful as one from a user of WYSIWYG competitors to Nvu, like Frontpage and Dreamweaver. And in that sense, that includes me.

I’ve edited a few existing pages in Nvu and also created a simple ‘this site has moved’ type page. I have admittedly, not created any substantial new pages. But my immediate thoughts were that it’s pretty cool with one or two things missing.

The main thing is site management. In Frontpage or Dreamweaver you define your local web directory and your remote server details. You edit a local copy of a file and then publish the file to your remote server.

In Nvu you define your remote server and edit exisiting files by pulling them down from the server and editing them locally before sending them back up. This is ok, but limiting I think. My server uses ftp to transfer the files and has a maximum simultaneous connection limit to protect from ftp (globbing?) attacks. As my the top level index.html page has a number of images in, this hits the maximum connections limit and means that I have to edit the file with half of the images missing. This isn’t good for judging the aesthetic appearance of your pages and may leave your page looking out of shape while you edit it.

This working with the files direct from your remote server also means that it’s easy to upload files with mistakes in them without realising.

Another nice site management feature would be some kind of site information cache, like an index of all files and links in the site. If you change the name of a file in the site, then Nvu could ask if you want to update all links within the site that point to that file. It could also point out any files which aren’t linked by any file in the site and any external links that are invalid (ie produce http errors – 404 etc) or can’t be resolved by DNS.

Further to those, or while waiting for the above, I would like it if Nvu could remember where the file I am editing came from on the server. I have more than once downloaded an index.html file from a subdirectory of my webserver, edited and uploaded it before editing the index.html in the top level directory of the site before uploading it again. The problem is that Nvu doesn’t remember where you got the current file from. Instead is asks you which directory you want to put it in, defaulting to the last directory you uploaded to. This is how I overwrote the index.html in my subdirectory with a new top level index.html and left the old top level index.html where it was, unchanged. Fortunately, I also went through the (slightly) laborious task of manually making a local copy of every edited file before uploading it.

One more feature that would be useful would be the ability to use SSH to upload files to the server, fewer and fewer people are using ftp these days, more people are using SSH’s encrypted SFTP method and Nvu should offer this.

Now those are some quite big things to request. As I stated [link removed] on the Nvu developer forums [link removed], I would be happy to write these features myself if I were a decent coder, I had the time and knew what I was on about.

Nvu is in it’s infancy and I’m being quite hard on it by expecting these features already. Besides my comments above, Nvu is a very capable WYSIWYG web editor. As I said, it is the best in its field on Linux at the moment and will only get better.

If you are looking for a WYSIWYG web editor for Linux, or a free replacement for Frontpage or Dreamweaver on Windows, go download Nvu now.

If you are a coder with a taste for web development, then go help the Nvu developers [link removed] right away! Writing my requested features is of course your first task 😉

Why are mobile phones so complicated to buy?

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I need a new mobile phone (thats cell phone for non Brits ;)). I’ve never been too bothered about having the lastest, greatest phone as my miserly student finances can’t afford it and my needs are modest. I normally keep a phone for 2 to 3 years, however after about 2 years, my phone is getting a bit flaky and storing all my numbers in phone memory instead of the SIM memory and then at christmas, with no warning it ‘remembered’ all of the numbers I’ve ever deleted so I then had about 2 or 3 numbers for quite a few people. Its also a bit out dated now, monochrome screen, ZX Spectrum style ring tones etc…

So I would like a new phone. Colour screen, polyphonic ring tones and camera are pretty much par for the course these days so I’m not going to save money by not having those, besides I want them. Java games I’m not bothered about, data storage is nice, an MP3 player and radio maybe but not critical. Picture/video messaging I probably won’t use much, but a camera that can save video clips I will. Some kind of Linux interoperability would be nice too (recommendations gratefully received).

Well, getting a phone isn’t a problem. Most retailers will give you the phone for nothing with a pay monthly contract these days unless you want the hottest, newest phone. What is baking my brain is the call time deals.

For example:

Random cool phone handset, free. 200 free anytime, any network minutes. 200 text messages free for the first 6 months, £6 per month after the first 6 months (may be cancelled after the first 3 months). Line rental £5 per month for the first 6 months, charged at £15 per month with the difference rebated at the end of the first 6 months provided you return your rebate claim form within 30 days of the end of the initial 6 month period. £15 per month for the second 6 months, charged at £30 per month with the difference rebated at the end of the second 6 months provided you return your rebate form within 30 days of the end of the second 6 month period. Line rental is £30 per month thereafter, based on a minimum 18 month contract period.

This is a pretty standard mobile phone contract tarriff in the UK, though £5 per month is among the lowest deals around at the moment, but with more expensive contracts, the terms are normally the same. If you want a new phone without a contract then you are paying a few hundred pounds for a handset.

I just want an affordable phone contract without the hassle. For this reason I am staying put with my perfectly reasonably priced contract, although the call restrictions on call time (500 mins per month after 7pm til 7am and all weekend) and cross network calls (50 mins per month after 7pm til 7am and all weekend), plus 100 free text messages for £20 per month, is a little inconvenient. The cross network and pre 7pm calls are what cost me more than I can afford as a penniless student. Thats why I’m looking at these ‘Cool new camera phone’ and £5 per month for 6 months with free anytime any network calls, as I will be able to afford it in 6 months when I have finished uni and the charges go up. Charge me £15 or £20 flat fee for 12 months minimum with 200 cross network minutes and 200 text messages and I’m yours. Make me fill in forms, pay extra, get it rebated, have the price go up in stages, then fuck you.

I would go on Pay as You Go, but that would mean I would never be able to afford to call anyone ever.

What the fuck is going on?