Planet FOSDEM

July 01, 2009

Philip Paeps

When will Firefox be able to print?

I run a business. This means I often have to print stuff for my accountant. I also feel that for the prices I charge my customers, the least I can do is send them an invoice on a piece of paper.

Unfortunately, Firefox still can't print.

With the exception of three countries (of which I am aware) everyone in the world uses ISO-standard A4 paper. For some reason however, Firefox continues to insist that I should be using "Letter" paper. I can't imagine where it gets this idea. It can't possibly be my "locale" (which is set to C) and I've certainly not configured this crazy papersize anywhere.

When will this be fixed?

I don't so much mind a default -- even if it's stupidly set to something only three countries in the world use -- if I could override it. I can click on "file" and on "page setup" until I'm blue in the face. The PostScript being sent to my printer continues to be wrong. Even if I "print to file", it's wrong. I can then fiddle with the PostScript to make it right, but I should not have to do that.

I really don't feel like grepping through the hundreds of megabytes of source code that Mozilla is to find where this silly papersize is coded to change it. Software should have sensible defaults. If software gives an option to override defaults, it should actually accept the override, not just ignore me.

Grumpy. Very very grumpy.

The web sucks. Browsers suck. I'm told that as technologies advance, humans regress as a form of self-defence. Have humans regressed too far? Is technology having to catch up with the dimwits?

Let's go back to simple.

July 01, 2009 20:23

June 30, 2009

Philip Paeps

Zen of shoe polishing

Countdown to holiday: two days. On Friday, Mark, Dieter and I leave for Canada and the West Coast Trail. Since the "West" is often spelled "Wet", I spent some quality time in the company of bees wax and my boots. Wax on, wax off. Seams getting stronger, leather getting darker and ... well, leatherier.

This weekend, I also gave my leather hat a similar treatment. Pity I didn't take before/after shots. It looks much nicer now. More aged. More water-resistant too.

If now we don't see one drop of rain... No, no, I don't think I'll be grumpy if it doesn't rain at all.

Now for more packing. And more unpacking.

The things we drag with us into the bush.

June 30, 2009 19:26

June 29, 2009

Jochen Maes

Tax-on-web

To people ranting about the Belgian Tax-on-Web!

Start earlier, I have successfully submitted my taxes for years now with Tax-on-Web, and without any hassle.

If you all try to submit the last day, well duh that the servers are overloaded!

Some people always find a reason to complain!

I for one am happy that the service exists and will be using it for the years to come!

Thank you!

by SeJo at June 29, 2009 23:39

gentoo and macbook5,1 (late 2008)

My macbook stopped booting a while ago (since switching to kernel 2.6.30). After searching for hours and hours recompiling kernels I finally got a hint from a grub user/developer (not sure).
I should use the grub2. After looking the tree for that version I only found the grub-9999 ebuild.

After manually adding the ~amd64 keyword and digesting the ebuild I could compile grub2.

Guess what? It worked, all the kernels I compiled and didn't work on the old grub, now worked!
So for future reference: when a kernerl stops booting, check what changes were made in the bootloader :p

by SeJo at June 29, 2009 18:04

June 24, 2009

Floris Lambrechts

Onweerstaanbaar

Zou jij dit kunnen weerstaan?

fortis PC-banking screenshot: niet klikken dit is een test

Ik wel. Aanvankelijk. Na twee weken werd het me te machtig :-)

Update: een helpdesker van Fortis PC Banking weet meer

by fl0 at June 24, 2009 18:58

Philip Paeps

Yet another cannabis farm

As I've mentioned before, reading newspapers intermittently allows one to discern certain patterns which may not be obvious to those who get twitches if they don't update their RSS reader at least twice a minute.

Today I discovered that Belgium seems to be reducing the number of cannabis farms by one a week. At this rate, we'll run out of them in no time, and customers will need to import their herbs from ... oh, the Netherlands?

Interesting, interesting...

June 24, 2009 14:40

June 21, 2009

Floris Lambrechts

Use Small caps please

Even though it’s officially known that ALL-CAPS ROT THE BRAIN, some people still use them.

Dear writers, please reconsider. And if you must, Please use small caps. They are lighter on the eye, and properly distinguish between UPPERCASE and lowercase Letters.

Since it is a layout trick, you are still free to revert to normal casing later on without the need to modify the source text.

The CSS involved reads like font-variant: small-caps.

by fl0 at June 21, 2009 11:46

June 19, 2009

FOSDEM news

Archives

We just archived the FOSDEM 2009 edition website. If you still need to find the pages from previous editions check out our archive site: http://archive.fosdem.org

by chri at June 19, 2009 18:32

June 18, 2009

Christophe Vandeplas

Hacking for Beer - BruCON 12 days left for early bird tickets

BruCON is an annual two-day conference by and for the security and hacker community. The conference offers lectures and workshops on a multitude of topics like computer security, privacy, information technology and its implications on society. It takes place at the Surfhouse in Brussels, Belgium on September 18 and 19.

Tickets should be purchased asap as from the 1st of July the price raises from €180 to €250. The staff didn't forget students ! Their price is €50 till the 1st of July.

The presentations on IPv6 security, MPLS hacking, Cyberwarfare, Social engineer techniques, Cloud Computing Security, Open source Information gathering, Dangers of Social networks, and much more, there will be interesting workshops and other events.

Unfortunately I won't be able to go as I'll be in Canada because of a wedding. But count me in for the second edition!

by chri at June 18, 2009 17:09

Philip Paeps

Quiet month

No, I'm not dead yet. Just otherwise occupied. Nothing to see here. Move along now. Plans for world domination are ongoing.

June 18, 2009 09:27

June 17, 2009

Floris Lambrechts

Ergernissen

  • Frituristen die het concept multitasking niet kennen
  • Schoffies die mijn banden plat laten als ik op Mechelen Zuid mijn fiets parkeer
  • Dat het zakje ook wordt meegewogen aan de kassa
  • Naar een concert gaan, en pas bij de bisnummers ontdekken dat er achter die speaker ook nog een gitarist zit

by fl0 at June 17, 2009 18:47

June 12, 2009

Jochen Maes

Getting things done

Today elise asked on twitter whether anyone knew a good GTD app.

Well I use yagtd, and I'm very happy with it. It's completely written in python and thus for me easy to read and adapt if needs to.

yagtd is a command line tool for managing your life. It incorporates all the features I need from a to-do system (and as an extra it has colours!). So... how do I use it? Let me show you:


#run the GTD app
python yagtd.py -c todo.txt
#add a simple task with context '@development @erlang' and project 'bleh'
GTD> add @development @erlang p:bleh write function moo/1 in module(cow)
# add a simple task with no context and project 'blah'
GTD> add p:blah do a code review of audenaeg's code
#show all tasks concerning @development
GTD> search @development
# set 50% complete for a task
GTD> complete 2 10
# show statusses for your projects (% complete)
GTD>status

Evidently this is not the complete feature set, but you should have enough to get started. I have always a GTD session open and I have a git repo where I push the txt file to each day.

If enough response I might write a complete tutorial until then: RTFM!

below a screenshot for the masses!

by SeJo at June 12, 2009 11:30

June 11, 2009

Floris Lambrechts

Interesting conversation

How he appeared in my contact list I don’t know, but I’m sure having some interesting conversations with this koli0900 chap:

  • koli900: ku je mor shtet
  • me: broa dog flimpets
  • koli0900: fol shqip mor kar
  • me: alli harvod dobeng
  • koli0900: ma ha karin
  • me: bollem pratka ovordeks
  • koli0900: pidhi satam

by fl0 at June 11, 2009 07:43

June 08, 2009

Pascal Bleser

osc plugin for the lazy

After my first osc plugin that does some output colouring, I've written another one for the lazy people like me. Mind you, osc is the command-line client for the openSUSE Build Service, and it is easy to extend through plugins.My typical workflow, when a build fails, is to do a osc cr to see the list of succeeded and failed builds and then, if applicable, do another osc bl to see the actual build

by Loki (noreply@blogger.com) at June 08, 2009 22:49

June 05, 2009

Philip Paeps

Electronic voting in Belgium

It won't surprise anyone that I'm not a great fan of electronic voting. I think most people who know anything about software share my reluctance to trust it for something as important as the democratic process.

For some reason, the government only releases the voting software after the elections. In other words, if the software is flawed in a way that influences the results of the elections, the problem can only be "fixed" by calling new elections. Inevitably, that means the problem won't be fixed. Ever.

Earlier today, I downloaded the "source codes" [sic] of the software used for the 2007 elections. Unfortunately, I've not been able to find a single line of code in the Zip archive yet. The archive contains a large number of binary files and even something that looks like a bootloader.

There also appears to be some documentation in the archive. Some of the documentation is in PDF files, but there are also some Microsoft "Word" files which I can't read.

Why does the government go through all this trouble to hide the source code of this important software? Do they assume citizens don't care? I'm a bit grumpy about this.

June 05, 2009 09:03

May 31, 2009

Mark Van den Borre

Dear movie industry,

I would like to have a copy of the 1993 Russian movie "Okno v Parizh", also known as "Window to Paris" or "Salades Russes". I am willing to pay for this privilege.

I did some research. It seems there's only been a region 4 (Australia, New Zealand, ...) DVD release on 2005/10/20, EAN 9398710510690, by Hopscotch Films, with no stock available anymore by now.

Any hints? Or should I go look for a Russian sites where I can download a free copy?

Sincerely,

Mark Van den Borre
potential customer

UPDATE: If you are looking for this movie, and you know enough Russian (I don't), http://www.intv.ru/uplay/N8h5n7TnB might be of interest to you.

by Mark Van den Borre (mark@markvdb.be) at May 31, 2009 21:45

Ralph Meijer

PubSubHubbub

PubSubHubbub is a protocol and reference implementation for doing publish-subscribe using web hooks, polling in feeds triggered by a ping from the publisher, and POSTing Atom entries to notify subscribers. The notification part is similar to what I've been working on for the publish-subscribe stuff at Mediamatic Lab, where we spiced up Idavoll with an HTTP interface to bridge the gap between XMPP Publish-Subscribe and HTTP speaking entities.

Although I spend a lot of time working on XMPP based publish-subscribe, I understand the reasons for going for a full HTTP-based approach. XMPP can be intimidating for developers of web applications. While the differences between XMPP and HTTP are important (stateful connections, asynchronous processing, etc), the fact that it is different is reason often enough. Hosting facilities don't always offer ways to do XMPP, and there is not nearly enough running code out there to make it easier for people to play with these technologies to spice up their web application with non-IM XMPP functionality. Having platforms like Google App Engine provide sending and handling raw XMPP stanzas as part of the API would surely help.

That said, PubSubHubbub has two separate sides to it, the publishing part and the notification part. There's nothing that prevents a hub to do the publishing part using regular XMPP publish-subscribe. Instead of fetching the Atom Feed over HTTP every time, it could use autodiscovery to find out the publish-subscribe node and upgrade by subscribing to it instead. Similarly, the notification part could send out XMPP notifications. Combined with existing HTTP aggregator, that combination is very similar to how the aggregator for Mimír works.

I'm still not convinced that PubSubHubbub is the answer to the efficient exchange of updates on social objects, but I do think it is a good way to make smaller entities be part of a federation of social networking sites. Likely, we'll see a hybrid approach, to begin with.

by ralphm at May 31, 2009 13:09

Social Web FooCamp 2009

Last month I was fortunate enough to attend Social Web FooCamp at O'Reilly HQ in Sebastopol, CA, a follow up to Social Graph FooCamp in 2008. I can't express how inspiring such events are, being able to have a continuous, in-depth conversation with so many bright minds about so many topics that keep you busy on regular days, and more. I'll give a quick overview of the whole trip, and then go into depth in a series of posts.

My trip started with a visit to friend and former Jaiku colleague Andy Smith, who was kind enough to take me in at Houseku. As soon as I landed on SFO, I got an SMS from him to make a detour to his office. Besides meeting a bunch of Andy's fellow googlers, I got to spend some time with Brett Slatkin talking about PubSubHubbub.

The next day I got a ride to Sebastopol from Edwin Aoki. After a trip full of interesting conversation, we arrived at the O'Reilly offices. Sebastopol was a lot warmer than San Francisco, perfect for camping. Lots of familiar faces, but also a lot of new ones. During the Friday evening, apart from the general introduction, I didn't get to any sessions, but instead spent talking to a bunch of people on XMPP, Publish-Subscribe and the work I am doing on federating social networks under that name Open-CI at Mediamatic Lab.

The next two days were filled with sessions and hallway talk on OpenID, OAuth, different approaches to Publish-Subscribe and inter-site communication, resource and service discovery and service scalability. While most of the topics were similar to last year, I was glad to share what we've done at Mediamatic Lab over the past year, while learning how others have fared. We used these technologies to make a true federation of social networking sites where you can make cross-site relations between people and their social objects. Some of our discoveries there we're shared among the participants, while others had interesting other approaches.

Especially interesting to me was a session on OAuth and OpenID where I could explain how we tried to improve upon the user experience. Both technologies have a bad reputation in this area. With some smart defaults and trust between sites, we could eliminate some of the screens. There was talk about using pop-ups in some situations, either as lightboxes or as new (small) windows. In our experience the former can't be used if you want to do SSL (since you can't validate the address and certificate). The latter was deemed confusing in our user tests. Research is still ongoing, I suppose. The other issue had to do with presenting OpenID providers. We currently use a drop down, but that doesn't scale up very nicely. Logos might work, but in the end has the same issue.

I also got to show Blaine Cook the code I wrote recently to make it easier to write XMPP publish-subscribe enabled services (code-as-a-node), that has been included in the recent Wokkel release. In turn, Blaine shared his thoughts on simple addressing on the web and we got to hash it out with a bunch of people like Brad Fitzpatrick, who also organized the pubsub shootout session. Finally, Eran Hammer-Lahav showed his work on XRD.

I'm pretty sure I forgot to mention a lot of things, but when it comes back to me, I'll write about it some other time.

by ralphm at May 31, 2009 13:03

May 29, 2009

Jochen Maes

fancontrol on macbook5,1

Morning!

Now that I'm commuting by train I have a bit more time to fiddle with my macbook. So I decided to install the cmp-daemon a tool I found in the arch Linux tree. No author information but a GPL license.
To get it working I needed to fix it a bit, here is my version.
Hope you can use it.

by SeJo at May 29, 2009 07:16

May 26, 2009

Mark Van den Borre

Flemish software developer or free software user? Marianne Thyssen = BAD pick

Please take the following into consideration when voting for your EU member of parliament:

One of the few members of the EU parliament active PRO software patents, so AGAINST your interests was Marianne Thyssen (CD&V).

At the time, Bart Staes (Groen!), Dirk Sterckx(OpenVLD), Sp.a and NVA díd do a good job. Merde, even Vlaams Belang (friends know how hard this is for me to acknowledge) has supported Flemish SMEs on this issue.

The sources of this information? Direct experience talking to members of the EU parliament, and first hand reporting by friends even closer to the case.

by Mark Van den Borre (mark@markvdb.be) at May 26, 2009 22:55

May 24, 2009

Philip Paeps

Forbidden efficiency

I'm running a bit behind on the news again. One advantage of reading a week's worth of newspapers in a day however, is that stories develop much quicker than if you have to wait a whole day for the next episode. A disadvantage is that idiocy becomes much clearer and gets the blood boiling much quicker too.

Next month, like everyone else in Europe, we'll be voting for our representatives in the European parliament. In Belgium, we will also be voting for representatives in the superfluous "regional" parliaments.

Elections are compulsory in Belgium. This is a good thing as it allows politicians to campaign on facts (should they so choose) rather than having to expend a lot of energy on motivating the uninterested to vote. A parliament voted only by fanatics would be a very bad thing of course. A couple of weeks before the elections, every eligible voter gets a summons in the mail from their local council telling them where they need to go to vote.

Some towns in Belgium have very mixed populations. Much to the dismay of certain right-wing linguistic supremacists, there are people speaking Dutch, French, Arabic, English, Turkish and other languages all living together in the same town. How very untidy! One such town near Brussels decided to be practical and send out the elections summons in Dutch and French. This is much more efficient of course than writing it in Dutch and adding a footnote that anyone needing a French translation can request one specially.

"Gosh, it's a letter from the government, three weeks before elections, could this be my summons? I don't know, we should request a translation to be sure!".

Of course, this got the extremists very upset. And the newspapers have exploded again with cries about "wasting money" and such. Only in the fictional region of "Flanders" do we have politicians who seriously believe that forbidding efficiency can save them money.

What can possibly be gained by emphatically deciding not to write to your inhabitants in a language they understand? Do they think it will motivate people to "integrate" (nasty word) better? If anything, I think it would make people feel more left out.

Forbidding efficiency. What a stupid idea.

I think it's obvious that I'm not going to vote for anyone promoting such lunacy.

Grump.

May 24, 2009 10:49

May 22, 2009

Pascal Bleser

Import Packman package signing keys

Short version:In order to import and trust the GPG key that signs Packman packages, do as follows (as root):rpm --import ftp://packman.links2linux.de/pub/packman/public-keys.ascLong version:Here is why you might get warnings from RPM when installing packages from the Packman repository, telling you that the signing key is unknown: in our infrastructure, the packages are built on a different host

by Loki (noreply@blogger.com) at May 22, 2009 05:32

May 21, 2009

Pascal Bleser

php-source-highlight

I spent an hour or two yesterday to write my first PHP extension in C++.It is a very simple wrapper around GNU source-highlight that also ships its functionality as a shared library and (C++) API since version 3.0.The whole point about that extension is that you can perform syntax highlighting using source-highlight's capabilities and broad support for many programming languages directly and

by Loki (noreply@blogger.com) at May 21, 2009 15:33

May 18, 2009

Pascal Bleser

openSUSE Conference 2009 Call for Papers Deadline

As you probably already heard, we'll have our first, very own, super-cool openSUSE Conference in September in Nürnberg.Obviously, the success of that event depends on your presence, active participation and as such, you might be interested in holding a talk. If so, make sure to register on the Call for Papers page, as the deadline is May 20th (in 2 days time) !

by Loki (noreply@blogger.com) at May 18, 2009 20:34

May 15, 2009

Pascal Bleser

vnstat on openSUSE

vnstat is a network traffic monitor that collects the amount of data you transmit over network interfaces (typically, your Internet uplink), and can display themon a terminal:or, since version 1.7, also as graphs:The latter can even be watched from a browser, using a CGI script.vnstat runs through a cron job at a regular interval (every 5 minutes by default) and collects network transfer

by Loki (noreply@blogger.com) at May 15, 2009 17:51

May 14, 2009

Jochen Maes

macbook 5,1 and more gentoo

tip1: As the dpi nvidia chooses looks like shit, add the Option "DPI" "96x96" to your xorg.conf (device section where you specify the nvidia driver)

tip2: the trackpad is hell, but by cloning the bcm5974-dkms installing it, blacklisting usbhid, loading bcm5974 and then usbhid it works... still need to get used to it but have right-click and middle-click

tip3: sound... submitted a bug as apparently my model is not supported with the codec (ACL889A).

to be continued....

by SeJo at May 14, 2009 13:00

May 13, 2009

Philip Paeps

Now on faster hardware

The machine that used to serve this blog (an aging Sun Netra T1) had been starting to show its age for a while. Rock-solid hardware though it is, it really is no match for the bloated scriptware running websites in the 21st century.

It has now been replaced by a shiny multi-core amd64 machine from iXsystems.

As part of the move to new hardware, I decided to replace Apache with lighttpd and move some more stuff into jails. This should ensure that the beast continues to be fast even if stuff gets even more bloated.

This was a remarkably smooth ride.

May 13, 2009 17:01

Jochen Maes

Gentoo on my macbook5,1

The company I work for provided me with a macbook unibody (on my request).
The last few days if I had some time I started installing Gentoo on a second partition.

The installation itself is easy enough, it's the configuration of the box that is hell. Especially as not all the drivers are already ported.

Status:

  • with nvidia-drivers Xorg does work
  • the wireless works
  • wired works
  • trackpad works (but no scroll, no double finger,...) mainly due to the appletouch driver not recognizing the model
  • sound does not work
  • bluetooth not tested
  • sleep not yet installed/tested

As you can see still a bit of work needed. I'm going to patch the appletouch myself don't think it should be a big hassle...

by SeJo at May 13, 2009 14:56

May 11, 2009

Philip Paeps

The Anomaly

Geeks love puzzles. To kill time before our flight and to satisfy gnn's need for trains, we went to the Science and Technology Museum in Ottawa. George got to see trains and we all enjoyed a number of amusing demonstrations of things not to try at home with liquid nitrogen.

In the museum shop, there was a large selection of tanglement puzzles, which of course I could not resist. I bought one called The Anomaly, which is classed as "mind boggling". And the classification was dead-on too. It took me hours to solve this one. Useful use of jetlag!

The Anomaly

I'll take this one to work tomorrow and share the frustration with the usual suspects. Muaahaha.

I am Philip and I recommend this puzzle.

May 11, 2009 18:18

May 10, 2009

Philip Paeps

Airport wireless

17:47 EDT

Airport wireless access continues to amuse me. At YOW, one can now get fifteen minutes of free wireless access. Normally, this would mean continuous wireless access, because few providers actually kill sessions. Just keep a tunnel open. Unfortunately, here they actually do kill sessions.

So I have to pick a new MAC address every fifteen minutes. Somewhat annoying but not impossible to script.

Next many hours will be spent in a little tube pointing towards an island off the coast of Europe. Not fun. Checking email for free before boarding makes it a little less bad.

May 10, 2009 21:47

May 09, 2009

Philip Paeps

Arbitrary tastiness

10:07 EDT

I've been in Ottawa for a couple of days again and the local Second Cup staff is starting to remember me from last year as the bearded nerd who likes to be surprised for breakfast. So far, I've not had a duplicate muffin yet. Whoopie!

Just to be different, I'm now also asking for arbitrary ice cream and beer. Surprise is good!

Last night, I started upgrading Coverity to the latest version and poked dmaxwell about things which are obviously obvious to him but less so to me. I expect to get the defect spam working this weekend. With some luck.

May 09, 2009 14:07

May 08, 2009

Jochen Maes

Huntington’s disease

Some of you may know that I'm the "guardian" of a Huntington patient. This weekend we are going to a gathering of patients.

The reason why I blog about it is because I wish to create more awareness in the minds of the people. A lot of people do not know the disease. Also this is the perfect place to spam the Flemish website.
When people see a Huntington patient they quickly judge that it's a drunk without knowing that there are multiple diseases that cause balance problems and uncontrolled movements. People react differently once they know of the existence of Huntington, and that is one of the goals.

People interested in more information or donating or have other questions regarding Huntington's disease, can contact me or the Liga.

by SeJo at May 08, 2009 07:25

May 07, 2009

Jochen Maes

zsh goodie

found today on irc://irc.freenode.net/#zsh

function vim() { /usr/bin/vim ${(@z)*/:/ +} }

will replace vim ~/.ssh/known_hosts:19 to vim ~/.ssh/known_hosts +19

by SeJo at May 07, 2009 12:59

May 06, 2009

Philip Paeps

New floating head

12:14 EDT

My old floating head was starting to show its age. It had been in place since November 2006. A couple of weeks ago, Wouter hackergotchified the infamous "pointy hat" photo for Planet grep and I'm rather chuffed with the result.

It'll last a couple of years again, I'm sure.

May 06, 2009 16:14

May 05, 2009

Philip Paeps

How to waste time

13:50 EDT

I decided to fly from Toronto to Ottawa this morning. There is a perfectly functional (if slow) train, but my carbon footprint for this trip is already gargantuan so I didn't feel too bad about saving a couple of hours and collecting a couple of hundred miles along the way.

Printing my boarding pass and bus-ticket to the airport yesterday, I noticed that for a domestic flight of under an hour, it is recommended that I get to the airport three hours before my flight.

What are these people smoking?

I showed up 40 minutes before my flight and had an ocean of time to get bored in. What on earth do they expect people to do for three hours? I have yet to miss my first flight due to showing up to the airport too late.

Flying is supposed to be the most efficient (if most polluting) way to get between two points. If you tell people to come to the airport with enough time to walk to their destination, it's no wonder airlines are losing business.

May 05, 2009 17:50

May 03, 2009

Pascal Bleser

tircd: Twitter from IRC

Twitter, yet another social network and instant messaging tool, yet another IM client with notifications. Annoying. Well there's an interesting alternative if you're already using an IRC client all the time, as I do.tircd is a Twitter to IRC gateway, implemented as an IRC server. It runs on your workstation (or a server in your network), you connect to it from your favourite IRC client (e.g.

by Loki (noreply@blogger.com) at May 03, 2009 13:13

May 01, 2009

Philip Paeps

Fighting robots

19:12 EDT

I survived another eight hours locked up in a steel tube pointing towards Canada earlier today. first thing I did after I got here (after witnessing the mandatory introductory card crash) was buy money for my Canadian pre-paid phone.

Rogers has also gone the robot way. Has anyone ever got one of those robot systems to actually work? Do we all need to take lessons in robot pronunciation now?

Long live gethuman.com!

May 01, 2009 23:12

April 25, 2009

Philip Paeps

Making projectors work in the Magic Era

After last week's minor catastrophe I discovered that while I have all my data nicely backed up, I was missing backups of some useful configuration files.

As many things now work basically "by magic" provided you don't need them to work properly I didn't notice until this afternoon that my beam and unbeam scripts had stopped working.

The scrips are very simple, beam basically does:

xrandr --output VGA $mode --right-of LVDS

Where $mode is --preferred unless I give something else as a parameter.

unbeam simply does:

xrandr --output VGA --off

They also disable minor annoyances like power saving and the screensaver and make some symlinks to start terminals with larger fonts. Nothing particularly exciting.

Turns out I had somehow forgotten to back up my xorg.conf file and that recent versions of X11 fail to scream about that by mostly "just working". Until you need to do something special. Like project.

I then discovered that anything I put in xorg.conf these days will basically be used against me. Grr. Only very bare bones files seems to be acceptable. Who knows where the rest of my configuration is. Probably in fancy XML files or binary formats which are quietly corrupting themselves in the background. sigh

This xorg.conf works on my ThinkPad X60s:

#
# newage xorg.conf -- anything you say will be used against you!
#
Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier      "Generic Keyboard"
        Driver          "keyboard"
        Option          "CoreKeyboard"
EndSection
Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier      "Configured Mouse"
        Driver          "mouse"
        Option          "CorePointer"
EndSection

Section "Device"
    Identifier      "Integrated Controller"
    Driver          "intel"
    BusID           "PCI:0:2:0"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
    Identifier      "Default Screen"
    Device          "Integrated Controller"
    DefaultDepth    24
    SubSection "Display"
        Depth           24
        Virtual         2304 1792
    EndSubSection
EndSection

Section "ServerLayout"
        Identifier      "Default Layout"
        Screen          "Default Screen"
        InputDevice     "Generic Keyboard"
        InputDevice     "Configured Mouse"
EndSection

Note the absence of any settings to make the trackpoint work. For some reason which is entirely beyond me, I now need to configure something called hal to make that work. In XML, with the usual 3 bytes of overhead per byte of data. mumble

In /etc/hal/fdi/policy/mouse-wheel.fdi:

<match key="info.product" string="TPPS/2 IBM TrackPoint">
<merge key="input.x11_options.EmulateWheel" type="string">true</merge>
<merge key="input.x11_options.EmulateWheelButton" type="string">2</merge>
<merge key="input.x11_options.YAxisMapping" type="string">4 5</merge>
<merge key="input.x11_options.XAxisMapping" type="string">6 7</merge>
<merge key="input.x11_options.Emulate3Buttons" type="string">true</merge>
<merge key="input.x11_options.EmulateWheelTimeout" type="string">200</merge>
</match>

The userfriendly police strikes again!

April 25, 2009 20:18

April 23, 2009

Pascal Bleser

Anyone with a Czech keyboard and a few minutes on his hands ?

Bug #432627 (Backspace doesn't work in russian keyboard layout after autologin) has been open for 6 months now and has seen a lot of very useful feedback and comments from several Russian contributors.I even proposed a change that fixes the problem for Russian keyboards, but we're just waiting for anyone with a Czech keyboard layout to test that change and see whether it breaks the keyboard or

by Loki (noreply@blogger.com) at April 23, 2009 19:01

April 20, 2009

Pascal Bleser

openSUSE Search

After noticing that sgt-d has created a custom Google search for openSUSE, and given that Mediawiki's native search capabilities are.. well.. suboptimal, I quickly hacked up a nicer search form that uses the above mentioned custom Google search (because the page at Google is not branded).Then I went on and added search forms for the openSUSE forums, Packman, the openSUSE mailing-list archive, the

by Loki (noreply@blogger.com) at April 20, 2009 20:40

How to build aircrack-ng on openSUSE

aircrack-ng is a well known network security tool that is capable of cracking most wireless encryption algorithms (WEP, WPA, ...). It is a very useful tool to assess the security of your WLAN, but unfortunately, it can also be abused by crackers to penetrate a wireless network.As such, and I cannot stress this enough:it is FORBIDDEN and a CRIMINAL ACT by (a very controversial and unclear) law in

by Loki (noreply@blogger.com) at April 20, 2009 14:57

Content moderation

Obviously, the Blogger CAPTCHAs have been cracked since some time, and I'm just sick of the comment spam.Hence I finally enabled comment moderation and went through existing comments to sweep the spam -- Blogger definitely needs better tools for that :(And BTW, this isn't a support channel, if you have questions or technical issues, ask on one of the many channels we have for exactly that purpose

by Loki (noreply@blogger.com) at April 20, 2009 09:00

April 18, 2009

Philip Paeps

Unhappy disk

I was reminded today that laptop hard disks really are unreliable. For some reason, my laptop disk just "gave up" earlier today. I have no idea why, but suddenly while I was working, it felt I should be allowed at my data anymore.

This does not please me. At all.

Happily, I have backups of pretty much all my important stuff -- in fact, I don't keep much important stuff on my laptop in the first place. Unhappily, my last backup is a couple of days old and seems to lack some configuration bits.

sigh

April 18, 2009 15:20

April 16, 2009

Christophe Vandeplas

Solar-powered statistics

A friend just blogged about his successful attempt to reverse engineer his solar-cells inverter to grab stats out of it. He says:

The inverter (the device that converts DC into AC) is a SolarMax C-series. It has a 2-line LCD display that gives out some basic information: current, voltage, power; produced energy today, this month, this year, … This is very useful information, but is a bit hard to access. The instruction manual reveals that there is a computer interface available to read out its data. Naturally, I wanted to explore this!

The interface is physically an 8P8C (usually called RJ45). Electrically it’s a serial interface. The manual isn’t exactly clear whether it’s an RS-232 or an RS-485 interface. After some mailing and calling, the people at Sputnik Engineering just mailed us the pinout diagram and document (both in German); it appeared to be RS-232. Their website even has a free utility called MaxTalk to read out the data!

Read the full post here. If you'd like to see scripts to generate graphs of the electric production you should ask it in his comments.

by chri at April 16, 2009 16:30

April 10, 2009

Pascal Bleser

RSS build notifications from OBS

One of the annoying things with the openSUSE Build Service ("OBS") is that while it is acceptable that it can take a while for the build grid to process your package, it is tedious to poll the results with "osc r" (or my contributed, nicely coloured "osc cr") again and again.Now, the openSUSE Build Service has a notification backend called "Hermes" (named so after the Greek mythology, Hermes

by Loki (noreply@blogger.com) at April 10, 2009 14:23

Philip Paeps

Off to the Ardennes!

This weekend, some suspicious geeky types are going to the Ardennes to see the effects of a week of continuous rain on unpaved roads. I have a sneaky suspicion that mud will figure quite highly. But it will be lots of fun, and we'll be enough people to play cards and Mah Jongg.

Bram found an establishment called Les Gattes for us to stay. I'm looking forward to it.

First however, I need to go raid another cheese shop.

April 10, 2009 10:43

April 09, 2009

Pascal Bleser

openSUSE Community Week countdown

As you probably already know, we'll have a first Community Week, with the current date range being from 2009-05-11 to -17.I hacked up a countdown image for it, in a similar fashion to the countdown images for openSUSE distribution releases: they adapt automatically to the language preferences of the browser visiting the page that contains the image, and a cron job updates the counter on the

by Loki (noreply@blogger.com) at April 09, 2009 16:03

openSUSE TV links for FOSDEM 2009 talks

I just went through the FOSDEM 2009 talks/slides/videos page on the wiki to add links to our openSUSE TV channel at blip.tv.So if you prefer to see the talks as streams with Flash instead of the Theora oggs we have on tube.opensuse.org, you can do so using the links on that page now.To do so, I also added an "OpensuseTV" template to our Wiki, in a similar fashion to the "Video" template. It uses

by Loki (noreply@blogger.com) at April 09, 2009 15:52

April 06, 2009

Philip Paeps

Looking for a fourth man

As blogged earlier I will be hiking the West Coast Trail this summer together with looksaus and Dieter. Ideally, we'd like to be four people so we can play cards and Mah Jongg without having to be too creative about it.

We leave from Brussels 3 July, intend to start the hike 6 July and return to Brussels 19 July.

If you are free during this period and you'd like to join us on the hike, please shout. You will need a tent, hiking experience and the ability to survive in the company of crazy people doing crazy things.

April 06, 2009 06:15

April 04, 2009

Jochen Maes

shopping spree

A day of shopping has passed by. I'm no big shopper and neither is my gf but sometimes you really need to do it. So today was buying trousers and sweatshirts day.

But! I wouldn't be a good geek without buying at least some other goodies also:
CD's:

  • dEUS: The Ideal Crash
  • dEUS: worst case scenario
  • Radiohead: OK Computer
  • Rage Against the Machine: Rage against the machine
  • Rage Against the Machine:  Live at the Grand Olympic Auditorium
Other things:
  • iLap 15": should have bought this like 15 years ago!
  • Battlefield 2142: Hope the game turns out well.
You should realize now that tonight and tomorrow I will probably be gaming all the time :p
[edit] Almost forgot! bought Star wars attack of the clones double cd. Performed by The moonlight Orchestra. [/edit]

by SeJo at April 04, 2009 16:21

April 03, 2009

Jochen Maes

imapfilter

I've been using mutt now for a while as my main mail application. I absolutely love it, the main problem i always had with mutt is my filters.
I have a setup with virtual hosts where most of the email users have no account on the server. And procmailrc is not really working with my setup (tried multiple times). So I was kinda stuck with thunderbird.
A few days ago, pleemans aka toi told me about imapfilter. At first I did not like it, but yesterday manually moving those mails annoyed me, so installed imapfiler and in 5 minutes I was setup and the filters were working.
Now mutt and I will rule the world!

Are you pondering what I'm pondering?

by SeJo at April 03, 2009 06:25

March 31, 2009

Christophe Vandeplas

Tomorrow conficker day

Today I was positively surprised by an internal corporate email:


! ! ! BELANGRIJK ! ! !
VIRUS CONFICKER

De voorbije maanden is er een virus ontdekt, CONFICKER, dat naar algemene verwachting morgen (1 april) actief wordt. Wat het virus dan precies zal doen is (nog) niet geweten. We proberen steeds zo veel mogelijk virussen tegen te houden en indien ze toch doorbreken zo goed mogelijk voorbereid te zijn, door onze toestellen te patchen, antivirus software te installeren, up te daten, enz. Alle gevolgen zijn echter niet altijd in te schatten.

DIT IS GEEN APRIL-GRAP! Wij willen via deze weg hiervoor de nodige aandacht vragen.

  • Merk je morgen iets abnormaals aan je pc, gelieve dan ONMIDDELLIJK zelf volgende acties te nemen:
  • Trek je netwerkkabel uit (disable ook je draadloos netwerk indien dat actief is!!)
  • Verwittig je collega’s zodat ze allert zijn voor dezelfde signalen
  • Neem ASAP contact op met helpdesk. Zij zullen je verder begeleiden in het zetten van de nodige stappen.

Snel actie nemen is bij een virus-uitbraak essentieel! Ga er dus alsjeblief niet van uit dat je begonnen taken nog wel eerst kan afwerken, want de kans is groot dat het dan te laat is.

Meer informatie over het virus vind je o.a. op volgende websites:

Voor de mensen die thuis geconfronteerd worden met dit virus, bestaat er een goede gratis tool van McAfee:

http://download.nai.com/products/mcafee-avert/stinger.exe

Fortunately my personal machines run Mac OS X and Linux; that are not a possible victim of the Conficker joke.

by chri at March 31, 2009 17:25

March 29, 2009

Philip Paeps

West Coast Trail

I convinced a couple of mates and possibly convinced some others to join me this summer to hike the infamous West Coast Trail.

This hike has been quite high on my list for a couple of years now and with airfare prices coming down, it's easier to motivate others making the trip halfway around the world to spend a week in the wilderness, putting mind and body under a completely different kind of stress than that provided by hacking software.

Time to start making plans ... and lists. Lots and lots of lists.

If anyone has hiked this trail before, I would love to hear about your experiences.

March 29, 2009 09:26

March 26, 2009

Jochen Maes

spotify

Apparently last.fm is closing down their free services for people not living in US, UK and DE.

So I'm on the lookout for a new way of listening to my music without the need of dragging an external disc with me all the time.

Heard spotify was good, so if you have an invitation... :p (I'm a beggar, I know)

[update]

spotify does not work in belgium, so just bought a subscription to last.fm...
Can't live without my music...

by SeJo at March 26, 2009 08:12

March 24, 2009

Philip Paeps

All this "twitter" noise

Planet Grep this morning seems to be a stream of "meta-micro-blogging".

I wonder, does anyone feel this new "micro-blogging" hype really adds any value?

I've yet to be convinced that "blogging" adds value, so perhaps I'm just naturally disinclined to see any benefits in the continuous stream of consciousness multicast by self-proclaimed new age geeks. Honestly though, how do people get any work done if every other minute they announce on "twitter" that they should be getting work done?

Never mind being interrupted every time someone they are "following" -- as they call it -- is not getting any work done and has the urge to multicast that fact.

What happened to the open source geeks? Whatever happened to idling on IRC?

And now I am off for a cup of coffee. And then I am going to fire up vim. And then I am going to open a buffer. And another buffer. And another one. And another one. And then I am going to write some code. And if I get stuck, I will read some code. And perhaps read some mailing lists.

See, no need for Twitter! In certain cases, polling really does make more sense than interrupts.

March 24, 2009 09:10

March 20, 2009

Philip Paeps

Now using reCAPTCHA

Because I have a million other things I should be doing instead, I wasted a couple of hours this morning adding reCAPTCHA to my blog. While my geeky questions were fun and fairly effective, I had trouble with spammers learning the answers to the "easy" questions and geeks not knowing the answers to the "difficult" ones.

This exercise again confirmed in my mind that Python is a dreadful language. Besides the fact that it's not C, the ridiculous indenting rules and the way that it tries to implement every single programming paradigm ever invented make it practically impossible to quickly hack something in.

I was also reminded that the "web" sucks. In the twenty minutes my blog was completely unprotected, nearly a hundred garbage-posts got in. Bah.

March 20, 2009 11:39

March 19, 2009

Philip Paeps

A window of work

I've been back to work since returning from Tokyo on Monday. Busy busy.

Unfortunately, I have had to cancel my talk at the UKUUG spring conference at shorter notice than I would have liked if I were organizing the conference because of some unmaskable other demands on my time. sigh

Back to hacking now though. I hope to have some time this weekend to look at the shiny hardware I picked up in Tokyo. :-)

March 19, 2009 10:24

March 18, 2009

Pascal Bleser

freshmeat.net 3 project metadata scraping

freshmeat.net provides an invaluable service to the FOSS community by allowing us to keep track of new projects and new releases of existing projects in a single central location (at least for most of them). As such, it is especially useful to packagers.Recently, the site has undergone a complete rewrite of its web interface and in that process, the XML project metadata that was available on the

by Loki (noreply@blogger.com) at March 18, 2009 22:33

March 16, 2009

Philip Paeps

Back to Copenhagen

11:28 JST

Waiting for an airplane again. It is clear the economy is shite because I had no problems burning miles for an upgrade again. Last year, business and economy extra were packed and economy was underpopulated. This year, it's the other way around. I'm not complaining. Miles are my friends (if briefly).

I had an excellent time at AsiaBSDCon again -- hence the lack of blog-noise, I was too busy enjoying myself and speaking with the local hackers.

Thank you Sato-san, Goto-san and others for organizing this conference, and thank you very much Saitoh-san for letting me borrow some really shiny ARM hardware for hacking on the crypto framework.

I hope to get home in many many hours with all my luggage undamaged so I can play with that toy and the toys I bought on my Akihabara raids.

March 16, 2009 02:28

March 12, 2009

Jochen Maes

small hint?

When having a server on the interwebs please configure sudo correct and rename sudo to something else!

by SeJo at March 12, 2009 15:50