C r a c k . a . s m i l e

Kubuntu (KDE) together with Ubuntu 9.10

mooshikam — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 12:42:24 +0000

I really do like the new Ubuntu, but there are some things that KDE has which it doesn’t offer. For one thing, the kio_slaves and Kate, the best free text editor that I used so far. I have considered installing Kubuntu in parallel to Ubuntu, but neither a shared home directory for them nor two home directories sounds intriguing. You can have both desktop environments by apt-get install kubuntu-desktop

Then you’ll be able to select KDE as window manager when logging in to your account. This will also replace the bootsplash theme in your initramfs that you see during bootup with Kubuntu’s theme, though. If you want to get the old one back: sudo update-usplash-theme usplash-theme-ubuntu

While we’re concerned with boot options, fiddling around with grub2 is beginning to grow into a rather complex task. What’s easier: Controlling your boot menu through the Startup manager.

Ubuntu 9.10 on a HP Compaq Presario CQ71 Notebook PC

mooshikam — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 11:29:24 +0000

This is the second time that my IBM Thinkpad R51 died on me, and since I love it dearly but the hardware is outdated by now, I bought a Hewlett-Packard Compaq Presario CQ71 Notebook PC. Since the 9.10 version of Ubuntu, dubbed “Karmic Koala”, was released recently, I decided to try it out. It’s really nice – things like the integrated webcam work out of the box on my notebook, e.g. through Cheese. What didn’t work too well, though, was audio.

Apparently that’s a problem with the snd-hda-intel module. The built-in card identifies as follows:
# cat /proc/asound/card0/codec#* | grep Codec Codec: IDT 92HD75B2X5 Codec: Intel G45 DEVCTG

There are numerous tips out there how to fix this problem that ALSA has with the snd-hda-intel model, most of them involve editing your /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf in a desperate attempt to find the right combination of options to get it working. I suggest before you try experimenting, you try what I did: install linux-backports-modules-alsa-karmic-generic via apt-get install linux-backports-modules-alsa-karmic-generic For me, this made my audio start working out of the box again without any more changes.

Automated logging of TBs and GeoCoins at GeoCaching.com

mooshikam — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 11:19:25 +0000

I have taken up a new hobby called Geocaching some months ago, where you run around with a GPS device in order to find hidden “caches” along the countryside. One thing that you can find in these caches are so-called “trackables” which own a tracking number. You enter this tracking number on the Geocaching.com website to claim that you have seen and maybe have taken the trackable item.

When attending an event together with other Geocachers, the number of trackable items present can become really big – there were over 80 of them for the last get-together that I went to. Since I don’t want to track all of these items by hand, I remembered about the possibility to automate web browsers with Selenium. After I got a list of the tracking numbers, I wrote a small script to handle the “Discover It!” requests to the GC.com website.

Here it is:

start();

  $selenium->open('http://www.geocaching.com/login/');
  $selenium->waitForPageToLoad('20000');

  // login
  $selenium->type('id=ctl00_ContentBody_myUsername', '___YOUR_ACCOUNT_NAME___');
  $selenium->type('id=ctl00_ContentBody_myPassword', '___YOUR_ACCOUNT_PASS___');
  $selenium->click('id=ctl00_ContentBody_Button1');
  $selenium->waitForPageToLoad('20000');

  // discover trackables
  foreach ($trackables as $track) {
    $selenium->open("http://www.geocaching.com/track/details.aspx?tracker=$track");
    $selenium->waitForPageToLoad('20000');

    $selenium->click('link=Found It? Log it!');
    $selenium->waitForPageToLoad('20000');
    $selenium->select('id=LogBookPanel1_ddLogType', 'label=Discovered It');
    $selenium->type('id=LogBookPanel1_tbCode', $track);
    $selenium->type('id=LogBookPanel1_tbLogInfo', '___DISCOVER_MESSAGE___');
    $selenium->click('id=LogBookPanel1_LogButton');
    $selenium->waitForPageToLoad('20000');
  }

  // close browser
  $selenium->close();
  $selenium->stop();

?>

My true political self

mooshikam — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 20:03:45 +0000

You are a
Social Moderate
(55% permissive)

and an…
Economic Liberal
(28% permissive)

You are best described as a:

Democrat

Link: The Politics Test on Ok Cupid

Bit hack optimizations

mooshikam — Tue, 20 May 2008 09:39:23 +0000

I came across Sean Eron Anderson’s Bit Twiddling Hacks page today, where all these awkward optimizations are collected that are faster than generated machine code from the compiler for common tasks. Using those was common practice when people were still coding in Assembler and needed to get the most out of their CPUs, and it probably still finds use in programming today when speed is of the essence.

A link on that page went to Paul Hsie’s Assembly Language Lab where you can find fast code for dividing by a constant and multiplying with a constant. The latter page has a warning that because it is over 235K of HTML, browsers may fail to render the page correctly. Very cute.

Help with regular expressions

mooshikam — Sun, 04 May 2008 02:28:17 +0000

Mastering regular expressions can quickly become a non-trivial task. While good text editors like e.g. Kate, KWrite or TextPad have good support for regular expressions, it can be difficult to construct complex regexps, and even more so to find out why they don’t work as intended if they fail.

I have found two resources which help with that: first, the Javascript Regular Expression Validator from net shift media, which takes a regular expression from you and provides two input fields for tests which can be matched against the expression – instantly, no need to press any buttons and wait for an answer. This is very handy to find out if there was a typo in your logic somewhere.

If you need more help in debugging your expressions, then Dr. Edmund Weitz’s RegEx Coach might be able to help. This Windows program (there’s an outdated, discountinued Linux version, too) will take you through the evaluation of your regular expression, step by step:

No text in Flash with libflashplayer in Linux

mooshikam — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 20:45:48 +0000

It seems that Macromedia/Adobe finally managed to produce a Flash plugin which doesn’t crash your browser on every second Youtube video you want to see. Although the FreeBSD patches that I have seen and some reports might even indicate that this was a Kernel problem. No idea, but – you might be suffering from the same problem as I did and have invisible fonts on some Flash pages that you visit. For me, this was the case after a reinstallation. Looking for clues on Google, I’ve seen mentions of this from as early as 2004, with some tips about fixing the configuration for the X Font server xfs, which must have been so broken that it isn’t in use any more. I’ve found a minimal example to see if you’re affected or not, too: If you don’t see the text next to the checkboxes on this political cartoon on CNN, then your problem will be that the Arial font is missing on your system. For other things like web sites, there are usually fallbacks to fonts which look about the same, but Flash is picky with this: If you don’t have the font installed, then you see nothing.

What you’ll have to do to fix this is to install the Microsoft Core Fonts package. If you are using Debian, run apt-get install msttcorefonts (or apt-get install msttcorfonts for earlier distributions) as root. If you are using Gentoo, run emerge corefonts as root. For other Linux systems, visit the Corefonts home page for instructions. Restart your browser after that. Now you should have the Arial font and be able to read the text in the Flash movies, too.

MathMap plugin and the Droste Effect

mooshikam — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 20:22:04 +0000

Found a very cool tool today which allows you to produce self-referential images, like you know it from fractals. It’s called MathMap and can do tons of other things as well – it even gives you the ability to write new plugins in a simple way yourself. There’s a GIMP plugin and a standalone Mac OS X program of it. The filter that’s particularly interesting is called the “Droste effect”. Josh Sommers has a collection of images produced with it on flickr and a tutorial there as well.

Here are some of the pictures created with it:

Moving a Linux installation to a bigger drive

mooshikam — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 11:20:12 +0000

I recently wanted to move my Gentoo installation from one notebook HDD to another, a bigger one. Moving the data over the network was fairly easy: Boot up two laptops with live CDs, in my case I happened to have two Ubuntu 7.10 CDs flying around, then start up netcat as root on one of them and using it on the other to copy the data:
nc -l -p 3333 > /dev/hdX on the receiving part and dd if=/dev/hdX | nc -q1 3333 on the sending one. You can use any other port, 3333 was the example that I used, and remember to replace hdX with your actual device. Alternatively, and a lot easier, is to use a mobile HD case to connect one of the drives to an USB port and then do the same as above without using netcat. If you do it this way, with dd, then you will retain everything, including the MBR so even your boot manager will be preserved. The next thing is to resize (expand) your data partition so that it can grow to make use of the additional storage space on your drive.

At first I tried using Partition Magic and similar tools from Acronis, which were always helping me out during my Windows days. Granted, the software was already a little dated, but the ext3 partitions wouldn’t have been any trouble for them. But nada, Partition Magic refused to do anything as it reported that the disk geometry of the target drive didn’t match the physical disk geometry present, which could lead to data loss and corruption. I was afraid that this was a real problem that was induced through my transfer solution, but it actually reported the same on the original drive as well. I popped in the Ubuntu live CDs again and was delighted to see that the Partition Manager parted had no trouble to fulfill the task, and with the graphical version GParted which can be accessed through System > Administration > Partition Editor, you have a nice GUI which is reminiscent of Partition Magic itself. The Qt version QtParted strangely wasn’t able to do this task, so give the Gnome version a try if you run into trouble.

Making digital videos by means of a Bluescreen effect

mooshikam — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 22:31:42 +0000

As you might know when you take a look at my very first posts to the blog, I have been interested in hacking around with Blizzard’s World of Warcraft game. Back when Blizzhackers was still up and the very first private servers popped up after a game server got hacked and people reverse engineered the server software, projects like WoWmapview (a program which could display ingame terrain) and the WoW Model viewer (a program which displayed models from the game, PC, NPC and monsters alike) popped up, too. The very first version of the WoW Model viewer was done by a smart chinese guy, but he released his sources (which I was the first to report on the Blizzhackers forum) and it seems that others have now taken up the project. Even more interesting: Some people are using this program to create their own videos by means of a Blue-/Greenscreen effect.

Very nice! WoW has definitely inspired lots of third party creations. Somebody even started to build a real time strategy game around it.