Planet Slackadelic

In the near future, I will be posting new stuff on commandlinegeek.com. Currently working on a series of articles on how to build an office productivity suite for the command line, with abilities to do spreadsheets, calendar, mail and document processing.

Congratualations to microsoft for one of their latest patents, ’Page Up’ and ‘Page Down.’ ZDNet article and the full text from the
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You.DontLike.Us has been running a XMPP server for quite some time, and I am now opening it up to the public for registration. Inband registration is active, and I reserve the right to delete any and all accounts for any or no reason, yada yada yada. Enjoy demonstrating your pessimism to the rest of the world!

Yes, it is true. I am alive. I’ve been swamped with work, and dropped off of IRC because of that. I’m still connected to both Freenode and OFTC as mwalling if you want to /query me, as well as my usual methods of contact.

I’ve been making tweaks in the background (especially to my Asterisk server), and plan on documenting them. I’ve also sketched out the long-overdue replacement for markwalling.org as a whole, which I will start working on soon… I promise. Slackware 12.1 has been released, along with several kernel versions, so I think the EeePC needs an update too.

So, the ToDo list (mainly for acountability’s sake):

 

1. Redesign and implement markwalling.org
2. Document the Astersik server
3. Freshen and document upgrading the EeePC to 12.1
4. I bought one of these and want to control it from Linux. (I’ve got a really old (early gen USB) QuickCam that I want to tie in as well, but controlling it is the first step)

OK, this is a bigger problem than it may sound or look. If you are one of those many who do not use a secure (encrypted) session (SSL, that is) to not only authenticate to but read and write your emails on Gmail, you are in trouble. At the time of writing, I suspect Mike [...]

I've written a small bash CLI interface to MPRIS players, available at http://files.fredemmott.co.uk/mprisshell.sh.

It's currently rather limited in functionality:

Usage: mprisshell.sh [command]
Commands:
  play                          Start playing the current track
  pause                         Pause the current track
  playpause                     If a track is playing, pause it; otherwise, play the current track
  next                          Skip to the next track
  previous                      Skip to the previous track
  incVolume [percentage]        Increase the volume by 10%, or the given percentage
  decVolume [percentage]        Decrease the volume by 10%, or the given percentage

It sends the above commands to the first MPRIS-capable player found; this includes the latest git head of YANIHP, Amarok 2, Audacious, and others. It's meant for normal users, not developers, for example as a program to bind to media keys.

There's easily findable tutorials on how to build the vorbis codec in scratchbox; however, you don't need to :)

Just add the chinook extra's repository, then as root, apt-get install gstreamer0.10-plugins-ivorbis (integer-only decoder). This package works fine on diablo.

Regarding TSDgeos' post, if you have working 32-bit multilib, you just need "linux32 sh installer-goes-here.sh". If you don't have that binary in your distribution, the source is in the slamd64 source archives among other places. Thanks to Andi Kleen for writing this incredibly useful little launcher back in 2002 :)

It's also useful for various games installers.

Firstly a big thank you to Trolltech^WNokia, and all of the team who organised the event - probably the best one I've been to so far.

As for what I did there:

• Drank lots of Belgian Beer :)
• Learned about new stuff in Qt, KDE, and Linux graphical stuff in general - in particular, Zack Rusin's talk on Gallium3D seems very promising
• Added MPRIS support to YANIHP - so it now support the same D-Bus interface as Amarok, VLC, Xmms2, and others
• Added a tray icon to YANIHP
• Received a free N810 from Nokia...

...which led to:

:D

Surprisingly few changes were needed:

• Added a compile-time option to make it so that left-clicking on the tray icon pops up the context menu, instead of hiding/showing YANIHP - I'll later make this apply to all context menus, where appropriate
• Added a compile-time option to hardcode data and music paths - otherwise YANIHP uses QDesktopServices::storageLocation - which seems to think that /usr/share/mime/data/ is a perfectly suitable location to store non-root user data on the N810...

Here's how to get it running:

• Install taglib (1.5), libqtcore4, libqt4-sql-sqlite, libqt4-phonon on the device, and the corresponding -dev packages in scratchbox
• Also install cmake in scratchbox
• Build YANIHP in scratchbox, as normal, with the following options:
  • EMBEDDED_FIXED_DATA_PATH=/home/user/.yanihp - this changes where the database, coverart, and lyrics are stored
  • EMBEDDED_FIXED_MUSIC_PATH=/media/mmc2/Music - this just changes the default location, the user's asked if they want to change it
  • EMBEDDED_USE_FIXED_PATHS=ON - enables the above two options
  • EMBEDDED_LEFT_BUTTON_CONTEXT_MENU=ON - makes it so that left clicking on the tray icon shows the context menu instead of showing/hiding YANIHP
  • WITH_Mpris_PLUGIN=OFF - not strictly neccessary, but I doubt you've got use for it
• Copy it across :)

There's a few caveats:

• It's only currently usable with the CleanLooks Qt theme - with small font sizes and so on, not with GTK support.
• Phonon-gstreamer doesn't appear to support manually switching between gstreamer audio sinks - in particular, there's no mp3 codec as such - instead, you need to connect your audio source to "dspmp3sink" instead. Alternatively, you can use another phonon backend.

I'm not uploading packages, as I've got no idea how to make a "good" debian package.

On the eve of Pakistan’s 61st Independence Day, it rained thoroughly throughout the city — perhaps throughout the country. I walked out late in the morning over the wet asphalt on a road that was rebuilt a few months ago to the spot where one of our cars was parked. Dad is in [...]

If you are not a systems administrator, you likely may never need to benchmark individual servers on which your applications are running. But if you are, odds are good that you already identify with the importance of knowing which parts of a system under your control are under-performing, causing bottlenecks, and plainly not coping [...]