RealNitro’s Blog

Wie LaTeX wil leren kennen: de jaarlijkse LaTeX-les van de VTK-Werkgroep Vrije Software gaat door volgende week dinsdag 6 november om 19u30 in auditorium A van het Jozef Plateau gebouw van de Faculteit Ingenieurswetenschappen. Meer info, en de mogelijkheid om een cursus en/of samenvatting te bestellen vind je hier.

A quick post to help people with the same problem:

I upgraded from Ubuntu Feisty Fawn to Gutsy Gibbon beta this weekend. Gutsy comes with xrandr 1.2 which allows for easy configuration of external displays without the need to restart X. Using the graphical “Screen and graphics” tool I just made things worse then they already were (I could no longer start X), so I started Googling. This page is what I needed. In short:

• Backup your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file and generate a new one.
• Edit your new xorg.conf file according to the instructions I just linked. (Add the TV stuff and especially the Virtual line.)
• Restart X.

Now when you attach your external screen, it will show up when you run xrandr, and you can start playing with it! (Read the rest of the page I linked.)

Good luck!

When it was time to replace our old LAN-only Linksys router, I ordered a WRT54G, as those devices are/were known to run Linux, which resulted in multiple projects releasing alternative software for those devices. Unfortunately the WRT54G version 5 had just been released, so I received a device that had ‘neutered’ hardware (half the RAM and half the Flash memory) and didn’t run Linux. None of the alternative softwares supported those new devices (yet).

But, no harm done, I could just run the default firmware, right? Unfortunately that default firmware, well, sucks. It really, really sucks. Some issues I had:

• Wifi locks up on OSX when using it for max. 30 minutes. Pulling the plug is the only solution.
• About once a day, when under ‘heavy use’ (i.e.: me and my brother surfing the web), all data traffic stops. Again, only pulling the plug solves the problem.
• Sometimes my brother could keep on working, but there is just no way my laptop could connect. Be it Wifi or LAN, it just wouldn’t work. Solution? You guessed it: pulling that plug again.
• Getting my Wii to talk to my router was a pain in the *ss. I got it to work in the end, thanks to Google and some people with the same issue (and router).

But, while searching for a solution for my Wii connection problem, I came across a forum post that advised switching to dd-wrt micro. dd-wrt micro is a special version of dd-wrt that is small enough to be used with WRT54G v5 models. There was just one drawback: I could brick the router (=turn the router useless) when something went wrong. So I descided to keep on pulling the router’s plug once or twice (or more) a day.

Until today. I was sick of all the disconnects and started preparing the switch to dd-wrt micro. Using this page I downloaded the images I needed, created an image with my router’s MAC address embedded, and started the flashing procedure. Everything went smoothly and my router has been up for more then 10 hours so far. I’ve been connected by Wifi for about 4 hours now and my connection has been rock-solid. You’ve got to love Open Source.

Some quick facts about the last few weeks. I might elaborate on some of them later:

• Picked a thesis subject. Can’t get the exact subject from the web framework (Plato) atm because it’s down, but it’s about implementing a .NET/CIL backend for Diablo.
• I bought a laptop (finally!). Specs: MacBook, white, 2.16Ghz, 2GB RAM, 120GB HDD. Turned it into a triple boot (it’s running Linux, OSX and Windows). Ubuntu runs great on it. Sleep/resume, remote control, volume keys worked out of the box. Wireless is working with the Madwifi drivers, the screen brightness keys used to work, but not anymore. Battery time is max. 3 hours on Ubuntu. My desktop pc is quite abandoned now…
• I passed my exams. Got better grades then I was expecting.
• Went to GUADEC, unfortunately without ikke (shame on him). Saw a lot great talks. Maybe more on that later.
• Just finished Harry Potter 7 last night. Great book, great series of books. I’m not going to give away any spoilers here though…

Things to come:

• A few more weeks of vacation. Way too much stuff I want to do I way too little time.
• Summer job/internship at Think Wize. I’ll be working on some of their Django-based solutions. Should be fun.

Meer info (binnenkort) op de VTK-WVS site.

This news just made my month: The White Stipes finished mixing and recording their newest album ‘Icky Thump’. The album will probably be released in June. More info on whitestripes.com and Little Room.

A quick review of the talks I attended last weekend at FOSDEM:
Saturday:

• OLPC: Great, innovative machine. The talk was nice, but I think it could have been better, maybe with another speaker…
• Liberating Java: Great talk. The only ciritique I can think of is that is was quite commercial. The speaker(s) obviously were trying to sell Java (and Sun). Not that I blame them. I enjoyed the talk.
• Jabber 101: The Jabber room was packed. The devrooms at FOSDEM really are starting to get too small. Great speaker. Didn’t learn a lot of new stuff.
• What’s new in GStreamer: Good talk. Chatted a bit with Ikke, made him envious of not being there.
• GEGL: Great speaker. Interesting talk, glad I know what GEGL is now.
• Django: Didn’t learn a lot, but it was interesting to hear somebody using Django professionally give his opinion about it. The devroom was packed, again.

Sunday:

• Plone 3.0: Nice talk.
• Drupal: Nice talk. The list of Drupal sites is quite impressive. I might give it a try some day, even though I’m not a PHP fan. (I prefer Python, and Django.)
• Elisa: Interesting project, I’m glad I got introduced to its structure, interesting questions and answers after the talk. Unfortunately the speaker wasn’t very good. The Python devroom was packed. Again.
• OpenOffice - OpenXML: I had expected this talk to become a discussion about ODF and OpenXML, but it didn’t, so I’m a bit disappointed about it.
• Turbocharging Linux with Mono: Great talk, I really enjoyed myself, too bad I missed the beginning. If Miguel de Icaza is right, 50% of all .NET apps will run on Mono within the next 4 months. Amazing.
• Secure Communications with Jabber: Once again, great speaker. I’m happy the Jabber people are thinking about protecting us from spam, eavesdropping, phishing, etc.
• Profiling Desktop Applications: the best talk of FOSDEM 2007 for me. Interesting and funny. I wish all our classes were like this.

Deze week wilde ik wat C programmeren in vim op eduserv. Jammergenoeg lukte het me niet om de syntax highlighting aan de gang te krijgen. Ik kreeg enkel wat onderstreepte keywords. Op aanraden van Ikke heb ik wat geprutst met de TERM variabele, maar niets leek te werken. ’s Avonds dan maar een mailtje gestuurd naar de DICT Helpdesk, en vandaag antwoord gekregen. De oplossing is:

TERM=xtermc; export TERM

Aangezien die instelling niet bewaard bleef na uit- en terug inloggen was het wel nodig TERM=xtermc toe te voegen aan .bashrc. Merci Helpdesk!

About a week ago I decided to move my blog from b2evolution (hosted by Ikke) to WordPress. I found a convertor-script here, but it didn’t work for my version of b2evolution (and WordPress). So I started hacking away with my beginner-php-skills and adapted the script.

Some ‘features’:

• It transfers your user, posts, comments and categories
• Comments by b2evolution blog members are translated to normal comments, using the nicknames, e-mailadresses and url’s from the users table.
• Several changes from the original script to support the current versions of b2evolution and WordPress.

One problem with this script is that post and category ‘names’ are not converted. I forgot to convert them and fixed them manually in the database as I found out about it when my blog was almost ready. If you want to use fancy urls with your post or category name in them, you will have to change the script to convert them from b2evolution, or just add them manually. Changing the script isn’t a lot of work, but I just don’t feel like reïnstalling WordPress just to test that feature. (I know, I’m lazy. )

A quick howto:

1. Install WordPress on your server. If you can visit your WordPress blog and read the standard WordPress post, you’re ready to go.
2. Upload the script to your server, and rename it to b2evo2wp.php
3. Surf to the file you just uploaded, fill in the required fields, and if you’re lucky, it all works…

Good luck, and let me know how it turned out.

I have been cleaning up and updating my Gentoo Linux system over the last few days. Tonight I decided to do a emerge -v depclean. Unfortunately this messed up my coreutils (I couldn’t use ls, mv, cp, …). The error I got was:

error while loading shared libraries: libacl.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Because of this error, I couldn’t fix the problem by re-emerging coreutils without acl support. The only solution was getting libacl.so.1 (and libattr.so.1) and putting them in /lib/ (or /usr/lib/). All solutions I found on Google use a live-cd to fix the problem, but thanks to Ikke, I was able to fix the problem without rebooting.

If you’re lucky (like me), you have busybox installed. Everytime I needed one of the broken commands while putting the missing files in /lib/, I just replaced them with busybox $CMD.

Come to think of it, you don’t even need busybox… I got my replacement files from openswan.org, but I copied them to my server to make sure they will be available:

cd /lib/
wget http://www.realnitro.be/files/code/libacl.so.1
wget http://www.realnitro.be/files/code/libattr.so.1
# ls, mv, cp should work again
echo "sys-apps/coreutils -acl" >> /etc/portage/package.keywords
emerge -v coreutils
# clean up, these are no longer needed
rm /lib/libacl.so.1
rm /lib/libattr.so.1


I hope this spares someone from having to reboot with a live-cd. Good luck!