gregoa's blog

at the office: a co-worker had two corrupted ms® office files; they simply crashed word when she tried to open them.

booted a knoppix CD, opened them with openoffice writer, saved them again; & she was happy again.

one more proof that free software is often better than proprietary stuff.

yesterday I activated cpu frequency scaling on my desktop box with the help of john goerzen's very fine tutorial.
(note to self: I guess I should try this on some other & more idling boxen, too.)

oh, & I guess I have not mentioned yet that I bought myself an usb bluetooth dongle which basically works, too; unfortunately my communicator 9500 is not more cooperative via bluetooth than via usb.

after procrastinating for several months today I moved my irssi instance from my workstation to a screen session on my playground server (in order to have it running permanently). I've documented the setup (script for starting/re-attaching the screen session on the server, connect from the workstation via ssh on X startup, setting un/away remotely via ssh in accordance to xscreensaver status on the workstation) in a small article.

upgraded from firefox 1.5 to iceweasel 2.0, swapped tabbrowser extensions against tab mix plus, removed an unused extension/add-on, added another one, found out that sage uses alt-z (instead of alt-s) now, played around with my userChrome.css (partly successfully), & I am quite happy.

during the last months we had problems with the internet connection at our office. I decided to exchange the router in order be to able to eliminate one possible culprit.

I went to buy a linksys wrt54gl ('L' as in 'Linux'), connected the cables, configured the box via the typical web interface, &: no connection to the internet via the funny austrian adsl (i.e. pptp) connection. the router got a connection but not a single packet went to the host at the other end of the tunnel.

time to implement my "secret" plans for the router: after reading the docs I installed openwrt, changed some settings (for pptp, for wpa encryption, for port forwarding), & one ifdown/ifup wan/wifi later it worked like a charm.

now let's see if the connection becomes more stable; if not then it's not the old router's fault, & I'll use the 'free' wrt54gl at home.

update: a few weeks later it's still running without any problems; so the connection issues at the office are solved; & I need to buy another wrt54gl if I want to have one at home ;-) — 2006-12-12

today philipp & me went to bolzano/bozen for the SFScon. it was a nice day with some good although not exciting talks (targeted at the general public but partly interesting nevertheless), & with meeting some interesting people (among them enrico zini from the debian project & werner koch from gnupg); listening to some (parts of) talks in italian was easier than coping with the german simultanous interpretation.

we finished the day with a delicious dinner in an italian restaurant.

... & then they went off into the setting sun: georg & chaussée, his shiny new laptop (a thinkpad r51e) running a carefully tuned version of ubuntu. & they seemed to like each other ...

$Microsoft--
$Linux++

somehow related — more or less:

From The Devil's Dictionary (1881-1906) [devil]:
  LOVE, n.  A temporary insanity curable by marriage or by removal of
  the patient from the influences under which he incurred the disorder. 
  This disease, like _caries_ and many other ailments, is prevalent only
  among civilized races living under artificial conditions; barbarous
  nations breathing pure air and eating simple food enjoy immunity from
  its ravages.  It is sometimes fatal, but more frequently to the
  physician than to the patient.

From The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (19 Sep 2003) [foldoc]:
  love
     What many users feel for computers.
     "I don't really love computers, I just say that to get them
     into bed with me". (Terry Pratchet)
     [What did you expect in a computing dictionary?]
     (1995-05-10)

since sunday I've been playing with a new toy: last.fm & its "scrobbling" feature. I've written a small tool to submit tracks ("scrobble") from the command line (in some lines of perl; not published yet); I've created a last.fm account; I've patched randomplay to make it use my lastfmscrobble script (& in a meaningful way, i.e. submitting only after a song has been played & if its score is > 0); & I've played around with last.fm clients (I didn't get the new one from the last.fm webpage to work but the old one from the debian package works if set to use OSS & invoked as aoss lastfm).
& I've written a nanoblogger plugin (more perl than bash) to show the recently played tracks in the blog's sidebar — & then decided to use last.fm's status graphics anyway (after figuring out how to configure them).

sometimes it's really simple. — in this case the objective was to enable sound in flash (in firefox). the solution was:

$ cat ~/.mozilla/firefox/rc 
FIREFOX_DSP="aoss"

you may also want to read /usr/share/doc/firefox/NEWS.Debian.gz and /usr/share/doc/firefox/README.Debian.

after playing around with "my" webcam I got streaming up more or less. at the moment I have:

#/bin/sh
# http://www.videolan.org/doc/streaming-howto/en/ch03.html
# 176x144
# 352x288
vlc v4l:// \
        :v4l-vdev="/dev/video0" :v4l-adev="/dev/dsp1" \
        :v4l-caching=1000 :v4l-fps=10.000000 \
        :v4l-width=352 :v4l-height=288 \
        --intf dummy \
        --sout '#transcode{vcodec=mp4v,acodec=mpga,fps=10,vb=512,ab=128,venc=ffmpeg{keyint=80,hurry-up,vt=800000},deinterlace}:standard{access=http,mux=ogg,dst=:1234}'

gxine http://localhost:1234/ worked afterwards. slow, with a lag, & bad sound. but it worked :-)

& the new webcam is already on the way ...