gregoa's blog

• brain: last weekend I tried to play the four-part piece in two voices (by john renbourn & stefan grossman) by heart for the first time. didn't work of course, but it will. sometime in the future.
• nails: two broken fingernails again; one by itself, the other by carrying parcels. - should I go shopping?

yesterday I finally changed ion3's keybindings. cf. my article.

& Alt_L didn't work as the Meta key in XTerms, e.g. in irssi. now it does.

behind the blinds:

• snow is falling
• birds are screaming
• 0°C

sunday morning in the alps

after xchat annoyed me once again by forgetting to set the mark lines after the last read line in a channel window I decided to give irssi a try — finally, after having thought about it for months.

well, it took me some hours, I grabbed through heaps of settings and tons of scripts (361 in the package irssi-scripts), & I'm sure I will have much fun with it in the future.

$console_apps += 1;

just when I got used to centericq's morse messages they stopped. - no failure of centericq or cw though but it seems that aplay has learned to use the sound card even if mpg321 is playing music.

strange - I can't remember changing anything relevant but maybe the 300+ MB aptitude upgrade pulled in something new. - & the effect isn't bad in general - au contraire ...

concerning the fun component:
installed xdaliclock. *hihi*

after several tries I got DRI working with my intel 865G graphics chip.

gregoa@belanna:~$ glxinfo | grep direct
direct rendering: Yes
gregoa@belanna:~$ glxgears 
379 frames in 5.1 seconds = 74.989 FPS
82 frames in 5.3 seconds = 15.381 FPS
66 frames in 5.1 seconds = 13.059 FPS
82 frames in 5.1 seconds = 16.237 FPS
80 frames in 5.0 seconds = 15.954 FPS
82 frames in 5.1 seconds = 16.209 FPS
gregoa@belanna:~$ 

how?
reading logs (i.e. /var/log/Xorg.0.log in this case) is often helpful; it told me to use the i915 instead of the i830 kernel module. [0] - new kernel - new luck.

update 1: tried some things. now glxgears is getting faster. don't ask me why exactly ...

gregoa@belanna:~$ glxgears 
594 frames in 5.0 seconds = 118.757 FPS
662 frames in 5.0 seconds = 132.250 FPS
647 frames in 5.0 seconds = 128.470 FPS
660 frames in 5.0 seconds = 131.886 FPS
710 frames in 5.0 seconds = 141.882 FPS
727 frames in 5.0 seconds = 145.335 FPS
692 frames in 5.0 seconds = 138.279 FPS
732 frames in 5.0 seconds = 146.280 FPS
gregoa@belanna:~$ 

update 2: & now it's slow again:

gregoa@belanna:~$ glxgears 
345 frames in 5.0 seconds = 68.716 FPS
81 frames in 5.0 seconds = 16.142 FPS
82 frames in 5.1 seconds = 16.196 FPS
81 frames in 5.0 seconds = 16.140 FPS
81 frames in 5.0 seconds = 16.099 FPS
76 frames in 5.0 seconds = 15.130 FPS
62 frames in 5.0 seconds = 12.340 FPS
81 frames in 5.0 seconds = 16.064 FPS
81 frames in 5.0 seconds = 16.193 FPS
81 frames in 5.0 seconds = 16.102 FPS
81 frames in 5.0 seconds = 16.132 FPS
81 frames in 5.1 seconds = 16.017 FPS
80 frames in 5.1 seconds = 15.838 FPS
81 frames in 5.0 seconds = 16.083 FPS
81 frames in 5.0 seconds = 16.183 FPS

update 3: better weather today?! or is it the new X server? or the new kernel?

gregoa@belanna:~$ glxgears 
3730 frames in 5.0 seconds = 745.987 FPS
4943 frames in 5.0 seconds = 981.419 FPS
1112 frames in 5.0 seconds = 221.716 FPS
4423 frames in 5.0 seconds = 881.946 FPS
5083 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1016.595 FPS
5226 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1041.151 FPS
4654 frames in 5.1 seconds = 921.170 FPS
4479 frames in 5.1 seconds = 874.422 FPS
2713 frames in 5.0 seconds = 539.345 FPS
5328 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1065.594 FPS
4946 frames in 5.0 seconds = 987.530 FPS
5181 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1036.035 FPS
5084 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1009.898 FPS
5375 frames in 5.1 seconds = 1063.975 FPS
5264 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1044.412 FPS
5323 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1064.588 FPS
5034 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1001.461 FPS

[0] CONFIG_DRM_I915=y

first week of work after two weeks of holidays. difficult change for my "bio rhythm" — or whatever that stuff with sleeping & staying awake & average central european working hours might be called.

calvin explains the problem much better:

a short look back on news in the year 2005 in 14 images.

I patched igal a bit ...
update: az has adjusted/applied the patch & closed the bug.

the painful problem: when I'm listening to music (with randomplay) mpg321 blocks the sound card. [0] side effect: I don't get sound notifications from centericq, & usually I don't see new messages because of the small window centericq is running in.

the funny solution: cw:

This package contains a simple command line client called cw, which sounds characters as Morse code on the console speaker. [..]

from now on I get morse messages from centericq whenever the sound card is used by an application [1][2] - cute ;-)

[0] & I haven't found a quick solution to open /dev/dsp non-blocking ...
[1] aplay .. || (echo "bla" | cw ..)
[2] & I'm somewhere near the box

my latest project called 'isbn2bibtex' seems to take off finally. the name is the aim: create a complete bibtex file from just a file with isbns. since today I have working beta version. ingredients:

• isbn2bibtex: a shell script that ties everything together, calls the various helper scripts, & manages the temp files etc.
• 4 new perl modules: MARC / libmarc-perl, MARC::Record / libmarc-record-perl, Net::Amazon / libnet-amazon-perl, Net::Z39.50 / libnet-z3950-perl (debian packages available now from the toastfreeware debian respository)
• 3 perl scripts, written by me (i.e. copied from the man pages of the above mentioned modules & adapted): isbn2usmarc, marcclean, isbn2amazon2ris
• 2 binaries (ris2xml & xml2bib) taken from bibutils
• marc2ris, a perl script adapted from refdb

the procedure is rather obvious: isbn2usmarc searches for the isbns on several z39.50 servers, marcclean removes duplicates, marc2ris converts the entries from usmarc (a.k.a. marc21) format to ris format, ris2xml & xml2bib finally produce bibtex output.

unfortunatley the z39.50 servers are not only hard to find & slow & everything, those I use don't find all books I was looking for (fiction doesn't seem to be the strong side of public & scientific libraries). that's where isbn2amazon2ris comes in, it tries to retrieve informations about the missing books from amazon.{de,co.uk,com}. - unfortunately amazon doesn't return any (publishing) address information, though. but now I have an amazon web services account. oh well.

well, and after all the fuzz I have bibtex files which I can open in any (text or) bibtex editor, e.g. jabref (debian package) (and recreate the keys in order to avoid duplicates).

now that the stuff seems to work more or less I have to decide if I really want to

1. type the isbns of all my books
2. store the data in bibtex format

:-)

update 1:
adapted isbn2usmarc to search for only 10 isbns at one time because some z39.50 servers whined & errored out on higher numbers. argl.

update 2:
started to type in some isbn numbers. it's not really that much work especially if many books are from the same publisher (i.e. the first 2 parts of the isbn are the same) & if the isbn is printed on the back (usual for "newer" books).

update 3:
with the help of bibtex2html I publish a list of books in my library in a daily cronjob.

on planet cUG the last entry from my movie feed didn't show up. I tried this & that & changed the feed & ... - you name it.

after turning log_level to INFO in config.ini I knew the reason:

"Obviously bogus year in feed (2004), cowardly not updating"

well, thank you very much, I know that I've been to cinema in 2004, too, & that's ok for me!

I was short of commenting out the whole if-statement in planetlib.py but then decided to only return the last ten movies in the feed. otherwise it would be getting longer & longer anyway ...