gregoa's blog

... & 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 ...

I borrowed a webcam (labtec webcam pro) from a friend yesterday & installed it today. & yeah — it works. some steps:

• get spca5xx-source.
• enable v4l in your kernel if it's not there already.
• unpack /usr/src/spca5xx-source.tar.bz2, create the kernel module with module-assistent (m-a prepare; m-a a-i spca5xx).
• modprobe spca5xx.
• well, that's all. use the cam (/dev/video0 or similar) with qtwengophone, camstream, gqcam, or (nice!) camE. — webcamd (or xawtv/v4lctl) doesn't like it.
• for the microphone you need snd-usb-audio in your kernel; then use /dev/dsp1 or hw:1,0 or similar.

now I've ordered another cam of the same type for the friend who officially still owns "my" cam ;-)

& maybe you'll find something on http://info.comodo.priv.at/webcam/ sometimes ...

on other news: cpulimit has entered the Debian archive yesterday.
& today tony mancill has uploaded jabref — thanks!

good will & efforts are not enough. I sent 3 bug reports today: #370733 is not reproducible (not even by myself), #370729 is a duplicate^Wtriplicate^Wquadruplicate^Wyou-name-it-plicate, at least #370741 is still alive ...

a small consolation: cdck has entered the archive yesterday.

receiving more & more trackback spam I got more & more annoyed; the idea from de.alt.soc.blogs came quite handy: only allow trackback pings were the URL of your own blog is in the submitted page.

so I've implemented this feature in nanobloggertrackback today & released a new version (tarball, Debian package).

today in the morning (in his timezone: yesterday in the evening) tony mancill uploaded another of my Debian packages: cpulimit. — thanks alot, tony!

the overall current state is now:

• fullquottel, & mimetic are in unstable and testing.
• mailtextbody, cdck, & cpulimit are waiting for ftp-masters' approval in the new queue.
• & then there are several perl modules I co-maintain within the Debian Perl Group (project home page, project info on alioth).

in case you're interested you can follow the development on my Debian quality assurance - packages overview page.

/dev/hda was my old windows disk. unused for over a year.
I wanted to ritually delete the partitions, & format new ones with ext3 on some suitable occasion. but today I needed disk space — so I just did it.

& it feels good ;-)

wrote a plugin for nanoblogger that shows the temperature in $METARCODE in my blog's sidebar.

$METARCODE for innsbruck is e.g. LOWI. cf. for example the US national weather service for finding out the weather/METAR code for your city/airport.