Twisty turny maze of life

Configuring svnweb for apache

2012-01-23T12:09:00.002+01:00

I'm currently looking for a suitable web interface to a svn repository. There are several available in Ubuntu so that makes the job a bit easier, but it was not a totally smooth experience.

svnweb looks pretty promising with the right functions easily available. But it wasn't all that trivial to install. The first try:

apt-get install libsvn-web-perl

I need to make a server root and populate it:

mkdir /var/www-svnweb

cd /var/www-svnweb

svnweb-install

then edit config.yaml in the obvious ways. But it fails, /usr/bin/svnweb-server throws errors about format.number and somesuch. Some googeling reveals this to be needed:

apt-get install libnumber-format-perl libtemplate-plugin-number-format-perl

Then I quickly got tired of running the server as a standalone process, I'd rather have it in the apache server on the machine. The Ubuntu package does not contain any configuration templates or examples, so I found the origin package and had a look in the tar.gz distribution. It did have a template. I want the service as a separate virtual server so I have to adapt some:

ServerName rancid.noc.ventelo.net

DocumentRoot /var/www-svnweb

ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/rancid-svnweb-error.log

LogFormat "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-Agent}i\"" combined

LogFormat "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b" common

LogFormat "%{Referer}i -> %U" referer

LogFormat "%{User-agent}i" agent

CustomLog /var/log/apache2/rancid-svnweb.log common

AllowOverride None

Options None

SetHandler perl-script

PerlHandler SVN::Web

SetHandler default-handler

From the template I can see that mod_perl is needed.

apt-get install libapache2-mod-perl

Trying to view the site did not render any useful results, and no log messages in the error log. So I had to go to the "root" apache error log and found messages about missing Apache2/Request.pm.

apt-file search Apache2/Request.pm

reveals the package containing that. And a small test shows that the package must also be enabled in apache.

apt-get install libapache2-request-perl

a2enmod apreq

And then it's working.

Crapping all over my raid

2011-11-13T19:54:00.001+01:00

I have a recently dead machine with 4 disks in a raid 5 set. And I have a working machine with disks and free space for more disks. So I moved the disks from my dead machine to the working machine.

When booting something unremarkable happened, Ubuntu said one of the disks needed checking, and it fsck'ed. For a long time. The machine already had some 2TB disks so it would take time. A bit later the boot sequence tells me that /boot is broken, would I like a shell to fix it? What?

Get shell. Run "fsck /boot", answer "y" to all. Fsck terminates claiming there are still errors. Run again. Still errors? Have a look in /etc/fstab. Ooooh.

/dev/sda1 /boot ext2 defaults 0 2

Oh shit. New disk controller on board, new disks. /dev/sda1 isn't the boot partition anymore, it's one of my raid disks. I'm still not really getting the consequences of what has happened. But I look in /dev/disk/by-uuid and see this:

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2011-11-13 15:16 c33afa82-c287-47fb-9b10-aca0524cfbc1 -> ../../sde1

Everything else is LVM. So I edit my fstab to use UUID=c33afa82-c287-47fb-9b10-aca0524cfbc1 for the device name, so that never happens again - on this machine.

Lesson: Always mount by UUID (or lvm device name) because device names change for the simplest reasons - like the kernel changing the probe order on the PCI bus. Most (all) distributions get this right, but I didn't and I'm too much of a old timer to have UUID as a knee-jerk reflex when I edit fstab.

Get the raid running. All the lvm devices that should be there appear. I had better check the filesystems then after this upset. The most important first: /dev/mapper/DiskMd0-media - that's the filesystem with all the family videos of the kids growing up on. The most important one. Fsck shows errors, lots of them. I press "y". After a little while it dawns on me, "hmmm, these would be errors introduced because fsck scribbled all over the disk earlier, right?" Ctrl-C! Fsck reports that the filesystem was modified. So fsck.ext2 has crapped all over one raid disk. Damn. What now? It's a raid 5. One failed disk is survivable. Only by this time there is a graphical login on the console and the VC with the original fstab on has scrolled long past it. And my head is like teflon when it comes like stuff like that. So I don't remember which drive had been crapped all over. Sdb? Sda?

Angst follows. Lots of reading and re-reading the mdadm man page way too impatiently. Can I remove one drive from the raid and run fsck to check if the filesystem is now consistent - proving that I removed the right drive? And if I removed the wrong drive, can I add it back causing no new problems?

mdadm md0 --fail /dev/sda1

fsck.ext2 -n /dev/mapper/DiskMd0-misc

...

Note the -n, it causes fsck to NOT modify the filesystem no matter what. Cause if it modifies a filesystem while the wrong disk removed then matters will get worse. ... Whew. No errors. Had there been errors I planned to do

mdadm md0 --re-add /dev/sda1

which should put the disk back in the raid with no new problems - providing that i didn't change the raid since it was removed (see the mdadm man page). Instead I could do

mdadm md0 --remove /dev/sda1

mdadm md0 --add /dev/sda1

And in /proc/mdstat I could see that the raid was rebuilding /dev/sda1, the disk that demonstrably was the one that has been crapped all over because of my fstab stupidity.

I have to add that I take more care at work. But not at home, since it's not work. And I do have a copy of the movies of the kids growing up on another disk.

So that's what I used (some of) my Sunday for.

But at least I could recover.

dnspython

2011-09-27T20:48:00.000+02:00

So, I'm fiddeling with various stuff at work, and need to retrieve DNS zones. The suite I'm currently working is in python so 2 minutes later it turns out that dnspython ("import dns") is the powerful choice.

10 minutes later it turns out that it is very poorly documented. The documentation is auto-generated and there seems to be no introductory material to any part of the gargantuan class hierarchy other than some very sparse examples. Printing the objects returned isn't much help, they all seem to be very clever generators and stuff or have as_text methods. This is probably my python newbieness that's shining through, but I just can't seem to find accessor methods for the DNS records (objects9 returned even.

As ever on the Internet, someone has felt the pain already, and done a good deed. Already in 2005 even. So presenting http://agiletesting.blogspot.com/2005/08/managing-dns-zone-files-with-dnspython.html

(Mumble. Someone ought to start a wiki to document it, but unfortunately that won't be me)

A book that is also a phone!

2011-09-21T08:06:00.000+02:00

Earlier I wrote about my experience with a tablet/pad and that I thought a Android phone might be a better fit for my needs since the tab was too heavy to use as a book for example. And so I got a large screen Android phone. And it is.

But it's not really a phone. I use it mostly as a book: On the bus, on the train, in bed before I sleep. I wish I could use it more as a mp3 player too, BUT I will have to shop for something with more battery life than a Galaxy S II otherwise mine will give out before dinner.

And I can make phone calls with it too.

Epost er så 1995!

2011-07-11T11:45:00.002+02:00

Her om dagen ble jeg gjort oppmerksom på at friprog senteret strever litt, de gjør greier for det i Farvel epost.

At det skal være lettere å følge opp henvendelser på twitter/linkedin/facebook virker mildest talt merkelig. At det skal gjøre det lettere for dem å ignorere eller svare nei på henvendelser de burde ignorere eller svare nei på virker også merkelig. Kan ikke tro at det vil gjøre bildet av henvendelser og hva som er svart på mindre oversiktlig. Status sefæren er et sosialt rom, ikke egentlig et saks- og henvendelses-behandlings-rom. Antar uten videre at de som bruker twitter/facebook/... seriøst til slikt sørger for å hente henvendelsene inn i saks- og henvendelses-systemet sitt så de kan se hva de har tatt stilling til og behandlet.

Nuvel, spent på hva de må gjøre for at dette skal lykkes - for andre verdier av "lykkes" enn "jeg følger ikke med på twitter" >:-)

Pad?!

2011-06-06T09:52:00.003+02:00

Pad'er er er over alt. Så snart elkjøp fikk prisen ned under 4000 kroner på Samsung Galaxy Tab i våres stod jeg klar og handlet en til meg og en til frua. Så nå har jeg båret rundt på en pad de siste månedene. Det fine med 7" formatet er at en kan bære dingsen med seg uten å bære den i ryggsekk eller "man bag" som en fort må fram med for å få med seg en iPad.

Det er en veldig fin / helt grei tablet/pad. Skjermen har utmerket kontrast og høy oppløsnign, den går fint å lese på i lange tider. Og den er stor nok til å lese på. Men som elektronisk bok er den ganske tung. Den fungerer utmerket til MP3 spiller, men også som MP3 spiller er den i tyngste laget. Jeg får fremdeles et kick av trådløs MP3 avspilling til bluetooth headsettet jeg kjøpte samtidig fordi om det nok mangler noe på bassen.

Jeg har lest at det er noen som har returnert dem av forskjellige grunner. Til den første artikkelen må jeg bemerke at jeg var gjennom Internett-avhengighetsfasen min på midten av 1990-tallet (jeg er jo early adopter :-p ) og at jeg siden før 2000 har kunnet reise fra Internettet i mange uker av gangen uten å få tomhetsfølelse. Så jeg er ikke følelsesmessig avhengig av å følge med på Twitter eller Facebook hele tiden. Akkurat det er trolig en av killer-app'ene til Tab'er og smart-telefonene slik de blir etterhvert. Den andre er nok å lese epost kontinuerlig og kunne se på alle de morsomme videoene en får linker til hele tiden - siden det ikke er et Apple-produkt har den jo flash-støtte. Som virker helt fint.

Til den andre artikkelen må jeg si at ikke jeg heller er sikker på at de egentlig er nyttige til noe. De er ikke greiere til å notere på enn Palm Pilotene var på begynnelsen av 2000-tallet. Selv ikke med bruk av swype el.l. input medtoder. På en jobb tur på første delen av 2000-tallet hadde jeg med meg en Palm Pilot og sammenfoldbart tastatur for å notere. Det fungerte fint, og noe tilsvarende må nok til får å gjøre tab'er til møteroms inventar. ... Men da er nok laptop mer konvensjonelt. Så det nyttigste en kan gjøre med dem på møter er å surfe og lese epost under hele møtet. Men, det kan en vist gjøre med en laptop også.

Trafikanten og Gule Sider har fine app'er til Android, men de er mer hendige på en mobiltelefon. Det som kunne ha vært fint er bruk av radio og TV tjenestene. Men siden jeg ser og hører ca. bare på NRK og NRK sin radio streamings-app er ustabil, og en tredjeparts applikasjonen for å strame NRK-TV ikke var noe særlig gøy heller og mobil sidene til NRK nett-tv suger (de er mest av alt litt dårlig og tilfeldig vedlikeholdt) så blir det ikke noe av det heller.

Min konklusjon må bli at Tab'er for min del mangler killer app, og at en Android-telefon og en ganske lett laptop vil dekke behovene mine bedre. Så nå har jeg bestilt en Samsung Galaxy S II telefon - laptop har jeg.

Perl debugging

2011-03-18T10:27:00.004+01:00

I use and love the perl debugger, it can do lots of nice and useful things, and is very useful to experiment with perl ad-hoc to help un-muddy waters. When I use a new library and I'm not sure about the data-structures or the exact contents of return values I can break the code at the right place, try some Data::Dumper helped print statements and formulate new code that helps me complete the code section.

But sometimes I find myself working in code where a dozen or more variables hold various values that need to go in a dozen places. If I've used the wrong one in one place I'm of course screwed. WTF, which variable held the right variant of the value? Working on router configurations I find I start with "interface FastEthernet0/1.346" and after a call or two the name has been exploded into "FastEthernet0/1.346", "fa", "fa0/1", "fa0/1.346", "346", and half a dozen of other variables holds various facts about the interface. And then the right name must be used in the right SQL queries. I hate having to type all the "p" statements to figure out which value to use where.

This made me deam of the Turbo Pascal 5-6 IDE I've used on MS-DOS back in the 1980ies. It had a watch variable window pane with continous updates. I often run perldb inside emacs to make some modes of debugging smoother, and the Emacs debugger mode supports watch variables - BUT only with gdb as debugger. After some googeling I found "pdkdb". It's a TK based GUI debugger for perl. It looks rather clunky and reminiscent of X programs of the early 1990ies but it has the watch variable window pane and convenient step over/step into/return/run buttons to control program execution. Lines can be made breakpoints by clicking on the line number. And if you mouse over a variable name there is a popup showing the contents of that variable. Excellent!

$ perl -d:ptkdb ./tester

Project page at sourceforge.

Bring some fiber

2011-01-11T12:03:00.002+01:00

So, I work with network people now.

The first thing I learnt: Always bring some fiber in case you get lost. You can be sure a backhoe will turn up to dig where there is fiber.

Mediawiki foo

2010-12-16T10:33:00.004+01:00

Some time ago Kristian Lyngstøl blogged about his wiki.sh hack which provides commandline "wikiget", "wikipost" and "wikiedit" interfaces to mediawikis. I planned to use it for a client project I'm doing right now. It turns out the restriction "supports only basic auth" was rather hard to overcome, at least for this one particular mediawiki instance I needed to make pages on.

So, in the good tradition of one-up-man-ship here is how I do mediawiki:

I was programming my project in perl in any case, so the python inferface suggested by a python-colleague would be non-optimal. As well as not included in Ubuntu afakt. But Mediawiki::API is included. The code below is mostly cut and paste from the documentation:


use Mediawiki::API;

my $wh;

sub wiki_upload {
 my ($page,$content) = @_;

 # First time use, generate object and log in.
 if (!defined($wh)) {
     $wh = MediaWiki::API->new( { api_url => $wikiapi } );
     $wh->login( { lgname => $user, lgpassword => $pw } ) or
       die "Wiki error: ".$wh->{error}->{code}.': '.$wh->{error}->{details};
 }

 my $ref = $wh->get_page( { 'title' => $page } ) or
   die $wh->{error}->{code} . ': ' . $wh->{error}->{details};

 die if $ref->{missing};

 # At this time $ref->{*} contains the page contents

 my $timestamp = $ref->{timestamp};

 $wh->edit( {
               'action' => 'edit',
               'title' => $page,
               'basetimestamp' => $timestamp,
               'text' => $content
              } )
   or die $wh->{error}->{code} . ': ' . $wh->{error}->{details};
}

wiki_upload("Sandbox","= Sandbox=\n Foobar! Gazonk!\n");

Boom!

Face-mail

2010-11-16T21:18:00.003+01:00

Years ago I had a T-shirt with the text "The Internet is full, go away!" written on it. Apparently a paraphrase over signs found between California and Oregon - some Oregonians had gotten their fill of escaping Californians.

And then of course AOL connected and so did everyone else and their grannies.

Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and some others have since wanted to dominate the Internet. It sort of looks like Facebook might, 'cause both the kids the grannies are there too and they're probably checking facebook more often than their email. And now facebook might have some kind killer email cum messaging functionality. Which may concentrate even more of the Internet's communications on Facebook.

I'm wondering if we'll see an inversion of what happened when AOL came to the Internet, a outflow from closed services onto the big open net. Will we now see the Internet convening on Facebook and disappearing into a closed platform?

Profiling is fun - or - getting munin-cgi-graph fast

2010-10-27T13:55:00.010+02:00

I have worked with operations and infrastructure in and around the field of Linux for ages, and in such I job I've not gotten to program a lot. But some. Todays post may be trivial for those that program more than me, but I got a rush out of it.

I've been using some spare time to help out with the munin 2.0 alpha. So I have been profiling it to optimize performance. The original objective was to find out what munin-cgi-graph was using more than a second for when making a single graph with rrdgraph. Especially since it appeared to take significantly under a second to run the rrdgraph command.

I did the work on a site with about 150 hosts and some thousands of "services" (fewer actual plugins since there were quite a few multigraph plugins). This makes a lot of stuff heavier, the nested $config hash with all configuration in (250K lines) takes 10-20 seconds to read from a file on disk.

There are many things in Munin that can be optimized but for munin-cgi-graph the very worst single thing was unneeded use of regular expressions. Regular expressions are very very handy, but in many many cases not needed. String and sub-string matching is a lot faster than regular expressions - but more tedious to type. In the case of munin_find_field regular expressions were definitely not needed in any way. All calls to the procedure showed simple full string matches. I found a few other places with un-needed regular expressions and made some simple replacements like this:

-            next if $key =~ /^#%#/;
+            next if substr($key,0,3) eq '#%#';

This went a very long way.

But the main thing I realized was that munin_find_field was being used way too much, and after restructuring how the work given it was looped over it all went a lot faster. In the end graphing time went from over 1 second to under 0.1 second pr. single graph. That was smooth enough to look at loading in firefox that any remaining regrets I may have had about removing munin-graph from trunk some weeks ago evaporated. It's fast enough.

We're looking to put the same optimizations in Munin 1.4, tonite a guy here is going to profile a full run of munin-graph to see how it works out and what new sore thumbs might stick out. The full run he's doing normally takes 40 minutes(!) without profiling. -- Yes, I know, 40 minutes is too long, and this is why we're switching to cgi graphing. We just have to make sure the cgi graphing is fast!

For profiling I can recommend Devel::NYTprof. It was very easy to use and made it easy to see our hotspot(s).

Back up your phone - no windows needed

2010-10-08T22:22:00.007+02:00

Clifford Stoll of " The Cuckoo's Egg" semi-fame once wrote in the rather more forgettable "Silicon Snake Oil" that no-one ever got a email that was worth keeping. I will take this as a sign of his Californian superficiality rather than a genuine insight (I know, he seems to be from Buffalo, New York, but he's an expat living in .ca.us now), as I have several emails I want to keep. And I also have MMSes and SMSes I want to keep, mostly from my wife. They are snapshots of our family life, things she wanted to show me and tell me while I was otherwise engaged. Very real and personal things that are worth keeping.

Clifford also said that e-commerce was un-viable. See, not good with the crystal ball was he.

So after using mobile phones for more than 10 years I finally get around to making backups.

I have a Nokia E52 phone. This runs Nokias Symbian, 3rd or 5th edition or some such. I recently asked my colleagues, free software users one and all, how to back up this phone. gnokii I was told. And I also found gammu/wammu which is based on the same phone interface library for Nokia Phones.

Unfortunately Nokia Symbian phones from the last 3 (? or 5 or 7 or so) years have a very limited AT command set and all in all the AT commands they support are not suitable for SMS retrieval. gnokii and friends work around this by providing a interface applet for the phone called "gnapplet". Unfortunately that does not support recent Nokia Symbian phones. So neither gnokii nor [gw]ammu works. Of the lot wammu seemed the friendliest though. If only my phone was old enough!

I booted up my tame Windows install in VMWare player and installed Nokias Ovi Suite. And it synced the phones messages. The SMS messages. No MMS, i.e. no pictures of the kids and wife. WTF? And also no way to export to any kind of file format. Not exactly safe keeping. WTF²?

Nokia has a app store too now, so I could timmidly ask "Is there an app for that?".

Yes. Just one. SyncLion. It purports to syncronize SMS, MMS and contacts with any IMAP server. First I had to fiddle with my Dovecot configuration because SyncLion was playing with namespaces and Dovecot was having none of it which resulted in "Unknown namespace" messages in SyncLion.

namespace private { separator = . prefix = Mobile. list = yes location = maildir:~/Maildir/mobile }

(I learnt what SyncLion was saying by enabeling raw logging in Dovecot). After that it started copying everything to our IMAP server. Thunderbird showed the new namespace, and I could direct it to subscribe to the three folders in the Mobile namespace: Contacts, Messages and Notes. Roundcube our webmail does not seem to see the Mobile namespace in any way and is unable to show anything from it.

Each of the three folders were full of what I expected. Including MMSes! Way! So now I can copy the messages I want to keep to some safe email folder, and keep them there forever, or until both the disk and the backup fails.

There are some issues I noticed though:

The Sync part of SyncLion is not complete. If I delete a message on the phone it does not disappear from the IMAP folder.
Nor does deleting a message in the IMAP folder remove it from the phone.
The emails that are composed could very well embed the image (and video) files in the emails, but the image (and video) files are attachments that I need to double-click to view.
Contrary-wise the contacts are easily human readable, but there is no vCard attached so I can't double-click and save.

BUT, the SMSes and MMSes are now possible to keep safe.

Uptime

2010-09-24T12:51:00.004+02:00

A while ago I installed new DNS-servers for a client. They're sitting way behind two layers of firewalls and the environment is therefore quiet and friendly. We were just contacted to set up some new name servers - since it had been a while since the last iteration.

# uptime
 12:47:42 up 1633 days, 13:15,  4 users,  load average: 0.03, 0.03, 0.00

Indeed, it has been a while.

It's just too easy

2010-09-02T02:07:00.004+02:00

I'm often among early adopters. Not so with flat screen TVs. Just got a one of the way flat Samsung "LED" ones. My wife wanted white frame, I wanted DLNA support. Digital Living Network Alliance has made a UPnP based standard for connecting multimedia appliances to network resources. Like my (*cough* our) new TV. All our network resources run Linux though, so windows software is no good for us. One of my colleagues figured this out for us, there are multiple DLNA servers for Linux. One of the most promising was TVMOBiLi. And they make Debian and Fedora packages. To get it working with Samsungs you, right now, need a release candidate (I installed 1.4.0.2196).

Start it. Point browser to http://localhost:30888/ where there is a nice web GUI. Click the "SETTINGS" link, and set up all the different directories we use for movies, mp3s and pictures. Fire up media player app on TV, and it already knows about the tvmobili server. And browsing the My Content folder on the TV showed all our files. And Samsung firmwares supports quite a lot of video and sound codecs.

Sometimes being slow to adopt new stuff saves a lot of work. And deprived me of a learning adventure. I still don't know much about DLNA.

Happy though.

Remote upgrade of ubuntu

2010-04-04T21:34:00.003+02:00

I had a Ubuntu 8.04.4 (LTS) machine languishing in the basement serving various things. To make it more useful I wanted to upgrade it.

It has no CD-ROM and besides it's in the basement so I wanted to upgrade it over network. I had the hardest time with update-manager, it didn't want to do the job over SSH.

Google to the rescue: http://www.kbrandt.com/2008/11/upgrade-ubuntu-remotely.html - So I got the right iso image and away I went.

Unfortunately there were some circular dependency problems going directly from 8.04.4 to 9.10 so unfortunately I had to edit sources.list and dist-upgrade my way through 8.10 to 9.04 and then use the described method to upgrade to 9.10. In any case it was quite simple, I seem to be modifying fewer and fewer config files as time pass. It might be wisdom, or just old age.

DVDs w/o the lead-in materials

2010-03-15T07:46:00.003+01:00

Lately a comparison of how much bother it is to watch a bought DVD vs. a priated movie has been circulating (I can't find it now...). The point being that on a DVD you have to watch the insulting "you wouldn't steal a bag would you?" thing that MPAA gets on the DVDs, , trailers for up and comming movies, the lead in before the menu, and then finally the menu. Where you can start the movie. Right after the US-federal or local copyright warning and the distributor lead in and so on. Some of these you can skip, some of them you can skip if you press the right button (i.e. Fast Forward works on some, Skip on some, and MENU on some, depending on how conscientious the DVD-issuer-staffer that did the job was).

On my DVD player at least, this is a case of "you're doing it wrong".

1. Insert DVD
2. Wait for it to spin up and start
3. Press "STOP". Wait for it to stop.
4. Press 1.

Most DVDs have the movie on track 1. I think I've seen one or two where the movie was on some other track (track 2 and 5 comes to mind), but they are few and far between.

Our most precious memories

2010-03-05T07:51:00.005+01:00

I guess I'm in the first generation of parents that use all digital media to help us remember how it was back when the children were small.

Now we all use digital cameras and camera video recorders for this. And the most thorough of us burn it onto CDs or DVDs just to make sure we can view it in our old age. (The rest of us wait for the disk to crash, and then it'll all be lost.)

Apart from the likeliness that we'll have something that can play a DVD in 20-40 years (seems quite unlikely) it turns out a typical CD-R has a life expectancy of less than 10 years. Even the CDs I bought along with my first CD player are reaching the end of their life nowish (good thing I have backed up all my CDs then :-)

So the movies and pictures of our children growing up and all the great occasions we'd like to be able to recall and treasure for years to come are in double trouble. Fortunately we can buy high quality media to store the bits on:

I'm not sure what to do about the problem of keeping a player around for those disks for 40 years. A player that can talk to our TV in 40 years time may be even harder.

Musikk skal bygges ut av glede

2010-02-25T08:04:00.009+01:00

I just wanted to say that Squeezebox Duet (the black things on the right here) rocks. And the server part is written in perl and right on the box it says that Linux (and BSD and Solaris) is supported.

I ripped and put away all my CDs some years ago, and played my music from the HTPC, which was OK I guess. But in the new house I've yet to set up the HTPC (with two small children and a new house, I wonder if I'll ever get the time for it), and besides it's kind of onerous to have to fire up the TV or a latptop to play music. Having a small black box hiding in the shelves and a remote controll with a color LCD and a mp3-player style interface is so much easier.

The reason for the "duet" name had escaped me until I looked at the box and remote control yesterday evening: There is a DAC and headphone/line out jack in the remote, so both the remote and the receiver can be connected to a (or rather two different) amplifier(s). I can connect it to the line-in on the kitchen Tivoli Model Two. I should remark here that much can be said about Tivoli Audio, but they have high WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor) and the sound pleases me.

Cool trivia: The remote runs Linux and you can enable SSH on it. A colleague wrote a Munin plugin for it to graph all sorts of meaningless stuff :-) Let's see if I can get him to publish it.

My hat off to the good people at Squeeze for a excellent and reasonably priced product.

EU-kontroll

2010-01-28T08:11:00.002+01:00

Det begynner å synke inn at biltilsynet eller hvem det nå var har sluttet å sende ut varsler om at biler må EU-kontroleres. "Dette er noe folk selv må ta ansvar for" eller noe slikt. Naturligvis har det resultert i svært store mengder avskiltnings-varsler. Kan ikke tro at arbeidsmengden hos den relevante myndigheten blir mindre på denne måten.

Nuvel. Tankene går i rettning av å lage et hack for å minne en selv på slikt - som ellers garantert går i familiens glemmebok. Men det slipper jeg. NAF har laget en web-tjeneste hvor du kan melde på alle bilene dine og få epost eller sms når tiden for EU-kontroll kommer. Gratis.

Firefox plugins: Web-spyware

2010-01-28T07:41:00.002+01:00

There are scores of way to monitor web users - to help target ads and do various accounting. Since I consider that the social contract between users and publishers on the web was broken way back when popup ads, animated ads, and noisy ads were introduced I feel totally justified in suppressing ads. So I've been running Adblock and Adblock-plus for ages. I've been using the adblockers to block various "spyware" scripts too, the ones normally found on Norwegian sites at least. The other day I found an other plugin: Ghostery. It tells me about the spyware it recognizes on every site and gives me the option of blocking it. Thanks! :-)

Podcasts

2010-01-26T09:08:00.004+01:00

I have never listened to podcasts while "on the go". I have been listening to podcasts on and off on my laptop, my audio-playback-app (amarok) subscribes to a number of shows I like. But to plug in my mp3 player and transfer the stuff has seemed like too much of a job.

Since I moved out of Oslo (to Asker) and started taking the train I've been spending 2-3 hours commuting. I've been reading a good deal. But late in the fall I got a new phone, a Nokia E52. It has a number of features to redeem it: reasonably sized, thin, WiFi, charge-via-USB, and a standard mini-jack for the handsfree - which works well with regular headsets. And a RSS-client in the web-browser. That can download podcasts if manipulated correctly.

Turns out that mp3 players need WiFi - because it was the final hurdle to get me listening podcasts on the train. If asked before this I would have denied that and called it frivolous. But with no need to plug in the phone to get podcasts - it's passed my threshold of "easy enough". Just start the browser at home or at work and click on the podcasts I want to listen to. Now the train rides are much more enjoyable. Quality of life++.

Munin presantasjon

2010-01-07T09:55:00.003+01:00

På tirsdag 12 skal jeg snakke om Munin på NUUG medlemsmøte i Oslo. De har videooverføring til Stavanger. En trenger ikke å være medlem for å komme inn; møtet er åpent og gratis for alle.

Disposisjonen min ser for tiden slik ut:

Hva Munin er og hvorfor det er så morsomt
Nye features i 1.4
Konfigurasjon
Lage en enkel plugin
Lage en enkel multigraph plugin
Spørsmål og svar

Full annonsering på: http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20100112-munin/

Munin 1.4.0 released

2009-12-01T09:59:00.005+01:00

A bit late, but time ran out on Friday: On Friday we released Munin 1.4.0 to the world! It has been 2 months of work after many years of ..., let's call it preparation.

There is a ChangeLog and an announcement.

The most striking at first glance will perhaps be the new look: nicer html styling and new graph colours with better contrast than in the 1.2 series. Besides there has been some focus on scalability and security besides bug fixing. There are more than 200 closed tickets in the 1.4.0 milestone.

In the scalability department there are such easy (and obvious) wins as running multiple rrd-graph instances in parallel; these days you hardly find a computer without multiple cores. Let's use them! This is tunable through "max_graph_jobs" in munin.conf (will be in 1.4.1, there is a bug preventing the keyword from working in 1.4.0 *blush*). The default is up to 6 parallel rrd-graph jobs.

Another scalability feature is "multigraph", a feature that allows one plugin to create multiple graphs. This makes it practical to graph 48 port switches, and due to another change this is presented as "drill down" graphs: One graph shows the summed traffic on all ports of the switch, and if you click that you'll be transported to a sub-page where you can see traffic on each of the ports. Multigraph is usefull enough, and novel enough that I will write another blog post about it, in the mean time you can study to plugins if you are interested: snmp__if_multi and multigraph_tester. The last one contains some explanatory text, the first one does not ;-) This feature I optimistically call "MRTG-killer". I hope Tobi Oetiker does not hate me for that, after all Munin relies very heavily on his excellent RRD tool for storage and graphing.

For security we have SSL (TLS) support so you can not only encrypt the traffic between the munin-master and the nodes, you can also use certificates for authentication if you want.

We'll get back to more on Munin 1.4, of this you can be sure.

Munin 1.4.0-beta is released

2009-11-21T01:54:00.004+01:00

1.4.0-beta has been released! Download from SVN or Sourceforge as usual. There should be a package in debian experimental shortly.

Thanks to all that have tested, fixed and posted bugs. I'm pretty happy that we have been able to fix a number of issues and that we're now running out of things to fix (or shifted them to a later release ;-)

There are two "high"-priority tickets in the trac right now:

#739 is rather cosmetic
#758 involves some changes that I want to test a couple of days before putting in a "release".

One third bug is "nice to have if we can get it" and the forth is a placeholder which will be closed once 1.4.0 is deemed "stable".

I have started to write an announcement message, which I include below for your edification.

ChangeLog is here: http://munin-monitoring.org/browser/tags/1.4.0-beta/ChangeLog

I expect that 1.4.0 will be released on next friday.

----
Introducing Munin 1.4.0!

Munin 1.4 is expected to appear in Debian Unstable and in EPEL within not too long. Will also appear in Ubuntu later. If you are a packager please contact us and we'll list your support/repository/whatever on our Wiki.

The most important features:

Better scalabilith through:

Multigraph plugins: One plugin, many graphs. This makes it possible to graph switches efficiently as one example. In our test environment graphing one 16 port switch went from over 30 seconds to 3 seconds (please see snmp__if_multi and multigraph_tester plugins for examples).
Prallellized munin-graph (tunable number of processes)
Nesting of groups to any depth: "Conglomerate;US;New_York;Manhattan;6th-floor;" if you wish

Slightly better templates
Better security through TLS (SSL) session encryption and certificates to authenticate masters and slaves.
Better SNMP support: SNMP version 1, 2c and 3, all modes of authentication are supported (but autoconfiguration of 3 is not quite there yet). (only applies to "most" SNMP plugins: those that have been ported to use Munin::Plugin::SNMP, some remain unported)
(exactly one instance of) "includedir" in munin.conf includes all files in that directory in the configuration.
munindoc command to show plugin documentaiton. A majority of the plugins are documented now - no need to read the code - in most cases ;-)
New fab look on HTML pages, new graph colours with better contrast
More than 100 new plugins since the 1.2 series.

Among them are a set of jmx based Java plugins to monitor JVMs.
A new and better MySQL plugin patterned on the Cacti MySQL plugin
PgSQL plugins based on generic Munin::Plugin::Pgsql module
Asterisk plugins
Netapp plugin

Slightly better "not Linux" support:

More Solaris plugins. Solaris plugin names have been aligned with the other platforms.
Core programs should play nice on all flavours of AIX
Nominal OS X ("darwin") support (need someone to make a .img for us :-)
Some HP-UX plugins have been contributed
Good bunch of NetBSD plugins have been contributed
Still support for FreeBSD :-)
And many many others

Ever better documentation everywhere, not least our web/wiki pages at munin-monitoring.org.
More bugfixes, both in the core code and plugins, than you can shake a stick at
Plugins can specify colours and printf format
Works well with RRD 1.3

Other things you may want to know:

munin-update and munin-node (and family) have been refactored and are much nicer to hack now.
CGI graphing remains "in BETA" but we now have a FASTCGI script too.

Full details in http://munin-monitoring/browser/tags/1.4.0-beta/ChangeLog

Munin 1.4.0-alpha2 is released

2009-11-13T23:47:00.004+01:00

Munin 1.4.0 alpha 2 is now out. SVN tag and source tar-ball at source forge.

I've not made as much progress as I'd have liked as I've spent more than half this week sick. Crossing fingers for a better next week.

Changelog at http://munin.projects.linpro.no/browser/tags/1.4.0-alpha2/ChangeLog

Some highlights compared to alpha 1:

snmp__if_multi plugin now works and graphs your switch traffic and errors. NOTE: Even if this is infinitly faster than the old way, if your switch has a slow SNMP agent you will need to tune the munin-node timeout setting. Run the plugin in munin-run to check it's execution time. My 16 port switch on local LAN gets me a runtime of less than 3 seconds.
Actually generates PNGs this time ;-)
Lots of different plugin fixes, including fixing autoconf-iguration issues.
Some HTML enhancements, including dropdown boxes for selecting peer nodes to view. Configurable with "dropdownlimit" in munin.conf
Various INSTALL documentation enhancements
Get rid of munindoc.in from the installation
Lots of other fixes!

Please test if you can.

I'd like to see install-reports on the munin-users list or in personal e-mail please. If you make bug tickets please mark as "1.4.0-alpha2" and select "1.4.0" as milestone.

Thanks,
Nicolai

Munin 1.4.0-alpha is released

2009-11-07T01:05:00.005+01:00

Munin 1.4.0-alpha is released. Get it while it's not from https://sourceforge.net/projects/munin/files/, or with SVN from the project site at http://munin-monitoring.org/. Changelog at http://munin.projects.linpro.no/browser/tags/1.4.0-alpha/ChangeLog

Compared to the last stable release it has

SSL support
Scalable SNMP support (now ready to take on MRTG, see multigraph_tester plugin for "documentation")
includedir statement in master config to include files from a "drop" directory
More than 100 new plugins
Lots and lots bugfixes
All "high" priority bugs have been closed or appears to be impossible to reproduce
And lots more

If you test this I'd like you to send a e-mail to the munin-users mailing list about your experience.

Get it while it's hot!

Munin 1.4 is coming!

2009-10-28T23:46:00.006+01:00

After years of languishing in the shadows of my attention Munin has gotten into the front seat and is running my life. A paid commission to complete Munin 1.4 with certain features has come in. The paid features are:

Scalable SNMP plugins (aka many graphs from just one plugin)
Drop directories for configuration (munin.conf.d) on the server
SSL
A stable releasee

And must be done and the delivery accepted by the customer by late November. Some other features are

SNMP plugin framework with support for SNMP versi0n 1, 2c and 3 and all manner of authentication
OO pgsql plugin framework
All new Java plugins using JMX to monitor JVMs
Nested grouping
Plays nice with RRD 1.3
Faster munin-graph due to amazing ability to fork rrdgraph processes
Faster CGI graphing, including a fastcgi script (but should still be considered beta)
Lots of new plugins in general
Lots of new plugins for Linux
Some new plugins for Solaris and *BSD flavours
Lots and lots of bug fixes and enhancements (~300 tickets closed in the trac).

One of the very cool things about this is that there is increasing community input. As well as the munin-users list and input through enhancement requests and bugs I regularly find very good patches in the trac ticket database. I feel very priveliged to be able to apply a user contributed patch and get better software as a result. Open Source Works! Many many thanks to the contributors!

This being the flu and cold season, for me and my family, I've got no time to loose between hacking Munin and staying at home to take care of myself and sick relatives. I'm scarcely to be seen at work any more, as I lay low to avoid the distractions of the workplace and my habits there.

I have a vague plan that in the future there will be one new stable version of Munin every year, with very very small feature increments to make it possible. I've no idea if I can manage to make good on that, so it's not a promise. It's keeping my fingers crossed sort of thing.

In any case, zero day warez comming your way in a little while!

/me goes back to the munin hacking

Flexus

2009-08-06T08:30:00.006+02:00

Siden jeg flyttet i sommer og skal ta tog (og bane) til jobb nå måtte jeg skaffe meg månedskort. I skranken hos NSB i Asker fikk jeg registreringsskjema for Flexus. Det viser seg at Flexus-systemet omsider er i produksjon. Fint.

Barnesykdommer
(Ingen blogpost er komplett uten syting) Etter litt utfylling laget de kort til meg (med navn på, uten bilde) og viste meg påfyllings-automaten. Skuffende nok greide den ikke å lese chip'en på bank-kortet mitt. Påfyllings-automaten tilbød ikke å lese magnetstripen etter tre mislykkede forsøk på å lese chip'en. Det gjør i det minste IKEA og andre butikker. Grr. Måtte få kona til å betale første måned.

Så igår morges gjorde jeg min første Flexus-reise. Kortet "bip'et" fint på validatoren, og den viste hvor lenge til kortet mitt gjelder. Så reiste jeg hjem. Så på National Theateret stasjon bip'et ikke biletten. Personen i bilettluken kunne lese kortet, så jeg tok toget hjem i trygg forvissning om at jeg hadde gjort mitt beste. I morges bip'et det ikke igjen. Ikke tid til å snakke med noen i en bilettluke. Man spør seg, er kortet ødelagt? Hvem har EMPet meg? Vil konduktøren kaste meg ut på hode og r**a? Snakke med bilettluken på Nathional igjen. De kom ut for å se og vise meg. Flexus-bilett-automaten sin "Flexus tjenester" funksjon kunne lese kortet. Gikk bort til en validator og dro kortet over platen som pilen viste. Nah. Bliettluke-personen gjorde det samme. Nah. En gang til, og plutselig bip'et den. Forsøkte å repetere. Nah. En gang til, bip! Hemmeligheten er en sirkulær bevegelse over platen folkens! Pilene er missvisende! Ghud vet hvorfor. Det virket å dra det rett oppover de første tre gangene.

Storebror
Forøvrig, det står bakpå at kortet skal valideres for hver reise. NSB-personen virket veldig avslappet på det. Uansett er 30 dagers-kortet validert for alle 30 dagene ved første bruk. Så en trenger ikke egentlig registrere seg hos storebror hver gang en går på et offentlig transportmiddel.

Kortet er ikke særlig transparent, selv ikke sett opp mot sola. Kan ikke se RFID-kretsen inni der. Noen som har en høvel så det kan høvles 1/100mm av gangen så vi kan se på det?

Irriterende lite informasjon på websidene til NSB og Ruter om fordelene med Flexus og hva slags fine funksjoner det støtter. Men "Flexus tjenester" på bilett-automaten viste hvertfall at kortet har rundt 6 slotter for forskjellige biletter, og jeg kan kjøpe "neste" månedskort på forhånd, og så blir det tatt i bruk når det forrige har gått ut.

I morges så jeg en Flexus bilett-automat som ikke fant boot disken sin. Standard PC oppstart display. *fnis*

Kubuntu/jaunty - breakages for me

2009-05-17T21:48:00.004+02:00

Kubuntu jaunty works for me. KDE 4.2 is pretty and nice and everything. The network manager plasmoid is very nice, it starts early and has the machine networked before firefox and thunderbirds finishes to boot.

Three things are broken:
- Bluetooth (still)
- Amarok 2
- The power management plasmoid

The gnome based work-arounds for bluetooth does not appear to work anymore. More on that later I suspect.

There is a workaround for the amarok 2 problem: http://nomad.ca/blog/2009/apr/3/amarok-14-jaunty-ubuntu-904/ - just tried it, and my podcasts are back and EVERYTHING. Some strange sound engine problem though. More on that later if it's interesting.

The power management plasmoid does not manage to run my CPUs at full speed when I select "performance", this after I've diddled with the performance profile so that it implies the "performance" CPU-scaling policy and so on. It also tries to show my laptops two batteries, but there is some one off problem with that so that I can only see the charging state of one of them. Good old Kpowersave to the rescue. It works.

Lenovo laptoper med Telenor 3G og Linux

2009-04-09T23:19:00.005+02:00

Så,

I februar postet jeg om 3G støtten i nyere Lenovo laptoper (siden rett før nyttår 2009 tror jeg). Dette er laptoper hvor det følger med gratis Telenor abonnement i 3 måneder. 3G hardwaren i maskinene er tilstrekkelig forskjellig til at standard programmene i Ubuntu Intrepid ikke virker. Ikke Jaunty heller vil jeg tro - uten at jeg har testet ennå. Den forrige blog-posten min dekket basisen i hvordan en får hardwaren opp på 3G slik at en kan bruke pppd - men det mangler noen deler for å komme "rett opp" på Telenor Trådløst Bredbånd. De følger her. Delene som følger her er litt Thinkpad spesifikke fordi de manipulerer Thinkpad sin ACPI til å skru av og på 3G hardwaren.

Jeg ville kunne koble meg til og fra og bruke hardwaren uten å måtte gi kommandoer med sudo eller i en root tty. Derfor har jeg gått til det skritt å lage .desktop filer som starter fine script - hvertfall under KDE, trolig også Gnome. De bruker gksudo til å få root - som scriptene tross alt må kjøres som, og så smelles det opp et log vindu med xterm (konfigurertbart) som viser hvordan det går med scriptet.

Script pakken min, versjon 0.1, er publisert på http://hjemme.langfeldt.net/3G.tar.gz - det er sent på kvelden i påska, det kan opplagt være feil O:-) - post kommentarer eller send meg epost på janl(måtte-nøkken-ta-spammere)redpill-linpro.com

Framgangsmåte:

Registrer SIM-kortet ditt hos Telenor
Mens du venter på bekreftelse (da jeg registrerte meg elektronisk tok det flere dager) kan du lese resten av framgangsmåten og forberede deg mentalt.
Som root og stående i / pakker du opp tar filen som du hentet over (det er litt uforsiktig å gjøre slikt uten å undersøke innholdet i tar filen først, den kunne f.eks. ha erstattet passord-filen din. Men det tenkte du sikkert på ;-)
Kikk på /etc/thinkpad/.resources/settings.sh - bruken av den er langt fra gjennomført i scriptene og oppsett-filene, men det gir deg en ideé.
Dersom du ikke erstatter TERMINAL kommandoen med noe annet enn xterm må du installere pakken som inneholder xterm i distribusjonen din. I Ubuntu heter pakken "xterm".
I /etc/ppp/peers/3G erstatter du verdiene på slutten av "name" og "password" linjene med nummeret du fikk av Telenor. Verdien som står i filen er riktig for MEG, trolig virker de overhodet ikke for DEG, men hvem vet om Telenor faktisk sjekker slikt.
Så kan du ta en kikk på /etc/ppp/3G-connect. Sammenholder du den med http://www.natisbad.org/E4300/Dell_Wireless_5530_AT_cmd_ref.html kan det være at du blir klokere. Og du kan bestemme om kortet ikke skal forsøke seg med både WCDMA og GSM, men tvinge det til å bruke den ene eller den andre.
I KDE 4 finnes det et widget/en plasmoid (dock-bar-applet tror jeg det heter i Gnome) som heter "Quick Access" ("folder view" kan også brukes, men da få du ikke byttet ikon på den). Den kan du legge til panelet ditt. Så høyre-klikker du på den og endrer pathen den viser til /etc/thinkpad og ikonet til /etc/thinkpad/.resources/thinkpad_logo-trans.gif, view mode til Icon Mode og Icon Size til f.eks. 32 slik at du kan se ikonene. Dette gjør at jeg får et ThinkPad ikon i panelet, og når jeg klikker på det popper det opp et lite vindu med 5 ikoner i. Det finnes sikkert noe liknende i Gnome.
Det gøyeste ikonet er "Connect 3G". Klikker du på det spretter en liten xterm opp som viser hvordan oppkoblingen går. Etter ikke alt for mange sekunder blir det lys i et nytt antenne ikon nederst på skjermen din og i xtermen kommer oppmuntrende tekst slik som dette:

Waiting for ACM devices
...
Waiting for ACM devices
Turning on radio (GSM/WCDMA)
RADIO ON - Connecting
Serial connection established.
Using interface ppp0
Connect: ppp0 <--> /dev/ttyACM2
CHAP authentication succeeded: Congratulations!
CHAP authentication succeeded
Could not determine remote IP address: defaulting to 10.64.64.64
Cannot determine ethernet address for proxy ARP
local IP address 77.17.195.246
remote IP address 10.64.64.64
primary DNS address 130.67.15.198
secondary DNS address 193.213.112.4

For å avslutte ppp forbindelsen trykker du på ^C. Vinduet avslutter og etter en kort stund slukker 3G-antenne-lampen nederst på skjermen.

Det er et umtsmon ikon også. Dersom du har umtsmon installert vil det starte opp 3G-radioen og så starte utsmon. Når du avslutter umtsmon - programmet henger antaklig ved avsluttning, må du skru av 3G-radioen selv: Når du klikker på Thinkpad-ikonet du laget tidligere et det en "scripts" mappe. Den kan du åpne, og fra den kjører du scriptet som heter "Disable_3G-GPS". Nedi scripts-mappen ligger forresten noen delscript som kan gi deg ideer. Jeg laget bare ikoner for de jeg syntes var viktigst.

God påske!

Ericsson Mobile Broadband Module F3507g

2009-04-09T22:56:00.004+02:00

Umtsmon is a very nice application for wireless broadband on GSM/WCDMA (alias UMTS of old) based devices that looks like AT-command modems. As I wrote earlier (norwegian) I have a wireless broadband device of that kind. Since it's easter I've been able to debug my scripts and can say definitly that it works - and how. So I just posted this to umtsmon-develop:

---
Hi again,

Since I'm not on the list you may have figured this out already without me knowing. But here I go anyway.

Nicolai Langfeldt wrote:
> following 3g device in a lenovo t400 laptop.
>
> lsusb:
> Bus 008 Device 002: ID 0bdb:1900 Ericsson Business Mobile Networks BV

It is also known as the more google-able "Ericsson Mobile Broadband Module F3507g". At least two colleagues have differently lettered, but recent Lenovos for the Norwegian market with this hardware. Google says the hardware is also found in Dell machines.

> It publishes 10 USB serial devices. /dev/ttyUSB2 and /dev/ttyUSB4 can be talked to (I have no other serial USB on this machine).

This device has proven to support pppd quite nicely (and also GPS, but that's out of scope for umtsmon I think :-).

* First of all it will only work if used with the cdc-acm (loaded name cdc_acm) tty driver. No chance with the usb-serial/option combo. Some versions of the option driver has the usb id listed and causes autoload. From what I see from some mailing list archives this should soon be fixed.

modprobe -rv option
modprobe -v cdc-acm

The device names are /dev/ttyACM[012]. Each device works the same, but for example you can run some AT commands to make the connected tty into a GPS device spouting NEMA strings. So it can work as a GPS on ACM0 and a 3G device on ACM1 at the same time. umtsmon sould be able to use two ACM devices, one for PPP and one for monitoring - I guess.

* Second, it has a somewhat peculiar AT command set: ATZ does not work. And radio has to be turned on with an explicit AT+CFUN=1 - Here is a pppd style chat script to enable radio and connect 3G:

---
TIMEOUT 30
ABORT "NO CARRIER"
ABORT "NO DIALTONE"
ABORT "ERROR"
ABORT "NO ANSWER"
ABORT "BUSY"
SAY "Turning on radio (GSM/WCDMA)\n"
"" "AT"
OK "AT+CFUN=1"
+PACSP0 "ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0"
SAY "RADIO ON - Connecting\n"
TIMEOUT 10
OK 'AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","telenor"'
OK "ATM1L3DT*99#"
}
---

There is a CONNECT somewhere in the output stream after the final command but chat does not recognize it.

IF I initialize the device with the AT commands up to the "RADIO ON" message utmsmon works with it.

I sort of understand that the next two commands to select

* Thirdly: Here are some command references and more usage examples:

http://www.natisbad.org/E4300/Dell_Wireless_5530_AT_cmd_ref.html samt http://www.nabble.com/X301-Ericsson-Modul-f3507g-AT-Command-reference-td20152955.html

Among other things the +CFUN command can be used to set different radio capapabilities (GPS, WCDMA, one of, both, etc.).

I have discovered that AT+CFUN=0 seems to shut the hardware off almost entirely. On my thinkpad I can get out of this by using ACPI to turn off and then on it's power. It should prove harder on other hardware it appears. Kermit is unable to connect to the

* Forth: I know C and I can run software in a debugger. So if you want I can test and debug umtsmon running on this hardware.

Regards,
Nicolai
---

My next post here is going to be my scripts and setup for automating the use of this with KDE 4.2

Norske helligdager i kalenderen i Zimbra

2009-03-23T14:06:00.011+01:00

Redpill Linpro har nå standardisert på Zimbra som gruppe-vare-tjener. I motsetning til f.eks. OX så virker kalenderen der veldig bra og folk ser ut til å ha noe større interesse for å faktisk bruke den.

Neste spørsmål da er: Hvor er helligdagene? Det er heldigvis ganske enkelt å legge inn med en gang en har funnet en .ics (iCal) kalender-fil som inneholder bare røde dager. Den en finner hos Mozilla har kongens fødselsdag og liknende, og det er ikke så gøy å få rød-merket i kalenderen.

På http://www.scapegoat.no/calendar/ fant jeg den kalenderen jeg så etter. Det er en iCal fil (.ics) som greit kan brukes sammen med f.eks. Lighning i Thunderbird. Men siden temaet er Zimbra skal jeg beskrive hvordan den implementeres der, med så få skjermbilde-dumper som mulig. Jeg antar at du har valgt norsk-språklig interface i Zimbra.

Last ned helligdags-filen - og lagre den til disk
Log inn i Zimbra
Velg hovedfunksjonsfanen "Innstillinger".
Under den er det en fane for Eksport/Import.
Øverste halvdel av det bildet som kommer opp er import. Klikk på radio-knappen for kalender
Ved ledeteksten "Destinasjon" klikk "Se på.." knappen.
I dialogen "Velg mappe" klikker du på "Ny".
Fyll inn kalendernavnet - f.eks. "helligdager" og velg riktig farge f.eks. rød.
Dersom du ønsker å være opptatt på helligdager klikker du ikke på "ekskluder ..." boksen.
Så trykker du OK og OK. Knappen skal nå vise kalender navnet du vil importere helligdagene inn på.
Trykk browse knappen, velg .ics filen og klikk OK
Trykk på importer knappen og vent overraskende lenge. Det er helligdager for 10 år der så det får være greit.

I kalender-visningen kan du nå sjekke boksen ved "helligdager" kalenderen og få de røde dagene i rødt. Kjempestas! Nå kan du se hvilke dager i påsken som er fridager!

3G modem på nye Lenovo maskiner

2009-02-26T09:54:00.006+01:00

Nye Lenovo modeller så som T400 f.eks. kommer i svært mange utgaver med et GPRS/3G modem som heter " Ericsson Mobile Broadband Module F3507g" samt 3 måneders gratis Telenor Trådløst "Bredbånds" abonement.

Kortet har både GPS, GSM og WCDMA støtte. Det det ikke gjør er å støtte en del helt normale AT kommandoer. "ATZ" (reset) f.eks. gir "ERROR". Og umtsmon (veldig fint program som viser operatør, signal-styrke og tilgjengelige radio-bånd) funker dårlig med kortet hvis ikke det gis noen ekstra AT-kommandoer først - og selv når jeg gjør det får ikke umtsmon nettverksforbindelse opp. Jeg har ikke eksprimentert helt ferdig ennå, jeg skal poste hva som skal til for å komme online med Telenor trådløst bredbånd senere.

I mellomtiden poster jeg link denne AT kommando-referansen for kortet: http://www.natisbad.org/E4300/Dell_Wireless_5530_AT_cmd_ref.html samt denne hjelpsomme linken: http://www.nabble.com/X301-Ericsson-Modul-f3507g-AT-Command-reference-td20152955.html

Det ser ut til at riktig AT+CFUN kommando er nøkkelen for å komme på lufta. Feil AT+CFUN kommando får kortet til å gå ganske kraftig i frø slik at jeg må kald-boote maskinen.

Men aller viktigst er det å passe på å bruke cdc-acm modulen istedenfor option/usbserial som noen kjerner gjør for tiden (modprobe -rv option; modprobe -v cdc-acm).

Ordering images

2009-02-10T21:08:00.002+01:00

My wife likes to take pictures. But she keeps putting off dumping her camera into her computer (and by extention backing them up to the family RAID). The other week I got stuck organizing a good number of months pictures from her 8GB CF. I investigated what I could do automatically. Quite a lot it turns out. The two most interesting commands here are:

exifautotran - auto transform (rotate) images according to the orientation sensor in the camera when the picture was taken
jheag -ft - time stamp the image file according to the EXIF meta-data in the image.

The rest is just a loop to organize the pictures into YYYY-MM directories. As I'm prone to, it's written in KSH, which is different enough from bash that you need to install ksh or pdksh to run it.

#!/usr/bin/ksh

echo "*** Rotating images"
exifautotran *.JPG *.jpg
echo "*** Fixing time stamps"
jhead -ft *.JPG *.jpg

declare -a DATE

for f in *.JPG *.jpg; do
LC_ALL=C DATE=( $(jhead $f | awk '/^Date/ { print $3 }' | tr ':' ' ') )
folder="${DATE[0]}-${DATE[1]}"
mkdir -p $folder
mv $f $folder
done

Mailbox order in Thunderbird

2009-02-02T11:09:00.004+01:00

Today I bring a trivial but useful tip to my Redpill-Linpro colleagues. Since english is the new corporate language I'll write in english.

Over this weekend we changed email servers from OX to Zimbra (talk about night and day). We had to make new a new account in our thunderbirds for zimbra.redpill-linpro.com. Thunderbird puts this new account at the bottom of the account list.

Which is clumsy when that's the account I want the most to read email in.

Visit the god ole' prefs.js (if you know where to find it you're qualified to edit it in spite of the warnings on top of the file). Find this line:

user_pref("mail.accountmanager.accounts", "account2,account3,account4,account5,account6");

Look further down to figure out which email server is associated with which account and then permutate the list as you see fit:

user_pref("mail.accountmanager.accounts", "account6,account5,account2,account3,account4");

in my case.

Wish us good luck with our new email system.

Bluetooth with kubuntu intrepid

2009-02-01T19:45:00.002+01:00

It seems bluetooth on kubuntu intrepid is broken. I only use bluetooth for transferring pictures from my phone to my laptop and for this purpose the gnome tools work very nicely - even under KDE.

Install bluez-gnome and gnome-bluetooth
Run bluetooth-applet
Run gnome-obex-server
Right click the bluetooth icon that appears in your tray and select "Setup new device"
All set :-)

The secret CLI of the SRW2016 switch

2008-12-31T15:23:00.004+01:00

I wrote earlier about my new switch. I've now gotten time to play with it - and started testing munin with it. Munin now has a very nice Munin::Plugin::SNMP module to support SNMP plugins - and just minutes ago I managed to verify that it works correctly with authenticated SNMPv3. My main problem was that I didn't specify '-l authNoPriv' on the snmpwalk command line. When I tried the snmp__uptime plugin with SNMPv3 configuration it worked at once. I spent *hours* figuring that out.

It turns out that the web view for the switch really only works with IE on Windows (not even Firefox on Windows) and even uses a ActiveX plugin. This sucks. BUT, the switch has a s3cr1t cli! Firstly telnet to the switch and enable the ssh interface by navigating the menus.

Then ssh to it, log in on the screen and at the menu screen press ^Z. You get a ">" prompt at which you can type "?" or "help" or "lcli". Lcli will ask for your username and password again. And then you're in a IOS look-alike cli interface. There is a wiki for it here with some articles on different things. It can clearly benefit from your contributions.

Pulse-audio rant

2008-12-25T00:05:00.004+01:00

I have always found that audio works better if I disable sound servers. So in KDE I have always disabled artsd. In F10 everything seems to be compiled to first use pulse-audio-server (se amazing architecture diagram on the right), a gnome desktop sound server, and then, perhaps, the ALSA device driver. After my upgrade to F10 it was first only half installed and impossible to get working. After intensive use of strace and google I figured out that installing pulse-audio-utils and rebooting to reset whatever erronous state the machine was in fixed that.

Now that I got Amarok working too I finaly found that everything but the flash plugin in Firefox supports pulse-audio. Wouldn't play Money For Nothing off YouTube. Somehow flash and pulse-audio/amarok excludes each other. Quitting Amarok (small click in the speakers as it shuts down - I've not heard that in ages...) and restarting Firefox took care of that, but what a bother.

Out goes pulse-audio:

# rpm -qa | grep pulse

Find list of offending packages. Then:

# yum remove pulseaudio-libs-glib2 pulseaudio-core-libs pulseaudio

And yet again Alsamixer will show a sane selection of mixer levers. I'm probably some kind of dinosaur but why are the young 'uns keeping up this crap? ALSA is all we (I) need! Go away! In the future George Bush will be dead (he said so himself) and the rest of us will use laptops. We don't need no steenking network sound daemons.

Mp3 support for Amarok in Fedora 10

2008-12-24T23:15:00.009+01:00

I recently upgraded my one Fedora machine to f10. Being a KDE user I was forced to switch to KDE 4 on yet another machine. I must say: f10 with KDE is very nice looking. I've also been forced to this with Ubuntu 8.10 (U810). The KDE 4 in Ubuntu 8.10 is not as nice looking - mostly thanks to the way cool solar background image in f10.

And that 3D acceleration works on my f10 box (old ATI card) and not on my U810 machine - for reasons unfathomable to me. So finally my KDE has native fadey and wobbely windows without requiring the ingestion of intoxicating substances. Clearly the twenty-ohoh's have reached my desktop too.

Which just leaves me with the need to make my point: F10 comes with Amarok 2. As usual mp3 is not supported but the old ways to fix this are obsolete. Working instructions for f10 was not so easy to find. The Fedora Wiki directs it's readers to buy a gstreamer plugin to enable mp3 playback.

In the end I found instructions for getting the support from rpmfusion - yet another addon repo for Fedora. I had to do this:

# rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm

# yum groupinstall sound-and-video

To paraphrase Dire Straits (first big release on CD way back then): All I want is my MP3! --- I have no idea which one - or ones of the packages were needed to fix the mp3 support.

All I want for Christmas is...

2008-12-24T22:17:00.004+01:00

Today (24th) was Christmas in Norway. Just one of the ways Santa manages to get more time to deliver the packages - I'm sure he has lots more coping strategies.

My wife and I are building a house. It'll be done come summer (the roof is on now, roofing tiles and all :-). So I've started to plan ahead for the machine room. The house will have pretty good wiring potential - we'll be able to wire at need (if I have forseen our needs and specified sufficient tubing for wiring). So next obvious need is a switch. Need one with management, VLAN and SNMP support of course; to be able to do interesting things. So my Christmas gift to myself is a Linksys SRW2016, a 16 port 10/100/1000Mbps switch. Way cheap. The management is of the "webview" flavour, but what the hell, it was cheap at the price and has good capabilities. The VLANs will enable me to use as little wiring as posible. The SNMP support will hopefuly motivate me to make Munin a fully fledged MRTG killer (it's important to have dreams! :-) I'll just have to cope with the "webview", whatever.

Best of all, it's fan free and rack mountable. In a few months I'll have to find a cheap 19", 80cm-1m deep rack. If anyone in the Oslo (Norway) area has a rack to spare please write (or call or SMS or MMS)! In the mean-time I have a toy :-)

God Jul!

Linux and Brother MFPs

2008-12-12T19:03:00.000+01:00

I've spent some time at my parents' lately. My dad has a huge beast called Brother DCP-9045CDN in the basement office. It's a "MFP", or multi-function printer. It's a scanner/colour printer combo that can also copy. It has a 35 page automatic paper feeder tray.

Ages ago when multifunction devices were introduced it was the age of "winprinters" and "winmodems" - dumb printers and modems that needed pretty advanced and hardware close drivers to work. The multifunction devices were exactly the same. Some of these worked with Linux but everyone were better off avoiding the win* hardware. Winmodems have since gone the way of the dinosaur it seems. I've not researched MFPs in general but this Brother device is very Linux friendly. So friendly is that Brother provides drivers in both RPM and DEB formats.

I'm plesantly surprised and happy :-)

Looking into this device I found that the printer supports PCL and BR-Script. BR-Script seems a very capable Postscript clone. No need for downloading drivers: just open your CUPS (the Linux/Unix/OS X printer software) configuration interface and configure it as a br-script brother device. This printer has the IP address 192.168.2.45, so I tell CUPS the printer URL is lpd://192.168.2.45/AUTO/ (does anyone know what the IPP URL for these devices are?) CUPS has a good set of Brother drivers and I selected the one described as "Brother DCP-8040 BR-Script3". Once set up it printed at once.

To use the scanner I needed to go to Brother.com and follow the links do support/download drivers and select Linux. I downloaded the .deb package, ran dpkg -i on it on my Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy) machine. I guess if I hadn't fiddled with this Firefox would have run a GUI installer on the package for me so I just would have had to click "OK". The package contained SANE drivers. SANE is the standard scanner framework on Linux. I just had to run "brsaneconfig2 -a name=dcp9045 model=DCP-9045CDN ip=192.168.2.45" as root - very clearly documented on the site. Then I ran "kooka" (KDE scanner program) from the KDE menu, it asked me what scanner I wanted to use, I selected the Brother one. Insert paper in the scanner press "scan" and it just worked.

*grumble* When Linux is as easy as 1-2-3 - where is the fun in it? >:-)

Neonode goes bankrupt

2008-12-11T21:47:00.001+01:00

If you read my previous posting about the current state of phones you may have been worried for me. Or not. I ended up getting a Neonode N2. For the size, not for the feature list. The feature list is sort of lacking, but they made up for it by very nicely and thoughtfully solving a gaggle of other things.

The one item I've ever owned that got the most "what the hell is that?" or "that's some small phone!" comments. That quite popular phones were this small around 2001 is clearly forgotten.

I like it for it's logical and direct interface. I would have bought their next model. But they went bankrupt. I wonder where I'll have to turn for my next phone.

Getting the most out of Atom with Ubuntu - upgrading it the right binary architecture

2008-09-18T19:44:00.000+02:00

From most howtos I find it appears that people tend to run i386 Ubuntu (if they run Ubuntu) on their Atom devices. I may have stopped using Gentoo because it was too much work, but I'd still like to get my Atom box faster - without going as far as compiling the whole environment myself.

For ages I've heard people go on about how cool it is to bootstrap e.g. Xen hosts or do interesting things in chroot environments on Debian and Ubuntu. Not having worked with or even played with Xen I at least finaly get to play chroot games.

The scenario is that I have:

A rather freshly installed PPC machine with faulty memory. I put quite a lot of hours into installing and configuring all the software: Apache, postfix with tweaks, courier, squirrelmail, squarecircle web mail, a caldav server using postgresql, lots of stuff. Hours. If I could transfer the disk image from the PPC machine to the Atom machine and replace the PPC binaries and libraries with ditto Atom ones, then the new machine will work exactly like the old one without any further configuration.
A new Atom machine up and networked with a Live CD (or Live SD as the case may be). This new machine is LPIA architecture (Low Power Intel Architecture), e.g. Atom. The Live CD has the machine up on the network and it has the address 10.0.0.128. The new filesystems are mounted under /mnt.

All this will apply equally for a transfer from i386 to Atom, or PPC to Atom for that matter.

Before you start. This is not a "supported" upgrade procedure. If you break your computer and can't fix it again you get to keep both parts. Proceed only if you accept this.

To prepare on the PPC I installed and ran debfoster, a program that can enforce your package choices. It will throw out the programs you don't want and install those you want that are missing. It keeps a file called keepers to account for these. After running debfoster I know all the packages I need to install - everything will follow these. Make a backup copy of it called keepers-keep.

Then I transfer the old machine to the new one by running this as root on the old machine:

rsync -avHx --numeric-ids --progress --delete \
-e ssh / root@10.0.0.128:/mnt/

The first thing you should know about this command is that it can wipe out whole systems if you type the command a bit wrong. By all means, be careful, and read the whole man page unless you're already familiar with rsync.
This command can be repeated later if mistakes are made on the new machine.

Now the machine is transferred, but the PPC binaries won't run on either i386 or lpia. The executable disk contents have to be reinstalled with packages that are the correct binary architecture.

Here is a little transcript:

# ld.so.cache from another architecture causes problems
rm /mnt/etc/ld.so.cache
# That this is missing distresses dpkg no end
touch /mnt/var/run/motd
# Old dpkg database can be tricky
mv /mnt/var/lib/dpkg /mnt/var/lib/dpkg.old
mkdir /mnt/var/lib/dpkg
# And so we go!
debootstrap --arch lpia hardy /mnt http://ports.ubuntu.com/

That was the easy bit. Now to fix some things, and install the rest of the packages we used to have:

# Some fixes
mount -o bind /dev /mnt/dev
mount -o bind /sys /mnt/sys
mount -o bind /proc /mnt/proc
LC_ALL=C chroot /mnt bash
ln -sf mawk /usr/bin/awk
apt-get -f install
cat >/etc/apt/sources.list <EOF
deb http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports/ hardy main restricted universe multiverse
deb-src http://no.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ hardy main restricted universe multiverse

deb http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports/ hardy-updates main restricted universe multiverse
deb-src http://no.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ hardy-updates main restricted universe multiverse

deb http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports/ hardy-backports main restricted universe multiverse
deb-src http://no.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ hardy-backports main restricted universe multiverse

deb http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports/ hardy-security main restricted universe multiverse
deb-src http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ hardy-security main restricted universe multiverse

EOF
apt-get update
apt-get install localepurge
for f in $(cat /var/lib/debfoster/keepers); do
apt-get --yes install $f
done

Now check that grub, linux-image and such boot-time necessities are installed, and install the boot loader in MBR and get it configured:

grub-install /dev/sda
update-grub

If it complains about not being able to figure out your BIOS devices you may want to create /boot/grub/device.map with these contents:

(hd0) /dev/sda
(hd1) /dev/sdb

At this time it might boot if you try. My next problem was that udev had taken away eth0 and named it eth2. On a Debian(Ubuntu machine the file that decides what the interface name is is named /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules. You can edit that file. You may find that the two first lines are some sample stuff ending in NAME="eth0" and NAME="eth1" and that your ethernet device is at the end and named eth2. Remove the two first lines, change the NAME to eth0 for the correct last line. Then reboot again. Now the ethernet should be at eth0 and you can configure it with NetworkManager or in /etc/network/interfaces or whatever.

And now it should be working. If you want the wireless to work follow the usual instructions.

SD-cards reach their true potential

2008-09-18T14:01:00.000+02:00

SD cards used to be toys used with small cameras and mp3 players that are too easy to loose between the sofa coushins (much less MicroSD!)

Then I got an Acer Aspire One with 120Gb harddisk. Along with the harddisk comes Windows Home Edition. Let it install so I can see if the machine works. It works. Amazing what the chinese can manage for such a nice price. The whole "small portable PC sold very cheaply" concept works for me. The largest problem in the picture is the teeny weeny small screen.

Now, how to get Linux (Ubuntu 8.04.1 which supports the Atom architecture) on it? No CD/DVD-drive in the beast, and I have no USB-CD/DVD drives. I do have some spare SD cards though.

Turns out that I can download a Live CD ISO image (the Ubuntu desktop CD is also a live CD), and the very nifty UNetbootin and get a Live SD card to boot live environment or install from. Then I need a memory card reader for the SD card since the AAO (apparently) can't boot from any of its builtin SD card slots (why is that?). Then you can persue the AAO documentation in the Ubuntu Wiki to get the OS installed and all the different bits working.

Didn't even have to waste a CDR.

And, somewhat to my amazement (not having read everything about it beforehand...) the Atom CPU is hyperthreaded too, almost as good as two cores.

Let me (once again) state the obvious: Something is afoot here. It's cheap and good.

Now to get the install "transmigrated" to "lpia" which is the formal architecture name for the Atom boxes. There are lpia repositories at ports.ubuntu.com, and i386 and lpia are binary compatible. I also have some other Ubuntu boxes where I can debotstrap a disk image that I can transfer. Will probably post about that later.

Travel by SMS

2008-09-11T22:11:00.000+02:00

I've recently traveled some between Oslo and Copenhagen for work. Whatever company I fly the tickets will be electronic, and I can check in using machines and my credit card or a printed paper with a barcode or somesuch. This is cool.

But when I fly SAS ("Scandinavian Airlines System" originaly, not "Special Air Service", the British special forces) I can check in by SMS, no need to get on the Internet or visit a machine. Even cooler.

Now all I have to navigate is the security line. If I fly SAS. If only they weren't so expensive.

Business idea

2008-08-23T22:27:00.000+02:00

I've read that RIAA and the like hire "protection agencies" to "protect" their IP on Peer-to-peer networks. Sort of like a protection racket.

Tonight I discovered, much to my embarrassment, that I've been running an open proxy for a while, and that it had been located by some service scanner and used. This explains why my tiny little server has been out of breath lately.

Looking at the access logs is a bit astonishing - maybe I'm naive. It's full of ad-URLs. So my proxy has been used to aid ad-fraud.

xx.xxx.xxx.xxx - - [23/Aug/2008:22:25:07 +0200] "GET http://ad.yieldmanager.com/imp?z=0&Z=0x0&s=310488&y=30 HTTP/1.1" 404 370 "http%3A%2F%2Fwww.btflash.net%2Findex.html" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; .NET CLR 2.0.40" xx.xxx.xxx.xxx - - [23/Aug/2008:22:25:08 +0200] "GET http://cpvtext.cpvfeed.com/cpv_inline.js?p=112491 HTTP/1.0" 404 380 "http://www.credit4loan.com/" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040614 Firefox/0.8" xx.xxx.xxx.xxx - - [23/Aug/2008:22:25:08 +0200] "GET http://banner.adtrgt.com/cpv_inline.js?p=112842&cb=8699342731 HTTP/1.0" 404 378 "http://www.2onlinegame.com/" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)"

The source IPs have been removed to protect the guilty. As you see I return 404 now. But there is obvious potential in aiding Google and the like in detecting ad-fraud. Could be a million dollar business. Good luck and remember to send me 10% finders fee ;-)

"Pay in your own currency"

2008-08-05T22:54:00.000+02:00

One of the newest legitimate "scams" around is the option of "pay in your own currency" in all sorts of places where they accept credit cards. Today amazon.com offered me to pay in NOK (Norwegian kroner) instead of USD. It has been a while since I shopped there (I prefer amazon.co.uk due to the shorter shipping times inside Europe) so they may have offered this a while now.

Seems nice safe to pay in your own currency does it not? I'm sure a lot of people would think so, including my mom.

As all services this comes at a price. Credit card companies use pretty good exchange rates between the store currency and your own credit card bill currency. The store will not use as good rates. So if you let the store charge you in NOK (or whatever) they're ripping you off.

In the amazon webstore it was pretty easy to see what the "native" currency was. In some webstores it's harder. For example my domain pedler is in Canada, but the prices are quoted in US dollars. Do I ask to be charged in USD or CAD? ... Since the price was quoted in USD I chose to be charged in USD as well.

So: Just say no to yet another premium service you don't need!

All mobile phones suck

2008-06-20T20:20:00.000+02:00

I want a new phone. The old one is broken. I'm using the family's vintage backup phone. The first phone I was happy with for more than a year was my old nokia 8890. I bought it so I could use it when traveling in the US, and I did, I even read and sent some small emails on my palm via IR to the phone. You can see it to the left here. It was small, light, and some of my colleagues called it a pimp phone. This was before phones became internet platforms. After the 8890 I got a 7110. The greenish phone with a spring loaded cover just like in the Matrix. The spring, not the tint. It was Nokias first WAP phone. WAP of the time was some catastrophy, data access over GSM was line switched and the minutes were dear. I soon came to miss my 8890 but instead I got a Sony Ericsson phone. It didn't last either. The first phone I ever had that got worn out after a year. I sort of hated it. The UI was flashy, but the CPU could only almost carry it off.

Time passed and Nokia long at last announced the first generation 8800. Steel and glass, and a bit heavy but I liked it. Very much. After two years, last fall, it broke, the microphone stopped working. It sucks to not be heard when you're talking in the phone. I switched to the vintage backup phone. No camera in it. I have a child now, and sending MMSes to my wife from our time away from her (away from my wife) is a missed pleasure.

Nokia now makes the third generation 8800s. This generation has decent battery life, decent picture resolution, and 3G support. Pretty good feature list. And they're so bloody expensive that I'm petrified of buying one. The original 8800 was merely very expensive.

I want a smallish phone with "current" features and not a freakish price. Nokia has none. Sony Ericsson has none. No-one has any iPhones are sort of nice, but way too large. OpenMoko is a very interesting concept, but the handset is too large. ... The closest I've come is Neonode N2. Looks nice, interesting UI, high geek factor. Only two things are against it: User reports indicate poor reception and there is no SyncML to syncronize with our calendar server. Oh, and poor availability in Norway.

There is as of yet no happy ending to this tale. I implore the worlds mobile phone manufacturers to make a small nice phone with a fast nice UI. And good reception. And SyncML. And fer gosh sakes! Sell it in Norway! Norway is a very good early adopter market!

*sigh*

Family data-center: calendar sharing

2008-05-06T21:46:00.000+02:00

Actually, the Internet file-sharing I wrote about previously has been totally uninteresting to my wife. Internet available calendars on the other hand!

When we were just two and she studied and studied for years we had few or no scheduling conflicts. When she started to work it was still manageable, we still only had each other to take into consideration. When we got our daughter the cup runneth full. The little critter was clearly the most important person, and our schedules had to be adjusted to her being among us: Kindergarten x-mas and easter breakfasts, parent-conference there, drop-offs and pickups adjusted to meetings and travel needs. This clearly needs a technological solution!

To be fair, I got this idea from my colleague Bjørn. His wife is a nurse, she works all kinds of hours on a weekly basis, he consults with a client that has all sorts of needs early and late and weekends and what not. And he runs a boy scout troop. They needed calendars long before they procreated.

Being an old fart/dinosaur I resisted this idea for a long time. Fortunately calendars proved surprisingly easy.

I use Thunderbird as IMAP(mail) client. There is a humongous plug in for Thunderbird called Lightning that gives it calendar abilities. There is also a standalone version of Lightning called Sunbird. In the most basic form these store .ics, Ical files locally on your machine. But that does not make them internet available. The next step up is storing the .ics files on your webdav server -- see, suddenly the webdav server became much more desirable! This is very easy, just give lightning a HTTP or HTTPS URL pointing to the webdav file and it will read and write directly to it.

There is a downside to this easy solution: You can only have one program/user attempting to update a calendar at a time. Your whole calendar is just one large file, and it can take several seconds to retrieve or save, and if someone tries to save the shared calendar at the same time, your're so SOL. So, some discipline is needed to use this. That includes shutting down all unused calendar clients, as my wife discovered some days ago, she lost her whole calendar due to some such mishap.

There is a fix to this, it's called caldav. Calendar over DAV i.e. over HTTP. The relationship between caldav and ics over webdav is the same as the relationship between Maildirs and mail-spool-files. The first works well even with multiple clients accessing and updating it at the same time, and the second sucks and is prone to corruption and data-loss.

If you're OK with not having a web interface to your calendar - there is a way to implement caldav without installing a whole groupware suite. After all you installed a working e-mail solution years ago, no need to redo that. The caldav implementation I chose/fount is called davical. It is implemented in PHP and uses Postgress for storage. It was a bit fiddly to install, maybe I did it wrong, maybe their docs were slightly outdated.

davical used to be called rscds, and therefore lives at http://rscds.sourceforge.net/. There are Debian .deb and Red Hat RPM files at source forge. Once you have them installed and read and followed http://wiki.davical.org/w/Installation_Stuff you can give your calendar URL as shown in http://rscds.sourceforge.net/clients.php. The first time I did this, and imported an old calendar with the help of Lightnings export/import functions, davical sat there quite stunned a while. And then it worked. It's fast to delete from, it refreshes quite fast compared to huge calendars in ICS files and so on.

Family data-center: file sharing

2008-05-06T20:18:00.000+02:00

One of the joys of Linux is easy, well, relatively easy anyway, setup of Internet services.

Todays service is webdav, a file sharing protocol for the Internet based on HTTP. You will need a Internet connected Linux box that you can connect to somehow through the use of dynamic DNS or some such. My home based Internet server is an oooold laptop running Debian Etch (PII, 366MHz, 190MB, 10GB disk). Very easy to maintain, upgrade and install new stuff on. I will assume you use a modern Linux distribution in the following, and also assume that it's Debian.

Next you need Apache, and to enable the modules dav and dav_fs. On most Linux machines you can run these commands as root: "a2enmod dav; a2enmod dav_fs". And create the directory dav under the Apache Document Root to store files in. Often this will be /var/www/dav . It must be owned by the user Apache runs as, on debian that's the "www-data" user: "chown www-data /var/www/dav".

Now configure Apache. In /etc/apache2/conf.d create a new file called dav.conf:

<directory /var/www/dav>
Order Allow,Deny
Allow from all

Dav On

AuthType Basic
AuthName "Langfeldt.net WebDav"
AuthUserFile /etc/davpasswd
Require valid-user
</directory>

This sets up access control for the directory and enables DAV in it. The password file is created by the htpasswd command as root. To create a first account called "janl" run "htpasswd -c /etc/davpasswd janl". For subsequent accounts or password changes drop the "-c" option. If you take out your web browser and direct it to http://yourserver/dav" you should be greeted by a password dialog. Your browser should then show a mostly empty directory listing. Firefox can only show webdav directories, but the KDE "konqueror" is able to also copy files into a webdav directory. In
konqueror the URL is "webdav://yourserver/dav" or "webdavs://yourserver/dav" if you have SSL on the web server. You can use webdav with Gnome too of course.

Now you can store files on the webdav volume and access it from anywhere in the world, whenever. in.solit.us has a useful help page at http://in.solit.us/about/webdav .

That's all for today. I'll return with something that may give you more cred with the wife: family calendar services.

Widescreen is theft

2008-03-24T11:24:00.000+01:00

Everything has to be widescreen these days. In a TV I'm all for it. On my computer it's theft. Screen sizes used to be 1024x768, 1280x960, 1400x1050, 1600x1200 or even 1920x1440. Now they are widescreen and the resolution is 1024x576, 1280x720, 1400x787, 1600x900 and 1920x1080 (or thereabouts, sometimes they're 16:10 not 16:9). See, they didn't give us wider screens, they gave us less tall screens! They stole our pixels!

If my primary use of computers was looking at movies or TV this would be fine. But it's not! I web-surf, read and write e-mail, edit Wiki pages, work spreadsheets, program. For all of these more lines on the screen is better: it results in less scrolling and better overview.

KDE4 - ooooh, that hurts

2008-03-21T21:27:00.000+01:00

I have been using KDE since before Gnome was usable (and Gnome is still not usable ;-) KDE has the useful property of having nice defaults and a good interface to change them in. Whenever I install KDE anew I only need to click around for 2 minutes or so before it's not only usable but cozy. Also KDE people seem to know such classics as "Apple User interface guidelines" (I hope that's the title, I have version 1 in a box somewhere and Amazon does not seem to have it) which has had a tendency to make their GUI usable in other ways too. So when I switched to Ubuntu I naturally started using Kubuntu, the KDE desktoped version of Ubuntu.

KDE4 was finished some time ago. When it was first made available for Ubuntu it would not install. But it installed when I tried just now (quiet easter days...).

OW! It's in need of some serious tweaking. I shall have to yearn for 4.1 I think. Meanwhile I'll use KDE3.

After using it for 30 minutes I can say that it is very slick looking. Animations and sound effects where ever. But it is so broken. Let me count the ways:

The "K" (start) menu is now a scrollable window into the application hierarchy. This makes it TOTALY un-navigatable! One of the basic tennents of UI design is that the user should be able to recognize where he is and how he got there. The new K menu gives the user such a small peep hole into the K menu structure that it's totally unusable. True, it has a "search" function where I can enter either "irc" or "konversation" to find my IRC client, but I would still claim that it fails the "mom" test. My mom would not be able to use the new start menu. Even if I helped her over the phone it's not easy enough to use as she can't see where she's at.
I like to have the system bar ("kicker" in kde3) vertically on the rigth side of my screen. It was easy to adapt in KDE3: Adjust the clock size so it fits, the task icons just show, with no text so I can recognize the tasks in the task bar. Perfect. The KDE4 "panels" clock is not size-adjustable and gets cut off. The task thingys are elongated and evenly spaced over the whole task-bar part of the panel, I have no idea why. Not tested in the vertical setting I expect.
There is a "new devices" widget in the panel that is some kind of plug and play manager. When I held the mouse over it a window poped up. When the panel is in the vertical-right position practically the whole of the popup window is outside the screen.
The "log out" widget for the panel does not adjust well to the "tiny" or "small" settings. In KDE3 it re-arranges the "lock" and "log out" icons to fit better, in KDE4 they are resized to "micro" and impossible to see.
The KDE4 panel lets me add "widgets" (I'm not sure this word is a good replacement for "applet" of KDE3), and the widgets appears on the panel somewhere. Re-arranging them seems not possible.
Where did the kde-mixer applet go? I need my sound mixer in the panel!
The new Konsole program has a totally cool way of changing settings. When I mouse over an alternative the window changes at once. BUT, it can't recall from instance to instance that I don't want to see the menu bar. Really not!
I want to use ALT+LEFT and ALT+RIGHT to switch desktops dammit! I don't care if this is a oft used application shortcut because I never use it.
There is no "disable all sounds" button in the notifications control panel. The only thing I want to make sounds is amarok. My desktop needs to be quiet... After growing weary of turning off sounds one by one a while I found out that if I switch tabs I can disable sound-effects entirely by disabling the sound-sub system. I'm sure that's not intuitive. I would hope to be able to disable sounds from the place I can see them enabled.

That's enough I think. Back to KDE3 for me.

2008-02-23T10:54:00.000+01:00

Er teknologi alltid et framskritt?

The sound of silence

2008-02-16T12:31:00.000+01:00

Can you build a completely quiet HTPC box? Can it run on off as little as 300W?

Finally! My MythTV PVR box is no longer the loudest in the living room. The two to three laptops that live there easily out-hums the larger box since I moved the machine into its new "HTPC Classic" cabinet made by mCubed. It is a good looking black aluminum fronted case with a mirror (plexi)glass "visor" across the front and symmetrically placed "on" and "eject" buttons. The DVD players front plastic has been pulled off and the mirror glass on the left side of the visor is taped on in it's place. Looks good and sounds good :-)

I wrote about the machine components earlier. Suffice it to say that it's a simple Athlon motherboard with a dual core Athlon64 X2 65W CPU. It was an ideal choice with regards to price, power and power consumption. I'll concentrate on the case and how it works this time.

The central idea with this cabinet are the huge heat sinks on the (out)sides, and mounting heat pipes on the hot things inside to channel the heat to the heat sinks. No moving parts cooling. Adding to that "vertical silence" aluminum disk casings with heat sinks and an all embracing rubber mat that goes around the disk inside the case. And mounting holes on rubber piles you also get pretty durn quiet disks. I can still hear the occasional seek sound, but there isn't much cause to seek the disk unless it's used. The disks are, according to their S.M.A.R.T. based temperature Munin graphs running at exactly the same temperature as before, except that I stacked them other way so the other one is now the hottest one. Graph shown below. To the left of the gap is before, to the right is now.

There are two interesting questions in this conversion:

Will I get by with a 300W PSU?
Will things stay cool enough?

Power and cooling

Reading forums and such one easily arrives at the conclusion that any PSU smaller than 500W is just too small for current CPUs and graphics cards and disks and whatever. I had chosen a low W CPU for this, a low featured mother board, and not the coolest graphics card either. The graphics card manages on the power it gets from the PCI-E bus, unlike some others (which need the new PCI-E power connectors or other extra power sources). The Munin graphs for voltages stayed exactly the same, even when playing back video and recording at the same time.

When it comes to temperatures things now are definitely hotter in some places. The GPU used to have a angry small fan. The scary bit here is that the new cabinet is positively perforated, and has 3 large vents in the back at the top, so I can hold my hand over the vents and gauge the temperature for myself. The GPU gets HOT. The NVIDIA measuring tool says it gets to 70-80C now, with heat pipes. It used to be 50C, with the angry fan. I hear from friends that their graphics cards run all the way up to 125C. 80C should be OK then. But I'll still check the couplings some times to see if I can get better heat transfer.

The PVR350 TV input card does realtime MPEG2 encoding in hardware. It has always been sitting in a poorly ventilated corner of the machine, with only its heat sink to defend itself with. Which it has done for many years now, and I've had no idea with how hot it gets. But with the vents I've realized it gets plenty hot. Fortunately, even without a fan in the case it now gets more air circulation than ever, due to the case perforations. It, and the GPU now serves the living room as a low intensity heat source (as it did before, come to think of it). By the time the air leaves the vent it's less than 30C).

Very difficult to build though

The other thing apparent from this graph is that I used almost 4 days (well, evenings, after the kid was asleep) from turning the machine off in the old cabinet and turning it on on the new one. It was bloody hard to mount everything in the cabinet. This was my hardest PC building project yet.

I have mounted my own kitchen, all manner of IKEA things, and a couple of PCs before. Building a mCubed box should not be attempted by anyone that is easily frustrated by such construction projects. Each and every one of the illustrated instruction sheets or pamphlets carry a disclaimer that a un-experienced PC builder should not try this at home. They are not kidding. There are instructions with everything that went into the case. But no where as detailed as IKEA instructions. You're required to figure out a good number of things while you work. The first thing that puzzled me was the CPU bracket spacer pieces. There were two sets, slightly differing, but both the same length. Of course I mounted the wrong ones first. It was obviously the wrong ones once I tried to complete the CPU bracket mounting as the nuts would never engage the screws properly. But I suspect that a number of people tried force before arriving at this conclusion.

Most of the troubles stem from the small inside. On the outside the cabinet is a standard width ATX desktop cabinet, and it's 5cm deeper. BUT, the afore mentioned huge heat sinks take up quite a lot of the width of the cabinet. On the inside there is enough space for a standard ATX mother board, the drive cage and the fan less 300W PSU. After that there is hardly any space for routing power cables, or anything else. In theory I should be able to fit 3 hard drives and the DVD drive into the cabinet, but I'll never get in a third drive, that drive bay is occupied by power cables so they don't have to lie messily around across the mother board. Not that I'm very happy with the degree of neatness I achieved. While mounting I dreamed that Lian Li would buy mCubed (Lian Li make the most easily buildt/mounted PC cabinets I know, they're also quite expensive).

Removing the cables to make room, I set about fitting the heat pipes. The ones for the CPU were easy and the heat pipes were very easy to bend as needed. That was one the least crowded side of the cabinet. The north bridge and the GPU heat pipes were to be terminated on the other side. This side already dominated completely by the PSU. I needed 5 very time consuming tries (over two evenings) to get the heat pipes in place.

In retrospect I notice that there are no pictures of the GPU and north bridge heatpipes mounted at the same time anywhere in the mounting instructions. If it wasn't for the fact that I've seen reviews of complete machines in this case I would have suspected that no-one had attempted mounting both at once before.

It's very crowded in the corner where the north bridge and GPU heat pipes have to go: Power lead to the PSU, TV-input card, mother board power, IDE cable, SATA cable, and a myriad of HDD-led, power-on and such mother board "heads" that have to be connected to get the thing working. And the iMON LED panel USB cable. In addition to all the power cables that are just hanging in that corner.

Another thing is the DVD-tray opening switch. In the baggie with stuff for the cabinet there is a small thing with some clear rubber lens shaped bits. They don't stack well at all. I had to find something else to pad the distance for the DVD-tray opening switch.

Pretty though

On the other hand. Everything is quite nice looking, if crowded. Plexi glass and chrome all over the inside. Black aluminum on the outside. The heat pipes are a bit unevenly finished, but not ugly, and the heat pipe clamps I received had quite coarse rounded milling patterns on them. Somewhere in the history of those metal squares there has been a large milling machine with a uneven cutting tool. No matter, the ample cooling paste that came with everything easily filled in the unevenness where it counted. And the outside is fault-less.

What I don't have to do with this setup is change cooling water every 6-12 months. And no cooling tower in the corner of the room either.

And they provide the screw drivers needed for putting it all together. An especially long stemmed screw driver is needed for fastening the drive and power cages. I would have had to go shopping for tools unless they had provided those I needed. And they also provide enough cooling paste, in every package that needs some. Nice touch.

Recommendations for mCubed

Please, if anyone from mCubed ever reads this, I have some suggestions for the box:

Deliver the PSU with a power lead that has a shorter connecting block, or even a 90 degree knee in the block. This will take less space from the heat pipes and stuff
On the PSU side of the cabinet make more holes spaced 1/3rd longer apart so that the heat pipes may enter the clamp blocks between the clams. As it is now the clamps are so closely placed that in effect there is only one clamp block
The north bridge of most computers hides behind the graphics cards. It is likely that a random user needs 3 90 degree angles to be able to connect the equipment to the clamp block. And it's bloody hard to mount both north bridge and GPU on that side together - see also the previous point.
If somehow the PSU could be rotated 180 degrees along the long axis so that the lead connection comes close to the wall of the cabinet this would save space and heat pipe logistics. Drop the knee on the lead then.
A FAQ please? What happens if I unbend a 90 degree knee on a heat pipe (I guess it breaks open)? Can I cut a heat pipe or are they based on a fluid heat transport (I guess it's based on fluids due to the way the pipes are sealed in the ends. But does the two lower heat pipes from the CPU work really well then, their up goes towards the CPU, not away as with the two higher ones do)?

CD cover art in Amarok

2008-01-26T15:37:00.000+01:00

I have long since RIPed all my CDs and they're now stored in the basement. I listen to my music on my MP3 player or on various computers that have a copy of the collection (including the living room MythTV media center of course). I use Amarok as player on most of the computers. It has a nice cover manager which can retrive cover art from various Amazon sites or give the URL to a cover image stored elsewhere. IMHO the covers adds to the experience of playing MP3s and I like the feature very much.

But, Amarok keeps the cover art in a cache directory with md5 sum file names. When I copy my collection to a new computer I have to re-find all the covers... This sucks. Amarok has a second way of storing the cover images. If I save a graphics file in a album directory this will be viewed as the album cover by Amarok. So all I have to do is get the covers from the cover manager into the MP3 directory hierarchy. Right!

It turns out that Amarok can be remote controlled by DCOP, "Desktop Communications Protocol", which is sort of like DBUS ("desktop bus" I suspect, it's part of the open desktop initiative which, it appears, will eventually make all the different desktops somehow interoperable by using common protocols).

If I type "dcop amarok" at a shell promot I get a list of all functions available:

qt
KBookmarkManager-/home/janl/.kde/share/apps/amarok/fileBrowserBookmarks.xml
KBookmarkNotifier
KDebug
KDirNotify-1
KIO::Observer
KIO::Scheduler
MainApplication-Interface
collection
contextbrowser
devices
html-widget1
html-widget2
html-widget3
html-widget4
html-widget5
ksycoca
mediabrowser
player (default)
playlist
playlistbrowser
script

Turns out I can do quite a lot with this, like starting and stopping playback. Changing the volume or skipping to the next track.

After some trial and error I found "dcop amarok player coverImage" which will return the path of the cover image of the currently played track: "/home/janl/.kde/share/apps/amarok/albumcovers/cache/130@7ab00582116d9a9034221828a4df648e" and similarly "dcop amarok player path" which returns the path of the currently playing track. So I know what directory the currently playing album is stored in. Just a short script away from what I want then:


#!/bin/bash

# Script to dump cover art into album directories.

# BEFORE YOU RUN THIS:
# - Use the cover manager to find and install covers for everything
# - Load your entire collection in the playlist
# - Set the volume to "0".
# - Run this script - and wait... Note that the script cannot tell when it
#   has completed O:-)

# This scrip will for each played track ask for
# - The directory it is stored in
# - The cover image
# - If there is no cover image in the directory given copy the cover image
#   there with the filename albumcover.png

# This all takes a good while if you have some thousands of tracks,
# perhaps as long as one second pr. track, so easily hours.  But it is
# automatic

OSD=$(dcop amarok player osdEnabled)
dcop amarok player enableOSD false
dcop amarok player play

while :; do
ALBUM="$(dcop amarok player album)"
NOW="$(dcop amarok player nowPlaying)"

echo "** $NOW / $ALBUM"
TRACKPATH=$(dcop amarok player path)
COVER=$(dcop amarok player coverImage)
dcop amarok player next

case $COVER in
  *nocover.png) continue;;
esac

DIR=$(dirname "$TRACKPATH")
[ -f "$DIR/albumcover.png" ] || cp -v "$COVER" "$DIR/albumcover.png"
done

dcop amarok player enableOSD $OSD

Now I can use rsync or unison to bounce my collection around - including the covers. ... But wait, it's not quite perfect yet, I'd like my MP3 player to show covers as well! There were several rockbox cover scripts in the Amarok wiki, but none suited me perfectly. Fortunately it's only a question of generating a 100x100 .bmp file called "cover.bmp" in each directory. The "convert" command from Image Magick does this without fuzz. Thus this script:

#!/bin/bash

COVER_SIZE="100x100"
RBNAME=cover.bmp

find . -name 'albumcover.png' -print | while read cover; do
DIR="$(dirname "$cover")"
NEW="$DIR/$RBNAME"
if [ -f "$NEW" ] ; then
    continue
fi
echo Converting cover in "$DIR"
convert "$cover" -geometry $COVER_SIZE "$NEW" || exit 1
done

To use it simply cd to a MP3 directory hierarchy and it will find all albumcover.png files and make cover.bmp from them. Then sync to your rockbox MP3 player.

Quiet PC, take III

2007-12-28T19:41:00.000+01:00

Back in 2004 I wrote about my first attempt at building a quiet PC. In retrospect I failed. Mostly because the disks were too noisy and needed individual noise dampening cases, but also because the Lian Li case, while beautiful and practical, was not very noise-insulated, and also the PSU could have been more quiet. The CPU cooler was nice.

A litte bit after this I put together a HTPC based on a old ASUS CUV4X mobo with a Celeron CPU, a Noise Control cabinet with very thorough noise dampening and put some Samsung Spinpoint disks in it. Sitting in a shelf in the living room it was quite tolerable. Especially in the day time, at night when everything becomes quiet the sound of it grew obtrusive. In 2004 it was bloody impossible to get MythTV running on it. I gave up after 2 days of work and setbacks. Therefore I used XP on it for years (ashamed all the while), and programmed recordings on it manually. This spring I installed MythUbuntu on it and everything just worked. Since it finally was really useful and I thought I'd invest some in it. Build a HD capable multimedia machine from the Celeron that just barely managed to decode a MPEG2 in realtime. Note, must support our current SD TV as we will not buy a digital flatscreen for a couple of years. Our SD TV is very nice and the HD things could be better (support MPEG4 DVB-T for example, the Norwegian terrestrial digital broadcast standard), and will be cheaper still.

So this winter I have a plan to make a HD HTPC which is All Quiet. The first step was new inards. The second step I'll return to in January when my new case arrives.

The first step was changing the the mother-board, CPU and graphics.

CPU first. AMD Athlons were out in 65nm process, with 65W power consumption. According to Toms Hardware CPU charts a bit better for video and media processing than Intels Core Duo CPUs. And a bit cheaper too, as AMD lowered prices.

Motherboard. Remembering the lesson of the first Quiet PC mother board I got a motherboard that a local clone maker uses in their "build your own PC" web-shop, they would not use a motherboard with high fail-rates. A MSI K9N NEO-F V3. Cheap, and low on features. No FireWire for example, or other bells and whistles for the overcooking aficionados. Probably low power consumption too. This motherboard supports AMDs "Cool 'n Quiet" which seems like an admirable concept.

Graphics card. A XFX GeForce 7600GS with passive cooling, 1080p over HDMI as well as Composite TV-out for our SD TV. Sadly no clicky link to this as it has been discontinued as I write this.

Then came the time for mounting the new stuff. First surprise was the 24pin power connector on the motherboard. My PSU had only a 20pin contact in addition to the 12V "P4" contact. The manual was very supportive though, a 20 pin connector should work well. Connecting the disk-drives... Ah, two IDE disk drives and one IDE DVD drive, and only one IDE bus with the usual two connectors. Bummer. Will have to order a large SATA disk then, to be able to use the DVD drive :-) A 500G SATA Samsung SpinPoint is now waiting to be mounted, just as soon as I get time - it will involve a fair amount of disk copying and mount-point jiggering.

When powered up the machine was Quiet. Already! The big AMD CPU cooling fan, with Cool 'n Quiet technology no doubt, was very low speed and quiet. With only the contents changed, no new super case yet, the machine is already quieter than before. And giving my server laptop (I keep an old laptop in the shelves as a server, my first bid for quiet computing in our small flat) quite an upset as the laptop is now easily the most noisy thing in the room.

One of my colleagues swears that the most, well the two most, important thing you can do to quiet a PC is to change the CPU fan to something big with a slow fan with so much capacity to spare that it will never need to speed up. And change the north bridge fan too, it tends to be a small angry fan. Or get a motherboard with passive cooling on the northbridge. And a passively cooled graphics card. After those three I would bet that getting disk enclosures (that enclose the disks entirely) is the next priority. They're in the mail. I'll write again when the new cabinet and disk enclosures are here.

Forbruker vs. selger

2007-12-28T15:57:00.000+01:00

Jeg hadde lyst til at overskriften skulle være "Langfeldt 1 - Apple 0" fordi det beskriver godt det jeg føler her jeg sitter og skriver på PowerBook'en min. Men dette er egentlig en historie om forbruker-lovgivningen i Norge, og hvor fin den er.

Historiens moral, framkommer på begynnelsen av historien fordi den er viktigere enn alt det jeg har lyst til å fortelle (som du kan lese under) om hvordan jeg fikk maskinen min tilbake reparert på tross av at Apple hevdet at skaden var forårsaket av meg.

Moralen er: Ikke gi deg! Norske forbrukere har utmerkede rettigheter nedfelt i forbrukerkjøps-loven, som gir 5 års reklamasjonsrett, og norsk rettspraksis som gjør at leverandøren må dokumentere at det er du som har forårsaket feilen dersom de nekter reparasjon innen de 5 årene med reklamasjonsrett (linker nederst). For den utholdende forbruker er dette veldig kraftige verktøy. Det tok meg to år, men det kunne gått på under et halv-år. Det var ikke egentlig mye arbeide. Og det har gitt personlig tilfredsstillelse.

Litt uti soga klikket jeg litt rundt på http://forbrukerportalen.no/ og fant siden "Slik klager du" som forklarte hvordan jeg burde gå fram i grei detalj.

Jeg startet med å snakke ordentlig med Apple og reparatøren for å se hva de hadde å si. Det er fint å ha tilbakevist alle argumenter fra motparten allerede i begynnelsen. Jeg fikk vite hva de mente og så satte jeg meg ned og tenke ordentlig på hva jeg mente og hvorfor de tok feil
Dette, og hele saks-historien oppsummerte jeg i et brev som jeg sendte Apple. Jeg holdt brevet i en rolig og balansert tone, fordi om det var fristende å fråde ild og fordervelse. Da Apple fremdeles svarte nei til reparasjon var neste skritt å
Skrive brev til forbrukerrådet og legge ved det lange brevet til Apple. Forbrukerrådet gikk så inn som megler mellom meg og Apple og i brevs form spurte de Apple "er det ikke slik at" og andre ting. Apple overholdt ikke alltid svarfristene, men de svarte alltid på fullstendig "økseskaft" måte som viste at de ikke egentlig satte seg inn i saken og avviste alle krav om reparasjon. Ren ut-trekkings taktikk for å slite meg ut. Etter noen runder med dette spurte forbrukerrådet hva jeg syntes vi skulle gjøre nå (på dette tidspunktet dukket det opp et telefonnummer og telefontid på brevarket, så jeg kunne ha ringt og pratet med saksbehandleren hvis jeg var usikker). Jeg skrev tilbake at Apple ikke hadde bidratt til å bringe saken videre med sine svar, og spurte om å få saken lagt fram for forbrukertvistutvalget. Forbrukertvist-utvalget er laveste rettslige instans i forbrukersaker.
Forbrukerrådet laget forbrukertvist-utvalgs sak for meg og forbrukertvistutvalget sendte først et brev til Apple der de ba om Apple sin saksframstilling. Etter et par dager ringte en vennlig person fra Apple meg og spurte hva jeg ønsket og hvis jeg fikk det om jeg da ville være enig i at saken kunne henlegges. Jeg spurte om nøyaktig det jeg ba om fra forbrukertvistutvalget - reparasjon av hengselen. Det har blitt påpekt at jeg burde ha forhandlet og fått mer av dem for 2 år med krangling og fjas fra deres side, det eneste jeg ville få igjen nå var jo en 5 år gammel datamaskin. Det kan godt være. Men til tross for at jeg kan være både påståelig og sikkert brautende, er jeg egentlig snill. Så Apple slapp advokat eller saksbehandler-utgifter for en forbrukertvistutvalgs-sak og jeg fikk sikkerhet om at maskinen ville bli reparert.

Jeg skrev alltid brev på norsk og sendte til Apple i Norge. De svarte på engelsk fra Irland hvor Apple gjør all kundebehandling fra. Hvis ikke jeg hadde vært flink i engelsk (jeg har skrevet bøker på engelsk) kunne jeg ha krevet å få svar på norsk.

Dette var en grei prosess som etter at jeg hadde skrevet det lange brevet som oppsummerte hele saken krevet svært lite av meg. Det anbefales absolutt å forsøke dette. Dersom forbrukerrådet mener du har en svak sak vil du nok få vite det. Jeg fikk ihvertfall vite at de mente jeg hadde en sterk sak.

Bakgrunnen for alt dette er at jeg har hentet Mac'en idag, litt over 2 år etter den ble levert med problematisk skjermhengsel - det tar på å bli åpnet og lukket flere ganger om dagen i 3 år. Heldigvis hadde jeg Apple Care utvidet 3 års garanti så det burde gå fint. Etter en måned eller så ringte jeg og spurte Office Line (nå Humac) hvordan det gikk med reparasjonen. De hadde sendt informasjon til Apple og ventet på svar. "Når får dere det da?" (samtalene i denne artikkelen er gjengitt fritt etter hukommelsen). "Det er ikke godt å si, Apple tar sin tid" svarte de. "Bare" 2 måneder etter at den var levert ringte de meg tilbake og sa at de ikke kunne reparere, ettersom jeg hadde forårsaket skaden. Jeg gav uttrykk for at det skjønte jeg ikke noe av. De skulle skaffe overslag på hvor mye det kostet å reparere på egen regning. Når det endelig kom var det snakk om noe rundt 10000 norske kroner. For det kan en jo kjøpe en ny maskin, om enn ikke fra Apple.

Jeg ble sur og sint (eller endog forbanna) ved tanken på det hele. Jeg lot saken ligge (og maskinen ligge hos Office Line), og tenkte på å gi meg. Da det hadde gått noen måneder til ble jeg fremdeles sur og sint når jeg tenkte på saken. Jeg ringte Office Line for å høre hva de hadde sagt til Apple om skaden. "Nei, vi har ikke noe spesielt belegg for at det er du som har forårsaket skaden, og dessuten har vi ikke kompetanse og materialkjennskap nok til å bedømme det" sa en person på verkstedet. Så jeg ringte til Apple igjen, de fant ikke saken og det hele ble forklart på nytt. Velvilligst skulle saken undersøkes. Men nei, de kunne ikke hjelpe. Jeg lar tid gå igjen, ringer Office Line og spør om ting Apple sa. Som de ikke kunne bekrefte. Snakke med Apple igjen. Apple: "Det er en annen skade på maskinen", "Ja, den er ikke relatert, den oppstod sånn og sånn". "Når det er en annen skade på maskinen så tar Apple intet ansvar og det står klart i Apple Care-avtalen"... Vi avsluttet og jeg gikk og fant Apple Care-avtalen fra da maskinen ble kjøpt. Stod ikke noe sånt der. Stod ikke noe sånt i den nye versjonen av avtalen på Internett heller (ikke det at det er noen grunn til å tro at den nye versjonen gjelder meg, avtalen som ble inngått ved innkjøp er den jeg har inngått med Apple). Support-personen hadde muligens røpet en intern policy for håndtering av skade saker. Men det som ble sagt til meg om avtalens innhold var løgn. Jeg forsøkte meg på telefonen med samme person igjen, påpekte avtale-tekst o.l. og fikk satt han fast på det med avtale-innholdet, men svaret ble allikevel "nei" til reparasjon.

Jeg brukte nå lang tid på å tenke på om jeg skulle orke å ta saken videre, men jeg ble fremdeles forbanna når jeg tenkte på det hele og v.h.a. nettet så fant jeg ut at (som nevnt over):

Forbrukerkjøpsloven gir utmerket beskyttelse i 5 år, noe som er lenger enn de fleste garantier
Norske høyesterett er flotte mennesker. I en dom fra 1995 la de bevisbyrden for skader på leverandøren.

I retrospekt er det også et veldig viktig poeng av en datamaskinreparatør er ikke nødvendigvis, eller sannsynligvis ikke, kompetent til å bedømme om to skader er relaterte, om skaden er forbruker-forårsaket eller hva som skal til for at en gitt skade skal oppstå. Slike spørsmål kan ha med fysikk og material-kunnskap å gjøre. En datamaskinreparatør er opplært til å åpne og lukke kasser og bytte deler, de har ikke opplæring i hvor mye kraft det trengs for å ødelegge en maskin på en gitt måte, eller om det er sannsynlig om det har skjedd ved slitasje eller uhell. Ettersom jeg har fysikk fra videregående kunne jeg argumentere føre noen argumenter mot at det var sammenheng mellom skadene på maskinen. Men, dersom du blir stilt overfor en påstand om at du har skadet noe av en "ekspert" så sjekk hva personen er ekspert på.

Exhibit your non-life

2007-11-13T22:56:00.000+01:00

Facebook. Very social. I just looked at my whatchamacallit, and saw what all my friends have been doing on Facebook lately. And then it dawned on me.

It's a voyeurs smörgåsbord.

Not sure what's cool? Just see what your friends are doing and do the same. Now you are the same, so at least you're equally cool. Even if you're exactly the same.

The voyeur / exhibitionist traits seem strong in the human race. Just look at celebrity magazines and news and Idol and the reality shows. Facebook is the same. See peoples lives. Be seen.

Facebook is missing a "I last had sex with" setting.

Said the exhibitionist blogger and author.

Agile or wh0t?

2007-10-01T19:52:00.000+02:00

We in the Linpro crowd now officially prefer that our projects are agile. We have had hallelujah presentations about it at weekend retreats and so on. The Agile projects I've been in have all been nice and all. I have nothing to complain about.

But apparently some people already have agilitis from over-exposure to agility.

Ugress

2007-05-04T22:22:00.000+02:00

last.fm reveals a Ugress CD I had not known about earlier: Film Music - Selected Cues 2002-2006. He has it in his discography now.

GPS

2007-05-04T21:43:00.000+02:00

GPS'es are too expensive to be the toy de jour yet I guess - though geo caching and other GPS games has gotten mentioned in the mainstream press. Too expensive yet?

With a view to driving in Italy this May/June I've ordered my GPS. A Fujitsu-Siemens LOOX N560 PDA with builtin GPS. Pretty cool, it's a PDA with the works: WiFi, Bluetooth, ... and Windows. I would have prefered Linux or PalmOS, but I also could not stand the thought of adding a separate Bluetooth GPS unit with charger and wires in addition to the PDA unit as a Palm would have required.

Another possibility would have been a dedicated GPS unit. But a PDA always in my pocket so I can always see where I am seems infinitely more cool.

Looking at the specs of the "PDA" I'm a bit taken aback: 624MHz, 128MB, wireless networking as I said. This is the spec of a perfectly good laptop only 5 years ago. It should be able to play video just fine - my daughter will surely enjoy this at some later time.

The delivery time from my hardware pusher is 3 weeks. I hope I get it before we leave.

First post!! TSSIA!

2007-05-04T21:22:00.000+02:00