blog.tensixtyone

Peter pointed out on the ManLUG mailing list that Liverpool will play host to a “micro-festival” on open source software in media production. The Open Source City festival is running from the 17th – 22nd of June at Mello Mello and various other sites across the city centre. This event has twigged interest from me due to the presentation on open source software from a speaker on IP from the Green Party, i’ve always known that the greens are very pro-open source but i’ve never heard it “from the horses mouth”.

So, my name is down and it’s booked into my calendar. Drop me a message if your also visiting.

I’ve been quite busy over the last two weeks, catching up on home projects and other things. After a few quick fixes and features sent over to the LottaNZB guys I was added to the development team, which is quite a change for me considering the last project I was on was over 4-5 years ago. Anyway, it’s been good to get my Launchpad user ID” back in use as the LottaNZB project is hosted on their services.

As well as LottaNZB, I’m also adding to the Python bindings for MythTV. At the moment the existing bindings only support simple operations and I’m expanding it out to abstract out most of the major concepts within the DB, for example channels and programs. Hopefully, they’ll provide useful in the future when I need to do a channel rescan.

The eee-acpi module, hacked by Asus from the asus-laptop module, currently manages the kill switches for the various extra hardware (wifi, cardreader, webcam) and also handles the extra Fn keys via ACPI events.

While hotkeys via ACPI are well supported by acpid and its ilk it is no longer the best way to handle these types of keys. Generally, the drivers for the mainstream laptops (ibm/lenovo, hp) have moved over to the input framework to communicate these key presses, usually displaying as an extra input device under /dev/input. These input devices can be handled by HAL and notifications of key presses send over the dbus allowing for desktop environments such as GNOME to handle these events without any strange hackery and fakekeys calls.

Thanks to the previous work of the asus-laptop developers there’s a patch that exists to disable the existing ACPI events and provide a input device for the extra keys, I’ve managed to hack together a version of the eeepc-acpi module using the Debian 1.01 source to export the “Asus Extra Buttons” input device.

After you have the inputs available, it’s a simple matter of producing a FDI for HAL to identify the device and map the scan codes to the actual keys. After the initial FDI was created I could use the volume keys without any extra software and also map the two application buttons (marked as VGA switch, and AP button) in GNOME to call scripts. The wifi key (Fn+F2) presented more of a problem, while it was mapped to “wifi” HAL didn’t know how to actually switch off the Atheros card. The killswitch for the card would need to be implemented as a program that listens to dbus, something a little outside my skill set.

The other buttons on the keyboard (sleep, brightness) are pure ACPI calls. This presents a problem that the keys produce events via the input layer and the ACPI layer at the same time, so for example you hit the brightness down button and HAL will pickup the notification and display the brightness OSD, but it quickly goes out of sync as what HAL sees and what the ACPI are doing are completely separate. Again, this is outside my skill set but I’d probably approach it by filtering out the keys in the kernel and let the ACPI events do their work.

The guys over at Fedora have a similar idea of moving over to an input based module, but for the moment no source has been produced. Due to the numerous little issues I’ve had I’ve decided to put this little project on the back-burner until I see what the Fedora people have produced, after all they’ll have people that are more experienced in this type of thing, whereas I am not.

I’ll get round to posting the source deb for the modified eee-acpi tonight or tomorrow.

After initally setting up my EeePC to run Debian Lenny I quickly encountered a issue were the madwifi drivers wouldn’t resume correctly. The card would be unable to operate as it has lost sync with the kernel drivers, removing and reloading the related modules solved the issue.

Some people on the EeeUser forums ripped out the existing script from the default Xandros install, a simple acpi script that jumped through some hoops to disable the modules and clear everything down. The script worked as part of the existing acpi-support package and worked when using the acpi suspend options, now i’ve got GNOME and HAL installed it turns out these are no longer used, therefore still causing the issue.

After a little research it seems that the suspend support within Debian is currently in a state of flux, and a few bug tickets have been raised about the various issues. This provided my first hint of how to resolve it, a quick script in pm-utils, much like the acpi one, will fix this for good.

Simply, place this script into your /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/ folder, I’ve got it as 45eee-wifi that way if the script fails for some reason at least your video will be resumed.

#!/bin/bash

PWR=$(cat /proc/acpi/asus/wlan)

load_modules() {
   modprobe ath_pci
   modprobe wlan_wep
   modprobe wlan_tkip
   modprobe wlan_ccmp
}

unload_modules() {
   rmmod ath_pci
   rmmod wlan_scan_sta
   rmmod wlan_tkip
   rmmod wlan_wep
   rmmod wlan_ccmp
   rmmod ath_rate_sample
   rmmod wlan_acl
   rmmod wlan
   rmmod ath_hal
}

wifi_on() {

   if [ "$PWR" = "0" ]; then
      modprobe pciehp pciehp_force=1
      sleep 3
      echo 1 > /proc/acpi/asus/wlan
      sleep 2
      load_modules
      sleep 1
   fi
}

wifi_off() {
   if [ "$PWR" = "1" ]; then
      unload_modules

      echo 0 > /proc/acpi/asus/wlan
      sleep 1
      rmmod pciehp
      rmmod pci_hotplug
   fi
}

case "$1" in
        hibernate|suspend)
                wifi_off
                ;;
        thaw|resume)
                wifi_on
                ;;
        *)
                ;;
esac

The scripts in the “Arch acpi-eee” package provided the basis for this script, and it also works alot better than the existing scripts provided on eeeuser.com.

Hackers have managed to circumvent the BBC’s anti-piracy systems to gain unrestricted access to the programmes on the corporation’s iPlayer internet TV service. – The Guardian

I never knew how true my previous statement would be, while i’m a little late posting a follow-up I have to comment on the media’s perspective of the “technically-able” internet users. It seems if something is hidden in plain sight and discovered by the masses it will be classed as hacking no matter how idiotic it is. The media should change it’s perspective and chastise the BBC for their inepitude.

Of course, it’s easier to blame a bunch of people with no legal department…

From time to time, to save on resources and make things easier you have to bodge certain items. Today’s example is generating a different report on the first working day of the month than the rest of the month. Crystal Reports doesn’t offer the functionality to identify the first working day of the month, so i’ve created the following fuction:

Function FirstWorkingDayOfMonth(d as Date)   
   dim td as date

   ' Grab the first day of the month and check what day of the week it is
   td = datevalue(Year(d),Month(d),1)

   select case dayofweek(td,crMonday)
      case 6
         ' Saturday
         FirstWorkingDayOfMonth = datevalue(year(d),month(d),3)
      case 7
         ' Sunday
         FirstWorkingDayOfMonth = datevalue(year(d),month(d),2)
      case else
         FirstWorkingDayOfMonth = td
   end select
End Function

Just incase this is handy for anyone else.

With the launch of BBC iPlayer for iPhones it seems they’ve let slip a little extra “feature”. You can now download programs from BBC iPlayer without DRM in a well encoded MP4 format. How? Easy.

First of all, install User Agent Switch for Firefox and setup the iPhone user-agent:

• Description: iPhone
• User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en)
• App Name: AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko)
• App Version: Version/3.0
• Platform: Mobile/1A542a Safari/419.3

Now browse to any BBC iPlayer program page and you’ll notice that it tries to serve up a Quicktime video, the MP4. As the URL isn’t displayed raw in the code, you can use a little Javascript wizardry to redirect you to the raw stream:

javascript:(function(){url = document.getElementById('mip-flash-player').getElementsByTagName("object")[0].childNodes[0].value; window.location = url;})()

Or if you want a simple drag and drop bookmarklet: iPlayer Download

The BBC will either pull the iPhone beta or re-engineer it with the iPhone SDK to develop a full client, either way this will not last long. Initally when I heard the iPhone was supported by iPlayer I was outraged, Why does a device with only around 100,000 users in the UK get priority over a operating system? It almost seems like Karma is against them, but no doubt this will get into the news as “hackers exploiting the system” rubbish. Only time will tell, enjoy it while you can.

Finally, i’ve got round to moving the /misc folder off onto Amazon S3. I’ve decided to do this due to my upcoming hosting move, not having to worry about several hundred megabytes of static data will ease the strain of moving. So, how have I done it?

First of all I created a bucket on S3 with the name assets.nikdoof.net, from there I setup a CNAME in BIND for assets.nikdoof.net pointing to s3.amazonaws.com to allow direct referencing to the files within the bucket.

assets.nikdoof.net.     IN      CNAME   s3.amazonaws.com.

Then for the relocation of the misc folder, setup a simple Apache mod_rewrite rule to transfer all requests for the misc folder to S3.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^/misc/(.*)$ http://assets.nikdoof.net/$1 [R,L]

So now it’s all up and working, and to give it a try yourself, here is a fetching wallpaper of Rachel Stevens.

Over the last few years i’ve had numerous domains to cover fads or preference changes, so now it’s time for a little spring cleaning.

In the next few weeks i’m hoping to drop my long time domain blueshiftmedia.net, and a vanity domain of bluecalx.net. Both of these domains have served me well, and i’ve also used blueshiftmedia for hosting my home business a long time ago. I’ll miss these two little domains but I can’t warrent the £9 per year just to have them redirect to my blog.

Just a quick note to the spammers/fraudsters who might be looking at this with interest, nothing of any interest goes to the associated mail accounts with those domains and theres no real links in.

Let me take you back, back to September 2003. I was working for Halton Borough Council as a phone jocky. I made a few posts which got me into some trouble. At the time I removed them from my site and I’ve never been able to extract them back out… until now.

Heres a prime example of the skills of the councillors running the Halton area… Be warned this may not be sutable viewing for computer literate people…

People reading this obviously wont appreciate the font layout and size he used…lets just say size 24 font, on 1280×1024 thats just a little excessive.

And also…

“THANK YOU VERY VERY MUCH FOR THIS VERY THRILLING E MAIL KM ps its made my DAY

A councillor demonstrating that sarcasim really is the lowest form of wit.

As part of a new year resolution (of a sort), I’ve decided to become more involved in the Linux community and one of the big stepping stones is the local LUGs. While ManLUG is active and quite easy to attend and keep up to speed with, some of the smaller local ones have fell into decline over the last few years. I guess a major issue is that we have such a well respected LUG within a few miles, Manchester LUG has been formed since 1994 and theres people in that group who have helped with major milestones in Linux (such as the MCC Interim releases). So today, I posted on the Liverpool LUG mailing list in a attempt to stirr up some action. Hopefully in the next few days we can get something organised, even if its just a pub meet it’ll be better than nothing.

So I finally rebooted my laptop after the 10.4.10 update, fine a few months late but what the hell. Anyway, my Powerbook started kernel panicking on boot. After a few minutes investigation I found that the iScroll kext was causing all the issues, quickly remove the file in single user mode and I was back up and running…

So much for seamless updates eh?

The BBC reports that Symbian dismisses the “gPhone” or Android as it’s now been dubbed, by the looks of it the BBC have snubbed the new “Open Handset Alliance” as theres no 100% dedication to the plaform, which is hard to expect when not even a demo version of the OS and hardware has rolled off production lines.

Looking at the members list, it seems that Symbian have got something to worry about. While Nokia and Sony Erricsson are about 60% of the mobile market and both Symbian customers it seems the rest, Motorola, HTC, LG, and Samsung have took the jump to join this group in its early stages. Also, alot of the big carriers are behind them, NTT DoCoMo, T-Mobile, and Telefonica.

Google has used their corporate might to pull in a few “big boys” from the industry, once a prototype is out and interest starts brewing i’d expect a few more to join in.

I’d been mulling over getting a N95 for a few weeks, and I was quite hyped up with moving to a intelligent handset (compaired my Nokia 3 Series mobile). To cut a long story short, I didn’t get the handset but Jo got it for me on Orange. I’m 6 days into my usage of the N95, so I feel now is a good time to air some initial views.

First of all, lets start on the obvious. The N95 is Nokia’s convergence product combining 3G, Wifi, and GPS with the Series60 3rd Edition (SymbianOS 9.1) software. The N95 has been a hit with few due to the ever crowded market place (HTC smartphones, iPhone) and a few minor issues. Nokia have recently addressed the major concerns with the launch of the N95-3 which has 8gb on-board storage, better battery, and larger screen, but it could be a little late with the impending arrival of the iPhone in europe. I’ve got the N95-1 version of the phone which was the main release version for the UK.

First boot, the phone showed the traditional “holding hands” Nokia branding, date/time setup, then dropped into the front screen. For the last year or so I’ve been using a HTC Wizard running Windows Mobile and have had to deal with a fair share of awful interface design from the hands of 3rd party developers, but the only way I could describe the front screen that came with the current firmware is a abomination. Orange had decided, in it’s infinite wisdom, to replace the plain and simple Series60 front screen with a menu driven nightmare that chews RAM and makes the whole phone sluggish. I had to get rid of it. I jumped into the familiar menus and tried in vain to remove the horrid front screen, it seems orange don’t want you to remove it.

I might as well admit, I’ve voided my warranty already, in fact, I voided it on the same day. Theres a few details available on-line to change your product ID to a generic Nokia one, then using the official Nokia Software Update to re-flash the phone with a nice generic firmware. This worked a treat. It might just be my opinions, but the Orange menu was just too much of a hindrance on the phone, enough to warrant trying to get rid of it as fast as I could. This is a carrier issue, not really what everyone would experience with the phone.

Bar the misfortune of the Orange menu, the interface is slick and easy to use. The menus for the phone are a tad over-complicated but you soon get used to the location of the commonly used functions. So, i’m keeping it, flashy menus and features win me over. The battery life could do with some improvement, and hopefully Nokia will release the improved battery for N95-1 edition handsets, but I guess only time will tell.

Ever since I got my N95 I’ve been doing some small mapping for the Open Street Map project. I’ll have to say, it has been fun. As strange as it sound it’s fun walking the streets of the local area.

In Widnes, theres alot of unmapped area, what has been done has been done by Chris, but only around Appleton has been done. In 3-4 days i’ve managed to do a few of my major routes. I’d highly recommend anyone with a GPS to get out there and help the project.