tensixtyone

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.

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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…

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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