Corbicula anti virus: Makefile!

It has been more than a month since my last Corbicula related post, but have no fear! I'm on a short break from school, so I'm resuming my Corbicula anti virus effort in full force!

Today a major advance was made, being spoilt rotten by MonoDevelop I had major issues getting MonoDevelop te compile using just the commandline. I got that figured out, and having tackled that hurdle I was able to write a proper Makefile for Corbicula. The Makefile includes install and uninstall sections. It also installs a proper .desktop file for GNOME. The translations from Rosetta were also committed to CVS.

But there's still a lot of work to be done, eventually I want to autotool Corbicula but that's not a priority. Making a Debian package for Corbicula is however, I hope to have a .deb available before the week terminates.

I'm also in need of an icon. To be more specific a HIG compliant icon depicting a clam of the 'Genus Corbicula' family. Anybody want to volunteer? I won't pay you, I promise! Please?

OpenOffice.org Curriculum Vitae template

A while back I lost my resume made with LaTeX, and it took me a while to do it all over again. I decided to go with OpenOffice.org this time, the layout remained mostly the same as my older LaTeX version though:

• Portable Document Format sample
• OpenOffice.org Writer template

To properly use this template you'll need to install the DejaVu TrueType fonts. If you do not wish to use these fonts, modify the 'Default' and the 'Heading' styles, because the other styles in the template inherit the font settings from these styles.

QEMU 0.8.0 backport

QEMU 0.8.0 appeared in Dapper a couple of days ago, I backported it, a binary package for Breezy can be found here.

icculus.org Quake 3 1.33 r517

Somewhere around the 500th revision of the icculus.org Quake 3 codebase the developers moved the build directory to a new location called 'build'. My ioq3build script has been modified to use the new build directory.

A new binary build of ioq3 for Breezy can be found here. The new build has been built for i586 compatible processors to work around a bug.

OpenOffice.org Report template

During the past years I've had to do some school reports, but since OpenOffice.org is lacking any good report templates (and it has a crappy set of default styles), I always did some last minute formatting, and handed in a scruffy looking report.

So I finally decided to resolve this issue and make a proper OpenOffice.org template myself, you can follow my progress here:

• Portable Document Format sample
• OpenOffice.org Writer template

I recently dropped the Bitstream Vera fonts in favour of the DejaVu fonts, because all the DejaVu fonts have an oblique font variant. I have a backport (to Ubuntu Breezy) of a more recent DejaVu fonts release here.

If you want to change the fonts change the 'Default' and the 'Heading' styles, because the other template styles depends on these!

Times New Roman vs Bitstream Vera Serif

Many of you might have noticed that the Bitstream Vera Serif font being rather large relative to it's point size. To satisfy my own curiosity I went to town with OpenOffice.org Writer and used lorem ipsum to fill a single page (A4, 1" margins), with text, and counting the characters on the page using both Times and Vera at different point sizes:

First the Times counts:

• 12 pt, 4796 chars, 100%
• 11 pt, 5733 chars, 120%
• 10.5 pt, 6220 chars, 130%
• 10 pt, 6908 chars, 144%

And the Vera Serif counts:

• 12 pt, 3461 chars, 70%
  
• 11 pt, 4216 chars, 88%
  
• 10.5 pt, 4592 chars, 96%
  
• 10 pt, 5088 chars, 106 %
  
• 9 pt, 6343 chars, 132%

As you can size there's a rather large difference with Vera at 10/10.5 being equivalent to Times at 12 pt. After some more testing it seems to be Vera's width which contributes most to it being large.

Cisco and minicom

Connecting to a Cisco router or switch is really easy using a terminal application called minicom, if you use minicom solely for this purpose you can do a system wide setup (as root) like this:
# minicom -s

Or make sure /etc/minicom/minirc.dfl contains this:
pr port /dev/ttys0
pu baudrate 9600
pu bits 8
pu parity N
pu stopbits 1
pu rtscts No

And make sure you add the dialout secondary group to the appropriate users:
# usermod -G dialout pmjdebruijn

ioq3build automation

Finally I decided to automate the build process to create my icculus.org Quake 3 Arena tarballs, the shell script is available here. Make sure you have these dependancies installed before executing the script:

• SDL(-dev)
• OpenAL(-dev)
• gcc, make, svn, zip

Make sure you understand what it does, the script

• fetches the latest sources from subversion
• compiles the sources optimized for i686 and up
• deletes cruft from the release directory
• strips the binaries
• zips the qvm's as pakio.pk3
• tarballs the whole shebang and drops the result next to this script
  

Note, if you have used my past builds, delete pak_icculus.pk3 from the baseq3 and missionpack directories.

icculus.org Quake 3 1.33 r468

I just built another subversion checkout of icculus.org Quake 3, it's available here.

Please note that there were some changes, all the executables have been renamed to the following:

• ioq3ded.i386
• ioquake3.i386
• ioquake3-smp.i386

As you already might have noticed Symetric Multi Processor support has been re-enabled, so this might benefit you if you own a dual processor or dual core processor computer.

Concentration Camp LEGO

While looking up some info on LEGO's educational series, I came acros these sets, quite shocking actually: Concentration Camp LEGO, which is the brain child of Zbigniew Libera.

This definately provokes some though and somehow this seems similar to the case with the Belgian Amnesty commercial where the smurfs get bombed...

PictBridge!

I tested my HP DeskJet 5940's PictBridge capabilities by connecting my Canon PowerShot A520 to it. It worked like a charm, no need to define papersize (which is autodetected), just point-and-print.

PictBridge is a beautiful example of how co-operation between vendors and open (vendor independant) standards will promote innovation.

Consumers can buy anything with a PictBridge logo on it, and it'll just work. What more would a consumer want?

HP DeskJet 5940

The HP DeskJet 5940 is a mid range printer sold by HP and is properly supported by Ubuntu Breezy Badger through hplip.
One of the first things I noticed about the 5940 is that it's top cover which looks like aluminium, actually is made from metal! I had expected it to be metallic paint on plastic.

Printing is reasonably fast and the printer actually doesn't make a lot of noise!

The 5940 uses the new vivera ink technology which supposedly makes the ink last a century. The new ink cardriges are very easy to install, which is a definate plus! After installing a new cartridge, the 5940 automatically prints an alignment page before printing your first document, which is nice, but can be ennoying when it's using expensive photo paper to do so!

Most printers I've seen sofar were hard to operate (without the computer), the 5940 is a pleasant exception, the on/off button is clearly marked, is has two seperate low-ink indicator leds, an abort printing immediately button (at last!) and a paper feed/resume printing button.

Last but not least it features a PictBridge compatible USB port, which can be used to operate the printer using nothing but a digital camera. Paper sizes are automatically detected and 150mm X 100mm photo's can be printed borderlessly.

Please note that the 5940 lacks an onboard card reader, which in my opinion is a plus because my system already has a card reader and most printers also export this card reader to the USB of the connected system, which in my case would mean having eight Generic STORAGE DEVICEs, instead of the normal four...

QEMU 0.7.2 backport

I backported QEMU 0.7.2 from Dapper to Breezy, it's available here. QEMU 0.7.2 has a lot of bugfixes by Fabrice and by the Debian team, so it's definately a big improvement on 0.7.0 which is included in Breezy by default.