Pascal's TechBlog

Migration Notice

2006-06-21T21:54:00.000+02:00

I will no longer update this blog.

My new blog can be found at blog.pcode.nl.

Globally Compatible Paper Size

2006-06-19T16:22:00.000+02:00

One of the reasons I dislike country's like the US of A is because they keep on clamping to their own medieval (and illogical) standards, for example, they haven't accepted the metric system there yet, the Inch and Mile are still the standard measure of distance.

The same thing goes for paper standards, almost the whole world has embraced ISO 216 and standardized on A4. But not the US, no, no... They still keep on using their Letter format.

When exporting documents to PDF for distribution, this raises issues. As both formats are incompatible with each other. A4 has more height, and Letter has more width. So when printing either of the formats to the other on paper implies the document gets scaled (best case) or the margins get cropped (worst case).

So I'm proposing a solution to this debacle which is quite simple: create your documents using the lowest common denominator of the paper metrics. This means using the width of A4 and the height of Letter: 210mm x 279mm.

Extracting Fonts from PDFs

2006-06-19T15:33:00.000+02:00

Have you ever come across a PDF, which uses some really cool fonts, but you can't seem to get a hold of them... Here's a solution, you can extract font from PDFs! It's possible!

There are some drawbacks though, in many (and probably most) cases it won't be either legal or moral to extract a font from a PDF and then use it without paying a licensing fee. Next most PDF creators only embed a subset of characters into the PDF, which means you won't get a complete character set. This basically means this method is only useful for sampling...

Now first you'll need to convert the PDF to an old school PostScript file like so:
# pdftops 1Rules.pdf

Next open the 1Rules.ps file with your favorite text editor and search for the following:
%%BeginResource: font CIKHFG+Schoensperger-Modified
%!FontType1-1.0: CIKHFG+Schoensperger-Modified
12 dict begin
/FontInfo 10 dict dup begin
/Notice (©1991 FontFontRevival; FontShop International ¥ Modified by Marc G @ the Black Library 7/99 so we can write the word 'Skaven' properly.) readonly def

...

cleartomark
%%EndResource

Copy that excluding the %%BeginResource and %%EndResource lines to a new textfile, which you can then save using a .pfa extension.
Open the newly created .pfa file with FontForge, and reencode the font as Latin1 (Encoding - Reencode - Latin1), and compact the font (Encoding - Compact). Because of the embedding the font's name will be garbled, so you'll want to adjust that (Element - Font Info - Names). Finally you can generate a TrueType or PostScript Type1 font to your liking (File - Generate Fonts).

Desktop Publishing Rules of Thumb

2006-06-16T16:27:00.000+02:00

Along the years I've seen many reports being written in the horrid default Microsoft Word style. OpenOffice.org's default style is just as horrid because of compatability reasons. The following are rules of thumb explaining how to properly layout a report:

Fonts
Always try to use the least number of fonts you can. For most documents this means you end up using either two or three fonts, depending whether you want to give your document (respectively) a traditional or contemporary look. For a traditional look, use a single serif font for both headers and body text. If you rather like a contemporary look, use a sans-serif font for the headers and a serif font for the body text. In both cases you might need to use a monospaced font to display screen dumps and the likes. The font size for your body text should always be either 10, 11 or 12pts.
While there there is not much fundamentally wrong with Times New Roman, Arial and Courier, they just reek of laksness, and basically say to the reading 'I didn't care!'.
Instead of using Times New Roman, try Palatino or a Garamond. Arial being a bad Helvetica ripoff, should be replaced even more so, for example try Frutiger, Gill Sans, Andale Sans, Univers, Akzidenz-Grotesk. And last but not least, Courier could be replaced by Prestige, Andale Mono or Vera Sans Mono.

Margins
Don't be afraid of white space, white space is your friend. All documents should at least have margins of 2.5cm, preferably even larger, 3.0cm or 3.5cm is not too much. LaTeX even uses 4.0cm for it's innner and outer margins, and that's just fine.
Large margins are a good place to grip the document, making sure your fingers aren't obscuring any text. For teachers, mentors and reviewers it's also an ideal place to scribble notes and corrections.

Line Width
There are several available rules of thumb concerning line width, they're all different, yet very similar. Some folks say each line should hold about 10-12 words, other say 12-14 words. Yet another crowd tells you to put the letters A-Z, a-z, 0-9 on a line as a guide. If you compare these methods (and some others) it basically boils down to the following, always keep on average between 10-15 words per line of text.
Reading lines shorter than 10 words will disturb the sentence flow too often, while lines larger than 15 words will be tiring, because of excessive eye movement.
Ofcourse you can't configure a line width anywhere so you must experiment the font size and margins accordingly.

Line Spacing
I always prefer a proportional line spacing between 110% and 120%. Having lines stuck too close to each other, may cause the eye to unintentionally switch between lines. But having lines be too far apart will disturb the sentence flow, because the eye needs to search where the next line starts.

Dont's
Do not type two spaces after a dot. This is a remnant of the typewriter era, where the double space would cue the brain a new sentence was about to start. But modern proportional fonts obsoleted this custom.
Do not use a non-proportional font for your body text. Non-proportional fonts are harder to read, and cause eye strain.
Do not mix TrueType and Type1 fonts in your document (especially when exporting to PDF). Different operating systems have different font renderers, and may render either TT or T1 fonts more crisp or blurry. Sticking with one type will keep your document looking consistent.
Do not use Comic Sans. Only you can prevent bunny punchings:

RichText Mail?

2006-06-16T13:16:00.000+02:00

During my participation in the Exchange Server 2003 course, it has come to my attention that Outlook and Exchange actually use RichText Format when MAPI is used to send or receive mails. Only when mails are sent using SMTP, POP3 or IMAP4 is the mail converted to plain text or HTML.

Nuff said...

OpenOffice.org templates packaged

2006-06-11T19:55:00.000+02:00

I managed to create a quick and dirty Ubuntu package of my OpenOffice.org humanist templates. The package contains the following five templates:

Humanist Presentation
Humanist Report (A4, Letter)
Humanist Curriculum Vitae (A4, Letter)

You can download the Ubuntu package here, and either double click the package or install it like this:
$ sudo dpkg -i openoffice.org-humanist-templates_0.4-2_all.deb

UPDATE: I updated the package to remove the spaces from the templates.

Lawrence Lessig: What have you done?

2006-06-11T15:55:00.000+02:00

I ran acros this old keynote from Lawrence Lessig the other day. It's a really good keynote where he makes a point out of the fact that most people talk about their ever decreasing freedoms, but never actually do anything substantial about it (like, for example, supporting EFF).

Sun Java 5 Fonts

2006-06-11T13:00:00.000+02:00

If you fiddle a bit with Synaptic you'll notice that the Sun Java 5 JRE/JDK has a package called sun-java5-fonts. What this package basically does is install the fonts (which are normally exclusively accessible by Java itself) and make them available to defoma. The Sun Java 5 Fonts package contains Lucida Bright, Lucida Sans and Lucida Typewriter. After installing these fonts, try visiting Slashdot again, it looks stunning!

UPDATE: You might need to run 'sudo fc-cache -v' to update your font cache.

Double One!

2006-06-11T12:35:00.000+02:00

For those of you, who know what this means: Yes, I do like to gloat!

CorelDRAW! 9 Fonts

2006-06-09T20:44:00.000+02:00

While going through my stuff the other day, I found an old student license of the CorelDRAW! 9 graphics suite. I popped in the CD and found a goldmine of professional fonts. Most fonts included with CorelDRAW! are from the Bitstream foundy (which also did the Vera fonts included with GNOME). Here's a short list of the Bitstream fonts:

Aldine401 BT (Bembo)
Humanst521 BT (Gill Sans)
Humnst777 Bt (Frutiger)
OrigGarmnd BT (Garamond)
Swis721 BT (Helvetica)
ZapfCalligr BT (Palatino)
ZapfHumnst BT (Optima)
Zurich BT (Univers)

All of these Bitstream fonts are properly hinted to produce good onscreen results when rendered with FreeType, the open source font rendering engine which is used by GNOME.

After inspecting the CorelDRAW! EULA I couldn't find anything prohibiting me from separating the Bitstream fonts from the rest of CorelDRAW! as long as I didn't have CorelDRAW! and/or the Bitstream fonts installed elsewhere.

Eben Moglen Keynote

2006-06-09T14:57:00.000+02:00

For all the folks who haven't seen Eben Moglen's Keynote at the Red Hat summit yet: you really really need to see it. It's available in several formats: Quicktime, Real, Ogg. Download it now!

Thom's comments on Ubuntu's GNOME

2006-06-05T15:56:00.000+02:00

After reading reading Thom Holwerda's post about Ubuntu's GNOME, I noticed that most of his complains were either bugs or works in progress, except for this one:

"GNOME needs a better default layout for its panels. The top bar is wasting an insane amount of space; to the left, we have a few menus and icons, and all the way to the far right we have the system tray and clock. In between, it's all gray. A solution would be to place the taskbar in between those two ends, but on most screens, the space there is just a little too limited to comfortably house the taskbar. Other than that, the top bar becomes extremely cluttered if it also houses the taskbar."

Thom seems to put space efficiency on par with usability, which in't necessarily true. Well, actually those will often be antithetical to each other.
Also the uselessness with which Thom portraits the empty space in the upper panel is hardly deserved. It can be quite handy for placing launchers (for Epiphany, Evolution, etc), and applets (Tomboy Notes, System Monitor, Weather Report, Network Manager, etc).
Housing the taskbar in the upper panel seems like an extremely bad idea, because most important the available space is much too small, so when a lot of applications are opened the application bars are so small, it'll be impossible to differentiate between them, and the taskbar loses it's primary functionality. That's the brillance of putting the taskbar in the lower panel, where there's plenty of room.

"Ubuntu still does not pass my ZipDisk test; nor does any other distribution for that matter. My desktop x86 has an internal IDE ZipDisk drive (250MB), and no matter what distribution I install, neither of them configures fstab correctly so I can use my ZipDisk instantly. And that's for an internal one-- don't get me started on any of my 6 external (parallel) drives. I never got those to work with any operating system (except Windows, as Iomega has drivers for that, obviously). By the way, BeOS/Zeta also passes the internal part of the ZipDisk test."

While Thom is right from a fundamental point of view, having plug and play ZipDisk support seems hardly relevant anymore. ZipDisks were never really popular, so investing a lot of effort in to this would be a waste of time. And considering a wonderful new technology called 'USB Memory Sticks' it would seem silly at best.

VMware Player

2006-06-03T13:11:00.000+02:00

While reading Planet Ubuntu NL, I noticed Nicolas' post about the fact that VMware Player was now prepackaged in Dapper. Thanks for the tip!

Anyway this is great! Really! The best part about having VMware Player prepackaged is the fact that the user doesn't have to compile the kernel modules manually anymore. Sweet...

BlackAdder II

2006-06-03T13:07:00.000+02:00

While re-watching the BlackAdder series, I noticed in the Potato episode of BlackAdder II, Simon Jones makes an appearance Sir Walter Raleigh, the seafarer. Simon Jones is probably most famous for his role in the original BCC series of The HitchHikers Guide to the Galaxy as Arthur Dent.

Elephants Dream

2006-05-26T17:48:00.000+02:00

Lately the Blender folks have released their short movie "Elephants Dream". The movie lasts for about ten minutes, but it really shows off what Blender is capable of. And it's very entertaining to watch.

You can download their HD formatted movie here, after you have downloaded the movie, it can be transcoded into a plain ol' DVD:

ffmpeg -i Elephants_Dream_HD.avi -pass 1 -target pal-dvd -aspect 16:9 Elephants_Dream_DVD.mpg
ffmpeg -i Elephants_Dream_HD.avi -pass 2 -target pal-dvd -aspect 16:9 Elephants_Dream_DVD.mpg
dvdauthor -o ed_dvd/ -t Elephants_Dream_DVD.mpg
dvdauthor -o ed_dvd/ -T
mkisofs -dvd-video -V "Elephants Dream" -v -o ed_dvd.iso ed_dvd

Transcoding the movie this way works fine, except that during the top-down scrolling bits of the movie it's not 100% smooth, this might be caused because the HD formatted movie uses a different framerate than PAL DVD. I'm not sure on how to resolve that yet.

OpenOffice.org: Lacking Professional Templates

2006-05-25T18:45:00.000+02:00

Commercial office suites like Microsoft Office and Corel WordPerfect Office offer the normal user a wealth of document templates for all common document types. Clearly OpenOffice.org lacks these.

Ofcourse there's the OOExtras project, but to be plain honest, most templates offered by OOExtras look very unprofessional downto outright butt ugly.

I decided to give it a shot and fill this gap. The end result being three templates:

All the templates use the Bitstream Vera fonts as these fonts are supplied by OOo itself, and are the only fonts which can be relied upon to be present on all OOo installations. During the design of these templates I've tried to find a balance between making them esthetically pleasing, legible and generally professional looking.

I submitted them to the OpenOffice.org Issue Tracker as issue 65779 for inclusion into the default OOo install.

NGC: Soul Calibur II

2006-05-24T12:17:00.000+02:00

Guess what... It's possible to hang Soul Calibur II on an Nintedo GameCube, and I did last night. I don't seem to be able to reproduce the crash. It happened somewhere in weapon master mode, after rebooting everything seemed fine again.

Anyway I seem to have progressed quite a bit only having played a couple of hours, I completed 7 of the 10 chapters, unlocking most of the characters and arena's.

SANE 2006: Free Software Bazaar

2006-05-19T16:41:00.000+02:00

I finally uploaded the Free Software Bazaar photo's I took at the end of the evening. I also started to actually manage my photo's, and quite frankly F-Spot rocks!!! The Flickr export feature works great.

The bazaar was actually quite fun to attend. I was introduced to OpenOffice.org's new 'Get Legal' campaign, which is a nice effort. Though I'm afraid it won't have that much of an impact, because most people just don't care whether they're using legal software or not. But let's hope for the best...

Another cool project which I first became aware of during the FSB was Simuze. It a great concept: a free distribution point for home made music. You really need to check out The Penis Song!

Leaked cover art for Dapper Drake!!!

2006-05-19T14:33:00.000+02:00

Dots Per Inch

2006-05-12T18:38:00.000+02:00

Calculating your screen's DPI rating is quite easy, first measure your screen's physical width and height (in inches), next divide your screen's native resolution by either your screen's pyshical width or height. For example:

Width: 1680px / 17.1" = ~98 DPI
Height: 1050px / 10.7" = ~98 DPI

After calculating your screen's DPI you can set it through System, Preferences, Font, Details.

I (don't) hate Cisco Systems (anymore)

2006-05-04T19:43:00.000+02:00

Last semester I took Cisco's CCNP7 course at school. During the course we weren't given the chance to take the Cisco CCNP7 final exam. After talking to my teacher about this, I was told that Cisco didn't offer our version (3) any more, and that version 4 wasn't available yet. Usually there is overlap between versions, but in my case there's a big gap. A crevasse of sorts.

Of course this is pure speculation, but version 4 probably covers more recent Cisco technology, which Cisco badly needs to sell. Basically the course is being prematurely ended because it doesn't advertise Cisco equipment enough.

So no certificate for me. I hate Cisco Systems.

IMPORTANT UPDATE: Filip van Bel of Cisco Systems has clarified the situation for me, which basically boils down to a miscommunication issue. Please note that I (in my frustration) was quick to judge and I no longer hold the opinion expressed above!

Dia Revisited

2006-04-28T15:33:00.000+02:00

About a week ago a new version of Dia was released, after more than a year Dia 0.95 was finally there. The changes in Dia aren't really major when considering the invested work, but from a usability perspective the changes are quite massive. Dia 0.94 still uses the old GTK 2.4 FileDialog, which is old and just plain crappy, and it finally got replaced in 0.95 with the new and more usable GTK 2.6 FileDialog.

Another change, which personally affects me, is the updated Cisco icon set. The new Cisco icons are now colored, and look exactly like the icons used in Cisco literature. A simple sample:
I hope Dia 0.95 makes it into Dapper. But if it doesn't I've ported the Debian package to Ubuntu, you can download them here.

UPDATE: Please remove your ~/.dia directory after upgrading to Dia 0.95, if you don't you won't get all the new Dia features.

YellowSheepRiver Municator

2006-04-27T19:20:00.000+02:00

The YellowSheepRiver Municator has been in the news lately, this machine has very much potential, a strong MIPS-like CPU (The Godson II) and a Mobile Radeon 7000 onboard, which means it has hardware 3D acceleration using open source drivers.

Beside it's primary target, being a low-cost desktop, this little machine has also great potential as a residential server. It's small size means it can be easily put in an electrics closet.

I certainly hope these machines will become available in the Netherlands, though I highly doubt it.

Corbicula anti virus: Other...

2006-04-27T19:04:00.000+02:00

With the previous releases of Corbicula it wasn't possible to scan anything else but the default supplied scan targets. With the latest corbicula release it's now possible to choose 'Other...', a FileChooserDialog opens where you can select any random directory you would want to scan for virusses.

Coinciding with this new feature release is also the first available Dapper Drake package, apt-gettable in a seperate repository:
deb http://dl.gna.org/corbicula/ubuntu dapper/

Dapper's glibc

2006-04-26T12:35:00.000+02:00

The current Ubuntu stable release (Breezy Badger) was released with gcc 4.0, one of the things that nagged me was the fact that Breezy's kernel wasn't compiled with 4.0 but with an older version of gcc, namely 3.4.

The first thing I did after installing Dapper Drake was to check whether the kernel was compiled with gcc 4.0, it was, so I was happy as a clam. But yesterday I was in for quite a shock, it seems that Dapper's glibc isn't compiled with 4.0, but with gcc 3.4.

I can think of only two reasons why not to compile glibc with gcc 4.0, either glibc just doesn't compile properly with gcc 4.0, or they used the old gcc 3.4 to prevent unknown regressions. In either case gcc 4.0 should not be the default system compiler.

StarCraft#

2006-04-26T12:31:00.000+02:00

I regularly read Monologue, today I came across something quite extraordinary: StarCraft#. Apparently Chris Toshok is rebuilding the StarCraft engine in C# using SDL#. Sofar he has only released binaries, I can't wait to see the sources.

Ubuntu Bonding

2006-04-23T17:42:00.000+02:00

It's quite easy to configure network interface fail-over on Ubuntu, this feature is called bonding in the Linux kernel. Bonding allows you to do two things: fail-over and load-balancing.

To configure fail-over make sure the bonding kernel module gets loaded during the boot process, this can be achieved by editing the /etc/modules file and adding the following line:
bonding mode=active-backup miimon=100

The mode module parameter tells the bonding module what to do, either fail-over or load-balancing. The miimon module parameters defines the monitoring interval in milliseconds.

Next install ifenslave, ifenslave binds the physical slave interfaces to the master logical interface:
# apt-get install ifenslave-2.6

Finally you need to edit the /etc/network/interfaces file:
auto bond0
iface bond0 inet static
address 192.168.9.9
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 192.168.9.1
post-up ifenslave bond0 eth0 eth1
pre-down ifenslave -d bond0 eth0 eth1

The post-up and pre-down lines make sure the physical slave interfaces are bound and unbound when the logical master interface goes up or is being taken down.

Advanced Trivial FTP

2006-04-22T18:55:00.000+02:00

The other day I had to install a TFTP daemon on my machine, to upgrade the IOS software of my Router, after considering my options, I went with atftpd, mainly because atftpd is very full featured and can be run standalone, without being dependant on inetd.

First install the Advanced Trivial FTP daemon and client:
# apt-get install atftpd atftp

Second create a tftpboot directory on your file system, make sure it's world writable if you want to be able to upload stuff:
# mkdir /tftpboot
# chmod 777 /tftpboot

Next edit your /etc/default/atftpd file to match this:
USE_INETD=false
OPTIONS="--daemon --port 69 --tftpd-timeout 300 --retry-timeout 5 --mcast-port 1758 --mcast-addr 239.239.239.0-255 --mcast-ttl 1 --maxthread 100 --verbose=5 /tftpboot"

Now you can start and stop the Advanced Trivial FTP daemon like so:
# /etc/init.d/atftpd start
# /etc/init.d/atftpd stop

Corbicula anti virus: Consistency

2006-04-19T19:50:00.000+02:00

I contacted lluis about protected virtual issue with Stetic, he explained to me, that making event handler protected virtual didn't have any technical merits, rather practical. When an event handler is made private, mcs complains unused private methods are declared, but in reality they aren't unused, they're just dynamically bound by Glade/Stetic instead of assigned in the code itself. Making these methods protected removes these warnings. The virtual part isn't strictly nessecarry.

After understanding why event handlers are made protected by Stetic, I revisited the Corbicula codebase and made all my private and public (yuck) event handlers protected.

MP3 ID3 tagging

2006-04-19T17:58:00.000+02:00

Somehow if you define a genre which doesn't exist (like Electronica) while ripping music with the Sound Juicer, it will just insert an unknown [255] as genre into the generated MP3s.

This is easy to correct though (tag as Electronic [52]):
# find ./Album/* -name *.mp3 -exec mp3info -g 52 {} \;

I'm not a GNU!

2006-04-19T16:18:00.000+02:00

During the past week I've been accused of being a follower of Richard Stallman's ideologies. Why? Just because I'm a GTK user/lover. And ofcourse anybody who uses GNU software must be against commercial software, right?

Wrong!
Unlike Richard Stallman I do not think COTS software to be either evil or unethical. Does that mean I generally like COTS software? No!

Examples
Microsoft Internet Explorer: I do think MSIE is evil, but not because it's commercial or closed source. It is because of MSIE that the W3C standards still aren't used today.
Microsoft Office: I do think Office is evil, but again not because it's commercial or closed source. MS refuses to support OpenDoc in Office, which is detrimental to interoperability between competing Office suites. Taking into account the fact that Office is the number one Office suite worldwide, this is an obvious abuse of Microsoft's monopoly.
Opera is de excellent example, of good COTS software, which is everything but evil. The folks at Opera Software seem to make a genuine effort to build the best browser on the planet, there is nothing wrong with trying to make a living of that.

Corbicula anti virus: Doing Dapper

2006-04-17T20:31:00.000+02:00

I fixed Corbicula to compile and run on Dapper Drake today. It only required two minor changes. First there has been a change in case of some method. Next it seemed the System reference wasn't implicit anymore, so I had to add that reference explicitly.

I also began working on a Scan Target called 'Other...' which opens een FileChooserDialog, which allows you to scan any directory you want instead of just the listed Scan Targets, initial work is done and the code compiles just fine, but somehow the code throws an exception because an empty string gets passed as Scan Target.

After looking over my code I noticed how inconsistent/sloppy I've been, I have some event handlers declared public and some private. After playing a bit with Stetic, it seems the way to go would be to declare them protected virtual instead.

Wacom Volito2 (CTF-420/G)

2006-04-16T00:23:00.000+02:00

To my surprise it seems that my Wacom Volito2 now works out of the box in Dapper:

Bus 004 Device 005: ID 056a:0062 Wacom Co., Ltd

[4294687.920000] input: Wacom Volito2 4x5 as /class/input/input5
[4294687.921000] drivers/usb/input/wacom.c: v1.44:USB Wacom Graphire and Wacom Intuos tablet driver

My Volito2 used to work using mouse emulation in Breezy, but that ment no absolute coordinate mode, I'm not even sure I want that, but I have a choice now... Choice is a good thing...

The Epiphany versus Firefox showdown

2006-04-15T16:32:00.000+02:00

The last few weeks I've been using Epiphany as my primary browser, and basically Epiphany knocks the socks right of Firefox. Epiphany's user interface looks a bit more clean and it's a bit more snappy than Firefox'. Epiphany is mostly GNOME HIG compliant, so it's easier to use, and it fits better in the GNOME desktop environment.

Yet I switched back to Firefox... why you ask...

First and foremost, Epiphany doesn't have a separate Google search box, instead when something is entered into the address bar which isn't an URL, it's sent to Google as a query, but somehow this doesn't always work properly, which can get pretty ennoying.

Another issue in Epiphany is the fact that every tab has it's own close button. Logically speaking this is better, and is actually required by the GNOME HIG, but practically this sucks (at for browsers it does). The main difference with browser tabs and text editor tabs (and the like), is the rate at which tabs are opened and closed. When compared to a text editor, tabs within a browser are probably opened and closed tenfold. For the user this means he has to visually locate the tab, then click the approriate close button on the tab. When considering the single close button (like Firefox has), located at the right, the user has one fixed position to click, which (generally speaking) is much more convenient.

Last, Epiphany still doesn't have del.icio.us plugin, which I have quickly grown attached to, after trying the Firefox plugin.

Dapper Drake

2006-04-14T16:59:00.000+02:00

It has been a couple of days now since I've installed Dapper Drake on my main desktop, the experience has been overwhelmingly positive.

One of the big improvements is the progress bar which is displayed while unmounting volumes, this prevents impatient users from prematurely disconnecting the removable drive.

Another improvement is the interdesktop application bar blinking*. Basically if an X-Chat or GAIM conversation receives a reply while your away working on another desktop, its application bar will appear on the desktop you're working on, and it'll blink to grab your attention. Now the sweet part happens when you click on the blinking application bar, you're immediately taken to the desktop where X-Chat or GAIM resides.

However there is a downside to Dapper, the first and foremost being the new and improved Human theme. Well it's new alright, but I'm not sure I would call it an improvement. The Orange makes me think about soccer and the new icons are way too busy and shiny. I basically couldn't tolerate it for more than a day or so, I quickly changed to Clearlooks controls with a Human window border and GNOME icons.

* I didn't know what else to call it.

Water Heater

2006-04-14T16:35:00.000+02:00

While showering yesterday our water heater gave out. Reading the manual didn't help. After contacting my father, I was told to reboot the water heater. No, that weren't six typo's in a row! reboot!

Sigh...

Dapper Dapper Dapper

2006-04-09T19:59:00.000+02:00

To celebrate my new found freedom I decided to have a go at installing Dapper Drake. I went with the good ol' install CD, not feeling adventurous enough to taste Espresso.

Being exciting during the first boot, I was in for a surprise... Xorg hung itself. After some searching on Launchpad, it appeared more folks were experiencing this problem.

For the time being I just removed the dri module from my xorg.conf. Now Xorg works fine, although I have no Direct Rendering now.

After I got everything to work properly I was amazed with how much faster Dapper boots, it's just incredible...

Windows Be Gone

2006-04-09T19:43:00.000+02:00

After using Ubuntu Breezy nearly full time for six month's, I finally decided I was ready to dump Microsoft Windows XP once and for all.

Free at last...

Java on FreeBSD

2006-04-06T15:18:00.000+02:00

It took a while, but the FreeBSD 5.x and 6.x branches finally have a proper Java platform. Java is probably one of the biggest arguments against FreeBSD on the enterprise server.

Having a proper Java release on FreeBSD is one thing, but keeping it up to date is another, we'll just have to wait and see...

There's something beautiful in the sky

2006-04-01T19:02:00.000+02:00

Since a couple of days I have a digital satellite receiver, and a CanalDigitaal subscription. Especially picture quality has improved by leaps and bounds.

After taking a look at the CanalDigitaal channel guide, there are some interesting channels to try, namely VH1 Classics and BBC Prime.

Cisco 836

2006-04-01T14:13:00.000+02:00

During the past week I received my second hand Cisco 836 ADSL over ISDN Secure Broadband Router. Cisco's equipment isn't perfect (at all), but it definately beats a Thomson SpeedTouch any day of the week.

I'm a "Joe Normal" ???

2006-04-01T14:07:00.000+02:00

While browsing Planet Ubuntu, I noticed the Nerd/Geek/Dork test and I just couldn't resist. After taking the test I was actually somewhat disappointed with the result, according to the test I'm a "Joe Normal", for crying out loud...

My results: 43% Nerd, 21% Geek, 43% Dork.

edit: I actually re-took the test with the following results: 47% Nerd, 34% Geek, 47% Dork. So I'm still a Joe Normal...

HSZLUUG Logo

2006-03-27T00:15:00.000+02:00

For a while now I've been involved with a local LUUG in my school, which is called HSZLUUG. During the past month we had a logo design competition, and because a lack of competition I won by default.

Behold the new official HSZLUUG logo:

AMiLDA Logo Design Competition

2006-03-19T14:49:00.000+01:00

A couple of weeks ago I found this really cool project which aims to replace the ADMtek 5120 routers firmware, it's called AMiLDA.

Recently they started a logo design competition, I though I'd give it a try:

More information can be found here.

"Copy Controlled" Music

2006-03-16T17:04:00.000+01:00

I've recently purchased Moby.Hotel and noticed it was "Copy Controlled", when I popped in the CD, it asked to install software. After the Sony rootkit debacle, nobody in his right mind will ever even consider installing software bundled to copy protect the CDs contents. So obviously, I didn't.

Frankly I can't see why record companies would want to copy protect their content, and here is why:

Most people who buy music, do not buy music to make illegal copies, most people who still buy music, do it because it's the right thing to do.
Copy protection will severely impair their righteous customers listening experience. (For example: I don't own a 'real' CD player, and I can't play it on my computer without installing Mute Records untrusted software).
Folks who illegally acquire music from p2p networks, remain unimpaired, and can redistribute it to their hearts desire!
The mere notion that any copy protection scheme could protect music against 'professional' pirates (who generally populate the p2p networks) is extremely naive at best.

I'm considering returning Moby.Hotel and will probably never purchase another "Copy Controlled" CD from Mute (or any other record company) again.

I hope this will be properly resolved in the future, so I can keep on enjoying Moby's music!

City counsil elections

2006-03-08T10:51:00.000+01:00

We had the city counsil elections yesterday, after checking the results for Sittard, I noticed that the left-wing parties seems to have significantly grown, which is a Good Thing(tm). Especially PvdA and GroenLinks seems to have had a growing spirt with respectively +8,7% and +3,3%.

It seems Sittard is in for a four year rule under a mostly left-wing city counsil... Good times ahead...

Dell PowerEdge 2500

2006-03-07T19:44:00.000+01:00

Recently a friend of mine purchased a Dell PowerEdge 2500, which to his suprise worked just perfectly with Ubuntu, even Dell's PERC RAID worked fine:

Red Hat/Adaptec aacraid driver (1.1.2-lk2 Oct 10 2005)
AAC0: kernel 2.5-0[2991]
AAC0: monitor 2.5-0[2991]
AAC0: bios 2.5-0[2991]
AAC0: serial 212010d2
scsi1 : percraid
Vendor: DELL Model: primary Rev: V1.0
Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 02
Vendor: DELL Model: files Rev: V1.0
Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 02

Sweet stuff!

patrick.fm

2006-03-07T19:37:00.000+01:00

After posting some mildly embarrassing pictures of Floortje (of Idols fame), it seems a fanatic (albeit nerdy) Floortje fan has defaced Patrick Kicken's homepage:

There is a lesson to be learnt here: Apply security updates swiftly, when available!

Mordheim rules!

2006-03-02T17:05:00.000+01:00

Surprisingly Games Workshop has released the Mordheim: City of the Damned rules for free!

Mordheim Rules
Mordheim Warbands
Mordheim Campaign Rules

GameCube RGB SCART Cable

2006-02-23T18:07:00.000+01:00

Saitek's GameCube RGB SCART Cable really does improve picture quality when opposed to the default composite cable and SCART converter. The colors are more vibrant, especially. And now the great part, I purchased one for 0,99 EUR at MediaMarkt.

BenHeck: SEGA Exodus

2006-02-23T14:33:00.000+01:00

A while back I purchased of the those Radica Genesis mini consoles, apparently these units are quite hackable, and someone managed to retrofit a SEGA Genesis Cartridge units on it:
BenHeck: SEGA Exodus

Rick Dangerous

2006-02-23T14:25:00.000+01:00

Bringing back some childhood memories is what this game does, Rick Dangerous is a which I played a lot on my old Atari ST. It's a great platformer, sortof 'Indiana Jones'-ish...
xRick screenshots

Some bloke actually ported this to the GameCube:
xRick for the GameCube

This really makes me consider modding my GameCube...

Savage

2006-02-22T12:46:00.000+01:00

I installed Dapper Flight 4 on my ASRock K7VM2 yesterday. It's a Micro-ATX board with a ProSavage8 IGP.

The ProSavage8 IGP wasn't properly detected and thus Xorg defaulted to the vesa driver. After loading the savage kernel module and changing the Xorg driver to savage I had working 3D acceleration!

After that I had a go with Xgl, it actually worked, it was slow as hell*, but it worked. Compiz wouldn't cooperate though, apparently the ProSavage8 hardware doesn't have support for textures which aren't a power of 2 in size.

* Xgl was actually slower than Xorg in 2D

SoftMaker's MegaFont XXL

2006-02-18T23:51:00.000+01:00

One of Ubuntu's shortcomings is that it has very few good fonts. Recently this situation has been improved by Bitstream, a major font foundry. Bitstream's Vera is nothing short of brilliant.

But having one great font isn't exactly ideal. A small compay in Germany offers a solution, it's called SoftMaker's MegaFont XXL. MegaFont is a font pack containing 10k fonts of good quality. Most fonts are proper serif or sans serif fonts, many cheaper font packs contain loads of symbol and shareware fonts. Please note I said good quality, not excellent quality, many fonts don't have excellent hinting which makes them less then perfect for onscreen display at smaller font sizes, but all the fonts are great on printed on paper.

SoftMaker has excellent academic licensing available which makes this fontpack a real boon for students using Linux.

Corbicula anti virus: Bug fixes

2006-02-12T19:12:00.000+01:00

A couple of days ago I received my first bug report, from Dan Ballard, it had to do with my inefficient and buggy infinite recursion prevention algoritm. I fixed it today, more info here, but the general thought is to follow all directories, and count followed symlinks to prevent infinite recursion.

Meanwhile I've also taken the liberty of creating a GnomeFiles page for Corbicula. If you are a Corbicula user, please consider voting. Thankyou!

Merging PDFs

2006-02-10T16:53:00.000+01:00

PDFs can be easily merged using GhostScript. The trick is to make GhostScript print a series of PDFs to it's own loopback and then have it write a new PDF, it work like this:

gs -q -sPAPERSIZE=a4 -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=full.pdf parts*.pdf

Bluetooth adventures with GNOME

2006-02-08T17:07:00.000+01:00

My dad recently got a Bluetooth capable phone, so I went out and bought a Conceptronic Bluetooth 2.0 USB Adapter 200M. The device identified itself as follows:

Cambridge Silicon Radio, Ltd Bluetooth Dongle (HCI mode)

Setting up Bluetooth in Ubuntu Breezy was, well..., a Breeze... I just installed 'gnome-bluetooth' through Synaptic. I plugged in the dongle, and started Bluetooth File Sharing from the Systems Tools menu. Next, the file transfer was initiated from the phone, a popup appeared on my desktop asking whether I wanted to accept a picture from 'Nokia'. After accepting the transfer, the picture appeared in my Home Folder.

Kudos to Edd Dumbill, for making my life a little bit easier. Thanks!

Corbicula anti virus: Gna!

2006-02-05T20:09:00.000+01:00

Growing ever more frustrated with CVS, I decided I would migrate away from SourceForge. Looking at the alternatives, I finally chose to go with Gna. Gna offers CVS, Subversion and Arch, I went with Subversion. Subversion has been a dream sofar...

Gna also uses rsync to manage it's download area, instead a clumsy web interface like SourceForge has. rsync combined with apt-ftparchive allowed me to quickly setup an apt repo, which is now available for Corbicula users:

deb http://dl.gna.org/corbicula/ubuntu breezy/

Moby

2006-02-04T15:42:00.000+01:00

For prolonged coding sessions I can highly recommend the following albums from Moby:

18
Play
Play The B Sides
I Like To Score

Corbicula anti virus: An Ubuntu package!

2006-02-03T23:19:00.000+01:00

Finally!

I've been promising an Ubuntu "Breezy Badger" package for several weeks... erhm, months now. Well the time has come, at last, I present to you:

corbicula_0.0.20060203-4_i386.deb
The package conforms to the Debian CLI Policy and it should properly install the Corbicula GConf schemas. The translations from Rosetta are also included and installed.

Please note that this is an alpha test version, so don't expect too much. I'd be happy to receive bugs reports, usability issues, etc.

Prince of Persia: Sands of Time

2006-02-02T19:59:00.000+01:00

Last night I finally finished playing Prince Of Persia: Sands of Time. I bought it a couple of weeks ago at a discount price. Not really expecting that much from the game, I was in for a surprise...

I really need to emphasize the fact that the Prince of Persia levels design is nothing short of brilliant! Most scenes are at the very least breath taking!

Another aspect of the game which is very good, was the voice acting. The voice actors playing Prince and Farah were properly selected to 'fit' the 3D characters.

The only major downside of PoP:SoT seems to be it's third person camera. Please don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with third person views, except that the camera code in PoP seems flip out sometimes. This behaviour seems to be exercerbated by small enclosures and heavy movements. This can really make combat a sour experience! But on the flip side, looking at other games, the camera issue seems omnipresent in 3D platform games. So this isn't really a downside since most games don't get this right...

One really cool feature is the possibility to unlock the original Prince of Persia game by Jordan Mechner halfway through the game. It seems the Ubisoft folks used the 'newer' Macintosh graphics, which looks great on a television.

It took me about 15 hours the complete the game, making PoP:SoT the first game I've completed on my GameCube. I can definately recommend it to anyone!

Corbicula anti virus: Makefile!

2006-01-29T22:04:00.000+01:00

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

2006-01-27T17:01:00.000+01:00

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

2006-01-22T21:28:00.000+01:00

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

2006-01-22T21:07:00.000+01:00

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

2006-01-18T19:00:00.000+01:00

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

2006-01-16T22:12:00.000+01:00

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

2006-01-13T19:43:00.000+01:00

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

2006-01-09T20:13:00.000+01:00

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

2006-01-08T18:21:00.000+01:00

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

2006-01-06T14:16:00.000+01:00

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!

2006-01-04T00:18:00.000+01:00

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

2006-01-03T18:51:00.000+01:00

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

2006-01-01T21:31:00.000+01:00

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.

Open Watcom and FreeDOS

2005-12-31T15:58:00.000+01:00

Apparently, a couple of days ago, the Open Watcom 1.4 C/C++ compiler suite was released. The new version of the suite finally includes a size optimized DOS target, I hope that this will help the FreeDOS project achive (what I consider to be) a major milestone in their project: To be able to compile the entire FreeDOS project with a single open source compiler.

Interface Design ala Gazpacho

2005-12-27T20:08:00.000+01:00

Gazpacho is a really cool interface design tool just like Glade, but done right.

The irony with Glade is that it's single use is to design interfaces, which in turn hasn't been done properly for Glade itself.

Don't get me wrong, Glade is a great tool, but Gazpacho is just that much better...

Free and Legal MP3 support using GStreamer

2005-12-24T14:03:00.000+01:00

Fluendo announced it has released a licensed MP3 decoder for the GStreamer framework, which allows distributions makers to have MP3 playback support by default in their distributions.

The Fedora Project can stop whining about licensing and just include MP3 playback, and Ubuntu can finally have the MP3 decoder legally installed by default.

Kudos to the folks at Fluendo!

Alexandria

2005-12-22T21:21:00.000+01:00

Alexandria is a book collection management tool written for GNOME using Ruby, it's a really simple application which allows you to add books using either an ISBN or you can search an online database (data is retrieved from multiple sources).

Alexandria is capable of exporting to several formats, including HTML. You can view my bookshelf here.

My LPI Certificate

2005-12-19T18:03:00.000+01:00

My LPI Certificate was delivered today, it was a flimsy piece of paper, which got a bit wet because of the postman (and of course the weather)...

Unsuprisingly the certificate was printed on Letter sized paper, which makes it hard to keep in a protective plastic holder... grrrr...

Another example why two standards are bad, and one standard is good...

Corbicula anti virus: status report

2005-12-16T17:15:00.000+01:00

It has been quiet on the Corbicula front lately, and to be plain honest development has stalled. Now that sounds like a bad thing, but it really isn't. Corbicula is feature complete right now, I don't plan on implementing extensive quarantine functionality which nobody uses anyway. When I say feature complete, please don't mistake this for 'done', because it really isn't. There are still some non-show-stopping issues left. They'll get fixed, eventually...

My packaging 'effort' has also ground to a halt, basically because I don't plan on creating an entire automake/autoconf instructure for something as trivial as Corbicula. The next release of MonoDevelop will feature a make like tool which uses the MonoDevelop Project file as it's input file, so I'll wait until then before creating proper packages.

In the mean time I've put a binary online here, to run it, please make sure you have Mono installed with gtk-sharp, gnome-sharp, gneme-vfs-sharp, gconf-sharp, glade-sharp, glib-sharp and gdk-sharp available. ClamAv also need to be installed with it's development files available (because Mono does late binding!).

Microsoft: One open document standard good, two better

2005-12-15T19:45:00.000+01:00

In this article a Microsoft dude makes the following comment:

Microsoft’s Yates said that OpenDocument and Open XML come from very different design points. “In the future at some point there will be convergence,” he said. In the near term, the transition period from proprietary document formats to Open XML-based ones will be “messy and complex,” he added. “Competition between standards we believe is a very good thing.”

Well, how insightfull, he just forgot to mention that Microsoft was purposefully instrumental in creating that very same mess.

Anyway for a while I've been wondering what the technical differences would be between these competing formats. A comment taken from slashdot:
Compared to ODF, the format Microsoft is proposing is vastly less suitable for XMLT transforms. It fails to leverage preexisting standards, so other implementations can't take advantage of existing code to render and manipulate SVG, MathML and the like.

This would suggest that (not surprisingly) Microsoft missed the point of using XML in general, by not re-using SVG and MathML, how very typical of them...

Anyway when I get a chance it'll be educative to do some digging on the topic to see whether these claims are actually true.

Nintendo GameCube

2005-12-13T13:22:00.000+01:00

After buying a Play TV Legends Street Fighter 2, I quickly got into console gaming, finally I decided to buy a Nintendo GameCube (Platinum Edition), with Mario Kart: Double Dash included.

The GameCube really is an awesome console, it features an IBM PowerPC 750CXe processor at 485mHz along with an ATI* Flipper graphics chip at 162mHz. The GameCube is probably the last of it's era not the feature a harddrive and multimedia centre capabilities, this of course can be attributed to it's small size (which prohibit's it from having a full size DVD-ROM drive) and extremely cool design.

Along with the GameCube I acquired a (reasonably cheap) fake controller by Joellenbeck which seems very sturdy.

* Based on ArtX technology

QEMU

2005-12-12T18:59:00.000+01:00

QEMU is a good processor emulator which uses dynamic translation to achieve acceptable performance levels. QEMU is especially nice because it requires no kernel module and it can emulate lots of different processors.

Using QEMU in Ubuntu is easy, start by installing the qemu package, then proceed to the commandline (for installation):

$ qemu-img create -f qcow win_nt4_wks.img 1G
Formating 'win_nt4_wks.img', fmt=qcow, size=1048576 kB
$ qemu -hda win_nt4_wks.img -cdrom win_nt4_wks.iso -boot d -m 128 -user-net

Then use the following command line boot the already installed operating system:

$ qemu -hda win_nt4_wks.img -boot c -m 128 -user-net

That's it, it's just that easy! The obligatory screenshot:

Transport Tycoon Deluxe

2005-12-02T21:19:00.000+01:00

Transport Tycoon Deluxe is a classic, designed and written by Chris Saywer. Today I bought a legal copy of the game at a local MediaMarkt for a spectacular price of 6 Euro's, it was definately worth it!

I quickly downloaded the OpenTTD source tarball and started compiling, and voila, OpenTTD natively on Breezy Badger:

The binaries are publicly available:
OpenTTD 4.0.1

ASUS Radeon 9250 GE/TD 256MB

2005-12-02T20:47:00.000+01:00

I received my Radeon 9250 yesterday, I did some simple benchmarks today, and results were a bit disappointing... I used a simple Quake 3 timedemo benchmark:

GeForce Ti 4200-8x (nvidia) @ 180 fps
Radeon 9250 (ati) @ 60 fps
Radeon 9250 (fglrx) @ X lockup

After doing some benchmarking in Windows, I came to the conclusion that the Radeon was about one third slower than my old GeForce, still the DRI drivers only attained about one third of the speed of my old GeForce. This means the DRI drivers only push the card to about 50% of it's potential.

Please don't get my wrong, the DRI folks are doing great work, the Radeon 9250 is a great card for the non-gamer, especially because it's works out of the box, without a need to install a proprietary driver on Ubuntu.

My icculus.org/quake3 patches got commited!

2005-11-30T21:38:00.000+01:00

My patches for Quake 3 just got commited to the icculus.org Subversion repository, revision 390 of the code now has them included.

Changelog

Quake 3 Architecture

2005-11-30T19:41:00.000+01:00

Since I've been working a bit with the Quake 3 codebase, I've seen how (relatively) clean it was written.

One major merit of the Quake 3 engine is that it has a Quake Virtual Machine which is similar to what the Java VM does, making part of the game code totally platform agnostic. Instead of designing a new language like the folks at Sun did, Id software chose to stick with good ol' C. One major advantage of this approach would be that game code written for the QVM would also still be compilable with a proper C compiler to platform native binaries. For generation of the QVM bytecode Id software took the LCC retargetable compiler and wrote a QVM bytecode generation backend for it. Very cool stuff indeed!

On a similar note, I've just released a new version of the icculus.org/quake3 codebase for Breezy Badger. Now it has my patches enabled by default, to disable them remove the pak_pb.pk3 file from the baseq3 and missionpack directories.

dosemu terminus fonts

2005-11-30T13:02:00.000+01:00

After fiddling a bit with dosemu, I quickly started using xdosemu, while starting xdosemu I got the following error messages:

ERROR: X: Unable to open font "vga"ERROR: , trying "vga"...
ERROR: X: Unable to open font "vga"ERROR: , trying "9x15"...

Once DOS was started, applications which use ASCII characters above #127 weren't displayed properly. ASCII characters above #127 were commonly used to draw primitive windows in text mode.

After a lot of trial and error involving commands like mkfontdir, xset and fc-cache, no results were yielded...

Finally I decided to install the xfonts-terminus-dos package, which solved all of my issues with the click of a button!

Hacking on icculus.org/quake3

2005-11-28T22:42:00.000+01:00

Source code is a beatiful thing, kudos to Id software for releasing their Quake 3 code once more, and kudos to the people at icculus.org which are really getting the Quake 3 code into shape, they have made many improments along the way:

AMD64 support
FreeBSD support
SDL for cross-platforminess
OpenAL sound

I always missed a 'Very High Quality' initial video options template in the original Quake 3, the 'High Quality' ivo template, uses a screen resolution of 800x600 which is pityful by todays standards. Anyway I added my own 'Very High Quality' ivo template, which is the same as the 'High Quality' ivo template except it uses a 1024x768 screen resolution, a texture quality of 3 and a geometry detail of 2. Even the most low end (but current) video card will be able to handle the 'Very High Quality' ivo template easily.

In the process of adding the new ivo template, I encountered a hardcoded value which turned into a bug while adding the new ivo template, which I fixed along the way. I also noticed a suboptimal for loop which I optimized.

Patches:
fix-hardcoded-custom-ivo-template
add-very-high-quality-ivo-template
optimize-graphicsoptions-checkconfig

Binary:
Quake 3 1.33 r386 i686

RealVNC 4

2005-11-25T14:09:00.000+01:00

It seems the RealVNC 4 packages in Breezy are broken. I wanted to use RealVNC to record a new Corbicula screencast using pyvnc2swf, but somehow I kept getting an error about not having a 'fixed' font, anyway the following solved the issue:

# sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/XF86Config

I'm LPI Level 1 Certified!

2005-11-23T12:51:00.000+01:00

I just got word I am now officially LPI Level 1 Certified!

I passed my 101 exam with flying colors, although 102 didn't go quite so well I still had some headroom left on that one as well.

I was surprised to get my test results this early, on the exam they mentioned a four week waiting period. It has only been 13 days since my exam, hmmm, well the four week period is probably just the maximum during peak exam periods...

LPI ID: LPI000098667

The Art Of Deception

2005-11-23T12:32:00.000+01:00

I just finished reading The Art Of Deception by Kevin D. Mitnick. It's an excellent book, really! The situation sketches are (mostly) very plausible, and at the end of every sketch advice is given to prevent the social engineering attack.

Mitnick clearly explains how the following attack vectors are used to coerce people into doing stuff for social engineers:

Authority
Liking
Reciprocation
Consistency
Social Validation
Scarcity

The last chapter contains a listing of useful information security policies, which can help mitigate intrusion risks when properly implemented. It's all about balance, security measures shouldn't be too bothersome, or employees will start circumventing them for speed and comfort.

If you are already kept up at night by worrying about potential security issues, this book will drive you mad, or if you really implement the given advice, it might restore your sanity.

Inkscape

2005-11-21T20:42:00.000+01:00

Inkscape is a great application, I did some concept art for Ubuntu Certified Workstation hardware:

Notice: This is unofficial artwork and not approved by Canonical!

PIP Isn't PowerPoint

2005-11-21T18:24:00.000+01:00

During the past couple of weeks I coded a simple presentation tool, which uses a plain text file as it's input source, it's basically an improvement notepad, with presentation capabilities. Note that it's only a very rudimentary tool, and ... it's win32 only.

To make matters worse I coded it in Delphi which is extremely unportable, most of the code was written at night time, so beware: looking at the source code without taking proper precautions may induce temporary blindness! Results of prolonged exposure are unknown! You've been warned!

Initially I wanted to cleanup the source before releasing PIP on the web, but I've lost interest, so here goes: PIP

Corporate Branding

2005-11-20T16:23:00.000+01:00

One of the things I quickly noticed about Ubuntu (and most Linux distributions in general), is that they don't allow for much corporate branding.

Microsoft Windows has had this capability since '95 (IIRC), just place a bitmap called oemlogo.bmp and a textfile called oeminfo.ini into C:\Windows\System and voila...

GNOME doesn't have anything which allows something like this... This could easily be implemented in the 'System' menu, with a menu called 'About Compaq', or the likes...
A simpler way to do something like this would be to modify the GDM greeter, so I fiddled a bit with the Ubuntu Human theme and an official ATI logo:
Human-ATI

dosemu

2005-11-18T21:02:00.000+01:00

I've been helping my dad moving his files from an old MS-DOS based 386 to a newer Athlon Thunderbird running Ubuntu. One of the issues I encountered was the fact that the old Lotus Symphony files couldn't properly be opened by OpenOffice.org Calc. So I had to find another solution: dosemu.

Salvaging the old files (from the old 100MB harddisk):
# dd if=/dev/hdc1 of=~/olddiskpart1
# mount -o loop -t vfat ~/olddiskpart1 /mnt/tmp
# cp -R /mnt/tmp* /var/lib/dosemu/msdos
# chmod -R 777 /var/lib/dosemu/msdos

A reference to the old files (in /etc/dosemu/dosemu.conf):
$_hdimage = "msdos"

A couple of essential printer settings (in /etc/dosemu/dosemu.conf):
$_printer = "DeskJet-3820"
$_printer_command = "lpr -l"
$_printer_timeout = (20)

And the legacy application worked like a charm!

Corbicula anti virus: Fixing bugs

2005-11-12T17:53:00.000+01:00

I noticed two bugs in Corbicula over the last week, I fixed both of 'em:

The Documents bookmark was always displayed in the Scan Target ListView, whether or not the ~/Documents directory actually existed. Now a check is made to ensure ~/Documents exists before the bookmark is added to the list.
Corbicula interprets the ~/.gtk-bookmarks file to add the user's bookmarks to the Scan Target ListView, the FileNotFoundException is now caught properly and an empty bookmarks list is returned when the ~/.gtk-bookmarks file is not found.

LinuxWorld 2005

2005-11-09T21:07:00.000+01:00

I visited LinuxWorld 2005 in the Netherlands today. LinuxWorld was hosted simultaneously with InfoSecurity and StorageExpo, but the LinuxWorld part was really dwarfed by the InfoSecurity and StorageExpo parts. Generally most stands didn't have anything really interesting to offer.

I did take the opportunity to take my LPI Level 1 exams at LinuxWorld. Both the 101 and the 102 exam were very doable. I really need to acknowledge the fact that the LPI folks organized the LPI exams very well. They even had a can of water for everybody (included in the exam fee). I think I managed to pass 101, but 102 didn't go that well, I'll probably just make it, but I won't know for sure for 4-6 weeks. Bummer!
Near the end of LinuxWorld I ran into some other folks of the #ubuntu-nl channel on irc.freenode.net. We had 'dinner' together:

Two Statements Multiple Choice

2005-11-03T18:31:00.000+01:00

I had a management exam yesterday. The teacher which taught the course decided to use the two statements multiple choice style of questioning (for the entire exam). It basically works like this:

Statement 1
Statement 2

A. Statement 1 is true, statement 2 is false
B. Statement 2 is true, statement 1 is false
C. Both statements are true
D. Both statements are false

Using common sense, it should be very clear, that this kind of questioning doesn't give a good representation of a student's knowledge. I investigated the issue further and wrote a simple exam simulator to create empirical data:

The X-axis represents the actual knowledge level of a hypothetical student, so a 700 promille on the X-axis of the graph means the student factually knows the answer to 700 promille of all statements and has to guess the remaining statements. The Y-axis represents the actual grade that would have been assigned to the student in question. Taking a look at the above graph the purple graph represents an ideal world without guessing, the blue graph represents the two statement multiple choice examination style, and it shows a delta of up to 250 promille below ideal grading. So this style of questioning is hardly fair at all.

Corbicula anti virus: GTK ownage

2005-10-28T21:57:00.000+02:00

Worked a bit on Corbicula... I finally got the ScanningDialog not to resize when a large file path was displayed in the FileScannedLabel.

The solution was beautiful, many GTK widgets have a builtin property called Ellipsize, when it's set to (for example) Middle, when the file path becomes too large to display within the current window size, the middle part of the file path is replaced with dots.

Conclusion GTK rocks...