www.ルイス.org

Software vendors: please stop shipping stripped binaries.  How do you expect to support your customers without this valuable information when something goes wrong?

I know I didn’t blog about this when I first read about the proposed update, but now that it is real and I can use it, it’s definitely worth a mention.

Sun ship a modified version of the panel calendar that supports multiple timezones, very handy when you work in a global organisation and regularly collaborate with people in different timezones.

Admittedly, this doesn’t apply too strongly to me in my current role at Sun, but at home, it’s very handy to glance quickly and know what time it is in China.

Hopefully Sun will quickly abandon their (in my opinion) third-party changes now that a far superior implementation is available upstream.  I present you, the Gnome calendar:

 

Today I decided to set up vpnc on my Linksys WRT54G router. I want to be able to connect to the VPN at work, and the Linksys is an ideal place to do it.

The setup I’m aiming for (where a single port gets VLANd off and becomes the only available to connect to the inside of the VPN at work) is trivial to do and I’m 98% sure one of the guys at work has already done it (although probably with some slightly different software, I’m not sure).

I run OpenWRT WHITE RUSSIAN 0.9 on my Linksys, which was the latest at the time I installed it. I believe there is a new development release, but this still seems to be quite current.

First step was getting vpnc installed with the necessary bits and pieces. OpenWRT comes equipped with what can only be described as a very streamlined version of apt: ipkg. I searched for vpnc over at www.ipkg.be, found a hit and as such added the necessary line to my /etc/ipkg.conf file. A quick update and I could install vpnc, kmod-tun and libgcrypt as required.

With my VPN config file in place, I quickly received an error:

/etc/vpnc/vpnc-script: 222: Syntax error: Bad for loop variable

What’s on line 222?

for ((i = 0 ; i < CISCO_SPLIT_INC ; i++ )) ; do

I did some searching and it seems this is perfectly valid Bourne syntax, so what gives? Well, OpenWRT uses ash as the default shell, not bash or sh. I decided to replace it with something equivalent:

i = 0;
while [ "$i" -lt CISCO_SPLIT_INC ]; do
// there was some stuff here, I added the next line just before the "done"
i = `expr $i + 1`

I had to make this fix a little further down too, but this did the trick and vpnc now correctly adds all of the default routes and properly updates the /etc/resolv.conf.

I’ve been using the new Skype 1.4 BETA for the last day or two.  It works quite well and the user interface has been massively updated.

In addition, I just discovered that this 1.4 BETA implements the full Skype API, which means that we already have the ability to send SMS messages with Linux Skype.

Currently the GUI does not provide all of the necessary hooks, but by following the simple steps described at share.skype.com/sites/devzone/2007/05/skype_api_is_catching_up_on_li.html I was easily able to send a quick test SMS to my mobile.

It won’t be long before Skype release an updated GUI, I hope.  But if not, no worries… I can write one myself.

My machine has completely and utterly locked up a couple of times over the past month.  It’s been pretty annoying but I’ve always been in the “damnit, I was busy working” mood when it happens, and never looked beyond that.

It happened again about an hour ago.

This time I bothered to think about why it might have happened.  Two seconds after deciding to think about it I figured that I should have probably configured a swap partition for my Linux install.

I have no idea why I didn’t do this when I installed, but I bothered to do it this time.  5GB should be more than sufficient, and it makes me feel better about my horrendously under-utilized boot disk.

I borrowed an openSuSE 10.2 DVD from Anton and finally got around to giving it a whirl. Here are my thoughts about it:

• GRUB bootsplash and boot-up is very nice and swish; better than Ubuntu
• installer is way behind the Ubuntu equivalent; there is too much choice and potential to go wrong
• partition editor is a recipe for disaster; different disks aren’t clearly defined: it would be very easy for a newbie to nuke their disk by accident
• the install went smoothly and the overall presentation of the OS is good
• GNOME support is much improved over previous releases; it feels like less of an afterthought
• I ended up with a CD-only application repository thanks to not having an uplink at install time. YaST2 sucks monkey balls; this is a real shame considering how great it used to be. The options are ambiguous and it took me a good amount of time to find out how to add a new YUM repository
• What is YUM? What is ZEN? What is going on with the consistency in this operating system? There are two available tools to add/update repositories and whatnot. One of them crashed half-way through, and the other wanted me to insert a disc!
• YUM is very slow, apt/deb is far superior
• Installing nvidia drivers was more complicated than Ubuntu (I gave up)
• The GNOME slab is very nice, not because it is better, but because it is good that people are thinking about things
• Beagle (with the Firefox plugin) by default is good news for all
• I didn’t get the 3D desktop stuff working
• Nice to have some proprietary stuff included by default: Flash, etc.
• My webcam wasn’t recognised (Ubuntu manages it)

• Much improved integration between KDE and GNOME

  Overall I wasn’t impressed. Some things are definitely ahead of Ubuntu: the GRUB menu is one big thing that I think the Ubuntu guys need to concentrate on. It seems the Novell guys are spending more time with whiz-bang than they are on the fundamentals.

  Ubuntu, on the other hand, now have a very solid foundation and the next release (which won’t install on my machine right now (but it is an alpha)) should definitely help level things out.

  If you want desktop Linux: use Ubuntu.

My previous suspicions about the Firefox cache being bypassed were actually not correct… it turns out that the local disk and memory caches that Firefox uses are still in-place.  This is all good for me, a quick clear of my local cache and all of the stale fuzzy images will be force-fetched from the appropriate servers.

The subject is a little misleading, but I couldn’t remember what the datacard that I’ve borrowed from Vlad is called.

I’m connecting to the Internet from home via a T-Mobile PCCard, which uses some fangled 3g technology to give me a 1.8Mbps Interweb connection.  Latency is a little higher than with conventional ‘broadband’, but the overall feel is good.

The big issue I have is with images… T-Mobile made a blanket decision to enable image compression by default.  This means that I get garbled crappy images which are a pain in the backside.

After a little reading about I discovered that you could use a force reload (Shift+Ctrl+R in Firefox) to get the full-res samples.  Yet more reading and I discovered that some people were setting a custom User Agent (appending “Blazer/4.0”) to fool the transparent proxy server into thinking the browser was incapable of page compression (although I don’t fully understand how this would help with inline JPEG compression, but anyway).  Unfortunately this neat little trick didn’t work to me.

This got me thinking… if I can use my browser to force the proxy to send me a full-res image then it must be doing something special.  A trip over to livehttpheaders.mozdev.org/, a new Firefox plugin and restart later and I was able to observe the HTTP headers that Firefox was sending to the server.

I quickly spotted that the following two extra headers were being sent on a force reload:

Pragma: no-cache

Cache-Control: no-cache

So it looked as though the Pragma and Cache-Control force the proxy to send me the real deal.  Now, time for another plugin, this time Modify Headers which I configured to be active at all times (“Always on”) and to send the exact two headers I mentioned in the last paragraph.

Modify Headers is a neat little plugin that allows the user to send any custom headers in a reasonably fine-grained way.  But for me, I wanted the headers active for all requests.

The result?  It was good… all of the pictures were now pretty.  Of course, this isn’t without its drawbacks… all requests bypass the cache, which means I’ll be pulling more data down, but in exchange for the good images I guess I don’t have much other choice.

I’ve not played around much yet, but I’m sure there will be other issues.  I’m a little curious as to how a regular page refresh is different to a forced page refresh… from what I’ve read there are a bunch of odd little things that go on, mostly historical.

But for now, I’m a happy bunny :)

When I was getting hibernation working, I went in and disabled the internal gigabit network interface on my motherboard.  It occurs to me now that I quite fancy using this.

Time to find out what hibernate under Linux can do.  I’m about to hibernate, enter the BIOS, enable the NIC, resume Linux and attempt to probe the NIC.

I hope it works.

Google have gone ahead and made some fairly large pledges to GNOME today. There are some that I think are well worth the money. In particular $4500 to reduce the initial login time (anything like this is great), Gmail-style threads in Evolution and a Search Party plugin for Firefox.

The Search Party plugin seems quite interesting to me—for example, I was searching for “deer park ubuntu” this morning after Alpha 1 was released of the upcoming Firefox 1.1 browser. Unfortunately I could find no releases for Debian or Ubuntu. Maybe with this search party plugin somebody would have struck gold and shared the rewards, or, somebody might have turned around and said “I’ll make a .deb file, you guys can have it when I’m done”.

Check out the full list at www.gnome.org/bounties/Google.html