To Each His Own

February 24, 2008 / alex / 1 Comment

Now that Patrick joined the planet, I decided to collect all steps necessary to make use of our local RPM-based multi-user WordPress (WP from now on) setup so I won’t have to remember all of this next time. When Adrian agreed to running WP here, he insisted (and rightly so) on an RPM based installation (check for WP related CVEs if you wonder why).

To run WP here, perform the following steps:

Ask me to create a WP database for you
Choose a path underneath your ~/.public_html you want to use for WP
cd ~/.public_html/your/blog/dir
ln -s /usr/share/wordpress/*.php .
ln -s /usr/share/wordpress/wp-admin .
ln -s /usr/share/wordpress/wp-includes .
mkdir wp-content
cd wp-content
mkdir upload

If you want to upload through WP, you will have to allow apache to write to the upload directory. I would suggest using ssh for uploads instead.

ln -s /usr/share/wordpress/wp-content/plugins .
ln -s /usr/share/wordpress/wp-content/themes .

If you want to use your own plugins or themes, you can also recreate these directories and symlink to your liking. Note that you will have to take care of security issues for these components yourself then.

Now go back to the main blog dir (cd .. if you didn’t do anything fancy)
rm wp-config.php
cp wp-config-sample.php wp-config.php
Edit wp-config.php and adjust all the DB_* defines
Let me know the path to your wp-config.php, so I can adjust the global wp-config.php to use yours for your blog
Setup your blog just like a “regular” WP installation

Yes, it is a lengthy procedure, but it will give you the freedom of your own, customizable blog with the comfort of regular security updates by root. Oh, and never copy and paste shell commands from forum posts or blog entries.

Reclothe the Mic

December 19, 2007 / alex / Leave a comment

So, how do I look? If you’re reading this on the planet you probably have no idea what the hell I am talking about. While I always loved the WordPress default theme Kubrick, I grew bored of it after a while, because it is all over the place (yes, the Internet). After testing some alternatives I finally decided to switch to Kubrick’s successor. Aside of the new looks, I also appreciate the fact that the K2 developers introduced new functionality and easy customization through the use of styles (this is Jolie, by the way).

Oh, and while spelling mic once again, I wondered whether ‘mic’ is the official notation. It seems that there is a lot of discussion regarding this issue and some people really take it it serious. Well, mic is the way I’ve learned it from the booklets, so I’ll keep it that way.

The Gibbon Can Bite

November 25, 2007 / alex / Leave a comment

After having installed gusty from scratch on some boxes and via update-manager on others, I decided it’s about time to upgrade my desktop machine as that was still running feisty. Unlike my previous experiences with gutsy this upgrade didn’t turn out to be as easy as pie as it should have been. Ever since I started using debian I upgrade my sources.list and run an apt-get dist-upgrade afterwards to perform a distribution upgrade, so I chose that path for this upgrade, too. Well I shouldn’t have done so: upgrading this way does not remove the deprecated evms package, that renders a gutsy system unusable.

Additionally I had moved my installation partition prior to this upgrade, but I didn’t know that update-grub keeps track of that in commented lines in menu.lst, so it repeatedly rewrote that file with the wrong boot partition, breaking unattended booting. From previous experiments I still had the xserver-xgl package installed without actually using it. Unfortunately the upgrade activated Xgl as default X server, breaking my desktop setup.

Then I had to learn that my favorite audio player is broken in gutsy. At first I considered capitulation and gave other players a try, but they still don’t behave the way an audio player should. So I investigated the problem further and it turns out that re-building the package with the new upstream release (which is available for a month now) fixes the problem. Rather frustrated I added that information to the original bug report.

No, this not the end of the list, yet. After recompiling VDR (more on that later), I discovered that the system crashes after a few minutes of watching TV. Using the ‘generic‘ instead of the ‘rt‘ linux-image actually fixes this, but I had no problems with the previous low-latency images. So, I filed another bug.

Oh, and while writing this entry I went out for while, just to find my mouse cursor to be dysfunctional on my return. Hopefully the bird in approach will be a little more gentle.

Goodbye Frame Drops

November 1, 2007 / alex / Leave a comment

It’s seems as if this site is a rather powerful wish list! It took exactly 11 days from my hope for other artists to follow in the footsteps of RADIOHEAD (suggesting to offer FLAC encoded files instead of MP3 encoded ones) until Saul Williams did just that. And now, less than a month after my request for multi-threaded H.264 decoding in ffmpeg, I finally have a build of MPlayer’s 1.0rc2 release running on my laptop that can playback the 1080p version of this BBC clip without dropping frames. Excellent!

Building it was a pain though. I started off using gutsy’s 1.0rc1 package, but I had to patch ‘rules‘ quite heavily until I had a package (that still runs scripts on installation that cause dpkg to fail). No wonder it won’t show up in gutsy any time soon. Once installed one has to run the new mplayer with -lavdopts fast:threads=2 in order to make the H.264 decoder use two threads instead of one. Even though it’s considered experimental it worked flawlessly for all the files I tried it on.

Now I’ll have to figure out, what to wish for next…

Some Are Getting It Indeed

October 26, 2007 / alex / Leave a comment

Finally! RADIOHEAD’s new way of distributing music seems to catch on. Another artist who’s excellent previous album often finds its way onto my playlist will release his upcoming album in a fashion similar to ‘In Rainbows’: Saul William‘s new release will be available as a DRM-free download in two flavors:

if you decide to pay 5$ you will be able to choose from a 192 kbits/s MP3, a 320 kbits/s MP3 or a FLAC version (yes!)
if you don’t want to pay anything you will still be able to download the 192 kbits/s MP3 version

Hey, even the free version is encoded with a higher bitrate than ‘In Rainbows’! I just hope the revenue generated by my five bucks will not be diminished by the bandwidth costs necessary to transfer those FLAC files to my hard disk.

Note that, according to the download site for the album, the MP3 files will be:

encoded with LAME v3.97 and love.

Sweet Irony

October 17, 2007 / alex / Leave a comment

After reading that the good people from id have released a Linux port of their ETQW demo, I decided to give it a try (even though it does not seem to be my kind of FPS) in order to test the 3D capabilities of my new laptop. When installing the demo I skipped through their EULA noting that 3e) forbids me to:

distribute the Software by any means, including, but not limited to, Internet or other electronic distribution, direct mail, retail, mail order, or other means;

The funny thing is that id distribute the demo via BitTorrent only – which automatically turns everybody downloading the software into a distributor of that file. The problem is of course that they use their standard EULA for the demo, but maybe somebody from the development department should have a chat with their lawyers sometime.

Oh, and as an update to my previous post: is it me or have hypertext experts turned RADIOHEAD’s homepage into a giant wobbly blob?

Update: it seems that either Firefox or the Flash Plugin for Linux fail to render the animation underneath the text, rendering the website unusable.

3£

October 15, 2007 / alex / Leave a comment

For those that have been off-line last week: RADIOHEAD released their new album “In Rainbows” as a pay as much as you think it’s actually worth digital download. As I enjoyed their music for more then a decade I was happy to learn that they chose such a consumer friendly approach with this release.

Some might argue that three quid are not overly generous, but I find the release to be somewhat reduced: The songs come as 160 kbits/s mp3 files, which is pretty much as low as you can go – I would not even have considered purchasing a 128 kbits/s release. While I would have preferred a >=192 kbits/s (or even a FLAC) release, I have to admit that the sound quality is excellent.

In case you are unhappy about the lack of an official cover you can easily help yourself with this large collection of inoffical ones.

I have to say it’s a wonderful album and although it’s not as “complicated” as the previous ones (and I really enjoyed that complexity) it still is a RADIOHEAD album and I am happy to hear that the online release seems to be a success. One can just hope that other artists get the message that people will actually pay a realistic price for high quality music if you give them the freedom to listen to it any way they want to.

New Hardware

October 3, 2007 / alex / Leave a comment

Recently I got equipped with a shiny new Lattitude D830. It came with a WUXGA display and nVidia’s latest Quadro NVS 140M monster to fill all those pixels. After having read some installation reports I decided to install gutsy on this machine.

The installation went smoothly and (although I haven’t done thorough testing) everything seems to run out of the box. Well, except for sound. A common workaround for this is to compile a current alsa-driver snapshot. It didn’t work for me at first as for the gutsy gibbon the snd-hda-intel module is now being installed in a non-standard position:
/lib/modules/2.6.22-12-generic/ubuntu/media
Which caused a conflict with my newly installed version. After deleting the ubuntu module sound works, however the volume control does not always behave as expected.

Overall, performance is very nice, however it is really frustrating that even with such a powerful machine it is not possible to play one of Apple’s full HD clips without frame drops. Unfortunately it seems like we will not be seeing anything from nVidia in terms of hardware acceleration in the near future – for now I’m hoping that ffmpeg will introduce multithreading support for h264 decoding some time soon (this thread on ffmpeg-devel looks promising).

Eerie Wheater

August 30, 2007 / alex / Leave a comment

Last week a minor thunderstorm passed us by – close enough to paint our sky with weird colors. The clouds stopped short of the horizon causing the buildings on the ground to have an unreal glow. On sunset it looked like the clouds caught fire. The following photos are some original captures of the event (no Gimp involved).

The funny thing is, I shot more than 140 pictures in order to capture some lightning without noticing that I had success with the very first one:

Yeah I know, it’s tiny. Maybe next summer – seems like thunderstorm season is over for this year.

Bugzilla Vandalism

August 22, 2007 / alex / Leave a comment

Those imbecile spammers are killing my time yet again: now that I have established successful strategies to keep them out of my inbox and to stop them publishing spam comments here (Akismet filtered 179 comments so far and counting), they started targeting bugzilla. On Monday I noticed several new attachments to Bug #9 (of our local bugzilla installation) which I closed three years ago.

After identifying the attachments as spam, I dug around for a remedy. Unfortunately I had to learn that the bugzilla developers have not addressed this issue yet, but I found this script by Jonathan Cheyer that enables easy bug, comment and attachment removal for spam users. The script has a minor flaw though: it’s written in Ruby. Due to Adrian’s foresighted policy of minimized package installation however, this server has no Ruby installed. Running the script remotely is not an option either.

I figured I would have to port the script: my choice would have been Python but the database bindings are not installed either, so I had to do it the good old bash way. The script is not available for download as its state cannot be considered ‘releasable’ yet. I will happily give it to people asking for it, if they don’t mind destroying their bugzilla installation.

The script worked as expected – our bugzilla is spam free again. I just hope I don’t have to run it too often in the future.