Nuudelisoppa

  • Disc rot on Maxell rewritables

    Disc rot ate one of my Maxell rewritable compact discs. This is the second disc to fail me from the bunch of 10 they came in. They’re pretty old in terms of IT time, but I’ve had floppies that lasted much longer.

  • The year of the ‘to each his own’ desktop

    A comment on Slashdot pretty well summarizes what is also my view of all this fuss about the year of the Linux desktop:

    Users who don’t want to learn how the machine works already have two major systems designed specifically for them: Windows and OSX. To me it makes perfect sense that Linux would be Open Source because Microsoft and Apple both recognize that the real money is gained by appealing to the general public and the general public is nearly technophobic.

    That being said, I would add that there’s nothing keeping a bold newcomer (such as Canonical) from breaking into the general market with a Linux desktop either, provided that their version is ‘good’ (i.e. dumbed-down IMO) enough. I’m just not too worried whether such development takes place or not.

    A Linux desktop for the masses would obviously help in improving hardware support, which is why I do still see it as a Good Thing. But for me it’s not the be all, end all outcome that other, perhaps more competitive people than myself see it as.

  • Make some noise

    I adapted Geek Thoughts‘ “Making Noise with ImageMagick” in creating video noise — a video simulating what you used to get when you turned on a television with no signal, back in the analog days. To combine the noise frames created by ImageMagick I used Netpbm, which I had to install separately (that is, it wasn’t installed by default in Lenny).

    Here’s the Bash multi-liner I used to generate 48 frames worth of noise:

    (for i in `seq 1 48`; \
do convert -size 640x480 xc: +noise Random \
-blur 1x1 -fx intensity -normalize ppm:-; done) \
| ppmtompeg kohina.txt

    And here’s kohina.txt which specifies how ppmtompeg packs the frames. Note that I just threw this together without too much thought, so it definitely needs tweaking depending on what the video is used for and so what (quality, compression, speed) matters. For example, I only used I-frames due to lack of imagination.

    PATTERN IIIIIIII
OUTPUT kohina.mpeg
INPUT_DIR stdin
BASE_FILE_FORMAT PPM
INPUT_CONVERT *
GOP_SIZE 8
SLICES_PER_FRAME 30
PIXEL HALF
RANGE 2
PSEARCH_ALG LOGARITHMIC
BSEARCH_ALG SIMPLE
IQSCALE 1
PQSCALE 1
BQSCALE 1
REFERENCE_FRAME ORIGINAL

    And here’s what it looks like, recompressed with Theora (using Oggconvert): kohina.ogg (2,8 MB). Generating an accompanyng soundtrack is trivial with Audacity.

  • SSH inside a while read loop

    Got bit by the fact that SSH inherits stdin from its parent, which rendered my fancy remote-command-in-a-loop useless. Passing -n to ssh made it work the way I’d expected.

  • WebDownloader for X settings

    The app which calls itself “WebDownloader for X” comes in a  package called d4x and saves its settings in ~/.ntrc_2. How’s that for consistency!

  • Uutinen: Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) julkaistu

    Ubuntu 9.10, koodinimeltään Karmic Koala, on julkaistu, ja on nyt ladattavissa Ubuntu Suomen sivuilta. Tietoa uusista ominaisuuksista sekä muita lisätietoja tuoreesta jakeluversiosta löytyy esimerkiksi julkaisumuistiosta.

    Itse olen käyttänyt virtuaalikoneessa Karmicia jo sen varhaisista testijulkaisuista (Alpha) lähtien Jaunty Jackalopen rinnalla. Karmicin silmiinpistävin uudistus lienee sen käynnistysgrafiikka, jolta kokonaan uuden tekniikan ansiosta siirrytään aiempaa sulavammin kirjautumisruutuun ja edelleen työpöydälle.

    Työpöydän päävalikosta löytyy uutena Ubuntun sovellusvalikoima, jonka avulla käyttäjä löytää entistä helpommin käytettävissään olevia ohjelmistoja. Vakio-ohjelmistoista puolestaan esimerkiksi Firefox on päivittynyt uusimpaan 3.5-sarjaan.

    Jauntyn suorituskyky oli tiettävästi pettymys Intelin piirisarjoilla varustettujen pikkukannettavien käyttäjille. Viimeisimmän löytämäni testin mukaan tilanne on parantunut huomattavasti. Launchpad-virheenjäljityssivustolta löytyy kuitenkin ainakin yksi vielä tätä kirjoittaessani avoin virheraportti Intelin näytönohjainpiirien ajuriongelmasta.

    Jatkossa tämän blogin merkinnät perustuvat Karmic Koalan käyttöön ainakin seuraavan version (jonka koodinimi on Lucid Lynx) julkaisuun saakka.

  • vrms

    Via Jacob.

    jani@gojira:~$ vrms

    No non-free or contrib packages installed on gojira!  rms would be proud.

    Well, that’s not accurate: at least I have the non-free version of VirtualBox installed. Now I’m trying to find out if this is a bug or a limitation set by something in my setup.

  • Miro 2.5.2 for Lenny

    I tweaked the current build from sid just enough to make it compile and run on lenny (IIRC, just one build-dependency version needed to be changed). The resulting packages are linked below, but I take no responsibility if they crash and burn your hard drive, so from here on, you’re on your own:

  • Search Everything and no search results in Posts > Edit

    I had this weird problem with WordPress searches: in one of my blogs I couldn’t get any search results in the Edit Posts listing. Not even a simple search for the letter ‘a’ would yield anything. I tracked the cause down to the Search Everything plugin, and then began comparing what was different between the problematic blog and one that didn’t have this problem. Here’s where it got weird: there were no differences. The other blog is for testing only, so I could set it identical to the one with the problem, and still the searches worked consistently in the testing blog while in the other one they didn’t.

    I tried unsetting Search Everything’s options and the searches began to work in the problematic blog too. So I tried setting them back on one by one… until I had them all as they had initially been, and the searches still worked!

    There must have been some kind of a screw-up with the plugin’s settings, perhaps brought on by an upgrade.

  • aptmethod error when doing security updates with reprepro update

    Got this error message when trying to do a reprepro update:

    aptmethod error receiving 'http://security.debian.org/debian-security/dists/lenny/updates/main/debian-installer/binary-i386/Packages.gz': '404 Not Found'

    This was caused by a missing UDebComponents: none in the security update source definition, in conf/updates. Quite obvious really, but got me scratching my head for a while.