I can’t put it in words but using Debian is just such a gratifying experience; the vast amount of packages and the great tools make this my absolute favorite GNU/Linux distribution. What makes Debian so attractive is the fact that a lot of non-free software (like Adobe Air, NoMachine’s NX etc.) has packages for it.

And yeah, I’m a fanboy.

Fixing it is rather easy:
CFLAGS="-O2 -fomit-frame-pointer" ./configure ...

Wer sich wundert, dass in seinem Computerbild lesenden Umfeld plötzlich die WLAN Konnektivität nicht mehr mag, der sollte dafür sorgen, dass die Computerbild Version von Kaspersky Internet Security von den Rechnern der Leserschaft verschwindet. Zur Not reicht es auch den Kaspersky NDIS Filter aus den Einstellungen des Adapters zu entfernen.

Grässliche Seuche sowas.

Now, the plugin ships with an old version of JWPlayer that doesn’t support subtitles. This is bad because that’s just the feature I needed. So, I updated the player version shipped with the plugin and also added a few more tricks to the otherwise great plugin:

• You can now specify a default size in the options. If you don’t give a size in the flv tag, it’ll automatically use the ones specified as default.
• There’s a few more parameter combinations, most notably you can now add subtitles to the parameter list (filename, sub, poster, width, height).

What does this mean? You now have the following possible combinations:

• (filename) Plays just the filename with the default size, no subs or poster
• (filename, subs) Plays the filename with the specified subtitles with the default size
• (filename, subs, poster) Same as above, just with the additional poster
• (filename, subs, width, height) Same as above but without poster and with custom sizes
• (filename, subs, poster, width, height) Same as above but with poster.

Yeah, I don’t really need the poster. If you’re interested you can grab the file here. Be advised that you need to download and unpack the player.swf and yt.swf from the new JWplayer to make this work. Also, you need the original plugin.

All bugs that plagued me before have been fixed: The CIFS server is running fine, multiple VirtualBox machines do not bring down the system anymore, the NICs stay up and there’s no more boot issue. I’ll probably wait a few more weeks before upgrading my pools, though. You know, I trust you, SUN… but I have learned from past mistakes .

On a exactly as bright note: Haiku has it’s first Alpha out in the wild. While the system apparently doesn’t like to be booted from a USB thumbdrive + GRUB2 right out of the ISO, it works great when actually burning the ISO to CD-ROM. The USB stack works great, networking is a joy; the Alpha recognized nearly all devices of my Vostro 1500 laptop, only the touchpad didn’t want to work (USB mouse solved that), the webcam was identified but when trying to connect it through Cortex the output module went a little haywire. Sound, graphics adapter (+ resolution), NIC – all in working order.

Haiku R1/Alpha screenshot

This is just great, awesome work! I’m still waiting for the day when BeOS makes it’s comeback onto my desktop .

Not only does 2009.06 ship with a notoriously broken CIFS server, effectively rendering zfs set sharesmb=on useless for me, it also doesn’t play nice when upgrading to snv_118 from the dev repositories. On 118 I’m getting hit by some strange xc_free_msg stuff that has apparently been fixed in 119 (which I can’t use because the SXCE build for 119 has severe problems, apparently).

Now, VirtualBox on the other hand is only a minor pain in the buttocks. For the entire 3.x series VirtualBox constantly locks up OpenSolaris (preferrably in the middle of the night so I can get to work first thing in the morning). The fix is available (again), you only have to build VirtualBox from source. Since this is not an option for me, I simply went back to the last version of the old 2.x series. Yes, this does fix the problem but it leaves me somewhat unsatisfied.

Makes me hope that Sun fixes a load of things in it’s products till the 2010.02 release, so it’ll be a pleasant upgrade .

On themudcrab there is a great article for those who want to boot ISOs directly from a USB thumbdrive.

Unfortunately the article does not describe one major aspect: Making the stick itself bootable.

You need a little bit of extra software here to make it happen, thankfully the download is small and the software is free.

• Download and install the HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool.

As I wrote, by default most thumbdrives do not have the bootable flag set. Also, they don’t have an MBR written. If you would try to install Grub4DOS on such a thumbdrive it would moan about an invalid partition table and recommend to use the –skip-mbr-check parameter.

That’s where HP’s tool comes in: Pop in your thumbdrive, start the HP tool and format the stick. The tool will write the necessary portions to the MBR, effectively making it possible to boot off the thumbdrive.

Done? Then follow the great guide on themudcrab showing all the necessary steps from now on. It even has the right software set as an example .

Since I had to reinstall Microangelo anyway, I whipped up a nice little icon for Vista users:

As you can see, the icon still is the beloved Dolfini, now in all it’s might and shine. There are quite a lot of sizes packed in the icon, so even when scaling the icon size up, it still looks great.

Download the icon file right here and enjoy .

Actually it’s quite easy to watch DVDs and browse menus with Mplayer. All you really need is a version that has dvdnav support enabled.

You can start the DVD the following way:

mplayer dvdnav://0 -dvd-device </dev/dvd | myfile.iso>

Quite easy, isn’t it?

Vodafone-Werbung “Heroes” Satire from Generation Upload

Unfortunately, XdccbLister has long been forgotten and XDCCB development moved on, leading to a discrepancy in file format output. Fortunately, though, the tool is free software so I’ve hacked together a very simple patch that should fix at least the biggest issues.

The patch can be applied against the v.0.5 you can grab at SourceForge. If you don’t want to do that, be it because you don’t have Perl or don’t know how, you can also grab a prebuild executable here.

Ab jetzt auch in einem Internet in Ihrer Nähe!

A to-do item on my list has always been enabling jumbo frames and LACP on my Opensolaris installation. So, let’s get this kicking!

Jumbo frames use a MTU of 9000 instead of 1500. Since I’ve aggregated nge0 and nge1 to aggr1 I can simply set the MTU of the aggr and the corresponding values will automatically be set on nge0 and nge1 (even if you don’t see them ):

ifconfig aggr1 unplumb
dladm set-linkprop -p mtu=9000 aggr1
ifconfig aggr1 plumb

Sweet stuff! Don’t forget to re-configure the address, netmask and gateway for the link. Now I want to enable LACP so I can make use of the combined throughput of the NICs:

dladm modify-aggr -L passive 1

Let’s check whether everything’s up and running as intended:

tsukasa@filesrv:/$ ifconfig aggr1
aggr1: flags=1000843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,MULTICAST,IPv4> mtu 9000 index 2
inet 192.168.X.X netmask ffffff00 broadcast 192.168.X.X

tsukasa@filesrv:/$ dladm show-aggr 1
LINK            POLICY   ADDRPOLICY           LACPACTIVITY  LACPTIMER   FLAGS
aggr1           L4       auto                 passive       short       -----

And indeed, everything went smooth.

Now, even with this boost in performance watching HD video over the network sometimes stuttered with many concurrent connections/operations going up- and downstream at the same time. Also, the Opensolaris 2009.06’s CIFS service has the unpleasant habit of dying and refusing to come up again until I reboot, so I went the easy way and simply enabled NFS for this ZFS system (can we call this a system? Mount? I don’t know…):

zfs set sharenfs=on filesrv/video

I didn’t have to do anything else or specify explicit rw options since I already mapped all the stuff before. Now, the only thing left to do:

mount filesrv:/filesrv/video /home/tsukasa/video -t nfs -o defaults,users,noauto,rsize=8192,wsize=8192,timeo=14,intr

And guess what, no more problems .

Schöne neue Welt.

Now, after trying a few different things (changing antennas, adapters etc.) I’ve given her a repeater for Mother’s Day. Take this as a little review, if you must.

The product I bought is the AVM Fritz!WLAN Repeater N/G, which promises easy, secure and fast setup and use. The repeater goes for about 70 Euros at Amazon, so it’s definitively more expensive than just buying a second WRT54GL and use it to bridge wireless connections.

AVM’s Fritz! repeater is a rather bulky plug for a power outlet, according to the relatively sparse guide you have to place it somewhere between the access point and the client it should serve. Sure thing, plugged the thing in.

First boot took about 2 minutes, since you have to wait for the new wireless network “AVM Fritz!WLAN Repeater” to appear and connect to it. Everything after is a piece of cake: Select the access point you want to repeat, give the passwords etc. and you’re good to go.

By default the repeater makes the SSID it repeats it’s own (which is questionable, but at least configurable). If you want to assign a static IP to the repeater you’re in for a bad surprise: You can’t. At least not in the repeater itself, you have to create a static lease on your DHCP server.

Just to give you an idea of the connection:
Before implementing the repeater in our network, my Mum’s connection was mere 20-30%, losing contact to the AP every few minutes (whenever a car passed by, the wind blew or some poltergeist would feel annoyed). Now, the repeater itself has a nice connection of 60-80% to the AP and serves my Mum’s computer with a strength of 85-98% which is exactly what we were aiming for. Since it’s a B/G network, connection goes up and down from 48MBit/s to 54MBit/s and vice versa at random, there are no connection drops though.

There are some useless gimmicks in the repeater: You can use it as a shortwave radio transmitter to broadcast your local music collection to radios accross the network (something that only works with Windows). Haven’t used it, won’t use it. Instead of implementing stuff like that, AVM should polish the interface and give it some advanced options for people who have to manage networks a little bit more restrictively.

Nice touch: The repeater can go to sleep/wake up at given time periods, unfortunately only fixed times, there’s no support for scenarios like “go to sleep x minutes after there’s no client”. So, our repeater goes down 20:30 and wakes up 05:00.

Booting time after the initial setup is acceptable. Settings are remembered across power-on/-off. The performance boost the repeater gives our B/G network at home is definitively notable. But is the device worth 70 Euros?

Personally, I think it is not worth the money. You can get all features by simply buying another WRT54GL for ~40-50 Euros. AVM’s repeater does not have any outstanding features that would justify the price tag. Quite the opposite: The lack of fine-grained control over the repeater makes it a bad choice for people who really want to get the most out of their wireless connection. For people who just want to get stuff moving quickly, it may be the right choice, though.

The Fujitsu-Siemens SAS controller worked out of the box (as predicted) and wasn’t castrated to only operate on FSC boards (nice!). The only thing I could moan about is the slot card… I had to lose one screw in order to make it fit into the PCIe slot… who cares.

Enabling SSH in a Nexenta zone can be bitchy, this should do the trick…
Add the following line to /lib/svc/method/svc-syseventd:

[ `zonename` = global ] || sleep 3600 & exit 0

Do a “dpkg-reconfigure sunwcsd” and “svccfg import /var/svc/manifest/system/sysevent.xml”. After that you should be able to enable ssh through svcadm.

Installing Java is easier, fortunately. Although aptitude install sun-java6-bin will fail, the following will work:

$ su -
# export SUN_PERSONALITY=1
# aptitude install nevada-compat
# aptitude install sun-java6-bin
# exit

Overall, there’s a little bit of tweaking necessary to get through some pitfalls of Nexenta, but it is definitively worth it.

So, I’ve finally added the missing pieces, namely mainboard, memory and a CPU. I opted for an Asus P5N64 WS Professional mainboard (mainly because nForce is reasonably well supported on Solaris), some Corsair 1333MHz DDR3 RAM and an Intel Q8200 CPU. Assembling everything was no problem – and much to my rejoice the operating system didn’t make a fuss either! Currently the machine still runs the old Linux installation with Nexenta Core Platform on another disk.

Sure, I had to do some handywork before network was back: On Linux I had to force a load of forcedeth and reconfigure my interfaces through /etc/network/interfaces and added bonding. Still, not much to do, all drivers present without binkering.

Solaris didn’t play so nice in the beginning, for some reason I had to plug-in both ethernet cables in order to complete the boot. After that I simply unplumbed the interfaces, disabled nwam through svcadm, enabled physical through svcadm (allowing me to manually configure the interfaces) and finally bonded/aggregated the interfaces through dladm. I do have to say that I like the way Solaris allows configuration of network interfaces way better than the standard Linux method (mainly: fire up vim and edit everything). The nice thing: I really didn’t have to install/download/compile anything, Solaris came loaded with all necessary drivers.

Now, the good news is that all the important components (SAS controller, SATA controller, ethernet, PCI and PCI-e bridges) work fine on Linux and Solaris. Bad news: I didn’t get to test wireless LAN and sound yet, that’s not really the purpose of that machine .

So, what’s the verdict on the P5N64 WS Pro in terms of non-Windows compatibility? It’s great, the board comes with 3 PCI-e 16x ports, 2 gigabit ethernet ports (Marvell), 2x eSATA and — much to my rejoice — a BIOS debugger. There is 1 PCI slot for your old stuff (in my case, maybe an old IDE controller or TV card) and 1 pinset for front-panel USB. A COM port slot is included in the package, which is a welcome addition. As usual Asus delivers a lot of stuff with the mainboard, unfortunately they didn’t provide a CD-ROM to restore the BIOS (AMI BIOS; which I had to do already…).

Next week I’ll plug-in the PCI-e SAS controller from Fujitsu-Siemens (which is based on LSI’s SAS1068) and get going with my JBODs .

There’s also a professional version that doesn’t have any throughput limitations but also only accesses one file at the time.

One thing I really like about this software is it’s ease of use. You just specify the disk, run a more-or-less quick scan (there are several levels available) and bam, you’re able to mount the partition and browse through your files (or what’s left of them). It’s so dead simple, you can hardly go wrong.

Other products like Active@ Partition Recovery aren’t bad but way slower and harder to use — at least in my simple case.

VDPAU is nVidia’s answer to AMD’s XvBA, both representing APIs to succeed the XvMC fame of decoding video material directly on the GPU – but this time not limited to MPEG2.

For this very reason I had to switch my graphic cards. I previously used a EVGA GeForce 8800 GTS/640, one of the older models of the series. Now I’m flying on a brand new EVGA GeForce 9800 GT which is basically the very same card but with a newer chip.

The performance gain is tremendous, the CPU usage fell from 100% to 1.9%!

You can force mplayer to prefer vdpau’d codecs by adding the following lines to your ~/.mplayer/config:

vo=vdpau,xv
vc=ffh264vdpau,ffmpeg12vdpau,ffvc1vdpau,ffwmv3vdpau,

This will use VDPAU and it’s codecs when possible and fall back on autodetect in all other cases.

All you need to get started with this great feature is a VDPAU patch, the newest nVidia driver and a supported card. Try it, it’s absolutely fantastic .

As clever readers of my blog probably noticed already — I like NAS systems. I was so fond of them, that my first post in 2008 basically said “I’m going to build one”. Now, one year later it’s slowly coming along.

I tested some basic hardware components over the last few weeks and received the case I opted for today. The case itself is a Sharkoon Rebel12 Value Edition, a relatively cheap, big case for ATX boards. It features a large number of 5.25″ bays, so there’s a lot of room for expansion — or is there? Unfortunately Sharkoon had to place steel guides at each bay, normally not a problem if you just want to insert a CD-ROM or DVD drive. But for a SATA backplane module, this easily becomes a lot of hassle.

I ended up cutting the steel guides with a hacksaw since I won’t need them anyway and trying to bend them was a phenomenal waste of time. Now the backplane fits perfectly into the case (just as intended) and I’ve thrown the ol’ hardware from my small fileserver into the new case to test it. I’m quite pleased up to this point, although my hands are incredibly sore now.

There is plenty of room in the case, making the mounting of the mainboard a breeze. The PSU goes in the bottom of the case, a strange decision but makes changing the darn thing very easy, so it is highly appreciated.

The only thing I will probably have to change is the front-panel fan: It blocks 3 bays – way too much. As soon as I receive the Scythe fan I ordered for the back of the machine, I’ll give this a try. The SATA backplanes do have fans as well, so I hope ventilation won’t be that much of a problem.

Next week I’ll mount the second and third backplane into the machine — unfortunately I won’t be able to use them, though. As long as I miss the new mainboard, CPU and SATA controller there’s only two SATA ports onboard. But oh well, the hardware does come from an old machine, so I’m thankful it does work after all that hack and slash I did to the case and it’s hardware.

Pictures will follow!

– “Don’t shout at your JBODs, they don’t like it!”

Don’t fret, of course you can run this application with Wine:
The only thing to notice here is that you need to set your Windows version to Windows 98, otherwise the application will always go haywire when loading a picture.

All features are working perfectly, no native DLLs needed.

That’s pretty annoying if you don’t know that the contents does indeed come from Klipper. So, just clear your Klipper history and you should be fine.

Of course, that means you can download the API wrapper straight from the web as well and don’t have to mangle around with subversion anymore .

But the question tips of another aspect: LINQ in combination with the wrapper.

As the entire assembly is written with extendability in mind, let me say: Yes, you can easily use LINQ with the wrapper:

If you want to build an in-folder search that also cares about subfolders though, recursively get the files from the folders, add them to a global index, run LINQ queries over it and export the Url of the result files back in. Easy as that.

Upon installing the VMware Tools, though, you’ll notice that the mouse gets stuck in the lower right corner of the screen if you didn’t remove the VirtualPC tools beforehand. Quite annoying, isn’t it? This comment describes how to solve the problem:

• Fire up regedit, navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetContro lClass.
• Within the keys under Class look for a value named UpperFilters, containing the value “msvmmouf”.
• Remove “msvmmouf” from the value and reboot your VM.

Nifty.

There are a few things missing from the Professional version, though. The lack of a powerful profiler for everyone still makes me shake my head but I’m using Red Gate’s ANTS profiler anyway, so who cares.

Let’s talk about some updates, add-ins and extras you should definetively try…

• Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 Service Pack 1
  This service pack adds a plethora of new features, enhancements and bug fixes and should be installed right away. Data scaffolding, new WinForms controls, an entire new data modelling framework, countless WPF enhancements… you name it, it’s probably in the SP already.
• PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2008
  This package contains numerous nifty functions that’ll improve your sourcecode and workflow. Remove unnecessary usings, open command prompts on the fly, way better undo… just read about the features on the homepage and try it, you won’t regret it.
• AnkhSVN
  I don’t like SourceSafe. For it’s requirements it gives back very little. In comparison Subversion performs great: You don’t need a server or anything, just create a repository on your local disk, check in your files and start branching, merging and keeping book of your changes. And best of it all: It’s free. Now, that’s where AnkhSVN comes into play – it adds TortoiseSVN’s power into Visual Studio. Don’t know how I worked without this.

So, what’s missing on this list? Let me know .

I don’t know why people keep nagging at the game, it’s great and just what I’d expect of a new title of the franchise.

The only thing I can really get mad about are the horrible DRM-esque copy protection, the need to register at least 2 accounts (1x Rockstar Social, 1x Windows Live) and the massive memory leak that brings down the performance after a few hours of play.

So, come on Rockstar… Instead of spending thousands and thousands of dollars to keep the game copy-protected, spend a few thousands on debugging the PC version – for Pete’s sake. It really isn’t funny and the fact that the game doesn’t even start with ATi graphic cards is… ok, that’s to be expected .