Tag: not_ok

Categories
General blog entries

KBlogger moved to KDE 4.3

And yet another epic fail for KBlogger, the new blogging tool that was supposed to be in KDE 4.0. After KDE-PIM was not ready for the 4.0 launch, it was postponed to KDE 4.1 – understandable but as anyone running a blog and a PC using KDE4 knows, we don’t have any decent blogging tool on linux.

After an early alpha (which was a step in the right direction) is became very quiet around KBlogger. So when KDE 4.1 was released I was surprised to see the lack of info about the new blogging tool.

When I found KBlogger on the KDE 4.2 release schedule I sighed – another half year to wait on a decent replacement for Windows Live Writer (which is still – in my opinion – one of the best blogging tool out there, even when used in VirtualBox).

Now, at the dawn of 2009 and the coming of KDE 4.2 I found it weird that the beta of 4.2 lacked a preview of KBlogger.

I just found these mail conversations on the KDE mailing list pushing KBlogger to KDE 4.3…. which is supposed to come out end 2009. Once again a huge let down for the KDE fans.

Despite the statements that KDE 4 is feature complete it keeps lacking vital programs: KDE PIM has a screwed up Kitchsync support (which in itself is half broken if you ask me), power management just arrived in 4.2 (Powerdevil) and KBlogger is still not here (even though its core component KBlog – a WYSIWYG editor – is working pretty well for some time now). I am still using KDE 4.x but so far the thrill has become quiet the waiting game. Yay for open source I suppose…

Categories
General blog entries

Configuring custom remote buttons for XBMC

When you are the proud owner of a MCE remote, you are set for use with XBMC. However, if you are using a custom remote (like the one that came with my Thermaltake DH-101 MediaLab kit) – you might wonder how you are going to get all the buttons to work. Short answer: you won’t by using the Lircmap.xml file.

I configured my remote using Lircmap.xml like it stated on the site and it worked fine. I modified the bit in both Lircmap.xml and Keymap.xml until the point came where you want to add buttons that are not on the standard remote.

I figured, I could just add another button to the section of Keymap.xml – in my case XBMC.EjectTray() but although XBMC started fine, you wind up with this:

ERROR: Remote Translator: Can't find button eject

This is because XBMC uses a fixed map to determine which buttons are valid. Instead of simply adding buttons by name, they have identifiers for each button so adding your own buttons won’t work.

At this point, you have 2 options:

First, if you only have a few buttons you could recycle unused buttons. Open up http://xbmc.org/trac/browser/trunk/XBMC/xbmc/ButtonTranslator.cpp and look for the function called ‘CButtonTranslator::TranslateRemoteString(const char *szButton)’; ctrl+f it if you can’t find it, right now it is at line 777. See the lines following it? Those are the valid button names. For example: ‘if (strButton.Equals(“left”)) wButtonCode = XINPUT_IR_REMOTE_LEFT;’ – in this line the name ‘left’ is specified. Look for buttons you are not using and override their action in Keymap.xml.

The second option is a bit trickier. First, create ‘advancedsettings.xml’ in de userdata folder and put ‘true’ inside the file. Restart XBMC and start monitoring the XBMC log (by default under /var/tmp/xbmc-user.log’).

Start pressing all remote buttons and note which obc code they produce. Add all these codes to Keymap.xml under the tag – create it if you have to. A valid piece would look like:

[keymap]
	[global]
		[universalremote]
			[obc30]XBMC.EjectTray()[/obc30]
		[/universalremote]
		...

Note that I replaced the tag start and endings with ‘[‘ and ‘]’ because my site seems to eat the correct ones.

Good luck taming XBMC and if you can’t figure out how to read the source file with the button names, you can look at this wiki article from the XBMC website. Note that it is usually out of date.

Update: the OBC codes only worked when I was using my universal remote with the XBox setting – unfortunately, this does not seem to work for specific remotes. Drat.

Categories
General blog entries

Download videos from Crunchyroll

With Dattebayo dropping Naruto Shippuden because CrunchyRoll will legaly release just hours after TV Tokyo airs, I decided it was time to write some magic to download the videos from Crunchroll. You see, I have a HTPC in my living room and I don’t really fancy watching Naruto in a browser when the time comes.

Disclaimer: this will NOT allow you to download paid shows without paying. Personal use only, don’t be an **** and distribute the video.

This will only work in FireFox – also, it will only work on the H264 videos. Put the following code in a file and install it into GreaseMonkey:

crunchroll_video_download.js

// ==UserScript== // @name           Provide download link on Crunchroll videos // @namespace      http://www.crunchyroll.com/ // @description    This script extracts the file name from the player code to allow the user to download it. // @include        http://www.crunchyroll.com/media-*/*.html?h264=1 // ==/UserScript== // Get the div holding the player object var div = document.getElementById('showmedia_left_col_new'); // Grab the script in that div which constructs the player var script = div.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; // Extract the configuration array from the script content var config_str = /"config":"([^"]+)"/.exec(script.innerHTML); // Decode the URI encoding which is used on the config parameter, we now have some XML structure var html = decodeURI(config_str[1]); // Grab the file tag from the XML content var filename = unescape(/([^<]+)/.exec(html)[1]);  // Find the message box on this page var msgbox = document.getElementById('message_box'); // Remove the style which hides it msgbox.setAttribute('style',''); // Get all divs inside the message box var divs = msgbox.getElementsByTagName('div'); // Set this to the div which should hold the message var msgdiv = null; // Loop through all found children to find the right one, with a class name 'message-list' for(i = 0; i < divs.length; i++) { 	if(divs[i].className == 'message-list') { 		msgdiv = divs[i]; 		break; 	} }
Categories
How-To's

Compiling Courier 0.60.0 into RPMs for CentOS 5.2

In this article I will explain how to build RPM packages from the tar.gz packages on the Courier site in order to install Courier and/or its components using the RPM based installer in CentOS.

Server crashes always come when you least expect them. My trusty server just came down with a bad case of broken SATA controllers (don’t know how to cure that). Of course, the socket A cpu (Athlon 2600XP) motherboard is long out of fashion and so we wind up with the purchase of a new server (technically an HTPC but I’ll post something about that later on).

One of the key packages I use for years is Courier MTA. This software is supported fine by Gentoo but because the number of servers that I need to maintain is steadily growing, the drive for cutting edge kernels and software is fading as upgrading Gentoo systems can be a time consuming process.

So in the reinstall I decided to drop the mail, web and ftp services into a virtual CentOS machine so I could move the server to a different computer in case of the physical host failing.

The first thing that became obvious was the lack of Courier RPM’s out there, simply because the Courier package from the site can be converted into RPM’s with ease. If you are reading this then you probably have not compiled packages before and you need some help.

Disclaimer: I am using a setup which uses MySQL based authentication so I will remove the other database packages as soon as I am done – if you need those, be sure to omit those commands.

Start out by installing ‘rpmbuild’ as we will use it to build the packages: 

yum install rpm-build

Next, get the latest source tarball from here.

As a normal user (running as root will give you an error so don’t bother) run the following: 

rpmbuild –ta courier-0.60.0.tar.bz2

In my case I got this error telling me I don’t have enough permissions to write where the rpmbuild tool wants to put its files: 

error: Failed to rename /usr/src/redhat/SPECS/rpm-spec.uykL0j to /usr/src/redhat/SPECS/rpm-spec.uykL0j: Permission denied: No such file or directory

This is a bother because Courier requires you to be non-root and rpmbuild requires you to be root. I solved this by temporarily changing the /usr/src/redhat owner to be me: 

chown berend:users /usr/src/redhat –R

Running rpmbuild again now shows us a list of missing dependencies, in my case I had to install: 

yum install expect libtool-ltdl-devel gdbm-devel pam-devel gnutls-devel mgetty-sendfax pcre-devel openssl-perl gamin-devel

One of the missing requirements is the ‘/usr/lib/ltdl.h’file – this is part of the libtool-ntdl-devel package. Another is ‘/usr/include/fam.h’ which is provided by gamin-devel.

The primary missing package however, is courier-authlib-devel. We can solve this by going back to the download page and downloading the courier-authlib tarball. After grabbing it, run rpmbuild on it: 

rpmbuild –ta courier-authlib-0.61.1.tar.bz2

On my system the following was required to be able to build the RPM: 

yum install libtool libtool-ltdl-devel openldap-devel mysql-devel zlib-devel postgresql-devel gcc-c++ redhat-rpm-config

Note that if you skipped installing the dependencies for courier itself, some of those packages are needed for courier-authlib as well.

After calling rpmbuild again on the courier-authlib tarball, the compiler should kick in and the build will complete on its own. After the build is complete, install courier-authlib-devel to be able to build Courier itself (you can later remove this if you don’t need it), you need to run this as root:

rpm –i /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/i386/courier-authlib-0.61.1-1.i386.rpm rpm –i /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/i386/courier-authlib-devel-0.61.1-1.i386.rpm

If did everything right, calling rpmbuild on the courier tarball will now fire up the compiler on courier itself, resulting in a neat pile of RPMs in ‘/usr/src/redhat/RPMS’ – most of which have self-explanatory names or are dependencies of each other.

Before installing Courier, lets clean up the mess we had to make to get here, run this as root again:

yum remove libtool libtool-ltdl-devel openldap-devel mysql-devel zlib-devel postgresql-devel gcc-c++ redhat-rpm-config gdbm-devel pam-devel gnutls-devel mgetty-sendfax pcre-devel openssl-perl gamin-devel courier-authlib-devel  chown root:root /usr/src/redhat –R

Note that we omit ‘expect’ from the remove command as it is needed by courier and its packages.

And there you have it, a complete guide to building your own Courier RPM packages on CentOS 5.2. All that is left is to actually install the RPM’s and set up Courier but that is beyond this little howto.

Categories
General blog entries

Restoring Windows 2003 SBS R2 Exchange

Windows 2003 SBS was always a bit weird for me. I’ve been playing with computers all my life and I know Windows Vista and earlier versions like the back of my hand but when it comes to server software on Windows I always have this unnerving feeling.

You should know that most of the time my presence is required when a server is almost dead or acting strangely so my experience shows that an unstable Windows server is usually ‘fixed’ by a complete reinstall – something I have never had to do to my linux servers.

Right now I am installing Windows 2003 SBS R2 for somebody I know. Their previous administrator never felt the need for finishing the setup or actually buying the license so when I came in, all I could do was reinstall the whole system.

I created a backup using NTbackup from the Exchange Store (which was half disabled on their server) and now I am trying to restore it. Guess what: it won’t.

I hate Microsoft for its poor practices and this is one of them: supplying backup tools that work within a very very confined space. In this case a fresh install will kill the option of restoring it without extensive Google-ing.

To be exact: I unmounted the Mailbox Store, marked it for restoration in the properties and fired up NTbackup to restore the backup. After setting a temp path (C:\temp) I hit restore and immediately see the whole thing fail. Of course NTbackup can’t tell me jack so I need to dig in the Application Log and I find this:

Event Type:  Error Event Source:  MSExchangeIS Event Category:  Exchange Backup Restore Event ID:  9635 User:  N/A Computer:  WIN2003 Description:  Failed to find a database to restore to from the Microsoft Active Directory.  Storage Group specified on the backup media is 581cb7ee-5fec-4d93-8f71-dcfe55a73319.  Database specified on backup media is Mailbox Store (SERVER1), error is 0xc7fe1f42.

After searching high and low I finally get a blog post from someone who solved this. The error is in fact so simple, they should execute the team that thought that this was a funny way to describe it.

The names don’t match. Seriously.

In the Server Console –> Advanced –> Exchange –> Servers –> Win2003 –> First Storage Group you will find a store called ‘Mailbox Store (WIN2003)’ – assuming your server is called win2003 – whereas the backup has a store called ‘Mailbox Store (SERVER1)’. NTbackup can’t fathom the possibility that we actually want to restore to a store on this server without the exact name match so it fails.

Solve this by right-clicking on the store, renaming it to the old name and restarting the restore. It will run now.

On a side note – this was not the end for me. I got event id 1088 after I managed to restore it: Distinguished Name is not the same for the Store and the server. I can’t grasp why them Redmond idiots haven’t made it possible to simply rename the DN of the store to make it work in case of a migration like now.

I tried renaming the legacy DN using the ADSI editor and the LegacyDN tool from the site. I couldn’t get it to work after trying 50 guides so finally I tried to uninstall the server software. This failed (of course) and left me with a system in which I couldn’t resume the setup. So after a new installation and 2 hours of waiting/babysitting I am back where I started, ready to restore my Exchange backup…

Categories
General blog entries

New Laptop

It has been quiet a while on this site while I was working and painting my living room. After the necessary stress of the ‘hollidays’ I decided it was time to buy myself a new laptop to replace my old 17″ HP laptop.

I finally settled for a 15 inch Dell XPS in Tuxedo Black. After 2 anxious weeks, the laptop arrived a week before the planned delivery date. Even though I was still pretty sick, I took some pain meds and manned up to get my new toy.

Currently I’m trying out all the software on this baby and some of it has to go. First thing up: ditch Internet Explorer, Windows Mail and Windows Media Player and replace them with Firefox, Thunderbird and Winamp.

After tuning Windows Vista and its software I’ll start installing Gentoo Linux – I can’t wait ^^.

Categories
General blog entries

Why I don’t like Ventrilo

Recently I installed Ventrillo because some red necks decided we needed a voice server for EVE Online and the in-game stuff won’t cut it. Ventrillo advertises with ‘advanced’ features like surround positioning and useless crap like that.

At first glance I’d say the GUI is old-skool, bit too plain and awkward to set up for the first time. It annoys the heck out of me where all panels are placed and how it all comes together.

Perhaps profiles are useful for some but not for me: I need a separate name for all servers I use in voice chats so profiles separate from the server settings is as useful as picking up your hamburger at a different counter from your fries…

Next up is the fact that it won’t minimize into the system tray, leaving me with yet another window to lug around.

Finally it has no Linux client. Seriously. It is in the works (or so the site says) but the do have a linux server, leaving me puzzled why linux is not supported in the first place.

The only cool thing that Ventrillo has (and Teamspeak will get in version 3.0 which is currently beta) is the surround stuff… Which I can’t try because I don’t have a surround setup on this computer…

Ow I long for the days where everyone would just stick to Teamspeak, which is still masterfully better suited for voice chat than all the other programs around…

Categories
General blog entries

MoveableType Plugin Joomla! enhanced

Joomla can be used in a blog like manner using the XML-RPC interface. Unfortunately, Joomla only provides a Blogger API plugin which is rather limited.

Luckely, some Japanese people created a plugin which improved the supported XMLRPC API’s. It’s called MoveableType XML-RPC Plugin and can be found on the Joomla site.

Technically this is not only a MoveableType implementation as it supports all functions needed for MetaWeblog and Blogger as well as Google Docs (since version 2.1.0).

The only thing driving me nuts is the fact that some blog tools refuse to work because the plugin refuses to return a list of supported functions (most programs just assume everthing is supported, which is wrong as almost everything is optional).

Fortunately this is solved quickly by adding a few lines of PHP to the plugins/xmlrpc/movabletype.php file. Find the following section (around line 790):

function mt_supportedMethods()    {       return (new xmlrpcresp(new xmlrpcval(array(), "array")));    }

Replace this with the following:

function mt_supportedMethods()    {       global $xmlrpcString, $xmlrpcArray;       $functions = array();       foreach(array_keys(plgXMLRPCMovableType::onGetWebServices()) as $function_name)          $functions[] = new xmlrpcval($function_name, $xmlrpcString);       $struct = new xmlrpcval($functions, $xmlrpcArray);       return new xmlrpcresp($struct);    }

And voila, there you have it, a fully working function listing enabling your favorite blog program to do its job properly…

Categories
General blog entries

Outlook and winmail.dat

In the legal world in the Netherlands the importance of email and websites is slowly starting to emerge. Of course, the huge, almost American-style law firms are using these techniques for years and years now, but the smaller law firms and the government itself always had a negative standing towards these modern day communication channels.

One of the most common complaints was the fact that the channels were not secure (this was one of the statements around the year 2000 while the rest of the world was starting to live and breath online). Now (2008) they are slowly dumping the fax machines (like those are secure) in favor of email. One of the things that became clear was the fact that they started using plain email. No PGP, no encryption, no secure mail storage – none of the above, which sort of surprised me (still does in fact).

If I have to be honest, both the fax and email are methods of communication that are pretty hard to intercept. You would need some decent skills to get even close to intercepting the communication and even now, the most important documents (originals and private documents) are still sent by postal mail. Thats right, normal old-skool hard copies. Probably one of the safest ways to sent stuff like that around. The only downside: transport can take a while, making rush jobs impossible (you probably would not want that anyway).

But I’m starting to side track here. The point is that they are finally starting to use email. Normal (status) communication is handled this way, think listings and charts, and has replaced the printed out versions that were driven between offices in the past. The downside of it all is the fact that these forms are now send around in Microsoft Word format, making conversions between offices error prone (try to explain that to them: Word = Word in the mind of an average legal secretary) and in fact, those errors have occured before. Think pages gone missing, tables out of alignment making the data useless etc. Mix in Open Office and you have yourself quite the party. I tried to explain that PDF might be a good option as prepared lists don’t need to be altered after they’ve been mailed to another office, but that suggestion has as much chance of becoming reality as me winning the lottery.

But that is the sort of crap we can handle. Everyone knows it is flawed so they expect problems. But now someone at the court of justice found the option in Microsoft Outlook to use RTF for the mailings. Probably to make pretty colors appear in the mailings or something. The result: the message (in RTF format) and the attachments are compiled into a winmail.dat binary and sent along with the plain text message.

Now, Outlook (and maybe Outlook Express) can do something with that, however Mozilla Thunderbird can not (any non-Microsoft mailer for that matter). I tried installing a 3rd party TNEF decoder, which worked but required a lot of extra steps. I finally found this Thunderbird add-on called LookOut, which in fact is an embedded TNEF decoder. After installing, any winmail.dat attachment found in a email will be decoded on the fly – showing the components inside as separate attachments.

Even though this sort of provides a work around, tomorrow I’ll call the department and have them check out who sent those mails. It a P.I.T.A. to fix each quirk those idiots come up with and frankly – they should get their act together, not all the law firms in The Netherlands have someone to fix these kinds of issues…

Categories
Linux / Gentoo Linux

Logitech Quickcam Communicate STX and Linux

Todays annoyance is the fact that my webcam was broken for months now because I couldn’t get the correct driver to work. To be exact, the device ID is 046d:08d7 and the correct driver for it is gspcav1, from this site. I tried the UVC driver from Berlios as well, but it only works with newer cameras (and as I upgraded from my perfectly fine Logitech Messenger just because Windows Vista needed it, Logitech can drop dead if they think I’ll buy yet another camera). Anyway, the UVC driver can be found here.

The problem I kept having was the fact that the gspcav1 driver was the only one for my camera but it wouldn’t compile. I would end up with this error dump:

make -C /usr/src/linux M=/var/tmp/portage/media-video/gspcav1-20071224/work/gspcav1-20071224 CC=x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-gcc modules
make[1]: Entering directory `/usr/src/linux-2.6.25-gentoo-r4'
  CC [M]  /var/tmp/portage/media-video/gspcav1-20071224/work/gspcav1-20071224/gspca_core.o
In file included from /var/tmp/portage/media-video/gspcav1-20071224/work/gspcav1-20071224/gspca_core.c:848:
/var/tmp/portage/media-video/gspcav1-20071224/work/gspcav1-20071224/Sunplus/spca506.h: In function 'spca506_SetNormeInput':
/var/tmp/portage/media-video/gspcav1-20071224/work/gspcav1-20071224/Sunplus/spca506.h:120: error: 'VIDEO_MODE_NTSC' undeclared (first use in this function)
/var/tmp/portage/media-video/gspcav1-20071224/work/gspcav1-20071224/Sunplus/spca506.h:120: error: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once
/var/tmp/portage/media-video/gspcav1-20071224/work/gspcav1-20071224/Sunplus/spca506.h:120: error: for each function it appears in.)
/var/tmp/portage/media-video/gspcav1-20071224/work/gspcav1-20071224/Sunplus/spca506.h:131: error: 'VIDEO_MODE_PAL' undeclared (first use in this function)
/var/tmp/portage/media-video/gspcav1-20071224/work/gspcav1-20071224/Sunplus/spca506.h:137: error: 'VIDEO_MODE_SECAM' undeclared (first use in this function)
/var/tmp/portage/media-video/gspcav1-20071224/work/gspcav1-20071224/gspca_core.c: In function 'spca5xx_get_depth':
/var/tmp/portage/media-video/gspcav1-20071224/work/gspcav1-20071224/gspca_core.c:1093: error: 'VIDEO_PALETTE_RGB565' undeclared (first use in this function)
/var/tmp/portage/media-video/gspcav1-20071224/work/gspcav1-20071224/gspca_core.c:1095: error: 'VIDEO_PALETTE_RGB24' undeclared (first use in this function)
/var/tmp/portage/media-video/gspcav1-20071224/work/gspcav1-20071224/gspca_core.c:1101: error: 'VIDEO_PALETTE_YUV420P' undeclared (first use in this function)
/var/tmp/portage/media-video/gspcav1-20071224/work/gspcav1-20071224/gspca_core.c:1104: error: 'VIDEO_PALETTE_RGB32' undeclared (first use in this function)
/var/tmp/portage/media-video/gspcav1-20071224/work/gspcav1-20071224/gspca_core.c: In function 'v4l_to_spca5xx':
/var/tmp/portage/media-video/gspcav1-20071224/work/gspcav1-20071224/gspca_core.c:1291: error: 'VIDEO_PALETTE_RGB565' undeclared (first use in this function)
/var/tmp/portage/media-video/gspcav1-20071224/work/gspcav1-20071224/gspca_core.c:1293: error: 'VIDEO_PALETTE_RGB24' undeclared (first use in this function)
/var/tmp/portage/media-video/gspcav1-20071224/work/gspcav1-20071224/gspca_core.c:1295: error: 'VIDEO_PALETTE_RGB32' undeclared (first use in this function)
/var/tmp/portage/media-video/gspcav1-20071224/work/gspcav1-20071224/gspca_core.c:1297: error: 'VIDEO_PALETTE_YUV422P' undeclared (first use in this function)
/var/tmp/portage/media-video/gspcav1-20071224/work/gspcav1-20071224/gspca_core.c:1299: error: 'VIDEO_PALETTE_YUV420P' undeclared (first use in this function)
/var/tmp/portage/media-video/gspcav1-20071224/work/gspcav1-20071224/gspca_core.c: In function 'spca50x_init_source':
/var/tmp/portage/media-video/gspcav1-20071224/work/gspcav1-20071224/gspca_core.c:1802: error: 'VIDEO_PALETTE_RGB24' undeclared (first use in this function)
/var/tmp/portage/media-video/gspcav1-20071224/work/gspcav1-20071224/gspca_core.c: In function 'spca5xx_setFrameDecoder':
/var/tmp/portage/media-video/gspcav1-20071224/work/gspcav1-20071224/gspca_core.c:1841: error: 'VIDEO_PALETTE_RGB24' undeclared (first use in this function)
/var/tmp/portage/media-video/gspcav1-20071224/work/gspcav1-20071224/gspca_core.c: In function 'spca5xx_do_ioctl':
/var/tmp/portage/media-video/gspcav1-20071224/work/gspcav1-20071224/gspca_core.c:2074: error: 'VIDIOCGCAP' undeclared (first use in this function)
/var/tmp/portage/media-video/gspcav1-20071224/work/gspcav1-20071224/gspca_core.c:2078: error: invalid application of 'sizeof' to incomplete type 'struct video_capability'

Note: I’m posting it all so someone might find it using a search engine because nobody else put this up.

The solution to this? So darn simple that I shouldn’t have missed it: enable Video For Linux 1 in the kernel. You see, this driver is designed for V4L1 and without the compatibility layer it will error like this. For the Gentoo users it seems like a problem which is here to stay as the ebuild can not check for this (only if any V4L version is enabled).

I still think it would be nice if the package maintainers put up a warning in the ebuild so I wouldn’t have to figure this out on my own… ahh well.

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