Michal Čihař - Archive for 6/2006

During yesterday afternoon I moved most of my things to new flat. I didn't expect I have so much things :-). However it went smoothly, I only feel really tired today.

There is still lot of work there, but we will hopefully manage it soon. One of first thing is internet connection, which is must for me. Until it is ready don't expect me to react quickly on emails and or bugs. Anyway I'll try to handle regullar mails during day at work.

On request I enabled generation of package lists for all architectures in my repository. So you can now install startict-english-czech on all arches directly using apt without need to manually download this package.

And not this does not mean I will build binaries for other arches, they will be still i386 and amd64 only, others will contain just Arch: all packages.

Yesterday Google released beta version of Google Earth which runs natively on Linux. As it is great toy I wanted to immediatelly test it :-). However it ran damn slow and libgl was complaining about wrong structure sizes:

ERROR! sizeof(I830DRIRec) does not match passed size from device driver

After some Googling I found bug #359328 which tells to use CVS snapshot of Mesa from experimental. Any yay, it works then. Now back to work let's contiue with playing later.

It looks like somebody in company Digital Infinity Ltd loves to read my blog. Maybe they should consider setting up personal mirror as if every computer in their address space is going to download whole blog as they did it today, it will cost them lot of bandwidht and I will get really upset and iptables will get new rule about 208.66.195.0 - 208.66.195.15.

So it's up to you, you have been warned.

I just finished make distclean in my CDs. In past years I collected many data CDs which I will hardly use in future. Many of them contains various software for Windows I used in past, rest are free applications which were given with some computer magazines. They are anyway obsolete by now even if I'd use Windows.

So about hundred of CDs travels to waste bin for a long jurney to landfill :-).

When I noticed that something like indexing services for blogs exists, I hacked simple dog command to download ping page. This worked more or less, but it didn't gave me any feedback. Today I decided it's time to switch to something more sophisticated.

As most (if not all) services are using XML-RPC with same functions, implementing this in python using xmlrpclib was quite easy. After few minutes reading documentation I had working code which can be attached to publish command in nanoblogger:

import xmlrpclib
import sys

def do_ping(url):
    print "Pinging %s ... " % url,
    sys.stdout.flush()
    try:
        s = xmlrpclib.ServerProxy(url)
        r = s.weblogUpdates.ping("Nijel's Weblog", "http://blog.cihar.com/")
        if r['flerror']:
            print "FAILED"
            print " error: %s" % r['message']
        else:
            print "ok"
        sys.stdout.flush()
    except Exception,v:
        print "FAILED"
        print " error: %s" % str(v)

do_ping("http://ping.blo.gs/")

I'm only affraid that ping services don't like me much now as during testing I produced lots of pings :-).

More than month after starting this blog, it's time to summarise experiences with nanoblogger. I enjoy blogging this way much more than previously used web based interface on abclinuxu.cz. Partly this is caused by change in editing (vim is much better than textarea in browser), another reason definitely is markdown which allows me to forget about HTML in most cases.

Anyway this way leads to creating many short posts, while previously I usually posted longer stories. I don't know which way is better and readers do prefer :-). So I will try to keep rate on approximately one (short) post per day.

And back to nanoblogger. It's not perfect system, however I was not able to find better suited for me. Generating blog is quote slow, but I don't care much. I had to switch to CVS version because some URLs were wrong in rc. And I had to modify even this CVS version to fit my needs, but those were only small changes. If you want text editor driven blogging system without comment support, nanoblogger might be good choice for you, otherwise you probably need something else.

I today spent quite a lot of time while trying to setup new television OVP CTV 2991 RF DVB-T. The only reason why we choose this one is because it is cheap and has integrated DVB-T tuner. Set top box was not an option because it would be too complicated for grandma who will be the only user.

The DVB-T tunes in this TV seems to be crap. It requires much stronger signal than my Hauppauge Nova-USB. Why the hell they can not make simmilar quality receiver as in cheap USB adapter? And don't trust anybody who will tell you that DVB-T can be received on anything.

Upon several requests I added another demo which is configured to use config authentication, so you can again directly link subpages without need to enter login information.

While working with that I also removed 2.8.0 branch from demo and CVS snapshots as it is not maintained and updated anymore.

After quite long searching we finally managed to choose new place to live. Looking was hard due to requirements on low price and good quality, however I thing result is quite good. It's located at the end of Prague near underground station Opatov.

Moving will start next week, hurray.