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<title>Life</title>
<link>http://blog.cihar.com/archives/life/</link>
<description>Random thoughts about everything…</description>
<dc:language>en-us</dc:language>
<dc:creator>Michal Čihař</dc:creator>
<dc:date>2008-06-17T18:02:16+02:00</dc:date>
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<item>
<link>http://blog.cihar.com/archives/2008/06/17/code_of_the_day/</link>
<title>Code of the day</title>
<dc:date>2008-06-17T16:50:58+02:00</dc:date>
<dc:creator>Michal Čihař</dc:creator>
<dc:subject>Life, Coding</dc:subject>
<description>
<![CDATA[<p>Why the hell do I have to hit various obscure pieces of code today? Current
winner is part of system-config-printer:</p>

<pre><code>def monitor_session (*args):
    pass

try:
    bus = dbus.SessionBus()
    bus.add_signal_receiver (monitor_session)
except:
    print &gt;&gt; sys.stderr, "%s: failed to connect to session D-Bus" % \
          PROGRAM_NAME
    sys.exit (1)
</code></pre>

<p>If you don't know D-Bus or Python: It listens to all signals on session bus
and does nothing with them. All this code causes is eating up memory and CPU
cycles when there is some higher load on session bus.</p>

<p>PS: Maybe I miss some nice idea behind this code, please enlighten me.</p>]]>
</description>
</item>
<item>
<link>http://blog.cihar.com/archives/2008/03/03/jabber_server_side_message_archiving/</link>
<title>Jabber server side message archiving</title>
<dc:date>2008-03-03T21:00:55+02:00</dc:date>
<dc:creator>Michal Čihař</dc:creator>
<dc:subject>Life</dc:subject>
<description>
<![CDATA[<p>One of reasons to setup my own Jabber server was to be able to store
history on server while having data under my control. I use Jabber
clients from several locations and having history on the server seems to
be logical step.</p>

<p>Unfortunately implementations of <a href="http://www.xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0136.html">XEP-0136</a> are a bit lacking. During
install I enabled <a href="http://www.ejabberd.im/mod_archive">mod_archive</a>, but it was not using up to date
specification and there is no client which works with it, so there was
no way to view data in it. Recently I found out that rewrite of this
module exists - <a href="http://www.ndl.kiev.ua/typo/articles/2007/11/14/mod_archive_odbc-release">mod_archive_odbc</a>. It is implementing current
version of XEP-0136 and is using SQL database for storage (so at least writing
SQL query to grab data is not that complicated as with Mnesia database
used by original version).</p>

<p>Migrating of current history went quite good using <a href="http://www.ndl.kiev.ua/typo/articles/2007/11/14/libwsw-wswutil-release">wswutils</a>, at
least I did not notice any problems so far. The only problem is no
support from clients. The only reliable way which works for now is
<a href="http://bepointbe.be/jabwebhist/">Jabber archive web reader</a>, but I'd really like to see integration
in <a href="http://gajim.org/">Gajim</a>, any volunteers? :-)</p>]]>
</description>
</item>
<item>
<link>http://blog.cihar.com/archives/2008/02/07/when_non_ascii_names_will_finally_work/</link>
<title>When non ASCII names will finally work?</title>
<dc:date>2008-02-07T14:35:23+02:00</dc:date>
<dc:creator>Michal Čihař</dc:creator>
<dc:subject>Life</dc:subject>
<description>
<![CDATA[<p>By using my name in various web services I usually spot bad
implementation of displaying name field in their website. I can see that
over years the amount of servers which cripple my name to something like
ÄŒihaÅ™ is getting lower, but there are still lots of them. When I find
way how to report it, I usually do so and I always enjoy fields like
"How to repeat". This time the guilty one is the <a href="http://bugs.mysql.com/34372">MySQL bugtracker</a>.</p>

<p>PS: Fortunately all Debian pages seem to catch up this year and my name
is no longer crippled in NEW queue or Lintian pages :-).</p>]]>
</description>
</item>
<item>
<link>http://blog.cihar.com/archives/2008/01/18/toshiba_acpi_keys_hal_and_friends/</link>
<title>Toshiba ACPI keys, HAL and friends</title>
<dc:date>2008-01-18T13:44:07+02:00</dc:date>
<dc:creator>Michal Čihař</dc:creator>
<dc:subject>Life, Coding, Debian</dc:subject>
<description>
<![CDATA[<p>Long time ago I used <a href="http://fnfx.sourceforge.net/">FnFX</a> to handle events from ACPI keys on my
Toshiba notebook. However when <a href="http://blog.cihar.com/archives/2007/10/03/reinstalling_notebook/">reinstalling notebook</a> because of
disk crash, I thought there must be a cleaner way to handle these and I
found patch for acpid which added handling of these special events.</p>

<p>However I really didn't like patching acpid on every update and there
didn't seem to be chance to merge it upstream, so I started to look for
better solution. After another amount of googling, I found that HAL
already has some support for Toshiba hotkeys. Unfortunately it is now
<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=400605">disabled in Debian</a> because most key did not emit anything using
HAL.</p>

<p>Okay, let's fix the HAL, maybe it will get later enabled. Converting
FnFX keymap to C code was quite easy and I made a <a href="http://cihar.com/patches/hal/toshiba_more_keys.patch">patch for HAL</a> to
add support for all keys. Hopefully it get merged soon and I can then
file bug on Debian package to reenable Toshiba support in HAL.</p>

<p>Meanwhile I'd like to find some generic way of configuring what happens
on these events. For now I hacked <a href="http://viewsvn.cihar.com/viewvc.cgi/scripts/trunk/bin/dbus-key-monitor">simple Python script</a> which
listens to DBUS events and invokes appropriate commands for keys, but I
hope that some such tool already exists and I just missed it. If you
know something, please let me know at <a href="&#109;&#97;&#x69;&#108;&#116;&#111;:&#109;&#x69;&#x63;&#x68;&#97;&#108;&#64;&#99;&#105;&#104;&#x61;&#x72;&#46;&#99;&#x6F;&#109;">&#109;&#x69;&#x63;&#x68;&#97;&#108;&#64;&#99;&#105;&#104;&#x61;&#x72;&#46;&#99;&#x6F;&#109;</a>.</p>]]>
</description>
</item>
<item>
<link>http://blog.cihar.com/archives/2008/01/15/good_bye_enca/</link>
<title>Good bye Enca</title>
<dc:date>2008-01-15T10:48:10+02:00</dc:date>
<dc:creator>Michal Čihař</dc:creator>
<dc:subject>Life</dc:subject>
<description>
<![CDATA[<p>Some days ago I was notified by <a href="http://dehs.alioth.debian.org/">DEHS</a> that <a href="http://packages.debian.org/sid/enca">Enca</a> homepage is
unreachable. Okay, this happens sometimes. But as the error lasted
longer and longer, I decided to ask author about it.</p>

<p>Unfortunately the reply was that this nice software is not maintained
anymore and computer which hosted it's homepage is gone. As it would be
bad to loose this software completely, I offered place to host downloads
for it. No, I'm not going to develop it, I already have enough projects
for which I don't have enough time. So my server has just become  a
<a href="http://dl.cihar.com/MIRROR/enca/">download place for Enca</a>.</p>]]>
</description>
</item>
<item>
<link>http://blog.cihar.com/archives/2007/12/13/time_to_move_from_nanoblogger/</link>
<title>Time to move from Nanoblogger?</title>
<dc:date>2007-12-13T12:06:32+02:00</dc:date>
<dc:creator>Michal Čihař</dc:creator>
<dc:subject>Life, Coding</dc:subject>
<description>
<![CDATA[<p>After more than year and half of blogging with <a href="http://nanoblogger.sourceforge.net/">Nanoblogger</a>, I'm
still more and more thinking about trying something else. With almost
500 entries I currently have, generating blog takes more and more time.
Otherwise there is not anything I'd miss, but something with comments
might be also better.</p>

<p>I didn't yet find time to investigate currently available blog engines,
but from what I remember in past, it was hard to choose something. What
is thing which many engines fail to fulfill is ability to use text
editor instead of writing text in browser. The other thing I'd like to
see is to have more than category (or tag) per post. Maybe <a href="http://ikiwiki.info/">ikiwiki</a>
would be good candidate for this...</p>

<p>However what to do with old content? Should it be migrated to new
system? I doubt it will be able to keep old URLs what is something I'd
like...</p>]]>
</description>
</item>
<item>
<link>http://blog.cihar.com/archives/2007/11/24/i_hate_this_system/</link>
<title>I hate this system</title>
<dc:date>2007-11-24T11:53:44+02:00</dc:date>
<dc:creator>Michal Čihař</dc:creator>
<dc:subject>Life</dc:subject>
<description>
<![CDATA[<p>My girlfriend has to use Windows, because university she studies does not give
her another option. Now she got some crap on which she should do some
statistics. This crap is being called SAS. I have not yet seen how does it
look like, but I already enjoyed funny hours with it's installer. As I'm
currently on the other side of world, I have to do all remotely...</p>

<p>The basic problem is simple: I do not have much space on C: drive and it does
not provide option to install on another drive. First she tried to install it
herself, the setup fucked up so much, that it deleted NTLDR and friends from
root folder, so Windows didn't boot up again. Fortunately there is also Debian
on that machine, so she booted to it, I installed ntfs-3g and restored needed
files from Windows XP installation CD (the recovery console did not work,
don't ask me why). So great, after about one hour we have back working
Windows!</p>

<p>Now I still did not have idea what is the problem. However the failure
appeared when the crap was trying to install some special JRE it has included.
When I started the installer for this JRE manually, it showed that there is
not enough space. Why the hell did not the original installer show this? Well
I did some cleanup on the disk and I got 1GB of free space. Hope that it will
be enough.</p>

<p>No. Somewhere near 58% installation is fucked up again with error -2147483648.
Wow nice number! Looking at disk space, it's down to few kilobytes. So again
the same problem! Okay, let's clean it up more and hopefully installer will
resume. But I should not hope for anything good from this installer. The only
option it now gives me is to reboot.</p>

<p>Reboot, start again installer and let's see what will break this time. Now it
found out that some Microsofts runtime is missing. Why it was not missing last
time? Okay, let's install it and (of course) we need another reboot. System
started up, installer launched and it seems to go on quite well, only the
last few percents are taking incredibly long, but the crap seems to finally
installed and it even runs!</p>

<p>Few questions: Why they do not check for required space in installer? Why do
they force me to disable anti virus during installation? Why does not remote
desktop from Windows work? Why is there such mess in Windows, especially in
Windows folder? Why are temporary files located all over the disk?</p>

<p>As last but not least thing I would like to thanks everybody who made ntfs-3g
and VNC work, I would never fix this without these tools.</p>]]>
</description>
</item>
<item>
<link>http://blog.cihar.com/archives/2007/10/03/reinstalling_notebook/</link>
<title>Reinstalling notebook</title>
<dc:date>2007-10-03T11:50:38+02:00</dc:date>
<dc:creator>Michal Čihař</dc:creator>
<dc:subject>Life, Debian</dc:subject>
<description>
<![CDATA[<p>Man never realizes how much customised distribution he has until he has
to reinstall it. Last week hard disk in my notebook died, so I had to
reinstall system and reconfigure everything. I fortunately have backups
of almost everything (at least I didn't notice that anything would be
missing), but I anyway spend two evenings in installing, configuring and
restoring from backups and I'm still not done with it, but the system is
at least usable for normal work.</p>

<p>However there are also some positive things on this: I get more space
and faster disk. I finally set up encrypted file system on my notebook.
I dropped several old crap that lived (or better was buried) somewhere
in my system and which I already forgot why it was there.  And I also
got rid of very bad partitioning scheme, which was there from times I
used together Debian and Windows and wanted to have another partition to
test SUSE installation while I worked there. Now there is only Debian to
rule them all ;-).</p>]]>
</description>
</item>
<item>
<link>http://blog.cihar.com/archives/2007/05/25/fighting_with_tons_of_mails/</link>
<title>Fighting with tons of mails</title>
<dc:date>2007-05-25T13:57:50+02:00</dc:date>
<dc:creator>Michal Čihař</dc:creator>
<dc:subject>Life</dc:subject>
<description>
<![CDATA[<p>Recently spam checking stopped to be enough to prevent my mailbox to
grow to incredible sizes, so I had to look for some possibility to block
viruses and other malware. The obvious choice went to open source
anti-virus <a href="http://www.clamav.net/">Clamav</a>.</p>

<p>Setting up was pretty easy, especially when there are tons of howtos on
the net (e.g. <a href="http://koivi.com/exim4-config/">Installing and configuring Exim 4 on Debian</a>). All I
had to do was to install Clamav and configure Exim to talk to it and
reject unwanted stuff.</p>

<p>And what are results? Quite impressive - 154860 caught viruses in last
24 hours.I wonder that lots of them were also caught by SpamAssassin,
because I definitely didn't receive that much malware in a day.</p>]]>
</description>
</item>
<item>
<link>http://blog.cihar.com/archives/2007/05/05/my_phone_finally_can_make_silent_photos/</link>
<title>My phone finally can make silent photos</title>
<dc:date>2007-05-05T14:24:25+02:00</dc:date>
<dc:creator>Michal Čihař</dc:creator>
<dc:subject>Life</dc:subject>
<description>
<![CDATA[<p>This was feature which I always hate - phone made strange sound when
taking photo. Fortunately I'm not alone who hates this and there are
several howtos on net which should guide you to do this.</p>

<p>The only way which worked for me at the end was replacing sounds in
phone filesystem, so that it plays silent sounds. For Sony-Ericsson
K750i with CID 49 BROWN you need specially hacked FAR from
<a href="http://www.se-tuning.cz/viewtopic.php?t=1822">SE-tuning.cz</a> and just replace files in filesystem
(<code>/tpa/preset/system/sound</code>). Now phone magically makes no
sounds when taking photos :-).</p>]]>
</description>
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