Rough Book

Sorry for the downtime. My webserver had a failing hard-drive and I figured that while I was replacing the hard-drive, I would upgrade the entire machine as well. The box was a Pentium 4 1.4Ghz with 512MB of RAM that I hadn’t upgraded since I first built it in 2002. Now it’s been upgraded to a Pentium 4 2.4Ghz (hyper-threaded) with 1GB of RAM. Building from source will be a lot faster now! The whole upgrade process took a while because I was also in the process of upgrading another one of my machines and that took for EVER (some issues with shorting). Finally I had to install FreeBSD (version 8.0) on the new hard-drive as well as Apache, PHP, MySQL, WordPress etc. After I have everything set up, I’m going to make sure that I image the hard-drive so that I can restore it from backup easily.

I tried to install ShapeWriter from the Android Marketplace yesterday and couldn’t find it (I was trying to reinstall it after flashing my phone with Cyanogenmod 5.0.8). After searching the interwebs, I found out that it had been removed from the marketplace on June 20th indefinitely (supposedly for QA issues). Luckily I had backed up the app using MyBackup Pro and still had the APK, so I was able to reinstall it. I’m putting the APK up here for anyone who needs to reinstall ShapeWriter.

Download ShapeWriter APK

I set up git on my FreeBSD box so that I can commit my code to GitHub. Today I tried to scp some stuff over and I was met with this rather unhelpful message:

vivin@serenity ~/Projects/code
$ scp -r vivin@www.vivin.net:~/code/agnostic .
Password:
ps: Process environment requires procfs(5)
Initializing new SSH agent...

vivin@serenity ~/Projects/code
$

I fixed the procfs problem by adding the following to my /etc/fstab:

proc                    /proc           procfs  rw              0       0
linproc                 /compat/linux/proc      linprocfs       rw      0       0

and then running:

vivin@enterprise ~
$ sudo mount /compat/linux/proc

vivin@enterprise ~
$ sudo mount /proc

So I try to scp again and I get:

vivin@serenity ~/Projects/code
$ scp -r vivin@www.vivin.net:~/code/agnostic .
Password:
Initializing new SSH agent...

vivin@serenity ~/Projects/code
$

WTF? Then I remembered making some changes to my .bashrc to be able to commit to github:

function start_agent {
  echo "Initializing new SSH agent..."
  /usr/bin/ssh-agent | sed 's/^echo/#echo/' > "${SSH_ENV}"
  echo succeeded
  chmod 600 "${SSH_ENV}"
  . "${SSH_ENV}" > /dev/null
  /usr/bin/ssh-add;
}

# Source SSH settings, if applicable
if [ -f "${SSH_ENV}" ]; then
  . "${SSH_ENV}" > /dev/null
  #ps ${SSH_AGENT_PID} doesn't work under cywgin
  ps -ef | grep ${SSH_AGENT_PID} | grep ssh-agent$ > /dev/null || {
    start_agent;
  }
else
  start_agent;
fi

I pulled all that out of my .bashrc and made a separate shell script for it. After I did that, scp started working again. I had no idea that calling scp would actually run .bashrc

I was pretty excited when I saw the VMWare image for ChromeOS up for download. I immediately downloaded it to try it out. The zip file I got from gdgt has a vmdk file but no vmx file. I created one from scratch to try ChromeOS out (I’ve made a new zip with the vmdk and the vmx. The link is at the end of this post.). It’s not too bad. The OS boots up really quick. The login screen is pretty spartan (look at the screenshots I have). You login with your Google/Gmail username and password. When you login, it opens up the Chrome browser. I wasn’t able to get anything else running other than the browser. Also, when I first logged in, Chrome complained that the security certificate for Gmail had been revoked. But I was able to login when I typed in the address for Gmail in again. The default tabs seem to be GMail and Google Calendar. I’m assuming that because it’s such an early build, you’re not able to try out the other stuff. Maybe there’s a way; I didn’t play around with it too much. There is a Date and Time settings menu that’s available from the browser, where you can set a few other options, like your proxy, SSL options, home page, and a few other advanced settings.
Read more…

This last weekend I had drill and the medics gave us the seasonal-flu mist-vaccine. It’s the one where they squirt gooey, inactive virus up your nose. I’ve had the vaccine before without any adverse side-effects. Yeah, not this time. I got the shot on Saturday and I was fine on Sunday. Not so on Monday. I woke up a few times in the middle of the night with a bit of a fever, but I figured that it would just go away. Yeah, didn’t happen. On Monday morning I felt like I had been run over by a semi. My throat felt like I had swallowed bits of broken glass. Needless to say, I didn’t go to work. I was bedridden most of the day, but towards the end I felt a little better. I tried to get a little work done but I wasn’t too successful since I had a hard time concentrating.
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In my previous post I talked about the problems I had while installing Ubuntu and Windows 7 on my Alienware m7700 laptop. It took me about three days of hair-pulling before I was finally able to get it to work. First, I burnt a new copy of the ISO for Ubuntu 9.04. Then, I enabled RAID on my system. I put the disks into stripe mode (the FastTrak Promise 378 does not support JBOD). This time, I got past the COMRESET error (ata3: COMRESET failed (errno=-16)) and was able to boot into the LiveCD. However, my joy was short-lived. The install would terminate (around the 40% mark) with the following message:

[Errno 5] Input/output error

This is often due to a faulty CD/DVD disk or drive, or a faulty hard disk. It may help to clean the CD/DVD, to burn the CD/DVD at a lower speed, to clean the CD/DVD drive lens (cleaning kits are often available from electronics suppliers), to check whether the hard disk is old and in need of replacement, or to move the system to a cooler environment.

Read more…

Yesterday I decided to reformat my Alienware m7700 Area-51 machine. It’s supposedly a laptop, but it’s actually a beast and it has a power supply that emits as much power as a small nuclear plant. Anyway, I put in a 500Gb and a 120Gb drive, with the 120Gb as a slave. The machine comes with a RAID controller (Promise SATA 378 TX2), but I have it turned off and in ATA mode. Win7 installed fine; the only problem I have is with the sound. My front speakers in my quadraphonic setup refuse to work. It’s strange. I even have the latest drivers from Creative for my Audigy2 ZS Notebook. It used to work fine before.

I figured I’d solve that problem later and decided to install Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) on the 500Gb drive. The LiveCD boots up fine, but when I try to actually try out the LiveCD or even try to install Ubuntu, it fails. Everything hangs after this message:

ata3: COMRESET failed (errno=-16)

After searching on the internets, it seems to be a RAID controller issue and a fix exists in the kernel. So I don’t know why I still have the problem. If anyone knows of a solution, please let me know! I’m going to keep working on the problem and see if I can solve it.

This is an update to my instructions on running the JavaFX 1.0 SDK on Linux. Those instructions do not work on the dmg image for the 1.1 version of the SDK.

Mike (thanks Mike!) posted a comment on that blog mentioning a small change that needed to be made. To get JavaFX 1.1 on Linux, first follow the steps in the original guide. When you need to mount the dmg, you need to provide an offset. So instead of the original command, do the following:

vivin@dauntless ~
$; sudo mount -o loop,offset=$((1024*17)) -t hfsplus javafx_sdk-1_0-macosx-universal.dmg.out javafx

The dmg should be mounted now.

A while ago, I wrote up a quick guide about running X/Windows applications (specifically, aterm) without root windows on Windows, using Cygwin. Recently I tried to set it up again and I realized that some of the information is slightly out of date. I’m also endeavoring to write a better guide. I’m assuming that you have, at the very least, a decent understanding of building things from source. The process under Cygwin is pretty much the same as under any other *nix, but there are a few quirks. On the whole, it’s a whole lot easier than it used to be. This guide is primarily geared towards running aterm with a transparent background on a windows machine so that you can have a decent client for the Cygwin commandline, instead of the crappy Windows one.

I’m assuming that you already have Cygwin installed. If you don’t, you can get it from here. In addition to whatever other packages you have selected to customize your install, you also need development packages (gcc and friends), Xorg packages (headers, includes, and libraries), and a few graphics libraries (for aterm):

• Devel
  • gcc-core
  • gcc-g++
  • libXaw3d-devel (for xv)
  • libjpeg-devel (for aterm)
  • libpng12-devel (for aterm)
• Libs
  • jpeg (for aterm)
  • libXaw3d-devel
  • libXaw3d-7
  • libfreetype6
  • libjpeg-devel
  • libjpeg62 (for aterm)
  • libjpeg6b (for aterm)
  • libpng12 (for aterm)
  • libpng12-devel (for aterm)
  • libtiff5 (for aterm, xv)
  • zlib-devel (for aterm)
  • zlib0 (for aterm)
• Utils
  • bzip2 (to handle .bz2 files)
• X11
  • libX11-devel
  • xinit
  • xsetroot (if xv doesn’t work for you)

After Cygwin finishes installing those packages, grab the sources for libAfterImage, aterm, and xv. Unpack the sources perform the requisite steps to build and install from source (./configure, make, and make install should work if all goes well).

libAfterImage:

If you get “parse error before XErrorEvent” errors while building libAfterImage, make sure that you didn’t forget to select the X11 development package.

aterm:

gcc on Cygwin expects –rdynamic and not -rdynamic. If you’re seeing these errors, edit the Makefiles under src and src/graphics within the aterm source directory. Change the “-rdynamic” to “–rdynamic”. The changes should be on line 54 for both files.

xv:

Under the tiff directory within the xv sources, there is a file called RANLIB.csh. Edit this file and make sure that you ONLY have the following line in there:

ranlib $1 >& /dev/null

Otherwise the build process will fail. Additionally, you need to edit xv.h. This file lives right at the root of your xv source directory. If you do not perform the following change, you’ll get errors from gcc complaining that “sys_errlist has previously been defined”. Change line 119 of xv.h to:

/*extern char *sys_errlist[]; */    /* this too... */

What you’re doing is commenting out the definition for sys_errlist so that it doesn’t conflict with what has already been defined in the Cygwin header files. These changes should be the only ones you need to get xv compiling and running.

Now you need to set up two batch files. One to start up X rootlessly, and another to start up aterm. Before you do that, make sure you add C:\cygwin\usr\bin and C:\cygwin\X11R6\usr\bin to your PATH variable. You can do this by going to My Computer > Properties > Advanced > Environment Variables. If you don’t do this, you’ll get “cygwin1.dll not found” errors while trying to run these batch files. The X windows binaries used to live in C:\cygwin\usr\X11R6\bin, but have since been moved to C:\cygwin\usr\bin. Therefore, the start-up batch-file now looks like this:

xwin.bat:

C:\cygwin\usr\X11R6\bin\run.exe C:\cygwin\usr\bin\xwin.exe -multiwindow -clipboard -silent-dup-error
C:\cygwin\usr\X11R6\bin\run.exe C:\cygwin\usr\local\bin\xv.exe -display :0 -root -quit -be -max /cygdrive/c/Documents\ and\ Settings/vivin/My\ Documents/My\ Pictures/Wallpapers/01707_spectrumofthesky_1920x1200.jpg

The first line starts up the X windowing system. The second line sets the wallpaper using aterm. You now need another batch file to run aterm, and that looks like this:

aterm.bat

C:\cygwin\usr\X11R6\bin\run.exe C:\cygwin\bin\bash.exe --login -i -c "aterm -sh 80 -tr -trsb -fade 20 -tint gray -sb -st -sr -sl 1000 -tn xterm"

This file starts aterm with the background image at 50% brightness, transparent background, transparent scrollbar, 20% fading on losing focus, gray tint, scrollbar, trough-less scrollbar, scrollbar on the right, 1000 scrollback lines, and with xterm terminal emulation. Like I mentioned in my original guide. xv will sometimes fail to start with xwin. If that is the case, you can modify aterm.bat to look like this:

aterm.bat:

C:\cygwin\usr\X11R6\bin\run.exe C:\cygwin\bin\bash.exe --login -i -c "xv -display :0 -root -quit -be -max /cygdrive/c/Documents\ and\ Settings/vivin/My\ Documents/My\ Pictures/Wallpapers/01707_spectrumofthesky_1920x1200.jpg && aterm -sh 80 -tr -trsb -fade 20 -tint gray -sb -st -sr -sl 1000 -tn xterm"

Slightly inefficient, but it works. Now if you have a dual-monitor display, you’ll notice that the background image is stretched across both screens when you run aterm. This is probably not what you want. To fix this problem you need to change a few invocation options for xv. For this to work properly (meaning, not look crappy) both screens should be running at the same resolution:

xv -display :0 -root -quit -be -maxpect -rmode 1 /cygdrive/c/Documents\ and\ Settings/vivin/My\ Documents/My\ Pictures/Wallpapers/01707_spectrumofthesky_1920x1200.jpg

Notice the -maxpect and -rmode 1 options. -maxpect expands the image to fill the screen while maintaining the aspect ratio, while -rmode 1 sets the display mode on xv to tiled. So you should now have your wallpaper displaying on both screens now (under X) without being distorted.

Here’s what it looks like on my machine:

This is on a dual-monitor setup with both screens running at 1920×1200 resolution. I’ve set X’s background to be the same as my windows Wallpaper so that it looks cooler. Notice how the background image (inside aterm) is not stretched, but tiled across the two screens. That’s all there is to it. Seems like a bit of work, but I think it’s worth it. My main reason for going through all this trouble was to get a decent terminal running in windows. I guess I could have just used xterm, but aterm looks so much nicer, doesn’t it?

Apparently the default settings for .htaccess files and URL rewrites in Ubuntu (8.04 anyway) is kinda jacked. Apache wasn’t seeing my .htaccess files, and even after setting up the configuration correctly, I was getting Internal Server (500) errors from .htaccess files.

The default setting for Apache2 on Ubuntu for .htaccess is “ignore it”. You need to enable it by going to /etc/apache2/sites-available/default and changing the AllowOverride directive, which you can find inside the <Directory> … </Directory> tags:

AllowOverride ALL

If you want to enable URL rewrites, you need to enable the mod_rewrite module as it is not enabled by default:

[11:31:14] vivin@dauntless ~/Projects/www/skyblue
$ sudo a2enmod rewrite
Module rewrite installed; run /etc/init.d/apache2 force-reload to enable.

[11:31:20] vivin@dauntless ~/Projects/www/skyblue
$ sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 force-reload
 * Reloading web server config apache2