This is a test…

Well, not really.

I was looking for an alternative to posting blog entries using the web interface, and was randomly trying a few apps in Debian. There were drivel and gnome-blog but they don’t seem to support tags. BloGTK seems to, but there’s something weird about how it does, and it doesn’t support multiple categories. BloGTK is also being removed from Debian.

Then I came across vimpress – a vim plugin for wordpress. It’s simple, but it does what I needed. You can get a list of your blog entires, post a new blog, or even edit an existing blog. So I’m testing it with this blog entry and see how it goes.

The only small rant, not to vimpress, but to Debian’s vim, is that vimpress needs vim’s python support, but it’s not built into the vim.basic binary, which I prefer over vim.gtk or vim.gnome. One of the reasons is when I ctrl-z to background vim, and then foreground it (fg), it sometimes (not all the time) gets stuck unless I hit ctrl-c. This does not happen with vim.basic, but only vim.gtk and vim.gnome.

I did try to trace it and it is when the function mch_suspend calling pause(), which causes vim to wait for a signal.

Perhaps I should report to vim later…

I’ve been keeping a git repo of my own for FlightGear for quite some time. I was using Tailor for importing CVS into git, since git-cvsimport seems to be an issue with the branches in FlightGear’s CVS. Tailor is very powerful, and work among over 10 different revision control systems.

On the other hand, I’ve been having some issues with tailor. Not until much much much later (about a week ago) that I discovered the cause and possibly the remedy. At the same time one of the FlightGear developers Tim Moore has figured out why git-cvsimport wasn’t happy, and more importantly how to make it happy.

And so I’ve re-imported FlightGear and SimGear source from scratch and it’s been going well so far. But for those who have been using my repo, you will have to re-clone it again.

I’ve also imported the FlightGear data repo, but beware, it’s rather big even for git. The bare repo is almost 1G. So if you’re happy with your current CVS checkout, I suggest you not to bother with my git one. Mind you, that’s the entire history. Considering a checkout is about 1.7G, that’s not too bad. I’ve also set a 512kB/s limit for my git upstream, just in case there are like 20 people cloning the data repo at the same time :)

For those who have been trolling around with your PS3 on the Playstation Network might know that all the playable demos and stuff on the PS3 networks can be downloaded on your usual computer, and then later get your PS3 to fetch and install them. That way you won’t have to use your PS3 to download for whatever reasons (time, disk space, connection, etc).

This ps3news forum post has all the goodies and explanations, how it works and what you need to do, except, it hasn’t got a Linux way of doing it. I spent some time looking into that a few months ago, and I think I should note them down here, before I forget the method myself…

The basic idea is you configure your PS3 to use a proxy, and then you tell it to download and install Folding@Home. The proxy translates the URL into a different one, i.e. you tell your proxy to rewrite the Folding@Home URL into one that points to the actual package you want to install.

To achieve that, I’ve decided to use apache, squid, and jesred. Apache and squid might be bit overkill, but that’s what I have already been using. jesred is a URL redirector in Debian that works with squid.

The download part is the same. You look for the game/demo/whatever you want and download the package (.pkg file) using the URL on the forum post. Let’s say you’ve got the file blah.pkg. Put the file somewhere accessible from your web server. For example, /var/www/ps3/ on my machine proxy1, which means I can download the file on my local network via http://proxy1/ps3/blah.pkg.

On to the squid config. In /etc/squid/squid.conf, I first define an access control:

acl myps3 src 192.168.0.123
http_access allow myps3

which allows my PS3, having an IP 192.168.0.123, to access my proxy.

I also have to add a special header_access rule:

header_access Content-Type deny myps3

which makes the PS3 happy downloading the file. Without this, the PS3 seems to refuse to even start downloading the package.

Then finally, I setup the URL rewrite:

url_rewrite_program /usr/lib/squid/jesred

which tells squid to use jesred for URL rewriting.

Now we setup jesred. Edit /etc/jesred.acl to suit your own needs. I have simply uncommented the line:

0.0.0.0/0

which allows URL rewrite from all sources.

Then we move onto /etc/jesred.rules. This is where we define our URL rewriting. First you need to know which URL your PS3 is using for Folding@Home. A list of possible URLs are shown in the 2.D of the FAQ on the forum post. My PS3 is PAL one, so to rewrite that URL to what we want:

regexi ^http://deu01.ps3.download.playstation.net/download/ps3/eu/fah/fah\.pkg 

http://proxy1/ps3/blah.pkg

(The above on one single line)

Remember every time you edit the jesred.rules file, you have to tell squid to reload (/etc/init.d/squid reload does the trick).

Finally, onto the PS3. Make sure you have set your PS3 to use your proxy. Now tell your PS3 to download and install Folding@Home.

And that’s it! I know it hasn’t got a nice GUI like the PS3.Proxyserver thing. But surely editing some text config files and running init reload scripts are that kind of things we have a passion for right?

If things don’t work, well, you can have a look at squid’s and jesred’s log. You might need to edit /etc/jesred.conf to enable its logging.

Let me know if I’ve made any mistakes, comments are also welcome.

<catty>  you know how with taiwanese or chinese, when your baby
         is one month old, you give out things like eggs and cakes and
         stuff like that to your relatives and friends...
<pigeon> yeah?
<catty>  we'll do similar things?
<pigeon> hmm, no, we'll give out linux live CDs...

I haven’t been using the ethernet bonding driver since I got my ASUS W7J laptop, as the ipw3945 doesn’t seem to work with it. But now I’ve switched over to iwl3945 driver, and it now seems to work pretty well with bonding again. Excellent!

For those who doesn’t know what bonding is, see my recent post.

So it had come to the last but not least day of LCA2008 – The Open Day.

Since last year, the Open Day has been yet another exciting day in LCA. There were over 30 booths hosted by different companies and organizations demonstrating their cool Linux and open source technologies.

I believe the ones that caught most attention would be the gaming booths where there were StepMania, Frets On Fire, and a bunch of open source games that were configured to use the wiimote.

And speaking of the wiimote, of course another highlight was Rusty’s Pong Hero. It was inspired by one of Johnny’s Lee wiimote project that uses the wiimote’s infrared camera and a infrared light to work together as a whiteboard. In Rusty’s case, you draw using a specially made infrared lipstick on the virtual whiteboard to play the classic Pong game. You can catch it in action on this video.

Overall the Open Day this year was great. Though I kinda hope for a better venue for it. Because it’s inside a building it’s kinda packed. I mean comparing to the one last year, LCA2007’s was a much better semi-opened area for things like Open Day.

I hung around till pretty much when then Open Day came to an end. I slowly strolled back to St Mary’s to get ready for my flight back to Sydney.

Goodbye LCA2008, and looking forward to LCA2009 in Tasmania.