I was “lucky” and got someone else’s Windows XP box to try and see if it runs, and it doesn’t. It starts up and says it needs the version of the game only works on a simplified chinese version of Windows. Then I thought, I’ve seen similar problems with other programs. Let me try fiddling with those locale and default language and encoding settings in the control panel, not to mention that I need to reboot Windows almost after every change of the settings. However, none of the changes helped. The game still won’t run. And because you could ask, no, we don’t have a simplified version of Windows.

I know for the fact that the game actually runs under WINE pretty well (good thing being an old game I guess), so I gave it a go. Installation worked. Then when I run it, yup, got the same simplified chinese version error. But there’s something different. The texts of the error dialog box are all garbage. I imagine they’re simplified chinese, but somehow not using the right font or encoding. I decided to fix this problem first, which I knew it would be easy cos I have had same problems with other chinese games before. All you need is to set LANG, in this case, to zh_CN.

And guess what, that not only solves the chinese encoding issue, that also convinces the game to think I’m on simplified chinese version of Windows. The game worked beautifully. And need not to say, setting an environment variable doesn’t require rebooting… unlike some retarded operating system.

WINE wins!

Or otherwise known as her dad played too much Phoenix Wright…

Original photo at http://livia.pigeond.net/gallery/main.php?g2_itemId=8556

Would be much better if I was wearing my Linux t-shirt… :)

Basically I want my RSS reader to fetch things (images for example) needed to display every entry during updates, so I can read them offline. Images in most feed entries are referenced remotely (http://), which are usually not downloaded until the entry is actually viewed. Some feeds use enclosures but that works more like an attachment rather than for content.

I’ve tried quite a few RSS readers and Straw seems to be the only one that does full automatic image fetch during updates. However Straw’s development has been stalling, and the latest version seems to be quite unstable.

Liferea has been my RSS reader for quite a while, and so I’ve decided to do it myself with (hopefully) the simplest way possible: a Liferea conversion filter which parses a feed and fetches things for offline reading.

At the moment it works by looking for <img> tags and fetches the image using wget, and then replaces the original image src to point to the local one.

It’s a pretty simple perl script. I have written it in a way so it can be extended it to parse and fetch other things in the future, maybe embedded videos for example. It currently downloads all images, one by one. It also checks if a file is already downloaded or not. You can change $SAVE_PATH in the script as needed.

You can git (yes, git) the script at git://pigeond.net/offline_filter.git. Or alternatively get the latest version here, or browse the repo at http://pigeond.net/git/?p=offline_filter.git.

To use it, set the script as the conversion filter for the feed you want to have things downloaded and it should just work.

Now I can read all the really important stuff on the train, like xkcd and failblog ;).

Apart from the obvious that you need SCIM installed in the 32-bit chroot, you’ll need to set SCIM_MODULE_PATH to point to the 32-bit SCIM libdir. For instance, my iceweasel32 script looks like:

#!/bin/sh
export CHROOT=/chroot/testing.32

export GTK_PATH=${CHROOT}/usr/lib/gtk-2.0

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=${CHROOT}/lib:${CHROOT}/usr/lib:/lib32:/usr/lib32

export SCIM_MODULE_PATH=${CHROOT}/usr/lib/scim-1.0

export MOZ_PLUGIN_PATH=${CHROOT}/usr/lib/mozilla/plugins

linux32 ${CHROOT}/usr/lib/iceweasel/firefox-bin "$@"

Secondly, you’ll need to add a symlink in /usr/lib32/gtk-2.0/2.10.0/immodules for the chroot’s /usr/lib/gtk-2.0/2.10.0/immodules/im-scim.so. Not the cleanest way I have to say, but it works.

The first is checking for vim python support before doing anything. I did this because in Debian vim (vim.basic) isn’t compiled with python support, and I prefer vim.basic over vim.gtk or vim.gnome as my default vim (and as for the reason, see my previous vimpress post.

The second is adding a :BlogSave command. Basically sending and saving an entry without publishing it, i.e. saving it as a draft, which I do a lot myself.

I’ve kept it in my git repo now at git://pigeond.net/vimpress.git

Gitweb at http://pigeond.net/git/?p=vimpress.git

Check it out at http://mpmap02.flightgear.org/. Code is in my usual git repo.

Enjoy…

There. My daugher, Livia, 5-month old.

We are having a daughter soon!

My wife and I now have a baby blog up and running. It has pretty much entirely in chinese though. So for those english speaking/reading people, let me do a quick summary of what’s been happening.

Our daughter is about 6-month old now, and the EDC is around the end of November. We are having the baby born in Taiwan.

To me, one of the coolest things with this was the ultrasound. You kinda wish you have one at home so you can watch the baby any time. Here are some of the early ultrasound of our daughter when we were in Taiwan:

8 weeks old

10 weeks old

And here are two video clips from the fetal morphology. The test was very detailed. The doctor pretty much checked everything, from sizes of the hands, legs, shapes and structures of the head, face, bones, spine, to heart, organs, and blood flows. That was also when we first found out the gender of our baby.

Looks like our baby was drinking…

Our baby punching! And if you watch close enough, you can also see a bubble coming out of her nose at the same time. Plus you can see her heart beating.

For the last month or so, my wife had also started to feel a lot of the moving going on too. The baby seems to move more after my wife having a meal or lying down. You can feel it if you put your hand on the tummy. And also once we actually saw the tummy moving as the baby (presumably) kicked.

We also started buying a few baby stuff, like the car restrain and some stuff for bathing.

It’s all coming along…

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…

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 :)

Ok, it’s not exactly “playing” the game, but pretty much just tapping, but still, that’s like the cutest thing!

Then again, considering there was a study that showed pigeons are actually smarter than 3-year-old children (you know, human kids), I’m sure someone could make a game with input and interface for pigeons to play properly.

Thanks for a few people e-mailing about the problem. Unfortunately most of those e-mails went into my spam mailbox, which I don’t go thru as often (for obvious reason :)

Anyway, thanks Lupis and Larry.

<tuppa>  I thought you have a child process pigeond
<pigeon> tuppa: yeah, forked the child process... but not exec yet...

You can have a read on a few posts here and here to learn about how it all started. There is even a national pigeon day anthem for it.

National Pigeon Day, they have entertainment, speeches, and even pigeon shaped cookies. I wish I could be there (and finally a reason that makes me want to go to the U.S.).

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.

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

Gotta love free and *good* wifi.

• cannot copy 268MB of files from and to the same harddisk (i.e. the infamous “out of memory” error)?
• cannot show me the total size of a folder because the “General” tab stopped appearing in the properties, until I rebooted?
• I have to reboot 6 times for various reasons (network not working, change of settings, etc) within 3 hours of usage?

Answer: useless piece of junk.

Please. Save yourself. Save your friends. Save the world. Tell everyone what’s wrong with Vista. I’m a Linux guy, but I’m not asking you to run Linux. I’m just asking you not to use this piece of crap. Use something that you deserve.

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.

In the afternoon, among the few talks I was interested, I decided to head to the MythTV BOF, partly because I know the BOFs weren’t recorded. As a quite-long time MythTV user I find the BOF pretty interesting, however I wish there was more time for it. One of the brought up issues, and also an everlasting issue, was TV guide data in Australia. I always feel funny that it is so hard to get the data, as if they don’t want you to watch their programmes.

After the afternoon tea was the lightning talks, followed by the closing of the conference. To me lightning talks are always the cool and very entertaining. Of course this year’s talks were no exception, and I enjoyed them a lot.

After the closing was the Google party. It was right outside the university union house, so it’s kinda outdoor. The atmosphere was good, and I think pretty much everyone was there enjoying the drinks and the BBQ. The food was nice, but I wish there were a bit more variety.

I stayed around for a bit and headed back to St Mary’s common room. My friend and I joined another two guys (sorry I didn’t catch the names or I just forgot :() there for a game of table tennis. I haven’t really played any double myself so that was kinda of cool.

Day 4 is the Professional Delegates Network Session (PDNS) night. Shortly after all the talks of the day we headed down to the Melbourne museum, where the PDNS was held.

I was absolutely stunned by the museum, and I just couldn’t stopped taking photos. And as a result this also distracted me from the actual “networking”. I shall put up my LCA2008 photos real soon. There was the CSIRAC – Australia’s first computer, and there were many many other cool displays of various animals and bugs, like those awesome ant’s nests and spiders.

It’s a pity though that we were only allowed to be in a rather small area of the museum, and we couldn’t really go anywhere else.

There’s also one of those displays where you put on a specially made glasses to watch a few video clips in 3D.

The food was very nice as well! There was a few things with some kind of raw beef, some thing that a bit like sushi but not quite, raw oysters, usual but delicious sandwiches. Allow me to say that the PDNS food this year was better than last year’s :P

So it was the first day of the LCA main conference. Apart from Bruce Schneier’s keynote and all the cool talks, it was also the 10th year anniversary of lwn.net, and during the morning tea we had some really really rich and delicious lwn chocolate muffin. It was soooo good.

It was also the day/night for the penguin dinner. It was held at the Queen Victoria night market, which is quite different from what the usual LCA penguin dinner used to be. And being the first time visiting Melbourne, it is actually a pretty good idea.

So we all like 700 people walking from the Melbourne University. It was funny that there was a guy who worked opposite to the road where we slowly strolled to the night market, and he couldn’t resist and headed down from his office and asked us what’s happening with all these people on the street.

We got to choose our own food from over like 30 different food places (even though I’ve got from the one only, but I loved it). And I like the semi-open environment (and glad that it wasn’t raining in the afternoon and the evening), more casual, and a lot more fun.

Didn’t pay much attention to the actual market though myself, as I found it very much the same as the one at the Rocks in Sydney.

I have been hiding in the gaming miniconf pretty much the whole day. It was all fun and cool. In particular the Crayon project, which is supposed to turn a simple photo or drawing into some sort of games, sounded very interesting. Unfortunately due to time constrains there wasn’t a demo. It might be shown on the open day however.

Another interesting one would be Rusty’s wiimote project, which will hopefully be ready to for demo on the open day as well.

As I got to St Mary’s pretty late yesterday, the registration desk was already closed by the time I got there. So only this morning I got my badge and conference bag.

One of the coolest about the bag is not only inside it has a bag for a laptop, but also the fact that it is detachable, which means I can use it in my backpack too. Another good one is the small umbrella, which I was meant to get one because my old small one broke, as they all do. Having said that, let’s hope it’s not going to rain anytime this week. :)

I managed to stay awake in the embedded miniconf with the Stuart’s robot talk and Benno’s OKL4. Both were very interesting. Unfortunately the PS3 and Cell Linux talk was cancelled, which is a bit disappointing considering I’ve recently got a (virtually free) PS3.

After lunch I went back to the embedded miniconf for more talk, then later I hopped into the multimedia miniconf for the Ingex talk. After that I just couldn’t talk it anymore and decided to stroll back to my room and take a nap.

Definitely need a longer and better sleep tonight for the gaming and perhaps kernel miniconf tomorrow.

And once again, like many other LCAers, I’m really grateful for the working wireless at the St Mary’s college rooms. Thanks very much to the LCA team.

Also just wondering if there’s any other FlightGear-ers around LCA this year? (apart from those who I already know). We could have a little chat, or maybe some hacking/debugging/troubleshooting sessions? Or even some multiplay fun?

See you all at LCA!

Unfortunately for anyone who has subscribed to my rss feed, your reader will probably see all old posts appearing as new ones. I apologies if this causes any troubles.

Share and enjoy…

Anyway, here’s a possible quick fix for those with an ASUS laptop (W7J at least) and a non-working brightness acpi key (in my case, it’s Fn + F5 and Fn + F6), even though /sys/class/backlight/asus-laptop/brightness works perfectly.

I poked around the disassembled DSDT code and did a bit of googling. After a few reboots and testing, I figured out passing acpi_osi="!Windows 2006" to the kernel fixes the issue.

Apparently with the (current) Linux ACPI driver, the OS interface (OSI) code will respond to the ACPI as quite a few different versions of M$ windows (see drivers/acpi/utilities/uteval.c for the entire list). This list can be modified by the kernel parameter acpi_osi (see Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt for full details).

So my guess is the DSDT thinks I’m running “Windows 2006″ (aka Vista), and so it is doing (or not doing) something with these two particular ACPI keys. Telling the Linux ACPI driver not to pretend to be Vista got rid of the problem.

This quick workaround also means that I didn’t have to patch my own DSDT and build a kernel with it.

[Updated: 5th November 2007] I was testing 2.6.23.x on the W7J, and I noticed both brightness keys Fn + F5 and Fn + F6 work without acpi_osi. I looked into it and I’ve found out that the ACPI video driver makes the keys work. And for some reasons with older kernels (2.6.22.x) the video module is not loaded automatically. So you can probably ignore what I said above months ago :)

I’m at Kao Hsiung Intl airport RCKH right now, waiting for my flight to VHHH, using their wireless provided by HiNet (which is like the best network in Taiwan).

So, what to do next… download some LCA 2007 videos? apt-get update && apt-get -u dist-upgrade? ;)

Hmm… doh! Flight delayed a bit… oh well… more coding time…

Switching between the two networks is not a big deal. And with the help of ifplugd, the switching is automatic. But after all, they are two different interfaces. It would be good if I could switch between them without losing any existing connections. After a bit of googling around, I’ve found one solution: Ethernet channel bonding.

From the Linux source code Documentation/networking/bonding.txt: “The Linux bonding driver provides a method for aggregating multiple network interfaces into a single logical “bonded” interface”. In my case, I’m bonding the eth0 (wired) and the eth2 (wireless) together.

Under Debian, the bonding driver is built as a module bonding. I’ve also installed the ifenslave. So I put the bonding driver into my /etc/modules so it’s loaded at system startup:

bonding mode=1 miimon=500

where mode=1 sets the bonding mode to active-backup. The bonding driver also supports a few different load-balancing modes, which you might want to check out as well. miimon=500 sets the link check interval in milliseconds.

There’s also a primary parameter which you could specify which slave interface will always be used if it is available (e.g. primary=eth0).

The bonding driver gives you a new network interface bond0. Now to setup bond0, eth0 and eth2 in /etc/network/interfaces:

# the wired interface
iface eth0 inet manual
    hostname xxxxxxx

# the wireless interface
iface eth2 inet manual
    wireless-key s:xxxxxxxxxxxxx restricted
    wireless-essid xxxxxxxxxxxx
    wireless-mode managed

# the bonding interface, eth0 + eth2
iface bond0 inet dhcp
    pre-up ifconfig bond0 up
    pre-up ifenslave bond0 eth0 eth2
    pre-down ifenslave -d bond0 eth0 eth2

bond0 is set to use DHCP, while eth0 and eth2 are not, as they will act as slave interfaces. bond0 is the master. The 2nd pre-up command for bond0 attaches both eth0 and eth2 as slaves to the bonding device. Note that it is possible to configure a bonding device via sysfs, which is also documented in Documentation/network/bonding.txt.

While ifplugd takes care of eth0 going up and down, I also want to turn off the wireless completely when the wired network is plugged in. So I added my own script /etc/ifplugd/action.d/bonding:

#!/bin/sh
set -e

if [ ! -f /proc/net/bonding/bond0 ]; then
    exit
fi

case "$1" in
eth0)
    case "$2" in
    up)
        /sbin/ifdown eth2
        /sbin/ifconfig eth2 down
        /sbin/iwconfig eth2 txpower off
        ;;

    down)
        /sbin/iwconfig eth2 txpower auto
        /sbin/ifup eth2
        /sbin/ifconfig eth2 up
        ;;
    esac

    # I need to do this sometimes, so I've put it in
    # or could someone comment on this?
    ifdown bond0
    ifup bond0

    ;;
esac

This script will turn off the wireless radio for me when my eth0 wired network is up.

I’m relying on ifplugd to bring up bond0, which will then bring up eth0 and eth2. Hence in /etc/network/interfaces I did not set any of the interfaces to be auto. I also added -l to the arguments of ifplugd in /etc/default/ifplugd:

ARGS="-q -f -u0 -d10 -w -I -l"

so that it will run the “down” script on ifplugd startup if no cable is detected. That way my script will bring up my wireless eth2 if eth0 is not plugged, say at boot time.

With this setup, the bonding driver automatically switches to use eth0 or eth2, whichever is brought up. In my setup, eth0 and eth2 won’t be up at the same time. If you use the primary parameter, the primary slave interface will always be used, even if the other slaves become available.

/proc/net/bonding/bond0 shows the status of the bonding interface. For example I’m now on the wireless network:

Ethernet Channel Bonding Driver: v3.0.3 (March 23, 2006)

Bonding Mode: fault-tolerance (active-backup)
Primary Slave: None
Currently Active Slave: eth2
MII Status: up
MII Polling Interval (ms): 500
Up Delay (ms): 0
Down Delay (ms): 0

Slave Interface: eth0
MII Status: down
Link Failure Count: 0
Permanent HW addr: 00:11:2f:9c:57:25

Slave Interface: eth2
MII Status: up
Link Failure Count: 0
Permanent HW addr: 00:11:2f:9c:57:25

It’s pretty obvious that the currently active slave is my eth2 wireless. I can run something like watch -n 1 cat /proc/net/bonding/bond0, and as I plug the ethernet cable back, the active slave will become eth0. You can also find out the currently active slave via /sys/class/net/bond0/bonding/active_slave.

For completeness, here is the output of ifconfig:

bond0     Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:11:2F:9C:57:25
          inet addr:192.168.11.3  Bcast:192.168.11.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          inet6 addr: fe80::211:2fff:fe9c:5725/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MASTER MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:329306 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:329010 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
          RX bytes:732552585 (698.6 MiB)  TX bytes:204431117 (194.9 MiB)

eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:11:2F:9C:57:25
          UP BROADCAST SLAVE MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:303936 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:304693 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
          RX bytes:245381818 (234.0 MiB)  TX bytes:27905638 (26.6 MiB)
          Interrupt:5 Base address:0xd800

eth2      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:11:2F:9C:57:25
          inet6 addr: fe80::211:2fff:fe9c:5725/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING SLAVE MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:25370 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:24317 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
          RX bytes:487170767 (464.6 MiB)  TX bytes:176525479 (168.3 MiB)
          Interrupt:5 Base address:0xe000 Memory:ff9fe000-ff9fefff

which shows bond0 being the master, and eth0 and eth2 being slaves.

It almost makes plugging and unplugging the ethernet cable fun. I can just sit there and keep replugging the cable alllllll day… :)

I’ve been using this setup for at least a week now and has been working very well. Please let me know if there’s anything I’ve missed, or any even better way of setting this up.

And of course it works under that proprietary . Then we realized it has rather serious issues with the composite-in being a bit slow (both slow frame rate and sometimes laggy).

As a Linuxer, naturally I then tried the device under Linux. Only just halfly expected, there is no driver for Linux yet. That’s no better way to spend your holidays overseas? I decided to spend a little on looking into the possibility to reverse engineer the windows driver.

Doing things on windows is always painful. Though I got one of the windows USB sniffer working, it wasn’t as convenient as doing things on Linux. So I went for using QEMU booting into windows and capture all the USB traffic. Unfortunately, windows (xp) crashes (classic BSOD style) while installing the device driver. I thought for a second, maybe it’s QEMU not emulating something that is needed?

Someone on #bochs pointed me to VirtualBox, so I gave it a go. Still out of luck though, windows xp crashes at the exact same spot. Damn.

On the bright side, I have discovered VirtualBox – yet another virtualizer for x86 hardware, and it’s pretty awesome:

• (On this Pentium M 1.6GHz laptop) VirtualBox is much much faster than QEMU (with kqemu) for, well, running windows xp.
• It has a GUI frontend for setting up VMs. As much as I prefer text/command-line based apps, a GUI frontend does help new users to try things out a lot.

Having said that, VirtualBox (currently anyway) is not entirely open source. It has two editions. And the version I tried was the one with those closed-source features. On the other hand they did say “some of these features will eventually be made available with the open-source version as well”.

So, no, I didn’t go very far with the reverse engineering. It’s usually a painful and time-consuming process. I did have some of the USB traffic sniffed and logged under windows, but I haven’t done much with them yet.

I have some more photos and info of the device here, including photos of it pulled apart.

I’ve finally switched my gateway box from my 12 years old Pentium (I) 166MHz gateway box (still running Debian potato, kernel 2.2. This is Linux for you, when it works, it can work forever…), to my 5-6 years old Netwinder.

I was also very glad that the Netwinder is now (or still) officially supported by Debian. I had Debian potato installed on it for years. Upgrading it was painless.

My old gateway box was running such an old kernel, and the firewall was one of those copied-from-others script using ipchains. This time I decided to use a better way to manage my firewall rules. After a bit of research and trying things out, I’ve chosen ipkungfu. Again, it was painless to setup.

The only not-so-good bit was, I did the machine switching-over only 1 day before I went away. So as it turned out, my net connection went down in about 2 days time. I always have some scripts checking if the net is up or not, and it would reset everything (bringing down/up the interface, renewing IP, relogging on, etc). But looks like that wasn’t helping either. So I thought it might be one of those cable-modem-needed-to-be-reset situation.

I asked my uncle to power cycle the cable modem for me. And just to be safe I asked him to do the same for the gateway box too. As expected my net connection went up again. And I was happy, for a while.

Who would have thought, it went down again. Suspiciously, it also only stayed up for about 2 days. My instinct told me it wasn’t a coincident. A few days later my uncle again power cycled the modem.

I got on and check the logs again and found that my firewall was blocking (and logging) a lot of IGMP packets from some mysterious 10.x.x.x (Telstra internal network instruments) IP. It’s strange though, I haven’t seen these logs when I was testing the net. So apparently just the bpalogin client heartbeat is not enough. Seems that without the IGMP packet response (or how-ever IGMP works), after a certain timeout period (2 days?) the other end terminates the net connection and stops leasing IP, even if the cable modem is on or even there are existing network connections. So of course, I’ve then updated my firewall rules.

Lesson learnt, testing the net for 1 day is not enough, cos it will go down in 2 days ;)

Once again, many thanks to my uncle for the trouble.

And on the first day arriving Taiwan, the news has got my attention on her again, being she was seriously injured in a car crashed and was in a deep coma. After less than 2 days of emergency treatment, she passed away.

Being in Taiwan when this happened has made me feeling even more real and close to this incident, as if it’s something I should really be concerning about. Guess that’s the power of the news channel on TV, which was continuously showing updates of her status.

As a GWG lover, I guess this photo has become a collector’s item now…

Staying here for three weeks or so, till just a little after the chinese new year, then heading to Hong Kong for a week before going back to Sydney.

It isn’t as cold here as I was told. In fact there were days which were considered hot (>20°C).

Food is great here as usual. The Taiwanese style fried chicken, all-you-can-eat hotpot, lamb hotpot, mini hotpot (yeah, lots of hotpots, even though it’s actually pretty hot now), seafood, steak, all sorts of ice tea and drinks, you name it. Not only they’re bloody good they’re also bloody cheap. We also went to the end-of-the-(chinese-)year (Wei Ya) dinner of a relatives’ company, which was absolutely awesome.

There’s also nite markets, and some minor random sightseeings and (window or not) shoppings.

I’ll keep uploading new photos here.

The highlight talk for me for the day was probably Adam Kennedy’s Nothing can possibly go wrong. Couldn’t quite describe it, just wait and download its video if you weren’t there.

And then there was the closing ceremony of LCA 2007. Like most people I would have loved it if the space invader demo worked. Even if we could setup a camera and write a program to do the same thing, we certainly don’t have like 800 people to test it everyday.

We progressed to the Penguin Dinner shortly after. It was a big dinner, apparently there were about 65 tables. Food was great even after having a bad stomach after the Open Day beef pie. During the dinner there was the rusty wrench presentation, the big cheque handing over, and also the usual speaker-autographed auction. After the dinner we had a little final party upstairs at the same place. I spent only a little bit there.

Photos of the last day of LCA here.

While Alexander Reeder presented his neat, practical and yet simple idea of his naked laptop weather display in the Open Source Art talk. He has reminded me of the broken laptop my ex-flatmate gave me, which has a rather flaky IDE bus as well. I should probably think of something cool to do with it.

In the afternoon we had the ROCKING Open Day at the pavilion. Though the venue is small (comparing to those big expo of course), there were heaps of interesting displays and demo. It might be things that we (Linux enthusiast) see everyday, but to the others it was a wonderful experience. It was very packed and apparently there were over a thousand people visited, including families and friends of people in the Linux community. Maybe this will become a trend of all LCAs in the future to have an awesome Open Day.

I ended up helping Endy a very little bit at his ScummVM demo stand. I showed and explained to a few kids the what and how of the game. Turns out there were a lot of young kids interested Sam ‘n Max and the Maniac Mansion Day of the Tentacles when they saw them. Many of them were willing to sit down and spend lots of time going though the game. Good games can really be good games of all time.

Photos of day 4 here.

The X talk reminds me of xdmx, which works but the version I tried last time still had the nasty Xrender bug (which is apparently fixed in the development version). Also I couldn’t get any GLX direct rendering to work, even for the local native screen which I thought it would work. Someone could show me some lights? (Is it supposed to work or not?)

In the evening we had the professional networking session at the Scientia. This is actually my first time at LCA as a professional. The atmosphere there was great. There were a lot more people there than I thought it would be. Took some nice photos there too.

Photos of the 3rd day here.

Jono Bacon pinpointed that a few good elements that what and how a (sound editing) GUI would make sense and be intuitive. I have played with ardour a little bit myself and I have to agree what Jono has said about it. I guess it’s kind of like how I keep hearing people who got used to a 3D modeling app like AC3D and then go and try Blender. (I use and am used to Blender, though)

Well, spent most of the day at the Gaming Miniconf. Wesnoth, PS3 Linux, and so forth.

Also fulfilled my panorama obsession and half-heartedly took one at the round house while people waiting for the conference party. No I haven’t fixed every single glitches in the photo, that’s what the GIMP tutorial on Thursday is for :)

It was pretty exciting to meet for the first time with a few people who I have known online for quite a while. George (or Gorilla) from the FlightGear gang, Leeds I know from #handhelds.org, and Endy from the ScummVM team showing off the latest version that has AGI support (for some of the old Sierra games like Space Quest I). Looking forward to his lightning talk at the Gaming Miniconf tomorrow.

Apparently Jeff ended up demonstrating the Wii in the Gnome miniconf (which I have missed). I reckon he should have demo using the Wiimote on Linux, which is pretty easy to setup. Or maybe that should be in the Gaming miniconf… :)

On the other hand, I was having weird trouble with the wireless on my laptop. It’s a Intel Centrino PRO/Wireless 2200BG, and I was using the ipw2200 module with the corresponding firmware. For some reasons it wasn’t able to get an IP from DHCP most of the time. I managed to get an IP once, but it dropped out pretty much straight away. I tried setting the same IP I got statically but it was only partially working (DNS working, for example, but nothing else worked, which was expected).

After consulting Jamie and John a bit they reckoned my wireless somehow kept dropping packets. And to be honest I haven’t actually use the wireless much on this laptop. I have no idea whether it’s a hardware/radio/firmware/driver problem or what. I ended up using my CF wifi card and it worked beautifully.

Anyone in the conference is welcomed to fix it for me :)

Took fewer photos than I wanted to today, but anyway they can be found here. I’ll try to put up new photos there for each LCA day.

With thanks to WMD, you could use the Wiimote under Linux fairly easily. For those who don’t know Wiimote talks to the Wii console via bluetooth. So it works with any computer with bluetooth as well.

People have been using the Wiimote on the computers in all sorts of different ways. As a guitar (Wiitar), as a drum machine, for games like Counter Strike, a virtual light sabre, etc. As for me, using the Wiimote with a flightsim, like FlightGear, would naturally be the first thing I wanna try.

The Wiimote has three accelerometers for the three axes. I’ve modified slightly the WMD script to send the X and Z force to the uinput device as the absolute coordinates. jscal then takes care of the calibration of the two axes. Then I changed the commandMap in the script to send BTN_0 to BTN_9 from all the buttons on the Wiimote.

On the FlightGear side all I need is to write a joystick definition XML for the Wiimote. I’ve also made the ‘B’ button to be the modifier. For example I have arrow Up and Down for throttle, Left and Right for the rudder. Then if I hold down ‘B’, Up Down Left Right become panning the viewport. ‘1′ and ‘2′ for changing views, ‘+’ and ‘-’ for zooming in and out, ‘A’ for brakes and gears. All set. Now I can fasten my seatbelt^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hwrist strap, sit back and ready for take off.

Updated 5th Jan 2007: Here is a patch against WMD SVN repository. Like I said it’s pretty hacky at the moment. And you definitely have to use jscal to calibrate it before it will behave sanely. Also you probably want to make changes to the commandMap in wmd/Config.py to map more buttons.

And for those FlightGearers out there, here is the Wiimote joystick XML config I’ve made.

Here’s a video of FlightGear + Wiimote in action:

The quickest hack I did was the GE version FGMap, which shows a moving map of all the online pilots on the FG MP servers. It is basically a very simple change with the FGMap CGI that translate MP server info into XML, only this time it outputs KML. Very simple and straight forward, nothing fancy at all. Check it out by opening this file in GE (if no one is on the server, you’ll see nothing! Check FGMap too).

Quickly I found this Collada exportor plugin for Blender. As a test I loaded the C172P aircraft AC3D model from FG into Blender, followed by a few trail-and-error and I figured out what I need to export for GE: 1) Convert all faces to triangles, 2) Export Triangles, Disable Physics, Use UV Image and optionally Use Relative Paths.

According to the KML tutorial I have to pack up the .dae file together with the textures, along with a textures.txt for textures path mapping. However I discovered you could actually alter the path referenced in the .dae file to a local jpeg file, or even an HTTP URL.

So now I’ve got GE to show a 3D model of an aircraft from FG. Next is to get FG to talk to GE. There are many ways (network, serial port, etc) in FG you can export real time flight data. To make things easier for now, I’ve set it up to export simply latitude, longitude, altitude, pitch, roll, heading to a file (or actually a fifo), then I wrote a little program to read and output a KML file for GE to read. Then on the GE side, I have to create a KML with a NetworkLink to refresh the actual FG KML.

Now, problems. It seems even if I set the refresh time to be 0 seconds, and I can see GE refreshing the link continuously, on screen it still only updates the position/orientation about once per second. It could well be a GE internal limitation (or feature). The bottom line is, we need a sane way to feed data into GE.

Another thing is I can never get GE to “follow” the aircraft properly. It’s either not panning faster enough, or it will go kinda crazy and jitter a lot. Guess I’m not a GE/KML yet. I need to test it more and tidy up my codes/scripts/things a bit and I’ll put them up.

Nevertheless, it’s kind of fun to “fly FG inside GE”.

Screenshots of FlightGear running side by side with Google Earth, whereby FG sending data to GE and showing the 3D aircraft. Possibly more screenshots here

KSFO

Hong Kong with Computamaps Hong Kong 3D models

Also I’ve added external links in the airport info box to World Aero Data and AirNav (for U.S. airports).

I got there sometime just before 11 I think. Weather wasn’t very good and quite windy from time to time, but it was very comfortable as I was definitely not sweating, a lot better than one of those 37 degree weekends (which was the week before). It was very crowded, with a lot of families with kids and everything.

So I was pretty much standing and walking around for over 6 hours, taking photos, watching flying demos and aircraft displays. It’s absolutely good fun if you love planes. For me maybe it was too much of a warbirds and fighters show, but still very enjoyable. There were aerobatics, formation flying, attacks demo, helicopter joy riding (which I didn’t do, it wasn’t free :P), also some R/C aircraft and gliders displays. F-111, Hornets, Hercules, Boeing 707, Vampire, Tiger moth, and many many more…

I took almost 300 photos in total, though most of them look pretty dark and dull due to the weather. And to satisfy my panorama need, I’ve taken a 360° panorama view at the base at the end of the day.

Note to self:

• Need better camera for this kind of show, a DSLR with like a 30x optical zoom lens would be great :)
• Hang around at the end of the day when almost everyone are leaving, perfect time for taking even more photos wherever and however you like, without the extra random people.

My RAAF airshow 2006 album is here.

And for the (first) best thing, LCA 2007 registration is now opened!

Now how cool is that! (Or I should just get out more…)

And so one thing leads to another. I setup Xinerama for the 2 screens. I played with DMX across the 3 screens for a bit. It’s nice but for some reasons it’s not doing direct rendering for GLX, neither the local nor the non-local clients.

And then the most obvious and exciting thing to do is to run multi-head FlightGear. As my setup is 3-screen-on-2-machines, normally you’d simply run one FlightGear on each machine. However my 1-screen-machine is rather old and slow, and not much memory (Pentium 2 w/256MB ram). So I ended up running two instances of FlightGear on the 2-screen-machine (Pentium 4 w/1GB ram) and forwarding the display onto the other (by setting DISPLAY). Its startup time is a lot faster this way.

When I have the time I should play with Chromium as well…

The Golden Gate Bridge across 3 screens

Flying over San Francisco

I want to thank Stanley again for the trouble, and probably any sorts of other things he had to do for this move.

Though, still need to wait for Curt to update the DNS for mpserver02.flightgear.org and mpmap02.flightgear.org, as he’s always very very busy. So if you need to use the FlightGear server on my box, you could just use pigeond.net 5000/5002, and this url for the FGMap.

And for our fellow FlightGear pilots, that would mean mpserver02.flightgear.org and mpmap02.flightgear.org would not work for a little bit when we’re moving.

The next day, we got up rather early in the morning and headed up to Katoomba in the Blue Mountains, where the reception took place at the Carrington Hotel in the evening. We got there around 11 something. And we decided to just look around, as we’d never been there before.

Brett asked me to help being the interpreter for various parts of the night, including translating some of the speeches to and from Mandarin. I still think I didn’t do the job good enough, partly because I was only told to do some of the translation on that night and on the fly. Especially the last one when I accidentally mixed in an English phrase my Mandarin ;) It was a good and rather entertaining experience though.

Well, the only thing I want to say is, I wonder why people don’t just stop using m$ windows when they first get the BSOD :)

Rob Levin, aka lilo, was hit by a car while riding on his bike. After being in the ICU in a coma for a few days, he passed away on the 16th September.

For those who don’t know, he is the founder and the head staff of freenode. Now what’s funny is I myself do not know this fact until today. I know lilo on freenode IRC, as we all do. I’ve talked to him a few times. He’s normally on some of the channels I join, such as, IIRC, #handhelds.org.

I know he’s a staff of freenode all along because he’s the “oper” on the IRC network, and he’s always the one who does all the announcement. He has also helped me once recovering a channel password. He’s friendly, helpful, polite, and patient. I guess this is how nice he is, but not someone who goes “do you know who I am?” :)

We have definitely lost a hard-working and precious person to freenode and the free software community.

Apparently he’s still online right now…


> /whois lilo
i=levin freenode/staff/pdpc.levin * :Rob Levin
#mythtv-users #handhelds.org
Whoops, I've stepped away. For URGENT freenode help (channel flooding, trolling users, network problems or access issues), please email my pager at 4iiygyvs<freenode.net . It's my job and I'm happy to respond. For ROUTINE issues, please see http://freenode.net/faq.shtml#gettinghelp.... Please take a look at my personal blog when you get a chance: http://spinhome.org .... Thanks!
is identified to services
End of /WHOIS list.

> /msg nickserv info lilo
Nickname: lilo << ONLINE >>
Registered: 12 years 35 weeks 1 day (7h 17m 28s) ago
Last Seen Address: i=levin>freenode/staff/pdpc.levin
Last Seen Quit Msg: “bbiab”
Email Address: levin@freenode.net
URL: http://blogdun.us/
Nickname Options: NoExpire, AutoMask, UnFiltered, AllowMemos, MemoNotify, MemoSignon

We got quite a bit of jittering but we managed to get quite a few awesome videos. shavlir also did a pretty cool aerobatics at the end when we realized we’re not able to do a proper refueling with the Harrier due to some “technical reasons” :)

Enjoy!