Yesterday my cat spilled a full cup of hot coffee on my 2k$+ laptop. Today, there is no trace of the incident and the laptop is working perfectly again. This is partially thanks to luck, partially to Dell laptop engineering and partially to my instinctive actions within first 10 seconds of the incident. I will recap it here so that if you happen to have a mishap of such kind you would know what to do to save your laptop.
The first thing I did is pick up the laptop (so that extra coffee from the table would not go into the vents at the bottom of the laptop) keeping the corner that was soaked with coffee downwards. With one hand I held the notebook and pressed and held the Power button to turn the laptop off as soon as possible. With the other hand I removed the power cord and tried to remove the battery as well. It took a couple seconds, but when that was done and the laptop was placed on a towel on the floor the time sensitive part was over.
After that was the clean-up. Coffee from the table and floor (so that other things don t get soaked), coffee form the outside of the laptop (with a damp cloth), After that I disassembled my laptop down to removing the motherboard and checking it for damage. Where ever I found traces of coffee, I cleaned them up with cotton swabs and spirit (clean water would also work, but would require more drying time). After I cleaned and dried every part off with a fan, I put the laptop back together. It took around 2 hours (more like 4 because I had to ask my girlfriend to pick up a new screwdriver on her way home as I lost mine). Everything was working, except the keyboard.
Bits of coffee got inside the keyboard and were shortening the wires so some lines of buttons were not working and some were activating other keys when pressed. On an advice from a fried, I took out the keyboard and washed it. I simply put the keyboard under a stream on running water and made sure that the water got into every possible and impossible opening. After 5 minutes of washing I got the hairdryer and proceeded to dry the keyboard. After an hour I put it in, but it still did not work, so I left it on a heating radiator overnight. After around 18 hours of drying the keyboard started working again. Oh and it was cleaner than it ever was 
Summary: Do not panic! Get water out of you laptop, get it turned off, disconnect power and remove the battery. If you manage to do all that in 10 seconds or less, you might have a chance of seeing your laptop boot up again.
A few years ago, I had some ideas about a real-world trading game. In short, a combination of the game play of Settlers of Catan , the cute pseudo-medieval world of The Settlers (the computer game), which you can play in your every day live along, without having to sit in front of the computer for a long time. I then started some code, lost motivation and let it sit there for a while.Recently, I re-developed interest in the idea and started from scratch, using Haskell and HAppS. To avoid losing interest again, I m now putting the code online and set up the server. I invite everyone to play around with it, maybe have a look at the code, send me patches or comments. As you can see, the web user interface is plain ugly HTML and could need some love. Some CSS is definitely needed, some AJAX would be nice. Also, the resource tree is very small at the moment there are a lot of things to work on, even if you don t want to touch Haskell!You can register at http://mumer.net/. You will be either given a forest (a source for wood) or a source of stone. You can reap your source, and trade on the Free Market , which is where you can always trade online, at bad prices. The idea is that you find real trade partners, to get better prices.For now, trading without physical contact is possible. You can create so-called issue ids, which represent stips of paper. You can then load resources on them, and give the paper (i.e. the number) to other players, who can then redeem them. Eventually, it is planned that these pieces of paper are provided centrally and (sufficiently) unforgeable, so that it is clear who owns a resource.You can also bid on certain stuff, such as a sawmil, which allows you to turn wood into boards. It will regularily be re-leased to the highest bidder.You can get the code (in a darcs repository) from http://darcs.nomeata.de/mumer2 and also browse the code.If you happen to be at the CCC right now and would like to talk about it, please do so!
For various reasons (which in the end boil down to lack of manpower), we are quite late in the process of packaging GNOME 2.24. (This is almost finished now, I ll keep you informed.) Which is why I may sound coming a bit late on noticing this one, but I was really speechless.
The problem: session management has flaws
Currently, a session manager uses XSMP (the X Session Management Protocol) to talk to applications. What it means is that for applications supporting this protocol, it is able to do more than simply starting and killing them: it will also remember their state, and offer them a way to shut down gracefully. However, XSMP is really a shitty protocol I won t explain why here, you will find tons of better explanations on the intarweb.
The gnome-session developers, being quite aware of this issue, did what anyone interested enough would have done: they designed a new protocol, based on D-Bus, and implemented it. The new protocol is not considered stable yet, but it is simple, efficient and above all, reliable that s a giant leap forward. For this reason, I was very excited to see what gnome-session 2.24 would look like, since it brings major cleanups in the code.
The solution: remove session management!
When I first started it, it did not restore my saved session. I simply supposed that the format of the saved session had changed, and that writing a conversion tool would be in order. Wrong. Let s bring the session preferences:
static void
on_save_session_clicked (GtkWidget *widget,
GsmPropertiesDialog *dialog)
g_debug ("Session saving is not implemented yet!");
/usr/lib; they
should be installed in private subdirectories of /usr/lib for that
application. The biggest group of offenders here currently seems to be
KDE; for some reason, unless I'm missing something, this seems to be a
semi-standard KDE way of doing things.
This version of Lintian will hopefully handle this better. Such libraries
won't be expected to be in shlibs files and won't get erroneous tags about
not being listed there. We'll also do a better job of distinguishing
between versioned shared libraries and shared library names that just
contain a hyphen. Such unversioned libraries will get a separate tag
pointing at the portion of Policy that says to put private libraries and
plugins in a subdirectory instead of /usr/lib.
Thanks as always to Frank Lichtenheld, Adam D. Barratt, and Jord Polo for
all the hard work they've been putting into Lintian. It's gotten much
better over the few months that I've not been able to work on it, which is
making me more excited to get back to it and do more.
$ lspci grep Modemthat is a SmartLink modem, supported well by sl-modem-deamon package and by alsa:
00:1f.6 Modem: Intel Corporation 82801CA/CAM AC'97 Modem Controller (rev 02)
$ ps -eo command grep slmRemember to edit /etc/default/sl-modem-daemon file and set the right country for you.
/usr/sbin/slmodemd --alsa -c ITALY modem:1
ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0works well if the number to call is a local one (I tried it before, and worked). Since Teleconomy provides a state-wide number (702...) with the above string the connection will fail with a sad:
NO CARRIERBut there is a fix: first, the Init1 should be ATX3 (but it seems to be enbedded in the one below), and the last arguments must be changed (well, I think it has something to do with line speed (MS=34 will result in a 33.6k line) or protocol, but don't care too much as long as it works) resulting in this Init2:
No Carrier! Trying again.
ATX3Q0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +MS=90And remember to select the "stupid mode" in gnome-ppp, and you'll have a nice:
--> Initializing modem.I'll move to ppp soon, since gnome-ppp seems to not understand "fsck, reconnect when disconnect, dude" option.
--> Sending: ATX3
ATX3
OK
--> Sending: ATX3Q0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +MS=90
ATX3Q0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +MS=90
OK
Modem initialized.
Sending: ATM1L3DT7020187187
Waiting for carrier.
ATM1L3DT7020187187
CONNECT 52000
--> Carrier detected. Starting PPP immediately.
--> Starting pppd at Fri Dec 26 19:12:23 2008
--> Pid of pppd: 4870
--> Using interface ppp0
--> local IP address ......
So. Burning down the house. Uniquely Welsh concept[1] or near-inevitable consequence of design failure? I present the following:
A reel from Glenn Gould's 1955 recording of the Goldberg Variations contains the following dialogue between the 22-year-old pianist and the recording engineer after a take of the 30th variation, a quodlibet:
By the way, I have a quodlibet of my own which came to me in the bathtub the other night. One of these days I will be asked to perform on the fourth of July, I'm sure, and when I do I figured out that by leaving out the repeats in the Star Spangled Banner and starting your entry on the thirteenth bar of God Save The King and then playing God Save the King over again and altering the harmony in the second half of The King to modulate to the supertonic region, it has the most marvelous effect. Listen to this.. (202KiB Ogg Vorbis).
Christmas is a time to ignore such trifling details as nearly accidently burning the house down, and instead to focus on what's important in life - working out which hoops to jump through to make new hardware useful without installing less convenient operating systems. This year was more straightforward than some, and merely involved attempting to work out how to give people money in return for books that could then be read on my Sony reader thingy. Shockingly enough, the Sony Ebook Store requires a windows app, so not a good start. There's no shortage of sites that sell ebooks in a variety of formats without any platform dependent awkwardness, though - of course, most of them are inconveniently DRMed. And the only DRMed content the Sonys will read is either Sony's own or some encrypted PDFs[1].
Over the next few days, I m looking at the most popular articles from this site and my previous news website during 2008. I ll be doing it in three parts.
Popularity is measured by page views from local access logs, but some articles were actually more popular in the months after they were first posted, so it s not completely accurate, but let s be forgiving over the holidays, OK?
Wow! I woke up this morning and, while browsing my usual feeds I got a nice (although odd) surprise: Rails and Merb will merge !!! Should we all wait for the end of days? ;-)
Seriously That is really something I d never have expected. Rails 3 will be such an interesting framework! What a nice Christmas gift!
Merry Christmas.
It's been a long time since I wrote about aptitude-gtk. Mostly that's
because I haven't been doing any work on it, due to a combination of
several holidays, sickness and (last but certainly not least) an
unfortunate relapse of WoW-addiction. But we have moved the ball
forward since the 0.5.0 release. Some of
the changes since then are just polishing, with no major changes in
functionality, but there are a few things that are very visible:
Status pipe support
aptitude now supports the dpkg status pipe. This means that it can
display a progress bar showing how far through the install process it
is. In fact, if you are using the Gnome frontend for Debconf, you
don't even need to display the terminal at all, unless a package is so
uncouth as to prompt directly on standard input. I'd like to thank
the Synaptic developers -- although this is all my own code, their
implementation of this functionality was very valuable documentation
of how apt frontends use the status pipe in practice. Incidentally,
the aptitude implementation is modularized and available in
src/generic/apt/parse_dpkg_status.cc and
src/generic/apt/parse_dpkg_status.h. If you
want to parse dpkg messages in your own GPL project, you might want to
take a look at that code. And if I don't forget, I'll ask about
including this in apt once the lenny freeze is lifted. [0]
Here's the dpkg progress bar in action, showing that dpkg is
configuring libmad0:
Clicking the "View Details" button on the dpkg progress bar will pop
up a terminal in a new tab; you can close the tab and dpkg will go
back to running in the background. And yes, I know that the progress
bar for the download shouldn't hang around after the download
completes. 
Searching for partial strings
As noted in the release notes for
0.5.0,
incremental searching from the curses frontend was broken by the 0.5.0
release. I've created a new match term named ?term-prefix which
matches against any extension of the term; for instance, searching
form ?term-prefix(comp)compilercomputercompromisecomp
This is a very rough proof-of-concept dialog that I've just checked
into the source tree. The checkboxes are fully functional (clicking
them shows and hides columns), but the buttons to save the current
setup or to apply it to all the active tabs are not working. With
this in place, we can think about creating columns for most of the
interesting information about a package (archive, maintainer, etc).
[0] By which I mean, I'll say does anyone object if I add this utility code to apt?, and when no-one says
noI'll commit it.
gpg-agent is a useful way to avoid having to
repeatedly type the passphrases needed to unlock the
private-keys. The agent prompts you for the passphrase and then
uses the unlocked keys for a user-determined time-period. For a
number of reasons it is a "good thing" if this prompting happens
in a different interface from that where the key is being used.
In an X window environment this is done by the
pinentry-gtk avatar of pinentry which
pops up a new window.
However, I use screen to multiplex operations
within a single terminal session, often without an X session. It
used to bother me that I could not get
pinentry-curses to pop up in a different window. No
more ;). Here is a hack that seems to work.
--ttypath $PINTTY,
--ttytype screen and --keep-tty for
gpg-agent.
gpg-agent to use a
secret-key, it will invoke pinentry-curses which
will connect to the pin window under
screen; the latter will warn you (-M)
that something is asking for a passphrase.
It would be nice if one did not have to invoke
socat and screen could do step (3) directly.
Is there any way to integrate the use of
gpg-agent with openvpn when the latter
uses SSL keys?
There may be some security issues with such use! I can't see
any at the moment but I may be wrong. :-(
A while ago, I wrote an initrd script and hook that would allow one
to run a system with root on a Network Block Device (NBD), that I
maintain both upstream and in Debian.
Since then, Laurent Vivier submitted a kernel patch that got merged,
and which will allow one to partition an NBD device. I had a patch for
my initrd script that would support running root off a partitioned NBD
device, but did not yet have the time to test and debug it.
Until today, that is. Well... not really. I made the time,
but I didn't really have it. For reference, the time is 07:25 right now,
and yes, I did stay up all night. But, well, who cares, right?
Right.
I'd really love to get this into lenny still, but since we're in deep
freeze... not keeping my breath. We'll see, I guess. The upload is going
to unstable, anyway after this one final test.
So how does it work? Unfortunately, no d-i support as of yet. I'd
been working on that, but then it turned out that in order to support
root-on-NBD, I'd have to somehow, somewhere, teach partman that NBD is
this strange thing which can be formatted, but not partitioned. I was
way far in my research (but nowhere in code, yet) on that when Laurent
sent in his partitioning patch, so it got postponed then, and I didn't
get a chance to pick it up anymore in time.
But if you're willing to use debootstrap manually, it's really simple
to set up:
# apt-get install nbd-client # nbd-client server port /dev/nbd0 # fdisk /dev/nbd0 [... create partitions ...] # mkfs -t ext3 /dev/nbd0p1 # mkdir /mnt/tmp # mount /dev/nbd0p1 /mnt/tmp # debootstrap --include=nbd-client sid /mnt/tmp # echo KILLALL=false >> /mnt/tmp/etc/nbd-clientThe "KILLALL" is necessary, since otherwise the nbd-client initscript will do nasty things with your root filesystem. Note that you still need nbd-client installed and run the initscript, even if it only uses nbd-client inside the initrd; because the initscript writes the nbd-client PID to /lib/init/rw/sendsigs.omit.d, which is also required if you don't want sendsigs to shoot the root filesystem from under your nose. This might see some changes in the future. Now boot with your kernel and initramfs, and boot it with the following arguments:
nbdroot=server,port root=/dev/nbd0p1Obviously, in the above two examples, you should replace 'server' by the IP address or hostname of your server, and 'port' by the port number on which your nbd-server is running. It is of course also possible to use nbd1p2 or nbd0p4, should you want that. And that's all there is to it. Well, almost; due to the way the network configuration is written in initramfs, I had to choose between reinventing the wheel, or hardcoding the NIC name to 'eth0'. I chose the latter. What this means is that if you want to boot off an NBD blockdevice that is only available on eth1 or wlan0 or some such, you lose. Other than that, go ahead and try. Should be on a DMNY (Debian Mirror Near You) RSN. Update: fill in the link to git.kernel.org, and mention the KILLALL thing. Oops.
40319
An e-book reader where I can click on any word and enter a definition for it.
The definition will then appear as a tooltip when I hover over the word.
Take that, Iain Banks, and Neal Stephenson!
32
I want Deskview X's terminal program. The one that resizes the font when
the window is resized. Except free and modern.
With modern (ie, auto-layout tiling) window managers, this is less of a
wishlist and more of a missing necessity. Ideally, it would always keep the
window 80 columns (or some other user-defined value) wide.
I've poked around in gnome-terminal's source, and this looks fairly
doable, but I have not found the time to get down and do it.
Next.