Rebuild the Robots

So the final release of hardy heron has finally been released. I did a clean install on my macbook from the yesterday and it went v smoothly. Infact i started the process from the cd at 14:10 and after just 15 minutes i booted back into my desktop at 14:25, which was pretty sweet, and a vast improvement over Gutsy.

Problems

Not many problems to report really, and far fewer problems over Gutsy and Hardy RC1. The one big thing seems to be the sound, no sound through the headphone jack is fixed by unmuting surround in the volume preferences. One more sound problem i am having is that Firefox occasionally has no sound, for now i am just logging out and in again which seems to fix the problem, i am not sure as to whether this problem is in Firefox beta 3, or in hardy heron..

Suki hackin into holloway's lappy

Just upgraded my macbook from Gutsy Gibbon to Hardy Heron RC1. The process was very neat, I just followed these instructions, the upgrade took about 1hr, and was not completely unmanned (i had to confirm a few things), but near enough.

Problems

• Once finished my system didnt have any sound, but after a short google search i found the solution to the problem is to open your volume control, go to preferences, and unmute the surround sound.
• Also a couple of plugins dont work in firefox 3, most importantly for me is the del.icio.us bookmark plugin, but im sure that will be updated soon.

First impressions

Everything else seems to be working as well, and in most cases better than Gutsy. The new Gnome is snappier and a tiny bit more polished, nice and subtle changes to the GUI (nothing too flashy, unless you want it that way). Ive turned on the new uncomplicated firewall which is a nice frontend CLI to iptables.

Thats it for now, ill probably write a few posts about pulseAudio and the new VNC client when ive had a play with them

Since switching to ubuntu ive been trying to find the best way to backup my phone book and calendar in Ubuntu. Ive tried various software sync solutions and none really worked the way i needed them to. Then i found obex, and through this post i found out a bit more Sony Ericsson specific information.

The tools

you will need to install obexftp to transfer files to and from your mobile.

sudo apt-get install obexftp

also i use the USB cable that came with my phone, but i will also show you how to use bluetooth if you dont have the cable, or just prefer wireless

backing up address book and calendar

Your address book and calendar are located at telecom/pb.vcf and telecom/cal.vcs respectivly this page is useful for finding out where various files are. so to backup these files open up a terminal window and enter the following

cd ~/Desktop; sudo obexftp -v -u 0 -U synch -S -g telecom/cal.vcs; sudo obexftp -v -u 0 -U synch -S -g telecom/pb.vcf;

the above method assumes you have your phone plugged in via USB, however if you wish to use bluetooth, enter the following, replacing PHONE_NAME with your phone's bluetooth name

cd ~/Desktop; sudo obexftp -v -b PHONE_NAME -U synch -S -g telecom/cal.vcs; sudo obexftp -v -b PHONE_NAME -U synch -S -g telecom/pb.vcf;

So whichever method you used you should now have 2 files on your desktop which you can backup to an external device.

Exploring your phone

So, i also wanted to backup all my photos from my phone, but first i needed to find out where they are. using obex you can list directory structures like this:

sudo obexftp -u 0 -l /

This will list the root directory of your phone, obex returns an xml file of the directory structure. using the same method i listed my Memory Stick which showed up when i listed the root directory.

sudo obexftp -u 0 -l /Memory Stick/

The name of your storage device may vary so check your xml listing and replace Memory Stick if necessary. I searched around and found my photos where at /Memory Stick/DCIM/100MSDCF/

Backing up multiple files

To backup photos taken with my phone's camera requires a bit more effort. When you ask for a directory listing through obex it returns an xml file with all the files in the current directory. When you want to download files you can only do it one at a time, so using the file list given by the xml i used grep sed and awk to make a nice list of files, then xargs to loop through the list and transfer all the files:

cd ~/Pictures; sudo obexftp -u 0 -l /Memory Stick/DCIM/100MSDCF/ | grep "file name" | awk '{print $2}' | sed -e 's/name="//g;s/"$//g' | xargs sudo obexftp -u 0 -g /Memory Stick/DCIM/100MSDCF/{}

And so now i have my phone book, calendar and photos backed up to my computer.

Ok so i like watching flash videos online, but dont like it when they get removed or the fullscreen button doesnt work. So i did a bit of investigation and discovered this website. He has some good explanations of packet sniffing with wireshark and howto use wget, you dont really need to read these but i suggest you do as it will give you better understanding of what your doing!

The tools

So before we begin i am running Linux (Ubuntu Gutsy) but it should work on all linux and Mac OSX. You will need to download a couple of programs:

• tshark - required for capturing the packets.
• curl - this is required for downloading some urls that wget doesnt work with.
• this shell script - this parses the packets you capture and downloads the flv files. You can download this to any location, but for this example we will assume you have it on your desktop.

on ubuntu to install curl and tshark type in the following commands sudo apt-get install curl sudo apt-get install tshark

The Method

1. Grab a beer
2. open a terminal window
3. enter the command sudo tshark -i eth0 > ~/Desktop/packets.txt and enter your password
4. when tshark starts capturing visit this video on veoh (or any video you like)
5. When the video starts playing you can close your browser window (repeat step 3 and 4 as many times as you wish)
6. Switch to terminal and type Ctrl+c to stop tshark
7. In terminal run the parseflv.sh shell script you downloaded earlier sh ~/Desktop/parseflv.sh ~/Desktop/downloads/ domo
8. Your video should start downloading to the folder you specified in the shell script

Explanation

1. First we open a terminal window and start tshark capturing packets on eth0 which is your ethernet port, if you are using wifi, or this doesnt capture any packets then you can type ifconfig to find out what the name of your device is. (my wifi is wifi0 so try that)
2. you need to be root to use tshark and see all your network interfaces, so you need to use sudo and enter your password
3. You can visit any video, ive found that all the videos on veoh and dailymotion work well, and all the links on sidereel seem to work fine. Youtube and Google videos dont work with this method at the moment (i assume they have some super stealth swf mechanism for fetching their flvs).
4. You can repeat steps 3 & 4 as many times as you like, eg to download a full series
5. The parseflv script takes 2 arguments, the first is the folder you want to download the flv's to, and the second is the prefix you wish to give these files. The script adds a counter to all your videos, so if you have the prefix S01E0 then your videos will be downloaded as S01E01, S01E02, S01E03 etc. Also the packets.txt and downloads.txt files are copied to your download directory for error checking.

At the moment this method is still a bit fiddly, a bit buggy, doesnt work on all sites and requires more actions than i would like, but for now it works well enough (i havent found a video on sidereel that it doesnt work on. I am planning to write this into a python application which will work on all platforms and just be a few button clicks.

Version 5.2, and my first release using bazaar. Ive revamped all my php classes and managed to clean up and get rid of a few hundred lines of code. Ive also changed my mod_rewrite to direct all traffic to a single script which then handles what to show you, more info on how to implement this can be found in this article

So, version control is far from a new concept to coders, basically it allows you to keep track of versions of your code-base, easily roll back to previous versions, and allows for multiple coders to work on the same program. I have not looked into version control because to date my code has been small enough to manage without. However, after reading this article i decided to give Bazaar a try. The online documentation is very easy to understand and it only took 10-15 minutes until i had committed my first revision of rebuildtherobots! My codebase is still relatively small and im not collaborating with anyone, so im only using a small portion of Bazaar's power, however having Bazaar keep track of all my changes is very re-assuring. I can now code while drunk and not have to worry about messing up my code and forgetting what i have done! so that's my verdict, if you like to code while pissed, then use version control!

So for the last few weeks I've been immersed in Linux geekery! I installed Ubuntu Linux on my Macbook about a month ago and after a few initial hiccups (nothing too serious) i now have it running smoothly. My reason for making the switch from OSX to Ubuntu is that on my laptop all i do is surf the web, listen to music, check email and write code, i found OSX 10.4 to be too slow and bloated for these fairly simple tasks.. since 10.4 updates to the operating system all seem to be focused around the iPhone and iPod and not on tuning up the kernel! Apple are pushing towards making things look 'pretty' and 'futuristic' instead of towards functional and ninja... and really i want more ninja , less frills.

So ive made another quick update to the site (v 5.1). The archive section now shows you every item ever posted, also items are now grouped by the day they were posted, these updates have been inspired by the tubmlr interface

So.. a few weeks ago my laptop hard drive completely stopped working, PLUS my G5's hard drive started behaving strangely, so the outlook for me having a working computer was not good. Above is a picture of my G5's old hard drive which i have just replaced, I got a 400GB Hitachi which ive partitioned into 2 volumes. As for my macbook it seems to be completely dead, ive tried a number of things (Disk utility, fsck, safe mode, single user mode) all of which do nothing, it looks like the drive has completely failed (after only a year of use, just after the warranty expired). However i recently found the instructions for replacing the macbook hard drive so i should hopefully have that sorted asap. Also the space in our NAS is running low so it looks like ill have to fork out for another two hard drives for that as well! It seems that today, speed is not as much of a limiting factor as storage.. luckily for us the price per GB keeps going down.

Just uploaded another update to the site, this one is version 5. Lots of tweaks to the code under the hood so everything is much tidier and should hopefully run faster. Some major noticeable updates include a cleaner interface, archives now show the full month in thumbnails, and the RSS feed now shows full size images.

Ever had the problem of Mplayer stuttering video playback over a network? Well, using the advanced features of MPlayer you can increase your cache size to compensate for this. This feature isnt very well documented but its a life saver if you are streaming larger video files over a network. to increase your cache size in MPlayer OSX do the following:

• Go to Mplayer preferences
• Click on the miscellaneous tab
• In the advanced settings check the additional parameters box
• Enter -cache x where x is your desired cache size in kb (so -cache 50000 would change your cache size to 50mb)

After restarting Mplayer your cache size will now be larger, the initial load time takes a bit longer but the video no longer stutters.

Just a quick status update to say my iTunes folder sync script works! well... at least in an alpha kind of way at any rate. So far it scans a remote folder, and your local library xml file for mp3s, these two are then compared, any mp3s in the remote folder that are not in iTunes get added to iTunes. I just need to tighten up a few loose ends before i release this for public scrutiny, should be soon though. On a side note, Iraq music charts and Afrofuturism.

So, i have been deep in code for a week or so, searching for the best way to solve the problem of multiple computers sharing the same, remote (on the same local network) music folder for iTunes. When i say sharing the same folder i mean this: all iTunes libraries of all computers on a local network are in sync with a folder on a remote volume. If one computer adds a file, all the other computers add this file to their local library and any changes to ID3 information is updated on all computers. DISCLAIMER: I am fairly fluent in PHP, CSS & HTML, this is my first attempt at creating a program at this level. comments on improving this are welcome END DISCLAIMER So far i have a working OSX alpha version of this concept using a combination of BASH, Perl and applescript. Release of this code (and the story of creating it) is imminent

Yes now! just upgraded my macbook memory to a mighty 2GB! everything is moving alot faster now, RAMtastic! on a side note the newest update to OS X is 10.4.10? shouldn't that be 10.5 apple?

So we have our FreeNAS RAID array setup now. We have two 500GB hard drives mirrored in a RAID 1 array and it seems to be working well. The setup was very simple, just downloaded/burned the iso, installed FreeNAS to a spare usb key then followed the documentation to setup the raid. So now we have a 500gb mirrored RAID 1 drive connected to our network and have been moving our collective media over to it. We are both running our laptop iTunes Libraries from the RAID and i am currently working on a program to keep our libraries in sync. The aim of this script is to scan the NAS music folder, scan the local iTunes library, compare the 2 and add files on the NAS that are not present on iTunes. At first i decided to use applescript but it seems this is too slow when you have 11000+ tunes! So i have resorted to learning objective-c and write a proper cocoa application to handle this. Wish me luck! ill update when there are updates!

So ive been hard at work over the past couple of weeks beefing up our home network. We now have about 7 computers on the network (2 pc's, a G3 iMac, a G5, G4, a macbook and a macbook pro) I've installed Smoothwall on One of the pc's which now acts as our firewall and DHCP router. It took several attempts to get this up and running, partly because of my linux newbieness and partly because of my shitty old Alcatel speedtouch adsl modem (by the way if you have the same modem drivers can be found here) Im also planning to add freeNAS to the other pc to store all our media, then setup a vlc server on the G4 to stream that media to the network.