Google Plus killed the technology blog

This may be the final entry in this and my other blogs.

I managed to painstakingly avoid using Facebook for many years, and instead waited patiently for Google to create it's social networking site, Google Plus (If you have never heard of Google+, I strongly urge you to go back to the rock you have so obviously been living under and/or go read some other non-technical site).

Ever since I have been active on Google+ (since soon after it's initial Beta period), have found it to be absolutely brilliant, if not addictive, and a far better medium to which I can expose my technical knowledge and findings to the masses.

This means that there is little or no time for the blog and I am almost positively confident of using one or more Google+ page(s) to replace this and most probably all of my other blogs.

Thank you Blogger for your great blogging service, but thank you so much more Google plus for finally giveing me what I (and so many other Google fans) wanted.

mirgating to libata

Since IDE/MFM/RLL is now depreciated, I thought I'd share my experiences of migrating to the newer libsata (SATA prod) drivers in 2.6 kernel.

Since I only have 2 devices on IDE ports (WD 320Gb HDD and a cdrw), there was very little for me to do as I had just about everything spread across both ata and libsata, so I removed all instances of ata, set built-in ATA driver support (since the system boots from IDE - for now) under libsata and enabled what I needed as modules for my SATA JBOD's

The whole thing almost went perfectly as planned (and as documented), except for the following minor irritations:

1. Forgot to change the real_root option in grub.conf from /dev/hda3 to /dev/sda3 :-P
2. udev was naming my cdrom to cdrw1/cdrom1

Admittedly, it took my a while figure out that I forgot to change the bootloader for the change in device names, but I quickly worked out how to change the cdrom device name back to default, by editing "/etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-cd.rules"

Xbox 1 savegames on XBOX 360

Since discovered that Burnout 3 and other Xbox 1 titles are now available through XBOX Live! games on demand, I decided to do away with disc swapping and focus my attention on purchasing games for XBOX360 and Xbox Originals online through Live!

Then it dawned on me... What about all the long and painful hours I dedicated to all those Xbox 1 Originals? Do I have to play them all over again including unlocking everything and developing perfect saves etc?

The short answer (more or less from Microsoft) is: No

The Long(er) answer is: Yes, but only with specific hardware, software and some patience (as well as unsigned savegames).


Quite a bit of research later, I discovered that it is theoretically possible as the XBOX 360 has a directory on it's HDD (Partition 3/Compatibility/Xbox1/UDATA to be precise). Besides, how else would it save normally backwards compatible game data?

So after I borrowing a Datel XPort 360 HDD adapter from an awesome friend, I was able to connect the XBOX 360 HDD onto my PC, and read (and also write to) the HDD contents within minutes, all I needed was Xport 360 Software

Next up I deleted my Halo save that I created on the XBOX360 HDD and dragged the Xbox Original savegame folder (ID: 4d530004) onto the XBOX 360 HDD disconnected it and it worked!

I then repeated this with Burnout 3 and tested it, but it failed to load save and shows Unusable in the in-game load menu for the savegam(e). Apparently this is because the savegame(s) are signed with HDD key so it will probably never work for this game *sob*

I decided to proceed with copying all my Xbox Original save games (or at least he ones I care about anyway) onto the XBOX 360 HDD, so I will update this post if and when I have the Games available to test.

isp faithfulness

I just discovered today that I was being charged by my ISP for a broadband account in a place I used to live in...

I applied for broadband back in 2006 when I was living in Sorrento, but broadband was not available in that area until about 6 months after I left that suburb and cancelled my dial-up. My ISP has been charging me for it ever since!

Luckily for me, my ISP not only cancelled the old unused account, but have also refunded the last 6 months. At least my ISP seems to reward faithful customers...

xbox360 and WMP11 fail

After about two years of procrastination, I finally got an xbox360 to fulfil my Burnout gaming needs. Before I got the (MW2) bundle, I installed Windows Media Player 11 (using the validation bypass trick). Now sitting here relieved that I finally got media sharing to work, I thought I'd blog about the one simple thing wrong with media sharing:

1. UNC network paths.

It took almost 2 weeks to find an answer to why my library was not showing up on the xbox360 and the answer lies here.

In summary (for those that don't want to follow that URL for some reason):

"If you want to share files that are not located locally on your machine, Microsoft has chosen to prevent you from sharing content located on network locations (UNC paths) like \\MACHINENAME\sharename"

Luckilly there is an undocumented registry "hack" that will fix this:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MediaPlayer\Preferences\HME]
“EnableRemoteContentSharing”=dword:00000001

Huge thanks go out to GibStorm for documenting this so well...

vim + gnupg = password manager

After finding that there are very little native password managers for linux, I decided to see if I could find a way to open my encrypted password file using a console-based editor without putting any plain text onto the disk at all (ie. transparent editing of gnupg encrypted files).

I stumbled onto the vim website (by way a Google search) and found a nice little script (plugin) that does all this for me!

Initially, I had some issues with getting it working but that was mainly due to exporting $GPG_TTY incorrectly :-P

However, as I use screen to manage everthing I do from the one terminal window/ssh session (vim incuded), the plugin works fine but fails to decrypt files when vim is invoked as a new screen.

I suspect that it's attributed to the $GPG_TTY variable, but my knowledge of screen and some other aspects of Linux are limited.

I now use vim + gnupg for my encrypted password file.


UPDATE 21/08/2009 @ 13:15
There seems to be an issue where the the GPG_TTY variable needs to re-exported every time you change to a another screen/pts. I have made myself a workaround, whereby I run a simple script that first exports the variable and then opens vim with the encrypted pwd file, but then vim removes the standard UDLR keybord controlls and falls back to classic vi mode. *sigh*

iPhone battery fail

My iPhone 3GS seems to be working well but with one small problem. Battery life sux.

The stupid thing lasts anywhere from about ½ a day to about about 1 day, which doesn't seem right at all.

I had also already jailbroken the the thing within the first few weeks of owning it, but since the latest firmware (3.0.1) came out recently, I thought I would update it in the hopes that Apple had silently fixed a possible power issue and to remove any jailbreak packages that could be causing this problem. No luck here folks.

About a week later I discovered that the phone was constantly emitting RF as a cheap set of speakers that I had turned on, would pick up the RF as interference and damn was this phone was being noisy!

After calling the Virgin Mobile iPhone hotline to get some support (which still didn't help mind), I stumbled onto apple's own iPhone battery information page and went through the troubleshooting steps, I seemed to have found the answer! Push mode notification. Turning it off has quietened it and the battery bar has stopped draining quicker than a cold beer in summer.

I am happy the problem is fixed and the battery is still in reasonably good condition, but this begs the question: Why is it on by default?

10th Annual System Administrator Appreciation Day

Today marks the 10th Annual System Administrator Appreciation Day.

Treat some lonely, unforgiven and/or unloved sysadmin with a gift and/or note of appreciation today and show how much you appreciate the hard work and effort that they do (myself included).

They are usually the same people that make your internets work! so show us some love. Please.





Happy Sysadmin Day!

/respect

silence isn't golden

Not only did the internal speaker in my my old Nokia 6610i fail not long after I got it, but so too did my Openmoko Neo Freerunner (GTA-02v5) (or so it would seem)!

*Grrr*

I was testing someone else's microphone+earphone's hands-free kit on the 'moko earlier on in the day, which didn't seem to phase the device as it simply didn't work, but after putting my phone on silent a few hours later, the 'moko now has no audio output except from the headphone jack!?!

After re-installing koolu's Android (v1.0_beta7), the thing still refuses to output audio to anything but the external headphone jack and I suspect that it's either the switch pins inside the female jack are stuck or the internal speaker has broken. I am yet to boot it with 0m2008.12 via uSDHC to confirm that it's a hardware fault.

The 'moko certainly has been a very interesting device to toy around with, but it has proved to be quite troublesome, making me want an iPhone 3Gs. If I can't get the audio issue sorted out soon, I will most likely get one. Problem is trying to buy one outright as I fear that no providers will because they all seem to list plans, but fail to give full price or outright purchase details *sigh*.

UPDATE 13/07/2009 @ 15:12
The 'moko now intermittently rings, but the microphone is still muted making calls impossible.


UPDATE 14/07/2009 @ 12:38
I found out from a scumb^H^H^H^H^Hcustomer service person @ Allphones, that Apple are not allowing retailers and telcos to sell the iPhone outright because it's apparently not cost-effective for them to do so.

Lucky for me, I have a friend who is willing to sell me his 16Gb 3G one for the cost of his 3G-s upgrade.


UPDATE 21/07/2009 @ 09:42
I found the link to the Australian Apple store online and I will be using half of my tax return on buying an iPhone. *sniff* Good bye 'moko... You have served me... err... not so well... :P

internets anew

Thanks to this article I was able to transform my crappy dg632 router into a dumb modem so that I could get better control (including better security) on my internet link.

The only problems I encountered was that I found it difficult to set the router into bridged mode, but finally found the answer here. The documentation on the gentoo wiki differed slightly too, in that the iptables exported variable for the WAN interface should be ppp0 instead of eth1.

Other than that I can now enjoy a properly firewalled, dyndns capable and port-forwarding capable setup at no extra cost.

Now all I need to do is get bind, ldap and openvpn working... having all this free time without a job does have it's benefits...

kde4

KDE4 finally hit stable in gentoo's portage! *woohoo!* (as of about a month ago :P)

I had to wait a few weeks so that package blocks got sorted out in portage (well, at least now there is only 2 rather than the 4 from last week), which just goes to show that immediately trying to update to anything isn't always a good idea! :P

so now the dell xps is chugging away at building all the kde packages and dependencies (as well as updates from about 4 weeks ago) etc etc and hopefully when I wake up tomorrow I will be greeted with a shiny slick new KDM :)

I really should be updating my diary-blog but I wanted to keep a record of the fact that I have figured out that waiting for sane dependency handling by portage updates is a good thing!

moar storage

I acquired two more 1Tb HDD's effectively making my current total storage space about 4Tb.

I want to software raid my 1Tb disks, but I need a silent UPS before I can (this system sits in my room, so I don't it waking me or anyone else if the power drops during the night), so my server is going to have to stay JBOD for now *sigh*

I am also contemplating putting Vista (x64) onto my lappy to make it easier for work, but I can't bear to loose my Gentoo/KDE after all the hard work that I have done in getting it functional.

I need to make some hard decisions here...

Also, I will hopefully get around to implementing IPTABLES + bridged mode modem + pppoe on my fileserver soon :)

Be afraid. Be VERY afraid

Thanks to Senator Conroy, Australia may have to suffer not only internet censorship but very slow internet speeds, due to an old yet unfeasable policy that the government seems determined to force into our homes (and probably businesses too).

I now direct you to http://nocleanfeed.com/ which explains (better than I can at least) what this is, how it affects you and most importantly, what you can do to help prevent it.

No Clean Feed - Stop Internet Censorship in Australia

OPENMOKO

I have finally been able to purchase a neo freerunner from openmoko!

Due to the current market, the Australian dollar is really low compared to the US Dollar (1 USD = 1.62063 AUD). But I needed a phone real bad and I really, really really wanted this one because of it 99% open (as in open source) nature.

I'm preparing for the arrival of it by purchasing a 16Gb microSDHC card (as well as the fact that I have dfu-util installed from a gentoo overlay from some time ago).

I'm considering putting Debian onto an SD card for uBoot... maybe a little too nerdy but hey, I didn't buy this thing as a fashion accessory :P


UPDATE 13/11/2008 @ 16:01
Today I discovered a nifty hardware feature. The hone can operate without it's battery as long as it's plugged in via it's USB cable!!! See here

Also, I managed to get host USB working the other day too.

Due to the available distributions it's very hard to find one and stick with it as some have feature and/or bugs that other do/don't have. FDOM sounds like it's for me though.

There is nothing this phone can't do (that which I need it to) :D

bubs is dead

My server (named bubs after the homestarruner character of the same name) died today after a power spike/power outage.

I'm not sure if bubs actually caused the outage, but one thing is for sure: It ain't turning back on.

My initial thoughts are that the power supply was damaged in the surge, but until I can get a reliable unit to test it with, I won't know for sure.

I have an old PSU from a PII computer but I doubt that will work on an amd64-based motherboard.

I just prey that the motherboard is ok becase it's going to get expensive to rebuild with new parts...

Might need to overnight some parts (or at lease a PSU)...


UPDATE 06/09/2008 @ 14:36
Bubs is back online!
Seems that all I should have done is removed it from power for a few minutes, toggle the (PSU) switch, apply power and hit the machines power button.

Also a quick test proved that an old PII/PIII ATX PSU is capable of powering an ASUS A8V board. Who would have thought :P

Home Network Redesign

I think I may have the motivation to redesign my network for the following reasons:

• Increased Security: Better Firewall solution
  
• Increased Security: Segmented network design, allowing for More control with untrusted hosts such as:
  
  
  
  • internet (DMZ)
    
  • Wireless and
    
  • temp hosts (ie. LAN party ^_^).
    
  
  
• Manageability: Implementing a secure routing protocol (RIP? maybe) may assist with network growth/changes
  
• Gloating: Show off my 1337 net skillz to my friends :P
  

The most important aspect of this is the first point (increased security). It should also allow me to easily create a vpn endpoint onto my server for remote access (from outside the network) and for internet access from the wireless network... *hmmm* radius anyone?

This should help me un-lazy myself and develop (internal) dns zone(s) too...

Hopefully I can have the design done and implemented by the end of next UNI break!

openmoko freerunner units

Since one of my geek tech friend's has introduced me to the openmoko FreeRunner I have been wanting to purchase one, but unfortunately they sold out before I could place an order. They have been OUT OF STOCK since early July (7/8 July maybe... can't remember) and their webstore says that the "next batch of shipments are scheduled to arrive on July 25th", problem is it's 5-day past that initial notice and no word of any kind has surfaced as to the availability of these units...

I DON'T want an iTurd but I really need a new phone... I did read somewhere that the company is operating like an open source project, so perhaps they are emulating delays and lack of communication that is normally haunted by most open-source software projects? :P

2Tb of goodness

So I finally shelled out (about ~$400+) for some more storage capacity (2 x 1Tb WD HDD). I was planning on buying a brand new fileserver ($2.5K worth) and doing software raid across them, but due to the cost of recovering from the car incident, I decided to do this on the cheap (JBOB). So now I have about 2Tb of storage at my disposal until I can afford the 10Tb fileserver (RAID6) *grin*

dmix

After many changes in my USE flags (alsa/arts) and the fact that I kept breaking my audio (NWN would have no sound, wine kept blocking other apps from accessing the audio harware and many other problematic things), I finally got a working dmixed (and arts free) audio setup *yay*.

This is how I (FINALLY) fixed it:

1. Created a working /etc/asound.conf (see bellow) and restart alsasound.


2. Removed arts altogether in favour of alsa (USE="-arts alsa") in /etc/make.conf, ran emerge -NDv world


3. while tired="true"; do; sleep 8h; done


4. Restarted X (/etc/init.d/xdm restart).

...and now I have dmix (which now works with wine!!!)!

Here is my /etc/asound.conf

pcm.dmixed {
    ipc_key 1025
    type dmix
    slave.pcm "hw:0,0"
}

#one called "dsnooped" for capturing 
pcm.dsnooped {
    ipc_key 1027
    type dsnoop
    slave.pcm "hw:0,0"
}

#and this is the real magic
pcm.asymed {
    type asym
    playback.pcm "dmixed"
    capture.pcm "dsnooped"
}

#a quick plug plugin for above device to do the converting magic
pcm.!default {
    type plug
    slave.pcm "asymed"
}

#a ctl device to keep xmms happy
ctl.pasymed {
    type hw
    card 0
}

#for aoss:
pcm.dsp0 {
    type plug
    slave.pcm "asymed"
}

ctl.mixer0 {
    type hw
    card 0
}

And as you can see in the screenshot below, you can see wine (foobar2000) using the dmix plug as it's output device :)



NOTE: Step 3 (sleeping) is optional :P

VMPlayer Anoyances

Here's something that I discovered whilst trying to figure out why I could only start some VM's and not others on an ntfs3g volume.

# cat ntfs3g.txt
If you are running your Virtual Machine on an ntfs3g formatted volume and you encounter the following error:

VMware Player unrecoverable error: (vcpu-0)
Failed to allocate page for guest RAM!
A log file is available in "vmname.log".  Please request support and include the contents of the log file.  
To collect data to submit to VMware support, run "vm-support".
We will respond on the basis of your support entitlement.

Try adding the following line to your VMX (configuration file):

mainMem.useNamedFile=FALSE 

NOTE: replace vmname with the name of your Virtual Machine.

I found this out from the following VMware Communities forum thread here