Nowadays I have a T-Mobile G1.  Using Sipdroid and any available data connection, I can now make calls on Diamondcard from my phone.

How to:

• Buy a Diamondcard account.  Yes, click the giant red SIGNUP NOW link.  Put ten bucks into it.  You’ll end up with two distinct pieces of authentication:
  • Website login username & password: these aren’t used to connect to the SIP server.
  • Account ID (mine’s five digits) and PIN number (mine’s 12 digits).  These are for SIP authentication.
  • 
• Download and install Sipdroid.  I recommend grabbing the version off the site as it supports connections over 3G, which is not available in the market edition.
• In Sipdroid go to Menu -> Settings -> SIP Account Settings
  • Authorization Username: <your Account ID>
  • Password: PIN number
  • Server: sip.diamondcard.us
  • Be sure the protocol is set to UDP
  • 
  • You should see the green circle of happiness in the notifications bar (pictured above).  If you see yellow or red, it’s failing to connect or authenticate.
• Make a test call.  Dial *43 for the standard Asterisk echo test.  Sipdroid shows latency and loss stats on screen, watch them.  I recommend staying on the echo test for a few minutes to see how stable your connection is.
• Call people!  I’m pretty sure you’ll need to be explicit about country codes so be sure to prefix numbers appropriately, such as +1 800-555-0123 or +44 20 7946 0123.

You might also want to:

• Plug Diamondcard into PBXes.org (it does work, maybe I’ll write it up…)
• Set your Diamondcard Caller ID

Jun 19 08:51:39 atlas kernel: [ 1324.948428] sd 3:0:1:0: [sdb] Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE,SUGGEST_OK
Jun 19 08:51:39 atlas kernel: [ 1324.948434] sd 3:0:1:0: [sdb] Sense Key : Medium Error [current] [descriptor]
Jun 19 08:51:39 atlas kernel: [ 1324.948442] Descriptor sense data with sense descriptors (in hex):
Jun 19 08:51:39 atlas kernel: [ 1324.948446]         72 03 11 04 00 00 00 0c 00 0a 80 00 00 00 00 00
Jun 19 08:51:39 atlas kernel: [ 1324.948463]         00 03 fa 3f
Jun 19 08:51:39 atlas kernel: [ 1324.948470] sd 3:0:1:0: [sdb] Add. Sense: Unrecovered read error - auto reallocate failed
Jun 19 08:51:39 atlas kernel: [ 1324.948519] ata4: EH complete
Jun 19 08:51:39 atlas kernel: [ 1324.950250] sd 3:0:1:0: [sdb] 156250000 512-byte hardware sectors: (80.0 GB/74.5 GiB)
Jun 19 08:51:39 atlas kernel: [ 1324.950919] sd 3:0:1:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
Jun 19 08:51:39 atlas kernel: [ 1324.954928] sd 3:0:1:0: [sdb] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn’t support DPO or FUA

After getting a new disk and the machine back operable, I’ve now plugged it in and trying to recover it.  Mounting fails, as it seems there are read errors in the journal itself:

Jun 19 08:35:39 atlas kernel: [  364.686504] EXT3-fs: INFO: recovery required on readonly filesystem.
Jun 19 08:35:39 atlas kernel: [  364.686508] EXT3-fs: write access will be enabled during recovery.
<errors like above>
Jun 19 08:36:08 atlas kernel: [  393.492868] JBD: recovery failed

It seems somewhat logical that it might be common to have physical failures in the area of the disk where the journal lives.  In my case, it seems the unreadable part(s) of the disk are all within the journal.  I ran debugfs on the volume to find that I could read all sorts of things on the disk — so I just needed to tell it to skip reading the journal and mount the disk anyway.

1. Before you remove the journal, you need to remove the needs_recovery flag from the volume.  You’d think this is possible with tune2fs, but it doesn’t seem so.  So you do it with debugfs:
   

   debugfs -w -R “feature ^needs_recovery” /dev/sdb1

2. Then remove the journal, forcibly:
   

   tune2fs -f -O ^has_journal /dev/sdb1

3. Now, go ahead and mount your volume as ext2:
   

   mount -t ext2 -o ro /dev/sdb /mnt/disk

Voila!  You’ve now nuked your journal, and marked your volume ready for mounting.  It’s possible that it has inconsistencies and needs a fsck, but I mounted anyway and was able to recover everything without failure.

I learned this trick from an Ubuntu forums post at http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-953279.html

I’m not unlike any other user: I don’t like unnecessary dialogs.

However as I’ve discovered, there is a fix!  Open up gconf-editor (Configuration Editor, not that you can find it on many menu systems these days) and browse to /apps/gnome-terminal/global and uncheck the confirm_window_close key.

Now you may return to killing your numerous terminals the way you’ve always enjoyed.

However the real fruit of the day is (you guessed it) Firefox Three.  I’m pretty happy to see this release; I’ve used the betas on and off for a while and been impressed how far it’s come.  It’ll still struggle to compete with the simplicity of Epiphany, but that’s just because I’m human.

It should also be noted that the Spread Firefox group has coordinated a campaign to start a new Guinness World Record for “the most software downloaded in 24 hours.”  So far since they opened the download floodgates about 18:16 UTC, and in the past ~ten hours or so, the Spread Firefox Download Day page is reporting over three million downloads, although I’m willing to bet that this is thus far an unofficial number.

There’s been a lot of commentary on the bad choice of starting time, the lack of advertising, some issues with the map not showing all the countries accurately but please spare us.  This is supposed to be a fun thing, so have fun with it!  Three million downloads thus far implies that the masses are quite happy.  You can’t seriously expect the organizers of this to make everyone just oh-so-peachy, so just roll with it!  Go download Firefox Three and enjoy!

Well done to everyone working with Mozilla!

One of my favorite bugs is the crashes that Xorg keeps causing, which has made my computing experience similarly enjoyable to Windows 95 where the computer is no longer logical, and likes to crash in a multitude of ways with no warning.

However onto the subject: Evolution’s new crash detection feature. I won’t debate the merit of this feature. Just the dialog box that I had to squint at over morning tea for a whole minute before I understood what the hell it’s prompting me for:

I get what this feature exists for. They’re worried that certain types of emails are crashing Evolution upon viewing, so we have a feature to disable the preview pane in the rare case that this is the issue. I suppose. I’ve personally never once had this issue. But what the hell. I’ll play along.

I’m annoyed by this dialog. When my software makes me think, it makes me unhappy. I don’t like to think:

• I don’t use the preview pane. Why am I seeing this dialog? There’s nothing to disable!
• “…appears to have exited unexpectedly…” — how the hell else would Evolution’s data files be in a state indicating crash? Be assertive in your dialog messages, as your users appreciate it! This should read “Evolution exited unexpectedly the last time it was run.”
• The text seems to indicate that “all preview panes will be hidden.” This tells me that the software will do what it says. But what options am I given? An Ignore and a Recover option. At this point in reading the dialog, I wasn’t expecting to be asked a question. I can make some assumptions about what these buttons do…but…what? I had to ponder about what button to push for a whole (admittedly sleepy) minute.

Bug 530345 filed. Hopefully not too grumpy in my bug report, I really do want this to get fixed. But it made me think so early in the morning so I’m allowed to be grumpy, right?

Took a few pictures as well.

Quite nice that most of the National Rail lines here don’t care at all if you bring a bike aboard.  It makes it so easy to get out of London and enjoy!

Check out a few photos, if ya like.

This hike is out of an excellent book, Time Out Country Walks near London, which I strongly recommend for anyone living in or around London!

So I’ve been in London (yes the actual City of London) for the past week and a half for work, and part of my adventure was to bring my bicycle with in order to try to ride around London and not get run over by any buses. The weather finally held (and I got my courage up) so I went for a ride. Needless to say, I didn’t die (else this bit of writing would be quite magical, no?)

It’s a bit different riding here. Shit, I’d take downtown Chicago at rush hour any day for a leisurely ride compared to here! Here I am, riding on the opposite sided of the road (which means that right turns are the difficult ones, not left turns!), none of the roads run in a straight line and always seem to be taking me away from the direction I’d like to be going, the roads are narrow and all under some sort of construction, the cabs are equally as crazy as Chicago cabs, and oh yeah — the cyclists here are completely insane as well…it makes for one heck of a ride!

However most importantly, I didn’t get eaten by a big red London bus.  Hooray!

I took a few pictures off Blackfriar’s bridge before the sun went down. Mostly just to prove that I was here. Hopefully I’ll be able to get out more now that the weather isn’t total crap.

Cycling in London == scary. However I did find some interesting resources on TFL for cyclists, and I’ve sent off for some maps. We’ll see how good they are!

If you’re a driver in London and were out today, thank you for not hitting me :)

• Requiring a minimum of three feet of clearance while passing bicyclists
• Prohibiting a motorist from opening a door into moving traffic, reducing the danger of “dooring”
• Raising the fines for vehicles parked in bike lanes or marked shared lanes
• Requiring motorists to yield to oncoming bicyclists when turning left, which prevents a “left hook” crash
• Prohibiting motorists from turning right in front of a bicyclist, which prevents a “right hook” crash
• Requiring motorists to exercise due care for bicyclists in addition to pedestrians

It also outlines some fines for doing bad things as outlined here, but I think that’s just to motivate drivers and I’m not concerned with the money values.  This amendment will help with some of the usual concerns that both myself and several others I’ve ridden with have had in Chicago; it can be quite worrysome cycling in the city and this is a good thing!

So, if you’re living in the city, please voice your two cents to your alderman!  From my understanding, not all of them sit on the Traffic Control & Safety Committee who votes on this, but it’s still good to voice your opinion.  The next meeting of the committee is quite soon - Wednesday March 5th at 9 AM.  If you support this amendment, please make yourself heard to make cycling in the city a safer place!

Feel free to check out a copy of the email going around about this.

The actual legislation is online as well.

The wreckage:

[1] [2]

The attempted repair, using nothing but pliers and a standard screwdriver:

[1][2]

’twas unsuccessful, stupid chain won’t rail around the smaller gears. D’oh!

Off to the bike shop in the morning for parts and supplies. In the mean time, we’re off to the local pub to sample the local Guinness :)

Regardless we had to do this. We needed to get someone. So I decided that I’d set up a proxy on my workstation, and have it ready for a devious day.

To prepare, I needed to set up squid and get familiar…it’s been several years since I’ve set up & run a squid proxy.  A quick setup of squid 3 on my router box here at home wasn’t much work at all, and before long I had a running proxy. Hacking in a url redirector script isn’t hard, either. Next step will be to set it running on my box at work!  Let the mischief begin(*evil grin*)

So as a variation on the original, which made me laugh (and I hope makes you laugh,) I give you Swirl-Ternet:

Hopefully in a week or two I’ll get a few co-workers with this and see how much trouble I can get into!

Importantly, I did save the license plate :)

Been taking lots of pictures :)

I’m one who loves old things, particularly when it comes to electronics.  Like sting, my P2 router.  Or my truck.  Or…well you name it, it’s old. So let me introduce my old camera - a Fujifilm FinePix A205 with a whopping two megapixels which I bought sometime in 2003:

So here’s my shiny new camera, a Canon Powershot SD1000:

For laughing effect, here’s tonight’s dinner:

(mmm, tasty!)

(no cameras were hurt in the process of making this dinner.)

To make life tastier, it worked right out of the box w/ gphoto and f-spot.  Wohoo!

I did however learn that the latest trunk of libgphoto2 is breaking ABI, which upsets f-spot’s crufty old version of libgphoto2-sharp.  Perhaps I’ll get back on the horse and get that sorted out sometime soon…

Actually, I take that back. There is! Discovering your own gems!

So this isn’t exactly code, but it really got me. When I upped to GNOME 2.20, I noticed my task list applet had some gibberish on the right-hand side of it. Strange, eh? Perhaps some sort of bug, perhaps? Naw, something that obvious would’ve been spotted a long time ago. I’ve done something strangely, I was sure of it. As always, a visual is best [red indicates my thoughs at the time…]:

It took me a few weeks of not being able to read such small text and not bothering to even try to before I even thought twice about it. It’s scary. It’s new. It’s something. It’ll go away. Or I’ll figure out what it’s there for.

Ah hah! All it took was a few drinks, and it all made sense. Those must be workspace names! But…uh…gosh, those are strange names when you manage to look close enough to read them. “comes after 11″ — who the hell named these things?!

Yep, that’d be me. Guilty as charged.

And I remember. Years ago. Naming my workspaces because “Workspace {1..4}” simply was unacceptable to me. But there was no good reason to stick a proper name on the workspace anyway, so I didn’t. I bet I childishly giggled to myself while writing those. But now it seems they’re used. And I’m laughing even more. Yep. Gem discovered.

Moral of the story: It’s better than finding $20 in your back pocket!

For those of you who can count, what /is/ after 11? I could never figure it out.

[but then I looked it up on Wikipedia…lo and behold!]

/* note to reader: it’s the american dream! [eddie izzard] */

I wasn’t home during the storm and downtown (just a few miles away) it wasn’t that bad down there.  Neighbors reported that it was the scarriest storm they’ve been thru (for whatever reason, Chicago seems to never really get hit that hard?)  One even mentioned that the windows in their home were bowing from the crazy winds/pressure.

I’m amazed by some of the huge trees that came down — uprooted and all.  The pictures speak for themselves.

• Zen Micro died today. After my first look it was grim. Put it back together tonight and surprisingly enough, it actually partially works. I even once got it to power on to the recovery screen. I also managed to crash Banshee with it once (that’s good sign!) But the touchpad is completely fried. This is bad. However, I think that my selection of tool was adequate for the task :)
  • A replacement may well be on it’s way…
• Nokia 770 is on the fritz. Been dealing with multiple issues:
  • Battery doesn’t seem to be physically stable anymore. I find my N770 turned off sometimes, and sometimes even a small wiggle of the battery does it.
  • Hasn’t been powering on all the time. Usually takes me ten minutes of futzing with it to make it come alive, and even then it crashes a lot at first. This seems to have steadied off a bit, if such a thing is possible.
  • Did I mention crashing? Yes, lots of crashing. Applications dying, particularly Opera. Kernel panics. Lost my maemopad database the other day, and my backup had puked the night before so I lost some important notes.
• Lost a hard drive, likely related to moving. Was a nice WD SATA 160 gig from a RAID1 setup. Thank goodness for Linux MD support being awesome and handling this properly, you’ve saved me oh-so-many times over the years.
  • Neat fact: I installed that hard drive nearly two years ago. That’s probably the longest I’ve ever had a hard running data drive last. Much better than the WD 60 gig drives I used to have to buy every six months!
• My stupid onboard IDE controller is on the fritz. I swear, it has a timeout of 8 hours, and then it dies, and I have to reboot. Fortunately that just means that I loose my optical drives. Unfortunately for me, it means that I lose my temper at midnight when I’m in the middle of a good movie, half asleep, and the movie quits. Don’t mess with me that late at night.
• Laptop is finally giving in again. I blame this on the travels. The LCD backlight won’t stay on for more than a few seconds. So it’s pretty much become an incoming SSH only box. As a matter of fact, I haven’t actually used it for anything in two weeks.
• Camera is dying. I’d blame this on the travels, but this is actually because I dropped it^W^W^W it’s getting old. Seems that some days the zoom motor just refuses to move. 2003 was a great year for digital cameras, but it isn’t anymore.

So with that, send me your hardware folks, and I promise — I’ll send it back in pieces!

Oh and I’ve broken other things…I’ve smashed this…and I’ve run the cat out the window! (Eddie Izzard joke) (you should laugh)

Last night I was unpacking my bag and found my Creative Zen Micro down at the bottom of the bag.  It was a sad sight.  I might as well have just gone for a swim in the lake while I was at it, because it was dripping, and I could see water inside the screen.  Tonight, with the help of this handy article at hardwarezone.com, I took it apart and found what I expected — pools of water inside the device. I’m hopeful that I can pull the ole “let it dry, reassemble and it’ll work” game, but I’m doubtful.

Does anyone have an old/spare MTP device that they’d be willing to donate or provide cheaply so I can work on MTP stuff for Banshee?  I’m going to comb eBay of course, but would be happy to take one off someone’s hands if they have a spare.  I don’t really have the cash or need these days to buy anything new.  If you have one, drop me a line!

In the mean time, I guess I’ll just have to write really clean code for Banshee that works perfectly, right? ;)

Diamondcard not only has a gateway for PC-to-Phone calling, but they also provide an international calling card service that you can dial to from most any country in the world.  The rates for the US are incredible - 1.7 cents/minute.  I talked with my family last night (bragging about le tour) for an hour — and it costed me all of $1.

I’m looking forward to getting PC-to-Phone set up properly, but regardless I have to recommend Diamondcard if you’re looking for a calling card + IP Phone service.  Thanks to the cool crew at Diamondcard!

Photos to make anyone who wasn’t there jealous:

My favorite bits:

• Staying at the hostel. It was a helluva long walk and really sucked on the rainy days, but it was a new experience. Forced random strangers to hang out and I met some cool people. Wish I would’ve gotten the names of the two guys running the hostel; they were very laid back.
• There were some killer keynotes; most importantly:
  • Alex’s presentation of PyroDesktop. I don’t take much stock in the comments of folks who don’t like this technology. It’s something we’ve never seen before, and I think the coolest part is the potential to draw a new crowd of developers to the desktop! Alex, Chris & company: keep up the good work!
  • Havoc and Bryan’s presentation of the Gnome Online Desktop. Super sweet guys. Everyone loves integration. Now, lets see it happen!
  • Doc Searls’ closing keynote. Doc is a funny man. “Now bend over and give me some content!”
• And my favorite sessions:
  • Larry’s presentation of F-Spot and the next wave of development. F-Spot rocks!
  • Telepathy and Tubes. You’ve heard the raves of others; I don’t need to spell it out here.
  • Joe’s presentation on Beagle and metadata joyfulness. Joe is a funny man.
  • Kudos to Jimmy K for holding his own during his talk on the new main menu development.
  • The Geodata standards project — creating a totally free database of mapping information.  Cool!
• The Walkabout.  What a great bar.

Many thanks to all the folks who made going out and drinking absolutely hilarious, including Gabriel, Aaron, Michael, Aiden, Rodney, Toms, any anyone else I’ve missed!

I will be taking the Eurostar train from London on the 28th down to Paris, France.  Will stay the night, and then the next morning get up to watch the final stage of the Tour de France.  How cool is that?!

Any of my fellow free software hackers know a decent cheap place to stay a night in/around Paris?

• Jono’s talk was excellent.
• Video taped the morning sessions in Recital; the F-Spot presentation was great. Larry is working on some sweet ass stuff. Sync’ing our photos online — integration with web services — I think a common theme is emerging!
• Hacked on libgphoto2-sharp and Banshee. Frustrated like no other. gPhoto doesn’t have any magic support for the lame underlying case-sensitive-insensitive FAT32 filesystem. I guess I kinda figured this would Just Work. I’ve been fighting with this for six months and sure enough, I just need to hack 50 lines of code.
• Telepathy: it’s tubular, dude!
• Too many metas: Joe, thank you for taking care of my metadata. You need to publish what you want from us software hackers so we can help take our desktop to the next generation.
• Havoc’s presentation was great. Full integration of Gnome and the web will make our desktop as useful as possible. Web services are all the rage these days and we’re all dying for that One Way To Link Them All…and I think this is the right approach. Bind our online lives with an online desktop and you’ll get my Mom to switch to Linux.
• To compliment Havoc’s talk (not just because Gabriel is awesome) but Gabriel is right: we need a Free Service License. Havoc mentioned it, and Gabriel has already been thinking of it for a week.
• Been meeting a bunch of people; particularly many of the Novell hackers I’ve heard of and met online several times.
• Went and drank the free beer, and the nice cheap doubles of Southern Comfort…on an empty stomach. Ended up back at the hostel relaxing and eating a really nasty fish ‘n chips.  No, that’s not proper british fish ‘n chips…it was deep fried with french fries.  So greasy it made me nearly sick this morning…

Still grumpy about libgphoto2.  Going to see about fixing it in libgphoto2-sharp, and then push the changes down to libgphoto2 proper.

GUADEC continues!

I’ve been meeting up with a number of GNOME folks that I’ve known over the last year and a half online, and it’s been a great experience. It’s kinda cool to have a team of Banshee hackers and supporters all roaming around. So many ideas! The hacking itch needs to be scratched this week. Big time.

So rather than turn up and go to sessions, what did I do? I walked across town with a bunch of the guys and watched the big football match. It was a blast! I went thru about 3 sets of batteries taking pictures, which I’ll post soon. Lots of funny action shots of people missing the goal. Hilarity.

Then of course, went out and got some beers and the fixings for some good ‘ol homemade pizza. Brought it back to the hostel where we’re staying at and made some pizza! Thanks to Aiden for helping us out and making it a lot of fun. Combine that with some beers, and then meeting up with a few folks later at a bar, and it was a great evening.  Also managed to give away an Ubuntu live cd to one of the guys working at the hostel — he was quite curious about free software and wanted to give it a try.  We didn’t even have to try to “sell it” — he asked for it!

The day has been quite interesting!  Points of interest:

• If you see some Netflix movies on the ground, return them.  The subscriber will appreciate it.  I left two Netflix returns sitting on the top of my truck and drove away.  They’re probably sitting out in the road somewhere, smashed to bits.  D’oh!
• I found parking, in a zone that won’t be street cleaned in the next few weeks, in less than five minutes.  Yes, it’s possible.  7600 N. Greenview — great parking!
• So I had left a few more things to pack last minute than I had realized.  So I stuffed it in the back of my truck, found a parking space, and then transferred it all up to the cab (which actually locks).  It’s stuffed — drivers side included!  It is quite a sight to see.  Will post pictures.

…and the adventure begins!  Was plenty early for the flight and all went well.  More to come later!

I’m completely astonished by this process. I’ve kept good details on what all it took, and I think these stories need to be told so that my fellow Americans can petition the proper authorities to get enough $$ in the State Department as to be able to provide this ever-increasingly-popular service of getting a passport. Expect a full report in the next few days as I collect my notes. I really wish I had stopped to collect email addresses of the folks I was in line with as to see whether they get their passport today. If you’ve been dealing with the passport fiasco here in the U.S. recently, please drop me a line as I’d be interested to hear your story!

I haven’t written in three months, and haven’t committed any code in four…as I’ve been a bit distracted by a few things, notably:

• That whole job thing. Turns out when you write code 8 - 10 hours a day it drains the coding life out of you. Am still working on overcoming my hate for coding past 8PM. I’m convinced that gedit/vim silently rearrange my code after 8PM so that it has more compilation errors, driving me to stop coding.
  • Perhaps it’s the immense rage caused by running Lotus Notes 5 (under Wine, no doubt!)
  • Perhaps it’s the fact that PHP likes to silently fail or cause strange errors?
  • Perhaps it’s that I _loathe_ bad management. Yes, that’s it. I might just be a young twenty-something kid but seriously, I know leadership & management and some folks “upstairs” don’t have their shit together. Good thing I work in a kick ass IT department!
• Cycling season is finally here. Finally. Gotta love that good ‘ol mid-western weather for keeping me indoors for so long! Started riding 50 miles/week, then ramped up to 75/week, and then last week jumped right up to 145 in a week (which is hurting right now). Just shy of 500 miles for the year so far; not bad considering I’ve got another 10-12 weeks of good weather and 1,000 miles left toward my goal.
• Being goofy. Yes, I’m a goof.
• Kicking some serious ass in the IT department’s completely unofficial but incredibly serious(ish) mini golf tournament. It’s an intense sport I tell you.
• The fact that bars in Chicago are open till 4 in the morning — enough said. This is simply trouble for a guy like me!
• My truck has been in the shop more hours than I’ve driven it. I’m giving up — I am going to sell it; I don’t need it anymore!

I’ve been up to a few interesting things lately:

• Setting up my own shiny new Linode to host vanstaveren.us stuff (websites, email). Exim + Dovecot makes for one heck of a good email server. I should probably write about Dovecot as it’s pretty swift, not too challenging to set up, and the LDA makes it even better. Cooperates much better than my old host’s IMAP server. Don’t ever consider 1and1 for any kind of hosting unless you like server load averages in the double digits, spiking up to 50+
  • Thanks Aaron for pointing me to Linode!
• Trying, oh so hard, to make my Nokia 770 listen to a simple Ogg Vorbis stream (or even a file). No seriously, I think I’ve spent quite a few hours on this, and I can’t get it to work. I’m getting near ready to re-flash it and start over I’m so distraught. Isn’t Ogg Vorbis one of those things that Just Works on a modern Linux machine?
• I’ve set up my own rsync mirroring system for Gentoo’s Portage tree. My Linode box (sam) sync’s every night, my server here at home sync’s from that, and my other three boxes (including my box at work, behind a firewall, over my VPN) sync from there. Think how much traffic Gentoo users could save their mirrors if they only had a similar setup!
• I’m finally — yes, it’s true — starting to work on Banshee again, working on MTP stuff. I’m going to be traveling in a month and my goal by then is to be able to send tunes and playlists to my device with zero trouble.
• I’m planning to go to GUADEC; this will be my first, and hopefully a lot of fun! Hopefully while there I can gather up a bit more motivation to get back to writing a bit more code :) I’ll also be visiting my job’s London office the following week. All in all it’ll be a sweet trip! If anyone is looking to split a room in a hotel, please drop me a message — I’m certainly looking for a roomate!

If you are ever looking to start a Banshee plugin, or want to see some random hack plugins, check it out.  I’m also happy to give SVN access to anyone who wants to make a commit or add their own module.

Happy hacking!

The guide that used to be at http://tricky.vanstaveren.us/Projects/Open_Source/Banshee/MTP has now been moved to the Banshee wiki at http://www.banshee-project.org/Guide/DAPs/MTP.  All the subpages have been moved accordingly.  My site has all the pages set to forward to the Banshee site, so update your bookmarks now :)
MTP progress has been busy as of late and with the recent release of libgphoto2-sharp 2.3.0, I’ve seen quite a few people trying to get their MTP devices working with Banshee and I’ve also been busy writing a lot of code.  Hopefully in the next few days I can tie up a few things and commit my local changes which include playlist support - yes folks, full playlist support.  It’s still a bit buggy tho, so I need a few more days to hack at it :)

libgphoto2-2.3.1 was released this past weekend, be sure to grab it for optimal MTP use!  It has a new hack to increase initialization times by factors between 10 and 100 times because of sped up metadata reading.  Naturally, this is hella-good :)

One can now play with libgphoto2 compatible devices out of a Mono application. Why is this important? Because Banshee likes DAP’s (Digital Audio Players), and uses this library to access MTP (Media Transfer Protocol) compatible devices. It brings us one step closer to having good, clean, easy-to-use MTP access on your open-source box.

If you have one of these MTP devices and want to know more about how to access your device with Banshee, read my guide!

A big thanks to Larry Ewing of the excellent F-Spot project for licensing the original copy of libgphoto2-sharp under the LGPL; without this, I’d be lost.

So, without further adeiu, I give you banshee-alarm-plugin-0.1. This page will be the home of any further releases. You can also subscribe to the feed category alarm-plugin to hear about any updates or releases.

Cheers!

I’m happy to say that the new job is also going very well.

I’ll post pictures and more fun info someday…in the mean time, I’m just getting back to coding again, which is good :)

Speaking of which, if you know an excellent ISP in the Chicagoland area (currently looking at RCN, thanks gabaug), please drop me a comment.  Hopefully they’ll be able to get in and have it installed in a week.  Time will tell.
Stuff you might miss off sting (my webserver) is my subversion repository including lirc-sharp, lirc-dbus-relayer, and a host of other broken pieces of code for Banshee.  If you need any of this code, email me and I can (eventually) get you a snapshot.
Oh yeah, and you’ll miss me too, since I won’t be online!  You can always drop me an email.

lirc-sharp is a set of Mono/.NET bindings for the LIRC Client Library.

LIRC is a piece of software that enables users to use infrared remotes with their computers, as well as use an infrared transmitter on a computer to communicate with other devices. One practical use is for making a media remote control, for controlling things like playback in music players and movie players that we often use when not sitting at the desktop.
This is a pre-release of what will be lirc-sharp 0.1.0…as of now I don’t plan to add any more features to it until post 0.1.0. Right now I’m chasing down some bugs in it and plan to smash it bit more here before I call it a 0.1.0 release. The API has changed quite a bit since I first published this module in my subversion repository and if you did try using it before, you’ll find that it makes a bit more sense now than it did.

So why am I writing this? lirc-sharp will enable any developer on a Mono/.NET language to very easily connect to the LIRC daemon, parse the lircrc config files, and be listening for commands. In just a few lines of code, one can be listening for specified LIRC commands!
I am developing this for an Mono application that will relay LIRC commands to D-Bus enabled applications; initial support will be for Banshee and Muine but it will be easy to add your own application. More to come on this!

As always, visit the project page for the full details, and a download link.
If you develop an application using these bindings, please contact me and let me know!

When I finally got everything merged in and logged into my Gnome session, it took me some time to get things really rolling. After poking around, I learned that NetworkManager on Gentoo doesn’t just “take care” of everything and make all the existing network scripts obsolete (like I was thinking it might do) - it actually just detects devices and calls the proper /etc/init.d/net.eth* script to make it go. I didn’t realize this - but once I did, things started to roll!

TIP #1: start your net.eth* scripts _after_ NetworkManager is loaded - this seems to make things work right for me. I fought NM up and down trying to just get it to grab a DHCP IP off my wired network and I couldn’t figure out why it wouldn’t. Turns out that dhcpcd was running for eth0 - and when NM requested an IP over the interface, naturally the interface went to shit and lost it’s IP.

TIP #2: get your interfaces all working properly _without_ NM running. When I tried to get it to work with my wireless card (Cisco Aironet 350), it would recognize that I had a wireless card plugged in but would show no available networks and just scan all day. Stop the NM & dhcdbd services, and tinker with your /etc/conf.d/wireless config until your card is recognized automatically on plugging in and automatically associates correctly and grabs a DHCP IP. If your device isn’t working w/o NM, odds are low that it will work with NM. My biggest conflict is that my card seems to have some memory of an old network (University network) that I used to connect to and defaults to that ESSID. Thus, I have to override it in my /etc/conf.d/wireless.

And some lovely command line output, for proof :)

So…I will probably post more here when I learn more about NM and how it works with Gentoo…but in the mean time, consider trying it out yourself Gentoo’ers!

….in unrelated news, it turns out that you can drag ‘n drop images from wordpress’ inline image uploader, but it’s a really bad idea. Firefox + WP allows it to happen, but the images all come up with broken links as they loose the site’s prefix. Turns out this isn’t a feature of the inline uploader, but just an “unhandled possible feature”. Argh.

It’s as easy as pie - just download from the Banshee subversion repository. Check out the Banshee Plugin Repository for how to get it!

Now what I’m really looking for is this - I need your feedback. The Wikipedia plugin now does more than just display wikipedia pages, it also does lyrics. Thus, it needs a new name. Anyone have any grand ideas? The winner with the best idea…I dont know…will get…voice on IRC for a day…or something.

Of course, the obligatory screenshot:

Yes, your Creative Zen Micro (or other supported MTP player), is ready for use.

Bug reports, feedback, suggestions, hate mail should be either filed on the GNOME Bugzilla under product Banshee, component MTP, or emailed to me.

The next step in cooking up some X server changes is to demo up XGL on here.  I hear that dual monitor support is in need of some love, and that most Radeon 9200 cards don’t work properly with XGL.  Sounds like my kind of daunting quest!

In other tabs open on my browser right now…yes folks, it’s true, THE TOUR DE FRANCE STARTS IN LESS THAN A MONTH!  July 1st, to be exact!  This will be the first year I ever have to spend these 22 days of bliss without a TV to watch it, so streaming radio applications, don’t fail me now!

I haven’t written any code in a while…seems i’ve got a bit of coder’s block.  I don’t know what’s going on…
Finally…the reason I haven’t posted in a while…I’ve moved my web hosting to a new company, 1 and 1. They’ve been pretty good to me (a lot better than my old host, who will remain nameless).  It seems that 1and1 is caching my homepage tho, so trick.vanstaveren.us still is borked even tho the files are there.  I’ve also had the ability to get sting.vanstaveren.us up and pointing to sting, my router & server box, to host some things like a little subversion repo for my crazier code, and other fun things :).  It also seems that Charter is a bunch of bitches and won’t open port 80 for me - they want me to buy their business package ($150/month) for that.  Ass holes.

Screenshots will follow, but as of now, I can plug in my Zen, view a list of the tracks on it including many details (stuff like bitrate and format doesn’t work just yet), I can drag and drop any number of tracks in any format that Banshee’s transcoding engine works with, and synchronize at the push of a button, and the rest is taken care of.  The sync works like a charm!

Gphoto has proven to be a very reliable library, and I will continue to implement more extensions of it into Banshee.  Some of the finer points, such as disk space, battery level, and time sync have not been implemented because they aren’t exposed in the ptp camlib, but I’m sure that it will come soon :)  I also haven’t finished track deleting support as the C# bindings that I’ve been using from f-spot don’t contain a delete method.  This will get done :)

Many thanks to the folks over at gphoto for all their work!  If you have a MTP device and have been waiting for a nice GUI to take care of transferring tracks, wait just a little longer, as it’ll be in Banshee CVS soon :)

Has anyone out there seen anything like this?

Marcus is a genius, and it turns out that libgphoto2 has mass-storage device detection support which just so happens to touch HAL in just the right way that it screws up banshee’s HAL device pointer. I haven’t taken the time to debug this, but it starts working when I remove the disk.so library from libgphoto2_port. SO…for the time being, it’s starting to work :)

Since we don’t have track metadata yet, everything is associated by Title=filename and Artist=foldername…but it is working :) Track write support works like a charm - and once libgphoto2 is ready to transfer metadata with it, I’ll make a release for folks to test things out with :)

libgphoto2 has proven to probably be the best choice for interfacing with MTP devices, but it’s holding a few issues right now that have slowed me down immensely…

1. Metadata. Marcus is working on this, but I don’t have the ability to read it yet, and write support is more just a figment of my imagination right now. Seeing that libgphoto2 is so advanced, the code for it is way over my head and I’ve been just kindly pestering Marcus as he works on things, and he actually went out and bought himself a Zen as well for debugging and testing. Marcus has been my hero lately and has made some great progress!
2. HAL issues with banshee and libgphoto2. I’m having trouble even figuring out where to debug this one. It seems that when I call libgphoto2’s camera detection routine, HAL must go on the flip…because when I get to the device initialization, the HAL pointer is stale and returns -1 for everything. All my attempts to hack past this (running detect after HAL validation, not running the detection routine, etc) have failed…I think it’s time to figure out what’s happening. Maybe banshee just needs to refresh it’s HAL information between creating the device class and calling it’s initialize? I don’t know, and I’m not familiar with the code enough to really know what I’m talking about.

So…I guess it’s been just a bit of a bummer lately b/c I feel like I’m stuck. libmtp worked in it’s own special way, but has proven to be under heavy development and hasn’t reached any of the maturity that libgphoto2 has, but libmtp did work. Makes me wonder if I should give it another shot…but…the gphoto developers have been so helpful and I know they’ll get it all working in the end. Argh!