http://trick.vanstaveren.us/wp They call me Trick for obvious reasons Fri, 19 Jun 2009 16:20:11 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Last Wednesday I came to work to find my workstation had died overnight -- and upon reboot, it failed to mount or fsck the root partition.  Unfortunately it seems my disk has seen enough service and was having failed reads: Jun 19 08:51:39 atlas kernel: [ 1324.948428] sd 3:0:1:0: [sdb] Result: ... http://trick.vanstaveren.us/wp/2009/06/19/how-to-recover-an-ext3-volume-with-an-unreadable-journal/ Has anyone else been as annoyed as I am about this dialog?  Every time I close a terminal which has a running child process, rather than the terminal closing and the child process(es) getting killed, gnome-terminal tries to protect: I'm not unlike any other user: I don't like unnecessary dialogs. However as ... http://trick.vanstaveren.us/wp/2009/06/02/gnome-terminal-226-annoyingly-protects-running-child-processes/ So I guess bananas has nothing to do with it, although all you monkeys will be jealous to know I had one with my dinner, and it was tasty. However the real fruit of the day is (you guessed it) Firefox Three.  I'm pretty happy to see this release; I've used ... http://trick.vanstaveren.us/wp/2008/06/17/firefox-three-guinness-world-records-and-bananas/ I've recently made the jump to the latest 'n greatest desktop, GNOME 2.22. Altogether I'm quite happy with the software. Not so happy with all the Gentoo bugs. But that's another story. One of my favorite bugs is the crashes that Xorg keeps causing, which has made my ... http://trick.vanstaveren.us/wp/2008/04/28/evolution-crash-detection/ So I got out on Sunday this weekend as well, and rode from High Wycombe to Aylesbury.  It was a good ride!  Proper English weather (rained like piss all day.) Took a few pictures as well. Quite nice that most of the National Rail lines here don't care at all if you ... http://trick.vanstaveren.us/wp/2008/04/15/cycling-in-buckinghamshire-uk/ This past Saturday we went on a bit of a hike around Surrey.  It was quite fun!  We had a small crew from work and a few friends from outside work.  Hop on a train from Victoria station to Holmwood, Dorking and walk to Gomshall, Surrey, and train back from ... http://trick.vanstaveren.us/wp/2008/04/14/hike-in-surrey-uk/ Fortunately for me I'm completely nuts! 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 ... http://trick.vanstaveren.us/wp/2008/04/08/cycling-in-london-not-for-the-faint-of-heart/ I was just recently made aware that the CBF has been working hard at an amendment for some city ordinances on cycling which will help define some legal lines that drivers & cyclists can count on.  I think it's quite reasonable from a purely safety perspective; I do not view ... http://trick.vanstaveren.us/wp/2008/03/03/hey-chicago-voice-your-opinion-for-the-ordinance-for-bicycle-safety-2008/ So I'm in Orange County, CA visiting my sister this weekend, and have gone to some length to get my bike out here. So what happens? I demolished my chain within 60 seconds of our first ride. In all my years, I've never twisted a chain. ... http://trick.vanstaveren.us/wp/2008/02/16/unfreakingbelieveable-i-broke-my-bike-again/ So after reading about the Upside-Down-Ternet (particularly after seeing it featured on XKCD,) I couldn't resist. After a few discussions at work, we decided that it would be a bad idea if we actually hijacked the company's proxy and did this. The thought of 200-some people all calling ... http://trick.vanstaveren.us/wp/2008/01/27/my-own-upside-down-ternet/ So I finally got rid of my truck, which was sad. However I did something good with it -- rather than going thru the hassle of trying to sell it, I donated it using donateacar.com which is a non-profit which facilitates people donating their cars, auctions them off, and ... http://trick.vanstaveren.us/wp/2008/01/09/bye-bye-truckers/ Go ahead, laugh.  I know it's funny that I somehow managed to break my old camera while making dinner.  What can I say.  I like to take pictures of things that I cook.  It just seems that it's a bad idea to do so while excessively drunk, which is what ... http://trick.vanstaveren.us/wp/2008/01/06/new-camera-look-a-sandwich/ At work we always marvel about the comments we come across in our code. Indiana Jones stories that somehow get related back to the code by it, how tired the programmer was when writing the code, indications of the [lack of] sobriety of the programmer, random musings about various ... http://trick.vanstaveren.us/wp/2007/11/03/lesson-in-programming-why-those-funny-comments-are-so-important/ So I finally got my power turned back on tonight a bit after 6:00...have been without since Thursday afternoon.  Only really frustrating part was throwing out a lot of good food.  Hardest part was trying to figure out what to do with myself having no computers/internet other than my N770 ... http://trick.vanstaveren.us/wp/2007/08/25/storm-carnage/ In the last 30 days, I've killed so much hardware it's not even funny anymore. 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 ... http://trick.vanstaveren.us/wp/2007/08/21/can-i-possibly-destroy-any-more-hardware/ So yesterday I was quite convinced that I was going to make it down to see the Chicago Air and Water Show, hoping I could see the Thunderbirds.  Well lets just say that we got water alright.  I stood out in the rain for well over an hour hoping to ... http://trick.vanstaveren.us/wp/2007/08/20/death-to-the-zen-micro/ I've been travelling for the last two weeks and have been trying (oh so hard) to get internet calling set up properly on my laptop.  The router in the flat I'm staying in is a POS, and is giving me a very hard time, so I have yet to make ... http://trick.vanstaveren.us/wp/2007/07/30/diamondcard-rocks/ So as a part of me taking a crazy vacation, I made it to Paris (for a whopping 24 hours) with one goal: The Tour de France! Photos to make anyone who wasn't there jealous: http://trick.vanstaveren.us/wp/2007/07/29/paris-et-le-tour/ Wowzers, what a great time! Was intending to write about each day individually, but that's certainly out of the question now. GUADEC was a great experience and I'm hooked on the community! A big thanks to everyone who helped put GUADEC '07 together. My favorite bits: Staying at ... http://trick.vanstaveren.us/wp/2007/07/24/guadec-followup/ This is mostly to brag to my siblings, if they haven't heard yet... 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 ... http://trick.vanstaveren.us/wp/2007/07/19/going-to-paris/ Wowzers, what a day! 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. ... http://trick.vanstaveren.us/wp/2007/07/18/guadec-core-day-1/ So I arrived in London around 6 AM; everything went quickly.  Plane ride was fun, albeit quite cozy. Took the paddington express train, which is super slick, jumped on the underground to Euston, and wandered around for a while until my train up to Birmingham. The train ride ... http://trick.vanstaveren.us/wp/2007/07/18/guadec-warmup-day-2/ (I wrote this on Sunday, July 15th, 2007...but it seems I never saved it...so here's the recap!) 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 ... http://trick.vanstaveren.us/wp/2007/07/18/travelling-let-the-adventure-begin/ So I've been planning this trip to the UK for GUADEC as well as to visit the London office of my employer, and I fly on Sunday. I applied for my U.S. Passport a month ago, paid the rush fees, and I got it about two hours ago! ... http://trick.vanstaveren.us/wp/2007/07/13/passport/ Yes, that's a VIM :w (not some new fangled creation), as in, I'm actually writing something here! 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 ... http://trick.vanstaveren.us/wp/2007/06/18/w/ Just as a quick update, Bertrand Lorentz has put together a second release of the alarm plugin, v0.2.  For those of you who love Banshee so much that you want to hear it first thing when you wake up in the morning, this plugin is for you! We're moving unofficial Banshee ... http://trick.vanstaveren.us/wp/2007/03/09/banshee-alarm-plugin-v02/ Howdy folks, 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 ... http://trick.vanstaveren.us/wp/2006/12/27/banshee-mtp-guide-moved/ After an age or two of waiting, pondering over licensing issues, and doing bits of maintenance here and there, the Mono/.NET bindings for libgphoto2 have now been released! One can now play with libgphoto2 compatible devices out of a Mono application. Why is this important? Because Banshee likes DAP's (Digital ... http://trick.vanstaveren.us/wp/2006/12/10/libgphoto2-sharp-230-released/ So...it's been a while since I've worked on this one, but I figure with Banshee 0.11.0 right around the corner, and plugins making their way into the portage tree, it's time for a release! So, without further adeiu, I give you banshee-alarm-plugin-0.1. This page will be the home of any ... http://trick.vanstaveren.us/wp/2006/09/17/banshee-alarm-and-sleep-timer-plugin/ I'm here in Chicago, IL now, safe and sound. I chose RCN as my internet provider and so far, so good. sting.vanstaveren.us is back up (and now accessable thru port 80), so all should be good. I'm happy to say that the new job is also going very well. I'll ... http://trick.vanstaveren.us/wp/2006/09/17/everythings-back-online/ I will be moving starting today - Tuesday, August 29th - to Chicago, Illinois.  If you're in Chicago and an open source hacker, drop me a note. Being that I am moving, my computers move with me too.  Thus, anything that is referenced on my wiki to sting.vanstaveren.us will be DOWN ... http://trick.vanstaveren.us/wp/2006/08/29/i-am-moving-downtime-for-anything-on-stingvanstaverenus/ So what's lirc-sharp, anyway? 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 ... http://trick.vanstaveren.us/wp/2006/08/11/introducing-lirc-sharp-009/ So, I've recently converted my laptop to Gentoo, and before I even had the base system merged in, I thought I should research NetworkManager. I was running Slackware 10.2 on the lappy, and I had never considered NetworkManager due to the fact that I'd probably have to hack at ... http://trick.vanstaveren.us/wp/2006/07/21/networkmanager-gentoo/ This morning I (very belatedly) committed a monster patch from David Schneider which extends the Wikipedia plugin to also be able to query autolyrics.com for the currently playing track. Building upon David's awesome parsing backend, this makes it integrate well with Banshee. What does this mean for you? ... http://trick.vanstaveren.us/wp/2006/06/24/banshee-knows-the-words-too/ Last night the addition of MTP support to Banshee landed in CVS HEAD. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it's true! The days of command line interfaces for your snazzy new Creative, iRiver, etc. player are nearly over. All you have to do is TRY IT! Just grab ... http://trick.vanstaveren.us/wp/2006/06/21/mtp-its-alive/ So I'm pleased to announce that another linux user has had a smooth upgrade to the modular X.org.  I've spent the last 24 hours making a jump from xorg 6.8.2 to 7.1, and right now I'm in the process of remerging a bunch of packages that depend on X just ... http://trick.vanstaveren.us/wp/2006/06/10/xorg-updates-such/ So on Monday, Marcus over in the gphoto2 development land committed a monster patch giving MTP Metadata support to libgphoto2.  I've been waiting for this patch to land so that I can pipe that information thru to Banshee MTP support, and I've got it :) Screenshots will follow, but as of ... http://trick.vanstaveren.us/wp/2006/04/20/eat-your-heart-out-microsoft/ It's been a fun trip over the last few days as I remember my XFCE days as I've been getting emails about the xfce-xmms-plugin that I started back in the day. That was TWO YEARS ago now that I wrote my first real open-source program, my first GTK+ program. ... http://trick.vanstaveren.us/wp/2006/04/04/trip-back-to-the-old-days/ I've always been wondering how I can make use of the FreeBusy export in Kronolith, and I've been looking for a php script to parse it into a simple calendar...so I've decided to write one for myself! It's nowhere near complete and has been borked by this weekend's time ... http://trick.vanstaveren.us/wp/2006/04/03/freebusy-parser/ So, I finally got it working over the weekend :) 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 ... http://trick.vanstaveren.us/wp/2006/04/03/transfers-in-banshee-with-libgphoto2mtp-driver-ptp2/ ...or lack thereof. I've hit a few walls with things, and been struggling to find the energy to debug them. 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... Metadata. Marcus ... http://trick.vanstaveren.us/wp/2006/03/31/mtp-progress/