15.6 kHz hum when TV is connected

When the TV monitor is kept above the PA system mixer, a 15.6 kHz hum is induced in the system.


I use a notch filter to get rid of it in recordings.

loading Ubuntu Linux on Clamshell iBook - part 5

Probably I should conclude this series here.

The power issue is a niggling one, but couldn't solve it, so am living with a max battery life of 1.5 hours or so. Standby lifetime is around a week, so it's pretty nice to leave it on standby and start it up for a quick browse or something. Found that the Fn-backspace (or should I say Fn-delete?) combo works as the delete key (since the mac keyboard doesn't have a "backspace" and instead has a "delete" which works like a backspace).

Future work may be an upgrade to swfdec-mozilla 0.8 (currently installed is 0.6)which is supposed to let flash movies play OK. Currently using greasemonkey workaround to download from youtube and play with vlc on desktop.

checking which version is installed on ubuntu

To find which version of a package is installed on ubuntu: Googling led to this post on howtogeek and this one in ubuntuforums so I can do either dpkg -s packagename or aptitude show packagename Aptitude is much slower. Another option, apt-show-versions turns out to be not installed currently. aptitude search pattern searches for all packages which match pattern.

Miranda IM

Finally settled on Miranda IM for Yahoo and MSN. Trillian used to need re-login for MSN after a couple of hibernate/resumes. Pidgin had crashes with MSN.

Had to install two more plugins for Miranda, keepstatus and startupstatus, for my requirement of remaining logged in automatically whenever I use the machine. Miranda also used to give an error message on resume, saying that Yahoo login was refused. Figured that this was because the ethernet interface was not yet up when it retried. Tweaked the settings Options -> Status -> StartupStatus -> Set after 60000 ms and in Options -> Status -> KeepStatus -> Check Connection (ticked) and Delay between retries at 60 sec.

Also blocked spam using Options -> Events-> Ignore settings. A bit non-intuitive, "The following events are being ignored" - Unknown contacts, everything is enabled (i.e. everything is ignored).

mp3 and wav as WinAmp Media File

While sorting files based on type in Windows explorer, both mp3 and wav files were being listed as WinAmp Media file. To prevent this, googled and adopted a similar strategy as given in the WinAmp forums:

1. Remove the mp3 and wav files associations from WinAmp preferences (Ctrl-P in WinAmp to reach preferences, File Types on left pane).
2. In Windows Explorer, Tools -> Folder Options -> File Types tab, Click New, Enter mp3 extension. Here, if it is already associated with some other app, it will complain. Then you need to remove the association from the other app...
3. Click Advanced button at the bottom, delete all the Actions, create two new actions - Action Play with Application used to perform field set as

   "C:\Program Files\Winamp\winamp.exe" "%1"

   and Action Enqueue in WinAmp with the field set as

   "C:\Program Files\Winamp\Winamp.exe" /ADD "%1"

4. Note of course that you need to put in the correct path to winamp.exe on your system, and that if the %1 is not within quotes, you will come to grief with any long filenames!

multilingual show notices in Google docs

Created multilingual show notices in Google docs by copy-pasting from blogger which has Indic transliteration support. Telugu had a problem - on generating print preview or while printing, the generated pdf had wrongly placed diacritic marks. Downloading a doc doesn't help, since the Telugu fonts are not loaded. Maybe I'll try later after installing the Indic fonts and keyboard support.

krishna on dell t100 setup continues

1. automysqlbackup.sh script from krishna used to backup and restore mysql databases. It gives two ways to restore:

   # mysql --user=username --pass=password --host=dbserver database < /path/file.sql 
   # or 
   # mysql --user=username --pass=password --host=dbserver -e "source /path/file.sql" database

   The latter method fails with ERROR 1064 (42000) at line 1: Luckily the former method works, tho' while importing SI db, it gave an error ERROR 1298 (HY000) at line 2410: Unknown or incorrect time zone: 'NULL' the db seems to be working. After the database import, phplist said database needs to be upgraded. As given in the docs, went to Main Page -> System Functions -> upgrade and it took less than a second.
2. Next, the php files were being served as MIME type application/x-trash. Not sure what exactly was wrong, but now it is working after
   (a) DirectoryIndex index.php index.html added to /etc/apache2/apache2.conf
   (b) index.html.old moved to another directory.
   (c) Subscription page configured properly.
3. Commandline php had to be installed, with apt-get install php5-cli as given at ubuntuforums.org
4. getmail downloaded from http://pyropus.ca/software/getmail/ and extracted from tar.gz.
5. apachemails added to webserver's group with

   useradd -G {group-name} username

   as given here. Listed users and groups seeing /etc/group,

   ps -eo euser,ruser,suser,fuser,f,comm,label

   showed that apache was being run as www-data so did
   

   chown apachemails:www-data apachebounces

6. Later found (after many attempts, testing pop with and without notls option) that this version of phplist (2.10.9) would not read arbitrary files as mbox files (like the earlier 2.10.5 on the older krishna could!) .

   Cannot open mailbox file Can't open mailbox /var/www/bounces/apachebounces: no such mailbox

   So had to change mbox location to /var/mail/username for a valid username.
7. Before that, sendemaillib edited as given in PB's earlier post. Since I copied the scripts from the old krishna, did not have any user problems with running the scripts.
8. Running processbounces gave

   Error: IMAP is not included in your PHP installation, cannot continue 

   Installed imap module with apt-get install php5-imap
9. Now to lock up the system using the techniques given here, but passwd -l causes the message

   Your account has expired; please contact your system administrator

   probably due to this bug. So, did the editing of /etc/ftpusers and /etc/ssh/sshd_config instead.

more on vm and finally not virtualizing after all

I'm filling in this post with stuff on the virtual machine just for completeness - we've decided to go ahead without virtualization for krishna since the only thing to be running on it would have been a single vm with phplist on it.

1. Added gpm to use mouse if necessary on the local terminal.
2. removed many daemons like bluetooth from /etc/rc3.d
3. Was giving error on boot of vm, "Use of uninitialized value $uni in pattern match (m//) at /usr/bin/ckbcomp 3109." etc. Apparently this was due to a missing dependency and adding perl solves the problem. sudo apt-get install perl solved the issue.
4. Cannot redir from lower ports as unprivileged user. So, 5080 redirected to port 80 and so on.
5. Way to port-forward only a limited number of ports for passive ftp is discussed in experts-exchange. The syntax for vsftpd is given here, for example, specifying pasv_max_port and pasv_min_port
6. Changed /etc/hostname and /etc/hosts so that each vm has it's own name.
7. While starting the vms using kvm, use -daemonize -nographic and not & to put into background. Otherwise becomes a zombie or something.
8. ftp server running on the vm was accessible from outside with firefox, not with filezilla or IE. Reason was probably that FF was rolling over to active mode.
9. Packet sniffed with wireshark, it gave all out-going packets tcp checksum errors due to checksum offload, so disabled checking in wireshark. Edit -> Preferences -> TCP
10. PASV ip address and port are specified as given here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Transfer_Protocol
    "PORT 192,168,0,1,192,2". first 4 numbers are ip address, The port fields should be interpreted as p1×256 + p2 = port192x256+2
11. Since qemu's natting was mangling the pasv packets, changing the ip to 10.0.2.2 - probably we have to go with ftp on raw server. This is in spite of setting the pasv_address in vsftpd.conf. After the packets leave the vm, the change is made by the NAT.
12. Since ftp is on bare metal, phplist being on a single vm is more convenient, so why have a vm at all - hence, going with a bare metal install. Install itself took only 10 minutes!
    

removing X from server

Too late, found that sudo aptitude remove ubuntu-desktop would have removed all the stuff in one line. Anyway, went through the meta-package references given here and did the aptitude remove for many of them. Some daemons like bluetooth still left, manually hunting them down... sudo apt-get remove xserver-xorg to remove X.

building virtualized servers on a dell T100

This is yet another looong post. Starting from scratch, had to do everything from changing bios settings to adding and removing virtual machines. Maybe I'll skip over the many days of trial and error and will just summarize the actual steps to be taken here.

1. The lights 1 2 3 4 on the front panel are only for diagnostics according to the Dell manual and do not indicate hard disks or anything like that.
   
2. Warning message "Alert! cover was previously removed" and not booting till F1 or F2 is pressed. Solution as given here - Bios setup -> System Security -> Chassis Intrusion -> Enabled Silent.
3. Much later, while installing KVM, found virtualization needs to be enabled in Bios as given here. So, as mentioned in the dell manual, went into Bios setup -> CPU Information -> Virtualization -> Enable. Also enabled the CPU info reporting to OS, which also was disabled by default.
   
4. PB wanted to do JeOS as given here, the installation on the base machine was Ubuntu server 8.10 Intrepid amd64 build.
5. Installed gui with sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop since I wanted to try out virt-manager. The installation of ubuntu-desktop stalled at 99% after downloading files for more than an hour, probably due to some network glitch. Did Ctrl-C, again ran the same command, this time it downloaded a few kB more and then finished the install with no more problems. The install itself took around 6 minutes. 4 GB RAM, amd64 kernel. Did apt-get remove gdm so that it would not boot into X.
6. While installing virtual machines from CD with virt-manager as given here, wizard would not proceed until CD was unmounted in host OS. Then, the CD could be selected.
7. Had to install qemu, without which install of virtual machines was failing. Listed in Ubuntu docs here, here and here.
   sudo apt-get install kvm libvirt-bin ubuntu-vm-builder qemu bridge-utils
8. Trying to install from the same Ubuntu server CD using virt-manager was hanging at the point where it installs and configures grub. Tried the install in expert mode and installed Lilo instead, this works. For expert mode, hit F4 when booting from CD after choosing English (language of install).
9. Virtual machines created with network options with virt-manager were not able to access the network. Only later did I know that all these machines needed was to be set to DHCP. QEMU has a strange and wonderful user mode virtual network which has a firewall / gateway / dhcp server at 10.0.2.2, DNS at 10.0.2.3. Since each instance of Qemu is a separate process, if set to DHCP, each Qemu virtual machine will get the address 10.0.2.15 ! And they are automatically NATed.
   
10. Now tried the commandline vmbuilder, since the virt-manager based installs were taking so much time and user interaction.Did the install according to the docs, some find the install to take just a minute! But in my case, found it took two hours. Reason was that it was downloading from ubuntu.com instead of using CD.
11. The --iso option for vmbuilder does not work, so the install was going to ubuntu.com for each package.
12. Also found that lines separated by \ for a multiline command works if typed in, but takes only the first line if copy-pasted!! So, my first vmbuilder image was a basic default one. Luckily, the default made a run.sh filein the same directory, which gave the syntax to run the vm as
    kvm -m 128 -drive file=disk0.qcow2 -net nic -net user $@
    The trailing $@ is equivalent to $1 $2 $3..., which means that you can add any more commandline arguments to the script (run.sh) and they will be passed on to the kvm program. Man kvm says it takes the same arguments as kvm-qemu - and man kvm-qemu redirects to the qemu man page.
    
13. Again another trial - the commandline virt-install (since the vmbuilder was using so much network and time). . It complained of "Unsupported virtualization type" - apparently had to put --hvm in the arguments. Bridge mode causes it to crash. Reason seems to be that the bridging, tap interface etc should be manually set up beforehand. So, removed the bridge option --network bridge:eth1. Then, it has qemu-system-x86 running at 100% cpu for a long time - indefinitely? - with no disk activity, as seen with top. So abandoned this attempt. The command used was
    virt-install --name testX3 --ram 512 --file testX3 file-size 6 --nographics --hvm --cdrom ubuntu-8.10-server-amd64.iso
14. The images created with vmbuilder could be copied and run using the kvm command. So, concentrating on those. Found the wonderful world of Qemu virtual networking! Redir seems to be the way to go, given at wikibooks. btm.geek says be sure to use bridging, but let's see how it goes with the user mode qemu. Now calling the virtual machines with
    kvm -m 128 -hda disk0.qcow2 -hdb disk1.qcow2 -redir tcp:5555::22
    for example exposes the ssh port 22 of the guest on the host machine's interfaces (localhost and eth0).
    ssh -p 5555 user@localhost connects to the guest vm's sshd. We've to see if this method continues to work under load.
    

printing over network with command prompt

Printing from the Acer laptop over the network using the method given at computing.net forum by typing

net use lpt2: \\machine2\shared_printer_name /persistent:yes
type filename.bin > lpt2

colinux dns fix

Emails from colinux were not coming to the radiosai.org address tho' the ones to the gmail address were being delivered. After checking spam and trash, checked out sending a mail from commandline and then checking /var/mail.info on colinux. Found that radiosai MX was not resolving, also mails to colinux root were bouncing saying that the file was too big. So, vi /etc/resolv.conf and added the opendns ips

nameserver 208.67.222.222
nameserver 208.67.220.220

Also did a rm * -f in /var/mail and restored the mailboxes with touch, chmod 600 and chown root:mail etc.

Annoying pop-up warns of click-jacking

Some glitch either in Blogger or in this template or in Firefox - this pop-up comes up every time I try to search for something, and have to clear the 'keep it blocked' check box every time...

Correction: This is from the NoScript plugin, so a simple fix is to uninstall it!

pidgin

Using pidgin now to remain online on Yahoo and MSN. Initially it crashed a lot, seemingly every time the machine hibernated or lost connectivity or both. Then disabled everything and enabled one by one. It may be either the email notifications or psychic mode or some such plugin. Disabled all plugins as advised in http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/TipsForBugReports, started with only Yahoo account enabled, one by one added GTalk and MSN, works OK. Went back to Google's client for GTalk, since I like the email notification with the very visible red icon.

Edit: Found that it was the MSN connectivity module, or maybe anything more than one network at a time, which is causing the crash on resume: when MSN is logged in along with yahoo, it crashes. When only yahoo is logged on, no crash on hibernate and resume.

two pass encoding fail

My last post was too euphoric too soon. WMEncoder is not allowing 2-pass encoding for some reason. When 2-pass is selected, it exits as soon as it finishes the first pass, and a 2 kB or something wmv file results. 1-pass is working, so using that as a workaround for the moment. Wonder if using avi files with ac3 audio is the culprit.

multitasking joy

Ah! the joys of multitasking! Typing this while WMEncoder and Virtualdubmod do encoding and Nero rips tracks from a CD (RW, recorded from MiniDisc using the Marantz recorder CDR631, with an optical connection to automate track creation). Probably better hardware, better drivers, more RAM are all responsible. Saispace2 would have definitely crashed with all this together.

loading Ubuntu Linux on Clamshell iBook - part 4

Previous posts in this series: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

USB mem-key automounting was pretty easy to add - just added ohci-hcd to the end of /etc/modules, and on next reboot, USB volumes were being automounted.

For the power management misreporting, did as suggested at applefritter, resetting PMU, PRAM and NVRAM followed by a full discharge. Copy-pasting from that post,

1) Reset the PMU again. With the computer off, use a straightened paper clip to push down the reset button "under the grille" near the power button for 5-10 seconds (the proper technique for this model). Your PMU has been reset.

2) Reset the PRAM. Start up the machine, then hold down the following 4-key combination immediately after the startup chime: [Apple]-[Option]-[letter P]-[letter R]. I usually find it helpful to hold [Apple]-[Option]-[letter R] with my left hand, press the power button with my right hand, then immediately press the [letter P]. Hold down all four keys until the Mac has chimed 3-4 times. When you let up, the Mac should start up normally. You'll have to shut it down again for the third step.

3) Reset the NVRAM. Start up the machine, then hold down the following 4-key combination immediately after the startup chime: [Apple]-[Option]-[letter O]-[letter F]. Hold down all four keys until the machine boots up to a grey screen with text: this is Open Firmware mode. NOTE: Be very careful what you do here! It's easy to mess things up in Open Firmware very quickly if you don't know what you're doing! Type the following commands exactly as they're written here, and follow each command by pressing the [Return] key:

reset-nvram
reset-all

Your NVRAM has been reset, and your Mac will now restart itself normally.

Now you can go about the task of completely draining, then recharging, your battery. Go to your Apple Menu>System Preferences>Energy Saver. Select "Battery" instead of "Power Adapter," and set the all the sliders to not sleep, ever. Period.

Now stick a CD in the drive and open iTunes. Turn on Repeat mode and play the CD indefinitely (you might want to pick a CD you actually like ...).

Unplug the power adapter and let the iBook run until it goes into low-power deep sleep. This could be the 5 minutes or so that you've been reporting, or it could be the full 2 hours that the battery should have been holding.

Once you're in deep-sleep mode, plug in the power adapter and allow the battery to charge for however long it takes -- overnight would be ideal. Then you can test the battery under normal use conditions and let us know what (if anything) has changed.

Sometimes, the PMU becomes confused and either (1) reports a charge higher than is actually on the battery, causing the charging circuit to turn off prematurely, (2) reports a charge lower than is actually on the battery, causing the computer to shut down or deep-sleep prematurely, or (3) some combination of these symptoms.

By resetting the PMU, the PRAM, and the NVRAM, the Mac should now have a clean slate and be forced to "relearn" when the battery is fully drained and fully charged. A full drain-and-charge cycle should help it find these parameters.

But unfortunately, after doing all that, still the battery shows only 44% charged, 1.15 hours remaining. Will have to dig some more.

router set up

DLink router DIR-615 set up at Planet. Currently disabled wireless and using it as a plugin replacement for saispace. This router has login Admin with blank pw, at 192.168.0.1 by default.

loading Ubuntu Linux on Clamshell iBook - part 3

Part one of this series and part two have more details.

Adding left and right button emulation - this post (google led me to this guy who links to a bunch of iBook Linuxers) mentioned that F11 and F12 were already mapped to middle and right-click. Just tried mine, mine are, too! Since mouseemu is installed, it must be doing the job. Or maybe it is the line in my /etc/X11/xorg.conf which says Option "XkbRules" "xorg"
... Aha! This guy says it is in /etc/sysctl.conf, and it is!

dev/mac_hid/mouse_button_emulation = 1
dev/mac_hid/mouse_button2_keycode = 87
dev/mac_hid/mouse_button3_keycode = 88

Choosing System->Preferences->Keyboard, one gets the Gnome Keyboard Prefs. In the layouts tab, choosing the Layout options button, under Numeric Keypad Delete behaviour, I have chosen the . button to be delete button. Next on the todo list is to clear up the power behaviour. Currently, the charging doesn't seem to be taking place when running linux, or maybe the pmu is not reporting it correctly. The Gnome panel was showing 44% for much of the time I was using it earlier. Now it shows 37%. When I disconnect and reconnect power, /proc/pmu/battery_0 shows a different count. But then it seems to get stuck?!

Right now, cat /proc/pmu/battery_0 shows:

flags      : 00000011
charge     : 810
max_charge : 2141
current    : 0
voltage    : 16030
time rem.  : 0

More than an hour back, it showed

flags      : 00000011
charge     : 789
max_charge : 2141
current    : 0
voltage    : 16020
time rem.  : 0

Plucking out and putting back the power plug makes the charge start moving at the rate of 5 for ten seconds (815 to 820 in around 10 sec, for example). But now it has stopped at 827 and doesn't move any more. Will have to check out this issue as well as the lack of USB hotplug support (sees the USB key only if rebooted).

toshiba satellite A75 laptop power jack re-soldering

Yet another Toshiba laptop with power jack problem, just a touch of solder on the jack by D did the job - just 90 minutes.

loading Ubuntu Linux on Clamshell iBook - part 2

The part 1 of this saga is here.

After a 256 MB SDRAM ordered from ebay.in arrived, installed xubuntu-desktop. But when it rebooted, it came up with gdm and gnome desktop by default. Looked pretty good. Went back to the login screen, chose Xfce, found the look to be similar, but some things like the volume control in the panel were missing. So, went back to the gnome desktop. Not too sluggish, pretty good, in fact. Installed various stuff like flash plugins for firefox mozilla-plugin-gnash and swfdec-mozilla, OpenOffice, etc, performance is good. Have to download flv files and play them with vlc or mplayer, since the swfdec has a CPU drinking problem playing flv flash players, does not refresh the screen. Hibernate is not supported in hardware, I think. Suspend works well. Have to disable the "Failed to suspend" message in GConf as mentioned in the help center. Battery life is perpetually shown as 40% in the Gnome panel applet. Must take a dekko at what can be done about that. But someone wants to buy the machine, so I may not get time to do that...

outgoing mails from Thunderbird to gmail - AVAST!

Outgoing mails were getting an error 5.7.0 Must issue a STARTTLS... though the TLS settings were set correctly. Googling found this page which gave the solution of disabling AVAST scanning of outgoing emails. On my system, Avast 4.8 Pro, in the Enhanced Interface (as against the Simple Interface) it was in Tasks -> Resident Protection (right-click) -> Properties (it gives a warning at this point) -> Internet Mail (with the Advanced configuration checkbox at the bottom checked) -> SMTP -> Scan outbound mail. Removed it, and SMTP started working again.

extigy check

I'd not mentioned that the Creative Extigy had gone bad before I got the Tascam US1641 in the Mandir. Checked it today with an adjustable power supply set to 12 V - it needs 12 V 1 amp - to see if the problem is only with the power supply. At first try, it seemed No go, well and truly dead. Then instead of the auto-detected drivers from XP, tried installing the creative drivers. Then the analog section seems to be working fine. Line in -84 dB noise floor or better, mic also good. The digital section seems to have packed up due to the high voltage from the bad power supply - burning smell when it is connected. SPDIF copper and optical, no sound heard in headphones tho the mixer has these inputs unmuted and turned up. Anyway, it'll do for mic PB recordings, that's a big plus.

adding cleartype

In Display properties, on the Appearance tab, Effects button: Select "Use the following method to smooth edges of screen fonts" check box, and then choose ClearType in the list.

Thunderbird migration

Migrating Thunderbbird to the Aspire 4530 was not so straightforward, since I'd made a bit of a mess while configuring it on saispace2. The mail files and the configuration were at two different places, and the settings had to be redone since the paths were different - E:\My Documents ... etc now instead of L:\Mozilla Thuderbird etc earlier.

1. Copied contents of L:\Program Files\Mozilla Thunderbird\Profiles and Local Folders to the new location in E:\
2. Copied contents of C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Thunderbird to same location
3. After starting Thunderbird, went to each account and changed the path to sig file and local folders.

New Acer laptop Aspire 4530

Migrating to the laptop to save power. Making a list of what I want installed on it, putting it all in a folder for easy installation. Used PING to create a backup image. Have not yet done any benchmarks except for audio. Though the Realtek HD audio has SPDIF out, the Line In is average: -73 dB noise floor and a drift of 0.054 sec in 30 minutes of recording. Not frame accurate, but at least better than the M-Audio MobilePro! Noise floor goes up considerably on using Mic Boost. Maybe I'll use the MobilePro for PB recordings?

loading Ubuntu Linux on Clamshell iBook - part 1

This will a long post.

The Clamshell iBook was hamstrung by non-availability of current browsers for MacOS 9. Loading MacOS X was not an option, with only 64 MB of RAM and no DVD drive. On an impulse, looked up Ubuntu, and found it had a PowerPC install supporting older machines with http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ports/releases/hardy/release/ubuntu-8.04.1-alternate-powerpc.iso

First started the install using just the install-powerpc image, but this didn't work: it went on for 45 minutes before asking me for user info, then went on for 2 more hours or so before saying that the install failed. Probably due to the limited RAM, tho' the installer was in "Low memory mode".

Then tried the cli-expert-powerpc image. Chose the same partitioning scheme as before,
Guided - use full disk
It created a 180 MB swap
(#4 180 MB swap)

One problem with this install was that it did not ask for a username - it created username oem and added it to sudoers list. The message was that I could run oem-config-prepare and then oem-config to change the oem user to whatever name I wanted. But the latter did not work, probably because of the minimal install. So, manually added user using adduser and added to sudo list using the method given here

sudo usermod -a -G admin username

removing the oem user with the technique given here, userdel.

Sound started working by adding snd-powermac to the end of modules with

sudo nano /etc/modules

as given in the PowerPC FAQ.

glxinfo reports no accelerated video as of now, though tried some stunts with setting the driver to ati and so on.

The Mac keyboard has some mapping problems. Where is the Del key for Ctrl-Alt-Del ?! Also, only a single button on the track-pad, so middle-clicking is out. Possible solution is at http://linuxaleph.blogspot.com/2008/11/mapping-middle-click-to-keyboard-key.html

Actually none of the bugs given at the Low-Memory Install page afffected my install, particularly the bug #202959 did not happen for me on the PowerPC. It does show an error while booting,

PCI: Cannot allocate resource region 0 of device 0001:10:19.0

but the boot process continues.

Adding repositories by editing sources.list sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list was not so easy. The PowerPC builds were shifted to the ports servers, so finally found at http://ports.ubuntu.com/dists/hardy/
My sources.list file :

deb http://ports.ubuntu.com/ hardy-security main restricted
deb-src http://ports.ubuntu.com/ hardy-security main restricted
deb http://ports.ubuntu.com/ hardy-security universe
deb-src http://ports.ubuntu.com/ hardy-security universe
deb http://ports.ubuntu.com/ hardy-security multiverse
deb-src http://ports.ubuntu.com/ hardy-security multiverse
deb http://ports.ubuntu.com/ hardy main restricted
deb-src http://ports.ubuntu.com/ hardy main restricted
deb http://ports.ubuntu.com/ hardy universe
deb-src http://ports.ubuntu.com/ hardy universe
deb http://ports.ubuntu.com/ hardy multiverse
deb-src http://ports.ubuntu.com/ hardy multiverse

Installed IceWM using instructions from the Low-Memory Install page with

sudo aptitude install icewm iceconf icepref iceme icewm-themes

Tried installing xdm for auto-login, since gdm and kdm are resource-hungry. But then xdm doesn't have that feature! So, using the technique given here and here, putting startx at the end of .bashrc as

if [ $(tty) == "/dev/tty1" ]; then
startx
/sbin/halt
fi

Firefox and dillo work OK. Dillo is fast but doesn't render CSS. Firefox needs more RAM, swaps a lot. Ordered more RAM from ebay.in - PC-133 SDRAM "suitable for most P-III laptops". Actually need PC-66, I hope it works. With more RAM, might try installing xubuntu-desktop and other goodies.

saga of corrupt pst file

K's S had a corrupt pst file, not opening in Outlook. Googled and passed on the following gyan:

Techrepublic points to MS knowledgebase and says pst max filesize is 2 GB
http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-10878_11-1052339.html (BTW, the link is correct - it is techrepublic.com.com....)

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q197315
also says the same thing,
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q296088
mentions that it affects

• Microsoft Outlook 2000 Standard Edition
• Microsoft Outlook 2002 Standard Edition
• Microsoft Outlook 98 Standard Edition
• Microsoft Outlook 97 Standard Edition

Googling for 5 GB pst file, found
"I'd suggest using Mozilla Thunderbird on Windows to do the conversion. It creates MBOX files, and it's free. I've used it to migrate 5 GB of PST files to mail.app for my wife and myself."
from comments at http://www.davidalison.com/2008/05/outlook-pst-files-and-mac-conversion.html

According to http://www.tek-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=1401989&page=12 last line,
"server side .pst tools don't support .pst files larger than 2gb. "
So there may have been some corruption if the file has gone through such tools.

Some more possibilities are listed in the comments of:
http://weblogs.asp.net/bleroy/archive/2007/06/27/outlook-pst-file-repair-tool.aspx
which say

• Don't use scanpst for > 2 GB
• Try opening in outlook 2007 (maybe you are using an even later version?)
• Try OutlookFix http://www.cimaware.com/main/products/outlookfix.php
  

Since this is paid sw, you could try thunderbird first, and later export back to outlook if necessary.

Resolution: Trying the Thunderbird stunt also did not work, many folders had junk characters and so on. It turned out that the file had become corrupted while being copied to the laptop. S went back to office, copied it again, this time it worked fine.

repairing dialup networking in XP

M had a problem connecting to Reliance using the USB dongle. Googled the error message 'Error 6 The handle is invalid.' and found the solution was a bit of voodoo from http://forums.practicallynetworked.com/showthread.php?t=6781:

1. Remove Modem driver from the Device Manager.

- Right click My Computer and select Properties.

- Click on Hardware, Device Manager. Click on + sign by modem, right click and
uninstall modem.

2. Delete the dial up connections and remove 3rd party RAS related
program if any.

3. Run the attached file to install RArepair.exe, then run RArepair.exe to
reinstall RAS components. Reboot.

4. Reinstall Modem driver and the 3rd party dial up program if it is
required by your ISP.

5. Recreate the dial up connection and check if the problem is resolved.


The exe file is also available on the forum page.

easy scheduled shutdown for windows

I wanted the equivalent of shutdown -h 3600 for windows, googled and found that it is shutdown -s -t 3600. And \System32\shutdown.exe shows a dialog box counting down the time to shutdown too. shutdown /? for more options...

M-Audio MobilePre USB

Unfortunately seems to be el-cheapo in results too. Has -72 dB of noise - comparable to a normal PC sound card, not like Pro or Semi-Pro cards which have at least -84 like the Darla (a discontinued product now at www.echoaudio.com ). But the real killer was lack of frame-accurate sampling. Drift of 0.3 sec in 30 minutes recording.

While doing the tests, played back drama CD with 13 tracks with the Marantz CD recorder (CDR 631)and recorded on saispace2 and sathya with the MobilePre and Darla cards respectively. The Darla recording synced with the CD audio captured using Cool Edit Pro's audio extraction, accurate to 0.02 sec over 70 minutes. The MobilePro had the 0.3 sec in 30 minutes.

"feedback destroyer in software"

This is a real boon.

HP Pavilion travails

M brought a HP Pavilion dv6000 - dv6402ca to be precise - to check if networking is OK. He runs WinXP on it, and not the pre-installed Vista, because he has some sw which won't work with Vista. Found that the network driver was not installed - nForce chipset. Since the wireless was working, thought it would be a ten minute job to download the driver, install it and check it. Little did I know....

First, the Broadcom Wifi refused to work with our Airport wireless network. After entering the SSID and WEP key, a simple "Repair" was enough to make the Compaq connect to it. Tried removing the earlier configured wireless network, retaining only our home network. No go. Finally tried a restart. Voila! Connected. So, try try try again, if you don't succeed, restart!

The nVidia driver was a hefty 50 MB download. Got the link from

http://en.kioskea.net/forum/affich-20336-hp-pavilion-dv6000-xp-drivers

Unfortunately, Windows downloaded a couple of updates, and I thought I could club both restarts together. So, ran the nVidia driver setup and chose not to restart immediately, ran the update installation, chose not to restart immediately, then restarted. But then the screen remained black after the initial XP splash screen. Back-light is seen, but no display.

Tried Safe mode: login screen comes up, but keyboard and trackpad are disabled! Keyboard only works in the initial boot menu. Even attaching a USB keyboard didn't help. Turned in for the night on that note.

Maybe in normal boot, the new driver might be making the external VGA the main screen, thought I, so tried it out today with an external monitor. That one too showed exactly the same display as the built-in LCD.

Is it a hardware problem? Tried booting with Knoppix. What I had was an older version from Linuxforu, 3.2. It booted fine the first time, but reported that it found BIOS Bug #81[000...000] - Later rebooting worked only in failsafe mode. Anyway, it seemed there was no hardware problem. But couldn't do any repair of the Windows install from there, since it was on NTFS and this version of Knoppix couldn't mount the drive though it made suitable fstab entries.

Next option was to try Windows XP recovery console using my XP disk. Administrator password? It turns out the default is blank! OK, but what do I do next? Tried chkdsk /r - it found some errors and corrected them, but on restart, the problem remained.

According to this thread, instead of recovery console, I should try the Windows repair method:

.... would probably recommend that you just do a setup-mode repair by booting from your Windows CD.

Skip the initial repair console option and choose to install Windows. When it says there is already a Windows, would you like to repair it?, that's the repair you want. It will run a full setup and keep your existing Windows configuration. This will mostly back you out to the service pack that is on your CD and so you'll need to reapply updates and service packs (except of course the
offending one.)

If the setup won't repair your existing Windows because your current service pack level is too far past your CD, you'll need to first build a "slipstreamed" CD with Win2K SP4 or XP SP2 integrated into it. The information to do this is widely available on the web, or post back if you need to and I'll give you details. You of course need another machine or a separate, clean Windows install with a CD-RW to make this....

OK, worked as advertised, except... it asked for my XP CD key and then asked for activation! Yikes. Tried options from RB both of whose CDs did not boot, finally got a volume licensed CD from P. At last. After another round of "repair", it finally came up.

Then I had to install the network driver. After that installation, still the Network Connections was empty! When in doubt, restart; so restarted. But the Wireless Adapter was shown as driver not loaded, and the ethernet adapter driver also was not loaded. Tried deleting the devices in device manager as per the trouble-shooting wizard's advice. Then rebooting with the Wireless adapter enabled, successfully detected both wireless and wired connections. ]

Phew!

Edit: And now the keyboard and trackpad work in Safe mode too.

setting up an Airport network with a PC

The old Airport Base station (graphite) needs a Mac for the configuration. Connected the base station and the iBook to a hub to which the ADSL router was also hooked up. Running the Airport Admin Utility, configured the Base station with appropriate ip address and so on, and enabled WEP. To make the PC connect, the WEP key has to be entered in hex: to get it in hex, one needs to go to the menu in the Airport Admin Utility and choose Network Equivalent Password. Once the hex key is entered in the PC, it connects just fine. This forum post which says XP requires 128 bit encryption is wrong. In my case, an added extra is an SSID which is not broadcast.

For setting up the connection, Network Connections -> Wireless Connection -> Properties -> Wireless Networks tab, add the SSID and the key. Once this is done, "Repair" option for the wireless connection makes it connect. In case a wired connection was active, the newly connected wireless connection may not be used as the gateway, a restart may be required.

posting with Wamcom Mozilla on the iBook

Now an Airport Base station is set up in the room and the Compaq connects wirelessly using WEP. This iBook doesn't have an Airport card, so it connects via ethernet to a hub.

Opera 6.03 has an issue with links not working: clicking on a link does not follow the hyperlink. Strange. Maybe a system problem? Will try the older Opera 5. Wamcom Mozilla - OK when it works, but crashes often. Like it crashed 5 minutes back going to the Apple website's Airport Extreme page! Error 2, and the computer needs to be restarted.

The blogger edit toolbar is seen, but in this browser, it's buggy - selecting some text and hitting any of the button makes all the text in the post disappear!

Edit: Got the Opera 6 from mac.oldapps.com Will try the Opera 5 version, later, maybe.

Edit: Opera 5 works. But javascript, rendering etc leave much to be desired. Mozilla seems the best of the lot.

posting from the iBook

All these days I thought the iBook's ethernet port was broken. K told me that it used to work just fine. Tried it out with different CAT5 cables, but still the router ethernet light did not glow. Then, googling for troubleshooting ethernet on Mac OS 9, found this page which guides users through the Internet Setup Assistant. Just went through the Assistant - a Wizard in Windows-speak - and "lo and behold" the connection works just fine. Revisited my old post to make the router dial out, and I'm in business. Maybe I'll hook up a hub or something to allow both laptops (iBook and Compaq) to be simultaneously online.

Edit: Since the IE5 on the iBook was not displaying the edit toolbar on Blogger, had to log in again on the PC to add the links. Will be installing better browsers soon.

Audition 3 mixer monitoring problem

Trying to record with Audition 3, came up against a monitoring issue. Even though the monitoring is set to "Always Input" as given in their knowledge base the result is as if "Smart Input" is selected: Can monitor only if the track is armed for recording. This is a major show-stopper for my technique of mixing down to a single stereo track. Also, the cues are not written to the wav files in Multitrack mode - only in Edit mode are the cues written to the wav files. So, my major USP for using Audition instead of Cubase goes down the drain. If the Yamaha AW4416 comes back, then maybe I can record in Edit mode with Audition. I'll post this issue with Adobe Support, let's see what happens.

Adobe Audition 3

Installed Adobe Audition 3 on the Mandir laptop. Audition records multitrack directly into the folder in which the session file is saved, similar to Cubase. But it silently dropped frames and finally stopped recording completely without any warnings when trying to record 6 tracks directly to the USB drive. Cubase gives a CPU meter and if it drops any frames, gives a dialog box and stops completely. Probably can record 1-2 tracks directly to the USB drive just like Cubase. Will activate and register Audition in a couple of days.

text find and replace replace

S prefers Inforapid's solution for text find and replace - lots of features, he says - also was probably turned off by the fact that Search and Replace requires .NET framework...

problem booting saispace2

There was some issue booting saispace2 last evening. Stopped at the Windows boot screen. Booting into Linux without any problem. Booted into Safe Mode - OK. Then tried Debug mode - froze while Yahoo messenger was logging in, and Adobe Flash plugin was trying to download an update. Tried the Enable Boot Logging mode - OK. Freed some more space on C drive after the recent updates - only 200 MB was free, made it to 1 GB free. Then booted normally, no problems.

exploring video streaming hosting options

Wowza media server gives a cost effective solution for streaming broadcast flash. Windows media server is free, of course. Hosting plans - checked out dedicated hosting at ThePlanet, for $199 for 5000 GB per month, $25 setup fee.

Bypass Gmail Spam filter

Gmail has added a nice option - making a filter to bypass the spam filter - an option "Never send it to Spam". Saw a reference in this thread.

chrome application shortcut

Created an application shortcut in the Quick Launch bar using Google Chrome for this blog. Ideal, since it will remember my login, and will open up in a jiffy. So, many recent posts....

Search and Replace

Found this great tool for find/replace whole blocks of text, googling for S who wanted to do this with some thousands of html pages. See screenshot below:

multiple recorders in Nero

Ticked the check-box to use multiple recorders, so can write mp3 backup CDs (of which I need two copies, one for Planet and one for Studio) twice as fast. When doing this, the number of copies can be kept as 1. Otherwise, it will prompt for another set of 2 blanks after finishing the first set.

videos on the iBook

Transcoding some Ted talks with Super as a background job at Planet and later watching them on the iBook at home. VCD compatible MPEG1 is always a safe bet, plays off the 8 GB mem-key. The PocketPC MPEG4 preset also works if used with DivXDoctor. DD takes around a minute to "doctor" the file and create a placeholder mov file of around 5-10 MB for the 20 minute video. Filesize of the orig video is around 10-20% of the MPEG1 file. Custom settings, using uncompressed PCM wav audio with DivX5 for video also works without DivXDoctor, filesize comparable to the MPEG1 when using 350 kbps for video.

find out which files are opened by a process

In Linux, lsof is available to find out lots of stuff about the filesystem, which files are open, by whom or which process, etc. On Windows, the solution seems to be the Sysinternals Process Explorer. The built-in tool on XP, called OpenFiles.exe, needs a flag to be enabled for it to show local non-shared files, or else it says

INFO: The system global flag 'maintain objects list' needs to be enabled to see
local opened files. See Openfiles /? for more information.

Unfortunately Openfiles /? does not give the solution so easily. Found it by googling at ExpertsExchange - The actual answer is more easily given by Openfiles /Local /? which is

OPENFILES /Local [ ON | OFF ]

Description:
   Enables an administrator to enable or disable the system global flag
   'maintain objects list' which tracks local file handles. Changes made
   by this switch will take effect only after restarting the system.
   Note: Enabling this flag adds performance overhead.

Examples:
   OPENFILES /Local
   OPENFILES /Local ON
   OPENFILES /Local OFF

The condition requiring a restart, and the performance overhead, means that we should go with ProcessExplorer....

In Process Explorer, there is a Findmenu item. Using that, just give the substring you want to search for. No wildcards. Just substring. If you want to see any file ending with .mp3, should not give *.mp3, just .mp3. And so on.

new feature in Listen Now

Added B's code for check-boxes for people to choose to skip some files in "Listen Now". Had to do some editing to remove the non-functional "Listen after ___ hour(s): ___ minutes - finally just made the fields hidden.

Data entry techniques on the PocketPC

The Toshiba e400 PocketPC gives 4 data entry methods.

• Transcriber - recognizes natural handwriting if written neatly.
• Block Recognizer - similar to Palm's Graffiti.
• Letter recognizer - supposed to recognize individual letters entered into a part of the screen
• Onscreen keyboard
  

Using the transcriber, this is what results:

This is a test of handwriting recognition where I will keep writing till it stops recognizing stuff. With this thing I can write pretty fast, but not very accurately. If I have to write with this. T,cs the time takento write neatly and then correct it waltz the effort? Or is typing with the virtual keyboard a better choice? Only timee tests will tell. But fol the moment, Tim trying it out.worth thePlncbablly it will recognizeProbablyI have to write very legibly otherwise it will recognize junk.

Using the onscreen keyboard:

This may be much slower, but less error-prone. And the suggestions also save time.

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. 40 sec. With keyboard.

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. 45 sec with transcriber after correcting with kb.

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. 42 sec. With block recognizer, many errors as I'm out of practice.

The qulck bkown fox jumpag oock tha lnzy boa 37seconds wltth eefceh necoynlzer. (letter recognizer)

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.
28 seconds with transcriber! Result of writing neatly.

Of course, now when I'm entering this into the blog, I remember that the phrase is actually "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." Jumps, not jumped.

speeds of various flash memory devices

Today I forgot to bring the 8 GB mem-key when I left the room in the morning, so fleetingly thought about recording on the 512 MB SD-card in the PocketPC. Then remembered that the Mandir laptop doesn't have a card-reader built-in. Anyway, tested out the speeds, found the times taken to read and write a 100 MB file to the various devices:
Transcend 8 GB JF220 - 20 sec write, 5 sec read. 40 Mbps w / 160 Mbps r.
Sandisk 1 GB - 20 sec write, 8 sec read. 40 Mbps w /100 Mbps r.
Kingston 512 MB SD-card - 35 sec write, 14 sec read. 23 Mbps w / 57 Mbps read.

Not a very scientific test, since just transferring the 100 MB file from one hard disk to another took 7 sec - the hard disk speeds probably interfere with the results above. But gives a rough idea.

At a time, the Transcend cannot record more than 2 mono audio tracks at 16 bit 44.1 kHz from Cubase - trying to add any more results in buffer underrun and Cubase stops recording. That's just 1.4 Mbps. Relatively, then, the SD-card with a card reader can probably not handle more than one mono audio track at a time while recording.

The unbranded All-in-One card reader I have also has some issues. Twice it caused the drive to vanish while reading the 100 MB file from the SD-card - power over USB cable issue, most probably. Connected it to another USB slot, checked with scandisk and found no errors, copied OK.

more software for the PocketPC

Added the Plucker reader Vade Mecum to the Pocket PC, as well as an image viewer from PDAMill. Both working well. Must try out Plucker files as an alternative to Mobipocket and iSilo. The reader is slower to load, but if the desktop "distiller" is good, it will make up for those deficiencies...

tweaking analog referer reports

Analog reports for sssbpt.org were becoming too large due to the referer report listing all the webmail sites which were being used to read the Sai Spiritual Showers emails. Added the following lines to the config file to make the report more manageable:

REFFLOOR 1000s
#list only those with more than 1000 ref in last 7 days
REFREPEXCLUDE http://mail.google.com/* 
REFREPEXCLUDE http://*mail* 
REFREPEXCLUDE http://sss.sssbpt.org/sssbpt/?p=confirm&uid*

e-commerce

I've had a flurry of ordering stuff on the 'Net - using bank direct debit via CCAvenue at zoomin.com, using paypal at Barnes and Noble and now with HDFC's NetSafe, probably I can do much more. It took just 10 minutes to open an HDFC account with PAN card and VoterID xerox copies. New branch here, so probably they are hungry for business. 5.30 pm to 7.30 pm working hours are good for us, too.

Recording Yagnam chants

Recording in PC with Tascam US-144 and PDStudio laptop. 2 line-ins for the mornings, one mic for the evenings. Works with Audition 1.0 and Cubase 1.1 LE. Cubase has the advantage of directly writing to the mem-key.

burnt fingers with IMAP

R wanted a solution to back up his gmail. Suggested IMAP, since so much is said about IMAP being superior to POP3. But in this case,

1. His total email size is going to be more than 4 GB, and according to Murphy's law, he will probably be still on FAT32, so will crash when that happens.
2. Archiving to DVD and deleting old mbox files will probably cause catastrophe with IMAP - won't that delete files on the server?

So, recommended POP3 to him. But he needs to make a lot of filters to make folders and populate them to recreate the labels he has on gmail.

fixed stuck ups button

The UPS in Mandir had it's on-off switch jammed by spilt paint. Took it to studio after unsuccessfully trying to un-jam it using a screwdriver and a knife-blade. There, D opened it up, filed away the paint, now it's better than before tho' a bit rough looking.

DKU-5 cable installation problem

N's clone DKU-5 cable was not working with his Nokia 6070 phone. For the error mesg on the phone, 'Enhancement not supported'

http://www.susteen.com/support/kb_answers.asp?QuestionId=34

Reasons could be:

1. Phone not supported by cable.
2. No proper driver installed.
3. Cable/phone may be damaged

DKU-5 seems to be compatible with 6070. Checking it out, found that the driver had an issue - Device manager showed that the USB-UART driver had problems.

While reinstalling the driver from driver CD, error message is "name already in use as service name". Uninstalled PC Suite and tried, still no go.
Uninstalled PC Suite, booted safe mode, removed all instances, rebooted safe mode, checked no instances of USB-UART, still the problem persisted.

Some people report that the driver which came with their CD was not working, they downloaded a driver from the manufacturer's website and that worked. But in this case, googling "USB World Technology Inc" gave a driver from driverguide.com which seems to be identical to the one in the CD.

Then, following the tip at linksys forum checked C:\WINDOWS\setupapi.log. It referred to the service "Serenum". Searched with regedit, found the keys, but could not delete them: it says "Unable to delete all specified values". So, stuck till some solution for this is found.

nice web 2.0 site

zoomin.com had a promo of 30 free prints for new sign-ins. Signed in with an invite sent by K, was pleased with their implementation and ideas. Pros - cheap prints. Unlimited storage, privacy options. Responsive site, fast photo uploads. Cons - Slooow Slideshows. They say they're hiring, and are looking for *nix experience. Maybe they want to switch away from ASP.NET?

capturing from video conferencing system

There's a LifeSize installation next door, and they wanted to be able to record the HiDef video for archives. Saw the manual (pdf, 723 kB) and it says the way to record is using a Standard Def video out. Checked it out, was giving a blurry PAL signal at something like 15 fps. Nothing like the 1280x720 30 fps output on the VGA out. Their tech support email said pretty much the same thing.

Tried connecting to the box using NetMeeting, since it supports H.323 and SIP. NetMeeting only got us 320x240 video with 10fps or so.

Have to try Mizuphone SIP client next, running a local SIP server.

freeing up space in C: on saispace2

Following the excellent set of steps given at http://searchenterprisedesktop.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid192_gci1252850,00.html to clean up c:. Got around a GB freed.

This week when Automatic Update prompted me to install IE7, I finally gave in and said yes. During the install, it had an option to install Malicious Software Removal Tool, which I had been de-selecting all these months. Again, gave in to MS's persistence, and agreed to the install. After that, MusicMatch Jukebox (v6) refuses to work. Serves me right for doing something stupid. Installed WinLame instead to do encoding with gui. Added to it's preset xml file for my usual:

<preset name="96 k mono">
   <comment>
      96 kbps cbr mono.
      Command line used: "-b 96 -m m" (maybe)
   </comment>
   <value name="lameNumberChannels">1</value>
   <value name="lameBitrate">96</value>
   <value name="lameCBR">1</value>
   <value name="hideLameSettings">1</value>
</preset>

Edit (Jan 12 2009): Move this to the top of the presets list in the xml file to make it the default...

loose contact with line driver card?

Following up my previous post, going through the diagrams, it appears that the only thing between our injected signal and some of the equipment is the line driver cards. Going through the line driver cards, tracing the signal since the circuit diagram could not be found, apparently no path for the System Reset signal there - just a dumb buffer using UHP 407s with pin 8 just connected to Vcc. So, system malfunction most probably due to a loose card, rather than anything else.

System troubles at Space

On Thursday August 14, just before the show, the "Home in process" light came on, and everything stopped working. I was under the impression that we'd bypassed the entire ATM2 system in 2006 by directly injecting the signal after the output demultiplexer. Strange, need to dig deeper. On Friday, opened up to see if any obvious wiring damage was visible. Nothing. Just to see, put it on, and it came on! Even the cabinet intrusion interlock is bypassed. But now the "Home in process" light is off. So, maybe some other signal is blocking the system - must trace the signals through.

And today, just when WB youth arrived for their show, the Star-Ball lamp blew. First replacement also seemed to be bad. Only after they left (showing them "Love is My Form" video instead) and we tried another lamp lying on the table, it worked! So we're down to our last replacement lamp....

IRDA transfers

Tried IR transfers to the Toshiba e400 - data goes at 56 kbps from phone to PDA - 250 kByte file takes 45 seconds.

Using Transcend JF220 with Linux

Another of A2's gifts was a Transcend Jetflash JF220 8 GB USB Flash drive - TS8GJF220
In order to use it with Linux and the iBook, had to run through some hoops because of its integrated finger-print reader. First, tried the partitioning techniques suggested in places like here, but fdisk on linux just showed the drive as having 10 MB. Learned that this was the "public" partition, and that I would have to repartition the drive's "public" and "private" areas using the Repartition tool given on CD, which works only on Windows. And for that to work, I have to go through a Wizard and submit my fingerprint! Struggled for a while with the fingerprint, since the sensor seemed to be sensitive to orientation (or maybe my finger-prints are not well-defined). Got through after 10-20 tries. After the repartition, when I made the "private" area the minimum possible 50 MB and the rest as "public", the iBook and Linux recognize the 7.5 GB space in the drive without any problem.

Now I have to try the Windows method of disabling auto-insert notification to prevent the fingerprint software from running in Windows. Unfortunately, the Win98 method doesn't work with XP. The fingerprint stuff is in a partition which is recognised as a CD-ROM - formatted cdfs. Can't even remove it.

Edit: Did the autoplay disabling with the Group Policy method mentioned here and as a comment here.

New toy - Toshiba e400 PocketPC

A2 gave me a Toshiba e400 PocketPC. Loaded eBook readers, video players into it. Tech specs are:

Intel PXA261 @ 300 MHz.
64 MB RAM, 16 MB ROM.
SD-card slot (512 MB card loaded).
16 bit colour TFT 240 x 320 pixels, 3.5 inches.
Microsoft PocketPC Ver. 4.20.1081 (2003, I think).

Here are the usage notes.

1. Removing the SD-card - According to the manual, you must shut off the PocketPC before removing the SD card. Also, in my experience, to prevent File Explorer from hanging, navigate to some other folder or the root folder (My Device) before putting off the device and removing the card, then put on the device to check that the card has been "unmounted". Later, if the card is put back (again, with the device switched off) File Explorer will then remount the card and show the new contents correctly. Maybe using "Stop All" in Settings -> System -> Memory -> Running Programs is also useful.
2. Installing programs without the USB cable - Those programs for pocketpc which are available as CAB files installed quite well, just by copying to SD card and clicking on them from File Explorer.
   
3. PDF readers - PocketXpdf does not have text reflow. Had problems with Foxit reader - it installs an installer(!) from the CAB file, which is not recognised as a PocketPC executable. Will have to try Adobe Reader using the convoluted technique of running the install with ActiveSync, copying out the CAB files created and so on.
   
4. Video players - Tried TCPMP and PocketMVP from PocketPCFreewares.com. TCPMP seemed to have the best performance and seemed the most tweakable. The Windows Media Player which is already installed plays wmv files quite well.
5. Ebook Readers - Successfully installed iSilo and Mobipocket readers. The Pocket Word and Pocket Excel which are also installed are also useful. I specially like iSilo's scrolling along with a finger touch-drag on the screen. iSilo supports pdb and txt, Mobipocket supports html and prc, Pocket Word reads doc, but did not work with an RTF exported from Google Docs. Mobi had trouble with a large html file (BattleStar Galactica novel, 540 kB single html file) saying insufficient memory, but read a H2H issue, 557 kB, fine. This was converted from pdf to html with libprs500. Both files read with the Pocket IE installed, but the novel had formatting problems due to margins which were too large.
   

flickr versus picasaweb

A posted some pictures on Flickr, and seeing the slideshow was a waiting experience: "Loading...." Something of a contrast with the slideshows on Google photos - Picasa web albums. Checked with ethereal. Found that pix used by Flickr are 300 kB average size per pic, while Google's pix are one-third the size. Bandwidth usage for Flickr slideshow at 1 second per pic was touching 1 Mbps easily and still managed to show the "loading" progress bar on occasion.

phplist bounce processing

Once again, found that the phplist bounce processing had stopped. Reason was probably an aborted bounce process run, which I'd started from the web-based link. When trying to run from commandline now, it said

A process for this page is already running and it was still alive 305 seconds ago
Running commandline, quitting. We'll find out what to do in the next run.

and refused to run from commandline. Went back to the web-based link from the admin section, this time it said

A process for this page is already running and it was still alive 461 seconds ago
Sleeping for 20 seconds, aborting will quit

but after 20 sec, started processing afresh. But this is somewhat risky when running from a remote machine, because the connection may break during the hour or so taken for processing. The best thing, then, would be to either

• run the bounce processing as a cron job (like we do), or
• when troubleshooting, run from inside a screen console, detach the screen when not actively monitoring it, or
• run the web-based link from a local X console, or
• run the web-based link from a VNC X console running on localhost.

tips from gizmo - print folder contents and boot safe mode

Gizmo's Tech Support Alert Newsletter is now merging with Windows Secrets, and in his last issue, Gizmo gave a few good tips.

To add the print directory feature to Windows Explorer, follow these steps:
a) Open Notepad and then copy and paste the following text into Notepad:

@echo off
dir %1 /-p /o:gn > "%temp%\Listing"
start /w notepad /p "%temp%\Listing"
del "%temp%\Listing"
exit

b) Save the file as Prin.bat in the Windows directory, and then close Notepad.

c) Start Windows Explorer, click Tools, and then click Folder Options.

d) Click the File Types tab, and then click File Folder. d1)Click Advanced (this step added by Gizmo)

e) Click Edit, and then click New.

f) In the Action box, type Print Directory Listing.

g) In Application used to perform action, click Prin.bat, and then click OK.

h) Click OK, click Apply, and then click OK.

Now Open Windows Explorer, right-click the folder that you would like to print a directory listing of, and then click Print Directory Listing.

He notes that this is adapted from Microsoft's knowledgebase.

...completely reliable way of booting into Safe Mode and that's by using the MSConfig Utility. This tip is not only useful getting problem USB keyboards into Safe Mode but also for folks who have trouble getting their timing right when pressing the F8 key during the boot sequence.

Press Start/Run and type msconfig into the run box and press Enter. When MSConfig starts, click the BOOT.TAB and put a check mark against /SAFEBOOT. Next time you boot, Windows will automatically start in Safe mode without any need to press F8. Remember later to take out the check mark otherwise your PC will always boot in Safe Mode.

This is especially useful for people like me in multi-boot environments.

gmail loading problem

R had a problem with his gmail account - it was stuck on the loading screen, refusing to go to standard view, tho' html view was working fine. Flushing the cache did not help. The same issue on various machines! Working on IE, not working on firefox. Finally, he got it working using the nocheckbrowser link - https://mail.google.com/mail?nocheckbrowser.

Kaspersky online virus scan

Did a scan of saispace2 from the Kaspersky.com site. Java based, nice interface. Downloading the virus definitions was the largest data transfer - around 25 MB. Full machine scan took around 5 hours. Tried another scan after 24 hours and a few reboots, this time the definitions seemed to be cached, so the scanner came up almost instantly. It found c:\program files\WinDriveGurard\windriveguard.exe on the first scan, which Kaspersky identifies as Trojan.Win32.Monderc.gen. Removed it after checking if any processes were running using that exe. Found a ScanProcess.exe which respawned even when killed, but this seemed to be the Kaspersky's exe, since closing the Kaspersky window removed that process from TaskManager. Found a process running in the Acer laptop from which I transfer files to saispace2 with USB drive, so killed the process and deleted the relevant files in C: there as well as on the USB drive. On the USB drive it was System\Windriveprotect\DriveProtect.exe or something like that. The second scan of C: alone took 35 minutes and came out clean.

dhcp problem

In the Phy Dept, there was an issue with a new Dell desktop with a wifi dongle not getting an ip address from the wireless router. Both were Netgear products, working fine on an identical machine on the next table. WG 111 (v3) Netgear wifi USB dongle, router was a Netgear WPN824.

After many tries with WinXP "repair" and the command-line

ipconfig /release
ipconfig /renew

and other such stunts, even a wired connection to the router failed, and pings showed a strange character in the destination's place,

Pinging <strange wing-dings character> with 32 bytes of data:

Finally it was wiped and the dell recovery CD was used to re-install WinXP, then everything started working again.

keychain: command not found

Bash reported

keychain: command not found

every time we logged on to krishna via ssh. Googled, found that it was a bug in Mandriva, fixed it by editing .bash_profile by adding an if [ -x /usr/bin/keychain ] like

 if [ ! -d $HOME/.keychain ]; then
     if [ -x /usr/bin/keychain ] ; then
                keychain
     fi
fi

The [space] before the -x is important....

improving speed on WinSCP

In my previous post, I'd mentioned the speed penalty of sftp on Windows. Checking out the WinSCP FAQ, found that using Blowfish instead of AES made the transfers as fast as on Linux! Load a saved session, go to the SSH settings on the left pane, move Blowfish up above AES, save the session, overwriting the previously saved session.

listening to SGH on mobile

Using a cell-phone to listen to any Shoutcast stream requires a suitable player. For Nokia phones, the official Nokia Internet Radio lists SGH:
http://europe.nokia.com/A41107005
http://europe.nokia.com/A41121127
For Nokia phones not supported by this app, there is the S60 Internet Radio.

The user instructions say that you need to copy the pls files of the stations of your choice. For SGH, the pls files are linked from the listen now links:

http://www.radiosai.org/Pages/AsiaStream.pls
http://www.radiosai.org/Pages/AfriStream.pls
http://www.radiosai.org/Pages/AmeriStream.pls
http://www.radiosai.org/Pages/BhajanStream.pls
http://www.radiosai.org/Pages/DiscourseStream.pls

Please note that if your internet connection is slow, you will hear choppy audio with breaks.

For Windows mobile, there is GSPlayer. For phones with Java, Glassplayer - not free, costs $5. Will add more players here as I find them.

RSS feeds or email updates for any page on the Net

A listener had sent us the tip long back, using dapper.net one can make RSS feeds or email updates or a flash widget or an alert for any page... The TFD page and my blog are already Dapped...

follow-up on installing indic support on XP

Here is a bit more detailed account of the Indic support install on Windows: as the Indic IME readme says,

IMEs cannot be installed or upgraded on a system that doesn't already support IMEs in the same language that you are installing. To enable Indic IME, go to control panel - > Regional and Language Options. Select Language Tab, and check the option "Install files for complex scripts and left-to-right language and insert Win XP CD in your CD-ROM drive.

After installing and rebooting, once again go to Control Panel -> Regional and Language Options -> Languages -> Details -> Add , choose your language, and in the drop down below, choose the newly installed IME if you want to type in phonetic English characters, or choose Inscript or other keyboard layout if you prefer that. Again you may need to restart. The Wikipedia Indic support page says that XP SP2 is required for Malayalam support, but Devanagari and the other South Indian languages can do without SP2. Blogger's transliteration help is here, which notes that the transliteration is also available as a separate product here.

downloading files with lynx

When using remote access, it is convenient to use text-based browsers like lynx instead of hogging bandwidth with X over ssh. When you want to save files like pdfs, hit the d key (instead of enter or g) when the link to the pdf is highlighted. Then you can retrieve it from the remote machine using sftp. The putty suite also has an sftp client. Winscp is also available if you want a gui and don't mind file transfers being slower.
Edit: The Putty suite's PSFTP seems to be as slow as WinScp - commandline on Linux is still faster.
Edit: See this post for improving speed on Windows!

FF3 installation issue

Could not get FF3 installed on Mandrake 10 - the problem is outlined here. A real pity...

Checking out Indic language support

Saw a good site with lots of song lyrics, http://guruguha.wikispaces.com/. Checking out Blogger's support for Indic languages and copy-pasting between languages, here goes....

यह हिन्दी में है - Yeh Hindi mein hai

ഇതു മലയാളത്തിലാണ് - ithu malayalathilAnu

ఇది తెలుగులో - idi telugulo

ಇದು ಕನ್ನಡದಲ್ಲಿ - idu kannadadalli

இது தமிழில் - ithu tamizhil

Blogger does not allow copy-paste between languages as far as I can see - the pasted script remains as Malayalam or Hindi or English or Tamil or Kannada or Telugu. The Language Tool on the toolbar does the magic, with Spell-check, too! Nice. Should try out some desktop Indic tools, maybe.

Edit: Tried various tools including Microsoft's Indic support site and Iwrite32. Using the Microsoft IME (Input Method Editor), text can be entered nicely in all apps, but transliteration between scripts is possible only in MS Office or some limited apps. I tried and did not succeed with Notepad, Wordpad, typing in IE or Firefox. Google docs, too can use the MS IME, but no transliteration. The best of the lot seemed to be online tools - wikipedia page on Indic support has lots and lots of good info and links. The online transliterate tool girgit looks interesting.
Edit: corrected a typo in the Tamil.

using the JW flash player for our radio streams

Multi-platform support, and the ability to show "Now playing" and "Coming up next" etc on the page where the player is embedded. Actually, the player has to be on an html page which is on the streaming server itself: otherwise the flash security measures will prevent "content from another domain". So, implemented using an iframe on a page on www.radiosai.org , the iframe's src is a page on stream.radiosai.org . The JW player's home page is here.

imported contacts successfully, google docs and gears

As mentioned in my previous post, tried out importing the "Gmail csv" exported by Gmail's contact manager, adding more stuff in exactly the same format, this time it worked. But to do that, had to go through a few hoops.

First, Google Docs did not allow me to just copy-paste from one spreadsheet to another. Had to go through the pain of publishing as csv using the 'More publishing Options' from one spreadsheet, importing it as external data on a new sheet on the destination spreadsheet, then linking the data to another sheet. But once I installed Gears, everything became simple again. I could just highlight cells on one spreadsheet, copy, highlight cells on the other spreadsheet, paste. Gears really adds to the functionality, but maybe the Google folks are leery of publicising its virtues too much due to its privacy issues - not safe to use with a public computer....

wonder why gmail contacts regressed

Generally Google products improve over time, but for some reason, the contacts browser in Gmail seems to have regressed very badly. So many features broken in the new version whose only advantage seems to be eye-candy:

• Search doesn't match for any field other than contact name
• Does not allow deleting of more than 20 contacts at a time
• Import is more finicky - csv files which work with old version don't work with new version!

Thank God the Google team have retained the "Older version" link at least! But I hope the GMail team cleans up the contacts mess. Reason for ranting right now is that I'm trying to import a csv file, with field headers Name, Email Address, Phone - but GMail old version insists on making a Notes field and putting Phone: 9999999 there. New version refuses to import at all. Will try making a csv file exactly like the "GMail csv export" which Gmail exports.

google apps user export

There was a migration to google apps for domains over the weekend, and one of the features the admin wanted was an easy way to export list of all users. I didn't find it, he found it himself - the Download user list as CSV link at the bottom of the Email addresses tab.

java vnc viewer's scaling support

Saw on tightvnc site that the java viewer also has scaling support like the Win32 viewer has. Tried to get it working from saiwaves. Copied the class and other files to /usr/share/vnc/classes/
Edited the index.vnc file by adding the scale factor parameter. But adding scaling causes the refresh to break - cursor trails everywhere - and also the auto scaling was not working in spite of using the open new window parameter. Probably because of the old version of vnc server running on saiwaves. So currently better to stick to no scaling on Linux.

manually adding files to the audio search database

Some Musings talks were not accessible by the audio search page since they were not played since early 2007, and a listener requested. So, added them using dummy csv files dated 2007-01-01 and 02, with values entered by hand. Have to remember to

1. not have a semi-colon or CR-LF after the last entry
2. fill in the duration in minutes correctly
3. make sure there are no spaces in the download-filename.
   

dharma's AGP slot bad - maybe

Dharma refused to boot a few months back, beeping a lack of display. Tried PCI card, still no go. So snuck in an old ISA VGA card to make it boot. Only 16 colours, but boots. Today tried other AGP cards - Matrox Marvel G400, G200 - no go. Tried the PCI card, still no go. Then tried the PCI card in a different PCI slot + ISA card, booted, saw that the PCI card was listed in device manager. Then tried with PCI alone, booted OK, recognised the Sis 6215 card and loaded the correct driver. So, restored the system to using the PCI Sis card. Maybe the AGP slot has gone bad?

portable DVD / VCD player smoothing issue

MS brought in a portable DVD / VCD player for consultation. It was a circular disk around an inch thick, the size of a DVD, with a 3 inch LCD screen on top. Apparently he was trying out some settings and from then on the video was just coloured blocks. Went through the menu system - while displaying the menu the screen was fine, so it was not directly a display problem. Under video settings or something, found a Smoothing option which had been turned on. Turned it off and voila! The video renders fine. Probably the smoothing doesn't work for VCDs?

problems with flash video

flv files served from media.radiosai.org using the JW FLV media player appeared to be broken - not working from any of the machines at the studio. Then all video sites appeared broken! Including youtube, google videos and all the players listed at Wikipedia. Obviously this was unlikely. Checking the flash version number using this page, found that the videos were working fine in Linux with an earlier version (9.0.xx) of Flash plugin, and also with the latest 9.0.124 version. Maybe the 9.0.115 was the one with the problem. Or maybe not. Also found a post with various workarounds for flash video problems. And running the flashutil from c:\windows\system32\macromed\flash\ followed by a machine restart worked for the studio machines. Manual download and installation might have caused some problem, which this util might have cleaned up.

Edit: After a restart, my firefox again had the same problem. This time, tried the "acceleration toggle" trick - turn hardware acceleration off and then on again, using the settings option available by right-clicking on the video, restarting the browser each time. And it started working again.

krishna not resolving dns after reboot

Since we seldom reboot, found this one only after a kernel update. Apparently the resolv.conf is being updated by resolvconf independently of what we set in the drakconf interface.

# Dynamic resolv.conf(5) file for glibc resolver(3) generated by resolvconf(8)
# DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE BY HAND -- YOUR CHANGES WILL BE OVERWRITTEN

We could not just remove resolvconf like this guy did, since drakconf did not allow it. Then PB edited /etc/resolvconf/resolv.conf.d/tail and added

nameserver x.y.z.w
nameserver p.q.r.s
nameserver a.b.c.d

to get it working, with inputs from forums like http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=188551

the toshiba laptop finally gets professional help

The poor Toshiba laptop was opened once again, since the power jack became un-soldered and the ribbon cable totally detached. D could only do the power jack - the wifi remained dead, and since the ribbon cable was ripped, no sound to headphone either. Finally, H got it repaired at Chennai, with cards replaced for Rs. 3.5 k and service free since it was a friend.