So that’s not good at all… not ideal anyway. So yesterday I took the plunge and updated my MythTV machine [which was running Slackware 13.0 at the time] to 13.1 using the ‘slackpkg’ tool. I read that some people were succesful using that tool, so that was enough for me. (I did have to edit the /etc/slackpkg/mirrors list a couple of time to force it to point to the new 13.1 repository though, and I had some other ‘minor’ issues [device files for hard-drives not created upon boot among other things].)

Anyhoo, when finally up and running I decided to boot up Firefox, I noticed it DID NOT CRASH.

It was a problem with, I guess, the X server all along, or some other library being included.

Me = happy now. I don’t have to browse Wikipedia or Google with my mobile anymore if I want to look up something while in the living-room…

But you forgot it in the meanwhile…

Usually, you used Firefox’s “Remember my password for this site” to remember stuff *for* you. This works out, most of the time…. until you change your computer and you do not have access to the cached passwords anymore.

Likewise, simply copying the “signons.sqlite” file to the new machine will not work, the passwords are encrypted with the master password.

Luckily, I *do* still have access to the old Firefox running on the old laptop…

So, I visited the website I wanted to log into and lo and behold, it filled in the cached username and password… Firebug is an excellent tool that can help out here — find the input that contains the password field and remember its ID. Then, in the location bar, type the following, et voila, that’s your password right there:
javascript:alert( document.getElementById( 'password_field_id' ).value );

I hear you say, “there’s nothing spectaculair about this, this is a very old and known trick”. Yes, I know — all the more reason to find it ridiculous that this still works!

Amazing that such an unsafe ‘feature’ like the password field still exists nowadays.

Anyway, deciding I’d take a little peek in the first random Firefox filtering plugin that I could find, downloaded it from “some site”, and unpacked the XPI.

This immediately caught my eye, and any coders should see the obvious error:

    //don't hide page if within FoxFilter mgmt pages
    if(aURI.spec.indexOf("chrome://foxfilter") != -1)
        return;

That is definitely not the way to check for such an URL. Quite a “beginners” error actually. I wanted to confirm this makes the whole filter useless, but was incorrectly thinking that I had to register first before using the plugin — so closed the browser and deleted the add-on.

Later I thought differently, and couldn’t resist finding it again and re-installing it. This time I downloaded it from the Mozilla Add-On site; and an agreement I had to agree to. Oh well…

There this caught my eye though: “The FoxFilter Team has spent HUNDREDS of hours in development, maintenance and support of FoxFilter. We are very proud of our product and are very happy that is helping protect children, teens AND adults from inappropriate content on the Internet.“.

Hundreds of hours missed that obvious error? Took me barely 5 seconds… OK enough with the being cocky already…

Anyway, downloaded the thing again; re-installed it and confirmed filtering was succesful when I went to “http://www.playboy.com”.

And, confirmed that it horribly failed on “http://www.playboy.com/?chrome://foxfilter“.

Yep, it is that easy. Then to think people pay for something it cannot really do (well until it is patched of course):

Premium Features

In addition to all of the great filtering features that have always been free of charge, we also offer security features as part of our premium service. Security features provide you with the ability to secure your settings with a password and prevent FoxFilter from being bypassed, uninstalled or disabled. A small support fee is required to obtain a registration code which enables the security features.

I’ve always thought that one should never, ever, trust software to do things that they claim to do properly. Even the most advanced logic could be bypassed by a silly mistake before it even reaches your advanced logic. If you got the chance to check it out, you should — just to prevent surprises in the future…

OK back into my lair…

Quite annoying, I do not want that process to die (nor the “jackd” process).

After having stumbled upon this page about the OOM killer, I wrote this little script, which I run just after jackd and linuxsampler have set-up (as root of course).

It’ll write the value -17 (OOM_DISABLE) to /proc/<pid>/oom_adj for selected process-names and this ought to prevent the OOM killer from ever targeting that process.

Haven’t seen it crashing on me since — but of course, your mileage may very…

I had to use ‘midimon’ to find the correct values and changed the defines in nekobee_synth.h.

After doing this, I found that the Volume knob was not responding correctly (it was not updating while I twisted it, nor did the sound change). I had to mess around in another file as well…

If you also want to be able to use the X-Session Pro mixer controller as a musical instrument: here is the patch.

I was pleasantly surprised to notice that Rosegarden nicely records those tweaks as well, so if I play back my composition, the knobs in the interface turn, too. Nice

One word of warning though: this patch locks the controls to the X-Session Pro. In the event of other hardware and having changed these mappings again, all your old compositions in your favourite MIDI sequencer shall no longer play back like it sounded before. Keep this in mind…

But never gotten further than the actual script that generates all the different states of a “volume knob”:

As I never shall get around to finishing my own skin anyway, I have posted a sample of these knobs to the Mixxx mailing list for comments as I believe they can make Mixxx look better.

Since then, some comments have been applied and a seperate ‘balance knob’ is now rendered.

These buttons can be used as replacement buttons for the outlineNetbook skin, or any other skin that uses 29×29 size buttons.

Updated: The balance knob, when centered shows a single green led and the marker line is now darker.

If you want to use them as well: here it is.

The best I could get Mixxx to run using ALSA devices was with 32 ms latency. And even then, audio still occasionally popped and cracked (worse even when the Nvidia driver was still using agpgart).

Popping and cracking kinda ruins the whole experience, so the potential performance benefit of a functioning JACK set-up is something that I “needed”.

Not working
For some reason though, initially, I could not get Mixxx and JACK work nicely together with my AUDIO4DJ audio interface.

This USB audio interface has 2 stereo in- and outputs; and I could only get either 1 output and 1 input. Without a headphone output and a 2nd input for vinyl control using JACK would render the whole set-up useless…

Some Googling did reveal some hints, like modifying the /etc/asound.conf file. I thought I had already done that earlier; but apparently this does not work with JACK.

See, my “old” asound.conf split the audio device up to two devices (I used one for the Master, and the other one for the Headphone output in Mixxx.) JACK can only handle one (or I am doing something wrong), so that had to be changed…

Solutions suggested in this thread on the NI forums did not work for me either, I ended up with the same problem basically: only one input and one output.

Working!
That thread did give me a hint to the solution — the following /etc/asound.conf, works for me like it should: it exposes a single “AUDIO4DJ” device, which binds stereo channels A and B to it:
pcm.AUDIO4DJ {
    type multi
    # bind hardware devices
    slaves.a.pcm "hw:0,0,0"
    slaves.a.channels 2
    slaves.b.pcm "hw:0,0,1"
    slaves.b.channels 2
    # bind channels to virtual device
    bindings.0.slave a
    bindings.0.channel 0
    bindings.1.slave a
    bindings.1.channel 1
    bindings.2.slave b
    bindings.2.channel 0
    bindings.3.slave b
    bindings.3.channel 1
}

(Note that slaves.b.pcm “hw:0,0,1″ — which points it to the B channel.)

That way, I can now use that “AUDIODJ4″ as a device-name in qjackctl as Input- and Output Device, each giving 4 channels (2 stereo channels).

If I now go into the Audio preferences in Mixxx, I can select channels 1-2 for the Master output and channels 3-4 for the Headphones. Similarly, for Vinyl Control, the first input deck can be put on channels 1-2 and the second on channels 3-4..

It took a bit of tinkering but, again, it was worth it!

Now that JACK is properly working and Mixxx can use it, vinyl control response is amazing and the audio playback is exceptional — I haven’t heard a pop or crack since!

This wasn’t as easy as it seemed as for some reason, blacklisting the ‘agpgart’ module did not seem to have any effect.

Why is it still loading the agpgart driver?
Running “modprobe -nv nvidia” it showed that it kept depending on the ‘agpgart’ module somehow.

A quick Google only showed other people having the problem, but alas, no solution.

Further poking around, I noticed when doing a “depmod -v” — which outputs module dependencies to standard out — that the nvidia module indeed depended on it.

Aha!
Hmmm… So I dove into the NVIDIA driver source (which I had to modify for a real-time kernel anyways, so the unpacked nvidia installer package was still on my system), and noticed the culprit.

The nv-linux.h file contains the following lines:
#if defined (CONFIG_AGP) || defined (CONFIG_AGP_MODULE)
#define AGPGART
#include <linux/agp_backend.h>
#include <linux/agpgart.h>
#endif
The CONFIG_AGP and CONFIG_AGP_MODULE it gets from your kernel configuration and presumably, this is what compiles in stuff that makes it depend on the ‘agpgart’ module. I put those lines in as /* comments */ and tried loading the module.

Indeed, it now does not depend on ‘agpgart’ anymore and shall use ‘nvagp’ now. And the time spent on it was worth it: I even got about 200 frames per second increase with glxgears.

Interesting times ahead for my pet project NG-BASIC!

After long deliberation I have decided to transfer the ownership; transfer the ownership to a new owner that is going to breathe fresh life into the project.

It shall be actively developed on — something which I can’t do anymore as I seem to be wasting more and more spare time on work.

I must say it feels weird to let go of it… I guess it’s similar to what an artist feels when he sells a painting (well I like to think so anyway).

When I initially wrote it I never expected anyone to be interested at all. Perhaps one or two like-minded people — I did not expect more for a “toy” programming language.

The emails I got and the amount of downloads over the years show differently: there’s still quite an interest in BASIC, be it because of the geekiness of it running in a browser; to quickly get some calculations done; to explain somebody the basics of a programming concept; or — for people born in the 70s and 80s — just out of pure nostalgia.

So, that’s all very cool and I’m glad that people enjoyed it and hope they will do so in the future.

I believe it will be in good hands at its new home. In a different context (read: not on my personal weblog with, for perhaps some people some non-subtle opinions) it can even reach a broader audience…

It will surely be interesting to see how it’ll develop, literally.

Farewell — may it be in for a nice ride!

And I was really happy with it until the first time it did not want to boot after shutting down.

The first time I push the power button, the lights went on, the fans started to blow out some air; and then, nothing.

Second time I pushed it, it shows the BIOS booting and then, the screen clears and then… nothing.

I can push the power button again to turn it off and then the cycle repeats itself. Interestingly is that, when booting the second time, it IS possible to enter the BIOS settings (although rebooting from that shuts down the laptop again). Different settings in the BIOS, resetting to defaults, been there done that to no avail.

Thinking, hey, it’s a new laptop, perhaps something is loose (memory, etcetera). I opened the case, unseated and re-seated the memory banks. Put the thing together and it booted again.

Yay.

So I keep it running all the time, only to reboot when it’s really necessary.

The second time it happened, I reseated the memory again: no luck. I grounded myself and touched the metal things on the laptop, for any static electricity to ‘go away’.

I tried to boot: Yay!

The last time it happened, yesterday, I reseated the memory, unloaded the static electricity.

But nothing.

Googled my ass off to discover more folks having the same problem. After reading things about ‘resetting’ something power-related by pressing the power button for 30 seconds with the battery and AC detached, decided to give that a shot.

Meanwhile I had moved to laptop to another room (perhaps it was a ‘mains’ problem so tried another socket — one thinks weird things under duress *hehe*), where I had left it, battery and mains detached already incidentally. So I went upstairs, held down that button for about 60 seconds. Tried to boot.. YES it booted.

Linux mentioned stuff about clock skew detected. Oh fsck yeah, I forgot I had reset the BIOS — had even removed that button-cell battery after reading that solved stuff for some people. So I quickly shutdown again to put the date settings correctly.

I should have done that from within Linux silly me: now it didn’t want to boot again.

Same problem — and holding down the button again for 30-60 seconds didn’t do the trick this time.

Patience seems to solve everything: I left the laptop, again, AC and battery detached for I think may have been 2 hours. Tried to boot it for the heck of it and it did so without problem.

It seems that something has to cool down or something — as it works after a long time of waiting. Perhaps static electricity, I don’t know. What I do know is that at that point it is not necessary to hold down the power button for 30+ seconds anymore…

So if you have this problem, and tried everything except the ‘patience’-hack: try to occupy yourself with something else — after an hour it may well boot fine!

Hope this may help other folks out there that have been pulling their hairs out over this.

Edit: Oh, I forgot to mention I will probably not ever buy an Acer laptop again. I called their support line yesterday around 5 o’clock. Now, day later, at 11:30, I still haven’t got a call back. WTF.

Edit: Last night my laptop went into sleep mode when I disconnected the AC and closed the lid… Oh no. But this morning, having cooled down properly, it booted in one go. No tinkering with memory modules or unloading of static electricity… Patience solves it. (Problem is, you do not have patience, when you are in a hurry…)

Yay.

As a result I am now delisted from Google’s index.

Apparently, this has been going on for a couple of months, but I was too busy with actual work so I never read any articles about it on the security-sites I normally occasionally visit.

Oh well, shit happens, and stuff has quickly been cleaned up (thank you, backups!) … and for safety have upgraded to the latest WordPress version. Not having upgraded a while ago, I was really just waiting for this to happen (yeh, lazy sysadmins et cetera )…

Seeing that basically the attacker could run any PHP code of his/her choice, which could include calling system binaries to retrieve information about user accounts or passwords. As I can not be a 100% sure about that at this moment, all the passwords have been reset to protect the innocent.

I am curious how long it’ll take before I get listed on Google again (as I still see Googlebot regularly visit the site)…

Me and my girlfriend enjoyed the PS2 version a lot and, as I’m reading lots of good things about this new one, and because I am the impatient type, I couldn’t resist ordering it after reading that there is still no sign of a definite European release date.

Graphically, it looks like an awesome game and knowing the franchise, I bet we’ll enjoy it lots.

And in awe we were! Damn, that shit looks sharp.

I had downloaded a few high-definition movie- and game-trailers from the PlayStation Network for playback and of course checked out the Casino Royale Blu-Ray that us Europeans got when registering our PS3.

Pretty awesome quality indeed… And the games, man, the games! Of course, MotorStorm has some impressive graphics and the PSN game Super Stardust HD just looks frigging amazing, Super Rub-a-Dub looking really smooth and even the Heavenly Sword demo that, honestly graphically wasn’t that impressive when watched on a standard TV-set, looked pretty cool.

I already wanted one, but now I definitely want one, having seen how the PS3 games look on high-def. But… dang…. those TV’s are still waaay too expensive.

09 f9 11 02 9d 74 e3 5b d8 41 56 c5 63 56 88 c0

Now what the fuck is that?

Quote Of The Week, QOTW

This wouldn’t be a ‘real’ issue if the machine was just storing recordings but, no, of course I had to cram the HD with all my photo’s-, video- and music collection, to free up space on the other machines.

Running fsck gave me *severe* errors, and the logfile was barfing up errors about group descriptors being corrupted. That did not look good at all.

I have had problems with drives before but I never had the pleasure getting thrown the warning **SEVERE DATA LOSS POSSIBILITY** at me. I quickly aborted the filesystem check because, to me, it seemed like the superblock was corrupted or something. Knowing the filesystem stores backup superblocks, I tried running it with an alternate one….. That seemed succesful … until … fsck hit me with a segmentation fault. Ouch.

That did not seem good. (All-in-all things were hopeful because I could mount the drive (with errors though) and access the data — and my adrenaline-level lowered.)

A bit of googling revealed that the problem could be solved by adding some swap space, there might be too little. I didn’t see the machine with 1G internal memory use any swap during the check process, but hell, I gave it a shot anyways, using dd, mkswap and swapon to make a temporary swapfile another 1 G in size.

That didn’t help either … As soon as it hit:

i_frag for inode 302 (...) is 152, should be zero.
Clear? yes

i_fsize for inode 302 (...) is 170, should be zero.
Clear? yes

Segmentation fault

Yikes. After a bit more googling I learned that this specific issue, segfaulting on setting the i_fsize for an inode, should be resolved in the latest version of e2fsprogs.

So I downloaded, compiled, and ran it on the seemingly un-fixable partition to see it nicely fix all the errors without hitting me with the segmentation fault again.

The machine is now up and running again, playing Eric B and Rakim as I write this. So I’m happy.

Yeh, well, what can I say — it can run Linux, dude.

So I took some time out to write this widget that now enables me to use my MacBook as a very expensive remote control:

If you are thinking about downloading it, please note that this version (0.2) is the first public release and although the code has been cleaned up a bit, there may surely be some issues with it.

Apple, OS X, Widgets, MythTV

Nope, it doesn’t seem enough anymore that somebody else even wants to try your software — no, people have to pay to get an un-crippled, functional application.

I don’t mind people making an honest buck, but the crippling of functionality seem like mob-extortion practices to me.

And it’s really starting to become an annoyance… again (hence this rant). It seems that money is more important than showing off what you can do. Back when I was a kid, it was fun to write software and share it with people I knew. The idea that somebody else was using my software or playing my game was cool — somebody else that would think ‘Wow this is a great, I’m glad he wrote this‘.

Now people are like, ‘I’m a l33t coder — gimme gimme gimme and you get this fine application without crippled functionality.‘, before you have actually started using the program. (And everything being released as a binary, it’s pretty hard to find out if they actually wrote it themselves and didn’t steal logic from known Open Source projects. Being I’m Dutch, I don’t think I would even want to pay up $20 to attempt to find out.)

Man, didn’t you write that utility or program because you wanted the functionality yourself? People downloaded and used your program and have possibly sent you bug-reports, feature requests and new ideas. And then, suddenly, your great free program turns into a cock-teasing prostitute that knows what the users want and you depend on the fact that a few people that have taken it for a lap-dance will pay up for the complete job — just showing enough to make the average guy horny.

No wonder there are guys (and girls) out there that crack that type of software. To continue the analogy in the previous paragraph, that isn’t rape, the software is asking for it.

No, today it seems that the crackers are the really smart guys out there. At least, they unconditionally release their tools — for their own egos or whatever. If the ego of any author of a cracked application was just as equally pleased he wouldn’t have had to lock-up his piece of software to begin with.

But relax, I wouldn’t use a cracked version of your program anyway — there’s no love, man — I’d only make love to a woman that actually wants to, for free.

Stranger things have happened: a proprietary operating system has entered my household once again. I didn’t pay for it, mind you, my boss did.

*sniff* It may be some weird fetish, but the smell of new hardware is just… well… there is just something about it..

So I’m all happy discovering new things and installing open source software such as Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice. I have to find me a decent editor as well (with code highlighting et cetera); over time I have gotten very fond of the Kate editor from the KDE.

I’m sure I’ll find something… free — as in beer… And if I don’t, well, there’s always vi…

Lucky, because I was just beginning to feel like a handicapped person not being able to reach some information over the last few weeks so.

Shows you how much I care about plugins — this thing seemed to have been available since at least the 20th of November of the last year.

Anyway, so far the plugin seems OK — I noticed an slight audio/video de-sync problem seems to have gone, too. So that’s cool.

I think it’s sad that the really handicapped people are still unable to reach any of those flash-based sites out there. It still baffles me people think they are really ‘protecting’ text by shoving it into a flash animation — all it really does is cut off the people that don’t have any way of viewing or hearing it in an alternative way.

Even sadder the fact that — hey, being human and all — I can’t be bothered no more, ’cause I got a viewer!