Workin' For The Wiikend

After acquiring my first DriveKey-powered "try before you buy" Wii game via torrent (and having a little fun fighting the Joker's minions off while occasionally blowing Robin into his component bricks with a well-placed BatBomb), I decided tonight to do a little more hacking. Thanks, CanadaMods.ca!

So, with the wife out watching some chick-flick w/ a friend, I got to spend a few hours playing with the HomeBrew Channel on my Wii. Very cool stuff available, from game emulators & ports, to new games, media players, and utilities. Complete list here.

To set up the HomeBrew Channel, follow these steps, including installation of the DVDx application so your Wii can play video DVDs.

Then, install the HomeBrew Browser, and grab some more software. After numerous tests, crashes, and reboots, I found that the best three options for playing video are these, all available through the HomeBrew Browser or via manual download from wiibrew.org.

Here's what I tested:

App	2G SD card w/ .mp3	Bus-powered 2.5" 500G USB drive w/ .avi	DVD-R w/ .avi	DVD-R Video DVD (burned w/ growisofs from dl'd .avi torrent) [1]	Video DVD (original, possibly DVD-DL? or DVD+R)
GeeXboX (embedded linux)	Y	Y	N	N	N
MPlayer CE	Y	Y	Y	Y	N
MPlayer TT			Y	Y	N

So, while I have scripted the process for easily converting .avi to DVD, I now no longer need to do so -- I can just plug my USB drive directly into the Wii and watch it on the big screen w/o having to waste hours in format conversion. Wii!

E-Fail

It's taken a while, but I've managed to get some metrics for how much mail I actually process.

Here's my inbox 3 weeks ago before I went on vacation for a week, then went without VPN access for a few days. The xkcd strip is particularly appropos.

Here's that same inbox today, sporting a newer version of Thunderbird. Note the pileup of over 1,000 emails in three weeks, in just ONE of the mailing list filter/folders I monitor.

So, other than filtering by sender & subject, automatically marking my own mailing list replies read, colourizing emails to make the more important ones stand out, and using "Show Unread Threads" view filtering ... what else can one do to manage the deluge?

Does anyone have any good, realistic strategies for dealing with 1000s of emails a month?

Simplified Win XP Pro EULA

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/eula/pro.mspx
-- Reminds me of the WTFPL license...

Mac OS X - VPN vs. LAN: DNS Royal Rumble

I've been "sharing the Mac experience" for the past day trying to get access to my local LAN and VPN concurrently. So far, it's only one or the other, but never both at the same time.

I've tried the Cisco client, the Shimo client, vpnc (compiled from scratch with and without openssl support), vpnc 0.5.3 from DarwinPorts, and even this custom bit of script I wrote based on some tips about using scutil.

#!/bin/bash
# goal here is to collect the DNS entries from the active services and merge them into the Global list

tmpfile=$(mktemp)

# get IPs from services using scutil
function getIPs ()
{
        return_IPs=""
        keys=$(echo "list State:/Network/"$1 | scutil | awk '{print $4}')
        for f in $keys; do
                echo "> show $f"
                printf "get "$f"\nshow "$f | scutil | grep "\."
                echo "show $f" | scutil 2>&1 | grep "\." 2>&1 | \
                  awk '{print $3}' 2>&1 >> $tmpfile
        done
        #cat $tmpfile
        IPlist=$(cat $tmpfile | sort -r 2>&1 | uniq 2>&1)
        for i in $IPlist; do
                return_IPs=$return_IPs" "$i
        done
        #echo $return_IPs
        rm -fr $tmpfile
}

function setIPs ()
{
        label="$1"
        IPs="$2"; # echo $IPs
        printf "get State:/Network/$label\nd.add ServerAddresses *$IPs\nset State:/Network/$label" | scutil
        echo "> show State:/Network/"$label
        printf "get State:/Network/"$label"\nshow State:/Network/"$label | \
          scutil | grep "\."
}

echo "--- BEFORE ---"
getIPs "Service/.+/DNS"
IPs=$return_IPs

echo ""; echo "--- AFTER ---"
setIPs "Service/com.cisco.VPN/DNS" "$IPs"
setIPs "Global/DNS" "$IPs"

mv /etc/resolv.conf /etc/resolv.conf.bak
for i in $IPs; do echo "nameserver $i" >> /etc/resolv.conf; done

# ./dnsfix.sh 
--- BEFORE ---
> show State:/Network/Service/F1C45B82-45A1-4F44-89AC-82102F187F0B/DNS
    0 : 192.168.x.y
> show State:/Network/Service/com.cisco.VPN/DNS
    0 : a.b.c.d
    1 : e.f.g.h

--- AFTER ---
> show State:/Network/Service/com.cisco.VPN/DNS
    0 : 192.168.x.y
    1 : a.b.c.d
    2 : e.f.g.h
> show State:/Network/Global/DNS
    0 : 192.168.x.y
    1 : a.b.c.d
    2 : e.f.g.h

Obviously, since it's a Mac, there's got to be a dead-simple way for this to work. Anyone know how?

Learning to Love the Mac, Part 2: Mouse Tips & Desktop Management

I have an 8-button Logitech MX500 optical mouse, and this week is the first time I've ever successfully mapped functionality to all the buttons. Windows did a reasonable job with a few of the buttons; Linux doesn't support anything beyond the first three; Mac OS X Server just gets it done.

Out of the box, my third button (scroll wheel) is mapped to the seemingly pointless Dashboard, which is a huge pain when you're used to middle-clicking to open a link in a new tab or to copy/paste text in a console. To get that functionality back, go to Applications > System Preferences > Exposé & Spaces then remove Mouse Button 3 from the Dashboard's "Hide and Show" feature.

Next, I set Mouse buttons 5, 6, and 8 to All windows, Application windows, and Show Desktop.

But even cooler than these is Spaces, though as yet I can't find a way to replicate Gnome or XFCE's ability to move windows from from Space to Space which lets you drag open app windows from Space to Space which in the Spaces view (F8). Still, having up to 16 virtual desktops is very handy, particularly when you need to virtualize Windows and Linux. If you want to be able to have console windows on all Spaces rather than having them all collected on a single Space, uncheck the "When switching to an application, switch to a space with open windows for the application".

My love-hate with SVN, Part 5: Fedora 11 + Eclipse 3.5 + Subversion 1.6

Finally figured out how to make Eclipse 3.5 play nicely on Fedora 11 w/ Subversion, and I owe this bit of knowledge to our new MacPro. *sigh*

I also owe a great deal of gratitude to Cloudsmith for providing their Cloudsmith Galileo+ repository, which includes these features:

I still wish the version numbers would better align, in that I have to install the SVN Team Provider v0.7.8 with the SVN Connector v2.2.0 and the SVNKit 1.3.0 implementation v2.2.0 to make all this work with Subversion 1.6. Oof.

Learning to Love the Mac: 13 Tips

A month ago a very large package arrived in the mail: my first MacPro server. I at once fell in love with the case design - clean, simple, and dead-easy to take apart in order to add more drives and RAM. However, that's where the love boat ran aground.

To say it's been a gradual learning curve would be an understatement. Here are a few things I've learned over the past month of dealing with Mac hardware and OS, as well as retraining my fingers to use Mac keyboard bindings (META = Apple Key or Windows Key, depending on your keyboard).

1. Use META-TAB instead of ALT-TAB to cycle applications
2. Use META-LEFT/RIGHT instead of HOME/END to jump to start/end of a line
3. Use ALT-LEFT/RIGHT instead of CTRL-LEFT/RIGHT to jump to prev/next word on a line
4. META-A, META-X, META-C, META-V replace CTRL-A, CTRL-X, CTRL-C, CTRL-V for select all, cut, copy, & paste. META-L, META-T, META-N replace CTRL-L, CTRL-T, CTRL-N (jump to location bar, new tab, new window). But CTRL-TAB still switches tabs. However, if you have multiple Firefox windows open, there is no way to toggle between them with the keyboard. Same problem with multiple Terminal windows. META-TAB only switches between groups of applications, but not windows within an application.
5. Sometimes ESC works to dispose a dialog; sometimes only clicking the red X works.

6. Q replaces qemu, but doesn't seem to work very well for my existing vmware or Virtual Box images
7. Virtual Box rocks on Windows, Linux and Mac

8. XCode provides gcc, make, etc.
9. Fink and DarwinPorts replace Debian/Ubuntu's apt-get and Gentoo's emerge, respectively. Once XCode and DarwinPorts are installed, you can port install vpnc (to fetch deps and compile on the fly) or apt-get install curl (to fetch deps and install).
10. rEFIt replaces grub, and more or less works as I'd expect. /efi/refit/refit.conf approximately replaces /boot/grub/menu.lst at least as far as picking what partition to default-boot and how long to wait

11. Java is in /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Home instead of /opt/ or /usr/lib/jvm/java
12. Subversion was easier to set up on Mac (using Fink) than on Fedora 10 (using yum), especially since there's now the Galileo+ Update Site from Cloudsmith so you don't have to download from multiple update sites to get it installed.

    However, the version of Subversion available via Fink doesn't work with projects checked out using Eclipse - seems that the commandline client (Subversion 1.4.4) and Subversive with SVNKit (SVN 1.6.1 w/ SVNKit 1.3.0.beta.r5741) are not compatible: svn: This client is too old to work with working copy '.'; please get a newer Subversion client. Using DarwinPorts to update the subversive client to 1.6.3 fixed this issue, but installed it into a different path (/opt/local/bin instead of /sw/bin or /usr/bin).

13. Eclipse looks better on Mac than on Linux; however, I recently stumbled across a great tip for making Eclipse waste less screen space under gtk on Linux. Highly recommended bit of gtk hackery - one file makes a world of difference!

Do you have any other tips for Linux or Windows people, surviving the transition to Mac OSX? Is there any way to tell OSX to use Windows or Linux keyboard defaults so I don't have to retrain myself?

My love-hate with SVN, Part 4: Corrupt Metadata & Going Over Quota

Ever had one of those days where nothing seems to work? Most of June's been that way for me...

This week I decided to trust my OS and let Fedora update me automatically to the latest release, Fedora 11. I've never tried a distribution upgrade; in the past I've only ever done a clean install (be it Windows, Ubuntu, MEPIS, AntiX, or Fedora). But I figured if @dougschaefer could do it, so could I.

It was fairly smooth sailing, though the handy gui tool preupgrade only downloaded packages but didn't do the upgrade, so on reboot (still in F10) I had to run preupgrade-cli "Fedora 11 (Leonidas)". I suspect I must have fatfingered my hard drive password when I rebooted he first time because it worked like a charm the second time. Overall, way more successful than attempts so far to make a Mac Pro get Fedora'd, thatsfersure (grub, video, and network card issues, to name but a few).

Anyway, now I have updated versions of subversion and python, and as a result, my Subversive projects in Eclipse don't work. After much cursing and experimenting (and updating my CollabNet Subversion version to 1.6.3, the solution seems to be simply this:

Check out the projects anew within Eclipse, and if necessary, diff local changes from old project to new project.

But, if the project is too big (jbosstools trunk folder is over 1.1G) you may get a heap error. You can check the whole project out via commandline, but Eclipse (or Subversive? or Mylyn?) uses too much memory and the whole thing dies, despite my running Eclipse w/ a half-gig of heap:

/home/nboldt/eclipse/eclipse/eclipse -clean \
  -showLocation -data /home/nboldt/eclipse/workspace-jboss \
  -vmargs -Djava.library.path=/opt/CollabNet_Subversion/lib \
  -Xmx512M -XX:PermSize=512M

In this case, the solution is to check out the project without recursing into folders.

Commandline on in the Console view, that looks like this:

svn checkout "https://svn.jboss.org/repos/jbosstools/trunk@HEAD" -r \
  HEAD --depth empty  "/home/nboldt/eclipse/workspace-jboss/jbosstools-trunk"

You can then copy stuff you already checked out into the new target project, then refresh the project in Eclipse. Of course in my case Eclipse then thought all the files were new, so I had to Override and Update from the repo.

Another 24374 files or 1.1G to download. No wonder I went over my quota this month!

(Really, it was due to several different .iso torrent downloads for Fedora and CentOS, along with the movie Dead Alive, just in time for BLITEOTW day!)

So, unfortunately, I haven't been able to enjoy any of the 33 projects in this years' Eclipse Galileo release, unlike others on the Planet and the BirdsNest have. Hopefully next month will see calmer seas.

On the plus side now that I'm running Fedora 11, I can use Delta RPMs thanks to the yum-presto plugin... so next month's bill should be much, much smaller.

I know it's a beta, but c'mon...

In addition to crashing a few times a day, Firefox 3.5b4 has this cool overlapping button feature on its "fail whale" page:

HOWTO: Enable Firefox 3.0 extensions in Firefox 3.5 for great justice

Just updated to Fedora 11, and with it Firefox 3.5b4. Sadly, that meant most of my extensions (including mouse gestures!) no longer worked... until I found this:

In A.D. 2009,
Firefox 3.5 was beginning.
Captain: What happen ?
Mechanic: Fedora 11 repo set up us the beta.
Operator: We get signal.
Captain: What !
Operator: Main browser turn on.
Captain: It's you !!
FF35: How are you gentlemen !!
FF35: All your extensions are belong to 3.0.
FF35: You are on the way a vanilla Firefox.
Captain: What you say !!
FF35: You have no chance to survive wait for GA.
FF35: Ha ha ha ha....
Operator: Captain !! *
Captain: To put back every 'extension'!!
Captain: You know what you doing.
Captain: Install this.
Captain: For great justice.

Captain's Log - Additional: Here's the same extension for Thunderbird 3.0b2, though I had to disable the quicksearch toolbar box as it wouldn't close properly in TB3; also found some handy toolbar buttons here for filtering a mailbox for all/unread.