Geekdinner: weinig inschrijvingen

Het ziet er naar uit dat het een 'klein' geekdinner gaat worden de komende week; tot dusver zijn er maar 13 inschrijvingen.

Als er nog mensen zijn die wel willen komen maar zich nog niet hebben ingeschreven, laat het dan zo snel mogelijk weten -- morgen (enfin, ondertussen al 'straks') moet ik immers de definitieve aantallen doorgeven.

Voor zij die gaan komen: tot donderdag,

dpkg vs RPM

Thomas blogs about some issues he had with his N900's facebook plugin. This post isn't about that, as I don't use facebook.

But as part of his blog post, he mentions the following:

This reminded me of a pet peeve I have with those people who claim Debian’s packaging system to be far superior to rpm – apparently dpkg doesn’t have any equivalent of rpm -qv which allows you to verify that the files that should be installed by a package are indeed on disk

True, probably because the script would be so trivial:

for i in $(cat /var/lib/dpkg/info/nbd-client.list)
do
	[ -f "$i" -o -d "$i" ] || echo "$i missing"
done

There, that wasn't hard, was it?

Now I'm not sure whether rpm's -qv option actually checks the checksum of the files, too. If it does that, then the semantically similar way would be:

(cd / && md5sum -c var/lib/dpkg/info/nbd-client.md5sums)

... except that MD5 is totally and utterly useless these days, and that we should be changing to something else. And that md5sums is an optional feature, provided by some, but not all, packages. And it may also be that maemo packages don't have md5sums (which would make sense). But, anyway.

Netgear WNDR3700 and OpenWRT

I wanted a machine on which I could easily run OpenWRT. So I'd went to the #openwrt channel on freenode a while back, and just asked for suggestions; people suggested to me that the Netgear WNDR3700 was a good choice, so I ordered that.

I assumed that it would be easy enough to install OpenWRT on this device, but hadn't actually looked into it, planning to wait with that until the device had arrived. Little did I know that the machine actually comes with OpenWRT preinstalled. Now there's an interesting twist.

Now you do need to run some "telnetenable" thingy to be able to get a shell, after which "telnet <device>" gets you a root shell (with no username or password by default). Supposedly you should update that by using "passwd", but they managed to break that in the firmware that comes with the device.

I am missing a few things, though.

root@WNDR3700:/bin# dmesg
/bin/ash: dmesg: not found
root@WNDR3700:~# uname -a
/bin/ash: uname: not found
root@WNDR3700:~# hexdump /bin/config |more
/bin/ash: less: not found

Unh?

root@WNDR3700:~# alias
more='less'
vim='vi'
root@WNDR3700:~# 

Aahh.

And for those who were wondering: no, it does not have any 'vi' installed, either.

Oh well.

The fun thing is, this device has a USB connector, too; so it should be possible to connect a USB storage device, install Debian, and use it as a very potent home server/router/switch/whatever. That'd require me to understand how hostap works, though, which I haven't played with yet. I'm sure I'll figure that bit out -- at some point.

Stuff

I'm running again.

No, not running in a bubulle style; I'm running for DPL. It started as a fairly last-minute decision because I would hate to see an election with only one candidate, but then two other people submitted their candidacy right after me.

As I stated in my candidacy email, I had "a concert" this weekend. Actually, there were three two-hour performances; two on saturday, one on sunday. Early on, I also suggested videotaping the performance (using the excellent dvswitch, for which I added a patch to support crossfading transitions) to the organising group within the choir, and they liked that. Apart from dvswitch, we used the theatre's own audio mixing setup (so I wouldn't have to worry about that too much) and the theatre's intercom system. I'd made some tally lights, but in the end we were not entirely able to use them, because there were some issues to be dealt with that meant I couldn't quite get them working properly.

So on saturday, I was in the theatre pretty early to get everything set up, did some explanations to the volunteers who would do the actual recording, drove my dad (who'd done the direction for the video parts) home, went home, and found my bed at around midnight.

On sunday, I got up fairly early, booted my laptop to update the live images with some fixes for some issues we'd encountered on saturday, left for the theatre fairly early again, set up the extra camera position, found out that one of the laptops was actually running at 100Mbit rather than a gigabit and that therefore the extra camera wasn't going to work, learned that one of the volunteers for sunday had done some other camera work for another performance right before that, for which he'd rented some high-end DV-capable cameras. So we broke down the two low-end set-ups, set up the high-end cameras, connected them to the laptops, recalibrated the whitebalance and the diaphragm setting, and restarted the streams. Then one laptop started failing. Since we had had to remove one camera anyway, I just replaced it. By that time, I had about 15 minutes left before sunday's performance would start, so I went to prepare for that.

After the performance had finished, I found out that something had gone wrong with the sound of sunday's performance; rather than music, we only heard crackling all the time. Luckily, the sound had also been separately recorded to a different medium, and that recording is fine, so we only need to resync the audio to the video, which should not be a problem.

All in all, I had an extremely busy weekend. The alert reader will note that I didn't mention 'food' anywhere in the above paragraphs, mostly because I hardly ever found the time to eat. But it was also extremely satisfying. We still have some postprocessing to do, but I expect I'll put some videos online once we've done that. They're truly stunning, at times.

And then yesterday I still had to spend some time writing my DPL platform, and doing some campaigning work. All in all, I didn't find my bed until approximately 4 AM... oh well.

I look forward to the election time, and hope that I will do well. I don't need to win, but I'd hope my result will be at least as good as the last time...

Update: we used the theatre's audio setup, not video setup -- oops

Baobab

So, we recorded the performance. As I mentioned in my previous blog post, the sound for sunday was not recorded properly, so while the image looks far better, having a video with no sound is hardly interesting.

But as a 'sneak preview' for the people involved, I uploaded one fragment of the Saturday recording to youtube:

There's a lot of grain in this image, courtesy of the fact that two of our three cameras just weren't very good. But beyond that, it looks quite good, I'd say...

N900 back!

So, a short while ago, the battery of my N900 had run flat. As in, completely, utterly flat. In itself, that's no big deal -- you connect it to a power outlet, wait until it's gone past the low-battery charging bits, then boot and use as usual.

Except that it wouldn't. I'd recently installed a firmware update from Nokia (which contained some bug fix that I really was waiting for), and now the bloody thing wouldn't boot. Rather than do the low-battery charging dance, it thought the battery had enough power that it could just go ahead and boot.

Of course it was wrong, so whenever I powered it on, it would sit there fore 30 seconds, try to boot, fail, power off for about a second, and start over. I left it like that for a night, but it didn't recharge.

Needless to say, that was quite annoying.

So I sent it in for repair, and today there was a package in the mail, containing my (repaired) N900.

They'd reflashed it. A reasonable course of action, I guess, but of course that meant all data was gone. Good thing it has a backup application, and good thing I stored those backups on an external micro-SD card.

Restoring those back-ups was a breeze; they'd also stored the contents of sources.list and have done something akin to "dpkg --get-selections", since now the application manager kindly asks me whether I wish to reinstall the applications that I had installed. Cute.

At any rate, I'm very happy I finally got rid of this awful Samsung "cellphone". It's a SGH-C140 that I had as a replacement until my N900 got back, but there was something very very wrong with it; I don't know whether it's a design flaw or just a wear-and-tear issue (these replacement phones aren't usually handled in the best possible way), but it managed to lose connection to the network every once in a while. So people who would call me would immediately get my voicemail, and then they'd be angry with me later because I was unavailable. Well, duh.

Anyway, that's over now. Whee.

Annoyed by Marc Wickmayer

In just under a month, Belgium will face Estonia in a Fed Cup World Group Playoff tie. The winning team will participate in the world group next year, which, in theory, opens the possibility of winning. So this is an important encounter. When team captain Sabine Appelmans announced the Belgian selection, it was described by the Belgian press as the 'dream team'—Clijsters, Henin, Wickmayer and Flipkens, aka the four best Belgian female Tennis professionals. That, combined with the possibility of a World Group promotion, seems to excite much of the country, to the extent that 10000 tickets have been sold in no time. Yes, I'll be there too.

But one man seems unhappy. Marc Wickmayer, father of Yanina, will say to everyone who wants to hear it, that 'Appelmans needs to choose'; that he's 'tired of the hypocrisy', and so on. His arguments: Clijsters and Henin have not been part of the Fed Cup selection in two years, and his daughter should not be the fourth wheel on the wagon after having been much of the reason why Belgium is playing these playoffs.

Sigh.

Let's check some facts, shall we?

• There are four singles rubbers. There are four players. Appelmans does not have to let any player play more than one singles rubber.
• Wickmayer is currently still the highest-ranked Belgian tennis pro, at number 14. Clijsters (17) and Henin (33) may have been ranked 1st before their respective comebacks, they are not now; and both still seem to be not entirely in their rhythm yet—especially so Henin. Appelmans would be stupid to bet the entire encounter on them.
• Last but not least, let's not forget that the opposition may not be easy. Kaia Kanepi, Estonia's top player, may be ranked 100 now; less than a year ago, however, she was at her career-high of 18. Due to several injuries, a viral ilness, and some bad luck, she has not won much anymore since last may, but she may be a tough nut to crack.

Curiously, Yanina herself does not share her father's opinion. She's been quoted several times as being excited to have Clijstes and Henin on the team, since 'the team is much better with them'. Indeed. Her relationship with her father, is often described as being 'very close'; apparently that doesn't mean they are of the same opinion on everything. Maybe it is time for the two of them to have a little chat on the whole Fed Cup thing, before this gets out of hand. I'd hate for Appelmans to have to make the wrong choices to appease people...