rullzer

Today I was talking to Sander about file system block sizes. And that the portage tree is actually way to big, at least when stored on disk. We remembered a blog post from Diego (a gentoo developer).

Long story short I now have a separate partition for portage (not my distfiles) on my laptop with a block size of 1KiB. This results in a portage tree that is only less than half the size of the previous portage tree! I have not done any timing measurements but it also seems that syncing the portage tree is now much faster! So if you have your portage tree on a separate partition (or want to play with resize2fs) why not change the block size to 1KiB?

This morning I was up rather early (well not that early but the others were still asleep ). So I decided to do a little coding and came up with a very simple Qt desktop client for facebook. Since it would of course be nice to have client sitting in your task bar showing new notifications, later this can be extended but for now that will do.

All this was created in a about an hour but would not have been possible without qfacebookconnect.

It is far from finished and no notifications are really visible yet but a nice start is made (not bad for 45 minutes coding). See the git repository of qbook if you want to take a peak, all paths are currently hard coded so you will need to do a little hacking, this is mainly because qfacebookconnect is not yet in portage so I can properly link to it.

Maybe next time when I am up early I will first fix an ebuild for that one

Since my old phone was sometimes shutting down without me telling it to shutdown or an empty battery forcing it to shutdown, I decided to get myself a new phone: the HTC Tattoo.

One of the things I missed on my Nokia N73 was the ability to sync pproperly with my linux enviroment, the tattoo runs android and syncs perfectly with google, wich in turn syncs nicely with other things. Of course the downside is that it syncs with google, but for now that is necessary evil.

So far I am pretty impressed, mobile e-mail, Facebook, flogging etc. All work like a charm. Even Eduroam, the WiFi used at the university works out of the box! That is not even the case on my laptop!

This message was of course written on my tattoo.

According to the statistics many of you use my bash.org rss feed. The traffic generated by this feed has grown over the last year and right now it is around 70% of the total traffic of this website (around 600MB a month).

Just out of principle this is a bit much for a RSS feed so I decided to move the feed to feedburner. Thanks to a .htaccess rule the feed is already forwarded. This means that current subscribers to the feed should not notice anything

Happy reading

Some time ago I learned about the foaf-project, I did like the project back then but I never took the time to write my own foaf.rdf. Well now it is created. Very basic but I hope it will be extended soon.

Since my recent social network activity the step to foaf was, in my eyes, also a logical one. But it does seem that a lot more people have facebook than foaf….

One of the nice things about foaf, if you are interested in semantic web stuff, is that it is in constant development there are discussions on the mailing list about how to structure the data etc or why things should change. This makes it a very dynamic project.

As you can see I do not yet have any foaf:knows elements in my foaf.rdf but lets hope that soon will change so a semantic network can span around me.

After having resisted for a long time last week I finally created a facebook account. I still prefer e-mail or instant messages (jabber!) but I have to admit it is a nice way to get in touch with a lot of people and to follow activity.

So now that I have sold my soul I decided to create an extra box on the blog with direct link to my various social network profiles. Just to make it look pretty!

So far I am active on 3 social networks:

• last.fm: I actually created my account in order to improve QtMPC, however it is now also coupled to my amarok and I upload the scrobble log from my ipod (with rockbox).
• linkedin: I created this to join the OpenStreetMap group.
• facebook: Now since a few days facebook.

Now I think that is (for now) enough to keep track of but it makes me wonder why there aren’t any good desktop apps to manage some of this. Like the facebook notification thingy at the bottom right. Why isn’t there a cool Qt app to just make this sit in the system tray? A well maybe a cool project for the upcoming semester

Since my girlfriend is going to do her research and write most of her thesis on Curaçao I will only have contact with her trough email/skype for some time.

She already has a webcam build into her webcam. Not great quality but good enough for skype. Also there was an old webcam which was bought approx 5 years ago, a Creative Webcam NX Pro, now I have not yet figured out what is so “pro” about it but it works like a charm!

The GSPA ZC3XX driver is the one I need! After that some programs need to be compiled with video4linux (2) support but that is to be expected. The only problem I ran in so far was skype itself! For some reason skype does not work with v4l2 so in order to run skype I have to use the following code:

LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l1compat.so skype

Long story short. The webcam works like a charm and thanks to the hard work of many people I had it working in no time!

A couple of days ago some friend came by for a beer (or multiple beers, who keeps count anyway?). However after some time I had to show something on my laptop and firefox was still open. So I got some complaints that GTK+ apps in KDE look horrible, which is true.

Now I am a konqueror user but every now and then I need to start Firefox. For some reason my bank can’t seem to properly write web apllications, they do a browser check and konqueror is not supported, faking the bowser string is not that hard but for some reason all the firefox specific things they want to do then fail on konqueror, long story short I sometimes have to use firefox!

So one of the guys suggested to use oxygen-molecule, it is in portage so it is just a matter of compiling and following the README. And I have to admit all of a sudden firefox looks awesome! So to all KDE users that have to run GTK+ apps every now and then get yourself oxygen-molecule!

WIth some people from OSM I was trying to construct a Voronoi diagram from some geo data. Some googling revield PL/R which can do this job perfectly.

The complete guide is available at bostongis.

This post is more a list of which emerge commands to execute… which is roughly what is decribed here.

1. Emerge postgresql and postgis (I assume you will install 8.4)
2. Emerge dev-lang/R
3. run R
   1. chooseCRANmirror()
   2. install.packages(‘deldir’)
4. Fetch the PL/R ebuild to your local overlay
5. Emerge plr

Note that not anything is installed yet. But following the elog messages and the guides should be pretty straight forward now!

This weekend I finally updated the router (Linksys WRT54GL) to OpenWRT-8.09.1. I was running 7.07 so it was about time. This means I moved form a 2.4 kernel to a 2.6 kernel.

It seems there are still some problems with the wifi but we have a dedicated acces point for that. Which means the required software is not even installed on the router. This is a good thing since there is very limit storage on the router.

While I was playing with the router I wanted to, finally, get OpenVPN running on it. Not that I really need the VPN but it is a matter of principles! So I started out with the OpenVPN Howto which guides your pretty much trough the whole setup.

However since room on the openwrt is limited, the easy-rsa (for key generation and signing) is not included. So I used my server to generate the keys and certs.

The ethernet-bridging is not necessary in my scenario but it seems the best way to go, espessialy since I want to implement it for some people that want to browse the samba shares. It is however important to note that you should have different local subnet and remote subnet.

So a productive weekend. It still feels cool that the router (which coasts only 55 euro’s) can be pimped so you can ssh to it, work with IPtables and act as an OpenVPN server! Embedded linux rocks