moving parts of the kasper clan

So, yes, I’ve joined the Borg once again and have started playing with Google’s BrowserSync Firefox extension. I decided to import all of my old Opera bookmarks and then (silly me) expected BrowserSync to be able to feed them all up to The Borg Collective (I mean the main Google server). What I kept getting was a very naughty little error message that was the opposite of helpful:

Error ‘-1Unexpected error’

Riiight.

So, I found this newsgroup posting and following the following steps, some of which also complained with unhelpful errors, but in the end, it seems to be working now.

it didn’t work :\
but i have anouther Possible ‘FIX’! so i will call it Possible ‘FIX
II’!
just press the STOP SYNCING butten and then run the wizard all over
again.
if it don’t work then try to unchecked *all* Store boxes. just as
MegeZone have suggest and then press okey and then press the STOP
SYNCING butten and then run the wizard all over again.

Clear and straight-forward, right? =;)

Oh yes. Ph34r m3!!!

Got your attention, did I?

I run Linux on my Apple G4 Powerbook, which means that I don’t have the luxury of such niceties as… oh, I don’t know… FLASH!?!?! So I was happy to find that even though I can’t view Google Video’s Flash-based movies, I can easily enough still play them on my G4 Powerbook running PPC Linux. I whipped up a very simple and quick little script for it, as follows:

#!/bin/bash

PLAYER=kaffeine

INFILE=$*
TMPFILE=”/tmp/$(basename $0).tmp”
echo “got->${INFILE}< -... going to work..."
cp "${INFILE}" "${TMPFILE}"
URL=$(grep 'url' ${TMPFILE} | sed 's,url:,,' )

${PLAYER} "${URL}"

I then saved in in ~/bin/google-video-player.sh and chmod +755′d it. I then clicked on the download link on google video’s pages, told Konqueror (or Firefox, Opera, etc., etc.) to open the file with my little script, and sat back and enjoyed as kaffeine (or xine or whatever you like to use) opened up and played the video for me.

Now, Google, don’t you think it would be very non-evil of you to provide a player for Linux PPC yourself? =;)

“Contentical” as in “pretty okey dokey with how things are going as of late” that is.

My beautiful children and bride are sort of settling in in our new home. My bride is making some friends here and there, as are my kiddos. There is reportedly a homeschooling luncheon/picnic/get-together thingey tomorrow that we’ll be partaking in!! We have a Father/Kiddo thing going on at church this Sunday. And we’ll be joining in on the church July 4th picnic celebration thinger 2 weeks following that. Feels good to start getting involved with and meeting people again.

Despite having to pay $250 recently to get a Terminix contract going on our new home (I’d like it if carpenter ants don’t destroy the rather large investment we’ve made in our new home), it really is a beautiful home that God has blessed us with. I am totally content with it. I’ve been doing a little bit of patching up little holes in walls (some of which were caused by our moving into said domicile) and I’m replacing a handrail (again, though this will be a MUCH smaller project than last time). =;) But that’s normal owning-a-home stuff. The weather has been absolutely gorgeous lately up here. Lynn and I looked at the weather yesterday evening and we noted that back in Harrisburg, our friends are enjoying(?) temps up in the 90’s, while we’re quite happy with the 75-degree average. =;)

With all the rain we’ve been having as of late, we have our very own lake (well, not really, but quite a bit of water) in the back of our property that’s just sort of sitting there as opposed to be working itself into a stream or what-not. I think I know where I need to build a trench to avoid it happening again, but we’ll see…. And having a riding mower (God blessed us with that when we bought this house) is T3H C()()L35T!!! I don’t know how I’ve managed to mow the lawn by pushing a mower along for all these years! =;)

I’ve actually gotten to get back into kpilot development a smidge a couple of weekends ago, which makes me truly happy. Finding time consistently to get work done on it is still proving to be a monumental challenge, but I guess that’s okay, based on Adriaan’s time-slicing too. =;) I have at least been able to work with Adriaan to get kpilot svn to the point that I’m running it daily both at home and work. Next up: multi-PC syncing improvements!!

And my little Linux-on-my-powerbook-G4 experiment is going really, really well. I think just about all that I really miss now is Flash, though I’ve done my part to try to get it available for Linux-PPC.

And with good movies coming out soon and good friends‘ visits being discussed, I bid you adieu, guten aben, and good dreams.

Amarok 1.4 has been released and all I can say is WWWWOOOOOOOWWWW.  This release is amazing, guys.  I’ve been waiting for it to show up in my kubuntu updates list and it hasn’t, so tonight I hunted a bit and found this announcement showing how to get it for dapper.  As I type this, I’m transferring 1.4G to my iPod nano, and it looks like it’s going to also transfer the album cover artwork along with it.  Kick butt!!!

For those who have been living in a hole for the last few years, amarok is an absolutely amazing and free music manager that uses the Qt toolkit, and is thusly available for Linux, *BSD, OS X, and probably Windows too, though I don’t honestly care enough to look.  I definitely heart this new release–the best one yet!!  =:)

Just installed 10.1 on my work laptop yesterday.  I have an IBM ThinkPad T42, and it doesn’t look like XGL is going to work for me on that.  Bummer.    That’s some of the reason that I went through this upgrade.  =:/

Just found this helpful link for finding SUSE 10.1 online package installation sources, and am upgrading KDE from 3.5.1 to 3.5.3 now (yay!).  Reason behind this was that there’s an annoying little buglet in KDE PIM 3.5.1 which shifts all of my appointments off by 5 hours (basically a time zone bug) that I believe was fixed in 3.5.2.

So, as a prelude… you may think of it as something very important to learn in life… if ever you are planning on digging very, very, very large rocks out of your New England back yard, be sure to cover yourself head to boots in mosquito repellant. Otherwise, you will assuredly find yourself covered in more bug bites than you care to count. I mean, honestly, what kind of stupid mosquito bites you on the ears??? How much blood can possibly be up there anyway? Blah. Death to all mosquitos!!!

Okay, so in other news, I’ve finally gotten back to coding a bit on kpilot. Feels good. Real good. =:) Granted, all that I’ve gotten accomplished so far has been getting the thing to compile and install where I want it to, but that includes finally learning a bit of python, discovering and debugging the AAP build system and its recipes, learning more about libtool and -rpath than I’d ever wanted to, and stealing Adriaan’s focus for half a day, at least. And none of those are particularly easy things, so I have some sense of accomplishment for this Saturday. =:)

In other, other news, I’ve finally figured out how to solve the latest 2 anomalies that I’ve hit with running Linux on my Powerbook. First of all, I learned that I have a “PowerBook5,6″ model, as shown by /proc/cpuinfo:

processor : 0
cpu : 7447A, altivec supported
clock : 1499.999000MHz
revision : 0.2 (pvr 8003 0102)
bogomips : 73.47
timebase : 18432000
platform : PowerMac
machine : PowerBook5,6
motherboard : PowerBook5,6 MacRISC3 Power Macintosh
detected as : 287 (PowerBook G4 15″)
pmac flags : 0000001b
L2 cache : 512K unified
pmac-generation : NewWorld

Secondly, something changed between kernel 2.6.15 and 2.6.17-rc5 that made pbbuttonsd stop working correctly with the function keys (F1/F2/etc.) on my kubuntu ppc system. For some reason, “KBDMode = fkeysfirst ” had stopped working. So, I had to pull down the latest source from the pbbuttonsd site and build a .deb out of it. To do this, I did an “apt-get source pbbuttonsd” and copy the contained debian/ directory from it into the new source directory for 0.7.5. I also had to update the debian/changelog entry so that it matched the new version and build time, etc. And then I had to add –without-ibam to the configure flags in debian/rules. Easy enough; had a pbbuttonsd-ppc.deb in several minutes. Installed it, started it, and happily enough, had working function keys again.

I also discovered that building a custom kernel and installing it on kubuntu PPC isn’t the same as x86, but it’s also not that big of a deal. It’s as simple as ” sudo make vmlinux modules modules_install” followed by “sudo installkernel 2.6.17-rc5 vmlinux System.map /boot”. Granted, you may have to mess with /etc/yaboot.conf and possibly run “sudo ybin -v”, but other than that, pretty basic.

Ooh, and the coolest thing is that it’s very simple to get your trackpad to ignore any mouse movements or taps while you’re typing by doing this: “syndaemon -d -k -i 0.3″. I have added this to “~/.kde/Autostart/run-syndaemon.sh” so that KDE will kick it off for me when X starts. And it does require this line in your /etc/X11/xorg.conf: Option “SHMConfig” “on”. But other than that, pretty simple.