Celebration day
Vorm.net is one year in my hands (not literally). Since I don't know if a lot of people have found something useful here (although some people e-mailed me about certain topics, which is fine), I have saved myself a lot of time typing
#ssh vorm.net
instad of the unintuitive joc1.tnw-s.tudelft.nl. So I registered the domain for another two years. Yeah...
[Permalink] -- Filed under: [web]
Sparkle
Found another great tip today. It is generally known that I do not like (Macromedia) Flash. Most important reason for this is the abuse of Flash by a lot of 'designers' and the use of flash for irritating ads as banners. (Another reason is the availability of an open standard) for vector graphics.)
Blocking Flash is rather easy (just do not install the plugin), but sometimes not 100% satisfactory. It would be better to select on a per site basis if you want to see the Flash or not, because sometimes Flash can add value. For example for a game or a movie, made by a developer with a clue.
Now I found a solution by Jesse Ruderman which I prefer. When a page has a Flash element, it shows a small link, and when you click on the link it shows the Flash object. Easy but effective.
To do this you must have a browser which supports user stylesheets and XBL (mainly Mozilla and family).
Just add:
object[classid$=":D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000"],
object[codebase*="swflash.cab"]
-moz-binding: url("http://vorm.net/flash.xml#obj");
to your userContent.css (instructions here). As you can see this loads flash.xml from my website. To speed things up, download the file and put it on your own webserver if you have one.
[Permalink] -- Filed under: [web]
Marooned
I installed a linux beta kernel (2.5.66) today. Because it is not 100% trivial I will explain how to use this together with ALSA.
First, the alsa driver in the kernel is old. So download alsa-driver.tar.gz and unzip it. Copy the alsa-kernel directory into the sound directory in the kernel source directory.
Now you can make clean; make mrproper and make config your kernel. Then make bzImage (no make dep is needed in the beta kernel). Read a kernel howto if you don't understand this part :-). You can build alsa as module (load it the same way as with 2.4 kernels) or in the kernel itself. I advise every desktop user to set the pre-emptive switch, it helps audio playback a lot.
If this
works you should have a /proc/asound with information about your
audiocard(s). Probably you can't play sound at this moment. The reason behind
this is that you need to create the devices. This can be done in two ways:
1) Use the devfs (device filesystem). Since you need to have a patched
kernel for this, you probably don't want this and if you do, you should
know.
2) Easiest way: Use the snddevices script in the
alsa-driver.tar.gz to setup the devices. This will leave you with a
/dev/dsp which is not writable by all users (and so not al users can
play audio), so use chmod to fix this.
It is not necessary to compile the alsa-libs.tar.gz and the alsa-utils.tar.gz but I recommend this. The libs are used by a lot of programs and the utils useful (aplay and amixer).
Volume: a lot of people think their setup doesn't work, while in reality the sound is muted (alsa's default). Use amixer or alsamixer to set the volume to your preferred loudness. Then use the alsactl store command to save the settings. If you wan't to have this settings at startup, you can add alsactl restore to your /etc/rc.d/rc.local file.
Good luck with your new alsa-enabled kernel! Comments are welcome.
[Permalink] -- Filed under: [linux]
For peace
Let there be peace.
Let there be peace.
The sound of Fauré's Requiem
provokes tears even in sunlight.
Winter sunshine
stretching across the frozen plains,
together with all her children:
ah, Mother of Mercies!
Let there be peace.
Let there be ever more peace.
At the sound of the Requiem's music
offered for the dead,
the icy cold of the living is covered and warmed
so that truly truly
the living,
those whose lives are done,
and even those who have yet to live,
are all united in one sisterhood of souls.
Let there be peace.
Kim Nam-jo (1927-)
[Permalink] -- Filed under:
Fixxxer
Today I fixed some bugs in my Perceptive Listener Tester. You can find version 0.05 on my software page. I also included a sample configuration files, so you may find out how it actually works ;-). Documentation will perhaps be provided in a later stadium.
[Permalink] -- Filed under: [science]