This site is now more than 10 years old. On the internet this is an era, so time for a change. I was active on the internet since 1992 and have run websites since 1997. The current layout (with some minor modifications) and use of this domain name however started in 2002. The word 'blog' was not yet common, so I referred to this site as a journal.

In the beginning of 2000 I had quite a lot of visitors and some useful information on this site. Popular were the posts on breaking audio captchas, my graduation and my notes on tangosteps. For tango there are excellent clips on youtube, but when this site started youtube didn't even exist! Another popular post was on how to remove flash from firefox. Now in 2012 flash is finally dying (but only a little), so some things need even longer than an internet era!

What is the alternative? For technical issues sites like stackoverflow, github and various distro fora are very useful because of the moderation and because google ranks these sites high. So I will continue to post results of my tinkering with technical stuff over there. For personal content sites like facebook, google plus, flickr, etc. are much easier too handle for the non-IT experienced friends and family. Another advantage of these sites is the option to authorize your data. On vorm.net everything was always accessible by everyone which made balancing what to put and what not to put on this site sometimes difficult. That said, I do not use a social media site at this point; I am old-fashioned, wanting to keep my own data and run my own stuff. But maybe I or the social media industry will change in the future and I will participate, who knows?

One of the nice features of the web is that it does not forget so easily. I intent to keep this site running in the current form. I did remove the navigation but kept the all content for historic reasons.

For now thanks for visiting and meet you in another (virtual) place!

Time to update this site with a new picture. It is from our holiday in Spain. Maybe the makers of The Elder Scrolls - Oblivion where also inspired by the city of Girona? At least the atmosphere there reminded me of the game.

Update: Probably fixed my rss feed.

Long time no post, but I did update the photos. More will come soon!

I am back from a perfect holiday in Canada. Photos can be found here.

I seem to have broken the utf-8 support on my site, but it is now fixed. Update: again...

ᛖᚴ ᚷᛖᛏ ᛖᛏᛁ ᚧ ᚷᛚᛖᚱ ᛘᚾ ᚦᛖᛋᛋ ᚨᚧ ᚡᛖ ᚱᚧᚨ ᛋᚨᚱ

Time to save the planet... Just kidding *wish I could*, but I just changed my server from a power hungry 140W eating beast, to a small and nice gentle 15W mini server. A factor ten cut, impressive! My new server is also built from green materials (according to the asus eee box site) and a little bit faster.. Now I hope it will serve me just as well as well as my old one and for the same amount of years..

While the rest of the techworld is getting excited about their aero, quartz or compiz 32bit color 3D desktop, I reached a less impressive milestone today:

From now on I use a 256 color terminal ;-). Actually I looked into this earlier, but since gnome-terminal and screen didn't support it back then (maybe upstream, but not in my distro), I enabled support just today.

Excellent documentation on this topic is already available on multiple places, but to summarize for myself:

.screenrc 
attrcolor b ".I"
termcapinfo xterm 'Co#256:AB=\E[48;5;%dm:AF=\E[38;5;%dm'
defbce "on" 
startup_message off

.bash_profile 
set TERM xterm-256color; export TERM

.vimrc 
set t_Co=256 
colorscheme=asudark

For vim you need a special colorscheme (gvim colorschemes do not work). My vim hacked 256 colors scheme, which work better with a transparent background then the original, is available here.

Back from beautiful country Vietnam and of course updated the photo section of this site.

Today I installed Ubuntu Hardy Heron on a desktop computer. I am pretty distro/desktop agnostic (see my ten year anniversary post), but since Debian Etch is a bit old for a desktop and Hardy Heron has Long Term Support (I do not want to update/fix a computer every half year!!) Ubuntu was my choice.

There are unlimited gnome improvements which I don't care about, but some things stand out for me in this release.

• Firefox 3 is much better than 2. The memory improvements and the renewed linux (gtk) focus helps. And luckily you can disable the stupid new urlbar in about:config with browser.urlbar.maxRichResults = 0 .
• The way non-free installation for media-playback, video drivers and browser plugins is handled, is sweet! The installation of this software is painless here. I even got a nice 64-bit(!) Java firefox plugin, which I was unable to install in Debian (thanks redhat/icedtea).
• And most important: the colors in the gnome-terminal are smoothened. Now that is what _I_ call eye candy. Less work and much more satisfaction than the integrated compiz.real ;-).

So thanks again for all free software developers!

A lot of work is done in making linux suspend work better. For me it works perfect (from linux kernel 2.6.20 or so). Therefore I wanted to go a step further and let my class A, heavy power-using receiver switch off when my desktop computer suspends (to ram). And switch back on when my computer wakes up. The motivation is that I only listen music via my computer.

To achieve this I bought the Gembird Silver Shield, a USB-switchable power adapter. I was prepared to do some nice USB snooping and C programming to get this device working in linux, but (un)fortunately there was already a working utility for this device.

Configuration for suspend/hibernate is not so easy and documentation is sparse for the user mode utilities. Since it took me more than the usual googling I will summarize my conclusions here for later use. First the gnome-screensaver measures the idle time. After this timeout is expired the gnome-power-manager starts to measure his own timeout (so before suspend the two times will stack). When the gnome-power-manager times out it will look at the Inhibit flag. If there is no inhibiting (for example my rhythmbox pushes Inhibiting, because I do not want to suspend when music is playing) your computer will suspend.

Since a custom script should be added to switch the power-switch off via usb with sispmctl the suspend-backend is important. Gnome power manager can use multiple backends to go to suspend mode. This works via hal (the hardware abstraction layer). Configuration for this is in /usr/share/hal/information. HAL is responsible for calling the suspend-backend. The default suspend-backend on my machine is pm-utils. (which can be tested with pm-(suspend/hibernate/power-save etc.). I also have a package called hibernate (which can also suspend, confusing isnt' it?). A third one is suspend2 (which can also hibernate....). These backends have different ways of adding custom hooks.

To add a hook to hibernate I added a file called local in /etc/hibernate/scriptlets.d/. The API is as follows (ugly in my book):

# -*- sh -*-

UsbPowerSocketDown() {
      /usr/bin/sispmctl -f1
}
UsbPowerSocketUp() {
      /usr/bin/sispmctl -o1
}

AddUsbOptions() {
      AddSuspendHook 10 UsbPowerSocketDown
      AddResumeHook 10 UsbPowerSocketUp
      return 0
}

AddUsbOptions

Pm-utils has a much nicer API. To add a custom hook add a file to /etc/pm/sleep.d . This uses init style ordering. So look in /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/ for a proper number. I needed to talk to the usb-bus AFTER the modules were loaded, so a number lower than 50. So I added /etc/pm/sleep.d/10usbpoweroptions with content like this:

#!/bin/bash
case $1 in
    suspend)
        /usr/bin/sispmctl -f1 
    ;;
    resume)
        sleep 1
        /usr/bin/sispmctl -o1 
    ;;
esac

After all this fiddling it works like a charm! Now hopefully one standard will emerge; because how to achieve the same result with KDE I don't know. I had to manually patch rhythmbox to change calling (via dbus) the Inhibit method from org.gnome.powermanager to org.freedesktop.powermanagement (because i used a wrong combination of versions..), so this suggests a move in the right direction.

There is only one week between this picture and the one below.... The trick is of course the invention of the aeroplane, which enabled me to make a trip to Egypt, a wonderful country. See more soon in my photo section of this site.

Anyway, good 2008 to everyone!

From a snowy Leiden I wish you pleasant holidays and a good 2008!

Fast virtualization is cheap nowadays on linux. Just apt-get install kvm on a recent kernel and VT-enabled processor and you are ready to run all kind of different os-es on your host. No more recompiling the vmware kernel modules *again* or fiddling with xen-modified kernels and difficult networking setups. Yeah!

One problem I encountered was getting a decent resolution (f.g. 1280x1024 or higher) in the guest xserver (xorg). Google was not really helpful this time so therefore I post this note for future reference. Qemu emulates two kind of video cards, standard is a cirrus, -std-vga provides you with a vesa one. Vesa was not able to help me (garbled screen), so using the (default) cirrus emulator is the way to go for a linux guest.

The trick was in changing the monitor sync and refresh rates, autodetection did not work properly (in my centos 4.0 guest). So here is my working snippet of /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

Section "Device"
  Identifier  "Generic Video Card"
  Driver      "cirrus"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
  Identifier  "Generic Monitor"
  Option    "DPMS"
  HorizSync 28-64
  VertRefresh 43-60
EndSection

I am using GNU/Linux for 10 years! As a celebration I made a white chocolate cake (recept) with tux on it. Thanks to all the volunteers for this great combination of free software. In the past I have used all major distributions, nowadays I am stuck with Debian. In fact I am rather distro-agnostic, if it runs xterm, screen, vim, mplayer, gcc and mutt I am happy. Pro is the nice Debian philosophy, con the fact that is has not incorporated SElinux yet. So perhaps I will switch in the next 10 years again?

Sidenote for R. Stallman: when i am using gnu/linux 25 years I promise to make a gnu cake :-D.

Last saturday I lost/gained another year depending on your worldview. Anyway, had a good day between the apes.

Last week I read a thread on the mplayer-dev mailinglist. It was about setting the default sound output from Alsa to OSS. It is now OSS for a default compile of the tarball. However OSS is deprecated in linux AND in almost all distributions that ship mplayer (my favorite media player) set the default output to Alsa.

Most in charge mplayer developers are pro OSS and do not want to switch. One of the arguments is that OSS is now GPL and is used other unices as well . There are also arguments about library vs. unix semantics. Alsa has an OSS compatibility mode (actually two, one in-kernel and one in-library). However using this blocks soft-mixing. This means that another program playing sounds can not do this while using default mplayer compile.

Both sides have some good arguments (i truly understand the points for OSS!, it is just not realistic), but discussing them in this context is useless and the way it is done on this mailing-list is very childish and out of reality. Mplayer should set Alsa as default output for linux, because 1) all major distributions do this and do this with good reason: 2) OSS in linux is deprecated. Reading this thread made me feel tired of (the immaturity of) the open source scene.

But today I am a happy guy again. Some troll suggested removing Alsa from the linux kernel and I was afraid of another useless thread. However I found a message from Takashi (one of Alsa's most productive driver and patchwriters:

Honestly, I'm not fully against changing the current code base (or crap, whatever, any childish name). There are indeed many misdesigns. But, replacing with the above is no option, IMO. The OSS have also many misdesigns, so the same argument would start again. One should learn something from history...

Anyway, if it's going to be more constructive, I'm willing to join in.

Takashi

Hannu (the main OSS developer) then said this:

We have no intention to push OSS back to the kernel or to replace ALSA. That alternative is not realistic any more. In addition OSS is a cross-platform product and staying more or less outside various kernel trees should provide better flexibility.

What we would like to push is that the old "deprecated" OSS/Free are removed from the kernel. OSS/Free is based on about years old OSS API version which was too limited for many applications. Having OSS/Free in the kernel doesn't serve any purpose.

Also we would like to stop the silly OSS vs ALSA war. OSS and ALSA are rather different. Both of them have some good points and bad points. For ordinary users it doesn't matter which API is used by the applications as long as they work. Just the application developers can see the real difference. Some of them prefer OSS while some other prefer ALSA and this should be their "freedom of choice".

I think the ideal solution would be that both ALSA and OSS APIs can co-exist by sharing the same low level drivers (which has already been demonstrated). The low level driver interfaces in both systems are practically identical. This means that ALSA's core can work with OSS' drivers and vice versa.

Today both OSS and ALSA teams have to spend significant amounts of time in emulating the "alien" APIs. Making OSS and ALSA to co-exist will require some work in both sides but that should be nothing when compared to the effort required for emulation.

Just my 2 cents.

Best regards, Hannu

Fortunately there are still a lot of sane people in the community. Thanks!

Back from a nice holiday. Photos are updated.

Good presentation on captchas by google. See this video. The group that is headed by the prof doing the presentation should easily be able to break current current used image captchas if their statements are true...

Perhaps I like it because perfectly reflects my own opinion though ;-).

Since I have searched for the maildirmake command on debian now two times (using http://packages.debian.org and apt-cache) with no result, I decided to blog the answer here.

You need to apt-get install courier-base. (and then /etc/init.d/courier-authdaemon stop; update-rc.d remove courier-authdaemon. This is not logical (I do not need courier at all, only postfix and mutt), so this post will help me and probably others in the future.

[update]
After hitting save I thought of an easier solution (?), use something like
echo 'function maildirmake { mkdir -p "$1"/{cur,new,tmp}; chmod -R 700 "$1";}' >> ~/.bashrc
[/update]

Linux and 64 bit computers are a good combination. The first linux 64 bit support dates from 1995. To be able to compile everything from source really helps supporting a platform. Windows mostly runs 32 bit programs at this moment, because proprietary software vendors (which account for most windows software) are not really fast in releasing new versions. Not all is well for linux though. Macromedia Flash is such a proprietary program of which no 64 bit player exists. Now, I do not really like flash (see also a previous entry about this, but for some reason flash is used to display movies on the web. If you think that that is weird, I agree. What has a vector renderer to do with a movie codec? The masters from youtube.com can perhaps tell you; we just have to comply.

I like to watch movies, so now I have a problem... Or not? Fortunately the flash way of bringing movies is just an container trick around a normal mpeg movie, and my favorite audio/movieplayer mplayer can play them just fine.

So if you are on debian, add contrib to /etc/apt/sources.list and apt-get install iceweasel iceweasel-greasemonkey mozilla-mplayer (the mplayer plugin is broken for firefox in etch at this moment). Now you only need a way to let mozilla know how to feed the movies. This can be done with a simple script like Michael Sheldons's.

So finally I can be an ultrahip blagotuber and and bring you movies ;-)

Happy Christmas Everyone!

During some longer than normal train travelling I had time to rework some site bits. Permalink code is rewritten, pages are now integrated into my journal and the archive navigation is date based. Tag support is added to site and feeds

Also I added photos from an autumn week in Morocco. This trip is really recommended in october.

Since some time I am an user of encfs. I actually did want to encrypt my whole root filesystem (just for fun, nothing to hide ;-)), but the loopback way is a hack and the old weak initialization vectors make watermark attacks easy. The weak key management was also a showstopper. Now that luks is relatively standard I hoped that with ubuntus upcoming edgy the eft the dm crypt + luks setup would be well enough integrated.

Unfortunately this is not the case. The installer does not support this yet. There is a myriad of conflicting documentation on how to set this up properly. Most of these are misleading and outdated. There are thousand ways to do this.. but I wanted to do it in a way that will be supported properly in the future. This guide is the best there is on this topic and following it literally does work for Edgy Eft.

One thing Edgy has changed (compared to the guide, which is actually for Dapper Drake) is that the latest cryptsetup package already has encrypted root initramsfs hooks. With adding cryptopts in the kernel line (or via kopts in grub) or making a /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/cryptoroot file the system _should_ come up automatically with the passphrase question. After a lot of fiddling (every distro seems to have their on ways of specifying the parameters) I still did not get this working. If you use the kernel line options cryptsetup is not installed in the initrd and if you use the conf file option, the proper kernel modules are not loaded.

Usually I behave like a good open source citizen and file nice bug reports about this, instead of whining in a journal entry. This time the 1000 different ways of doing these + the already very confusing bug reports about this package, left me feeling disqualified to do so. In the end, just following the guide for ubuntu and writing my own initramfs non configurable hook functions (which conflict with the future cryptopts settings !!) seems the best way right now. What makes the situation even more difficult for starters is that google does not list the proper page for ubuntu but a very outdated howto, so hopefully this entry will help the proper guide bubble up.

Hopefully this is something that is going to get better in future! Distributors, please fix this and standardize! On the bright side, the debian future for this looks most promising, clean implementation and support in the beta installer..

Back from my holiday in Belgium and Luxembourg. I had a good time, turned 30; now I am trying to get back to business.