Cyrill Gorcunov's blog

What to do if your desktop is trashed by files/directories

2010-02-28T21:01:00.002+03:00

I use a simple approach -- make new directory and move all the thrash there. I'd DIR1/, DIR2/, DIR3/,..., DIR7. Have created directory named STUFF/ and moved all DIRx there. Now desktop is clear and I may start trashing it again :)

Про использование KScope

2010-02-21T23:49:00.003+03:00

Должен признаться, я люблю пользоваться KScope. Практически во всех проектах. Однако, единственная (на мой взгляд) более-менее удобная версия -- 1.6.2. Она больше не поддержвается. Новые версии 1.9.x крайне неудобные. Вот и приходится тащить за собой кучу библиотек kde-3.5 + Qt 3 дабы "ходить" по исходникам.

Сейчас снова проявил себя вопрос перехода на новый дистрибутив. Либо обновлять Ubuntu, либо пробовать что-то другое. Пользоваться Ubuntu как-то надоело, хочу поиграться с Fedora. Ну и как быть с KScope?

Поковырялся в сети. Похоже, единственно правильное решение -- отказаться от KScope

окончательно и перейти на связку Vim+AScope. Vim пользую уже давно, так что это не проблема, а вот AScope... Не знаю, но посмотрим :)

Using Chromium

2009-12-05T20:48:00.004+03:00

I friend of mine told me about Chromium being that fast on handling web pages. So I decided to try and have it installed on my laptop (Ubuntu 9.04, I didn't upgrade yet).

So I must admit I like it. Really. It's much faster then all other browsers I've ever tried.

How to install it. Here is all-in-one instruction.

Run

gksudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list

and append

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main

Then import key

sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com 0xfbef0d696de1c72ba5a835fe5a9bf3bb4e5e17b5

Taken from http://www.ubuntugeek.com/how-to-install-chromium-google-chrome-in-ubuntu-using-deb-package.html

Ubuntu 9.10 and Acer Aspire 5542g

2009-11-07T10:32:00.007+03:00

A friend of mine just bought new shiny Acer Aspire 5542g and asked me to install Ubuntu on it (I must admit I always glad if someone switch to Linux). "Ok", I said, "it should not be that hard", "We even save your Windows 7 there after all."

So I've installed Ubuntu-9.10. It seems to operate fine at a first glance. Then I found a serious problem -- sound subsystem of the laptop seems to be not working well under Linux. The interrupts from sound card are quite imbalanced (ie there is a big difference between interrupts counted on cpu0 and cpu1, which mostly means that something is wrong with configuration). Also microphone is heard on physical level though pulseaudio do not see it (I may tap on mic by finger and hear it). What is more strage -- is that pulseaudio start discovering it as only laptop get back from suspend to ram state.

Anyway, laptop can play music, video and etc. even being a bit screwed I would say.
Perhaps the situation gets better with kernel update. (for the record: I've tried latest linux kernel as well: 2.6.32-rc6, without success).

Customising mutt

2009-09-23T00:08:00.003+04:00

Sometime (well not that dense actually) I need to save patches being received by procmail+mutt knot. By default if you save message mutt asking you to create a mailbox where to put such a message. And I find it a bit inconvenient for me. So, reading mutt manual a bit I found good setting to be used -- save-hook.

So now I have

save-hook ~A +patches/

and all patches I'm saving goes there. At least this is a way more comfortable.

KScope-1.6.2 and Ubuntu 9.0.4

2009-05-01T14:37:00.002+04:00

Whoa! To be able to use KScope-1.6.2 I was needed to just unpack kscope deb package. It seems since I was upgrading from previous ubuntu distro the all deps are satisfied by default (ie Qt and kde 3.5). I'm happy.

KScope and Ubuntu-9.04

2009-04-27T19:57:00.002+04:00

I use KScope all the time for kernel development and other (more or less big projects as well). And yesterday I've upgraded my Ubuntu to latest version 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope). And how surprised I was when have found that there is no more KScope support in base distro (to be fair I don't remember if I've installed KScope on previous Ubuntu from a base repo). Anyway, it seems there is PPA branch which allowed me to install fresh new shiny KScope-1.9.2. Unfortunatelly it's not the version I've a habbit to work on. Completely redesigned version which is to support new Qt libraries and don't depend over KDE anymore. My best wishes to developers (though this version of KScope is quite raw at moment but usable).

Christ has arisen!

2009-04-19T00:40:00.000+04:00

Holiday tonight - so will be short. Christ has arisen!

Alt+o under mc-4.6.2-pre1

2009-04-13T20:49:00.004+04:00

After have been switched to Ubuntu-8.10 I found that mc (midnight commander) started to behave starnge on Alt+o hotkey pressed. Initially it was like "syncronize panels using active one as a template". So now it doesn't react on keypress as it was before. Pressing all around I found that now Alt+i does what Alt+o did earlier. Then I surfed net a bit a found this link which says that a change in behaviour was an intentional one. Darn! It's that named backward compatibility in its full glory :)

Women's Day

2009-03-08T11:28:00.004+03:00

That is for all women in the world. Hope you know a few words in russian :)

Defender of the Fatherland Day

2009-02-23T16:57:00.002+03:00

We have a holiday today due to "Defender of the Fatherland Day" which is more "Man's Day" I believe. One additional weekend is a great oportunity to sit front of the laptop all day long :)

Classmate meeting

2009-02-21T22:11:00.006+03:00

I've just had a classmate meeting. I didn't see these people almost for 13 years. Most of them already married, have children, and some even divorced :) Anyway -- it was really fun and pleasure to see all of them. Photos attached.

Ubuntu disk killer fixed!?

2009-01-18T11:33:00.005+03:00

Just pointed out that Ubuntu "disk-killer" bug is just fixed and in testing state. Well as only I read this note I suddenly remember that I fit the "being bugged" audience since I'm on laptop with Ubuntu all the time (yep, I was on Gentoo for a long time but tired of emerge). So I should have been already fixed the bug otherwise my hdd had being dead. How did I? Heh, checking the /etc settings I found I made a simple script to eliminate the bug /etc/init.d/hdparm cosists of:

---
#! /bin/sh -e

#
# turn off Power Management on HDD

# Get lsb functions
. /lib/lsb/init-functions
. /etc/default/rcS

case "$1" in
start)
/sbin/hdparm -B 255 /dev/sda
log_end_msg $?
;;
restart)
$0 start
;;
*)
log_success_msg "Usage: /etc/init.d/hdparm {start|restart}"
exit 1
esac

exit 0
---

and /etc/rc2.d/S50hdparm, /etc/rc3.d/S15hdparm is symlink to it.

Restoring ASUS WL-500gPv2 router firmware

2009-01-17T19:12:00.008+03:00

That happened I've bricked my router during a -regular- firmware update. So the router became into a state when I could just throw it out the room. How it happened you may ask? Well, I switched to a new ISP "Corbina" which is to be fair very good/stable provier. But only detail -- it ship connection by vpn or l2tp connection. And I didn't manage to handle such a situation with OpenWrt, DD-Wrt (yeah, I know, there are that many 'manuals' explaining what you need to do to put internet connection up with -wrt firmware but neither of them satisfied me). So I decided to
bring new -shiny- OpenWrt firmware. I've started tftp and upload new firmware then I wait until 'firmware reburn' complete and... nothing. Roted didn't respond to anything. Neither ping or else did work. The router was plain dead. Doh!

What to do... ok internet will save us (at least I don't believe I'm only the one who is drown with such a situation and of course I couldn't be the first one :)

And eventually the solution was found on some forum. I didn't save neither forum address nor author (sorry) but just copied text snipped that helped me.

Side note: since my router was in state when it was not providing me ip I set my eth0
to 192.168.1.2 by hands before starting recovery procedure.

---
Recovery!!:
-----------
1. pull power cable and wait 20 seconds
2. keep button pressed and connect power cable: power led should flash
3. ping 192.168.1.1 should reply else redo steps 1 and 2
4. run Asus Firmware restoration tool, select firmware file (e.g. wg01080109_WL500g_EN.trx) and press upload.
After some seconds press the Abort button or wait until it says "Upload fails! Please check the connection"
5. from a dos box or linux console run: tftp -i 192.168.1.1 put wg01080109_WL500g_EN.trx
6. tftp returns something like: "Transfer successful: 3731456 bytes in 2 seconds, 1865728 bytes/s" if it doesn't redo steps 1-5 (sometimes I needed three or four times before it worked)
7. after ca. 80 seconds your Asus should reboot

I did this procedure with
1. wl500g-clear-nvram.trx
2. wl500g-recover.trx
Then I could flash any firmware and the device was alive again.....

---

Here wl500g-clear-nvram.trx and wl500g-recover.trx -- custom firmware images from
http://oleg.wl500g.info/

Hope this note could help somone else.

Firefox word-between spacing issue

2009-01-11T15:43:00.002+03:00

After a some moment I've stopped using Firefox since really nasty issue was found -- the space between words were really expanded which is quite annoying. So I was googling and found no answer how to solve this issue. Then I realized that the queries were wrong -- they are to be "word spacing issue firefox" or something like this. So eventually google pointed me that removing pango-graphite package would help out. I removed it and -- viola I could use firefox again without problems :)

Winter is coming...

2008-11-19T20:07:00.003+03:00

Today we have a first snowfall. Really timid snowflakes was falling almost whole day long. I suppose winter is coming... at least for some period :)

Xwrt works

2008-10-24T20:57:00.000+04:00

Actually it works. Moreover it works great! So Xwrt ruullezzz! :)

ASUS WL-500G Premium v2

2008-10-14T19:41:00.001+04:00

I've bought ASUS WL-500G Premium v2 and even installed X-Wrt on it (from xwrt snapshots with linux-2.4 series kernel). So all works fine -- but WiFi doesn't. Investigating...

Autumn Views from the home window

2008-09-28T13:26:00.008+04:00

That happend I live on fifth floor all my life. And every autumn there are so beauty views of mapples being red/yellow/green mixture.

So here are an examples. Sorry for bad quality - n80 you know :)

Linksys wrt54gs v7 disaster

2008-09-20T15:14:00.000+04:00

What the...? It's quite disaster but my Linksys router managed to have v7 firmware. Which makes it completely unappliable for OpenWrt. I hope the sellers could change it for some better supported model.

My DSL-840V has been attacked again

2008-09-20T10:26:00.001+04:00

That happend again. My router was successfully attacked again. Not sure if I mentoined it earlier - it was happening before. So after that (previous) case I just changed password but nothing more since my brother uses Windows which doesn't support WPA2 by default - it's to be updated to SP2 and additional patch to be able to use WPA2. But I'm too lazy to update his laptop. So I choosed to just change the password to one generated by pw_gen.

Yesterday I was playing with my mother's laptop (Ubuntu based Acer) and it was unable to access router and get IP thru wifi. So eventually I just turned her laptop off. Meanwhile her laptop was the only one AP who was asking to connect thru wifi. After turning it off I found that there some a strange activity on the router wifi led. So I connected to router thru wire cable and was amazed that wifi connection is still alive. It was cracked without doubts. Someone cracked the password and spread spurious MAC address by wifi waves to connect to router. I suppose it's someone called himself as KL4156 (as his AP is named).

Anyway - now I've generated new 128bit wep key. Hope it'll help for a while.

I've got new router

2008-09-18T22:02:00.000+04:00

Yes! It happend! My sister brought me the Linksys WRT54GS router yesterday. Now it's time to setup OpenWrt or better X-Wrt there. Well, as only get spare time for this.

Star Wars: Force Unleashed

2008-09-16T22:40:00.000+04:00

The new Star Wars game is coming out quite soon (today?) - Force Unleashed. Unfortunately only on Xbox 360 and PS3 platforms. Should I buy one of this console? Not sure. I wouldn't say they are quite expensive but not really cheap stuff.

Linksys WRT54GS ordered

2008-09-13T13:21:00.000+04:00

I've ordered WRT54GS wifi router - hope my firend bring it to me today or tomorrow. As I heard OpenWRT could be installed on this device - will try. Back side of this actions will be that warranty will not be appliable anymore. But I don't really care much about it - the hacking is always fun and not warranty comfortable - isn't it? :)

How to block network ports

2008-09-10T20:56:00.000+04:00

There is only one way to _really_ block network ports. Our admins are so strong that they found it... Check the pictures :)

Vacation ended

2008-08-04T21:33:00.000+04:00

So my vacantion is ended up. I was moving to village where we have a not that big (but really comfortable - woodish) house. The weather was so-so. Sometimes sun... sometimes rain and even storm. So I think it was really good holidays there. What is a bit disaster - is GPRS connection - it was quite slooow. That slow so I've been forced to check only kernel mailing list rarely. Anyway now things is calming down.

Opera Updated

2008-06-28T12:40:00.000+04:00

I've updated Opera to latest (stable) 9.50 . So good and so fast bowser I would say.

Carrying the racks

2008-06-26T21:51:00.000+04:00

These two days was really exhausting. Our group of engineers was in duties of 'dockers'. We have carried ~3.5 tons of racks from 1 to 4 floor. So boring and so hard. The whole body is broken.

Weak Password Mistake

2008-06-20T20:23:00.000+04:00

Today I've found that someone is sending messages by my name. It happend in our social net - vkontakte.ru. It seems that my account was hacked and the main reason I see is too weak password - it was 7777777. I've my account renamed to someting like "Account is not valid" so my friends would see that name in the massages instead of mine. Anyway, to use such a password was a horrible mistake ;-)

Fixing up screwed mail headers by procmail and sed

2008-06-09T20:16:00.000+04:00

I've been annoed a huge number of times by incorrect headers being setted up by some mail user agents. Eventually I stared - maybe I should patch my mail agent to be able to view normal names of people who have been screwed up? Don't think so - mutt works fine and I dont have any willing to touch its code so I decided to write quite small sed script to deal with them.

Well, lets our dance begin. First off - take into account that I'm not regular expression specialist so I made it maybe too stricted - but it works for me at least.

The problem

Some headers are screwed up like:
=?ISO-8859-1?Q?name address?=

It is wrong and should be:
=?ISO-8859-1?Q?name?=address

See? "?=" is placed before the mail address itself.

The solution

Actually as I mentoined is a bit/quite silly but it works. I've added the following sed script in my .procmailrc file:

# all mail to default
:0 fHw
* From:.*=?.*
| sed -e 's/^From:$.*$=?$.*$<$.*$>$.*$?=$.*$$/From: =?\2?=<\3>\4/'
:0:
new
#EOF

So it handles only one address at once so oneday it should be improved to go further.

Internet going to be cheaper

2008-06-02T18:08:00.000+04:00

My ISP get me much cheaper traffic now - the cost is reduced for ~1/3 of original price. Good news I must say ;)

DNS suffer

2008-06-01T12:24:00.000+04:00

I've been suffered with my ISP DNS resolver quite frequently. So I was searching for some DNS caching utility. And the winner is pdnsd - try it I think you'll like it.

BitlBee

2008-05-11T14:03:00.000+04:00

A firend of mine pointed me to BitlBee project http://www.bitlbee.org/. Well, interesting thing I thought... Today I've set it up - and my conclusion is - very good project - now I can talk with my gmail penpals thru irssi - http://www.irssi.org/.