Inside the magician’s hat

Finally, vacations!! It’s been a while since the last post… but I’m back and with a cool tip on the game Prince of Persia – Sands of time.

I got stuck in the observatory part (when the game is around 71% completed). There’s a central platform in the scenario that should raise, but it doesn’t!! This is a known glitch, and fortunately someone found a nice workaround. Take a look here: http://www.neoseeker.com/forums/5727/t336412-71-observatory-central-platform-doesn-raise/

Now, back to my vacations :-D

Here is a nice document explaining how to enable the wireless activity LED on some Thinkpad models – http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/ThinkPad_11a/b/g_Wireless_LAN_Mini_Express_Adapter – In my case, the following command did the magic :)

[code]
# echo -n 1 > /proc/sys/dev/wifi0/ledpin
[/code]

Howdy!

I’m currently adding support for SLES11 on the IBM Installation Toolkit (http://www14.software.ibm.com/webapp/set2/sas/f/lopdiags/installtools/home.html), and was stuck on some network configuration issues. In SLES10 we used to bind the network configs to a certain interface by using the interface’s MAC address to create the ifcg-eth-id-* files under /etc/sysconfig/network/.

This type of binding is necessary because the kernel gives names to the devices based on the order it loads the modules. Imagine you have a machine with 2 NICs, one using the e1000 module, and the other using tg3. If you do

[code]
#modprobe e1000
#modprobe tg3
[/code]

then you’ll have eth0 -> e1000, and eth1 -> tg3. If you change the modprobe order, then eth0 -> tg3 and eth1 -> e1000. This is a big issue when dealing with devices that can be hotplugged (or when running some strange types of installation, which is my case :D).

Beginning on OpenSuSE 10.3 they stopped using the ifcfg-eth-id-* approach and moved on to udev. With udev it is possible to rename the devices by using udev rules, and this is extremely useful to give persistent names to network interfaces, based on their MAC address, for instance. See http://www.reactivated.net/writing_udev_rules.html for more details.

Ok, so far so good, but this change broke my code that I used on SLES10 to configure network interfaces :P

Now, there are only ifcfg-<device> files under /etc/sysconfig/network. Inside each ifcfg-<device>, there’s an option called LLADDR, that is the MAC address for the interface. Also, the autoinst.xml file changed a little bit – below is the <interface> part of one SLES11 autoinst.xml file, note that there’s a <lladdr> entry there :) :

[code]
<interface>
<bootproto>dhcp4</bootproto>
<device>eth0</device>
<lladdr>aa:bb:cc:dd:ff:00</lladdr>
<name>Ethernet Network Card</name>
<startmode>auto</startmode>
</interface>
[/code]

This autoinst.xml config will result on file /etc/sysconfig/network/ifcfg-eth0, containing a LADDR variable with value aa:bb:cc:dd:ff:00, along with the correct udev rules to bind the name eth0 to the correct interface.

Hope this is useful to someone else!

See you :)

Here’s a nice tip that I found today in Gentoo’s forum, just in case someone is having the same problem I had: no sound in flash movies inside Firefox – ALSA modules from kernel 2.6.29-gentoo-r5 and adobe-flash-10.0.22.87.

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-5831435.html#5831435

see ya!

Yeah, I like music soooo much ;) Here’s a nice article on how to convert an .ape (Monkey’s Audio file) to either MP3 or Ogg formats.

http://gimpel.gi.funpic.de/wiki/index.php?title=Howto:convert_ape_to_wav/mp3/ogg_on_Linux

I used the cueape.sh script, and to be honest, it does the work pretty well!

Just found out this nice post http://liquidat.wordpress.com/2007/12/03/short-tip-convert-ogg-file-to-mp3/ showing how to convert ogg files to mp3. Had to apply some changes to the command line, so here it is (just in case you need it like I did):

[code] for file in *.ogg;do oggdec -o - "$file"|lame --vbr-new -h -V 4 - - "$(basename "$file" .ogg).mp3";done[/code]

The only flaw is that music tags (artist, album, etc) get lost in the process. There must be a way to maintain them in the mp3 file, but I haven’t had the time to play with it yet …

If you’re looking for color schemes for Vim, then you’ll enjoy the following link:

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~maverick/VimColorSchemeTest/

Some of the schemes will work only in the Vim’s graphical interface (GVim), but there are others with color configs for Vim (running on a terminal, like xterm).

If you want a scheme that will work on vim in the terminal, make sure it has cterm, ctermbg and ctermfg configs. It’s also a good idea to run vim on a 256 color terminal. Take a look on these pointers for more on this:

http://www.jukie.net/~bart/blog/20060824224842

http://blog.cynapses.org/2006/08/09/konsole-256color/

I’ve been trying to find a nice way for printing chm files in book style – no lucky!

Both Xchm and Kchmviewer are very good programs for viewing chm files in the computer, but they lack the ability to print whole documents at once (if some one knows how to do that with these apps, please drop a comment/email/whatever :D)

Then I came to know this great project – chm2pd. Just get it, install it with its dependencies (very easy, just follow the steps in the README that comes with the source code) and you’re ready to go! Convert your chm files to pdf and print them as you please.

More on this great script cand be found on:  http://www.karakas-online.de/forum/viewtopic.php?t=10275

I had a problem today and I’d like to share the solution :P

Imagine you have some ISO files exported on a NFS server, and then you mount the directory with this ISO files in the local computer. Something like:

[code]
# mount nfs_server:/srv/exports/isos /mnt/isos
[/code]

Ok, this way you’ll have all your ISO files at /mnt/isos. Now, imagine you want to mount one of these ISOs in loopback:

[code]
# mount -o loop /mnt/isos/blah.iso /tmp/blah
/mnt/isos/blah.iso: Permission denied
[/code]

OOppss.. Permission denied??? Hmmm.. I got stuck with this problem for almost 30 minutes. Tried changing permissions and exporting parameters, Google, but no answer at all… then… fortunately…. I found it:  -o loop,ro!

[code]
# mount -o loop,ro /mnt/isos/blah.iso /tmp/blah
[/code]

YEAH!  It cost me 30 minutes :P

Yes, I’m a Gkrellm fan!…

…And I thought about writing a Gkrellm plugin to ge stock quotes from Bovespa (using Yahoo! API), but, before start doing that, I found gkrellstock (http://gkrellstock.sourceforge.net/).

This is a very simple frontend to the Finance-Quote Perl’s module (http://search.cpan.org/~hampton/), and saved me some time ;D