Author: jrwren

Unmet build dependencies

Packaging for debian based distributions can be a pain, especially when you don’t do it often, and you normally do not install -dev packages.

dpkg-checkbuilddeps 2>&1 | perl -p -e ‘s/\([^)]*\)//g;s/([^:]*:){2}//;’ | sudo xargs echo apt-get install

This little 1.25 line shell script helps ease my pain. It only generates the command to run, since apt-get likes to interact, so sending it STDIN doesn’t work very well.

Good, bad, good…New Job, fun times.

This entry is my first in my “life” category. Sorry if you are syndicating and this isn’t technology related.

Life has been strange. I have not used the home computer much lately, which means I haven’t been learning new good things. This depresses me to some extent.

The good is that I’ve been foccusing more on another hobbie. I made an excellent fish dish using the holy trinity of vegitables as a base. It turned out great, but in the process I learned that my lovely wife must be alergic to Pollack. Strange, because she has never had problems with other white fish.

Yes, cooking is a hobbie. I enjoyed it even before I started watching FoodTV, but FoodTV definitely fuels me. Alton Brown takes my interest to new levels. Unfortunately most of the things on FoodTV involve meat. I do eat meat, but not in our home. My wife is a vegetarian, so our home is meat free. Beyond meat, my wife is a health nut. She avoids hydrogenated vegetable oils. Something about the hydrogenation process triggers alergies and other bad things. She also has been slowly cutting out dairy, and thanks to Silk and Soy Garden. Butter was tough to replace, but a month ago or so, after a bad experience with a gross soy butter substitute and a year of prodding from a good friend, we tried Soy Garden. It is excellent.

So butter meant many foods that had been lost. Biscuits are mostly butter, flour, and milk. I made biscuits, they are delicious. My favorite new thing to make is also based on butter and flour.

This is the most fun thing I’ve done in a while. I’d wanted to make my own flour tortilla for years. I’d heard it is easy. I’d heard it is painful. I’d read elaborate recipes, and the need for special baking equipment. Finally, I just decided to do it. Man was it easy. Butter(even fake), flour, baking power, and water! Roll out flat, and cook stovetop on high heat in a cast iron pan.

Mmmm… completely homemade burritos are tastey! I made the refritos from dehydrated pintos. I made the tortillas. I didn’t grow the tomatoes, but they are natural. 🙂 I didn’t make the cheese either. But they were tastey!

So I quit my job and am starting a new job. It is focussed on Software Development instead of this strange mid level tech support and web development hybrid position that I am in now. The companies(I contract through one to another) that I am leaving are being most gratious about my exit. I heard some horror stories from people who had left recently, but I guess their situation was different. I actually got the “Is there anything we can offer you to stay?” question, which was very nice, even though I am already committed to moving.

This new job is 20-30min commute vs the 45-60min commute I have now. I figure I will gain an additional hour for myself each day. That is 5 hours a week, 20 hours a month, 250 hours a year that I won’t be driving!

These are the ups and downs of life I suppose… I think I’m pretty good at appreciating the ups, and making the best of the downs…

Last night was pretty cool, my wife took me to the University of Michigan’s Life Sciences Orchestera concert. The two Mozart pieces were great. The two pieces by someone I’d never heard of were great. The two Aaron Copeland pieces were miss and meh. It did give me time to focus on what I dislike about Copeland. The compositions are bipolar. I won’t try to explain it. You will either know what I mean, or you won’t.

I have to wonder if it isn’t these kinds of events, a free orchestral concert, that set the University of Michigan appart from other schools.

Logitech Quickcam Messenger in Linux

I found this link about the Logitech Quickcam Messenger.

http://www.yoper.com/forum2/index.php?showtopic=6274

I found it by searching for the USB ID that I got from ‘lsusb’ output.
ID 046d:08f0 Logitech, Inc.

It is cool because Comcast was giving away these things for free to promote their high speed internet with video emails and conferencing.

I’m using Ubuntu Breezy right now, so I had to force the compilation to use gcc-3.3

sudo rm /usr/bin/gcc ; sudo ln -s gcc-3.3 /usr/bin/gcc

The rest of this should work in Ubuntu Hoary as well.

Lets use sudo intead of su:

sed -ie ‘s/su -p -c/sudo/’ ./quickcam.sh

Make sure you have kernel-headers installed, and a build link setup:

sudo apt-get install linux-headers-`uname -r`
sudo ln -s /usr/src/linux-headers-`uname -r` /lib/modules/`uname -r`/build

Now just run ./quickcam.sh from the qc-usb-messenger-0.8.tar.gz
file.

It will make you press enter a bunch of times. Just keep doing that.

Eventually it will load, test, and install the quickcam.ko kernel module.

See http://home.mag.cx/messenger/ for more details.

The microphone in the Quickcam Messenger is already supported by the usb-audio module. The button on the camera may be used. See the readme:http://home.mag.cx/messenger/source/_README_MESSENGER

Penguicon 3.0 – Saturday

Man am I tried.

The ars linux guys sure can talk about stuff until late. In fact, there were so many presentations I’m going to have to stop, and think back to who went first.

…

I think it was Sean “Harshy” who stepped up first and gave a talk about the status of Coaster and development woes. It was very interesting to hear the developer point of view of getting a new open source project off the ground. Coaster is a gnome cd burning application that uses nautilus-cd-burn. NCB on the other hand uses cdrecord. Being built on those two layers, and both of them having their share of bugs seemed to be a big challenge for Coaster. The libburn project looked promising, but no work has proceeded on it for years.

Next was Rick “TheRock” Lull doing a cool presentation of some network tools. Nagios, NMIS and Cacti. This was an excellent description and demonstration of these tools. Cacti looks like a great MRTG on steroids. NMIS looks like clutter, but if you can get passed the cluttered interface, it looks useful. I’ve used Nagios for years, so its difficult for me to relay it in simple words. It is not difficult to configure Nagios, but it does have a steep learning curve. Once you have figured out which text configuration files to edit, things become simple.

Finally, Tatsuya “tm” Murase gave a fundaments of security talk. It wasn’t anything technical, but instead emphasized a different way to thinking about security. It was really a long list of best practices of thought. Highly relevant information for those new and serious in security.

Then greenfly played three teh_scene videos. OMG ROFL! Very funny stuff.

I was looking forward to showing off my implementation of autocomplete html input text elements, but there was no time or interest or whatever for more presentations. I think folks decided to quietly kick ban me after I started trolling peoples presentations mentioning that Mandrake does some things. I was pretty tired by this time, so I headed home in the snow!!! SNOW!!! Penguicon brought the snow!

Rewind the day 12 hrs, and I would have been just ariving at BW3s to watch the Pistons smoke the Sixers with schweeb, biokatt, syndicate, metalikop and Loraine. We ate wings, drank beer and a few of us even ate desert. I didn’t think BW3s would have a very good desert, but that chocolate fudge cake thing was awesome.

Penguicon /

Penguicon got started today. I’m at work, but since this is taking place in my neck of the world, I am trying to be somewhat involved in the event. (crashing it)

http://www.penguicon.org/

Ars is involved.

http://wiki.arslinux.com/ArsLinuxCon2005

My wife and I made the trek (40 miles, 45 minutes) to meet the Ars folks at BW3 Novi last night. It was cool to talk with StoneTable, greenfly, and everyone else. I didn’t get to talk much with the folks at the other end of the table.

My wife loved the Fujitsu P series laptop aka fujip. It really is amazing how small it is. I want his and hers.

I get to talk geek so rarely that it was good, much needed geek talk. Hopefully this is the beginning of a good weekend.

ipod tip

I don’t even own an ipod, but I found this information useful.


http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=93651

Putting iPod into Disk Mode
Learn how to manually put iPod into Disk Mode.

When troubleshooting an issue with your iPod, it’s sometimes helpful to manually put it into Disk Mode.

Putting iPod into Disk Mode

1. Plug the iPod Power Adapter into an electrical outlet and connect iPod to the power adapter.
2. Toggle the Hold switch on and off. (Set it to Hold, then turn it off again.)
3. Press and hold the Play/Pause and Menu buttons until the Apple/iPod logo appears, then release them. This resets iPod. When you reset iPod all your music and data files are saved, but some customized settings may be lost.
4. When the Apple logo appears, immediately press and hold the Previous and Next buttons until the Disk Mode screen appears. (For iPod Software 1.0 through 1.1, a FireWire logo appears on the screen.)
5. Disconnect iPod from the power adapter and connect it to your computer.

Putting iPod mini or iPod (Click Wheel) into Disk Mode

1. Plug the iPod Power Adapter into an electrical outlet and connect iPod to the power adapter.
2. Toggle the Hold switch on and off. (Set it to Hold, then turn it off again.)
3. Press and hold the Menu and Select buttons for at least 6 seconds until the Apple logo appears.
4. When the Apple logo appears, release the Menu and Select buttons and immediately press and hold the Select and the Play/Pause buttons until the Disk Mode screen appears.

5. Disconnect iPod from the power adapter and connect it to your computer.

If you are having difficulty putting the iPod mini or iPod (Click Wheel) into Disk Mode, set the iPod on a flat surface. Make sure that the finger pressing the Select button is not touching the click wheel. Also make sure that you are pressing the Play/Pause button toward the outside of the click wheel and not near the center.

If you are still unable to put iPod mini or iPod (Click Wheel) into Disk Mode, use one finger from one hand to press the Select button, and one finger from the other hand to press the Play/Pause button.

Reset iPod to get it out of Disk Mode.

Sorry to scoble.

hehe. I have coined a new proper noun into a verb:

scoble(v.) 1. To post like scoble. 2. To post links to others content without adding any value of your own.

So in my second scoble of today, I really like Thomas Vander Stichele’s post titled “foo” (poorly titled), specifically the “How not to do it” section.

This should be in the mind of anyone before they communicate with others.

This has been my last scoble of the day.