Dances with gnomes

Spam on comments

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 22:02:42 GMT

Due to the great amount of spam on this blog's comments and after a global clean up, I've decided to filter the comments before publishing them. This doesn't mean any kind of censorship on the comments' content, just a human-based spam filter.

I'm not very happy about this measure, but the lack of a proper captcha system to filter spam on comments in Livejournal leaves me no choice :-(

Always UTF-8

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 19:31:54 GMT

Today, fed up with having to convert all subtitle files from ISO-8859-15 to UTF-8, I've coded a simple bash script to do it for me. It can be downloaded from here (GPLv3 licensed).

It uses iconv to make the conversion. The input and output encodings aren't hard-typed, so if you need to make different encoding conversions, just change that values.

The Mystery of the Bewitched Crypt

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 23:29:48 GMT

Today, I finished reading "The Mystery of the Bewitched Crypt" by Eduardo Mendoza.

It is quite hilarious and I enjoyed it a lot. It is completely different from "The Truth about the Savolta Case", his previous (and first) book. I think I will read more books by Eduardo Mendoza as I enjoy a lot the way he writes.

How to compile the Logitech Quickcam Messenger driver for the Linux kernel 2.6.24

Wed, 19 Mar 2008 19:26:29 GMT

Finally, I got some spare time to play around with my Logitech Quickcam Messenger.

I had some problems compiling the driver for my Linux kernel 2.6.24, so I decided to write a quick HOWTO.

First of all, make sure you have a Logitech Quickcam Messenger or something similar. When I run lsusb, I got this:

ID 046d:08f6 Logitech, Inc.

You can find out which driver does your webcam need here.

Then, download the driver sources from here (more drivers can be found here).

Make sure you have the following modules compiled or include them as part of your kernel:

VIDEO_DEV

VIDEO_V4L1

VIDEO_V4L1_COMPAT

VIDEO_CAPTURE_DRIVERS

VIDEO_HELPERS_CHIPS_AUTO

V4L_USB_DRIVERS

I didn't install the USB_QUICKCAM_MESSENGER driver because it didn't work for my webcam (otherwise I wouldn't have written this HOWTO).

After that, download the 2.6.24 patch (Thanks, Gentoo guys!) and apply it:

patch -p0 < qc-usb-messenger-1.7-2.6.24.patch

Finally, enter the qc-usb-messenger-1.7 directory and run the following command: ./quickcam.sh

Follow all the instructions and you will have your brand new Logitech Quickcam Messenger driver running!

I hope this short HOWTO can help somebody with his webcam :-)

N810 on the way!

Wed, 30 Jan 2008 18:17:30 GMT

Just for one-liner lovers :-P

Happy new year!

Tue, 01 Jan 2008 16:26:04 GMT

First of all, I'd like to wish everybody a happy new year!

Today, I finished reading "A clockwork orange" (the 21-chapter version). IMHO, it's quite better than Kubrick's film, because the 21st chapter is important to understand the book properly

Lately, I've been learning a bit of Ruby, but I haven't had much time, so it's a "work in progress" activity. It looks promising and it has some nice features, so maybe I make up my mind to learn a bit of Ruby on Rails...

Back from San Sebastián

Mon, 19 Nov 2007 20:25:14 GMT

Last weekend I went to San Sebastián to attend a Gnome meeting there. Death Master, Alberto, Jesmar and Valentín came too and we had a pretty geek weekend (Thanks for all, Rachel!).

It was my first contact with the Spanish Gnome Community and the experience was quite exciting. At first, I was a bit lost, because I was almost the only one there without a laptop, but the talks about Gnome as a semantic desktop, GIT and GIO/GVFS were very interesting. On Sunday, I couldn't attend the morning talks because San Sebastian at night was enormous, but we went sightseeing (Photos not available, sorry) and enjoyed it a lot.

It's a pity I can't attend the HispaLinux Congress this year, but I hope I'll be at 5th Guadec in Madrid next year.

Some photos of the meeting can be found here (thanks to Alvaro del Castillo).

N810 maemo submission accepted

Fri, 09 Nov 2007 21:56:49 GMT

Congratulations! You have been accepted to the N810 maemo device
program. We will send your discount and instructions as soon as the
device is available in your selected shop (soon).

Test your GNU/Linux knowledge

Sat, 20 Oct 2007 14:03:02 GMT

Just for fun, take a test on GNU/Linux (Spanish).

N810 announced

Thu, 18 Oct 2007 17:39:37 GMT

Awesome!!!

Nokia, a developer's discount would be very nice of yours... :-)

Patch accepted

Tue, 02 Oct 2007 17:41:32 GMT

Today, the patch I wrote some months ago was accepted in Conduit 0.3.4:

From Conduit's 0.3.4 changelog:

2007-08-23 John Stowers <john.stowers@gmail.com>
* conduit/Hal.py: Add n800 detection to Hal. patch from Jaime
Frutos Morales

I'm glad to see that my work is not useless and that patches got merged eventually :-)

Many changes

Fri, 03 Aug 2007 17:48:40 GMT

Much time without blogging (since May, 18th). Many changes in my life left me no spare time to blog, so I'll try to sum them up:

University: I finished my degree in Computer Science Engineering ("Ingeniero en Informática" in Spanish). I got quite good marks, specially in the final project for my major about IPv6 deployment. I want to go on studying, so I'm starting a Master in advanced networking and multimedia contents on October at the UNED.

Work: I started working as a GNU/Linux sysadmin on July. I have already set up a Nagios monitoring system and I'm planning to do some clustering stuff at work.

WhyFLOSS conference (Madrid): I gave a lecture on IPv6 deployment both using a tunnel and a Dual stack approach. You can get the PDF file here (in Spanish)

Conduit: I've coded some patches [ 1 , 2 ] to add initial N800 sync support to Conduit. It just syncs N800's backup files, but support for music and video files is coming.

My first IPv6 talk

Fri, 18 May 2007 19:00:20 GMT

Today, we had a meeting with the University's Data Center staff.

First, I gave a talk about IPv6 and I showed them our plan about IPv6 deployment on the University's network. It was my first talk outside the faculty and it turned out to be better than I expected. Then, my friend Alberto showed them our simulation of the University's network using VNUML, a network simulation program based on User-Mode Linux.

They seemed quite interested in both the idea of IPv6 deployment and our simulation, so they asked us some interesting questions about them. As always, money and time are the main difficulties in this kind of deployments, so they told us that, before starting, they have to estimate how much money it would cost (due to the new hardware required) and how much money the University can afford to spend on it. They also tell us that this won't be done before Summer due to some priority projects.

Although these last two things could sound discouraging, they asked us some questions that we didn't expect to hear, like how far we had planned to go with our project, what were our next steps and whether we will be willing to explain them more advanced concepts about IPv6 and about our simulation and how to use it after the Summer. We agreed to keep in touch and see what comes next.

To sum up, I'm very happy with the result of the meeting :-D

IPv6 tunneling

Fri, 11 May 2007 21:26:34 GMT

Yesterday, I asked for an IPv6 tunnel to SixXS, an IPv6 tunnel broker.

They are very quick and efficient approving tunneling petitions, so today my tunnel was accepted and I could use it to test some IPv6 services. They have a program called AICCU that configures the tunnel automatically (it just needs the username and password).

So far, the connection has been excellent, so I recommend you this tunnel broker for your IPv6 experience.

Writing, writing

Sun, 06 May 2007 20:16:21 GMT

I've already started writing the report of the Final Project for my major.

I've almost complete the IPv6 theory chapter and I'll soon start writing the chapter about my University's network case study.

In two weeks time, we'll have a meeting with my University's Data Center to show them our work and our plans for IPv6 deployment on the University's network.

Let's see whether they are interested or not...

Back to the daily routine

Tue, 10 Apr 2007 20:08:44 GMT

I'm back from my Easter holidays. I spent a wonderful week in Santiago de Compostela and I took a break which I needed indeed.

Today I've returned to the daily routine (study, programming practicals and start writing the report for the final project for my major). I look forward to finishing my degree...

N800 flashed

Mon, 26 Mar 2007 17:27:05 GMT

I had some trouble with my N800, so today I decided to flash it. In 10 minutes I downloaded the flasher and the new firmware. Following the instructions to flash my N800 in Linux, it just took a couple of minutes to flash the device.

It seems that the new firmware has solved my problems, so I'm very happy with the easy flashing process and its results ;-)

Simulated mail server

Wed, 14 Mar 2007 00:49:11 GMT

Today, I finished configuring both a SMTP server with Postfix and a POP3 server with Courier for a network simulation.

I had some problems with authentication, mainly using Courier, but finally I managed to solve them. Although it wasn't a trivial task, it wasn't as difficult as I had expected.

I just have to configure a simple firewall using IPtables to finish the basic dual IPv4/IPv6 network simulation.

I would like to thank my friend Maño for his Apache configuration file and his answers to my IPtables questions about HTTP and HTTPS filtering.

C# and Mono

Mon, 12 Mar 2007 19:25:56 GMT

I was curious to know what the Mono project is all about, so yesterday I read the basic documentation they have on their web. I found it interesting, so today I started reading this book:

It's a bit old (2003) for the current state of Mono, but it's quite good. I will have to code some programs for my concurrent programming subject in several programming languages, so after C and Java, I will try C# using Mono and test its compatibility with the Windows .NET framework. Let's see what happens...

What to do after the degree

Sat, 10 Mar 2007 21:07:10 GMT

I've been talking this week with one of my lecturers about what to do after I finish my degree in Computer Science Engineering (I don't know whether this is the right name for my degree in English, in Spanish it is called "Ingeniero en Informática"). He has advised me to do the PhD, but only if I want to stay at the faculty as a teacher, because in Spain the PhD is not appreciated outside the university.

So, the problem is that I don't know yet whether I want to stay at the faculty as a teacher or not. I been thinking about working for a year or two in a Free Software firm and decide then. Meanwhile, I could improve my English a bit and my German, which I have neglected more than I should.

Any advice or suggestion will be welcomed. Thanks in advance :-)

Hacker culture

Mon, 05 Mar 2007 22:49:01 GMT

Although it can sound weird (not for me, but for the rest of my classmates), a seminar about hacker culture, free software, software patents and related topics has started at the faculty.

In the first classes, we've been talking about hacker culture and we were told to read the article "How to become a hacker" by Eric S. Raymond. I had already read it, but it was funny to read it again, specially if you are told to read it at the faculty!

I hope this seminar will continue with the same approach, because I love this kind of topics and the way they are discussed so far.

UPnP plugin for Rhythmbox

Wed, 21 Feb 2007 01:11:04 GMT

Lately, I've been listening to MP3 files via UPnP on my N800. Unfortunately, I have to run an UPnP media server on my PC, choose the music directories to share and wait for the files to be loaded into the UPnP shared library (this takes a long time if you have many days of music stored in your HD).

Although there are good media servers out there (Ushare, Gmediaserver, Fuppes, etc), I don't want to use them for this task, because I already have my music library created inside Rhythmbox. Because of that, I've started coding an UPnP plugin for Rhythmbox based on libupnp.

It will be similar to the DAAP plugin, but using UPnP Protocol instead. I've already done the "create media server" and "destroy media server" part, but it doesn't share any music yet.

I hope that starting so many projects recently doesn't mean that they will be left unfinished... Let's see.

Porting isn't trivial

Tue, 13 Feb 2007 21:26:19 GMT

I have been trying to port Gossip to the Maemo platform, but maybe this port will have to wait until Gtk 2.10 and Glib 2.12 are ported to the Maemo platform because Gossip has hard dependencies on these two libraries.

Loudmouth (Jabber library used by Gossip) is already ported to Maemo and porting libgossip is trivial, but the rest of code can't be ported without an almost rewrite of the code so, for now, I'll wait and see what happens with the GTK 2.10 and Glib 2.12 porting.

On the other hand, I've made some progress with Arousa, although I haven't publish any code yet. I've been thinking about using a pickle implementation or a SQLite one, but finally I've decided to use the SQLite implementation because gtk.Treeview can't be pickled directly and because the SQLite implementation allows to view and query Arosa's dictionaries from outside of Arousa.

Just one word to describe the Nokia N800: Amazing!

Sat, 03 Feb 2007 16:12:30 GMT

I'm amazed with my brand new Nokia N800. I haven't tested much its connectivity and the web browser because there are no wireless connections where I am now, but the other of things work fine for me :-D

I've just applied for a project page in garage.maemo.org to host my Maemo port of Gossip.

I've also started a python "foreign vocabulary studying tool" for Maemo. Well, it's not a completely new application because I wrote most of it during last summer. I'm porting it to Maemo and adding more features because it isn't finished. I hope I can publish a first release by the end of this month.

Setting up maemo SDK

Wed, 31 Jan 2007 00:20:06 GMT

After many attemps, finally I achieved to set up the maemo SDK. It wasn't easy because my Linux runs on an AMD64 and scratchbox (The cross-compilation toolkit used by maemo) doesn't support x86_64 architecture, so I had to create a chrooted x86 environment to install scratchbox. I follow the instructions of this HOWTO and Nokia's instructions and it works fine.

Mandatory screenshot of maemo SDK using ARM emulation: