An Open World

Finally Purchased a Domain

Michael Pobega — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 05:24:05 +0000

So, I finally got around to purchasing a domain and now I’m trying to move everything over, including my own personal website. From now on I’ll be updating here instead of at wordpress.com

My new blog is located at http://fuzzydev.org/~pobega

Developing a Python WordPress library

Michael Pobega — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 17:38:44 +0000

As an introduction to programming I decided to divulge into a full-fledged project, instead of working on smaller programs. Considering the lack of a good Python WordPress library I decided to combine the features of two separate programs (Vimpress [http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1953] and a WordPresslib [http://www.blackbirdblog.it/programmazione/progetti/28]) and XML-RPC to create a full-scale WordPress-compatible library and client for Python.
Currently I’m converting these two functional (by that I mean function based as opposed to object oriented) libraries to one complete objective library. I’m still at the beginning steps, defining classes and functions, but it’s functional to the point of being able to post! (see previous blog entry)

Eee-Control and snd_hda_intel Troubles

Michael Pobega — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 14:03:57 +0000

Ever since I bought my Eee PC 901 I’ve been trying to find a way to manually control the fan; all of the tools that worked on my Celeron-powered 900 don’t work at all on my Atom-powered 901.
After a bit of Googling I found a program called Eee-Control, which claimed that it could control the Atom’s clock and fan speed. After trying and disliking the software I removed it from my system, but then I noticed a weird problem with my speakers — they kept popping every time I initialized the sound! So after recompiling the drivers and my kernel (and completely borking 2.6.28.2) I found that the problem was a silly script that EeeControl put in /etc/modprobe.d/ setting snd_hda_intel’s power_save parameter to 1.
According to modinfo, parm: power_save:Automatic power-saving timeout (in second, 0 = disable). (int), so the script was turning off my speakers after one second of inactivity. I can only assume that the upstream author thought it was a boolean argument.
Anyway, I contacted upstream and hope to have it fixed … Even a value of 30 would be better.

Introduction; the World’s First Fully Open Netbook

Michael Pobega — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 13:49:41 +0000

The netbook market has become watered down with so many competitors trying to cash in on the new craze, including but not limited to netbooks from companies such as Asus, Acer, Dell, MSI Wind, and Sony. Finally though, one company has decided to release a fully open netbook for those of us who love open stuff. Lemote’s 8.9 inch YeeLoong netbook doesn’t look fantastic by any means, and it sports a processor barely half as powerful as it’s competitors, but it’s definitely a step in the right direction.

The information given on Lemote’s site is very limited, but from what I can tell the YeeLong netbook won’t sport internal wireless or an internal webcam or any of that jazz (though they do offer a USB wifi “extension”, whatever that means), but it will have a competitive price. If the price is cheap enough perhaps I’ll buy one just to support open hardware

Tunneling a connection through SSH

Michael Pobega — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 19:23:04 +0000

So I finally arrived at school, only to find that my college has decided to block IRC on the campus wifi. Weirdly enough, they allow AIM/MSN/Jabber/Skype/Ekiga/etc traffic, but not IRC. According to the IT department “IRC is commonly used to spread viruses”. I’m not sure how valid that is, but it didn’t stop me from trying to connect to my usual IRC networks.

Luckily all they did was block the common (6000~7000) IRC ports, which meant that I could still get on any networks that offered alternate ports. But for those odd servers that don’t offer any ports outside of the 6000~7000 range, there is another way to get around this block using an SSH tunnel and a program called tsocks, a program made to simplify the use of a SOCKS proxy connection. After installing tsocks find tsocks.conf and make sure everything else is commented out but:

server = 127.0.0.1
# Server type defaults to 4 so we need to specify it as 5 for this one
server_type = 5
# The port defaults to 1080 but I’ve stated it here for clarity
server_port = 1025

Now when you connect to your SSH server, you use the -D flag followed by the port in your tsocks.conf. For example, if you were using my configuration you would run ssh -D 1025 servername

Another use for this is to achieve wired connection speeds with a wireless connection – you can tunnel wget through tsocks and increase your download speed (considering your SSH server is on the local network)

Have fun and happy chatting!

Fleeting thoughts

Michael Pobega — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 02:22:50 +0000

I’m glad to finally be leaving for school. Spending my life on this island has been such a drag; not that there isn’t anything to do, because I assure you, there is — but because I’ve grown tired of seeing the same people day in and day out. It’s the same people, the same teachers, the same restaurants, the same drama (that isn’t to say that I enjoy drama, because I don’t), and it’s become repetitive.

Hopefully the new start at SUNY IT will work out. I just need a new environment.

Finally upgraded my Eee PC 900 – Eee PC 901

Michael Pobega — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 23:08:56 +0000

I finally got the chance to buy a new Eee PC before leaving for college (to be exact, it arrived six days before I leave) and it’s great. Besides the processor being more powerful, I get three to five hours of battery life and my operating system is extremely responsive.

The video card is also an upgraded Intel card (though it doesn’t make that much of a difference, really) which helps a small bit when it comes to gaming.

The best part of the Eee 901 is the improved build quality; the hardware feels a lot nicer and less prone to breakage, which I experienced pretty often with my Eee PC 900.

New Kernel (2.6.27.9) Upgrade on my Eee

Michael Pobega — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 21:32:30 +0000

So I upgraded my kernel from my very outdated 2.6.25-* kernel to 2.6.27.9, and I have to say I’m impressed.

I ditched my old MadWiFi drivers (contrib) for fully free and open source ath5k modules (built right into the kernel!), as well as having my ethernet built in (non-modular) and an improvement in boot time (under 2 seconds, but still)

I’ll be posting up a .deb and .config when I get around to it, I need to fix a little bit more (the webcam doesn’t work out of the box, I’m probably going to need to compile that into the kernel too).

All Hail Vimpress!

Michael Pobega — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 23:08:58 +0000

For the last week I’ve been using Drivel — a GNOME application for blogging from your desktop. The problem with using Drivel for a WordPress blog is that it doesn’t support multiple categories or even tags! Luckily, I’ve found a nice alternative that integrated with my favorite text editor; Vimpress!

Vimpress supports categories and tags, as well as the ability to edit previous posts. My only quarry with Vim is that it doesn’t allow the deletion of older entries, for which I’m still forced to login to my WordPress dashboard to do. The commands for Vimpress are:

:BlogNew
Creates a new blog entry.
:BlogList
Lists all previous entries. Press enter while your cursor is on one to edit it
:BlogSend
Send your new entry or edit to WordPress

Just a tip; Don’t touch the StrID ever. WordPress will automatically assign you one when you send a new entry, so don’t worry yourself about it. Have fun, and happy blogging!

Wget and Post Data

Michael Pobega — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 21:41:48 +0000

I had an idea for a script to automatically log me in to Advance Wars by Web and grab the number of games which it is my turn in, but Wget seems to have a lot of trouble with post-data and cookies while accessing pages. Currently, this is how my script looks:

#! /bin/sh
# Script for grabbing “Your Turn Games” from AWBW (http://awbw.amarriner.com)
# Written and maintained by Michael Pobega
# Special thanks to the GNU Wget manpage for help with cookie sessions

wget –keep-session-cookies –save-cookies cookies.txt –post-data ‘username=pobega&password=PASSWORD’ –keep-session-cookies http://awbw.amarriner.com/login.php

wget –load-cookies cookies.txt

http://awbw.amarriner.com/yourturn.php

Every time I’d login to the page, the downloaded yourturn.php would complain that I was not logged in. I’m going to mess around with this script a little more and hopefully find the problem.

Edit: Nevermind, I found the problem. I guess I’m a bit blind, but it’s right in the wget(1) manpage:

If the server is using session cookies to track user authentication, the above will not work because –save-cookies will not save them (and neither will browsers) and the cookies.txt file will be empty. In that case use –keep-session-cookies along with –save-cookies to force saving of session cookies.