f-log

I have placed my order for to blanks and clear over at the GWINARMY, join the army !!

My gentoo rage has been quelled, it seems the oggvorbis tag in /etc/make.conf I had has been changed to just vorbis.
Yep, just updated it and test reinstalling MPD and now has vorbis support, not sure what anyone who has never heard that vorbis is ogg will think ...
Still going to moan over at the MPD forums !

MPD is great (for me). I setup the server, added all my music (see notes) and set it to play forever.
There is no GUI by default so I installed the command line MPC. If you want a nice GUI, lots of people are writing them. I even considered writing one myself (still might), as all that is required is the user interface, all the music decoding and playing are handled by the server.
I have about 1000 .MP3 files and around 3000 .OGG music files, adding the .MP3 files was easy

ln -s /my/folder/for/music/mp3 /var/lib/mpd/music/mp3
mpc ls mp3 | mpc add

but adding the .OGG files did nothing no error, no message, just no files showing up in the play queue.
Turns out that OGG VORBIS was not selected at compile time and rebuilding MPD linking to libvorbis fixed that.

USE="vorbis" emerge -v media-sound/mpd

If only I had gotten an error or even if the issue had been logged in the MPD log/error log files I could have resolved this sooner.
As it was I happened across someone having a simular issue defined by running

mpd --version

Which reports the formats supported.

mpd (MPD: Music Player Daemon) 0.12.1

Copyright (C) 2003-2006 Warren Dukes <warren.dukes@gmail.com>
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions. There is NO
warranty; not even MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

Supported formats:
mp3 mp2 ogg amf dsm far gdm imf it med mod mtm s3m stm stx ult uni xm

Supported outputs:
alsa oss

I will now check why gentoo did not build MPD with vorbis support and complain and moan at MPD for lack of errors !!

I was pretty annoyed when gentoo org/news/en/gwn/20061030-newsletter.xml" gentoo pulled xmms, but after reading the many irate posts I did come to realise it was the right thing to do.
Xmms sound player was the first program I installed after setting up my desktop and it has been stable and present though out my gentoo ing, but this has now given me the opportunity to try MPD a more linux orientated app, being server/client based, should be fun.

If I am lucky I get to check my email once every couple of days, so it should come as no supprise that it took me almost two weeks to match this DVD.
"Pom Poko" is the rather bizarre story of a tribe of raccons that are bing forced out of their forest by Tokyo developments and how they try and fight back with ancient transfoming magic. As with other "Studio Ghibli" films this is a bit more adult than the description on the back, with some of the raccons wanting to kill rather than scray the humans. Also you see a raccon get run over in detail and all the male raccons wonder about sporting large testicles.
Still it is classic "Studio Ghibli" so expect more depth than Disney running at 114 mins, good but not great.

If you have Java installed then checkout this very impressive ripple tank applet http://www.falstad.com/ripple/index.html
In other news I swa my first wii advert on TV today (well it was recorded from last night) on rapture.tv
Should the wii logo followed by a fading in wiimote with a voice over saying "what could this be" (or words to that effect).

What does this little lot do ?
name=`cat $1 | sed -e 's/<\//\n<\//gi'| grep -A 18 -B 2 /l.gif | sed -e 's/.*nbsp;//' -e 's/.*balls\///' -e 's/\.gif.*//' | grep -v "<" | head -n1`
echo "These results from $1 will be saved in results\${$name}.dat"
cat $1 | sed -e 's/<\//\n<\//gi'| grep -A 18 -B 2 /l.gif | sed -e 's/.*nbsp;//' -e 's/.*balls\///' -e 's/\.gif.*//' | grep -v "<" > results/$name.dat

Well after downloading some pages from a 'site' I wanted to recover some numeric data, but the why the page is laid out that is not easy.
First off the first line is much like the third, 'sed' is the stream editor and grep finds things, sooo...

cat $1 |

prints the contents of the first argument to my script and pipes it through to the next command rather than displaying it on the screen.

sed -e 's/<\//\n<\//gi' |

Takes the file data one line at a time and finds a < sign that is immediately followed by a / (slashes have to be escaped with another \) and replaces it with a line break (\n) and </, at every location (g) ignoring case (i).
This breaks up the blocks of code so almost every new tag is on its own line and the pipes (|) this to the next command.

grep -A 18 -B 2 /l.gif |

Returns only the 2 lines before (-B) and 18 lines after (-A) it finds a line containing /l.gif which is the header in the page, again results are piped to the next command.

sed -e 's/.*nbsp;//' -e 's/.*balls\///' -e 's/\.gif.*//'

This time we use the stream editor (sed) to process 3 expressions (-e) before piping the results onto the next command.
The first one replaces any number of characters (.*) that are followed by  , then any number of characters followed by "balls/", then any thing starting with .gif followed by any number of characters (the . is escaped (\.))
The information was held in the form of gif images with the data as the name, that little lot whittled down all the code either side of the data just leaving me with data itself.

grep -v "<" > results/$name.dat

Finally grep is used with (-v) to return any lines not matching "<" the results redirected into the $name file name which was the first result of all this and recovered in line one.
phew.

What does this little lot do ?
name=`cat $1 | sed -e 's/<\//\n<\//gi'| grep -A 18 -B 2 /l.gif | sed -e 's/.*nbsp;//' -e 's/.*balls\///' -e 's/\.gif.*//' | grep -v "<" | head -n1`
echo "These results from $1 will be saved in results\${$name}.dat"
cat $1 | sed -e 's/<\//\n<\//gi'| grep -A 18 -B 2 /l.gif | sed -e 's/.*nbsp;//' -e 's/.*balls\///' -e 's/\.gif.*//' | grep -v "<" > results/$name.dat


One thing I hate at work is waiting for something that has an unknown life span, to finish.
The task may take a few minutes, but it is never long enough to start another task.
I rediscovered QEMU again the other day and set about installing Damn Small linux DSL) as my guest OS within windows XP.
You can get QEMU for windows here and the latest DSL cd image from here
You can then just run QEMU booting from the image as if it was a CD, but I wanted a hard disk image that I could install DSL to.
To boot with just the CD image use
qemu.exe -L . -cdrom cdromimage.iso -m 256 -boot d
and to build a hard disk image and then boot it use

qemu-img.exe create -f qcow hda.img 3G
qemu.exe -L . -hda hda.img -m 256
but a new hard disk image is unbootable to I did both
qemu.exe -L . -cdrom cdromimage.iso -hda hda.img -m 256 -boot d
and then installed DSL on to the hard disk image.
I found that I wanted the linux window to be small so I ran DSL with
fb800x600
or
fb800x600 2
to go straight to the console without loading X windows.
When asked about your mouse type, say PS2 even if its USB and do not expect ping to work, though firefox connected to the internet fine (once I had setup the proxy settings).
Then once everything is setup you can use the QEMU monitor via CTRL+ALT+2 and save the virtual machine and then restore later, no need to wait for it to boot up ever again.
Most of the documentation is oriented towards running window inside linux but there are links to pages with more linux in windows information.

The LUG asked me to do talk on the http://www.lpi.org exam I had taken. I warned them I would not have mush time to prepare (with Alex etc) but it went really well, at least two members actively taking print outs and looking at seriously trying to take the exam.

While looking after Alex I have been watching most of the second series of http://www.hak5.org on the laptop and its better than (some) tv !!
They do stuff like add LEDs to mice, show you how to install linux doom on an Ipod and how hacking tools work. Each episode is about 50mins and has loads of content, I just wonder how much of my monthly bandwidth its eaten up !

I get to play a few minutes of Burnout 3 every day and I have unlocked all 173 events available in the game and I have got GOLD on 164, only 9 more to go.