Professional Geekism

I’m actually unbelievably shocked. Uncontrollable, crazy laughter gripped the inner space of my mind when I was faced with the news that Microsoft are planning to support Firefox 3.x and Safari 3 from the Exchange 2010 ‘Outlook Web Access’ web page.

Further still, they’re touting the fact that the OWA now has all of the features the regular Outlook desktop does!

Does this not strike anyone else as a move that would make Windows (and Office, particularly since itself and OpenOffice will by then both have full ODF compatibility) completely obsolete? Why would you pay for a Windows 7 site license, when you can upgrade your Exchange server to 2010, replace all of the Windows machines with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, Firefox 3.1 and OpenOffice, and save your company thousands of pounds?

On top of this, they’ve supposedly tuned 2010 to be ‘less bursty’ in the way that it accesses the disk, as well as adding JBOD concatenation support. Does anyone else see that as ‘Please virtualise your Exchange servers’? Yep, so did I.

I suppose you could be running HyperV, but with Microsoft supporting iterations of Windows Server under RedHat Xen virtulisation, I really don’t see how they’re going to convince people to pay for their the majority of their bread-and-butter products, once Exchange 2010 débuts.

What’s next? Windows 7 released under the Microsoft Public License? Perhaps they’ll just call it ‘Windows Azure Client’ when they give it away for free…

I’ve had a re-occurring issue with pidgin randomly screwing with my CPU usage; actually maxing out a single core for no apparent reason and/or crashing thereafter. In actual fact, I think I can even attribute a few recent gnome-panel crashes to this behaviour, as well.

Today I’ve been informed (by my darling girlfriend) that her buddy icon was out of date: she’d changed it a while back, yet my client was appeared to be stubbornly displaying the old icon, even weeks later. As I couldn’t find a method for forcing the buddy icon to update within the program itself, I navigated to ~/.purple/icons (finding approximately 1,660 cached icons!) and deleted the lot.

Since restarting pidgin it’s taken a while for the buddy icons to repopulate for some reason, but after a few tests, it does appear that they’re updating properly when changed by the other party. As a side effect, I believe I’ve found (and fixed) the cause of pidgin’s leak/loop/error! Hopefully someone else will find my serendipitous bug-squashing useful.

I may even launch a bug report, given that I couldn’t find one. Now all I need is time to do so…

Oddly enough, only a day after my post concerning some odd differences between two Ubuntu Flash 10 packages, I received an e-mail from the Ubuntu mailing list to tell me that the next hug (bug) day is actually centred around flashplayer-nonfree!

Quoting the e-mail for any of you not on the list:

Fellow Ubuntu Triagers!

This week's HugDay target is *drum roll please* flashplugin-nonfree!
* 78 New bugs need a hug
* 53 Incomplete bugs need a status check
* 35 Confirmed bugs need a review

Bookmark it, add it to your calendars, turn over those egg-timers!
* 5th of March, 2009
* http://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuBugDay/20090305

Can't stress it enough: everyone can help!

Have some time? Triage boogz! I won't be upset if you get a headstart~
Have a blog? Blog about Hugday!
Have some screen space? Open #ubuntu-bugs and keep an eye out for
newcomers in need.
Have minions? Teach THEM to triage for you!

Wanna be famous? Is easy! remember to use 5-A-day so if you do a good
work your name could be listed at the top 5-A-Day Contributors in the
Ubuntu Hall of Fame page!

Make a difference; we will be in #ubuntu-bugs (FreeNode) all day and
night, and will be ready to answer your questions about how to help.

If you're new to all this, head to
http://wiki.ubuntu.com/HelpingWithBugs

Have a nice day,
Martin Mai
[From the BugSquad]

That’s quite a lot of bugs. Hopefully the Ubuntu ‘Jaunty Jackalope’ 9.04 release will iron these issues out.

Bizarrely, I’ve noticed that the Canonical-supplied Adobe Flash 10 plugin isn’t working as well as the Adobe-supplied version.

You could regard this as a possibly moronic statement at first, but there’s a little evidence to back it up. Firstly, I’ve been using the ‘adobe-flashplugin’ package provided via the Canonical Partner repository for some time. I think it works a heck of a lot better than Flash 9, and I’ve been much happier with the experience. That isn’t to say that it’s perfect, but at least Firefox doesn’t crash with every 3rd/4th Youtube video I play.

By standard of course, the Canonical Partner repository is disabled within a fresh Ubuntu installation. So when my girlfriend mentioned that the videos on Llewtube.com weren’t displaying, I wasn’t surprised to find that she was using the latest version of the ‘flashplugin-nonfree’ package:

sudo dpkg -l | grep flash
ii flashplugin-nonfree 10.0.22.87ubuntu1~intrepid1 Adobe Flash Player plugin installer

Given that I could view the videos on the aforementioned website without a single issue, I went to check my plugin version:

ii adobe-flashplugin 10.0.22.87-2intrepid1 Adobe Flash Player plugin version 10

So we’re supposedly using the same version of the Flash plugin, but from different packages. Would anyone like to explain why one package works and the other does not?

Getting around the problem was a simple task for her: simply enable the Partner repository by navigating to the Software Sources configuration utility (via System -> Administration -> Software Sources) and (after giving your password) checking the two ‘partner’ lines under the Third Party tab. If you don’t have them, you can add them (one at a time) with these two lines:

deb http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu intrepid partner
deb-src http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu intrepid partner

(If you’re reading this, and you’ve not yet upgraded to Ubuntu 8.10; the bulk of this guide should work with 8.04 also. You will, however, need to swap out ‘intrepid’ for ‘hardy’! :))

When you’ve enabled the partner repositories (check the boxes) it’s a matter of closing Software Sources and letting it reload the package sources when prompted. After that, simply open a terminal and paste in the following:

sudo apt-get remove --purge flashplugin-nonfree && sudo apt-get install adobe-flashplugin

If you restart Firefox, you should now be sorted. If in doubt, search in Synaptic (System -> Administration -> Synaptic) for ‘Flash’ and see what is (or isn’t) installed.

I’ve just had to setup Windows on a physical machine (shudder) to control and monitor the IOMeter disk benchmarks that are needed for my final year project. I didn’t try to run it in Wine, but I suppose I should’ve. Needless to say, I do require it to be perfect in order to maintain the fairness of my testing, so Windows was unfortunately my first choice.

Due to the age of the hardware I had lying around; an old Athlon XP-M system with an Abit NF7-S 2.0 and 512MB of ‘borrowed’ memory (thanks Ian), it was safe to say that it wouldn’t be any good installing Vista on it. Therefore I downloaded and burnt an XP ISO from my MSDN account and set about installing XP to the 200GB SATA drive I had (thanks Neillans, actually!)

The Abit NF7-S range of boards (particularly the V2.0) were highly-regarded during their hay-day: a testament to Abit’s awesome legacy. Not least for their inclusion of SATA ports way back in 2002, when Serial ATA was a relatively new feature on desktop boards. It even included basic RAID functions across the twin ports, courtesy of the Sil3112r chipset, which is still sold today if you look hard enough. When this was my main motherboard I actually ran a pair of 36GB WD Raptors in RAID-0 (scarily the same pair I use as my root drive now! I’m poor, OK?) and everything worked extremely well.. I never had a single problem with it.

But fast-forward to installing XP onto a SATA single disk, and I was stumped for a little while. Aside from the faff in convincing my floppy drive to work with the board (I’d previously disabled it via three, separate options in the BIOS — nightmare) I then had XP’s installation looping continuously, instead of booting from the HDD to continue with the second phase of the installation. It was almost as if XP was failing to write NTLDR into the MBR, somehow.

Now by convention on modern motherboards, SATA ports can typically be set to three modes: RAID, AHCI, and IDE. The latter of which is used purely for compatibility with older operating systems. However, the ‘RAID’ mode typically prevents that particular disk from being presented as a possible boot disk by marking it for use within RAID arrays only. It’s all fairly self-explanatory, however.

However, within the NF7-S’s BIOS, there are no such options. You can either enable/disable the SATA chipset, and optionally enable/disable the ‘SATA RAID ROM’, which you would believe would be only required if creating RAID arrays. I didn’t wish to use the RAID features and therefore I didn’t intend on ear-marking the disk as a RAID disk, as I wanted to boot from it. Sounds sensible, right?

Sadly, unless this ROM option is actually enabled, regardless of whether or not I wished to use any of the RAID features; the disks will not be presented as boot disks. Quite why there is even an option in the first place is beyond me! Because of this, the XP installation CD was failing to find a suitable boot disk and was therefore intent on looping endlessly through the first phase of the installation process. Fun times…

It has since occurred to me just how far SATA adoption and usability has actually come in the last 5-6 years. With most chipsets now natively including anything from two to eight AHCI SATA ports, as well as incorporating much better integration into the BIOS menus. Similarly, with natively AHCI-aware operating systems such as Linux, Solaris (and friends), many BSDs, Vista (and Windows 7!) now becoming largely common-place, there are few reasons for any of the IDE-compatibility options any longer.

That is, unless you’ve only got a single-core processor, 512MB of memory and an old, awkward (but great) motherboard. I just wish the IOMeter devs would consider creating a GTK+/QT4 front-end for dynamo!

I’ve been running a m0n0wall router for some time now. The build and design of the machine was meant to be documented on the ‘RoutITX’ page of this blog, but I’d never gotten around to finishing it off. I may do this now that I have more time, but I’m not promising anything…

Even so, due to the impressive compatibility of the Sony Ericsson K800i and Linux, and the subsequent lack of the same DHCP/CDC USB Ethernet adapter functionality in the K850i, I thought it’d be quite cool to see if the K800i could be configured as a back-up WAN interface within m0n0wall.

So I fish my K800i (now retired, although I wish it wasn’t) out of its resting place, find a USB cable, and plug it into the back of the m0n0wall machine. No new interface appeared on the ‘assign interfaces’ page, so I restarted it. Still no new interfaces. Upon checking the kernel messages in the log, I found these lines pertaining to the CDC USB Ethernet device:

Jan 4 20:28:06 kernel: device_attach: cdce0 attach returned 6
Jan 4 20:28:06 kernel: cdce0: could not find data bulk in
Jan 4 20:28:06 kernel: cdce0: Sony Ericsson Sony Ericsson K800, rev 2.00/0.00, addr 2

Which, as a Linux geek, confused me somewhat. Google turned up a number of results for ‘cdce0′ problems or ‘attach returned 6′ regarding various other drivers, but only one really addressed the issue in particular, albeit for a much older SE phone. You’ll notice that there haven’t been any replies, either.

A former colleague pointed me in the direction of a patch that was submitted around October 2008 which enables the proper handling of the CDC USB device within the Nokia N80. Hopefully it should help, but it may be some time before the patch filters down to m0n0wall.

This is just one of those times when I wish I’d followed the world of software development a little more.

My domain’s been around quite some time.. Not exactly like this in its current guise, but I’ve had the domain for a number of years now. As a result, I’ve also often become quite frustrated by finding my own ramblings/moans/whinges on Google’s listings, in the search for solutions.

So here’s an experiment. A phrase that I know yields no results on Google (as of this posting date):

Rachel Jennison Harper.

I’ll update when Google does..

Edit: Google has now updated! In no more than 19 hours, too.

In addition to this, I appaer to have made a mini celebrity out of Miss Harper. Given the continued existence of this blog (and the long-standing back-up of Google’s search listings) she won’t be forgotten any time soon!

For those of you who don’t follow XKCD, you really are missing out. It’s just genius, and today’s comic really did tickle me.. (Click for a larger image!)

This really is a true story, and she doesn’t know I put it in my comic because her wifi hasn’t worked for weeks.

Well, I laughed at least. And it reminds me of a famous euphemism, too..

Nick: “Jon, why have you locked your door?”
Jon: “I’m re-compiling my kernel!“

I absolutely adored my Sony Ericsson K800i. What a phone; everyone’s had one or used one at some point. Given that they’re quite long in the tooth now, you’d be hard-pushed to have not come across someone that had/has one.

So when the K850i came out, I was quite eager to get my upgrade. And so far there’s been only one real drawback to it, that I’ve found: using it as a modem.

When I first moved into my current abode, I didn’t have any ADSL for a few weeks. Predictably one can steal some wireless broadband, or one can attempt to use some form of mobile broadband. Before signing my life away for a few months, I decided to test my phone (which at the time, was the K800i) with Ubuntu. To my sheer delight, the phone presents itself as a USB Ethernet adapter, and Ubuntu’s network-manager simply sent a DHCP request and received an ACK. No messing about here: I had 3G broadband within 5 seconds of plugging the USB cable in!

So obviously when I attempted the same trick with my K850i, I was really quite dismayed to find that you can’t do this any longer. The USB Ethernet device is there (grep -i CDC /var/log/messages) but for the life of me, I cannot find a way to obtain a DHCP lease via the usb0 interface.

Yes, it works perfectly (and with HSDPA speeds, thanks to my city-centre location) if you use wvdial or one of its GUI front-ends (gnome-ppp worked well) and I’ve been able to connect like this..

But I can’t understand why the Sony Ericsson engineers would want to remove such a simple mechanism in favour of the greatest faff-about in history. I’d be interested to hear from anyone that’s managed to get this working.. Although I fear by the time I get an answer, I’ll be back on some ADSL goodness: HSPDA is alright in a pinch, but T-Mobile UK’s data network seems so heavily sensitive to peak times (I suspect insane levels of contention) and the latency is atrocious. Half a second? Ugh. That’ll be the Deep Packet Inspection they do…

Many people already know that I dabble with Asterisk on a daily basis. Our Linux distribution of choice here at work, also happens to be Gentoo.

Now, when updating Gentoo’s ‘world’ package base, you do get some problems occassionally. This is a downside to being ‘on the cutting edge’ and, it’s obviously no wonder why distributions such-as Ubuntu, Red Hat and SuSe, stick to well-tested release schedules.

Recently, after a well over-due profile update (from 2006.0 to 2008.0) and the following emerge -av –newuse –deep world command, Asterisk simply stopped working. No warning, and it took a while for me to notice.

Once I had noticed, it became apparent that something was really quite awry. Asterisk wouldn’t start via the init script (with has a seemingly immortal, and hideously annoying process), nor via just calling the executable. I eventually realised, with the help of this bug report and the /var/log/asterisk/full logfile, that Asterisk was failing to find the speex modules it required.

Long story short, as per the bug report, you need to downgrade (and mask for good measure) speex to 1.1.12 to retain functionality on anything older than a January/Febuary release of Asterisk 1.4.x.

The fact that Portage still only has Asterisk 1.2.x, means that unless you switch to using the voip overlay, you’re going to find this issue will affect you.

Oh Gentoo, how I love and hate you!