Monthly Archives: September 2006

Sound Volume

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I like listening to music while I work. I also like notification sounds – such as gaim chiming when messages are received (so I look at them) and such things.

I use an iMic USB audio dongle to output sound to my headphones (partly because the connector on my laptop is a bit dodgy now) and I’ve detailed in the past how support for hotplugging of audio devices leaves a lot to be desired (it’s worse than it used to be sadly – I used to just be able to run esd against sound device and all was hunky dory).

What currently gets me is that music can be an adequate volume and then WHAM this loud gaim notification comes through.

Setting gaim to be softer and music to be louder isn’t immediately obvious and is easy to get wrong. It’d be great if the Volume Control applet could tweak it all from one place (and there was a way to change what the drop down volume applet controlled).

Doctor != Hacker

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Thoughts on manadotry registration of IT professionals.

Having the argument for this and comparing to “we have it for doctors” doesn’t fly. If you start playing doctor on random people, you can kill them.

Writing code and whacking it up on the net can in no way directly cause harm to someone the same way as DIY heart surgery could.

Anybody who goes and grabs random code out in the wild and runs a system on it on which human life depends gets everything they deserve. They’re the bad guys here – not those writing and sharing code.

So how do you make sure this person constructing a system on which life depends is competant? The same way you do for everybody you hire – check their resume, talk to them, have appropriate checks and balances in place.

Just because somebody has a sheet of paper means nothing about their actual ability. Remember those crappy teachers from your school years? They all had teaching degrees. Rember how the university student tutor you had was a lot better than the teacher? Hrrm… that teaching degree obviously means a lot when it comes to ability then.
I certainly wouldn’t hire at least 80% of my past fellew undergrad students – even though they have the same sheet of paper as me.

Please, everybody go read The Daily WTF and see how much even experts with certifications can get it so, so, so wrong.

Saturn comes back around…

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For certain evil purposes last week, I assembled the old Saturn with a hard disk I found when cleaning a little while ago (I have that kind of tech stuff – you clean up and find 40GB disks – I’m pretty sure I have an 8.4 bumming around somewhere too).

Saturn comes back around

I ended up being able to do the evil I needed to, but I could tell that the room was a bit warmer due to the extra box being alive. I was also lazy and couldn’t be bothered going downstairs for the D200, so this was shot with my old and trusty Coolpix 4500.

I used the box to be able to get remote access to a customers’ test setup to do some diagnosis on a bug (that’s notoriously hard to reproduce). I think I have a fair idea of what it is now though (timing related – not fun).

Remember kids, threads are evil.

Also, an interesting thing to note is that there is, in fact, a limit to not the number of fds you can pass to the select(2) system call, but to the actual number (on my Ubuntu box here, passing a fd of, say 2000 is probably going to lead to trouble). This has nothing to do with the previously mentioned bug, but an interesting point.

and the morning annoyance award goes to….

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goes to VMware. Honestly, why every time i go and upgrade a kernel or  version of the free (as in beer) VM it asks me about serial numbers.

They also get a “annoyance award” for not listing Victoria as a state that could be in Australia on their web site. They do list other Australian states though (e.g. Westeren Australia and the Australian Capital Territory) yet not one of the most populous.
Or it should really go to Solaris. What a pain in the arse to get to the point of being able to compile $random_free_software_project. Look at Ubuntu/Debian: install system, apt-get build-dep $project, grab source, build. No fucking around with PATH or some strange application to do security updates (which I don’t know how on earth I figured out – I know that somebody else I work with hasn’t been able to easily find it). Why oh why is it so hard? Can’t there be an easy way? Please, somebody enlighten me!

WRT54GL client mode OpenWRT fun!

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the wireless USB dongle I had running on my MythTV box had drivers that weren’t always reliable. I have recently totally decided that if I haven’t had time to debug them and fix the problems by now, I won’t in the near future.

Today a courier arrived with two of the Linksys WRT54GL for me. yay! My aim is to put OpenWRT on them and use them in client mode (one for me, one for mum) to get around unstable wireless drivers.

I just set mine up and it works! MythTV box now much more reliably on the network!

Although, I did hit one snag – the MAC address on the sticker on my unit was NOT the actual MAC address of the router. Really annoying when setting up MAC filtering. Grr….

(i really should set up better wireless security here)

Twinhan USB DTV dongle not working :(

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so after doing some researching (read: using search engines with linux + product name), I came to the conclusion that a Twinhan USB2.0 DVB dongle would be the dongle for me. Yes – it’s small, compact and does digital tv without requiring a non-existant free PCI slot in my Shuttle MythTV box.

Having had great success with my last bit of new hardware (a really cheap Logitech QuickCam Express or something) – plug it in and it “just works”. Oh Linux how you are better than Microsoft Windows for hardware usability!

But this was not to be. It uses a vp7045 chipset, which has drivers both in Ubuntu 6.06 “Dapper” and in the latest v4l-dvb hg tree.

But for the life of me I couldn’t get it to tune into any TV stations (for those of you who like using hardware and not just having expensive boxes around, you will appreciate how tuning into a TV station is rather important functionality for a TV card). So I started having a look around the interweb for possible answers.

The best I could come up with was “are you sure you have all the cables plugged in” – yes, I was.

So seeing as this is the first digital TV dongle in this house, I wondered if the signal just wasn’t getting here. I got a friend to bring around a spare digital set top box. It worked fine. Brilliantly in fact – it even worked with the shitty small antenna that came with the dongle. So it wasn’t an ability to receive.

I then came across this post to the linux-dvb list titled “New VP7045 with TDA10046 instead of MT352 (was: VP7045 tuner doesn’t work)”. Which really does hint at the problem!

I could be one of the lucky ones with a new revision that uses the TDA10046 instead of the MT352! (after getting some debug info from the card out of the driver – it was reporting itself as v1.02, so quite possible).

Maybe time to hack the dvb driver for it? Things seem pretty modular, so it couldn’t be too hard, right?

Well, the vp7045-fe.c file is the front end (well, what it assumes is the front end) for the vp7045.c dongle. So all I really need to do is to get it to use the tda10046 frontend (under frontends/tda1004x.c) instead of the vp7045-fe.c fe code.

Well, it seems as though the tda10046 is an i2c device while the vp7045-fe isn’t. Hrrm… I’ve never really done much with i2c, so this’ll be fun!

I’ve currently managed to hack the driver so that we do some things to do with the tda chip – although i haven’t gotten in detecting the i2c adapter – which means we’re never going to get a front end! (in fact, when you plug in the device with my modified driver you get a “no frontend detected” message from the kernel).

i’ve tried poking on the #linuxtv channel on freenode to no avail – so it seems like i’m on my own for a bit.

A good way to spend midnight until 3am though :)

I’ll probably end up doing the same tonight. Why? Because it’s just so much fun.

Oh, and if anybody has any pointers – it would be appreciated.

I am, of course, assuming the hardware itself isn’t faulty. I have no MS Windows system around to test on.