A blog on rails, php, computing, my bass guitar and stuff

In reply to my last article about media centers.
Well, I installed xbmc this weekend and actually it kinda sucked. Installation was a breeze: kudos for that. But when I ran it, it hogged all of the cpu time of the second core. 100% constantly.

I’ve got an Ati hd3200 integrated on the motherboard and in combination with XBMC I believe that’s a bad choice. I’ve read numerous threads about people having the same problem as me I’m quite upset with this. I don’t blame the XBMC developers, they do a fabulous job, but still it sucks.

I hope that in the next couple of weeks this problem is solved but I don’t think it will. I’m now looking for an alternative but XBMC just looks so polished…. It’s too bad it’s not usable for me

I’m now downloading the live cd of XBMC and see if that works ’cause I dont know who to blame: me, ati, xbmc or ubuntu…

Well as the title says: the cronjobs of the root user didn't run on one of my servers (MY MACHINE!) and it took a while to figure out why they weren't running. It ended up to be something with locking the root account. These steps fixed the problem:

One of our Joomla! sites was "hacked" with some stupid script and the fuckers put a iframe in every page

But with sed that was fixed in a matter of seconds:

OR:

Searching for hacked sites:

Drawback is that it doesn't removed the inserted newline :S Because it isn't the design of sed (wha-evah).
Also it doesn't handle files with spaces in the filename. But that's only minor because in my case I didn't have any php or html files with spaces in them

I saw that there are python bindings for libindicate. They're called "python-indicate".

There's also a wiki about this new feature from Ubuntu. I thought about creating a plugin for weechat that uses this library. Especially because the notify-plugins is useless if you're away and somebody mentions you on irc. Libindicate would be perfect for this. First have to find out how the behaviour of the applet would be.

[update]
I asked my question on the libindicate launchpad so I'm very curious about the answer(s).
[/update]

Ubuntu 9.10 comes with an older version of weechat. So I downloaded the stable release 0.3.0 and installed it:

Note: gtk is not very usable so you better use the ncurses interface!

I wrote a little plugin for it that autosaves the current connected channels and enables autojoin for them. It can be found on my github page and on the plugins page of weechat (if FlashCode aprobes the new version 0.2).

And here a nice plugin of weechat in action with the autojoin plugin (Nice!!):

For php I use Zend Studio for Linux. We have a license at work for it and it is in my opinion the best editor for php. It's relatively fast and you can use it to quickfix php over an ftp connection.

For Ruby I use netbeans. I would also like to use it for php but it doesn't allow to quicly open a file via ftp/scp or whatever. And it can sometimes be sloooooowwww. I've  seen netbeans used on a Windows platform and there it is much faster.

When I right-click on a project in netbeans for the first time, it takes 5 seconds (not lying!) to render the popup-menu. Come onm take forever!

And because I was now developing with Python I decided to try a new editor. Something more hardcore and lighter. Something nerdy So ofcourse I only have two decent options: Vim & Emacs.

I already had try them with Ruby. But I found good Ruby (& Rails) support rather lacking by both of them. I believe that the python comminity is more hardcore and therefore are using more arcane editors And maybe because they aren't afraid to hack away in another language than their own (lisp, vimscript).

I think I have been comparing the two editors for nearly two weeks now. I have spent hours and hours comparing, trying and browsing for blog posts about the two. At the end, I really didn't know which one to choose. I really suck at deciding something So I made a little list of what I find to be strong points of each editor:

VIM:

• Better syntax highlighting/theming supprt (wombat ftw!!)
• Faster/smaller
• No weird handling of new buffers like with emacsclient
• No daemon like: emacs --daemon
• Better python integration
• Easier to make extensions
• Preview of docstrings when using omni completion

EMACS:

• Better python-mode
• No commandmode/normalmode
• Directory browser/editor
• Debugger (better integration with external tools)
• easier to begin
• Everyting is a buffer™

And now I have chosen to be the editor with which I am going to work is...... (drum roll please) .......:

Gedit!

No, it's (g)Vim

And while writing this article I was looking for a WordPress/blog plugin for Vim and Emacs. At a glance it looked like the wordpress plugin for Emacs was a little bit better. So already I was doubting my decision... So it could be that I switch editor in the next few months But I'm first going to really use gvim to see if it fits with my workflow and is really useable for me.

As cherry on the pie, a nice screenshot of my gvim in action:

[update]
I've installed Netneans 6.8m2 and it feels a lot faster than 6.7 but python completion is as bad as in 6.7.
[/update]

[update2]
Found out about Vim's netrw. So Emacs no longer got "Directory browser/editor" as a strong point.
[/update2]

When enabling Visual effects Zend wouldn't maximize anymore. So after a bit of googling I found a nice tutorial to fix the problem with Zend.

The certificates of the courier imapd-ssl and pop3d-ssl were expired. After some searching I found how to renew them:

With thanks to this post.

If first thought that /usr/lib/courier/mkimapdcert generates the certificates in the wrong path. But on another server the cp command complained that the two files were identical. So it looks like they are hard-linked or something...

I read on OSnews about the alpha release of Haiku. It's been several years since I installed BeOS the last time so I decided to try Haiku.

I first tried it on virtualbox but I didn't get the networking to work flawlessly so I decided to install it on libvirt. I expected quite a hassle but it was done in a whissle.

First download the raw image of Haiku and run something like:

Next I had to edit the Haiku libvirt xml to change the default nic model.  I always stop the libvirt service just to be sure. Then edit this file: /etc/libvirt/qemu/Haiku.xml

Make sure the nic looks something like:

I first tried the rtl8139 interface but that isn't supported by Haiku :s A list of possible interfaces can be found on the libvirt website.

I can now access it via vnc. But Ubuntu has some kind of bug in the vnc client of virt-viewer so it is sllooooooowwwww...

Too lazy to type something usefull here. Just for my own reference...

Useful links:

• http://alsa.opensrc.org/index.php/DigitalOut
• http://www.pulseaudio.org/wiki/PerfectSetup

Steps to take:

usermod -a -G audio $USER
sudo aptitude install pulseaudio
sudo nano /etc/pulse/default.pa

load-module module-combine
load-module module-zeroconf-publish
load-module module-native-protocol-tcp auth-ip-acl=127.0.0.1;192.168.1.0/24

pulseaudio --start (or run pulseaudio in screen)
aplay ~/train.wav