log of Logfish.net

You may already know youtube-dl, a popular Python script which allows you to easily download a youtube video. Well, there is another program which mimics this behavior, but works for more then just youtube, and it's called cclive.

CClive started out as a perl program under the name of clive, but the C++ rewrite is simpler and has a smaller memory footprint. Cclive has the same usage as youtube-dl:

I wanted to use this, so I decided to package it for Ubuntu, there was no package available yet, so this blog entry is to tell you about my new PPA entry for cclive. Debian unstable has a package for it already, so for debian you can find it here.

The 0.5.5 release supported sites are

People often say that Python is an easy language, but like other easy languages it is often harder to make sure you are working in a safe manner. I'm not talking about security, but bug-free.

A) Assert allot:

After being annoyed by the snapshot filenames of gitweb, I started looking around. A patch to fix the problem has already been submitted to the gitweb developers and if they see the need it will be part of a future release. Bored of waiting, I tried cgit.

cgit is currently at version 0.8.3 and still needs some testing and security checks before it gets to version 1.0 (according to their own README), but that is no reason not to try it out locally.

At the time of writing there are were no packages available, so I decided to create one and post in to my PPA. If you have apache set up and running and know a bit of what you are doing, get that package and let's take it for a spin.

I use a single panel for all my stuff, so I need to keep it tidy. To access the Gnome menu, you have two applets: the menu applet and the menu bar applet. The menu bar applets shows "Applications Places Systems" which is nice, but takes up a lot of space. The menu applet only uses a single icon, but will hide the your bookmarks quite deep (if you have more then 4 bookmarks). My bookmarks are hidden at Icon → Placed → Bookmarks. To long if you ask me. Meanwhile the menu-bar applet uses to much space on the panel. All this results in an irritated user: me.

Open source to the rescue! I'll show you what I've done to get it to work, if you don't want to know you can just download the Ubuntu Karmic package from my ppa: https://launchpad.net/~bneijt/+archive/ppa

Karmic Koala is out, and here are the metalinks (also attached below):

http://releases.ubuntu.com/karmic/ubuntu-9.10-desktop-i386.metalink
http://releases.ubuntu.com/karmic/ubuntu-9.10-desktop-amd64.metalink

http://releases.ubuntu.com/karmic/ubuntu-9.10-alternate-amd64.metalink
http://releases.ubuntu.com/karmic/ubuntu-9.10-alternate-i386.metalink

http://releases.ubuntu.com/karmic/ubuntu-9.10-server-amd64.metalink
http://releases.ubuntu.com/karmic/ubuntu-9.10-server-i386.metalink

http://releases.ubuntu.com/karmic/ubuntu-9.10-desktop-armel+dove.metalink
http://releases.ubuntu.com/karmic/ubuntu-9.10-desktop-armel+imx51.metalink

Metalinks are a fast way to download them from multiple servers. Under Ubuntu, you can try the command-line client aria2c, or use the Firefox plugin DownloadThemAll on the metalinks above and instantly have it download and check the download.

Aria2c: After installing aria2 (sudo aptitude install aria2) use the command aria2c -M http://the_link_to_the_metalink.

DownloadTemAll: Right click on the link and download it with DownloadThemAll, after it has downloaded the metalink it will realise what it got it's hands on and show a window with the proper links. You will then start to download from the best Ubuntu servers automatically.

Project B is out and OpenMoko inc is bringing us: the wiki reader

What is it? Well, it's a small ebook reader like device with a touch screen with WikiPedia on board. Think of it as a TomTom navigator but without a colour screen and it doesn't talk. Come to think of it, if you would buy a TomTom and put in an SD card with wikipedia, you would probably have Project B, with the added bonus of being in colour and cheaper.

I looked up some e-book readers and it looks a lot like a Pocketbook 360, a product of the Pocketbook company. Never heard of them before, but they seem to make similair products. Another thing is that I don't get the whole idea: if you want to use Wikipedia on a mobile device, either use your phone (which has a browser these days), or a netbook. People are better off just buying an iPhone because it has Wikipedia on it two, and you can see the articles in colour and you can even look up other things on the internet.

One thing is nice, the device is cheap. They even mention on their page that they didn't bother painting it because that is cheaper (and better for the environment)footnote. But with that cheapness comes the idea of another single-use device that is cheap to buy and useless to own, a bit like an apple core remover: nice to have it IF you don't forget to actually use it. But when it comes down to it, you will still just use the internet or your phone because at that time you can't find the damn thing.

A while back I created a chat database to log conversations. Based on the context of the conversation it would find responses, so if ABC was said, it would search the database for ABCD and replies with D. If ABC is not in the database, it wil search for BC and finally C.

At first I thought I might use the database to start investigating chat bots for my master thesis, but that day never came. I've now used that database to bootstrap a new implementation of Wally at Google App Engine. I can now say that I've done something using the WebApp framework, and it seems to work. With the free quota it should be able to live a good and long life, so feel free to chat with Wally the echoing chat wall.

The 5 real reasons to avoid OpenMoko phone:

* OpenMoko software will block calls for free. Some developers are paid, but nobody is the sole authority over what should and shouldn't be fixed.
* OpenMoko endorses and supports none of the used technologies. Essentially nothing works.
* OpenMoko won't expose your whereabouts or provide ways for others to track you. It has no social features what so ever.
* OpenMoko doesn't play patent- and DRM-free formats like Ogg Vorbis and Theora.
* OpenMoko is not the only option. There are better alternatives that respect your time, play free media formats, and let you use software -- like the IPhone 3G.

Further more, even if you can still buy the hardware, all company backed distributions have stalled in their development. Even though the list of distributions is growing, the list of problems (phone locking up, calls failing, messages disappearing) is not shrinking. The OpenMoko company has started yet another project that, what ever it will be, is probably going to fail because of the same problem: you can create, distribute and sell the hardware but it will do nothing without good software. With the FreeRunner they have shown that they don't have the expertise to pull that off. At the hart of this problem, is a proud community which aims to be open and free. This community will never be able to serve normal users because they think freedom and choice should always win over usability and stability.

Many thanks to the FSF for a template to rant about the OpenMoko FreeRunner.

PS In five years or so, I'll use my OpenMoko phone with as much joy as I now use my Linux Desktop and then I'll post a comment saying that all is well in OpenMoko land.

Yes, a new site: http://www.dynmirror.net/
Using metadata files from various servers (MD5SUMS files etc) this site can couple various mirrors together and automatically create metalinks for the same hash. It is currently the fastest and easiest way to add metalinks to your website. An example is Firefox for windows version 3.5.2.

The new Karmic is missing something that I used to use: gnome-power-cmd (formally gnome-power-cmd.sh). To fill this void, I had to dive into the internet to find what could replace it.

The idea behind gnome-power-cmd is that you could make suspend, hibernate and reboot calls from the commandline if you where logged in as normal user, not needing the root privileges. It was a userspace variant of the pm-utils (pm-suspend, etc.) which all need you to be root. The death of the command (which was simply a shell script) probably came with the HAL to DeviceKit transition. So, on Karmic it seems that neither HAL dbus messages, nor gnome-power-command calls will work. This is the closest thing I could find:

That should suspend your computer. You can substitute the Suspend with Hibernate if you want, although I haven't tried the latter as it doesn't work with my computer (on boot, it just ignores it and nothing is restored). A local replacement for gnome-power-cmd shown and downloadable below