log of Logfish.net

I had some time to kill, so I pulled up my system monitor and had a look. One thing bugged me: Firefox was doing something while I was not doing something with Firefox. So I dove into the settings and documentation and this long post deals with all the things I could find.

After installing Ubuntu Lucid alpha 1 I found out I had to download the OpenTTD data files again, so I decided to create a package for it. It is a very ugly package, but does the trick. Have fun!

I had the problem that Empathy would disconnect almost immediately when trying to make an audio call. I started it on the command-line and got the following output:

The solution was simple but also weird: remove the .gstreamer-0.10 directory from your home directory (so ~/.gstreamer-0.10), after that no more problems with the rtp element being created.

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

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

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

This is a reply to http://linuxfonts.narod.ru/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.the.desktop.html (v0.2.2)

I'll leave out the points mentioned as "(Being resolved)" and for the rest, I'll follow the same order as the original author. And before I begin, I must say it was a well written list and I think there are a lot of places where programmers really need criticism like this or more proper project management to get the quality everybody is looking for.

And now for the list.

Here is a stupid, small but working recode script. It recodes flac, mpc, mp3 and m4a to Ogg Vorbis using gstreamer, after recoding the files are placed in the 'old' directory. Really simple, but if you have a large collection of mp3 files you want to recode into low quality Ogg Vorbis files, here is one way to do it.

I don't need to say more then the title, right? You can do this with convert from the ImageMagick package, but doing it with gstreamer was news to me. Here is the code to svg2png with gstreamer:

In the old days, Linux fans where not able to see the M$ video streams, and although it is still a problematic format downloading it has become easier.

What you need is: gstreamer, totem-gstreamer and all the good, bad and ugly plugins for gstreamer (not sure which the mmssrc plugin is part of)