Author: tsukasa

So, as posativ pointed out the infamous Jugendmedienzensurstaatsvertrag is off the table (at least for now, although we all know proposals like this never die) – so let’s stick it to the man and keep the posts rolling.

What’s new?

If you’ve been wondering why tray icons in Ubuntu aren’t transparent, the answer is simple: The maintainers compile the applets with the wrong flags. To get your transparent tray icons back, do this:

– Grab the build-dependencies and the source for gnome-panel through apt-get
– Edit the debian/rules file and add the flag ”–with-in-process-applets=notification-area” to DEB_CONFIGURE_EXTRA_FLAGS
– Rebuild the package, install and enjoy.

Kind of sad that this problem seems to exist for a long time now and no one seems to care.

Thanks to the ingenuity of German politicians I am required to either tag every article of this page for age restrictions and child protection  (an impossible task) or would have to authenticate you to make sure you are indeed over 18 years old (also an impossible task).

Another possibility would be to restrict access to this weblog based on the current time. But since I am not the administrator of this server and the FTP access is defunct for quite some time this is the only way I see right now.

So that’s why every article and every page on this blog are now offline.

Enjoy Tsukasa no Hibi (child-friendly version) in a clean, pure manner.

I recently purchased a PC Weasel PCI card off eBay. While I’m having trouble getting the thing to run as I wish in my fileserver it does indeed work fine on my bare-metal test computer. One thing that bugged me a lot was the process of flashing firmware onto the PC Weasel. It supports up to 7 different firmware partitions but flashing them from command line is a real pain and with my limited knowledge of kermit and minicom I was totally dumbfounded.

Thankfully SecureCRT is always a viable option for one’s console needs (when using Windows, that is). PuTTY is cool but SecureCRT is great – it allows for massive scripting and is even recommended in the PC Weasel manual. So I did some scripting and this is the result:

[code language=”vb”]
# $language = "VBScript"
# $interface = "1.0"

‘ ****************************************************
‘ * *
‘ * PC WEASEL PCI FLASH HELPER FOR SECURECRT *
‘ * *
‘ * written by Tsukasa *
‘ * for SecureCRT 6.6.0 *
‘ * *
‘ * INSTRUCTIONS: Set the jumper for safeboot, open *
‘ * a serial connection through SCRT, *
‘ * run the script and power on the *
‘ * target machine. *
‘ * Cancel the script as soon as the *
‘ * S19-line input is done and set the *
‘ * remaining options manually. *
‘ * *
‘ ****************************************************

‘ ##### Edit the 3 values below ##### ‘

Const FirmwareFile = "PCIweasel_2.07_s19"
Const FirmwareName = "PC Weasel v2.07"
Const FirmwareSlot = "2"

‘ ##### DO NOT EDIT ANYTHING FROM HERE ON #####

Const ForReading = 1
Const ForWriting = 2

Sub Main
Set fso = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
Set file = fso.OpenTextFile(FirmwareFile, ForReading, False)

‘ Wait for boot menu input
crt.Screen.WaitForString "[x]–>"

‘ Enter flasher…
crt.Screen.Send "l"

‘ Select partition to flash…
crt.Screen.WaitForString "Partition number for image [1-7]:"
crt.Screen.Send FirmwareSlot

‘ Give the new firmware a name…
crt.Screen.WaitForString "Image name"
crt.Screen.Send FirmwareName & Chr(13)

‘ Erase partition…
crt.Screen.WaitForString "Erase this flash partition?"
crt.Screen.Send "Y"

‘ Wait until PC Weasel is ready to receive the S19 lines…
crt.Screen.WaitForString vbNewLine & ">"

‘ Send the S19 lines until finished
Do While file.AtEndOfStream <> True
str = file.Readline
crt.Screen.Send str & Chr(13)
crt.Screen.WaitForString ">"
Loop
End Sub
[/code]

This simple script will do most of the handiwork for you. It works well for me so I’m fine with it being somewhat incomplete 🙂 .

Since I got a Xbox 360 Universal Remote quite some time ago (actually: when a friend of mine decided that the Xbox 360 is a terrible console and not worth having – a sentiment I can only share) I was always keen on getting the little bugger to work with XBMC. Lady Luck smiled at me when I finally found a cheap RC6-compatible USB IR-receiver on eBay. Just to get you some idea what I bought:

Bus 003 Device 002: ID 147a:e017 Formosa Industrial Computing, Inc. eHome Infrared Receiver

Yep, it’s one of the run-of-the-mill Formosa SnowFlakeEmulation thingies you find in just about anything from Acer laptops to small projector addons. I don’t know about you but that’s more than I could ever ask for (at least for the 2€ I paid) and the device works flawlessly with Lirc and the Xbox 360 remote (as long as the batteries don’t die on you). So, easy peasy to get all the stuff I already hacked together wired into XBMC, eh? Not at all. You see, XBMC does try – and I’m not doing anything wrong methinks – to use /dev/lircd as an endpoint for Lirc. The commandline –lircdev gets ignored completely. Maybe I’m missing a link here. The solution is pretty simple: Create a symlink to /var/run/lirc/lircd, start XBMC and rejoice – it verks!

One of the more common questions is how to run Wuala as a Windows service. There is a thread describing how to run Wuala as a scheduled task which may satisfy some people – but let’s face it: You probably want a real service, you know, one you can control through “net start” and “net stop”.

Setting up your own services on Windows is pretty easy these days. You either shell out squid for FireDaemon or go the free way with srvany. If you don’t like fiddling around with software this piece of software may interest you. It is a simple service wrapper for Wuala written in C# that installs a new service called wuasrv and starts/stops the client software accordingly.

Installation is dead simple:

– Configure Wuala (i.e. check the “remember password” box)
– Unpack WualaService
– Edit WuaSrv.xml and alter path to point to your wuala.exe
– Run ServiceInstaller.exe
– Open the Windows service manager, select the Wuala service, go to it’s properties and change the account it runs under (running Wuala under SYSTEM account may not be such a great idea)
– Start the service and rejoice.

Configure Wuala to auto-login and enable the Dokan integration to get your W: drive right at boot 🙂 .

I’ll post the source-code to the programs later on, so enjoy 🙂 .

So, I decided to re-install my laptop today.

One thing that got me curious: The NX Client and Sandboxie started showing strange phenomenons.

Sandboxie couldn’t quick-restore files from the sandbox (permission denied error) and the NX Client couldn’t find the default key.

Turns out that both problems have the same root: Cygwin.

After some tries with Try & Decide I pinned down the problem to E Texteditor’s integrated Cygwin installation. Even using the official Cygwin setup and standard install wouldn’t help.

The quick fix for this is to not use an external Cygwin installation in conjunction with these two programs.

Quite a bummer. If anyone has a better fix, feel free to leave me a comment 🙂 .