Tsukasa no Hibi

Cloudy Sky. Occasional Rain.

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Moving old data to new disks

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As I wrote earlier this week one of my disks kept dying on me. The solution – of course – is to replace the faulty device with a brand-new one and move the data to the new disk.

While I had great success in doing so with Acronis True Image’s “Clone Disk” feature I had a little hickup while mounting the disk into the storage cage of my case. So for the time being I had to use the broken drive for another 2 days (don’t do this at home, kids!). As you can imagine the data became desynchronized and since I didn’t really have the time to clone the disk again I opted for another, more time saving method.

Everyone knows how to pack an entire system, store it somewhere in the network and restore it – all thanks to Linux live CDs and my good ol’ friend tar. tar is great for a lot of reasons: It processes .files, it keeps permissions and ownership intact… oh yeah, and it packs things.

So, this time I didn’t need to pack my entire system but only a few selected folders. And I didn’t really need to pack them either. But tar makes a great companion for moving sensitive data between disks, no less. Just start your machine in single user mode (or with a Live CD if you plan on moving your root partition around), mount target/destination, cd into the directory you want to move and use this nifty little command:

tar cd - . | (cd /my/new/home; tar xvpf -)

Yep, that’s all that is to it. Keeps all properties intact, which is important for, well, just about any kind of file/folder.

I don’t like mondays

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Today the Samsung hard-disk that houses large portions of my system started dying on me. Good news: It’ll only take a few days to get a replacement, bad news: Until then I’ll have to continue working with an obviously broken device — not quite reassuring, is it?

Omgwtfhp

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I had the unfortunate pleasure (?) to setup a HP Compaq dx2450, one of those machines that come with 3 operating system discs but no media containing the drivers (I can’t help but to wonder why?). So if you want to/have to install a corporate, custom version of Windows you’re basically stuck with hp’s website which offers a lot of downloads — unfortunately you can scrap all of them.

With the notable exception of the audio driver all other downloads on that page are utterly useless. Thanks to this blog post (similar story, I heart you, mate!) I was able to make it through the process without any major hickups, though.

Still, what the hell, hp? I thought we’re talking about business line products here?

Adobe AIR Beta for Linux

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Wowzers, finally there’s a version of AIR available that has an (almost) equal set of features to it’s Windows and Mac counterparts.

Before you can install this new version you do have to uninstall your old AIR applications (as they won’t work with the new version anymore) as well as the AIR runtime itself. Both can be done through your package manager.

Features now include working trayicon support, kwallet integration and some other goodies.

Using T-Online’s Call & Surf Comfort Plus? Free Hotspots!

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Wowzers, today I was waiting at the trainstation for my next ride home when I decided to power-on my notebook and scan for open wireless networks. T-Mobile obviously had one in range, I immediatly connected (hoping for free cookies, but no way 🙁 ) and was greeted with a very intruiging notice: You can actually use a lot of official, high bandwidth hotspots for free with T-Mobile’s T-Hotspot offer that – and that’s the vital point here – includes a flatrate.

Well, if it contains a flatrate it obviously isn’t free but – and that’s the second vital point – if you’re already a T-Online customer with at least Call & Surf Comfort Plus (basically the worry-free package that we have at home) you do get free access to all the hotspots.

That is pretty kickass and I definetively have something to look forward to from now on 🙂 . Also, I was surprised to see how many trains of DB are equipped with hotspots already, makes me love DB even more than I currently do.

To check if you qualify for free access already simply log into your customer center, choose “Services” and select “Hotspot”.

Restarting your WRT54GL per cron

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Gee, sometimes I really want to push my router down a cliff: It runs out of memory and generally slow. Automatic reboot sounds like a good idea there…

Just add this as a startup script to reboot the router at 01:00AM:

echo '00 01 * * * root /sbin/reboot' > /tmp/cron.d/rebootrouter

Easy to do, powerful feature.

Using vi as hex editor

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There are many things vi can do, for instance invoke other commands to process files. That’s pretty cool.

Since installing Okteta isn’t always an option, here’s a small snippet on how to work simple capabilities into vi:

vi -b myfile
[in vi]: %!xxd
[to return to previous view]: %!xxd -r

Pretty easy, pretty handy. Something to keep in mind. Another thing to keep in mind: Always open binary files with the -b switch, otherwise you’ll damage the files when saving them with vi.

Autohiding Panels in KDE 4.2

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It’s been possible for some time now to auto-hide panels. Now you don’t even need to mess in the configuration files anymore — thanks to a new panel settings menu. Absolutely awesome.

I have to say that I can’t really understand why someone would be unhappy with the way the menu is implemented right now. It’s easily accessable and easy to comprehend (in terms of what it does). If one wants to nit-pick: There’s no way to access the Desktop/Activity properties (wallpaper, Plasma theme etc.) from systemsettings. Boo-boo.

Making the NX Client portable

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NX is great. I’m deeply in love with it. Sometimes it’s acting like a real jerk, though. The NX Web Companion is installing a lot of crap into the active user’s profile. The NX client writes stuff in the active user’s profile. Both isn’t really convenient for me.

I prefer to have all my settings with me on a USB thumbdrive. So, in the spirit of PortableApps I’ll show you how to simply turn NX into a portable application.

First thing to do is installing NX client on a machine, if you have installed already – that’s fine. Copy the entire program folder to a new directory structure like NxClientPortable\App (I’ll follow the PortableApps schema here). In NxClientPortable create a new directory named “Data” and a batch file with the following contents:

@echo off
set USERPROFILE=%CD%\Data

App\nxclient.exe %*

reg delete /f /va "HKCU\Software\Cygnus Solutions"
reg delete /f /va "HKLM\Software\Cygnus Solutions"

That’s it. Start the batch file and you’ll be fine. No need for installations, no files in some stranger’s profile. Everything goes back to your thumbdrive neatly.

This example also demonstrates why batch still isn’t dead: The USERPROFILE variable will be changed just within the scope of our batch file, all other applications will still use the path specified in the “global” instance of the variable.

Bleh

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Seems Defensio kind of blocked more than I initially intended by simply crashing and throwing all comments down the pipe. Until the problem is sorted out, I’ve simply disabled the plugin completely. Sorry for the inconvenience.

On a bright note: Recent Firefox nightly builds allow for proper, stable windowless Flash. Yes, that means Flash doesn’t crash anymore. Whoopy-doo. Be sure to use this nifty extension when using nightly builds. And don’t forget that you can edit your existing /usr/bin/firefox to simply use the new prefix (i.e. /opt/firefox) which is especially handy.

New nVidia Linux driver speeds things up

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The end of the world must be near: nVidia released a new version of their GNU/Linux driver that fixes some of the annoyances regarding RENDER performance. Given you apply some manual adjustments to the configuration the new driver performs in a somewhat usable manner.

It is still far from the beauty that ATI users can enjoy (in terms of performance) but it’s an immense improvement over the old, totally unusable slideshow.

Fixing the “null” date problem in WordPress

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If you’ve been a constant reader of my blog (and of course I know you are 😉 ) you could hardly have missed the ugly “0” date in the archives. Turns out that this 0 date was caused by all the old drafts I had saved but never published. Deleting the drafts would help, but simply assigning them a date seemed like a more sane solution. Voila, problem solved.

Making Cygwin portable

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One of the very packages I always install when I have to work with Windows is Cygwin. Being able to use my beloved GNU tools really makes things easier. Often I don’t have the option to install it. I grieved a little bit about the fact that some problems could be solved with just 2 commands that were — of course — missing from Windows’ horrendous command prompt. So I snooped around and built the following batch that’ll start a full-blown Cygwin session from i.e. portable harddisk: 

@echo off set PATH=%CD%bin;%CD%sbin;%CD%usrsbin;%PATH set HOME=%CD%homePortable mount -bfu %CD%/ / mount -bfu %CD%bin /usr/bin mount -bfu %CD%lib /usr/lib cd %HOME% bash ----login -i

Easy, huh? All you have to do to make it work is renaming your /home/Username to /home/Portable (or simply adjust the setting in the batch). Pretty neat stuff.

Building recent Mplayer SVN + CoreAVC For Linux

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As Michael points out there’s a slight problem with the CoreAVC For Linux patchset that enable Mplayer to take advantage of CoreCodec’s h.264 decoder — with recent changes in the sourcecode the old build_patch.pl script doesn’t produce usable output anymore.

There still is a way to compile Mplayer with the modification, though: Mithun Diwakar altered a patch to work against current subversion checkouts. How long this one will hold… we don’t know. But I think it would be preferable to fix up the patchbuilder. Maybe I’ll hack around on it during the weekend (no promise 🙂 ).