tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-147199552024-03-23T18:16:27.015+00:00James Ots - Computery ThingsI am <a href="http://www.jamesots.com">James Ots</a> and that's my real blog, but I've created this one so I can blog about Android, Linux and geeky things like that.James Otshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12813882332573811934noreply@blogger.comBlogger74125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14719955.post-5827909954615694952010-08-15T08:20:00.002+00:002010-08-15T08:27:52.468+00:00Making a VCDS inferface workWhile I'm in the mood for posting solutions to technical problems, here's another. I have a OBD interface cable for my VW Bora so that I can run a piece of software called VCDS (sometimes known as VAG-COM) and read the error codes from my car's ECU. However, when I plug in the cable (it's the USB version), it is usually assigned to COM7. Unfortunately, the VCDS programme only supports COM1-4.<br /><br />Weirdly, the solution for me is to plug the cable in and run VCDS settings. If I choose COM3 then it successfully detects a COM port - I think it's used by the built in model. I save the settings, and then bring up the Device Manager and change the port used by the interface cable to COM3. It says the port is already in use, but lets you change it anyway. Then I just use the VCDS software and it works. This seems completely wrong, and to be honest, I'm sure there's probably a better way of doing it than this, but at least it works.James Otshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12813882332573811934noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14719955.post-11545304805390786472010-08-15T08:16:00.002+00:002010-08-15T08:20:54.406+00:00Disabling the buzzI just installed openSUSE 11.3 on my desktop computer, and I have to say it's pretty much awesome. Almost everything has worked straight out of the box, including my Wacom graphics tablet and my wireless card. One thing that's been annoying me is that whenever I make a mistake (such as trying to delete some text that isn't there), my computer makes the most almighty buzz. Or maybe it could be described as a belch. It's pretty horrible, however you describe it, and makes me jump out of my skin every time. I think it's supposed to be the System Bell.<br /><br />I spent some time trying to work out how to stop this, and eventually managed to stop it by doing this: I opened up KMix, clicked on the 'Mixer' button to bring up the full mixer. The selected tab was HDA Intel, and I clicked on Settings > Configure Channels, and then dragged the item called 'Beep' from 'Available channels' to 'Visible channels' and clicked OK. Then I muted the Beep channel.<br /><br />I just thought I'd post that in case anyone else has a similar problem and is searching for a solution some time in the future.James Otshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12813882332573811934noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14719955.post-7744088674200599242010-02-18T11:12:00.002+00:002010-02-18T11:22:14.596+00:00Activating Virgin Media Broadband on LinuxYesterday I installed Virgin Media broadband at my new house. Virgin Media? Am I insane? Well, unfortunately my new house is 4.5km away from the exchange and the fastest ADSL connection is less than 2 Mbits, so Virgin was my only option. Anyway, I digress. The reason for the post is to help out any other Linux users who want to use Virgin Media.<br /><br />When I plugged in the router and went to view a website on my computer, I was redirected to an activation page, where I had to enter my name and postcode and stuff like that. Except that the first page you go to checks to make sure you're running Windows or using a Mac. Thankfully, Konqueror and Opera both let me change my browser identification string so that Virgin's servers think I am using Windows. So far, so good. The next problem comes a few steps later when the 'Next' button doesn't respond. A quick view of the page's source shows that Virgin is trying to set the browser's homepage using some bad JavaScript. It also shows that after trying to do that, it was just going to redirect to another page anyway, so I was able to copy that URL into the address bar and carry on. I don't remember what the URL was, but if you look for the function called 'next()' in the source, you'll see it there. A few pages later it prompts you to download and install their special tools. There's no option to skip this, but if you click on 'Next', it starts the download and then goes onto the next page anyway. You can just ignore the download.<br /><br />After all that, your connection should be activated. Mine was, anyway. Now I get about a 4 Mbit connection instead of the slow 2 Mbit ADSL connection. Which is still slow, considering Virgin Media advertise it as a 20 Mbit connection, but I wasn't expecting anything that good from Virgin Media. After all, they are just NTL with a new name.James Otshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12813882332573811934noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14719955.post-9723624950732106422009-06-17T15:36:00.002+00:002009-06-17T16:03:23.997+00:00An UpdateSo I have a baby. Joscelyn Eleanore was born two weeks ago, and is completely wonderful. And on Saturday Naomi, Joscelyn and myself are flying off to Canada so that the inlaws get to see their first grandchild. I'm really looking forward to it. Well, mostly. It'll probably be quite tiring - we're hiring a car and will be doing a huge amount of driving (around 3000 miles) so that we can see everyone Naomi wants to see. But it'll be fun.<br /><br />My other baby (my seven year old laptop, Lazarus) is losing its memory. One of the memory slots decided to give up the ghost, so it now only has half a gig of RAM. One gig was already on the low side of comfortable, so now it's extremely frustrating to use. At least I'm running Linux on it and not Windows, since I generally find Windows likes to have around double the amount of RAM that Linux likes. It'd be a good excuse to put Lazarus in the grave one final time and get a nice, fast, new computer. But I can't afford a new computer and a new baby. Well, I could, but I just got a new 10-22mm lens for my camera and I want a new Line 6 box for my guitar, so I might just have to struggle on. Oh well, I'm in Canada for the next five weeks, so I don't have to worry about it at the moment.James Otshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12813882332573811934noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14719955.post-25432478962918320152009-04-14T19:36:00.002+00:002009-04-14T19:39:31.607+00:00KNetWalkI'm trying to write an Android game, but I've been rather addicted to playing KNetWalk, which is slowing me down somewhat. I'm getting fast at KNetWalk though - I just did the Very Hard level in 59 seconds without any penalties. I think I might give up now, although I reckon I could probably do it in 50 seconds if I was very lucky.James Otshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12813882332573811934noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14719955.post-67442640935028062002009-04-14T08:08:00.002+00:002009-04-14T08:11:30.518+00:00tinyurl No Longer Breaks My Security ModelAt least, not on my Android phone. I've just released Check Redirect on the Android Market (for free, of course), which intercepts view intentions on links, and if the link is a tiny url of some sort (the list of intercepted hosts is configurable) it pops up a dialog letting you know where the link redirects to, and asks if you wish to follow the link.<br /><br />And when I'm using Linux instead of my phone, I found an extension for firefox which does a similar thing. I can't remember what it was called though.James Otshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12813882332573811934noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14719955.post-17235290777392804812009-03-30T13:54:00.002+00:002009-03-30T14:01:52.741+00:00tiny.url Breaks My Security ModelSince using twitter, I've noticed a lot of people use services such as tiny.url or tr.im in order to shorten URLs. There's a problem with this though: I now have no idea what website I'm about to visit. If someone I trust has posted the link I'm reasonably likely to click on it, but for other people I tend to avoid these shortened links because I have no idea in advance what they are.<br /><br />What is really needed is for the shortener service to show you what site you're about to visit first, so you can make a more informed decision about whether to visit the site or not. Hmm, maybe I should be sending this as a feature request to those sites instead of randomly blogging about it...James Otshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12813882332573811934noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14719955.post-40707328276470995902009-03-04T18:13:00.002+00:002009-03-04T18:27:19.605+00:00Android Reloaded<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZr0F8XBpiYvYzs7e4DkjEdgF-6BnYLmuDYNccIP7IBemlE6jM9_81exlpJ2FPWuBQBE26KDmaZ_VqouBzBs_YGz18QkUAP4WPpoVjXvsjTP0d-uN7ReL9VBm1x1E5C68QgoaJhw/s1600-h/android-power-new.png"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 267px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZr0F8XBpiYvYzs7e4DkjEdgF-6BnYLmuDYNccIP7IBemlE6jM9_81exlpJ2FPWuBQBE26KDmaZ_VqouBzBs_YGz18QkUAP4WPpoVjXvsjTP0d-uN7ReL9VBm1x1E5C68QgoaJhw/s400/android-power-new.png" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5309397830736625954" /></a><br /><br />On Monday night I got home from the pub, and my phone announced that there was an update available, and would I be so kind as to allow it to update itself. I said, 'Yes, that would be lovely', and my G1 proceeded to show me a nice updating screen while it changed all its software around.<br /><br />There's not much to see for it. The Android Market now tells you when anything you've installed has an update available, which is nice. Google Maps is now version 3, but I can't tell the difference. The biggest changes though, have to be memory usage and power consumption. Previously, after using my phone on and off during the day at work, the battery level would generally be down around 40% when I came home. However, the last two days have seen it around 60% instead, which is a great improvement. The other change is that before the update, my /data partition had around 10Mb free on it, while after the update it has around 30Mb free. I don't know how they've done that. Perhaps shifted some space from the /cache partition? I never bothered noting the free space on anything other than /data before.James Otshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12813882332573811934noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14719955.post-24357376185986458472009-02-28T23:12:00.002+00:002009-02-28T23:19:30.402+00:00G1 Power UsageAfter posting my last entry, I thought I'd elaborate on the G1's power usage. There's a useful little tool available on the Android Market called Watts, which logs the battery level and shows a graph of it. The image below is two screenshots from Watts. <br /><br />The one on the left is the device's power usage last night, when I wasn't using the phone at all since I was asleep, but the phone was still checking my email and twitter regularly. <br /><br />The one on the right was this afternoon, when I was watching the rugby at my parents', but also using my G1 a far amount for twittering, checking emails, texting, and looking up things like the words of 'God Save the Queen' and what a drop goal is. <br /><br />As you can see, the standby life is pretty good, and you can probably get a good eight hours of reasonably intensive use out of the battery. Which is pretty poor, but I can live with it, since I don't usually use the phone that intensively.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWwEsn1-pGJv_cnmu1LS_prZPdlcHuGSveGw3R3J1u0N1EdPkwpJcT2P-NcTOBGNFzD1OzdqAfKmU-jqt6CQwdkMBeyWPttn4DRLAVnn-DXpO0UK9JGyJ8LFAIONOCorM3xWlhVw/s1600-h/android-power.png"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWwEsn1-pGJv_cnmu1LS_prZPdlcHuGSveGw3R3J1u0N1EdPkwpJcT2P-NcTOBGNFzD1OzdqAfKmU-jqt6CQwdkMBeyWPttn4DRLAVnn-DXpO0UK9JGyJ8LFAIONOCorM3xWlhVw/s400/android-power.png" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5307990305318472770" /></a>James Otshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12813882332573811934noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14719955.post-51102935518873270412009-02-28T14:32:00.003+00:002009-02-28T15:06:27.255+00:00Should I Buy A G1?Since I've got myself a T-Mobile G1, I've had several people ask me if they too should get one. And the answer, as it often is, is: It depends.<br /><br />If you want a phone with good battery life, this is definitely not the phone for you. If you have GPS and Wifi and 3G and all the bells and whistles turned on and you're using the phone constantly, you'll probably only get four or five hours of use out of it. I turn GPS and Wifi off and turn the screen brightness down (because even when it's turned right down it's pretty bright), and don't use it non-stop, just a fair bit of twittering and the odd bit of internet browsing and some texts and phone calls. And usually it's down to around 40% battery by the end of the day. Of course, it depends completely on how you use it. I usually plug the phone in at night so that it's fully charged in the morning. Last night I forgot to switch the charger on, and when I checked in the morning it had used less than 5% of the battery, so it's standby use is pretty good.<br /><br />If you want a phone which was take videos, this isn't (yet) the phone for you. There are rumours of software upgrades on the way which will add this capability, but it isn't there yet.<br /><br />If you want a phone with an on-screen keyboard, this also isn't (yet) the phone for you. It's apparently on the way though. An I don't understand why anyone would rather use an on-screen keyboard when you can use the G1's fantastic real keyboard. I didn't think I'd like using the keyboard much, but it works brilliantly, at least for my hands. The 'chin' on the phone gets only very slightly in the way. And my phone is a black one - I've heard the letters are hard to see on the white and bronze versions.<br /><br />If you want a phone which doesn't force you to have a Google account, this isn't the phone for you. The first thing you have to do when you set up your phone is either enter your Google account details, or sign up for a new account. The phone is very tied into the Google way of doing things. This isn't that much of a problem for me - I'm not Googlephobic. Nor am I a Googlephile. Most of my email still goes through my own server, and there is software for the G1 which lets me read that email just fine. And I was starting to use Google calendar just before I got the G1, so it's quite nice that it is now synched up with the phone. Some people will find the Googleness of the phone to be a hindrance, but I find it works really smoothly, and is around three million times better than my previous Nokia when it comes to synchronization.<br /><br />If you want something which is thin and stylish, this probably isn't the phone for you. It isn't huge, but it's certainly no iphone. It's not ugly either - personally I think it's really well designed and good looking. Again, it's up to the beholder and their eye.<br /><br />If you want a phone with an incredibly flexible operating system, this is the phone for you. The Android OS is very well designed, and the way it operates is mostly very intuitive. And unlike Nokia phones, where it seems that once you have the phone, you won't get any new features until you buy a new phone, the T-Mobile say that the G1 will be actively updated with new versions of software.<br /><br />If you want to write software for your phone (in Java), this is the phone for you. Writing Android software is very easy, and Linux is a first class operating system when it comes to their development tools. Some parts of the SDK aren't quite finished, but that's because Google hadn't got them 100% stable before releasing the phone, and thought it'd be better to release a stable incomplete SDK that a buggy complete SDK, and I think that's a good way for things to be.<br /><br />If you want a phone which is exceptionally useful, this is the phone for you. There is already a huge amount of software available for it, and although there's a fair amount of rubbish, there's also loads of very useful stuff, and I'm finding the phone more and more indispensable.<br /><br />If you want to be in on the ground floor with the mobile operating system of the future, this is the phone for you. I genuinely believe that Android is the way to go with mobile phones, and have no regrets about getting this phone. And I purposefully got a twelve month contract rather than anything longer, because I'm pretty sure that by this time next year there'll be Android phones out there which are ten times better than this one!<br /><br />The phone's main negatives for me: poor battery life; not enough internal memory; sometimes a little sluggish going back to the home screen (I think it's probably garbage collecting); a few minor niggles with some of the core software (but at least I can branch the code and write a better version if I want to).<br /><br />The phone's main positives for me: bright, high contrast, high definition screen; real keyboard; sensitive (capacitive) touch screen; well designed operating system; mostly well designed software; easy syncing with Google; infinite possibilities; easy to use; fun to write software for it.James Otshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12813882332573811934noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14719955.post-8474272355534423182009-02-08T23:14:00.002+00:002009-02-08T23:30:31.787+00:00Android FunOn Friday I got myself a nice shiny new T-Mobile G1. Also known (incorrectly) as the GooglePhone. It's pretty darn good. Well, unless you expect the battery to last the day when you're playing on it constantly because it's your new toy. I imagine that once I'm using it 'normally' instead of intensively, it won't be quite so bad. But I'd certainly say at the moment that the battery life is atrocious. Oh well, I was expecting that anyway. Onwards and upwards. It's otherwise a fantastic little device, and has enormous potential.<br /><br />And it's easy to programme. I used to try to programme my Nokia phone using Symbian. But the number of hoops I had to jump through in order to get anything to work totally put me off, and I never got futher than writing a programme which said 'Hello' on the screen. (I guess 'Hello World' wouldn't have been much more effort, but by that time I'd had enough.) But programming Android is very easy. At first it was a little awkward, because on my six year old laptop (yes, six years old) the emulator was very slow, and used nearly all my computer's memory. But now I have a real phone I can plug the USB cable in and run and debug my programmes directly on the device. And from Linux too, which is pretty good.<br /><br />I'm currently working on a little programme which will log sensor values to a file. Then I'll be able to plot them on a Google map and see how fast I was travelling and how hard I was accelerating or cornering. Not because I drive 'that way', but because I've always thought it would be interesting to log stuff like that, and now I have a device which can do it. So far I've just written a test programme which shows the values of the various sensors and moves sliders around, but it's been incredibly easy to do.<br /><br />And just in case there's anyone reading this who wonders how I got the debugging to work in openSUSE 11.1, here's how. (Bear in mind that this is additional info to that which is in the SDK - it doesn't really make sense on its own). I created a file called 50-android.rules in /etc/udev/rules.d containing this line:<br /><br />SUBSYSTEM=="usb", SYSFS{idVendor}=="0bb4", MODE="0666", SYMLINK+="android_adb"<br /><br />Then I chmodded it to 755, and, as root, ran 'adb kill-server' followed by 'adb start-server'. Then I ran 'adb devices' to see if the device showed up in the list. If it didn't I killed and restarted the server again until it did. (I don't know if I need to, or if I could just wait.)<br /><br />After that, I was able to run and debug programmes from Eclipse directly on the device. Although I had to make sure that the manifest file had debuggable set to true, otherwise it didn't work.James Otshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12813882332573811934noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14719955.post-67876335444002508002008-06-24T07:19:00.002+00:002008-06-24T07:27:02.661+00:00Eating my own dog foodI've been running openSUSE's KDE 4.1 snapshots on my machine for a while now, and despite the occasional programme falling over (usually konqueror or akregator at the moment), it's being a great experience. I'm particularly addicted to KNetWalk, which is probably going to give me RSI, but I can do it so fast now that I need a new challenge. So I thought I'd get the source and have a go at making it harder. So I did. Get the source, that is. I updated my SVN version of the code, compiled it, and it all compiled without a hitch.<br /><br />Hang on. That can't be right. I never manager to compile KDE without problems. I must have made a mistake. So I tried logging into my newly compiled KDE, and it works too. I guess KDE is a little better than it used to be!<br /><br />Anyway, I was so impressed by how easy it is right now, that I had to blog about it. I haven't done any KDE coding for a while, so I'm not exactly eating my <span style="font-style:italic;">own</span> dog food. Maybe the title should be 'Making my own dog food' or something instead. But I will. Oh yes, I will. Probably. There are lots of little rough edges all over the place which I want to iron out, and ironing out rough edges is my forté. Maybe the title should be 'Ironing my own dog food'.James Otshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12813882332573811934noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14719955.post-77543581713158212772008-05-31T22:43:00.002+00:002008-05-31T22:59:08.574+00:00WowA couple of days ago, I dug out my old laptop, the screen of which had given up the ghost a few months ago, and switched it on. To my surprise, it was working perfectly, which is great, because my work laptop is about to be taken away as they roll out a load of extremely fast desktops. Great for work, not so great for me. But at least my old laptop has decided not to be broken any more.<br /><br />For the last year or so, since I had my nice new work laptop, I've been running openSUSE on an external USB hard drive (which surprisingly, benchmarked faster than using the internal drive), and I've been using KDE 4.0. I know my last post on this blog said I'd reverted to 3.5, but I tried 4.0.1 when it came out (or possible 4.0.2?), and discovered the actual show stoppers had been fixed, and the irritations were small enough I could live with them.<br /><br />Anyway, onto the 'wow'. Since my old laptop had a clean install of openSUSE 10.3 on it and I didn't mind about messing it up with an unstable version of KDE, I put the unstable KDE snapshot version on instead of 4.0. And I think the word which best sums it up is 'Wow'. It's really, really good. <br /><br />There are some bits in particular that I liked: being able to resize the panel; the panel for icons on the desktop; the beautiful highlight for icons; the alt-f2 thingy (I can never remember its proper name) which is brilliant, and looks and works so well I keep pressing alt-f2 and typing stuff in even though I don't need to run any programmes; the way you can style plasma easily; the way plasma styles work so much better than before; the pim programmes being KDE4ified; the sounds; the plus/minus symbols for selecting/deselecting icons (brilliant idea); everything seems more responsive (even on this old laptop); things looking good even without compositing switched on...<br /><br />So, great job everyone. This beta is fantastic.James Otshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12813882332573811934noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14719955.post-66066019619774822692008-01-27T19:43:00.000+00:002008-01-27T19:58:38.742+00:00RevertedAlas (and alack), I have reverted to using KDE 3.5.8. I wasn't going to, but yesterday then KDE 4.0.0 refused to load for some unknown reason, and I got thinking: Was it worth trying to fix it? Unfortunately, I could only think of four reasons to use KDE 4.0.0, and they weren't very convincing:<br /><br />Reasons to use KDE 3.5.8<br /><ul><li>It's a stable, well tested system which has had most of the rough edges whittled away over time - and most of the time, it just works. (This reason could be expanded into many bullet points - one for each thing in KDE 3.5.8 which works which is broken in KDE 4.0.0, but I'll leave it rolled up into a single bullet point to save this looking more like a rant than it probably already does - and leave the bug reports in bugs.kde.org).<br /></li><li>I don't have to use AIGLX (the non-compositing version of KDE 4.0.0's KWin isn't very useable), and so everything is much faster, Google Earth works and I can watch videos. (In KDE 4.0.0 kaffeine and codeine just show an empty black box)</li><li>I can set up the panels just how I like them. (One medium sized panel at the bottom for the K-menu, the task list (or whatever it is called), a clock and the lock/logout buttons, and a small one at the top for a 'quick launch' bar, the pager and the system tray.)</li><li>I think the style I use in KDE 3.5.8 is sharper than Oxygen currently is, which looks a bit blurry somehow - I'm not exactly sure why though. But it makes it nicer to use.</li></ul>Reasons to use KDE 4.0.0<br /><ul><li>Plasma on the desktop can be pretty (although it tends to crash a lot).</li><li>KWin with compositing looks cool.</li><li>Tabs in the Oxygen style look kind of nice.</li><li>I can find bugs and report them so that KDE 4.0.1/KDE 4.1 can be better.</li></ul>I am well aware that KDE 4.0.0 is actually a beta release which has been release as a .0 release to try to get more people to use it so that more bugs can be reported and fixed, so I can't complain too much (although I would strongly argue for not releasing betas without the beta moniker, but that's another rant). I'll still boot into KDE 4.0.0 from time to time (that is, if openSUSE's packages fix themselves soon!) and look forward to KDE 4.0.1.James Otshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12813882332573811934noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14719955.post-72066919156292306032008-01-19T08:00:00.000+00:002008-01-19T08:07:27.883+00:00KDE 4.0: The First WeekI've now had KDE 4.0 installed for just over a week, and I'm getting used to its quirks. I'm very impressed with KWin - it hasn't crashed on me once. At least, not since I got the right combination of options (for me, the intel graphics driver instead of the i810 one, and OpenGL instead of XRender). And it's a darn sight nicer than compiz. I always got frustrated by compiz because it didn't understand KDE properly, and I couldn't use Alt+RMB to resize and things like that. And it would crash. KWin just works, although rather slowly.<br /><br />Generally, KDE 4.0 seems a fair bit slower than KDE 3.5, but I think that might be down to the compositing stuff. Also, there are quite a few little niggly bugs which I hope will be fixed by 4.0.1. I've reported a few bugs, but I'm still trying to work out reliable ways of reproducing some of them before I report them.<br /><br />I said in my last post that I was inspired to start coding for KDE 4.0. Well, as usual, my inspiration has quickly waned as I moved into a new house and have more useful things to do at the moment, such as painting. So don't expect code from me any time soon.James Otshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12813882332573811934noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14719955.post-7761119171145758082008-01-13T16:27:00.000+00:002008-01-13T16:48:46.722+00:00Living with KDE 4.0Surprisingly enough, no one has flamed me yet for being disappointed with the quality of KDE 4.0. I must try harder. I used to be able to attract flames much more easily.<br /><br />Well, I've had KDE 4.0 on my machine for a day or so now, and I'm getting used to it. I've switched to running AIGLX so that I can use KWin's OpenGL mode instead of the XRender mode, and it's a lot more stable, although I can't run Google Earth any more. With the OpenGL rendering, the desktop look great, and the beauty of the desktop alone is probably enough to stop me switching back to KDE 3.5 at the moment. A few times I have clicked on a window only to have it completely disappear without warning - not sure what that's about. There are a few niggling little bugs in the behaviour of a few things, but I'm sure they'll get sorted in a minor release before too long. (Such as icon widgets not working with a graphics tablet, not being able to hide the plasma blob, konqueror not loading images or styles, etc.)<br /><br />I am inspired to try writing some plasma applets to do things properly. And when I say properly, I mean how I want them to work. I've had a look at some of the source for existing stuff, and it looks relatively easy, so instead of writing any more of this, I'm now going to go off and write some code. Perhaps. If I can stop gazing at the beautiful desktop.James Otshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12813882332573811934noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14719955.post-22634133161966501742008-01-11T21:04:00.001+00:002008-01-11T21:16:17.271+00:00Giving 4.0 a goSo, KDE 4.0 is out, and I have installed it on my computer. I've had it on there for a while actually, in one form or another, but this is the first time I've used the actual released version, and the first time I've logged into my main account using it.<br /><br />And what are my first impressions? Well, the first impressions are that it has, again, improved over the previous pre-release. A nice new wallpaper, a slightly sleeker panel, and a number 4 instead of a 3.97 or something.<br /><br />My second impressions are that it's still very unstable, very unpolished and, to be honest, somewhere between an alpha and a beta in quality. I had been expecting the lack of features, as that was well advertised, but I had at least expected the released features to work. Anyway, I'm going to stick it out - it's going to stay on my computer for the next week at least, and I'll start writing bug reports., and looking forward to 4.0.1, or whatever comes next.<br /><span style="font-style: italic;"></span>James Otshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12813882332573811934noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14719955.post-60606913964028161172007-10-06T07:46:00.001+00:002007-10-06T08:04:09.062+00:00openSUSE 10.3: First Look<span style="font-style: italic;">Please bear in mind that this is not a review; it is just a few initial observations after installing openSUSE 10.3 and using it for an hour or so. I'm not a journalist, so even after using it for a week I wouldn't be able to write a well balanced review of openSUSE 10.3. And I'm biased, because I've been using SUSE for at least seven years.</span><br /><br />I downloaded the openSUSE 10.3 yesterday and upgraded my laptop from 10.2 in the evening. The upgrade went reasonably smoothly, with just the usual problems: the wireless network couldn't be connected during installation so it couldn't find any online repositories, so I ended up telling it to remove quite a few packages which it couldn't upgrade, and after the installation it had got my hard drives the wrong way round in grub's menu.list - but that's my fault for booting from an external USB drive, which confuses things as the drives do get renumbered on boot.<br /><br />After installing, everything still worked just as it did before, which was great. They've even put the intel graphics card hack into the boot scripts now so I don't have to have it in boot.local. I switched the graphics driver from <span style="font-style: italic;">i810</span> to the new <span style="font-style: italic;">intel</span> one, and the wireless driver from <span style="font-style: italic;">ipw3945</span> to <span style="font-style: italic;">iwl3945</span>, and now my wireless connection comes up reliably. I used to have to connect to a neighbour's unsecured network before it would allow me to connect to my secured one.<br /><br />Upon trying to play an mp3 file, a message popped up prompting me to install the mp3 codecs, so I followed the instructions, and it gave me a nice wizard which allowed me to choose a whole load of codecs and other 'restricted' stuff. It then proceeded to download it all, complain that all the files on the DVD were corrupt (thought they weren't - they installed fine later), installed the stuff which had worked, and I had mp3 playability. It was much easier than before, except for the spurious corruption messages.<br /><br />The package management seems to have been overhauled considerably, but it still has the problem of not giving much feedback as to what is going on: instead of showing an overall progress bar and then working its way through all the sub tasks, it'll show a progress bar for one task, and when that has finished it'll show another progress bar. You have no way of knowing whether you have a minute left to wait or three hours. Also, if you move the dialog to the corner of the screen, when the next progress bar appears it'll be back in the default position, which is really annoying. I imagine I'll probably continue using Smart because it is so, well, smart.<br /><br />The boot and login graphics are back to green, which I like because it means my computer looks different from most. And the graphics are much sharper and more professional-looking, in my mind at least. Especially the welcome graphic when you boot from DVD. I have switched my desktop wallpaper back to the openSUSE 10.1 one though, as I prefer a blue wallpaper to a green one. The icons in YaST have all changed - they don't look better though - they're all grey and nondescript.<br /><br />I'd like to keep playing with openSUSE 10.3 today, but I have to go to the Grand Designs Live show now. Oh, what a hardship!James Otshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12813882332573811934noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14719955.post-28652000812130719132007-09-26T20:51:00.000+00:002007-09-26T20:53:17.996+00:00KDE4 Won't StartI can't start KDE4 any more - it fails to start dbus. To be more exact, qdbus gives this error message when it is run:<br /><br />Could not connect to D-Bus server: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.Spawn.ExecFailed: Failed to execute dbus-launch to autolaunch D-Bus session<br /><br /><br />But when I run dbus-launch it works fine. I'm sure it's probably something simple, but I'm about ready to give up.James Otshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12813882332573811934noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14719955.post-82863197404657491892007-06-27T09:21:00.000+00:002007-06-27T09:25:41.704+00:00Hibernate LoggingHave you ever tried to get hibernate to log SQL? It's quite easy, just set log4j.logger.org.hibernate.SQL=DEBUG, and hey presto, you have SQL statements logged. Except it's not too useful, as most of them are parameterised queries, with lists of question marks instead of values. So you do a search on Google and it turns up millions of entries saying you need to set log4j.logger.org.hibernate.type. But it doesn't help, because all the articles say the value should be INFO, whereas what you really want is log4j.logger.org.hibernate.type=TRACE.<br /><br />So there you go. Maybe Google will turn up my blog entry instead for you.James Otshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12813882332573811934noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14719955.post-62717746033807351872007-05-01T17:56:00.000+00:002007-05-01T17:57:32.744+00:00My rpmdb is backThanks to everyone who told me about the rpmdb backup in /var/adm/backup/rpmdb - I restored it and now everything is working beautifully.James Otshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12813882332573811934noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14719955.post-91746225001401519242007-04-28T07:30:00.000+00:002007-04-28T07:33:29.593+00:00Oops, I lost my rpmdbYesterday my computer started randomly rebooting when I was trying to install packages on my computer, so I booted from a live CD and ran resierfsck on my disk, which fixed a whole bunch of things. But now when I run <span style="font-family: courier new;">rpm -qa</span> I get a list of no packages - and running <span style="font-family: courier new;">rpmdb --rebuilddb</span> doesn't help. Fortunately <span style="font-family: courier new;">smart query</span> lists everything that is installed, so I'm pretty sure there must be some way to get the rpmdb back, but I can't find it. Help!James Otshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12813882332573811934noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14719955.post-34219042097515775522007-04-08T18:30:00.000+00:002007-04-08T18:40:00.757+00:00How To Build A New FreetypeI've had several requests for my RPM for freetype2 including sub-pixel rendering for openSUSE 10.2. So here are instructions on how to build your own, including my modified SPEC file. If you're in the USA it might be illegal to download my file, so this file is only for people who live in free countries. Or at least semi-free countries, like the UK.<br /><br /><ol><li>Download <a href="http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/SL-OSS-factory/inst-source/suse/src/freetype2-2.3.1-7.src.rpm">freetype2 source rpm</a> from <a href="http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/SL-OSS-factory/inst-source/suse/src/">http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/SL-OSS-factory/inst-source/suse/src/</a> - it might be a newer version by the time you come to download this.</li><li>Download freetype-2.3.3.tar.bz2 and freetype-doc-2.3.3.tar.bz2 from <a href="http://freetype.org">freetype.org</a>.</li><li>Download <a href="http://jamesots.com/downloads/freetype2.spec">freetype2.spec</a> if your government will let you.</li><li>Install the source rpm: <span style="font-family: courier new;">sudo rpm -ivh freetype2-2.3.1-7.src.rpm</span></li><li>Put the tar.bz2 files in /usr/src/packages/SOURCES</li><li>Put the spec file in /usr/src/packages/SPECS</li><li>Build the rpm: <span style="font-family: courier new;">rpmbuild /usr/src/packages/SPECS/freetype2.spec</span></li><li>The built rpms will be in /usr/src/packages/RPMS/i586</li></ol>Note that you will need to have any required libraries and tools installed in order to build this. It should just be the basic development tools I think.James Otshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12813882332573811934noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14719955.post-83818242676970852452007-04-07T11:41:00.000+00:002007-04-07T11:49:32.596+00:00Sub-pixel Antialiasing in openSUSE 10.2Finally, I have sub-pixel antialiasing in openSUSE 10.2. For some reason, it was turned off in the 10.2 release because of something being broken. I haven't been able to find out what. But yesterday I got tired of waiting for it to be fixed, so I downloaded the alpha freetype package from 10.3, only to find that it also has sub-pixel antialiasing turned off. No problem - I just installed the source package, replaced the tar files with version 2.3.3 ones, edited the spec file to enable sub-pixel rendering, disabled the freetype2-bitmap-foundry patch (because it wouldn't compile with it in there), rebuilt the rpm and installed it. Hey presto - sub-pixel rendering!<br /><br />Last time I blogged about getting fonts to look better in 10.1, I had a load of comments telling me I should just turn of antialiasing because text looks better without it. Well, I like antialiasing, and especially sub-pixel antialiasing. On my 1900x1200 display it looks great. So there!James Otshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12813882332573811934noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14719955.post-42381776088733620992007-03-10T16:53:00.000+00:002007-03-10T16:59:03.298+00:00My Subwoofer Is WoofingI managed to get the subwoofer on my Inspiron 9400 working today. I had read in several places that I just need to add 'model=ref' to the module config file, but I'd tried that without success.<br /><br />Today I discovered that openSUSE 10.2 uses version 1.0.12 rc2 of the alsa drivers, and they don't support the subwoofer. So I downloaded alsa-driver-1.0.13, configured it with <span style="font-weight: bold;">./configure --with-cards=hda-intel</span>, ran <span style="font-weight: bold;">make</span>, and then <span style="font-weight: bold;">make install-modules</span>, rebooted my machine, and the sub was working. Oh and that model=ref line was added to /etc/modprobe.d/sound, so now the first line is <span style="font-weight: bold;">options snd-hda-intel enable=1 index=0 model=ref</span>.<br /><br /><br />There's only one slight problem - the master volume control doesn't adjust the subwoofer (shown as LFE in the mixer), and muting the sound also doesn't mute the sub. But other than that it works!James Otshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12813882332573811934noreply@blogger.com7