<ARCHIVE> Wilmer's stuff

Maintaining a weblog indeed seems to be one of those things I'd better not be doing. I'm in Mountain View for a month and two days already and this is the first time I actually write something here instead of postponing it. Good, because in five days I'm leaving already so it'd be too late. Today's Memorial Day, an American bank holiday, so I'm not even at work.

Had a good time here, both at work and in the weekends. More productive than last year, and more exciting evenings and weekends. My bicycle was still waiting for me, and after I blew off all the dust it gathered in almost a year time, it's quite capable of getting me to and back from work again. :-)

Of course with how well EUR is doing compared to USD, one should always spend some of his/her time in the US on Amazon.com. I decided to do the same and am quite hooked to Mario Kart DS now. It's just a fantastic and very addictive game. Also bought a Nokia N800, which is a great toy, but not as great as the DS.

Last Saturday hoyhoy took me to a comedy club in Santa Cruz. Kasper Hauser (of SkyMaul fame) was there, which was quite amusing. We failed to see what was funny about the other artist though, especially since we were pretty much the only persons not laughing at all. :-)

Other hilights include how I found out telephones do not like salty water and taking a non-triband spare phone to the US is pointless. I'm a bit sad about my poor 6310i (I tried to save it by washing it out with non-salty water and then letting it dry for more than a day but it didn't help) and am not sure about what to get now. I'll probably wait for the GPhone, which' existence I don't have to deny anymore. :-)

Anyway, it's almost twenty degrees (Celsius, obviously, Fahrenheits are just too confusing and illogical :-P) outside so what am I doing in the living room? Time to check out this "sun" thing while I still can!

Yesterday I finally found an excuse to play with WWW::Mechanize. Wrote a little script that parses an e-mail and posts it as a ticket comment on BitlBee's Trac page. Just posting it here now in case someone else is interested. It works pretty well already, I just have to find something to MIME-decode messages, otherwise things look a bit ugly sometimes and signatures may not be detected and stripped properly.

The script is at: http://wilmer.gaast.net/downloads/mail2trac.pl. Just add it to your procmailrc or /etc/aliases and you're done!

[edit] MIME-decoding is there too now. That was a hell to implement... :-(

Now that my (and pretty much every other) machine uses UTF-8 by default, I was pretty much forced to ditch rxvt in favour of rxvt-unicode. Unfortunately the rxvt-unicode authors think attaching some keycap picture insert mode to the Ctrl-Shift key combination (which is easy to hit by accident) would be HANDY. Even handier, it can only be disabled at compile time.

Thanks for nothing guys, I really hope there's at least one person on this planet who agrees that this is handy ... I'm afraid most people who accidentally hit Ctrl-Shift every few minutes don't agree.

So, behold:


For all you Debian+rxvt-unicode users out there waiting for this bug to be fixed... :-)

[edit]Added dch command to make sure apt-get doesn't reinstall the original package every time.[/edit]

So actually Flickr is full of pictures of this store already, but now I got a Google Street Views link! ;-) It's a common store in at least the Silicon Valley, and I really wonder if maybe they invented this common misspell. :-)

Just "wrote" a little tool so I can change the margins of the TV-Out signal. It's amazing how much bigger the picture is now. I'm off to watch some cartoons. :-)

In case anyone's looking for this: xtvmargin

Got a little bit confused by this bug report while trying to get the TV-out on my mainboard working properly. As any European TV, mine wants PAL signals, not NTSC. The bug report gave me the impression that there should be separate PAL/NTSC mode definitions. But in the current driver, this isn't the case anymore.

Instead, they now use RandR properties to maintain this setting. And RandR, at least for properties, seems to be read-only .... soooo, how does it work then???

Well, try something like this:


Took me a whole weekend to find this, but at least it works now, in full colour! This didn't seem to be very well-documented to me, so I hope this post will help. If it doesn't work for you, maybe your TV doesn't understand S-Video. There's a very simple hack to solve that issue too. All you need is two wires, no need to solder anything. :-)

Thanks for making Linux drivers for the on-board graphics stuff on my mainboard. Next year, could you please not publish them as a .... .EXE file???

Yep, another birthday passed, and I celebrated it with my father and grandparents, here in Dublin. My grandparents never travelled by airplane so far, so it was quite an adventure. Unfortunately they had to get to know the great Irish weather here. But then again, it isn't all that different from the Dutch weather...

So a little while after my complaint about NTL blocking traffic to some sites, they now block access to all sites ... they cut me off. :-) Still waiting for my ADSL. This is Ireland, so if they say it'll take two weeks to ocnnect you, you do have to add two more. (That's how it works with appointments at least, I'm told. If you have an appointment at x, make sure you don't actually show up before x+15 min!) Oh heck, fortunately most bigger cities know these things called "security-unconscious neighbours" and "open access point"... ;-)

Still want to do some BitlBee snapshot release, maybe tomorrow. The new Jabber groupchat support works very well, it's working perfectly at work for over two months already, and I'm actually not even the only one who uses it. :-) And who knows when this will become a stable release... Clearly I've been too ambitious with adding new stuff, and too lazy to finish all the details to make it worth releasing. :-(

Oh yeah, and the new website rocks! But I suppose most people saw it already by now.