Evil Home Stereo

Wow, finally some news which bothered me enough to make me post a new blog entry. No, not the fact that tomorrow is my birthay and I totally forgot about it ;~) It’s about that (German) article on the Heise newsticker from yesterday.

It reports that Siemens applied for about 5,000 patents this year, 100 more than last year. That’s right, five thousand. What the hell are they patenting there? You can’t tell me that people are innovative enough to invent 5,000 new things a year. People of only one company.

Granted, it’s the the company with the most applications in Germany (and second in Europe after Philips). But still, how many of those applications must be for stuff which is quite trivial? Any how many might be software patents?

No wonder patent offices grant the most trivial stuff if they get flooded with that mass of patent applications per year.

I remember a time when I tuned quite regularly into music TV like MTV and VIVA (and Onyx which I never actually liked). Most the time not to watch it actively but to have some background music on long hack nights. Some times I even actively switched into some shows which could happen to be quite fun to watch. Like Fast Forward with Charlotte Roche or Mixery Raw Deluxe when it was still moderated by MC Rene. The latter even though I’m not really a Hip Hop fan. Oh, and of course the Anime on VIVA.

But at some point, it all went down.

Have you ever noticed that stupid icon “Java Web Start” the JRE throws on your desktop if you install it on Windows? Have you ever tried it instead of deleting it immediately? The idea behind it is quite nifty though nothing really new. If you click on a so-called JNLP file (“Java Network Launching Protocol”), an application is loaded on your box and can be started immediately. Something like Java Applets on speed. Or An Administrator’s Worst Nightmare, I’m not sure.

Whatever, out of interest I tried to use it on my KDE box. And it didn’t work (of course). The Installation Guide offers a short guide for Mozilla (or better: Netscape). It’s actually so vague that it also applies to Konqueror (use the File Associations options).

Instead of following the step-by-step guide (and probably miss some details) you can also just install a small desktop file to $KDEHOME/share/mimelnk/application — the KDEHOME environment variable defaults to what the command kde-config --localprefix tells you. If you want to install it system-wide, put it into the subdirectory application below the directory the command kde-config --install mime --expandvars gives you. I guess you might have to run kbuildsycoca afterwards (restarting KDE will definitely help).

As GNOME and KDE share the same syntax for desktop files, it should be possible to use that file on GNOME, too, but I have no clue where you have to put it.

After ages finally a new blog entry… and still no comments possible. Sorry guys, I suck, but vi is the easiest blogging tool to set up.

Whatever, this post is a reply to Aaron Seigo’s last posting (I first started to write it as a comment on his blog but blogger.com’s comment functionality sucks and I missed my vi). Under the title “konsole vs xterm, or proof that KDE is not bloated” he writes:

[...] I explained to [somebody who complained about konsole's assumed bloatedness] that since konsole allows multiple tabs one avoids the overhead of multiple instances of the same app when running multiple sessions; having an equal number of xterms would be “heavier” for some value of N sessions. [...]

Yeah Aaron, for the usage case you quoted, Konsole might be indeed less a hog than xterm et al. And I actually always have some Konsole with a bunch of tabs open somewhere.

But I also have the habit to open up “one shot” shells for commands I just quickly hack in; like looking up man pages (the startup time of kio_help is even worse than Konsole) or some shell commands to try out. Those I normally open via minicli or a (better: the only) symbol I have in my Kicker. Much quicker than locating first the collected shells, change focus and open up a new tab.

Multiple konsole windows also have the advantage that you can spread them over several desktops.

So in those cases the footprints of all the Konsoles probably add up, at least for the short time they run. But that’s not so bad, I have enough memory in my box.

What’s worse is the startup time for a single new konsole instance; just compare the numbers:

mss@otherland ~ $ time xterm -e bash -c exit

real    0m0.363s
user    0m0.032s
sys     0m0.018s
mss@otherland ~ $ time konsole -e bash -c exit

real    0m2.148s
user    0m0.872s
sys     0m0.153s

I must admit that all my KDE is compiled with full debug enabled which makes it a bit sluggish sometimes, but comparable numbers to the above I get on the boxes at my university’s labs which run a standard SuSE install. So guys, please get down those frickin startup times KDE apps generally show. (Or maybe I should try prelink one day?)

But you know what? I use Konsole instead of xterm anyway — for the features it offers I have no problem waiting a few jiffies for a new shell. And these times are already much too hectic anyway…

Last Monday I got my hands on a Siemens Gigaset SE515 DSL/cable router (the successor of the SE505, officially not yet available but already shipped for free if you order a new DSL account at GMX). The box and the software itself looked pretty good, much better than the D-Link DSL-G664T router I had to configure before.

At some point I switched on the logging feature in debug mode (why is another, rather long story) and suddenly some Linux boot messages stared at me. Very cool. I finished my job (or not, part of that other story) and went home. But before that I looked on the CD, in the manual, everywhere. Nowhere I found a notice where one can get the GPL’d sources from.

At home I decided to write them a mail and (politely) ask for the sources. And today (almost a week later, but hey) I got an answer:

Guten Tag Herr Stretz,

vielen Dank, dass Sie sich mit Ihrem Anliegen an Siemens Customer Care wenden.

Hier k�nnen Sie Informationen und den Quellcode finden. Diese Seite wird noch weiter aktualisiert werden.

http://now-portal.c-lab.de, dort nach “gigaset” suchen (search)

Wir w�nschen Ihnen einen sch�nen Tag und freuen uns, da� Sie sich f�r Siemens entschieden haben.

Mit freundlichen Gr��en

Harry Wilms
Siemens Customer Care Center

And indeed, here is the code. I haven’t looked at it yet if it’s complete, but at least something’s there.

A word about that NOW Portal: Looks like yet another open source project hoster like SourceForge, BerliOS or Tigris.org, but focused on a collaboration of German companies with open source projects. It’s sponsored by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research.

unsermake is a pretty cool replacement for automake in KDE, developed by Stephan Kulow. It’s already been around for quite some time but had never an offical website and the code was available only via CVS. So today I created an unoffical homepage at the KDE Wiki and wrote a small script which generates nightly builds on my website.

Since I upgraded my workstation and my notebook to a 2.6 kernel, both emitted an annoying hissing sound from the speakers. Judging from the posting on several mailinglists and forums am I not the only one who hears this. But nobody has a clue what it could be. Except the guys on the LKML of course.

A Google query I hadn’t tried yet (because I didn’t notice until now that it’s depending on the CPU load) led me to this posting by Aaron Burt which explains my problem perfectly. And the solution posted by Prakash K. Cheemplavam does the trick.

The sound goes away if you disable the Athlon Powersave mode via athcool. Doh. That’s bad. Ok, it’s really a relieve for my ears but I need that Powersave mode.

Prakash mentions that this is a known problem for the VIA KT133 chipset under Windows (my machines are one KT133 and a KT266). And athcool even offers an “fixup” mode which should fix some “VIA audio problems”. Which doesn’t help.

As I neither want to do without the Powersave mode nor can stand that sound, I’ve got to find another solution. One question is why it didn’t happen with a 2.4 kernel. Maybe Frank v. Waveren points into the right direction and the to 1000 Hz increased timer interrupt is the culprit. When I find the time I’ve got to check if the variable interrupt patch posted by Jean-Marc Valin or the ones by the High Resolution Timers project helps.

Nathaniel McCallum wrote a short guide on how to switch your Gentoo to the recenetly released X.org X-server:

1. Make sure that all your config files are updated by running “etc-update”. The reason is that after xorg-x11 is installed there will be over 200 new config files to update. Most (if not all) of them just need to be replaced. You just don’t want to get old non-updated config files to get mixed in with this (and possibly break something).
2. I made sure I had a binary package available of xfree. If you dont a simple “emerge -B xfree” will do.
3. Then I made a binary package of xorg-x11 without actually installing it (ie. “emerge -B –nodeps xorg-x11″). This way I had binary packages of both in case of problems (to avoid multiple compiles if there is a problem).
4. After that I stopped xdm and xfs (in my default runlevel; ie. “/etc/init.d/[xfs and xdm] stop”)
5. Then I uninstalled xfree (“emerge -Cp xfree”).
6. Then I emerged xorg-x11 (“emerge -k xorg-x11″).
7. The only major changes are the name of the config file and the path of the fonts. Once xorg-x11 is installed, there are lots of config files to update. So then I ran etc-update and just entered “-5″ to overwrite all the config files with the newer versions.
8. Then I edited my old XFConfig-4 to changed the new path to the fonts. All fonts are now in /usr/share/fonts/.
9. Change the name of the XFConfig/XFConfig-4 file to xorg.conf
10. Re-start xfs and xdm.
11. Done! It was actually very painless. And my machine even seems
    slightly faster. But perhaps I’m just immagineing things .

And Neil Bothwick added:

To save recompiling such a large program to create a package, use “quickpkg xfree” to build it from the currently installed files.

Unfortunately did I read this after I unmerged XFree and kicked off the compilation of the new X. So no binaries for me. Let’s keep the fingers crossed and see if it goes smoothly anyway…

Nice quote from the current c’t editorial:

When a company like T-Com claims that their creative heads discovered the brand new trend to be telephone flatrates, they probably believe as well that the radio was invented by removing the ray tube from the TV.

Today SpamAssassin marked a mail sent by a friend of mine as spam. That was the first false positive for… umm… ages. But it still was unnecessary, because I know her and have her in my addressbook. But my Bayes database didn’t know her because she writes me a mail once in a blue moon. And neither was she in my whitelist because I’m too lazy to keep the list in sync with my addressbook.

But OTOH is my addressbook (managed by KAddressBook) relatively up to date. Alas! KMail 3.2 doesn’t support a filter criteria like “sender is in addressbook”.

I first tried to wrote somthing like this via DCOP but that didn’t work because the DCOP interfaces of the apps involved are still far from perfect. So I needed to parse the stuff myself. (Which wasn’t that hard.)

When I later went to file a wish for the new filter criteria, I found out that I obviously wasn’t the first one who needed a script like this. In the existing wish there was a script by J�rg Brenninkmeyer which had the nifty feature to request the list of addresses you recently wrote to, too. I blatantly stole that feature from him

To cut a long story short, here is my script. To install it, follow the description in the script itself:

This script will read a mail from stdin and query both your KMail list of recent recipients and your KAddressbook for any addresses found in From and Reply-To headers. If an entry was found, a header X-Kmail-Known-Sender with a value of YES or NO is added.

To use this script with KMail, copy this file to ~/bin/kmail-known-sender.sh and create a new filter like this (stuff inside double quotes has to be typed to/chosen from the input fields):

Filter Criteria:

“” “is greater than” “0″

Filter Action:

“pipe through” “~/bin/kmail-known-sender.sh”

Important: Deselect the “If this filter matches, stop processing here”-checkbox.

Now you can check for the X-KMail-Known-Sender where you need it, eg. in a following rule for SpamAssassin:

Filter Criteria:

“X-KMail-Known-Sender” “doesn’t contain” “YES”

Filter Action:

“pipe through” “spamc”