B10[mg]

Today I was surprised by Yahoo Mail. Usually, I can access the beta version without a problem, but for some reason, Yahoo deemed it necessary to block linux users. Why, oh why? It was working rather well!

image hosted by photobucket.

The solution? Get MS Windows or a Mac. Yahoo, why hast thou forsaken us Linux users?

Update: another, simpler solution workaround is to use the User Agent Switcher Extension (and set it to FireFox 2.0, WinXP).

yahoo mail beta, linux, firefox

After my 30Boxes greasemonkey script had been implemented on the website, I figured it was time to look at more possibilities.

The iPod Nano I have always tells me it can offer me calendars, so why not give it a go? I already found out how to put music on the iPod so let's see if I can get more stuff to work!

The format iPod supports (for calendars) is ics (the iCal file format). 30Boxes makes it a breeze to grab this file. Just login, go to Setting, Sharing, Entire View and there you'll see a link pointing to your ICS File.

After mounting your iPod, all you have to do is something like:

$ GET [ICS File URL] > /mnt/ipod/Calendars/30boxes.ics

And you're good to go. Your 30Boxes calendar can now be viewed on your iPod.

Sweet, but of course a calendar isn't too fun to look at all day. It usually contains appointments and data concerning boring meetings, so lets see if I can also get some photos of my wife on there (believe me, it's much more fun to look at than a calendar ;-).

Sure enough this is easy too! GPixPod, a python solution, is designed just for this. After installing it, it worked straight out of the box.

So now I can listen to (part of) my collection of metal CDs by using gnupod. 30Boxes is providing me with an ics file, so I can keep track of my appointments and in the meanwhile, I can look at my wife, thanks to GPixPod. That leaves me with the Contacts option, but I first have to find a good way to store addresses and phone numbers (... as if I didn't try half a billion things already). Feel free to recommend me a service like hiveminder or 30boxes with solid addressbook functionality :-)

gnupod, 30boxes, gpixpod, ipod, linux, ics, ical

Every morning, I find myself making breakfast as fast as possible, so I can check on the traffic jam situation, weather forecast and emails. Why not let my computer talk to me, while I prepare breakfast?

People who use Linux and are interested in text-to-speech all know festival. It's fun for a while, yet not too useful in my humble opinion, because I (and others) have problems understanding the text.

So I went to look for other software and found Cepstral.

The voices are audible, the "effects" are funny and it's easy to teach your voice how to pronounce words (names can be a problem). The only drawback: it's not for free (except for the demos).

My first bet was to write a script around the demos, thinking it'd be very expensive. But when I found out you can get a license for a mere 30 USD, I dropped my script and went for it.

I registered the voice "Callie" and am impressed by her. The quality is so much better than festival. Woohoo, awesome!

So, for the people who have nothing else to do, feel free to listen to Callie reading this entry :-)

festival, text to speech, cepstral

In the past, I didn't care about my home too much. Computers and wires everywhere. But now that I live in my new home, I think it'd be more appropriate to make it all look a little nicer (if only it was to prevent problems with my wife ;-)

So I started out with my WiFi LAN. As usually, I don't pay attention to hardware compatibility and my Linux system and so I ended up with the damned Linksys WRK54G. After that was fixed, I still encountered many problems. It usually happened when I'd be downloading some torrent. The D-Link AP would freak out and needed a reset. Not nice. Maybe my PCI card (D-Link DWL-G520+ using the acx module) was to blame?

Time for a change! And yes, I finally looked at the driver support, and computer stores in my vicinity. After some time of researching, the best I could easily get would be a SMC SMCWPCI-G.

This card contains an atheros chip and is supposed to work decent with the madwifi modules. After installing the card and modules, I got it working quite nice, although my connection wasn't as fast as I hoped it to be. This was easily fixed by the iwconfig command (`iwconfig ath0 rate 54M`).

Yay! Stable, somewhat fast, WLAN!

DWL-G520+, SMCWPCI-G, WLAN, madwifi, acx

In my (limited) spare time, I sometimes sell my soul to whoever pays me (read: I program for people who'd like to pay me ;-). Since my time is very limited lately, I now keep it to a bare minimum, yet every now and then I still hack up some Perl scripts for someone else.

Sometimes these people ask me to install whatever I have made, and usually, I have no problems with doing that. Yesterday, however, I ran into a little dispute with a certain rather big webhoster, or better, with the hellhelpdesk of it.

My script seemed to die and I couldn't really see why (the code worked fine on my server), yet luckily, the FTP credentials I received, also worked for a SSH connection (making life so much easier).

Running the script from the command line went fine, so I went looking for the Apache error log files. Most webhosts I have seen, seem to think it's evil to present the files to you, so they hide them somewhere in a dark corner of the server.

"This must be a FAQ", I thought, so I went to crawl on the webhost's website. After several minutes of digging through the "documentation", I gave up and hit the "Live Help" button.

After typing the user name (of my "employer"), a flashy window popped up and a nice gentleman asked me how he could help me. I explained to him that I'd like to see the error_logs, for I had no clue why my scripts weren't working. He would put the IIS error log files in "my" root directory. I explained him that I really doubted the server I was on was running IIS, and he promptly corrected himself by saying he would put the Apache logfiles in the root directory.

No clue where they were before my request, yet after a little while, I indeed saw the file error_log in /home/ (so not the root...).

Quickly after I spotted the error! My .htaccess file, with some URL rewrites, didn't work.

[Tue Mar 07 02:07:23 2006] [alert] [client 82.93.15.120] /path/to/.htaccess: Invalid command 'RewriteEngine', perhaps mis-spelled or defined by a module not included in the server configuration

So, back to the friendly live help guy! He assured me, however, this was a "coding error" and they didn't support coding errors. I can see there point, yet I can also see this error has close to nothing to do with my script/coding. I asked him friendly to solve this (by installing or enabling mod_rewrite on the server), yet he didn't move from his diagnosis: coding error.

I worked around it by using a ErrorDocument 404 setting, yet it's ugly.

Why, oh why didn't he just say: "Sorry, but mod_rewrite is not supported" ?

I hate it when I know more about something, than the guy who's supposed to help me (luckily, that barely happens ;-)