Planet Larry

Tracemonky javascript performance

2008-08-27T23:04:39Z

I thought that my comparison of the latest Webkit vs stable Gecko wasn't fair so I decided today to create an ebuild to fetch the latest xulrunner so I could test Tracemonkey. I had to tweak the ebuild a little (other than fetching with mercurial) because xulrunner would not compile with lcms enabled. I created another USE flag that toggles lcms. With this and some modification to the patch tarball I was able to build the latest xulrunner.

Here is my ebuild:

/usr/local/portage/net-libs/xulrunner/xulrunner-9999.ebuild

This ebuild requires the xulrunner.conf from the original ebuild files.

Next I launched Epiphany and typed "about:config". I searched for "jit" and then toggled "javascript.options.jit.content" to true and restarted my browser. Then I proceeded to run Celtic Kane's javascript speed test and the Sunspider Benchmark. Celtic Kane's test didn't show much of an improvement over the old javascript engine and didn't come close to Squirrelfish's performance. The result was a palty 23ms decrease in time.

Maybe the Sunspider Benchmark would be different. Here is the comparison of the old Gecko JS engine and Tracemonkey. The old engine is under the FROM title and Tracemonkey is under TO.

We see some significant improvements over the old engine but we see some regression too. The overall picture shows us a slight improvement. Next let's compare Webkit's results to Tracemonkey. Here we have Webkit in the TO column and Tracemonky in the FROM column. Get ready for an all out browser war!

Yikes! That's disappointing. For all the noise we've heard about Tracemonkey these were not the results I was expecting. Squirrelfish is still eating it for lunch. I guess it's a good sign that Mozilla's numbers are improving but I have yet to see the performance they claim. There could be many reasons for this and I'm sure things will only improve but as it stands now I cannot achieve the kind of numbers I've seen put up on the web about Tracemonkey.

Vim Line Number Colors

2008-08-27T22:47:17Z

I have been using some other writting tools for coding at work and such and I’ve discovered a nifty feature I really like but can’t seem to find for G/Vim. I want to say it was Visual Studio.NET 2008 where I saw it but I can’t swear to it. Either way though I can’t find a screenshot of what I saw, so I will my best to describe it.

I would like a script that will allow me to change the color of every 10th line number. Well actually, I would to be able to adjust how many lines it skips, but 10 is a nice round number. So for example:

1  This is
2  Syntax
3  Highlighted Code
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12

I hope that helps. If anyone knows if such a plugin exists, do share!

Enjoy the Penguins!

An Alternative Olympic Medal Table

2008-08-27T05:54:22Z

So Great Britain did really well in the Olympics this year, coming forth in both total number of medals, and in the number of gold, silver and bronze.

Country	Gold	Silver	Bronze	Total
Great Britain	19	13	15	47

So well done to all the Olympic Athletes for taking part, from whatever country.

Britain is of course part of the European Union. Alexander Stubb, the Finnish Foreign Minister who is in the news at lot a the moment after taking charge in Georgia, one said that "the EU will always be more than an international organisation, but less than a state." (Source - PDF)

So the people running the young Europeans website, had the fab idea of adding all the EU's medals up.

Country	Gold	Silver	Bronze	Total
EU	87	101	92	280
China	51	21	28	100
USA	36	38	36	110
Russia	23	21	28	72

Only a couple of medals away from getting more than the next three regions combined!

Maybe you disagree with Stubb and think the EU is not any different than other international organisations. In that case we would compare the EU to America's and Russia's international organisations.

Country	Gold	Silver	Bronze	Total
EU	87	101	92	280
NAFTA	41	47	43	131
CIS	31	35	56	122

Still win!

Discuss this post - Leave a comment

Sweet Vim Page

2008-08-27T03:33:53Z

I found this page, which appears to be fairly old, but its new to me, which means odds are its new to someone else too.

Its basically a page that allows you to look at a huge number of screenshots of colorschemes off of Vim.org at the same time. Be fair warned, it will suck massive bandwidth and be super slow on non-broadband connections. Other than that its great fun to look around.

Vim Color Scheme Test

Enjoy the Penguins!

Silent Computing

2008-08-27T03:29:40Z

Silent computing is something I had never thought about before today. Well, not really anyway. I mean it has occured to me in the past that, “Gee my computer is loud,” but past that I never really put much thought into how loud it really is or how much it actually annoys me.

Today though all of this did occur to me so I went to Newegg.com after reading this article on a fanless power supply. After going there I attempted to create the quietest computer I could, sans harddrive and graphics card. Sans harddrive for two reasons really. First, I have a perfectly good harddrive from Western Digital I would frankenstien I actually built this computer. Second, the quietest drives out there would, of course, be the massive flash drives that are parading as “hard drives” these days. While I, like everyone else, would love to own two or three, I like most, can’t afford to have one for the hell of it. Sans graphics card because I don’t know where to go with that. I have never owned a graphics card that was new or fancy enough to have a fan built onto it. Second, how loud are those anyway? Third, whats the best ATI graphics card, sans fan, that you can buy?

Given all of that, here is the list of hardware I came up with, what do you think? Can you do better? All Linux compatible of course.

Enjoy the Penguins!

Webkit vs Gecko Javascript performance

2008-08-26T22:54:56Z

If you haven't noticed I have a fascination with bleeding edge software. One of the pieces of software I have been following since its inception is the GTK port of Webkit. It is an excellent browser engine that is just as capable if not more so than other major competing engines. One of Webkit's strong points is javascript performance. The Squirrelfish javascript engine that was introduced a few months ago offers incredible performance.

To prove my point I tested the latest Webkit from subversion againt Xulrunner-1.9 using two different javascript tests. The first test is I used was Celtic Kane's Javascript speed test. I ran the test a couple dozen times on each browser. The Webkit based Midori browser scored an 89ms (lower is better) for its best case while the best I was able to acheive with Epiphany on Xulrunner was 255ms which makes it over 2.5 times slower. In fact Midori's worst time wasn't even close to Epiphany's best time. I took screenshots of the two best times I achieved. On the left are the results for Webkit/Midori while on the right are results for Gecko/Epiphany.

The second test I ran was Webkit's own Sunspider Javascript test. It is a much more complete javascript test and takes several minutes to complete. Again Webkit outshines Gecko in the Sunspider tests but the results are much closer. Webkit's javascript engine, Squirrelfish averages about 1.5 times faster than Gecko's engine. Webkit results are shown in the FROM column while Gecko results are in the TO column.

It seems this is all about to change. Firefox 3.1 is supposed to include a new and improved javascript engine called Tracemonkey that outshines Squirrelfish. It is not yet complete so it is hard to tell how much better it is actually going to be but preliminary tests show some amazing results. When I get a chance to test it I'll post another comparison.

With all the improvements going into both the Gecko engine and the Webkit engine it should make web browsing on either platfrom a much better experience. I do have to give the Mozilla foundation credit for Gecko. I was starting to prefer a Webkit based GNOME environment over embedded Gecko but Xulrunner-1.9/Firefox-3 was a very good release and the next release is only going to be better. Things are really heating up now in the browser wars again.

How to creating your custom *nix CD:

2008-08-26T18:52:45Z

Building a custom, patched FreeBSD ISO install image

Howto build a Gentoo-LiveCD from scratch

HOWTO Gentoo LiveCD and LiveUSB

Howto create a bootable NetBSD image

Forwarding VirtualBox guest apps on host's X server

2008-08-26T18:07:00Z

SCENARIO:

My host machine runs a stable amd64 Gentoo and Virtualbox. My guest operating system is again gentoo (this time a bleeding edge unstable ~x86 with evil overlays), but every X11 capable guest should work.

The guest machine network uses NAT, so there's nothing to configure, just dhcp and internet works.

GOAL:

Have guest apps to look native on my host DE, using systray, being able to copy/paste, while still running on a protected enviroment.

No need to run session managers (xdm) in the guest machine, neither to configure Xorg or to install VirtualBox Guest Additions.

HOWTO:

NAT doesn't allow host to ssh in guest, but there's a workaround:

$ VBoxManage setextradata "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/ssh/HostPort" 2222
$ VBoxManage setextradata "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/ssh/GuestPort" 22
$ VBoxManage setextradata "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/ssh/Protocol" TCP

Read here to find how to undo those steps.

The guest now must be shut down (a simple reboot will not work).

Now the host machine can ssh into guest using this command:

$ ssh -p 2222 "user"@localhost

On the host machine we uncomment/edit those lines in /etc/ssh/ssh_config

ForwardAgent yes
ForwardX11 yes

On the guest machine we uncomment/edit this line in /etc/ssh/sshd_config
X11Forwarding yes
Remaining in the guest machine we reload the ssh revice:
# /etc/init.d/sshd reload
Now we run (from the host) a little test to see if everything works fine:
$ ssh -p 2222 "user"@localhost -YC xclock
If it complains about wrong autenthication remove from the guest ~/.Xauthority and try again.
Now we make things nicer:
$ echo "alias runguest='ssh -p 2222 "user"@localhost -YC '" >> .bashrc
Now we can open a terminal and:
$ runguest firefox
Cool, isn't it?
DEAR LAZYWEB:
One of the nicest features of VirtualBox is the ability to "hibernate" the guest "saving the machine state". Can anybody find a way to ctrl-z a forwarded app, suspend the Virtual Machine and then foreground it once resumed the VM?

Links

2008-08-26T14:48:20Z

Relgious Links:

LDSCompanion.org - A Great site filled with uplifting Quotes, Stories, Poetry, and Music

LDS.org - Official site for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Linux Links:

Gentoo.org - The greatest Linux distro in the universe.

suseblog.com - My friend's blog - we won't hold it against him for not using gentoo.

wonkabar.org - My other friend's blog. He's a gentoo dev. He rocks.

Family Links:

Curt and Laura's Blog

Chloe and Brandon's Blog

Craig and Annie's Blog

Friend's Links

Ty and Trista Swartzlander

mkfs.ext3 weirdness

2008-08-26T12:55:31Z

I'm in a school today setting up a skolelinux environment and the main server (who has 500 GB harddisks) wasn't going to work, the installer froze while "formatting" the hardrive to ext3.

After some fiddling around it turns out that mkfs.ext3 did for some unknown reason completely fill the available ram which made the installer crap out. It was not an installer problem because running mkfs.ext3 would do the same.

I've never seen that kind of behavior but mkfs.jfs came to the rescue, the server is up and running. So if you find that your skolelinux (or other debian-based linux) installation freezes while formatting it might be (for some weird unknown reason) the filesystem type.

About Me

2008-08-26T10:51:08Z

Hi there! I'm PoeticIntensity

I guess this is my journal... still.

I started journaling when I was 14, in 1990, as a new years resolution. I had no idea then just how much I would get into journaling.

It took me 12 years, off and on, to transcode all of my 3000+ journal entries, and then put them into a database. I thought it would be cool to be able to search them, and I was good at web development, so I created a database of my journal entries...

Then, I thought it would be cool to give others the opportunity to do the same - and so ILMJ was born.

My name is Jason. I'm married with two kids, soon to be three. I love my wife more every day, as well as my children.

I'm a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and know the Gospel of Jesus Christ to be true. Living it is the only way we can find personal salvation in the afterlife.

I'm also a Linux geek, and am grateful for the existence of Linux for many reasons. For one, it pays my bills. Also, without it, I probably would have given up completely on computers, due to Microsoft's incompetence, and would probably be a lumberjack somewhere in Montana.

With that said, you'll most likely find a mixture of gospel-related entries, geeky entries, and entries about stuff going on in my life. That's the general gist of it, anyway...

Other than that, I generally enjoy spreading truth, and am as happy as the moment-by-moment choices I make.

Live life. Love life. It's your choice.

The OQO odyssey - Part 3

2008-08-26T06:24:08Z

This article is part of the OQO odyssey series - You can find the previous posts here, here and there.

If you think, the rest of the installation would be a cakewalk, you are under a misapprehension. But let’s talk about it one after the other.

I should start my report at kernel level which was the first big thing as I haven’t seen the WIFI Card or the Ethernet controller on the pci bus. But where is it? The answer is USB:

Bus 003 Device 002: ID 1557:0002 OQO model 01 WiFi interface Bus 003 Device 003: ID 1557:0003 OQO model 01 Bluetooth interface Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 001 Device 004: ID 1557:7720 OQO model 01+ Ethernet Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub

Great. The info delivered from the lsusb command is as useful as windows error messages on a Linux environment. So all that helps now is googling for some more hints what they really did. After some hours I was sure: The Ethernet card turned out to be an ASIX AX8817X based thing while the wlan should be something like an Atmel AT76C505A USB WiFi.

Knowing the components it was quite easy building a suitable kernel. But how do we transfer our chroot stuff to the umpc? Our main problem there are our permissions we got to preserve. I have decided to do it the ‘tar’ way, abusing ssh for saving some space while unpacking:

tar cpf - * | ssh oqo “(cd /mnt/gentoo/boot; tar xvpf -)”

But you should take care of the disc first: If you unpack the archives over some existing files, you might run into troubles - at least I did: The device booted, but the next emerge ripped out many essential packages due to some strange things happening with the world file. So my advice would be formating the partition before doing that stunt!

The transfer went fine and just like a miracle the OQO booted. Wow. I could even log into the system for checking if things are ok. As I didn’t like the damn small keys, I just started up an ssh session to the device still being connected to my Ethernet card but sadly ACPI and WIFI refused to work.

Cursing doesn’t help here - so I continued my research which lead me to a package named net-wireless/at76c503a which should take care of my WIFI card. But did you notice the word ’should’?

The next thing I’ll be doing is shooting some messages to some mailing lists for getting some hints. But I’ll keep you updated!

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Embedding JavaScript in Python

2008-08-25T23:05:16Z

Reading some posts about embedding languages/runtimes in applications on Planet GNOME reminded me I still had to announce some really quick and incomplete code blob I created some days after last GUADEC edition (which was insanely cool, thanks guys).

It takes WebKit’s JavaScriptCore and allows you to embed it in some Python program, so you, as a Python developer, can allow consumers to write plugins using JavaScript. Don’t ask me whether it’s useful, maybe it’s not, but anyway.

There’s one catch: currently there is no support to expose custom Python objects to the JavaScript runtime: you’re able to use JavaScript objects and functions etc. from within Python, but not the other way around. I started working on this, but the JSCore API lacked some stuff to be able to implement this cleanly (or I missed a part of it, that’s possible as well), maybe it has changed by now… There is transparent translation of JavaScript base types: unicode strings, booleans, null (which becomes None in Python), undefined (which becomes jscore.UNDEFINED) and floats.

I did not work on the code for quite a long time because of too much real-job-work, maybe it no longer compiles, sorry… Anyway, it’s available in git here, patches welcome etc. I guess this is the best sample code around. It’s using Cython for compilation (never tried with Pyrex, although this might work as well). If anyone can use it, great, if not, too bad, I did learn Cython doing this

Updated sK1 gnome patch

2008-08-25T21:49:39Z

It seems that the latest revision of sK1 has a new configurator.py that breaks my old gnome patch. I've updated the patch to work with the latest revision. Hopefully this won't end up being an arms race type of affair where configurator.py is constantly changing. Just rename to gnome-sK1.patch and copy in place of the old patch and remember to edit the fonts and font sizes in the patch if you want to match your gnome theme better.

Updated Midori ebuild

2008-08-25T20:58:30Z

Midori is now using a new build system so if you attempt to emerge it like before it will not work. There is an updated ebuild available on bugzilla. Unfortunately I have yet to get it to work. It builds fine with the new ebuild but the program will not start. I am using it in conjunction with my webkit-gtk svn ebuild. If I find the solution to the problem I will post an update.

UPDATE: It's working now. I built it with a vanilla compiler instead of my default hardened compiler and it is running now. I test Acid3 on Midori everytime I rebuild it. It gets to 77 before it crashes. This is better than the 69 I was getting before. At one time I was able to acheive 100 percent compliance but that hasn't happened in months. My biggest gripe/bug continues to be the font settings. It seems that Midori will not respect my font settings until I adjust them. I have to change the font size and then change it back again every time I start Midori.

More beginner Python cheatsheets

2008-08-25T19:16:00Z
Around this time last year I posted a cheatsheet for writing/packaging/testing scripts in python. Well, I'm speaking this week at the Utah Open Source Conference and will be giving an introductory talk about python. I've also been given my brother'

Generating SSH Key Pairs

2008-08-25T16:48:34Z

Today I needed to sync a file on two servers using ssh, and I needed to do it automatically. I knew that ssh could use key-pairs to enable a secure authentication system without requiring passwords, but I couldn't remember how to do it. I googled a bit and found this gem of a tutorial on how to do precisely what I needed: I'll post both the link and the text, just for easy future reference.

Here's the text:

To {ssh, scp} from HostA to HostB without issuing a password:

On both HostA and HostB,

mkdir ~/.ssh

chmod 0700 ~/.ssh

On HostA,

cd .ssh ssh-keygen -t rsa1 -C "Some comment"

ssh-keygen -t rsa -C "Some comment"

ssh-keygen -t dsa -C "Some comment"

Each of the 'ssh-keygen' commands will prompt you for a passphrase. Choose something easy to remember but difficult to guess. The commands will produce the files

~/.ssh/identity, ~/.ssh/identity.pub

~/.ssh/id_rsa, ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

~/.ssh/id_dsa, ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub

respectively.

The "*.pub" files are your public keys. The others are your private keys - guard them carefully. If they're stolen, then your account on HostB, or any other machine where you've set up public-key authentication, is wide open to the thief.

On HostA,

scp ~/.ssh/identity.pub HostB:~/.ssh/authorized_keys

cp ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub some_temp_file

cat ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub >> some_temp_file

scp some_temp_file HostB:~/.ssh/authorized_keys2

On HostB,

chmod 0600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

chmod 0600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys2

Now you should be able to 'ssh' from HostA to HostB without a password, but 'ssh' will prompt you for a passphrase, because it needs to decrypt your private keys.

and here's the link:

http://osdir.com/ml/netbsd.help/2002-04/msg00162.html

LAN Party!

2008-08-25T10:42:35Z

Man, I've got a lot to write. Quite a bit happened this weekend, and last weekend. I'll start with this weekend.

We had another LAN party this weekend, and it was up at Shane's house in Perry, UT. We played the usual, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, and Unreal Tournament 2004.

Traffic was pretty horrible going up through Davis County, but I left early, so all was well.

This time, there were 8 of us playing, and I must say, we all had a ball. The usuals, Shaun, Shane, and I were all up there gettin' our groove on, but there were also a few others. Eric, Blaine, Brady, John, and Shane's son, Darrin were there, too. Hehe.... Good times.

the most memorable portion of this round would definitely have to be Eric and me taking on everyone else. Talk about craziness.... I haven't been that intense during a game since I used to play Weapons Factory up at BYU with my roommates. I remembering actually sweating during those games, it would be so intense.

I guess the intensity comes with really wanting to win. When the stakes are against me, I tend to up the level a bit.   Heh... I was shaking after playing 2 on 6 this weekend. Good times... I also simply must say, Eric and I won 4 out of 4, and it definitely was NOT easy.

Hmmm.... Other than that, the stuffed burgers were fantastic, comradery was awesome, and the evening was well worth the drive. I got 3 hours of sleep.

Como utilizar o Mascaramento de pacotes para descobrir as causas de um downgrade.

2008-08-25T00:33:05Z

Uma das coisas mais comuns no uso do gentoo, principalmente quando mistura pacotes estáveis, testings e unstables (como eu costumo fazer), é o downgrade de algum pacote para alguma versão anterior sem uma razão aparente, como o downgrade de uma versão estável para uma antiga versão.

Isso ocorreu comigo quando fui realizar um emerge -NDuav word:
hellboy ~ # emerge -NDuav world
These are the packages that would be merged, in order:
Calculating world dependencies… done! [ebuild     UD] dev-util/bzr-1.1 [1.5] USE=”bash-completion -curl -emacs -sftp -test” 3,346 kB [ebuild     U ] app-text/poppler-0.8.6 [0.8.5] USE=”jpeg zlib -cjk” 1,435 kB [ebuild     U ] app-text/poppler-bindings-0.8.6 [0.8.5] USE=”cairo gtk -qt3 -qt4 -test” 0 kB
Total: 3 packages (2 upgrades, 1 downgrade), Size of downloads: 4,781 kB
Would you like to merge these packages? [Yes/No]
Vejam o caso do bazaar (dev-util/bzr), mas acontece que a versão 1.5 é uma versão estável como aponta o eix:
hellboy ~ # eix dev-util/bzr [I] dev-util/bzr Available versions: 0.17 1.1 ~1.3 ~1.4 1.5 [M]~1.6_rc5 {bash-completion curl emacs sftp test} Installed versions: 1.5(07:43:31 PM 08/23/2008)(bash-completion -curl -emacs -sftp -test) Homepage:            http://bazaar-vcs.org/ Description:         Bazaar is a next generation distributed version control system.
A razão deste comportamento é sempre por causa de algum pacote já instalado ou que vai ser instalado, eu acho que a maneira abaixo a mais simples para descobrir qual o pacote esta forçando o downgrade.

Primeiro eu mascaro o todas as versões abaixo da versão já instalada do programa que esta sendo forçado o downgrade, no caso, todas as versões do bazaar abaixo do 1.5.
sudo echo ‘<=dev-util/bzr-1.4′ >> /etc/portage/package.mask
Feito isso, refaço o comando que originou o pedido de downgrade e vejo o resultado:
hellboy ~ # emerge -NDuav world
These are the packages that would be merged, in order:
Calculating world dependencies / !!! All ebuilds that could satisfy “=dev-util/bzr-1.1*” have been masked. !!! One of the following masked packages is required to complete your request: - dev-util/bzr-1.1 (masked by: package.mask)
For more information, see MASKED PACKAGES section in the emerge man page or refer to the Gentoo Handbook. (dependency required by “dev-util/bzrtools-1.1.0″ [installed])
!!! Problem resolving dependencies for dev-util/bzrtools !!! Depgraph creation failed.
Dai eu observo que o responsável pelo downgrade é o pacote dev-util/bzrtools, que consta com todas as versões consideradas como instáveis:
hellboy ~ # eix bzrtools [I] dev-util/bzrtools Available versions: ~0.17.1 (~)1.1.0 ~1.3.0 ~1.4.0 ~1.5.0 Installed versions: 1.1.0(02:34:38 AM 02/06/200 Homepage:            http://bazaar.canonical.com/BzrTools Description:         bzrtools is a useful collection of utilities for bzr.
Como é um caso de pacotes instáveis, uma maneira seria apagar o pacote instável ou utilizar a keyword, como eu estou querendo aprender mais do bazaar, prefiro arriscar utilizar o pacote instável.
sudo echo ‘=dev-util/bzrtools-1.5.0 ~*’ >> /etc/portage/package.keywords
Com isso elimino a fonte do downgrade e refaço o meu comando sem medo de downgrades :-D.
hellboy ~ # emerge -NDuav world
These are the packages that would be merged, in order:
Calculating world dependencies… done! [ebuild     U ] dev-util/bzrtools-1.5.0 [1.1.0] 82 kB [ebuild     U ] app-text/poppler-0.8.6 [0.8.5] USE=”jpeg zlib -cjk” 1,435 kB [ebuild     U ] app-text/poppler-bindings-0.8.6 [0.8.5] USE=”cairo gtk -qt3 -qt4 -test” 0 kB
Total: 3 packages (3 upgrades), Size of downloads: 1,517 kB
Would you like to merge these packages? [Yes/No]

CSS: transparency with opaque text

2008-08-24T20:46:15Z

CSS opacity is a relatively new feature that has become a part of CSS3. Currently Webkit, Gecko, and Opera support standard CSS opacity while IE7 supports opacity with a nonstandard CSS filter. The opacity tag is used like this:

#transblock {
opacity: .5;
}

This will give the div with the ID of transblock a transparency of 50%. You can do the same thing in IE7 with a filter. It looks like this:

#transblock {
filter:alpha(opacity=50);
}

Ideally you should use both attributes to get the same opacity in Firefox, Safari, Opera, and IE7. This does not work in old browsers, including IE6. Older versions of Firefox (<0.9)
#transblock {
position: absolute;
top: 0px;
left: 0px;
height: 200px;
width: 200px;
z-index: 0;
opacity: .5;
filter:alpha(opacity=50);
}

#block {
position: absolute;
top: 0px;
left: 0px;
height: 200px;
width: 200px;
z-index: 1;
}

Obviously you can add any other attributes you wish to the div. This becomes more difficult when you have a div with variable height because you need to repeat the div contents within both the transparent div and the opaque div. I find it is easiest if you limit what attributes you assign to the ID of the div and instead create a class with the shared attributes. So if you want a div with a background of 50% white transparency and a foreground of black bold opaque text it will look like this:

#transblock {
z-index: 0;
opacity .5:
filter:alpha(opacity=50);
background-color: white;
}

#block {
z-index: 1;
}

.block {
position: absolute;
top: 0px;
left: 0px
color: black;
text-decoration: bold;
}

Then when you declare these in XHTML you can use:

and

This way you only have to edit the class to change your layout without having to edit two different IDs. You should notice two things. First that this requires absolute positioning and z-index values to place the opaque text over the tranparent background. Second, I am using the same name for an ID that I use for a class. Normally I would say that this can be confusing but in this situation I think it is actually easier to understand and manipulate the code.

The use of a sperate class is only really needed if you have variable height because otherwise you do not need to repeat the code. The separate class makes sure that the attributes between the transparent div and the opaque div are always the same which ensures the size of the div is maintained whenever attributes or contents are changed within the div. The only time you would actually have to edit the IDs is if you wanted to change the opacity level or the color of the background.

One other thing to note is that IE7's opacity filter only works on elements with a specified height and/or width.

Linux powersaving tunables

2008-08-22T20:52:14Z

Linux offers many powersaving features but you have to know where to look to enable these features. There is a wealth of information over at LessWatts.org. I have greatly reduced my power consumption by implementing many of their tips. The first place you should start is by enabling cpufreq. This is probably the number one powersaving feature. I would also enable dynticks in the kernel. To get a better idea of how much power you are using make sure to enable the powertop interface in the kernel. Then there are many tunable powersaving features that you can manipulate from userland. Here are examples that I have used.

hal-disable-polling --device /dev/hda

Disables polling of your cdrom drive but without it most drives will not automatically recognize when a CD/DVD is inserted.

echo 5 > /sys/bus/pci/drivers/iwl3945/0000\:03\:00.0/power_level

Turns on powersaving features of the intel 3945 wireless card. Some people have reported that it can cause problems with staying connected to access points. I haven't had much trouble with it.

hdparm -B 1 -S 12 /dev/sda

Enables aggressive powersaving on the hard drive.

echo 1 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/sched_mc_power_savings

Increases CPU idle time which allows you to acheive lower power states.

echo min_power > /sys/class/scsi_host/host0/link_power_management_policy

Enables power managment for SATA.

echo 1500 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_writeback_centisecs

Increases dirty VM writeback time which allows your HDD to stay spun down for longer periods of time.

In addition to these features the cpufreqd, laptop-mode, and powersave daemons all can help lower your wattage.

Flash 10 update

2008-08-21T21:40:50Z

Four days ago I installed Flash 10 on my laptop. I was hoping it would solve some of the issues I was having with Flash. Unfortunately I haven't seen many differences at all. I'm not sure if my problems are related to Flash itself or nspluginwrapper but Flash still crashes or hangs my browser occasionally and some Flash videos still don't work, they just display a gray box where the video should be. The good news is that Flash hasn't crashed X yet which started happening on my laptop recently with Flash 9. Also I haven't had any regressions yet so that's good news. I would recommend checking it yourself. I would love to know how well it is working on 32-bit machines.

UPDATE: Shortly after posting this I visited some other flash sites that normally worked with Flash 9 and they were not working correctly. I reverted to Flash 9 for the time being and things are back to "normal".

tahple or twople?

2008-08-21T07:09:38Z

The word tuple is used quite a lot in computing. That’s what database people call a row in a table. It’s also what several programming languages call a structure where the fields are ordered but not named.

It seems to be one of those words that is hard to translate, so other languages often use the English word. And yet there is some confusion about pronunciation. Some say tahple, some say twople. As far as I know there is no dispute about the spelling, it’s tuple. So where do you get twople from that?

I think having a lot of exceptions on pronunciation from what is the obvious pronunciation is bad for language. There are words that are fancy or interesting enough to perhaps deserve it, but tuple isn’t one of them. So I’m going to keep saying tahple.

Newspapers please link to your sources

2008-08-20T16:38:31Z

The pop singer Lily Allen wrote a piece on her blog saying that she had finished her anticipated second album called Stuck On The Naughty Step but her record company had not yet released it, perhaps because the people supposed to be doing that had been laid off.

For this post, it does not matter if you like Lily Allen or not, but in the last paragraph, I linked to the Lily Allen's blogpost, look did it again! Not hard was it?

Well three of four of Britain's major national broadsheet papers quoted from the above blog post, the Times, Guardian and Telegraph, All three of them failed to link to their source. The Metro, the paper they put on buses and trains, did not do any better.

Only the tax funded BBC managed to link to Allen's site. However, the link is across in the right column, and does not link directly to the blog post.

I know by the standards of newspapers that the hyperlink is cutting edge technology, being invented only in 1965 by Project Xandu and first used on the World Wide Web in 1991 by Sir Tim Berners-Lee

The journalists presumably had the blog they were cutting and pasting from in front of them while writing, would it have been that much more effort to cut and paste the URL into the post?

On most browsers, you can copy the URL with these three shortcuts: Ctrl+L, Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C

Unless you are on the Mac, then you want: Cmd+L, Cmd+A, Cmd+C

Hyperlinks are what turns text into hypertext, there is a clue in every link: http://, the HTTP stands for Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol. It is not PTDP the "Plain Text Deadend Protocol", it is not NWHTHTCNLP, the "Now We Have Them Here They Can Never Leave Protocol".

Linking to what are you talking about is how the Web works, like taking your trolley back to the trolley rack is how supermarkets work. Throwing your trolley into a ditch or leaving it in the middle of the road ruins the ecosystem. It is also rather inconvenient for the other shoppers who find there are no trolleys anymore.

Likewise, withholding the sources to keep your readers in the dark is disrespecting the ecology of the Web. Again the key is in the name "Web", interconnected sites, it is the World Wide Web, not 'My Little Cul-de-sac'.
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Who the fuck cares about the design of Ubuntu's next release?

2008-08-20T12:59:28Z

Seriously. Is there so little to write about that everybody writes about some theme prototypes for the new Ubuntu release? If you consider that (and posting screenshots that have been flowing around for months) news you better start doing something else.

Yeah there's gonna be a new Ubuntu release soon, here's the short summary:

The GNOME variant will somewhat work and have some UI patches that might be neat but that never reach upstream. But in general it will try to follow fedora and opensuse by trying to incorporate all the technology those two distros work on while doing a half-assed job implementing them (remember the pulseaudio fiasco that gave an awesome product a bad name just cause someone decided it would have to be in since all the other kids have it).

The KDE variant will throw the KDE 4 version that they manage to compile out in spite of it being months away from being feature-complete enough to get work done. Most of the things that make the GNOME version usable will not be available but hell, something needs to be done cause the KDE4 live CDs that everybody used to play around with KDE4 for the 5 minutes they could stomach it were based on OpenSuse.

Apart from that the release will feature nothing. Version bumps for all the programs in the repository. Some new artwork here or there. But as we have come to know Ubuntu, it will be mostly an aggregation of the work the other distros like fedora and Opensuse did. After upstart I have not seen any real innovation by Ubuntu, except for their "bulletproofX" idea which only makes sense cause they tend to break things with updates so users will end up without X or means to fix that issue.

Really, I don't have anything against people running Ubuntu, but why does some work on themes get that amount of coverage? Is it just cause the whole thing is too unexciting to write anything real about but the buzz needs to be kept up to stay "the lead"?

YouTube selfmade - Part 1

2008-08-20T07:02:02Z

Have you ever asked yourself how sites like YouTube are working? Why it is possible grabbing videos from there that simple? How it’s built? I guess that’s some questions now. But if you don’t mind, I’ll answer some…

Let’s start with our web browser and hit a video portal. As an example I’m using the following video clip found on YouTube:

Let’s assume that everything web based has to be downloaded to your computer to be displayed in your browser. In our case it’s a website and the embedded flash video object which should even be cached on disc. The clue here is the fact that if you hit the reload button, the video is already ready to be played instantly.

As a proof you can empty your browser cache and reload the site again - et voilà, we’re downloading it again. Having an empty browser cache is a nice thing, especially if you are looking for objects inside. Regarding our experiment here, we should have the swf flash movie in there, the website itself and some images.

But if you watch your cache carefully, there’s more in it - a strange file named .flv which leads back to Macromedia if you google for it. Let’s watch another video without clearing the cache and see what happens: The swf file stays pretty much the same - just the flv file count increases.

Now let’s add 1 and 1 and hope its result is 2: If I am right, the flv file is the video we’re searching for. For confirming my suspicion I just rename the one of the flv files to something more meaningful and move it out of the cache. If the flv file actually is the video it should be possible decoding it. A rather crude attempt would be trying mplayer:

~ $ mplayer PenguinsLinuxAd.flv MPlayer dev-SVN-r27120-4.3.1 (C) 2000-2008 MPlayer Team CPU: Genuine Intel(R) CPU T2500 @ 2.00GHz (Family: 6, Model: 14, Stepping: 8) CPUflags: MMX: 1 MMX2: 1 3DNow: 0 3DNow2: 0 SSE: 1 SSE2: 1 Compiled with runtime CPU detection. Playing PenguinsLinuxAd.flv. libavformat file format detected. [lavf] Video stream found, -vid 0 [lavf] Audio stream found, -aid 1 VIDEO: [FLV1] 480x360 0bpp 28.083 fps 0.0 kbps ( 0.0 kbyte/s) ========================================================================== Opening video decoder: [ffmpeg] FFmpeg's libavcodec codec family Selected video codec: [ffflv] vfm: ffmpeg (FFmpeg Flash video) ========================================================================== ========================================================================== Opening audio decoder: [mp3lib] MPEG layer-2, layer-3 AUDIO: 44100 Hz, 2 ch, s16le, 64.0 kbit/4.54% (ratio: 8000->176400) Selected audio codec: [mp3] afm: mp3lib (mp3lib MPEG layer-2, layer-3) ========================================================================== AO: [alsa] 48000Hz 2ch s16le (2 bytes per sample) Starting playback... VDec: vo config request - 480 x 360 (preferred colorspace: Planar YV12) VDec: using Planar YV12 as output csp (no 0) Movie-Aspect is undefined - no prescaling applied. VO: [xv] 480x360 => 480x360 Planar YV12 A: 7.4 V: 7.4 A-V: -0.000 ct: 0.000 0/ 0 5% 0% 2.5% 2 0

Believe it or not: It worked. So the fla file is definitively the video. My next idea is using ffmpg for recoding the fla file to something more ‘useful’ for me. What about mp4?

~ $ ffmpeg -i PenguinsLinuxAd.flv PenguinsLinuxAd.mp4 FFmpeg version UNKNOWN, Copyright (c) 2000-2008 Fabrice Bellard, et al. configuration: --prefix=/usr --libdir=/usr/lib --shlibdir=/usr/lib --mandir=/usr/share/man --enable-static --enable-shared --cc=i686-pc-linux-gnu-gcc --disable-altivec --disable-debug --disable-ffplay --disable-network --disable-optimizations --enable-libfaac --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libvorbis --enable-libxvid --enable-liba52 --enable-libdc1394 --enable-pthreads --enable-x11grab --enable-libfaad --enable-libamr-nb --enable-libamr-wb --enable-nonfree --enable-gpl --enable-postproc --enable-avfilter --enable-avfilter-lavf --enable-swscale --disable-stripping libavutil version: 49.6.0 libavcodec version: 51.53.0 libavformat version: 52.12.0 libavdevice version: 52.0.0 libavfilter version: 0.0.0 built on Jul 2 2008 16:52:29, gcc: 4.3.1 Seems stream 0 codec frame rate differs from container frame rate: 1000.00 (1000/1) -> 28.08 (337/12) Input #0, flv, from 'PenguinsLinuxAd.flv': Duration: 00:00:51.1, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 64 kb/s Stream #0.0: Video: flv, yuv420p, 480x360, 28.08 tb(r) Stream #0.1: Audio: mp3, 44100 Hz, stereo, 64 kb/s Output #0, mp4, to 'PenguinsLinuxAd.mp4': Stream #0.0: Video: mpeg4, yuv420p, 480x360, q=2-31, 200 kb/s, 28.08 tb(c) Stream #0.1: Audio: libfaac, 44100 Hz, stereo, 64 kb/s Stream mapping: Stream #0.0 -> #0.0 Stream #0.1 -> #0.1 Press [q] to stop encoding frame= 1420 fps= 46 q=31.0 Lsize= 2047kB time=50.6 bitrate= 331.6kbits/s video:1629kB audio:388kB global headers:0kB muxing overhead 1.477593%

And there we go. My theory is now that grabber software just does what we have done here manually - It downloads the flv file and recodes it to the format you want to have it.

Let’s assume we can reverse the whole process and convert video files into flv format which can be used for flash movies that can be played while being loaded - just like a video stream without a streaming server. I guess we do know the basics for doing our own player now - but that will be a topic for another post here.

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OOXML applals rejected — DIS 29500 to be published within the next few weeks

2008-08-19T20:06:12Z

A few days ago ISO announced that the the two ISO and IEC technical boards rejected all four appeals to the ISO/IEC DIS 29500 — these were from Brazil, India, South Africa and Venezuela (the latter I forgot to mention before because it came quite late).

At the same time it announced the publication of the final ISO/IEC DIS 29500 text to occur within the next few weeks.

Read about the votes on Updegrove's ConsortiumInfo.org blog.

read more

Ansi2html

2008-08-19T18:35:19Z

At times it may be good idea to display the exact terminal output to viewers to easily convey what’s being done. The cut and paste method works fine but ANSI coloring will be lost. Lately I had some friends in the forums to help me figure this out.

Ansi2html is a program that can convert ANSI colored output and display it as a webpage. Ansi2html is one of the programs that is part of kbtin, a MUD-client. For Gentoo users, an ebuild thankfully rids the cruft and only ansi2html is built. Thanks to timeBandit for pointing this out and thanks to tarpman for the ebuild.

Using ansi2html is easy, just enter:

command -color | ansi2html > command.html

The color argument is required because color output is often repressed when output to a console or terminal (most popular commands have them). For example:

emerge -p --color=y frozen-bubble | ansi2html > emerge-frozen-bubble.html

Will give me this:

emerge-frozen-bubble.html link

I was thinking ansi2html might be good for displaying text inline on this Blog (as in preformatted colored text) but ansi2html builds a custom, built-in, css that make this all too unrealistic to build inline.

Have a good day.

Dynamically switching between display setup configurations

2008-08-19T17:15:40Z

I have a laptop that I use in different contexts. Sometimes all by itself (whoever starts singing Celine Dion will get hit in the head), sometimes attached to our TV at home, sometimes in my home office with my 24" display attached.

I use xrandr to turn certain outputs or inputs on or off and have a bunch of scripts to set a certain display layout (you can find them in my configuration file repository) but I always had to call them manually when I wanted to switch to a different layout. That's somewhat of a pain in the butt so I wrote a script to circle through all available desktop layout setups.

A few notes:

My ~/.screenlayout directory contains three files: 0-default.sh, 1-with_external.sh, 2--with_tv.sh. I named them like that to easily define the sequence of files to call. Then I bound my script to a hotkey and now I have a very simple way to switch through my setups. This might not work if you have 20 different layouts, but for a small amount of layouts it works really well and quick.

xrandr does not fuck things up. If you cannot change to a certain resolution xrandr will just not do it which means circling through setups is save (except for when you have buggy monitors that don't report their capabilities properly).

So here's the sourcecode to the script, you can also download the code here:

CODE:
#!/bin/env python # -*- coding: utf8 -*- # Switching the desktop configuration around based on a keystroke # @author: Jürgen Geuter # # this assumes that you have put all commands that are necessary # to change the resolution (like calls to xrandr) into .sh files # in the ~/.screenlayout/ directory. # An example for this machine would be: # # #!/bin/sh # xrandr --output LVDS --mode 1280x800 --output VGA --off # # But you can include commands to start or stop applications and whatnot # into those scripts. Just make sure that they return a correct unix # error code: 0 on success, int>0 else # # Apart from python this script needs dbus bindings and libnotify-python cause it gives you fancy notifications. # The code is just a quick hack, not pretty and covered under the GPLv3 # (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.txt) import dbus import glob import os class Displayswitcher(object):     """Class for switching the display settings. Pretty much self-contained"""     def __init__(self):         """Setup the libnotify binding and set some config values"""         # libnotify         self._sessionbus = dbus.SessionBus()         libnotify_dbus = self._sessionbus.get_object(                 'org.freedesktop.Notifications',                 '/org/freedesktop/Notifications')         self._libnotify = dbus.Interface(libnotify_dbus,                 'org.freedesktop.Notifications')                  # config         # Popup duration         self._duration = 3000         # Message to display in case of success         self._message = "Display setup changed to %s"         # Message to display in case of error         self._errormessage = "Display setup could not be changed to %s"         # Subject of the notification         self._subject = "Display setup"         # Statefile contains the current state         self._statefile = "/tmp/displayswitch.state"         # where the setups live         self._setupdir = "~/.screenlayout/"     def popup(self, subject, message):         """Popup a given message for the configured DURATION"""         self._libnotify.Notify('Displayswitch', 0, '', subject,                 message, [], {}, self._duration)     def write_state(self,state):         """write the new state to a statefile"""         handle = open(self._statefile,"w")         handle.write(str(state))         handle.close()     def read_state(self):         """read the current state"""         state = None         try:             handle = open(self._statefile,"r")             state = int(handle.read().strip())         except:             pass         return state     def change_state(self):         """Circle through states."""         state = self.read_state()         setups = self.get_display_setups()         states = len(setups)-1         if not state==None:             newstate = state+1             # just to make sure we circle             if newstate > states:                 newstate = 0         else:             newstate = 0         error = os.system(setups[newstate])         # os.system returns 0 on success, another value else         if error:             self.popup(self._subject,                     self._errormessage % setups[newstate])         else:             self.popup(self._subject,                     self._message % setups[newstate])         self.write_state(newstate)     def get_display_setups(self):         """Read the possible .sh scripts from the directory given in         the configuration."""         setups = glob.glob(os.path.join(             os.path.expanduser(self._setupdir),"*.sh"))         return setups if __name__=="__main__":     switcher = Displayswitcher()     switcher.change_state()

Binding a keyboard shortcut to a random command in GNOME

2008-08-19T16:47:35Z

Sometimes you want to bind a certain keystroke or a combination of keys to a command. GNOME allows you to set a few hotkeys for certain predefined actions within the preferences, hotkeys for launching a terminal or for muting the soundcard.

Sometimes that is too inflexible and you want to set some keystroke to execute another program. You could run xbindkeys which on the other hand interferes with you GNOME keyboard settings.

But GNOME allows you to bind random keystrokes to executing random scripts, here's a short howto.

First the GUI way:

You start gconf-editor (as much as it might suck that there's no UI to add those to GNOME, adding them to gconf the way I'm gonna explain ain't too bad).

When looking at gconf-editor you'll see two panes, the left one forming a tree and the right one having a list of key to value mappings. This is where the gui-tools set their options.

In the left panel navigate to /apps/metacity/global_keybindings/ which brings up the global keybinding properties for gnome in the right panel.

You'll find a bunch (precisely 10) entries called "run_command_"+number. Here you set up the keystrokes that will execute some random command. In the screenshot I did setup the "XF86Display" key as command 1. I could have also set t or whatever comes to mind.

Now I have to tell GNOME what command "command_1" actually is.

In gconf-editor you navigate to /apps/metacity/keybinding_commands/. You see the familiar "command_"+number. Since I added a hotkey for command_1 in the first step, I now add the command I want called to the key "command_1", in my example a simple script that switches display layouts, but it could be anything.

There's no need to click "save" or anything, all changes in gconf-editor are instantly.

Second the commandline way:

You can modify gconf via the command line, too, if you know which keys you want changed, gconftool-2 is your friend.

To set a hotkey for command_1 run

CODE:
gconftool-2 -s /apps/metacity/global_keybindings/run_command_1 -t string MY_HOTKEY
.
To tell GNOME which command you want executed as command_1, run

CODE:
gconftool-2 -s /apps/metacity/keybinding_commands/command_1 -t string MY_COMMAND
.

Not the most comfortable thing ever if you don't know how it works but you do now, so it's no longer black magic

Have fun.