ICQ just broke support for pidgin in Ubuntu. There’s a thread about it here, the patch is here. If you don’t want to apt-get source, apply the patch, and build it, you have the following option: if you are on Hardy, x86, and trust me a lot, I have the packages built here. I’ll leave them up until the update gets released, or my server goes down.

This is about the second day of TCF. You may recall the first day of TCF, which I posted about five days ago.

Overall, Sunday was much slower than Saturday — we gave out around 75 CDs, as opposed to 300 on Saturday. However, this is to be expected; despite their best efforts, TCF is very much a one day event. However, on Sunday we still talked to a lot of interested potential users, so it was definitely worth being there both days.

I also bought a rack server. It’s 2U, dual Xeon 2.8Ghz, 2 GB of ram, and a 80GB SATA hard drive. Cost? 90 bucks. This was a steal, except for one problem: I don’t own a rack! I was later amused by the juxtaposition of me building a microatx server to use 40 watts of power and make no noise, and then sitting a 2U rack server next to it, which consumes 300+ Watts of power and sounds like an airplane. Lucky for me, my boss was interested in it, so it’ll be our new Asterisk server in the coming months.

Overall, I was pleased by our outcome this year, and will consider going back next year. Next year, I’d like to try to have multiple presentations on Linux and Linux-related topics. Perhaps I can get someone else to do the general Linux/Ubuntu stump speech, and focus on a more specific topic — such as Bash, PHP, or Asterisk.

In other news, I’m almost done with University forever. I have about 2 weeks more of wrapping up work, and then I graduate on the 17th. After that, I’ll only be working full time, so I’ll have some time to pursue actually developing open source software, instead of just shilling it to crowds

Today was the first day of the Trenton Computer festival. Bryan and I left for Trenton around 8:30 AM (after a few false starts) and got there to set up around 10 after 9 — Mike and his brother arrived soon after. This year we had two tables — one for demo machines (one Kubuntu, one Xubuntu, an OLPC, an n810, and an Ubuntu Desktop running Compiz Fusion on dual LCDs), and one for handouts (and room to talk).

(Author’s Note: Wondering why these pictures have so few people? I was the cameraman, so these are from times when I could actually stop shilling Ubuntu CDs and take a picture).

I brought 200 Printed Gutsy CDs, and I planned on bringing 200 burned Hardy CDs — unfortunately, mtx had other plans, so I couldn’t get my media changer to burn more than one CD before losing permissions on the cd burner. There were 5 machines there, burning Hardy CDs continuously — they were still going as fast as we could burn them.

At 1:20, I left to give my presentation on Ubuntu. As Matt mentions here, early in the presentation, the projector went to sleep on me. He doesn’t mention that a) the projector was limited to 640×480 resolution, b) the internet was borked in that building. I didn’t get to show off everything I wanted to, but overall it went well. As I left, I led a train of around 20 people back to our LoCo Table.

Overall, today went very well; we gave out around 300 CDs total, and, more importantly to me, talked to a lot of people about Linux groups in their area (I expect a rather good turnout for the next LUG/IP meeting). Tomorrow will be just as fun, albeit a bit slower than today turned out to be.

I’m upgrading my laptop to hardy today, as I’m giving a presentation on Ubuntu and Hardy tomorrow at the Trenton Computer Festival — I’ve been running Hardy for months, but I like reinstalling after release, as I get rid of all the junk in the corners, and make sure all the important stuff gets enabled. I set up my desktop with Hardy already, as I usually have that at our table showing the latest and greatest desktop effects on dual lcd monitors.

When I installed Gutsy on my laptop, I used the new-fangled encrypted partitions system. I didn’t encrypt the whole drive — I like to keep my home directory separate from everything else, and that includes encryption — instead, I did the following:

• /boot, ext2
• / , ext3
• encrypted partition 1, lvm 1
• encrypted partition 2, lvm 2

Then in lvm 1:

• /var, ext3
• /tmp, ext2
• swap

and in lvm 2:

• /home, ext3

and then, all done. When I started up the machine, I was prompted for 2 passwords — one for each encrypted partition — , but other than that, I had what I wanted. Encrypted home, encrypted var, tmp, and swap, and everything else unencrypted (because it doesn’t need to be, and there’s no reason to slow it down).

So, today, using the alternative install CD, I set up my partitions exactly as they are. It prompted me for my passwords when I configured my encypted partitions, did its stuff, etc. Then I selected to use them as lvm groups, and figured i was ready to go.
It wasn’t until I stared at blank LVM groups that I realized when I entered my password, it was asking for the password for my new encrypted partitions. That it was making. While it was erasing all my data.

My first reaction: a loud shriek. Ever see those cheesy slasher films, where some woman runs screaming through the forest? That was me.

My second reaction was to go through a mental inventory of what I erased. Upon recall, I remembered that I backed up my home partition to an external about a month ago. Besides that, I keep my password lists on a remote server as an encrypted file, my senior project is kept in a subversion repository remotely, and I haven’t done much else important in the past month. I also moved tomorrow’s presentation to a flash stick, so I could work on it on my desktop (which I’m writing this on right now). In total, I lost:

• my xorg.confs
• my script to change symlinks back and forth for glx, depending on whether i was using intel or nvidia
• my cool php script to check an ubuntu cd’s md5sums.txt agaist my derived md5s
• my notes from my friend’s Orpheus game.

Overall, not very much, but I dodged a bullet. Nonetheless, as usual, back up your data before a reinstall — especially if you did something similar to what I did. The alternative installation CD is a fickle diety, and her wrath will be upon thee if you did not do full disk encryption. Next release, I think I’ll play it safe and configure my encrypted stuff manually.

Saturday was the NJ LoCo Team’s April LAN Party. Another LoCo Team member, and professional Linux writer, Dave Harding, gave a detailed account of our last LAN party. Dave hasn’t posted a report on Saturday’s, so I assume this time it is my turn. What follows is a detailed report, without the detailed part.

11:30 It started off with quite a bang. I had planned on waking up at 7 or 8 to start setting up downstairs. Christina woke me up around 11:30, because Dave had been ringing the doorbell for 3 minutes. Dave, Christina, and I then spent the next 40 minutes or so setting up.

Noon. Randy from the PA LoCo team shows up, with his friend “Teddy”. Setup continues.

12:30: We’re set up, Bryan shows up, and play starts. We start with Urban Terror.

1:30ish: Jerry and his son show up for the scheduled Frozen Bubble Tournament. As Jerry’s son is 8, we quickly switch to Armagetron.

2:20: Frozen Bubble Tournament begins. I realize that I’m horrible at Frozen Bubble. Christina takes my spot while I run off to shower.

3:30ish: Frozen Bubble Tournament is complete, and Teddy is the undisputed Champion.

I put together Planet badges for both of the tournaments; unfortunately, Teddy doesn’t blog, so he won’t get to use the champion one. You can tell who participated, as they have this badge:

4ish: We play some more Armagetron. Jerry and son leave. We switch back to Urban Terror, “lunch” (burgers and fries) gets ordered.

5: More Urban Terror. John (aka “the ringer”) shows up.

6: Mostly Urban Terror.

8: Brett shows up. Like John and I, Brett spent much of his childhood playing FPSes like Counter Strike (which is very similar to Urban Terror). Teams are split up to make ringers as even as possible.

We play through a number of different modes: Free For All, Team Survivor, Team Deathmatch, Follow the Leader, Capture and Hold. Of all of them, Bomb is the most popular. It’s a throwback to the general Counter Strike scenario — the Red team has a bomb, which they must plant; the Blue team has to stop the Reds from blowing up the bomb, by either stopping it from being planted, or defusing it before it goes off. This usually involves “hunt down and destroy the opposing side”, but planting the bomb forces the blue team to track down the red team and defuse the bomb within 30 seconds.

10: We grab dinner. Three people split a pizza, and everyone else grabs food at WaWa.

11:30 Randy and Teddy head out. More Urban Terror.

1AM: I’d been planning an Urban Terror Team Tournament, but I wanted 2 or 3 person teams, so I had held out for more people (8 had signed up, many more said they were coming; 6 showed, plus Jerry and his son for Frozen Bubble). Once the LAN was officially over, I held the mock tournament. As I said previously, we tried to split up the ringers as evenly as possible. Teams were as follows:

Blue: Me (almost a ringer), John (”Ringer of Ringers”)

Red: Dave, Bryan, Brett (ringer)

We played a bomb match (as previously described). Play was intense, but it was quickly obvious that when teams are 2 to 3, and the 3 have the bomb, 3 definitely have an advantage, regardless of average skill level. Play went as follows:

1. The round would start
2. Within 20 seconds, Brett would run to a bomb site and plant the bomb.
3. John and I had 30 seconds to figure out what bomb site they were at, and beat 3 people.
4. Terrorists win.

The final score was 13 Red, 8 Blue

We decided to do another round, with switched teams (Red switched with Blue). This round was much more fierce, and a lot closer. In the end, the score was Red 15, Blue 14.

To beat the tie, we decided to play a Team Survival Match with knives only (ie, the dumbest idea in history). When John and I were winning 14 rounds to 3, we decided to call it.

For the Frozen Bubble Tournament, Dave made an amazing Frozen Bubble Trophy. Not to be outdone, I had equally impressive awards for the Urban Terror Tournament — specifically, gold and silver painted plastic dollar store bling necklaces.

“2nd Place”: Dave, Brett (MVP), and Bryan.

“1st Place”: John and Joe (me)

Not pictured: Christina, MVP (Most valuable Non-Player).

Given that we really tied, and the other team didn’t have to play another round, I will forgo the champion badge: , and we’ll all use this one:

I can’t guarantee the accuracy of these events — specifically, the times people came and went. If you notice any glaring inaccuracies, please comment and I’ll correct them.

In Conclusion, despite having fewer players than last time around, the LAN went great, and I’m glad to have been a part of it. We’re planning on having a combined LAN and BBQ sometime over the summer.

Martijn van de Streek posted that he’s set up Asterisk on his server. Good job, and glad to hear it!

Unfortunately, if you care about security, it’s not as easy as “sudo apt-get install asterisk” — the package is in universe, not main, and therefore hasn’t been getting security updates. The package is at 1.4.10, Asterisk is up to 1.4.19, and the package hasn’t been patched for the myriad security problems in between. Take a look at the Asterisk security list and cringe.

While that may not be an issue for home, at work we own a C Class, which gets scanned night and day for holes by bad, bad people. So when I set this up for work, I had to super lock the server down, and I had to compile Asterisk from source, as the ubuntu package is too big a risk.

For both home and work, I’m using FreePBX, which makes Asterisk much easier to configure. At this point, I can configure Asterisk myself, I have a handle on most of the internals of Asterisk and FreePBX, and I’ve written a few macros and AGI scripts — but that doesn’t help my bosses if they want to add an extension when I’m away. Though there is a distro called TrixBox that includes Asterisk and FreePBX, I’ve never liked “vocational” distributions (or CentOS), so I always set mine up on Ubuntu Server.

After I move my work Asterisk server from “former employee’s tower pc under the rack” to “server in the rack”, I’ll log my steps and make an up-to-date how-to on how to set up Asterisk and FreePBX on Ubuntu Server (plus all my little tricks I’ve added). Over the summer, after I finish my degree, I plan on making a repo that has a) an always up-to-date version of Asterisk, b) a package for FreePBX, to make it easier to set this stuff up. Of course, I will also try to get both into Ubuntu as quickly as possible. After that, I’m considering making a Python-based program to manage Asterisk, as a replacement to FOP and iSymphony.

Once again, I’m glad to see one more asterisk user. Be sure to add Enum to your trunk, and register your number with e164.org!

Well, I’ve updated to Wordpress 2.5. With that, I’ve also changed my theme to one that supports widgets.

This is spurred by a request Dave made the other day, to have a way to print blog posts in a readable way, without comments. To this end, I added the wp-print plugin, which gives you a link to a printable version, without comments, and with all links as footnotes at the bottom (all of this configurable, of course). Note that, if you’re using Wordpress 2.5 like I am, at the time of this writing you need to use the beta version located here.

So, in the interest of making Dave happy, please add a print link, or I’m afraid Dave might take drastic measures, possibly involving kittens.

Just a quick post.

Wrote an RSS Feed Generator for DeviantArt Galleries.

To use it, replace yourusername with … your username.

http://www.joeterranova.net/code/deviantart.php?artist=yourusername

Source code is available here.

Brief attempt at a man page.

How it Works

When life gives you lemons, use regular expressions.

I monitored http requests to find DeviantArt’s back end ajax interface (which they use to do previous/next on galleries). From there I wrote a regular expression to parse out each entry, along with entry url, image url, date, and title. From there it’s pretty straight forward.

Keep in mind, I can’t guarantee this will work for you. If it’s been some time since I posted this, you may want to check if they’ve reintegrated rss feeds. That said, unless they change their layout, I doubt they’ll be purposefully breaking this script.

Right now, the only thing it does is get the latest entries from the given user’s gallery — no tags or anything like that. That stuff is probably doable. If you want anything specific, you can a) use the source and change it yourself, or b) leave a comment, and I’ll add it (within reason) when I have time. If you make good changes, let me know and I’ll post them here.

Options:

artist — the artist to get the feed for (ie, your username)

ex: deviantart.php?artist=yourusername

count — the number of items to return. The default is 24. If set higher than your total deviations, it’ll return all of them.

ex: deviantart.php?artist=yourusername&count=10

export — if set, instead of returning an rss feed, it’ll just output the results in an array using var_export. Useful if you’re just trying to get your deviations on your site (and your site uses php).

ex: deviantart.php?artist=yourusername&export=1

nolink — by default, the rss feed will show the thumbnail image as a link back to the main deviation. Add this to disable the link part.

ex: deviantart.php?artist=yourusername&nolink=1

I’ll leave this up, but if I notice real major traffic, I’ll be taking it down and putting it elsewhere (I’ll of course leave the source up). Please don’t do anything silly like hit my url every 10 seconds. For maximum reliability, host it yourself.

If you host it yourself, there’s 3 parameters at the top of the script to change:

$usecurl=1;
$url = 'http://www.joeterranova.net/code/deviantart.php';
$webmaster='joeterranova@gmail.com (Joe Terranova)';

$usecurl — set this to 1 to use curl instead of file_get_contents. If your host doesn’t have the curl extension installed and you set this to 1, you’ll get an error — conversely, if your host has remote file opening off (like mine does), and this is set to 0, you’ll get an error.

$url — set this to the url of the script.

$webmaster — set this to your email address and name.

For any questions, comments, or feature requests, leave a comment here. I release this code under the GPL v3 (see code for details).

As I said in my previous entry, Best Buy didn’t sell the n810, and they still don’t. However, “Best Buy Mobile” does, and I finally found one with one in stock.

And it’s awesome!

In celebration, here’s a video of me doing a barrel roll.

(and why I hate gift cards).

For the past several months, I’ve been drooling over the n810. I decided that, following Christmas, I’d be getting one for myself. My boss decided to give us our Christmas bonus in the form of a Best Buy gift card — no big deal, right? Best Buy will of course be selling them.

So, I currently have 275 in Best Buy gift cards total, and 150 in visa gift cards.

This is the n810 on CircuitCity.com . They have it, full price.

Here’s the n810 at Buy.com. Note that not only is it in stock, it’s also already on sale.

And here’s the n810 at Best Buy

When I searched for it previously, I was just told no search results were found. This confirms my suspicions — not only do they know the n810 exists, they’re purposefully not stocking it, and want people to buy n800s instead (which is of course absurd, as the n810 is better in every way). Perhaps this is because they’re really bad at turning over inventory. Perhaps it’s because they hate me.

Maybe this is why Best Buy makes so much off unused gift cards. However, if I go buy it else where instead, I’ll have to figure out something else to spend 275 on — it’ll probably end up being something dumb, like a PS3 or Windows Vista Ultimate. I guess I’ll wait a few weeks to see if Best Buy gives up on their stock of n800s and ships them all to Woot.com