Tales From The Geek Side

I was part of a conversation a while ago about how nice it would be to have an Android app that made it work as a universal remote control.  The major stumbling block, and the reason why there aren’t boundless remote control apps already, is that most (all?) android devices lack an IR transmitter.  I thought of two ways to work around this limitation:

1. Attach an IR transmitter to a device on your local LAN and then send the remote control codes via TCP.  The downside here is that there are actually some people (and I know this can be hard to believe) that do not have a LAN in their home much less a PC near their entertainment center.
2. Attach an IR transmitter to the 3.5mm audio output jack.  I wasn’t sure how difficult it would be to get the transmitter to work correctly by responding to an analog audio signal but it seemed possible.

The Global Cache iTach family of products would work for option #1.  In particular the WF2IR looks attractive.  The prices I’ve seen are over $100 and so I probably won’t be buying one any time soon.  To create a popular remote control app the hardware required for it must be cheap and easy to come by.

Thinkflood took the approach in option #2 with their RedEye products.  The RedEye mini plugs into the 3.5mm hack and it just a little IR transmitter.  At $50 I’m much more inclined to use a RedEye mini.   I hope they create an Android application.

The following profiles are supported by the Motorola Droid (Milestone).  I generated this list with links because I haven’t found a good location with everything written down in a clear manner.

• HFP: hands free profile
• HSP: headset profile
• A2DP: advanced audio distribution profile
• AVRCP: audio video remote control profile
• PBAP: phone book access profile
• OPP: object push profile

Sources:
Motorola
Wikipedia

Jochen Keil emailed me a bunch of patches for tcl-dox. I’m not maintaining tcl-dox anymore but hopefully the patches can help people.

If you use pam_ldap to authenticate against Active Directory you may have a problem you never thought of. You may be allowing disabled accounts access to your system. Use the following filter to exclude disabled accounts. The filter looks at the userAccountControl field which is a bit field. It checks the single bit that determines if an account is enabled or disabled. This snippet belongs in /etc/pam_ldap.conf.

pam_filter &(objectclass=User)(!(userAccountControl:1.2.840.113556.1.4.803:=2))

On second thought this might not be desirable. This will filter out disabled accounts making them appear as though they do not exist which is different than being disabled.

Sometimes you want to have logs of who created files and deleted files and even those who opened files.  Samba makes this possible but not where you’d expect.  You’d probably expect to see this if you increased the log level option to a verbose enough number.  It turns out that there is a vfs module that does exactly this.  It logs auditing information to syslog. But remember, this information goes to syslog, not to your normal samba log files. Also note that there is a vfs module named audit and one called full_audit.

Example share definition using the auditing facility.

[web-sites]
comment = "Web Sites"
# turn on auditing to see what the heck is going on
vfs objects = full_audit
writeable = yes
locking = no
create mask = 0775
directory mask = 0775
force create mode = 0664
force directory mode = 0775
force user = www-data
force group = www-data
path = /var/www-sites/
valid users = @www-data

I recently setup a new subversion server at work.  While testing it out users had problems checking out large projects.  Tortoise gave an error about a secure connection truncation (or something like that).  On the server end there were some uninformative error messages in the logs.  The problem was intermittent but was pretty easily reproducible.

I finally tracked the problem down to mod_deflate.  After disabling mod_deflate the problem completely disappeared.

I’ve had my Droid for a while now and I’m still extremely pleased.  Nothing is perfect and the Droid is not an exception but overall I’m very pleased with my purchase.  In multiple cases the phone has truly saved time.  Most of the time it’s just a toy for me though!  We’ve used the GPS navigation to save time and headaches.  I’ve been pleasantly surprised at the accuracy of the voice recognition.  It’s not perfect but it is better than I’ve seen before.

I’ve used the phone to take videos where I normally would have had nothing.  The camera quality is so terrible that most photos I take aren’t worth it — they look terrible.  Video is acceptible though.

I used the phone to respond to a problem at work.  That didn’t save me any time but it saved a bunch of people at work time.

I’ve been using the same phone for about 4 years. I hate talking on the phone. What drove me to buying a droid, on opening day none the less, was the prospect of having a powerful “internet in my pocket” computer. The fact that it has a telphony app is cool but secondary. What follows is a quick brain dump of my first day with the gadget

• The screen is incredible! Bright, crisp, high resolution.
• The keyboard is very easy for me to use and I was surprised to see that it was back lit. In hind sight the keyboard would have to be back lit or else you couldn’t be thoroughly annoying at the movie theater.
• I was slightly annoyed that I had to use a gmail account to access Android market but whatever… I played around with a couple of cool little free apps. I put a weather widget on my home screen.
• The facebook tools (can) sync with your contact list. If the facebook name matches your contact name their facebook photo ends up on your phone. I think it syncs other contact info too but I’m not sure.
• I setup access to my work email (exchange) in about three seconds. The corporate calendar thingy works as does the corporate email thingy.
• On my way home from work last night I used the turn-by-turn Google Map navigation GPS dealy and it worked very well. I even used the voice search. I said “navigate to Applebees in gates.” …And that worked!
• It’s slow when it’s not in 3g mode and I haven’t used it on WIFI yet. I haven’t used the web browser much yet and kind of hope I rarely do. Specialized apps are much better.
• I installed a Pandora and a Last.fm app (both free). That was slick. I fired up Pandora and out blasted metal from my phone.
• The charger is cool. It’s a tiny wall wart with a USB recepticle! They give you a USB cable that you could use to attach the phone to a PC or to the wall wart.

There is a ton left to explore but I do not yet have buyer’s remorse.

What I’d really like is to sync the calendar with an iCal based calendar.  I’ve been using WebCalendar for a long time.  While I have many gripes about WebCalendar it does what I need it to do and I’m loathe to switch to using Google Calendars.  I’m more apt to write my own calendar app than use Google Calendar.

I released a bunch of software related to a message passing middle-ware that I developed at work. My employer, Impact Technologies, agreed to release the code. I call the middle-wave iobroker. iobroker uses a post/subscribe mechanism and passes around arbitrary sized messages. Each message is given a class-id which is an arbitrary string. Clients subscribe using regular expressions telling the server what messages they are interested in receiving. When a message arrives matching a subscription the server forwards the message to the client. Communication is through UNIX sockets or via TCP or both. I’ve also released a number of supporting libraries. The support libraries all have BSD licenses while the iobroker server is licensed using GPL v2. See the software page for more info and to download the code.

I recently learned about Grubs configfile option. At first it doesn’t seem very interesting but it solves an interesting problem. Suppose you have multiple installations of Linux on your system all on different partitions. Ideally they would all work together seamlessly and update one grub menu.lst file. But if you have them on different partitions that won’t happen. There are a lot of reasons why something like that is difficult. Enter configfile to save the day.

To solve this problem you could make one partition exclusively for grub. You would install grub to the master boot record and install the stage 1.5 files to this tiny grub partition. In that tiny partition you would have a menu.lst file that would call out all of your other installs. It’s similar to using chainloading but it’s not quite the same. You’d only have to edit this master menu.lst whenever you added a new OS. Here’s a contrived example:

title Debian Lenny
configfile (hd0,1)/boot/grub/menu.lst

title Ubuntu
configfile (hd0,2)/boot/grub/menu.lst

You could do something similar using a chainloading approach and installing grub as the local boot record in each of your OSes but this way you have just one installation of grub to deal with.