I am no longer maintaining tcl-dox. It started as a fun experiment but I’ve lost interest. Tcl-dox is highly error prone and difficult to maintain because it is based on regular expressions. I may work on
a new version of tcl-dox that uses libtcl and the Tcl_ParseCommand function to do far more robust and reliable translations. …But time is scarce and I can’t promise that I’ll ever get around to that.

If you wish to take over tcl-dox please let me know. I’ll post about it here so any existing tcl-dox users can easily find the new home.

This release fixes a couple of very minor issues. I can’t promise that this release is any better than the others.

More than a month ago I became the lucky owner of a Sandisk Sansa C240 mp3 player.  It’s a relatively small flash based mp3 player with a color screen.  My previous mp3 player, a Creative Zen Nano Plus, started acting funny after I went running in the rain with it one too many times.

Both the Zen and the Sansa fit my needs relatively well.  I use my mp3 player when running and when at working out at the gym.  I’m a Linux user and require that I can interface with the player via Linux.  They both met those needs.  The Zen uses AAA batteries which is nice because I can change out batteries when they aren’t fresh (I use rechargables, nimh).  The Sansa on the other hand has an internal lithium-ion battery.  The Sansa charges over USB.  With the Sansa if the charge is low I’m out of luck until I recharge.  In practice this has led to me plugging it in to charge frequently.

The best part about the Sansa is that it is supported by Rockbox.  Rockbox is a firmware for a relatively large number of mp3 players.  It’s open source and feature rich.  I had heard about Rockbox a long time ago but never owned a supported player.

I’ll skip all of the details about Rockbox that you can read about at the their website and mention the two features that really matter.  The thing that makes Rockbox a necessity for me is that I can operate it completely without looking at the device.  This is make possible by audible cues.  When I’m on a menu Rockbox reads aloud the menu options!  When I skip songs I get an audible cue.  As a runner I can tell you that there it is terribly frustrating to stop and fumble with your mp3 player.  Things are even worse on sunny days when it’s hard to read the display.  Rockbox eliminates that problem.  Oh and remember the dilemna about batteries?  Rockbox announces battery level audibly so I always know when my battery is getting low and needs a charge.

The other killer feature is that Rockbox has fantastic support for playlists.  It’s easy to create playlists on the fly, save them for later, and even edit them.  I’ve not seen many mp3 player but the few that I have seen had poor support for playlists and the ones that did support them were a joke.  There’s no way I’m going to use “Media Player 10″ just to add a playlist.

Some other nice (but not as nice as audible cues and playlist support) features are:

• Dual boots into the old firmware if I want it
• Super easy installation by way of a graphical installer
• Many apps including Doom and a stopwatch with a lap counter
• Thorough documentation that is device specific

The next time I get an mp3 player I will only consider devices supported by Rockbox.

Long ago I found this set of instructions for installing “RALUS” on Debian. Since their install scripts were so terrible I was happy to find good alternative. I’m reproducing the instructions here for my own reference. These instructions are based off of installing version 11d.7170.

The first step is to convert the RPM files to debs. The RPMs are repackaged as .tar.gz files in the directory cdimg/pkgs/Linux.

$ tar xzvf VRTSralus.tar.gz
$ tar xzvf VRTSvxmsa.tar.gz

You will now have two RPM files. They must be converted to .debs using alien.

$ alien VRTSralus-11.00.7170-0.i386.rpm
vrtsralus_11.00.7170-1_i386.deb generated
$ alien VRTSvxmsa-4.4-021.i686.rpm
Warning: Skipping conversion of scripts in package VRTSvxmsa: postinst prerm
Warning: Use the --scripts parameter to include the scripts.
vrtsvxmsa_4.4-22_i386.deb generated

The next step is to install the .debs.

# dpkg --install vrtsralus_11.00.7170-1_i386.deb
(Reading database ... 45374 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to replace vrtsralus 11.00.6235-1 (using vrtsralus_11.00.7170-1_i386.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement vrtsralus ...
Setting up vrtsralus (11.00.7170-1) ...

# dpkg --install vrtsvxmsa_4.4-22_i386.deb
(Reading database ... 45374 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to replace vrtsvxmsa 4.4-18 (using vrtsvxmsa_4.4-22_i386.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement vrtsvxmsa ...
Setting up vrtsvxmsa (4.4-22) ...

Be sure to install libstdc++2.10-glibc2.2 if you haven’t already:

# apt-get install libstdc++2.10-glibc2.2

Link to the startup script:

# ln -s /opt/VRTSralus/bin/VRTSralus.init /etc/init.d/

Create beoper group and add root to that group:

# groupadd beoper
# adduser root beoper

Note Well:

The source of this post provides more information. You should also read their page as I have omitted creating configuration files and setting up the Windows side.

References:

http://newvibes.net/index.php/veritas-backup-exec-agent-for-unix-linux-on-debian

Thanks go to everyone that contributed code.

The latest version is 0.8.1.

I’ve been using Sync Kolab for months now but I’ve always been disappointed. Thunderbird has an option to choose the format of messages, either plain text or HTML, for each contact. This is great because I like the richer formatting available in HTML but HTML isn’t appropriate for many situations. Mailing lists are a prime example of when to use plain text. I’d finally grown annoyed enough that I started peering into the source code to add the feature myself.

What I found in the code was that the feature was already supported — if you are using the VCARD backend. Now that I’ve switched to the VCARD backend all is well!

This week I came across a post on digg showcasing a number of blog editors.  I had looked into off-line blog editors on Linux and Windows not too long ago but I was not very impressed with what I saw.  This time I saw ScribeFire which is a firefox add-on.

I’m not usually wild about software that is implemented as add-ons or plugins for other software but in this case I think I’m ok with it.  Blogging is web oriented so embedding a blog editor in firefox could be justified.  Still I think I’d prefer it to be a standalone app especially since ScribeFire has add-ons of its own as well as themes. 

Time will tell if I continue to use this software or not but it looks very promising.

This is the first version that I was able to install due to security reasons. Previous versions effectively bypassed authorization settings because WebSVN would run as the web server user account. This version of WebSVN reads and honors authz files. All you need to do is configure Apache to authenticate users the same way as you would for SVN and tell WebSVN where your authz file is. This version also has a lot of usability improvements (no more tedious scrolling!) as well as a much improved look.

The stuff I like the most (so far):

• New look
• Honors authorization file
• No more scrolling when digging in a deep directory tree!
• Web based blame
• Web based diff
• Syntax highlighting via enscript