Empathy (and Pidgin), Telepathy, Farsight, GStreamer and Gmail videochat

This post is solely for the benefit of people googling randomly, scratching their heads.

If you're trying to do a videochat with a Gmail user, but it doesn't work (it connects and then disconnects directly), chances are you may see the same issue I did.

If that's the case, the list of video codecs you present will most likely consist of JPEG, THEORA and MPV (without any H264 or H263).

What you need is most likely a ffmpeg package for GStreamer. On Ubuntu karmic, gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg is the right one. After a

sudo aptitude install gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg gstreamer0.10-tools; gst-inspect-0.10

things should be better (you will need to restart Empathy/Pidgin).

Sipdroid and asterisk

If you haven't found it yet, sipdroid is a small, reasonably well integrated sip client for android phones. If you install the version not available on market, you can also use it while using your 3g connection.

One drawback is that it doesn't neccessary play nice with Asterisk out of the box, these are the things I had to address to get it running smoothly (of course, YMMV).

You're most likely being NATed by your operator (if you want to be sure, you can install WhatIsMyIp and check), so

nat=yes

is pretty much a given. However, you do need

qualify=no

or your Asterisk will consider the phone unreachable.

Also, sipdroid currently only supports alaw, so you should make sure that no other codec will suddenly be required. If your asterisk is suitably located [low latency] and have ample cpu, you can use canreinvite=no for that, otherwise, you can try to restrict those you connect to so only alaw will be used, but that way may have many hidden surprises, especially if one of them is a PSTN operator.

Some app ideas, and then some

I got me one of them Android phones a little more than a month ago. Because of this, I may start posting random stuff for the benefit of people Googling, but also ideas for applications I want (and would pay for).

One meme I couldn't resist

If you read this, if your eyes are passing over this right now, even if we don't speak often, please post a comment with a memory of you and me. It can be anything you want -- good or bad. When you're finished, post this little paragraph on your blog and be surprised (or mortified) about what people remember about you.

Linux on Advent 9112

A while ago my wife got a (two actually) Advent 9112 portable. Elgiganten and PC City (Swedish companies part of Dixons) has been seeling them really cheap, and in spite of their small size, they seems to be rather nice machines (they even have IEEE1394 ports if you need that).
(They are rebranded machines, original name is ECS S20II).

Anyway, this is a consumer information post for those considering one of those. As Ubuntu is our standard distro nowadays, Gutsy was what we tried. Basically, everything worked out of the box (although it took us a good while to figure out that we had to enable the built in camera with a Fn-sequence).

In spite of what is said on the tech guys page, the wlan card didn't seem to be a Intel card but a realtek one (the rt73usb driver was used). We noticed network issues after hibernation sometimes but didn't care enough to examine those.

However, she no longer has this machine. The first one she got had a hot subpixel that was rather annoying, and the replacement had the problem off turning itself off randomly (not very often, the first time was after a week's usage). When we returned that, we decided to get a HP TX1345 instead (mainly because we thought it'd be fun with a touchscreen). I'll write about that one later.

PulseAudio and v4l2 for Flash

I just tried out PulseAudio yesterday and found it a rather enjoyable experience. The only thing that didn't work out of the box turned out to be Adobe Flash. I soon found libflashsupport that I think is rather interesting. In addition to how it's used there, I'm guessing it should be easy to whip out support for v4l2, which would help if you have a modern laptop and want to use the uvcvideo-driver.

Please Dear Internet, do this for me!

In the section "Cool hacks I want to do put probably won't get around to in quite a while" we have (among other things) a value calculator for LibraryThing - something that takes a look at your (or a public) library and calculates what it would cost to buy that library.

There are price comparison sites galore for books, but I want an API to code against (I could of course screen scrape and watch it break every now and then, but I prefer not to. And unfortunately, none of the data providers I've tried asking have been interested enough to answer, it seems.

Terratec Cinergy 400 USB Mk2 and Linux

I spent some time yesterday investigating my TV device, as it would please me greatly not having to reboot to OS X to record stuff.

As it had support for some devices from the same company, I thought the Em2880 driver was a good place to start looking. So i put in a sensible configuration and made it use that driver. No luck.

After some additional fiddling, I decided to open the box and see what I had. Most of the circuits seemed pretty normal (SAA7113H, TDA9874AH, ALC202), but there was a IC3160-64TQ I didn't recognize.

After some googling, I found it in a product list as TV tuner USB. I didn't manage to find any datasheet or other documentation though.

Somewhat later, I found this review of the Compro Videomate Action Pro and Ultra, which explained that the IC 3160 was previously known as AVIClink AL5000. At least that explains the ViP5000 I see from it.

Next step; there doesn't seem to be any drivers available for that chipset, so it's write your own if I want one. I do, but am not sure how long that would take (although thanks to this page, I've found usbsnoop, which could help a lot). And if I get another card (they seem to be rather cheap nowadays) I have a feeling I won't be as eager to work on this.

C# for Emacs?

Dear lazyweb, is there still no C# mode (ruleset) standard enough to be a part of cc-mode, or at least available as a simple apt-get?

(My current environment is Ubuntu gutsy.)

Outlook and Cyrus (or any other IMAP server)

We've recently had the "pleasure" of investigating Outlook to make it work better with Cyrus when using IMAP, but as it's most about Outlook, this might help for all you dovecot and other users as well.

• There's no escape from PST hell! Your PST files need to be undamaged and preferably local for Outlook to work good. We haven't investigated any of the non-MS repair tools, but scanpst.exe is a good start.
• The default configuration for Outlook is "not so good" - it will traverse the entire folder structure regularly. That wouldn't be so bad except that it uses a rather short (fixed) timeout for the entire operation, and complains loudly and behaves badly if doesn't complete in time. Under Tools > Send/Receive > Send/Receive Settings > Define Send/Receive Groups -> All Accounts you should deselect anything but the Inbox.
  You'll also need to deselect "Get folder unread count" or it will still traverse your entire folder structure.
• Though the need seems to vary, I'd still recommend running with some hack to wake up Outlook from IDLE in order for the connection not to time out and be disconnected. Dovecot seems to contain such a hack natively. We're on Cyrus and I've whipped out a hack that does the same thing. (Lie to the client saying we have new mail, immediately followed by an expunge and new information where that faked mail has disappeared).

The second bullet is particularly exciting to me - for starters, I've strongly preferred if the timeout was per sub action (actual IMAP command) as that wouldn't break things for those who use a large amount of folders.

I was also rather thrilled to discover that "Get folder unread count" automatically recurses and queries all subfolder of the selected folder, without giving the user any hint about what's happening.

Migrated

After having successfully migrated Himmelmora mo to blogger, I quickly decied to migrate Sky heath as well. As you'll probably have noticed some way if you're reading this.

Large data areas - how much can you malloc

One of the funny (in a tear-your-hair fashion) things with AIX is that it has so many process models, and no matter what they will give you trouble somehow.

One common issue for us is that we hit the default limit of 256 Mbyte data per process. And of course, our applications usually don't signal that they run out of memory, instead we get weird segmentation faults and other freaky stuff.

And of course, these issues do not surface often enough for this to be the first thing we think about. But everytime it does it makes me want to set MAXDATA for everything (which I of course won't do).

Modernized

Thanks to Google reader, I finally got around to fix an atom feed (a bit slow given that RFC 4287 was published in December).

Anyway, it seemed a bit weird to me that no one had fixed an atom feed for my system (COREblog 1.x) before. And then I realized how outdated my Zope skills (and software) were - I guess I really should learn ZPT some day, but it works well enough for now.

I guess I'm a junkie

Congratulations the world. ISO 26300 is now available.

Unfortunately, we're still using some software not up to standard, but we're working on it.

What makes software great

I intended to whine about OS X and bundles, but as one of our mail servers dumped earlier today, I'll write about that instead.

One of the softwares we put a great deal in is IBM SAN FS. As is it a proprietary, closed product, I don't have a clue as to the code quality, or the development model. Or lots of other things that influence the quality of the overall product.

What I do know is that the support team is truly excellent, which compensates for the closedness of the product, something very rare in my book.

We've had (and continue to have) some issues, but no matter what cluster file system we'd chosen, I'm rather convinced we'd be a sort of test lab, and while I'd personally prefer at least being able to find and fix errors ourselves, paying someone who knows the code base to fix errors is a much smarter thing to do when trying ourselves (and this is the same for open and closed products of this magnitude).

TSM

I really do like TSM as a backup system. But the code really seems to be something to scare little kids with. I remember the first time I tried running it on a freshly installed Debian sarge. I got it working eventually, but it took rather long.

Of course, TSM is the only PPC-program I've used so far that just doesn't work on an Mac mini (intel):


pontus:~ pontus$ sudo dsmc incr
IBM Tivoli Storage Manager
Command Line Backup/Archive Client Interface
Client Version 5, Release 3, Level 3.0
Client date/time: 2006-05-02 14:10:13
(c) Copyright by IBM Corporation and other(s) 1990, 2006. All Rights Reserved.

Node Name: PONTUSMINI
Session established with server TSM2: AIX-RS/6000
Server Version 5, Release 3, Level 2.2
Server date/time: 2006-05-02 14:10:11 Last access: 2006-05-02 14:10:08

Incremental backup of volume '/'
dsmc(6146,0x82015800) malloc: *** vm_allocate(size=2869547008) failed (error code=3)
dsmc(6146,0x82015800) malloc: *** error: can't allocate region
dsmc(6146,0x82015800) malloc: *** set a breakpoint in szone_error to debug
dsmc(6146,0x82015800) malloc: *** vm_allocate(size=2869547008) failed (error code=3)
dsmc(6146,0x82015800) malloc: *** error: can't allocate region
dsmc(6146,0x82015800) malloc: *** set a breakpoint in szone_error to debug
dsmc(6146,0x82015800) malloc: *** vm_allocate(size=2869547008) failed (error code=3)
dsmc(6146,0x82015800) malloc: *** error: can't allocate region
dsmc(6146,0x82015800) malloc: *** set a breakpoint in szone_error to debug
dsmc(6146,0x82015800) malloc: *** vm_allocate(size=2869547008) failed (error code=3)
dsmc(6146,0x82015800) malloc: *** error: can't allocate region
dsmc(6146,0x82015800) malloc: *** set a breakpoint in szone_error to debug
dsmc(6146,0x82015800) malloc: *** vm_allocate(size=2869547008) failed (error code=3)
dsmc(6146,0x82015800) malloc: *** error: can't allocate region
dsmc(6146,0x82015800) malloc: *** set a breakpoint in szone_error to debug
dsmc(6146,0x82015800) malloc: *** vm_allocate(size=2869547008) failed (error code=3)
dsmc(6146,0x82015800) malloc: *** error: can't allocate region
dsmc(6146,0x82015800) malloc: *** set a breakpoint in szone_error to debug
dsmc(6146,0x82015800) malloc: *** vm_allocate(size=2869547008) failed (error code=3)
dsmc(6146,0x82015800) malloc: *** error: can't allocate region
dsmc(6146,0x82015800) malloc: *** set a breakpoint in szone_error to debug
dsmc(6146,0x82015800) malloc: *** vm_allocate(size=2869547008) failed (error code=3)
dsmc(6146,0x82015800) malloc: *** error: can't allocate region
dsmc(6146,0x82015800) malloc: *** set a breakpoint in szone_error to debug
Abort trap
pontus:~ pontus$

Growl

Having recently began my journey of trying the switch from Linux to OS X for my desktop experience, I've recently discovered Growl and I like it more than I guessed I would.

The primary use for me is nicer notifications for IM events (I'm using PSI to Jabber, which I didn't know supported Growl when I installed it), although the reason I decided to try it was notifications for incoming mail.