Geemoo dot ca

CPU Speed Status Bar Monitor for wmii

Sun, 14 Mar 2010 19:02:53 -0400

So, I recently bought a new computer, and this one is a dual core and supports all kinds of dynamic speed adjusting goodness, which apparently my last CPU did not. While this is all great, there is a bit of a downside.

Down in the status bar of the window manager I use (wmiirc-lua), there is a little box indicating the current scaled CPU speed that each core is running at. As a result of the new dynamicness, the contents of that box are changing all the time. I was going to remove it entirely, but instead decided to write a graphical version of the same. The result of this effort is a wmii plugin called CPU Graph. Upon configuring wmii to load this, it'll create a 10 character scrolling ASCII bar indicating the current CPU speed.

I've got it up at github for the moment, until bartman gets a chance to merge it into the tree.

Download. Install. Enjoy the ASCII goodness.

Turning off Magnetic Net Mode in gschem

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 11:07:40 -0500

I searched for this options for 15 minutes, so I'm posting this here so I don't have to again.

If you're like me and find the magnetic nets always connect to the wrong stuff, you can turn them off! You can do so by adding (magnetic-net-mode "disabled") to your ~/.gschemrc or to a gafrc in your project directory.

Reinstalling GRUB on an Ubuntu install

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 15:30:54 -0500

So, I recently had to fix an ubuntu install after Windows had been reinstalled onto the drive.. end result: of course Windows tromped over the MBR and wiped out grub, making the computer automatically boot into windows. The fix is to get booted into Ubuntu and reinstall grub. If you're a debian user, the best way I found to do this is:

Download the Ubuntu liveCD for whatever version of ubuntu you are trying to fix. Don't forget to download the 64bit version if you're trying to fix a 64bit install of Ubuntu.
Do a google search for the usb-creator package for a not quite cutting edge version of ubuntu. While it would be awesome if this package were in debian, I'm sure the demand for it is pretty low, since it seems to be an Ubuntu creation. I am running Debian Squeeze/testing, and had good results using the usb-creator from Jaunty, which can be found here. (It'd be nice if you could just dd the iso to the usb drive and have it work, but alas I tried that, and it does not boot.)
Download and install usb-creator via dpkg -i
Insert a USB disk that you don't mind getting wiped, run usb-creator, select your liveCD iso file and usb disk, click format, and then Create disk.
Wait forever.
Pop the USB stick into the busted machine, and boot from the usb drive into the first menu with the install options.
Move the cursor over the first option for "Try Ubuntu Live CD without changes" and press to edit the menu command. Replace the boot=whatever parameter with root=/dev/sdXY, where sdXY is whatever partition your Ubuntu install is on.
Press and boot up into your Ubuntu install.
Open up a terminal, run sudo bash to get to a root shell.
Run update-grub to update your grub configuration file.
Run grub-install /dev/sdX, where sdx is whatever drive you boot off.. probably sda. (NOT sda1)

Once that finishes successfully, you should be able to reboot the machine and grub will start up, allowing you to select what install you which to use. There might be an easier way to do this, but since I'm not a regular Ubuntu user, this is what I found through web searchs and trial and error. If someone has an easier way, please do fire me an email and I'll update this post.

Firefox/IceWeasel Zoom Control

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 15:11:07 -0500

I'm not sure when it happened, since I don't use it all that frequently, but firefox/iceweasel changed the default behaviour of Ctrl+Scrollwheel from Zoom in/out to moving back and forth in history. If you want to change it back to controlling the zoom of the page, you can open about:config and change mousewheel.horizscroll.withcontrolkey from its default value of 0 to a value of 3. There are other values you can set that have other functions.. If you're interested, I found the info at http://kb.mozillazine.org/Firefox_:_FAQs_:_About:config_Entries.

Chicken and Veggies

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 21:41:55 -0500

My wife is away at her family for a vacation, but before she left, she was wondering if I was going to be ok for finding something to eat. Fortunately, I seem to be faring ok, and I don't think I'll perish while she's away. Meal for supper tonight (and probably lunch later this week) is Rotini with grilled chicken, zuchini, green onion, cheese and pasta sauce. Happy to say it turned out quite great.

Google Calculator for Bender

Sat, 29 Aug 2009 15:01:47 -0400

I used to have a Supybot, but I eventually got rid of it because I didn't want to have to use python to make it do things.

I instead got myself a bender bot (a BasicBot::Pluggable perl bot) from dave0. I wanted a calculator for it, so I whipped up GoogleCalc. GoogleCalc uses the power of google's calculator and will respond to calc commands in channel. It's awesome, only because google calculator is awesome.

Note: There is an existing Google Calculator BasicBot module, but it seemed much more complicated than I needed and didn't come with examples or docs as to how to install it in a bender bot. It's entirely possible it's not supposed to be installed into a bender bot. This way seemed much easier.

Grab GoogleCalc.pm and copy it into your modules directory, and edit your yml config file to load it on startup. Talk to it via the calc command.

15:10:02 [ ManOnIRC] MagicBot: calc 1 + 2
15:10:03 [ MagicBot] ManOnIRC: 1 + 2 = 3
15:10:15 [ ManOnIRC] Thanks MagicBot! You rock!

Digikey Search Plugin for Vimperator

Sat, 29 Aug 2009 10:41:35 -0400

As a person that dabbles alot in electronics, I happen to do alot of searching for parts on Digikey. As a person that doesn't like using the mouse when I'm at the computer, I use a lot of Vimperator. It seems only natural for me that these two things should be combined.

Today, I sat down and wrote a vimperator plugin to search digikey for part numbers. You can download it at http://github.com/geemoo/vimperator-digikey_search/tree/master. To install the plugin, copy the js file into your ~/.vimperator/plugins directory. If the plugins directory doesn't exist, you should create it first.

CW sample file generator

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 23:15:53 -0400

I've been thinking about learning morse code (AKA CW) for a while, and after last weekend, I've finally convinced myself that I want to do it. So, my first step was to write myself a little script to generate CW practice files that I can listen to on the bus rides to work. Running the script will generate a text file, and an mp3 file. The general idea is that you load up mp3 file onto your ipod, decode the message on paper (or in your head, if you're that good), and then compare it against the text version to see how many mistakes you made.

The script uses an assortment of tools, all of which were fairly easy to acquire. The list comprises the following: QSO, sox, lame, cwpcm and ofcourse bash. You can get the list of tools by doing a apt-get install morse lame sox. cwpcm you have to compile from source, I'm afraid. You can grab it at http://cwtext.sourceforge.net/.

Once you've got all that, run it at your command line, with the number of samples you wish to generate. If you're going to make a large number, I recommend going for coffee. The mp3 conversion step is time consuming. At the top of the script, there are two variables you can play with.. the characters per minute, and the words per minute, which affect the speed that the morse is played at.

# ./gencw.sh 50
cw-4WPM-8CPM-0001....
cw-4WPM-8CPM-0002....
cw-4WPM-8CPM-0003....

You can download the script at http://geemoo.ca/files/gencw.sh.

Flushing the Mail Queue in Exim

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 14:40:50 -0400

I always seem to forget how to do this, so perhaps blogging it will help. If you ever want to force exim to attempt to resend its queued message, even if they are frozen or not, can you can this by running exim -qff. This will force it to go through all messages it has and attempt to resend each one.

Apache Authentication... Valid User OR from this IP

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 14:26:43 -0400

This is really simple, but it took me a bit of digging to find it, so that's why I'm posting it here. I have a directory that I want to protect. To access it, you have to be either 1) an authenticated user, or 2) on my local LAN.

Step 1. Create an .htpasswd file as you normally would with the htpasswd command.
Step 2. Create an .htaccess file that looks like this.

AuthName "My private directory of stuff"
AuthType Basic
AuthUserFile /the/path/to/the/.htpasswd
AuthGroupFile /dev/null
require valid-user
Order allow,deny
Allow from 192.168.0
Satisfy Any