Feb/100
Google Buzz, Android and Google Apps Accounts
I was looking at the Google Android Maps Application that is now providing integrated Google Buzz support, showing buzzes directly on the map and allowing you to buzz (around where I live and work, there has been a tremendous uptake of Google Buzz which makes this really compelling).
However, there's a little peculiarity about the Android maps application: If your main Google Account you configured (that's the first one you configure) on the phone is a Google Apps account, Maps will use that for buzz-support (apparently, there's already some kind of infrastructure for inter-company Buzzing in place). This means that you would only see buzzes from other people in your domain and, because there's no official support for this out there, only if they are also using an Android phone.
"Mittelpraktisch" as I would say in German.
The obvious workaround is to configure your private gmail account to be your primary account (this is only possible by factory-resetting your device by the way), but this has some disadvantages, mainly the fact that the calendar on the Android phones only supports syncing with the primary account and as it happens, usually it's the work-calendar (the Apps one) you want synchronized; not the private one (that lingers unused in my case).
To work around this issue, share your work calendar with your private Google account.
Unfortunately, I couldn't do that as I'm posting this, because the default in the domain configuration is to not allow this. Thankfully, I'm that domain's administrator, so I could change it (small company. remember.), but it seems to take a while to propagate into the calendar account.
I'll post more as my investigation turns out more, though it is my gut feeling that this mess will solve itself as Google fixes their Maps application to not use that phantom corporate buzz account.
Sep/092
Introducing sacy, the Smarty Asset Compiler
We all know how beneficial to the performance of a web application it can be to serve assets like CSS files and JavaScript files in larger chunks as opposed to smaller ones.
The main reason behind this is the latency incurring from requesting a resource from the server plus the additional bandwidth of the request metadata which can grow quite large when you take cookies into account.
But knowing this, we also want to keep files separate during development to help us with the debugging and development process. We also want the deployment to not increase too much in difficulty, so we naturally dislike solutions that require additional scripts to run at deployment time.
And we certainly don't want to mess with the client-side caching that HTTP provides.
And maybe we're using Smarty and PHP.
So this is where sacy, the Smarty Asset Compiler plugin comes in.
The only thing (besides a one-time configuration of the plugin) you have to do during development is to wrap all your <link>-Tags with {asset_compile}....{/asset_compile} and the plugin will do everything else for you, where everything includes:
- automatic detection of actually linked files
- automatic detection of changed files
- automatic minimizing of linked files
- compilation of all linked files into one big file
- linking that big file for your clients to consume. Because the file is still served by your webserver, there's no need for complicated handling of client-side caching methods (ETag, If-Modified-Since and friends): Your webserver does all that for you.
- Because the cached file gets a new URL every time any of the corresponding source files change, you can be sure that requesting clients will retrieve the correct, up-to-date version of your assets.
- sacy handles concurrency, without even blocking while one process is writing the compiled file (and of course without corrputing said file).
sacy is released under the MIT license and ready to be used (though it currently only handles CSS files and ignores the media-attribute - stuff I'm going to change over the next few days).
Interested? Visit the project's page on GitHub or even better, fork it and help improving it!
Aug/0915
Snow Leopard and PHP
Earlier versions of Mac OS X always had pretty outdated versions of PHP in their default installation, so what you usually did was to go to entropy.ch and fetch the packages provided there.
Now, after updating to Snow Leopard you'll notice that the entropy configuration has been removed and once you add it back in, you'll see Apache segfaulting and some missing symbol errors.
Entropy has not updated the packages to snow leopard yet, so you could have a look at PHP that came with stock snow leopard: This time it's even bleeding edge: Snow Leopard comes with PHP 5.3.0.
Unfortunately though, some vital extensions are missing, most notably for me, the PostgeSQL extension.
This time around though, Snow Leopard comes with a functioning PHP development toolset, so there's nothing stopping you to build it yourself, so here's how to get the official PostgreSQL extension working on Snow Leopard's stock php:
- Make sure that you have installed the current Xcode Tools. You'll need a working compiler for this.
- Make sure that you have installed PostgreSQL and know where it is on your machine. In my case, I've used the One-click installer from EnterpriseDB (which persisted the update to 10.6).
- Now that Snow Leopard uses a full 64bit userspace, we'll have to make sure that the PostgreSQL client library is available as a 64 bit binary - or even better, as an universal binary.Unfortunately, that's not the case with the one-click installer, so we'll have to fix that first:
- Download the sources of the PostgreSQL version you have installed from postgresql.org
- Open a terminal and use the following commands:
% tar xjf postgresql-[version].tar.bz2 % cd postgresql-[version] % CFLAGS="-arch i386 -arch x86_64" ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/mypostgres % make
make will fail sooner or later because you the postgres build scripts can't handle building an universal binary server, but the compile will progress enough for us to now build libpq. Let's do this:
% make -C src/interfaces % sudo make -C src/interfaces install % make -C src/include % sudo make -C src/include install % make -C src/bin % sudo make -C src/bin install
- Download the php 5.3.0 source code from their website. I used the bzipped version.
- Open your Terminal and cd to the location of the download. Then use the following commands:
% tar -xjf php-5.3.0.tar.bz2 % cd php-5.3.0/ext/pgsql % phpize % ./configure --with-pgsql=/usr/local/mypostgres % make -j8 # in case of one of these nice 8 core macs :p % sudo make install % cd /etc % cp php.ini-default php.ini
- Now edit your new php.ini and add the line
extension=pgsql.so
And that's it. Restart Apache (using apachectl or the System Preferences) and you'll have PostgreSQL support.
All in all this is a tedious process and it's the price us early adopters have to pay constantly.
If you want an honest recommendation on how to run PHP with PostgreSQL support on Snow Leopard, I'd say: Don't. Wait for the various 3rd party packages to get updated.
Jun/090
802.11n, Powerline and Sonos
I decided to have a look into the networking setup for my bedroom as lately, I was getting really bad bandwidth.
Earlier, while unable to stream 1080p into my bedrom, I was able to watch 720p, but lately even that has become choppy at best.
In my bedroom, I was using a Sonos Zone Player 100 connected via Ethernet to a Devolo A/V 200MBit power line adapter.
I have been using the switch integrated into the zone player to connect the bedrom MacMini media center and the PS3 to the network. The idea was that powerline will provide better bandwidth than WiFi, which it initially seemed to do, but as I said, lately, this system became really painful to use.
Naturally I had enough and wanted to look into other options.
Here's a quick list of my findings:
- The Sonos ZonePlayer actually acts as a bridge. If one player is connected via Ethernet, it'll use its mesh network to wirelessly bridge that Ethernet connection to the switch inside the Sonos. I'm actually deeply astonished that I even got working networking with my configuration.
- Either my Devolo adaptor is defective or something strange is going on in my power line network - a test using FTP never yielded more than 1 MB/s throughput which explains why 720p didn't work.
- While still not a ratified standard, 802.11n, at least as implemented by Apple works really well and delivers constant 4 MB/s throughput in my configuration.
- Not wanting to risk cross-vendor incompatibilities (802.11n is not ratified after all), I went the Apple Airport route, even though there probably would have been cheaper solutions.
- Knowing that bandwidth rapidly decreases with range, I bought one AirPort Extreme Base Station and three AirPort Expresses which I'm using to do nothing but extend the 5Ghz n network.
- All the AirPort products have a nasty constantly lit LED which I had to cover up - this is my bedroom after all, but I still wanted line of sight to optimize bandwidth. There is a configuration option for the LED, but it only provides two options: Constantly on (annoying) and blinking on traffic (very annoying).
- While the large AirPort Extreme can create both a 2.4 GHz and a 5 GHz network, the Express ones can only extend either one of them!
This involved a lot of trying out, changing around configurations and a bit of research, but going from 0.7 MB/s to 4 MB/s in throughput certainly was worth the time spent.
Also, yes, these numbers are in Megabytes unless I'm writing MBits in which case it's Megabits.
Apr/094
Playing Worms Armageddon on a Mac
Last weekend, I had a real blast with the Xbox 360 Arcade version of worms. Even after so many years, this game still rules them all, especially (if not only) in multiplayer mode.
The only drawback of the 360 version is the lack of weapons.
While the provided set is all well, the game is just not the same without the Super Banana Bomb or the Super Sheep.
So this is why I looked for my old Worms Armageddon CD and tried to get it to work on todays hardware.
Making it work under plain Vista was easy enough (get the latest beta patch for armageddon, by the way):
Right-Click the Icon, select the compatibility tab, chose Windows XP, Disable Themes and Desktop composition and run the game with administrative privileges.
You may get away with not using one option or the other, but this one worked consistently.
To be really useful though, I wanted to make the game run under OS X as this is my main environment and I really dislike going through the lengthy booting process that is bootcamp.
I tried the various virtualization solutions around - something that should work seeing that the game doesn't really need much in terms of hardware support.
But unfortunately, this was way harder than anticipated:
- The initial try was done using VMWare Fusion which looked very good at first, but failed miserably later on: While I was able to launch (and actually use) the games frontend, the actual game was a flickery mess with no known workaround.
- Parallels failed by displaying a black menu. It was still clickable, but there was nothing on the screen but blackness and a white square border. Googling around a bit led to the idea to set SlowFrontendWorkaround in the registry to 0 which actually made the launcher work, but the game itself crashed consistenly without error message.
In the end, I've achieved success using VirtualBox. The SlowFrontendWorkaround is still needed to make the launcher work and the mouse helper of the VirtualBox guest tools needs to be disabled (on the Machine menu, the game still runs with the helper enabled, but you won't be able to actually control the mouse pointer consistently), but after that, the game runs flawlessly.
Flickerless and with a decent frame rate. And with sound, of course.
To enable the workaround I talked about, use this .reg file.
Now the slaughter of worms can begin 
Mar/090
Double-blind cola test
Two of my coworkers decided today after lunch that it was time to solve the age-old question: Is it possible to actually detect different kinds of cola just by tasting them.
In the spirit of true science (and a hefty dose of Mythbusters), we decided to do this the right way and to create a double blind test. The idea is that not only the tester has to not know the different test subjects, but also the person administering the test to make sure that the tester is not influenced in any way.
So here's what we have done:
- We bought 5 different types of cola: A can of coke light, a can of standard coke, a PET bottle of standard coke, a can of coke zero and finally, a can of the new Red Bull cola (in danger of spoiling the outcome: eek).
- We marked five glasses with numbers from 1 to 5 at the bottom.
- We asked a coworker not taking part in the actual test to fill the glasses with the respective drink.
- We put the glasses on our table in random order and designated each glasses position with letters from A to E.
- One after another, we drank the samples and noted which glass (A-E) we thought to contain what drink (1-5). As to not influence ourselves during the test, the kitchen area was off-limits for everyone but the test subject and each persons results where to be kept secret until the end of the test.
- We compared notes.
- We checked the bottom of the glasses to see how we fared.
The results are interesting:
- Of the four people taking part in the test, all but one person guessed all types correctly. The one person who failed wasn't able to correctly distinguish between bottled and canned standard coke.
- Everyone instantly recognized the Red Bull Cola (no wonder there, it's much brighter than the other contenders and it smells like cough medicine)
- Everyone got the coke light and zero correctly.
- Although the tester pool was way too small, it's interesting that 75% of the testers were able to discern the coke in the bottle from the coke in the can - I would not have guessed that, but then, there's only a 50% chance to be wrong on this one - we may all just have been lucky - at least I was, to be honest.
Fun in the office doing pointless stuff after lunch, I guess.
Mar/092
New MacMini (early 09) and Linux
The new MacMinis that were announced this week come with a Firewire 800 port which was reason enough for me to update shion yet again (keeping the host name of course).
All my media she's serving to my various systems is stored on a second generation Drobo which is currently connected via USB2, but has a lingering FW800 port.
Of course the upgrade to FW800 will not double the transfer rate to and from the drobo, but it should increase it significantly, so I went ahead and got one of the new Minis.
As usual, I entered the Ubuntu (Intrepid) CD, hold c while turning the device on and completed the installation.
This left the Mini in an unbootable state.
It seems that this newest generation of Mac Hardware isn't capable of booting from an MBR partitioned harddrive. Earlier Macs complained a bit if the harddrive wasn't correctly partitioned, but then went ahead and booted the other OS anyways.
Not so much with the new boxes it seems.
To finally achieve what I wanted I had to do the following complicated procedure:
- Install rEFIt (just download the package and install the .mpkg file)
- Use the Bootcamp assistant to repartition the drive.
- Reboot with the Ubuntu Desktop CD and run parted (the partitioning could probably be accomplished using the console installer, but I didn't manage to do it correctly).
- Resize the FAT32-partition which was created by the Bootcamp partitioner to make room at the end for the swap partition.
- Create the swap partition.
- Format the FAT32-partition with something useful (ext3)
- Restart and enter the rEFIt partitioner tool (it's in the boot menu)
- Allow it to resync the MBR
- Insert the Ubuntu Server CD, reboot holding the C key
- Install Ubuntu normally, but don't change the partition layout - just use the existing partitions.
- Reboot and repeat steps 7 and 8
- Start Linux.
Additionally, you will have to keep using rEFIt as the boot device control panel item does not recognize the linux partitions any more, so can't boot from them.
Now to find out whether that stupid resistor is still needed to make the new mini boot headless.
Jan/093
Tunnel munin nodes over HTTP
Last time I've talked about Munin, the one system monitoring tool I feel working well enough for me to actually bother to work with. Harsh words, I know, but the key to every solution is simplicity. And simple Munin is. Simple, but still powerful enough to do everything I would want it to do.
The one problem I had with it is that the querying of remote nodes works over a custom TCP port (4949) which doesn't work behind firewalls.
There are some SSH tunneling solutions around, but what do you do if even SSH is no option because the remote access method provided to you relies on some kind of VPN technology or access token.
Even if you could keep a long-running VPN connection, it's a very performance intensive solution as it requires resources on the VPN gateway. But this point is moot anyways because nearly all VPNs terminate long running connections. If re-establishing the connection requires physical interaction, then you are basically done here.
This is why I have created a neat little solution which tunnels the munin traffic over HTTP. It works with a local proxy server your munin monitoring process will connect to and a little CGI-script on the remote end.
This will cause multiple HTTP connections per query interval (the proxy uses Keep-Alive though so it's not TCP connections we are talking about - it's just hits in the access.log you'll have to filter out somehow) because it's impossible for a CGI script to keep the connection open and send data both ways - at least not if your server-side is running plain PHP which is the case in the setup I was designing this for.
Aynways - the solution works flawlessly and helps me to monitor a server behind one hell of a firewall and behind a reverse proxy.
You'll find the code here (on GitHub as usual) and some explanation on how to use it is here.
Licensed under the MIT license as usual.
Dec/080
Windows Media Encoder: File not found
Today I have come across an installation of a Windows Media Encoder that refused to actually encode media. Whenever I started the encoding process, the encoder quit with the error 0x80070002 and gave the very helpful unformation that "the system cannot find the file specified".
The problem appeared quite suddenly after working perfectly fine for the last three months. As the system is behind a very air-tight firewall and is the only machine in the network segment (aside of some IP cameras), the system hasn't even been updated via Windows Update. So I have to conclude, that the problem appeared out of the blue. One day it worked, the next it stopped working.
I've tried everything to fix this (the encoder in question was encoding a live stream for a client of ours): From reinstalling the Axis capture driver to reinstalling Windows Media Encoder - nothing worked - the error message stayed the same.
Even googling proved all but helpful: There are quite many pages apparently mirroring all and the same MSDN forum on which someone actually posted the same problem but never got an answer. How annoying is that? You find 10 or more hits, everyone having your problem right in the title and everyone on a different page, but in the end, it's all the same posting mirrored by different sites and plastered with advertisements.
On a hunch though, I have deleted "%Localappdata%\Microsoft\Windows Media" and "%Localappdata%\Microsoft\Windows Media Player" seeing that these folders stayed intact after a reinstallation while also being somewhat Windows media related.
Of course that helped!
So if you ever are in the same problem and Media Encoder suddenly stops encoding, it's maybe caused by a corrupted cache of sorts. In that case, remove the cache and be encoding again, but note though, that if you are on a client machine with all your media on, removing these folders may be unwise as they could contain some meta information about your media.
In my case that didn't matter though.
Nov/080
Listen to your home music from the office
My MP3 collection is safely stored on shion, on a drobo mounted as /nas. Naturally, I want to listen to said music from the office - especially considering my fully routed VPN access between the office and my home infrastructure and the upstream which suffices for at least 10 concurrent 128bit streams (boy - technology has changed in the last few years - I remember the times where you couldn't reliably stream 128 bit streams - let alone my 160/320 mp3s).
I've tried many things so far to make this happen:
- serve the files with a tool like jinzora. This works, but I don't really like jinzora's web interface and I was never able to get it to work correctly on my Ubuntu box. I was able to trace it down to null bytes read from their tag parser, but the code is very convoluted and practically unreadable without putting quite some effort into that. Considering that I didn't much like the interface in the first place, I didn't want to invest time into that.
- Use a SlimServer (now Squeezecenter) with a softsqueeze player. Even though I don't use my squeezebox (an original model with the original slimdevices brand, not the newer Logitech one) any more because the integrated amplifier in the Sonos players works much better for my current setup. This solution worked quite ok, but the audio tends to stutter a bit at the beginning of tracks, indicating some buffering issues.
- Use iTune's integrated library sharing feature. This seemed both undoable and unpractical. Unpractical because it would force me to keep my main mac running all the time and undoable because iTunes sharing can't pass subnet boundaries. Aside of that, it's a wonderful solution as audio doesn't stutter, I already know the interface and access is very quick and convenient.
But then I found out how to make the iTunes thing both very much doable and practical.
The network boundary problem can be solved using Network Beacon, a ZeroConf proxy. Start the application, create a new beacon. Chose any service name, use «_daap._tcp.» as service type, set the port number to 3689, enable the host proxy, keep the host name clear and enter the IP address of the system running iTunes (or firefly - see below).
Oh, and the target iTunes refuses to serve out data to machines in different subnets, so to be able to directly access a remote iTunes, you'd also have to set up an SSH tunnel.
Using Network Beacon, ZeroConf quickly begins working across any subnet boundaries.
The next problem was about the fact that I was forced to keep my main workstation running at home. I fixed that with Firefly Media Server for which even a pretty recent prebuilt package exists for Ubuntu (apt-get install mt-daapd).
I've installed that, configured iptables to drop packets for port 3689 on the external interface, configured Firefly to use the music share (which basically is a current backup of the itunes library of my main workstation - rsync for the win).
Firefly in this case even detects the existing iTunes playlists (as the music share is just a backup copy of my iTunes library - including the iTunes Library.xml), though smart playists don't work, but can easily be recreated in the firefly web interface.
This means that I can access my complete home mp3 library from the office, stutter free, using an interface I'm well used to, without being forced to keep my main machine running all the time.
And it isn't even that much of a hack and thus easy to rebuild should the need arise.
I'd love to not be forced to do the Network Beacon thing, but avahi doesn't relay ZeroConf information across VPN interfaces.