Recently I published an init.d script for debian/ubuntu to start wuala in headless mode. Since some time now I have a mediacenter running on Archlinux so the debian init.d script needed some change to run properly. I’m currently putting together a package to install wuala on archlinux with via pacman. In the meantime I will publish the rc.d script in case someone wants to install wuala manually following the instructions found here. /etc/rc.d/wuala (download)

Since I switched to Snow Leopard I was not satisfied with the printing drivers for my old HP OfficeJet 95. I used the included Gutenprint drivers. For text they worked ok, but images looked terrible. Today I decided to do something about it. From Linux I know that HPLIP has some pretty good driver (hpijs) for most HP Devices. Fortunately I can use the same drivers for Mac OS X to. You need three packages to do this. More information can be found on the website of the Linux Foundation.

I recently had the problem to enable 5.1 Sound with 3 click outputs on an Nvidia ION board. By default Linux configures it with only one plug configured as output. After some research I found a solution in the OpenSUSE Wiki you have to set during module loading to get it working. Basically you have to add options snd-hda-intel <strong>model=3stack-6ch</strong> enable=1 index=0 to your modeprobe.conf to tell the driver to use all its 3 plugs as output. After you loaded the modules like this, alsamixer will show you all the 6 channels, so you can unmute them.

I recently wanted to install Wuala on my brand new media center PC running Ubuntu on it. It was not that hard because there is an excellent tutorial on how to setup wuala on a headless machine. Unfortunately there was no script to start and stop Wuala on system start-up and shutdown. So I decided to create one. /etc/init.d/wuala (download) #!/bin/bash #!/bin/bash ### BEGIN INIT INFO # Provides: wuala # Required-Start: $network $local_fs $remote_fs # Required-Stop: $network $local_fs $remote_fs # Default-Start: 2 3 4 5 # Default-Stop: 0 1 6 # Short-Description: start Wuala headless (wuala) ### END INIT INFO WUALADIR=/home/wuala WUALAUSR=wuala WUALALOG=$WUALADIR/out.log WUALAERR=$WUALADIR/error.log uptest(){ if ps -u $WUALAUSR u|grep -v grep|grep loader3.jar >/dev/null;then echo "Wuala is running" return 0 else echo "Wuala is not running" return 1 fi } case "${1:-''}" in 'start') # start commands here echo "Starting Wuala..." uptest || su $WUALAUSR -c "wualacmd > $WUALALOG 2> $WUALAERR &" ;; 'stop') # stop commands here echo "Stopping Wuala..." uptest && su $WUALAUSR -c "wualacmd exit > $WUALALOG 2> $WUALAERR" ;; 'restart') # restart commands here $0 stop sleep 1 $0 start ;; 'status') # status commands here uptest && su $WUALAUSR -c "wualacmd showStatus" uptest && su $WUALAUSR -c "wualacmd connectionInfo" uptest && su $WUALAUSR -c "wualacmd showSettings" ;; *) # no parameter specified echo "Usage: $SELF start|stop|restart|status" exit 1 ;; esac It is a very early version with not much error checking, so use it at your own risk. I just posted it in case somebody might find it useful.

Update: Sony released a new version of their BIOS which allows the activation via menu. I found a nice tutorial how to enable the Support for Intel VT on a Sony Vaio, with Firmware. Just follow the tutorial on this site.

Recently I found a script to migrate between SQLite and PostgreSQL on Lazy Crazy Coder’s blog. It’s pretty cool, especially as it shows the flexibility of SQLAlchemy in this case used as a middleware. You can download the script here.

I recently had the problem that my VLC Media Player took about a minute to start. First I didn’t know what caused the problem until I remembered that I imported my Music Library into VLC, so it always scanned the whole Library to import the meta data. To disable the Media Library do as follows: Open: Tools -> Preferences Under Show Setting select “All” to show all settings Go to: Playlist

I recently do a lot of mathematical computation, using MATLAB, unfortunately MATLAB is not open-source and fairly expensive to buy. There is a open-source reimplementation of the MATLAB language called GNU Octave. But I never really liked it, mostly because of the missing visualization features compared to MATLAB. So I started to look for something else, and as I’m a huge fan of Python it was obvious to take a look at SciPy, a Scientific extension based on NumPy, a highly optimized multi-dimensional array library. And I must admit I don’t regret it.

This is the first official release of the Bazaar ProENGINEER Helpers. It’s a simple command line version with no direct integration into Pro/E. You can find more information about how to use it here. Or just directly download it!

In the past I used several different sources to get VMware images, so here is a list of my sources with a short description on what’s the advantages of each source. http://www.thoughtpolice.co.uk/ The ThoughtPolice in most cases seems to be the best source if you need a base image for a server based on various operating systems. It provides fairly small images for Ubuntu, Debian, FreeBSD, CentOS, Fedora. http://virtualappliances.net/ Virtual Appliances provides ready to go images for Webservers based on LAMP, Apache Tomcat and many others. It’s the ideal solution if you need a quick preconfigured webserver. The images even seem to be ready for production use with only minor changes. http://www.vmware.com/appliances/