Archive for the ‘Computers’ Category.

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Sure/Smartie LCDProc

December 22, 2009, 7:04 pm

Recently I’ve been looking at getting a computing device into the Land Rover. Short of buying a full sized 7″ touch screen, I opted to go for a slightly cheaper £20 4×20 LCD display. This was more to be proof of concept, and give me a starter to work on, before I decide whether or not to put a full sized screen in.

Ultimately, I purchased a SmartieLCD module from Ebay. It arrived, I plugged it into my laptop running Windows at work, and it worked first time. Now it was time to get it working with LCDProc!

Earlier on I had spotted that SmartieLCD in Windows used the Matrix Orbital DLL file. Sadly, when using LCDProc in Linux, Matrix didn’t work at all. It was time to go looking

Enthused by http://lists.omnipotent.net/pipermail/lcdproc/2009-July/013021.html, and manufacturers documentation, I decided to check out the CVS copy of LCDProc. The last ‘release’ was back in 2007, so if I was to get anything recent it would have to be from CVS

cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@lcdproc.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/lcdproc login
cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@lcdproc.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/lcdproc co -P lcdproc

Having a look around the source files indicate that Sure Electronics displays were supported, but not enabled by default. A simple ./configure flag would enable them, so it was time to get compiling. Firstly some support files have to be installed first.

sudo apt-get install libusb-dev autogen automake

After that, kick off the build process, and enable Sure Electronics support at configure time.

sh ./autogen.sh
./configure –enable-drivers=SureElec
make
sudo make install

Now that the software is installed, LCDd needs configured in order to send data to the LCD display.

sudo vim /usr/local/etc/LCDd.conf

In here, a few parts need changed -

driver=SureElec
DriverPath=/usr/local/lib/lcdproc/
Edition=3
Contrast=200
Brightness=480

And that’s it! Execute /usr/local/sbin/LCDd, and you should get a Clients: 0 and Screens: 0 on the LCD display.

All is good!

Category: Cars, Computers, Cool things, Geek, Land Rover, Linux  |  2 Comments

Lost your APC UPS?

November 10, 2009, 5:21 pm

I was in a sticky situation this weekend. I had casually set up one of our APC UPS RT 5000 units to use DHCP to get a statically assigned address. However, I hadn’t implemented Option 43 on the DHCP server and the APC management card had fallen off the network.

Unable to find a serial cable of the right type, and unable to get the card onto the subnet, I was faced with resetting the firmware. That was until I read the manual!

With the APC9619 card, at least, if you know the MAC address (I did, it was in our DHCP server config), you can prod the card with an ICMP packet to assign the desired address.

Simply do this…

Assign an IP address to the MAC address in your local ARP table
sudo arp -s 10.240.64.32 00:C0:B7:CA:D8:9B

Ping the address with a 113 byte ICMP packet.
ping 10.240.64.32 -s 113

This causes the management card to accept the address as its own, and at that point you can now telnet to the card and enter the administration console (unless you like clicky pointy things, in which case you can use your web browser)

It seems to time out rather quickly, so don’t mess about in the admin console. Jump in, remove the DHCP Vendor cookie requirement (2, 1, 1, 1, 2, 8, 1, 9) and reboot the management card.

All done! No cables, no firmware, no massive reconfiguration.

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Category: Computers, Technology, Work  |  Comment

Asterisk Jabber Call Notifications

January 5, 2009, 8:06 pm

The other evening I busied myself with tweaking Asterisk to do some more geeky things. One such item was where I configured it to send a message to my Jabber account every time there was a call to a particular extension. Great for call logging, integration, and general user friendliness. If I was so inclined, it could message a Yahoo, MSN, ICQ, or AOL account through the Jabber platform to inform me of a new call. How rather flexible.

Category: Asterisk, Computers, Geek, Technology, VoIP  |  Comment

A Reason to Hate Cisco

January 4, 2009, 10:13 pm

Last week I ‘accidentally’ bought a Cisco 7911 phone on Ebay. My bid was low, the device was missing a few bits, but I still thought I wouldn’t get it.

Suffice to say… I’ve just written this piece on how to load the SIP firmware onto a Cisco 7911 phone. The procedures are covered elsewhere, but I thought I could compress it into a format that’s slightly easier to understand. Hope it makes sense. :-)

Whilst I’m at it, if anyone can email me a working SIP based cnf.xml file, it would be greatly appreciated. Getting the firmware onto the phone is easy… configuring it for Asterisk seems to be a completely different ballgame.

Category: Asterisk, Computers, VoIP  |  1 Comment

PS3 and Matroska? Could be soon…

December 29, 2008, 3:00 pm

Word is that the Matroska container format will be officially supported by DivX 7. Surely a good thing, as Sony have a deal with Divx to provide decoding software for the PS3. Maybe this will spell the end of having to transcode those ubiquitous MKV files for use on a PS3. With a due date of around January 2009, how long before the PS3 officially supports the MKV format? After that… roll on 1440p support :-) Continue reading ‘PS3 and Matroska? Could be soon…’ »

Category: Computers, Cool things  |  3 Comments

Disable Compiz

November 11, 2008, 11:31 pm

Since KDE have ruined Kubuntu with KDE4, it’s time to use Gnome. However Compiz and glitzy pointless effects irritate me no end. A few quick commands will disable them for the current user…

gconftool-2 –set /desktop/gnome/applications/window_manager/current /usr/bin/metacity –type=string

gconftool-2 –set /desktop/gnome/applications/window_manager/default /usr/bin/metacity –type=string

The next time you log in, it will use the default Metacity window manager instead of Compiz. Happiness all round.

*** UPDATE *** See Calum’s response below for the correct method.

Category: Computers, Geek, KDE, Linux  |  4 Comments

EVE Online Badness

October 11, 2008, 12:14 am

Recently EVE Online had been playing up. It was still in demo mode, but I quite fancied having a shot at it. The app was having none of it though…

kyleg@CHLP0023:~$ eve
Single-user install…
This is the update checker…
Running /home/kyleg/.cedega/.updater/cedega_updater.py
Running… /home/kyleg/.cedega/.ui/runGUI
kyleg@CHLP0023:~$ err:client:receive_fd FD went missing; attempting recovery
wine client perror:0: write/writev: Bad file descriptor
kyleg@CHLP0023:~$

Some hunting revealed a similar issue for Mac users. It translated to Linux use quite easily though.

kyleg@CHLP0023:~$ rm -rf ~/.cedega/EVE\ Online/c_drive/Documents\ and\ Settings/Local\ Settings/Application\ Data/CCP/EVE/c_program_files_ccp_eve_tranquility/cache/
kyleg@CHLP0023:~$

Sadly the issue still continued, so the settings directory was nuked as well. I also killed off some wineserver apps at the same time, so it could have been down to them at this point…

kyleg@CHLP0023:~$ rm -rf ~/.cedega/EVE\ Online/c_drive/Documents\ and\ Settings/Local\ Settings/Application\ Data/CCP/EVE/c_program_files_ccp_eve_tranquility/settings/
kyleg@CHLP0023:~$ ps waux | grep -i [w]ine
kyleg 21418 0.0 0.0 36552 1728 ? Ss 00:41 0:00 /home/kyleg/.cedega/.winex_ver/winex-eve-000130/winex/bin/wineserver
kyleg 21419 0.0 0.0 36552 1728 ? S 00:41 0:00 /home/kyleg/.cedega/.winex_ver/winex-eve-000130/winex/bin/wineserver
kyleg@CHLP0023:~$ kill 21418
kyleg@CHLP0023:~$ kill 21419
kyleg@CHLP0023:~$

All was pretty by this point, and EVE continued as expected.

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Category: Computers, Linux  |  Comment

Grub on a DL380

July 18, 2008, 10:08 am

Having had the misfortune to be editing the partition table of one of our Oracle servers, I discovered that Grub 0.97 (the SLES SP1 variety) doesn’t play well with DL380 Smart Array Controllers. The magic auto detection that we’ve all grown to know and love just… it just doesn’t. Here’s how to regain that Grub magic…

Continue reading ‘Grub on a DL380’ »

Category: Computers, Geek, Linux, Work  |  Comment

An Idea

July 15, 2008, 12:11 am

It’s probably already been covered, but my 30 seconds of Google-Fu hasn’t turned anything up so bear with me…

Take one OpenMoko phone,  a geolocation service like Fire Eagle, an online celltower database such as CellDB, and some code to use those lovely d-bus bindings, and you could have a location reporting service that’s easy on the battery and mostly precise in urban areas. If your area isn’t covered by CellDB, then run around with the OpenMoko GPS reciever online for a while to report celltower locations, and you’re sorted.

Use all of the above to create services like Socialight, location based Twittering, rough geotagging for photos (courtesy of Flickr and FireEagle [both Yahoo companies]) , pre-emptive OSM tile downloads, Asterisk routing – you could even implement ex-girlfriend logic to it all, if she were to have a similar device :-)

Well, I’m sure someone has thought of this already, but I thought I would commit ideas to storage just in case. Once my FreeRunner arrives, I know what I’ll be working on

Category: Computers, Cool things, Geek, Internet, Linux, Openstreetmap, Twitter, Web  |  2 Comments

UK is Embargoed

May 15, 2008, 2:42 pm

Now, I don’t claim to keep up with the news as it happens when it happens, but I’m sure I would have heard about the UK being embargoed by the USA… Instead, I seem to be hearing of it 2nd hand through Sun Microsystems…

Java Embargoed

Category: Computers  |  Comment
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