REverberations - Open-Source

TwinHan Remote under Ubuntu Lucid Lynx 10.04

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 12:46:37 -0500

Years ago with one of my DVB TV tuner cards cards I unexpectedly also received a little USB IR receiver and remote. In common with almost all peripheral hardware, it was designed for Windows but can with a little effort be made to work with a linux machine, such as my MythTV machine.

I made it work by hand years ago, but then had no use for it for a while, and a few months ago wanted to make it work again. It turns out that Adam Pierce has a good set of instructions. But, like all other commenters on that blog post, my setup broke when upgrading to Ubuntu 10.04.

Grrrr.

I have finally found a working combination that hopefully will help others - the suggestions in the blog post were good enough to set me on the right track, but not good enough to make it actually work.

Here's the items that I had to modify by hand over and above my (upgraded) Ubuntu 10.04 setup:

It turns out that nothing makes the directory /var/run/lirc/, which is where lirc needs to put its socket. So, I have modified /etc/init.d/lirc to add this code block at line 109:

if [ ! -d /var/run/lirc ];then
log_success_msg "/var/run/lirc/ is missing, creating"
mkdir /var/run/lirc
fi

lircd should then be able to start and create a socket called lircd within that directory.
Nothing creates /dev/lirc. This may not be needed but certainly some of the lirc testing tools expect to find it, so:

cd /dev
ln -s input/by-id/usb-Twinhan_Tech_Remote_Control_1111111-event-if00 lirc
Nothing creates /dev/lircd. This may not be needed, as it is the legacy equivalent of /var/run/lirc/lircd, but I suggest linking it:

cd /dev
ln -s /var/run/lirc/lircd
You need to modify /usr/share/hal/fdi/preprobe/20thirdparty/lirc.fdi as per Adam's blog entry.
As other commenters have noted, the USB ID has changed and lirc needs to be aware of this, so modify /etc/init.d/hardware.conf to contain:

REMOTE="Custom"
REMOTE_MODULES=""
REMOTE_DRIVER="devinput"
REMOTE_DEVICE="/dev/input/by-id/usb-Twinhan_Tech_Remote_Control_1111111-event-if00"
REMOTE_LIRCD_CONF=""
REMOTE_LIRCD_ARGS=""

TRANSMITTER="None"
TRANSMITTER_MODULES=""
TRANSMITTER_DRIVER=""
TRANSMITTER_DEVICE=""
TRANSMITTER_LIRCD_CONF=""
TRANSMITTER_LIRCD_ARGS=""

START_LIRCD="true"

LOAD_MODULES="true"

LIRCMD_CONF=""

FORCE_NONINTERACTIVE_RECONFIGURATION="false"
START_LIRCMD=""
REMOTE_SOCKET=""
TRANSMITTER_SOCKET=""
Lastly, and this is the bit that had me stumped, I needed to take the header block from the released lircd.conf.devinput, remove unnecessary sections, and modify it with the keycodes published by Adam's commenters, installed as /etc/lirc/lircd.conf:

# generated by devinput.sh (obsolete 32 bit version)
begin remote

name devinput
bits 16
eps 30
aeps 100

one 0 0
zero 0 0
pre_data_bits 16
pre_data 0x8001
gap 132799
toggle_bit_mask 0x0

begin codes
FULLSCREEN 0x0177
POWER 0x0164
1 0x0201
2 0x0202
3 0x0203
4 0x0204
5 0x0205
6 0x0206
7 0x0207
8 0x0208
9 0x0209
RECORD 0x00A7
0 0x0200
FAVORITE 0x016C
REWIND 0x00A8
CH+ 0x0192
FORWARD 0x009F
VOL- 0x0072
PLAY 0x00CF
VOL+ 0x0073
RECALL 0x0198
CH- 0x0193
STOP 0x0080
PAUSE 0x0077
MUTE 0x0071
CANCEL 0x00DF
CAPTURE 0x00D2
PREVIEW 0x016A
EPG 0x016D
RECORDLIST 0x018B
TAB 0x000F
TELETEXT 0x0184
end codes
end remote

The key names in the above file line up nicely with the ones in my mythtv lirc config, and are all-caps versions of what is actually printed on my remote.

All that, and just in time for my Logitech Harmony remote to arrive and have to start again.

Lucid (Bad) Dreams

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 08:52:35 -0500

For years now I've loved linux. I've met and spoken with Linus Torvalds. I've even made a pilgrimage to where he wrote it. For servers, and many desktop uses, there's nothing quite like it.

The core linux system is a beautiful thing. Through uni studies, attending several linux.conf.au events over the years, and personal interest I've studied multiple parts of the code, and even fiddled under the hood myself at times.

And yet every time it comes to upgrading my highly-customised home server, one or more things breaks horribly, requiring much of my time to fix. These days the distribution I run on the server is kubuntu - a legacy from when the system was also used as a desktop. This upgrade will hopefully be the last for years, as the latest 10.04 release "lucid" is a Long Term Support release, meaning it will be kept safe and stable for years to come. Good thing, given it's taken me a few weeks to get this far. Here's a log for those who are interested.

X would start, but with only a small white window with no useful content. Looking into the logs, it turns out it was far from happy with the status of /usr/lib/libGL.so. Googling around and looking at symlinks, it turns out that the system of symlinks for such things has changed, only one package didn't get the memo:
```
reverb@trane ~ $ sudo apt-file search /usr/lib/libGL.so

libgl1-mesa-dev: /usr/lib/libGL.so
```
Fixing this, there's a similar mess for libGL.so.1. All this NVIDIA-related rubbish is most annoying, but this server isn't going to get any new hardware for years at the current rate, and as such it has to work. It sure did just fine before the update.

My IR remote control no longer worked. What a mess this was. Nobody online had this one sorted, and until last night neither did I. I think I'll post that separately so it can be of assistance to others trying to make this work too.

Linux is an amazing thing which is capable of complex setups well beyond that which most users would have, and all for free. That just doesn't mean that the complex stuff is easy when it breaks in new and creative ways. It would be a full-time job to keep up with the changes that have happened with this release. I've had to find this out after the fact and spend time patching it all up. I had hoped Canonical (maintainers of Ubuntu/Kubuntu) would be doing this for me, and on the vast majority of hardware-software combinations out there they do very well. I can just see as time becomes more and more precious in years to come that a service doing all this custom work for me would start to look very attractive. Especially when your setup looks like this:

Dual-core intel something or other, 4GB RAM
RAID5 using four 750GB partitions across 2x750GB, 1x1.5TB and 1x808GB SATA drives
Custom-compiled afpd shares the RAID to the Macs in the house
Backup to external USB hard drives, rotated off-site
Uplink is ethernet to Airport Express which extends the Airport Extreme network at the other end of the house where the DSL gear is
Downlink is to a network-attached APC UPS (through my ancient USB Ethernet adapter, no less!), which gets its address from the server using dhcp
USB IR receiver receives commands from a Twinhan remote
Two DVB tuners are connected via a powered antenna splitter
A SVN build of MythTV schedules (using Shepherd) and records (from the tuners) live TV
A SVN build of MythTVfrontend (although I've been trialling xbmc) displays recorded shows controlled by the remote out through DVI and SPDIF optical audio to my Onkyo HDMI receiver, then on to the 1080p TV.
Mythweb (with modified PHP and apache configs) runs to allow TV scheduling from a web browser
Boinc runs in the background searching for aliens and cancer cures. Seriously.
Lots of other things like mail, NFS, etc. that a server normally does.

Should be simple to upgrade, right?

iPhoto Libraries in mythgallery (mythtv)

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 20:19:46 -0500

Here's some information about a personal coding itch I scratched recently, on the off chance that it helps someone else out there. Certainly my Google skills didn't turn up anyone else who had solved the same problem.

Problem Description
You have a Mac somewhere where you use Apple's excellent iPhoto to manage your huge digital photography collection.
However, you don't have (and most likely don't want) a spiffy but locked-down and feature-light Apple TV to display them on your TV, instead preferring the excellent and far more versatile open-source mythtv.
Mythtv has mythgallery which displays pictures from a normal filesystem reasonably well, but the poor thing has little to no understanding of the complexities of Apple's "iPhoto Library" on-disk layout. I'm talking Albums basically, plus an understanding of "Originals" versus "Modified". I just want it to be how it looks in iPhoto, but on my big LCD screen in front of the couch, controlled with my myth remote. Is that too much to ask??!

Research/Analysis
Can't find anyone else with this issue so figure "how hard can it be?". Not very, it turned out, at least to get something working, if ugly.
The perl Mac::iPhoto looks like a good place to start, but since it hasn't been touched since 2003 it certainly doesn't do anything much useful on my current (7.1.3) iPhoto Library.
It uses Mac::PropertyList to do the parsing of the xml file, which doesn't seem to work either. After much fiddling it looks like the AlbumData.xml file in the iPhoto Library actually is invalid - it doesn't have the proper header. First hack Mac::PropertyList to accept the dodgy header, but later decide to keep that standard and put the hack into my script instead.

Design
Decide to make a directory next to the iPhoto Library which is full of symlinks pointing into the actual library. Directories in this tree will correspond to Albums in iPhoto, and the links will be named such that the alphabetical order used by mythgallery corresponds to the order in iPhoto.
Try and get this working on the linux box and also via Samba but in the end it's simplest to run the code and create the symlink tree on my mac and then rsync both the iPhoto Library and the symlink tree across to the linux box.
Don't use samba, it stuffs up the annoying ":" that iPhoto uses in paths, at least for me. rsync handles it fine, it's not even that Mac-specific one to my knowledge, just whatever is on my Ubuntu box.

Code
You'll need Mac::iPhoto 0.1-timg, which is the modification of 0.1 available on cpan to work with iPhoto 7.1.3, and Mac::PropertyList 1.31 from cpan. I guess I should put my code on CPAN, but just wanted to get it all up here for now.
Once that's available, you will of course need the actual iPhotoToDirectories script. It's all hard-coded - but you wouldn't have made it this far if you couldn't edit it to work in your situation :)

Operation
You'll need the same directory structure on both the mac and the linux box as the symlinks get created on the mac but are de-referenced on the linux box.
Once it's all in place, run iPhotoToDirectories on your mac whenever you want. It takes a long time, so I wouldn't script it. Maybe an overnight cronjob if you keep your Mac on all night. I don't so I just run it when I remember.
Then rsync both the iPhoto Library and the symlink tree to the linux box.
Finally, chmod -R a+rx the linux directories if the uid on your mac is different from your myth user.
And then, assuming mythgallery can navigate to that symlink directory, it should work and the browsing should be significantly more useful than it was before browsing the raw directory.

Known issues

Mac::iPhoto's parsing is amazingly slow, ie. ~30mins for me
hard-coded paths
ampersands (&) in album names break things
empty albums should be not put into output
sorting could be much improved
would be nice to understand Events too, hmmm...
lots more UNknown issues, for sure. Let me know!

But hey it works! And with a full-time life that's enough for me right now.

linux.conf.au 2007

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 12:42:28 -0600

I'm out at New South Wales university this week for linux.conf.au, a tech-oriented conference. This is the fourth time I've been along to one of these (they run every year), and this year it's being held in Sydney, back where the first one was that I came to in 2001.
The free software culture is generating some amazing things - one of the highlights for me has been the talks on the One Laptop Per Child project - these guys are really thinking how to bring technology to huge numbers of people (their target market is one billion children in the world), which involves quite a lot of rethinking existing ways of doing things. One telling statistic is that 60% of the children in the world have no power at their place of residence, so requiring a device to be able to draw power off the grid just was never going to work.
Plenty of talks more related to my work as well, the details of which I won't bore my mostly non-technical audience with! Suffice to say it's a nice break from work in the pleasant campus surroundings.

ThoughtThing 0.4

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Sun, 09 Oct 2005 21:20:56 -0500

It's been a long while since the last update, but I've just released version 0.4 of my toy software project ThoughtThing. You can read more about what it does here.
In the great spirit of Open Source software, someone else did most of the work by changing my code for his purposes, and then sent the changes back to me so I could share them with everyone else. A bit of polish and everyone benefits.
He actually used the software to track the organisation of a conference with other people - it's quite nice when something I developed as something to do while looking for work when first back in Sydney has helped someone on the other side of the world organise a conference.

AWOL Explanation

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Fri, 25 Mar 2005 22:21:30 -0600

So where have I been hiding recently? Well, a few things have been taking up our time settling into the new house, plus work is pretty crazy with some less-than-realistic deadlines starting to get people... shall we say... motivated.
I'd completely forgotten that today was a day off until yesterday, so that left me with a day to do pretty much nothing. I actually stayed up all night watching movies to try and get my body clock even a little in sync with Liz, who is doing night shift at the moment.
It looks like we might have a customer for Zeus, so if that plays out then we may have a new dog in the next couple of weeks. Always good news, as that would mean one less that needs to be put to sleep.
Heading down to Canberra for a week for linux.conf.au, which I have been to twice previously. There's always quite a bit to learn from the gurus of the Open Source movement - the way these guys keep coming up with new cool stuff constantly amazes me.
There's been quite a lot of SES work recently - a funeral for our local controller of many years where Liz and I were the guard of honour at the front of the church, and also plenty to keep us busy with the recent stormy weather Sydney has been battered with. If only it would get the dam levels up a bit more. Liz is proudly telling everyone that she was chainsawing a couple of stories up hanging off a ladder the other night - something I usually balk at so good on her.
Finally, good news came through recently that long-lost friend Meaghan who has been living in Milton Keynes, England for the last few years is coming back to Sydney for good next week! For a while she was planning on moving to Perth of all places, but that seems to have sorted itself out now.
She's been missed and now we're going to have to try to beat that English accent out of her - sure took me a while to get rid of mine and we were only there six months!

New Blogging Software

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Sat, 22 Jan 2005 13:35:00 -0600

I have been toying around with the idea of doing some internal blogging at work for a while now, and yesterday I finally got a small patch of time and sufficient links that I wanted to post to become inspired.
My previous blogging software, Blosxom has been working fine for me for years now - that's what I used while travelling around Europe, I've hacked the code to bits and know it inside out.
However, it wasn't going to work for me here. Mainly because the software I use to post to it, Blapp is quite limited and doesn't support multiple blogs.
Plus, there's plenty of new features around in other software, and Blosxom hasn't seen a release in quite some time.
So, I went shopping. Eventually I turned up the brilliant Open-Source Serendipity system. It has two main features I've always wanted in Blosxom - written in PHP and with a MySQL backend.
Up and running in minutes at work, I quickly got to posting through the web interface. Since it supports XML-RPC I could concievably use a client on the Mac, but I haven't explored it much yet.
As you have probably guessed by now, I liked it so much that I moved this site over to it also. All post-Europe2002-3 posts have been imported, along with comments (comment dates are all wrong though). Since it supports RSS importing, this process was relatively pain free.
Sure, there's quite a bit to learn, but it seems to be working nicely thus far. I've hacked the Idea style a bit to get a look I'm happy with for now.
Sorry to everyone though, you're going to have to do the update bookmarks thing. The URL you have bookmarked should be http://www.reverb.com.au/tgould/.
Also, if you are a user of RSS, you'll have to get a new feed into you aggregator, although I put an entry into the old one to point this out.
Post any comments if you find any problems, I'd like to get this working smoothly.

Anyone up for a trip to Melbourne?

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Wed, 29 Dec 2004 22:01:00 -0600

Looks like some crazy lads are running an Aussie blogging conference down in that "other" city. Might be work a look.
But then again, there's also linux.conf.au coming up in Canberra in April. Should I go to both?

Tux Goes Back to Work

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Wed, 01 Dec 2004 12:31:00 -0600

A rather amusing morning getting into work today as I brought in my 1.5 metre high, 1 metre wide penguin back to work. The actual reason that I have such a thing is that it is the mascot for the Linux operating system, and my work mates gave it to me as a birthday present some years back. The memory of Meaghan carrying it home with only her little legs visible out the bottom as we walked through the middle of Sydney and then got on the train will stuck with me for a long while yet.

First trick was getting him out of our new car at Hurstville where Liz dropped me, right opposite the Police station. The funny looks had started.
Carrying it to buy a ticket, the ticket office lady wanted me to give him to her. Not really the sort of thing to give away, but it was much nicer than her insisting that I buy a ticket for him. This is not really a joke, as if you want to take a bike on the train (like, for example, we did before and after riding 55km in the Cycle Sydney in the 36 degree heat on Sunday) during peak hour, you have to buy a ticket. This thing takes up space in a more square pattern rather than an elongated pattern, and if it hits people it is nice and squishy, but other than that it's still pretty huge.
After waiting for a magically disappearing express train to the city, I got on a normal one after twenty minutes waiting on the station with him.
Once on the train, not too suprisingly this several kilos of soft toy proved to be quite the conversation starter. Plenty of people were amused at the sign of a normal-looking corporate guy carrying a large soft toy, asking how I came to be in posession of such a thing.
The worst was yet to come, however, and it came in the form of a rather drunken woman who got on at Kogarah station. Yes, drunken, even though this was about 11am on a Wednesday morning. She proceeded to groom tux (he got pretty dirty from all the public transport - lucky his bum is black), and tell me how she thought I should keep him. Better than suggesting I leave it on the train, I guess.
The conversation (or is a one-way conversation called something else?) then turned to her collection of stuffed toys which she stole from somewhere, and from there how her boyfriend of seven years won't come around to her apartment anymore because there is no room with the quantity of plush animals around.
I seem to be like magnet for these people. Luckily she managed to remember to get off at Wolli Creek and go get drunker or something.
Finally my stop came at Central, and thankfully the train hadn't become too full - the biggest challenge had been the several people who for whatever reason wanted to walk between the carriages, the door of which tux's bum was blocking. I got out and waited for the couple of hundered people to go up the escalator before I tried with tux.
At the ticket gates at the top, the lady said "Thank You - just what I've always wanted!" No no no, although this does seem to be a good way to get women to talk to me if I wasn't already engaged.
Then it was just the walk to work remaining. This invovled crossing Elizabeth Street, dodging people everywhere and getting the second "yeah, Linux!" for the morning from J. Random Passer-by.
And then Tux was back where he was born (he arrived un-stuffed from memory and my work-mates had to fill him up and seal him somehow or other). He is currently sitting in my boss' desk, who is away until Monday.

One of the reasons for such a journey was that I was sent to a corporate "Fish!" course yesterday, where we learnt all about how to be a nice person and love our jobs. It was actually better than it sounded, although the concept of decorating everything you can see with fish-related items is a bit much.

Hence Tux. Penguins eat fish, you see...

Cool Mac OSX Apps

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Thu, 15 Apr 2004 19:59:00 -0500

Just a quick heads up on some of the incredibly cool software that exists for the Apple OSX platform which I have stumbled across recently and changed the way I work:

OK, so I've been using this for ages, but Salling Software's Clicker is still totally awesome. Impresses people day after day with the way that I walk away from my Mac, it locks the screen (and hence blocks access to two other computers - see below), and when I come back, it knows it's me and unlocks the screen. Even pauses iTunes, advises me of incoming calls, ...
I actually caught up with the author, Jonas, in Stockholm last year, and bought him several beers. The man has done something I haven't seen in any other software for a long time - actually created something new. True innovation, not just using that word as a marketing ploy.
If you have to work with more than one computer on a day to day basis (I have my iBook, an iMac and my Dell Gentoo box at work), you need to use osx2x. Billed as an "Excess keyboard remover", that's what it does. I use one USB keyboard and mouse connected to my iBook, and push the mouse off the left side onto my iMac's screen, or to the right onto the Linux box. Keyboard follows. Cut and Paste between machines works. Total magic. Oh yes, and Open Source, so we have actually been able to modify the code and change some of the functionality. Great stuff!
Open Source virtual desktops done right with Desktop Manager. Supports the skins made to work with the expensive Codetek Virtual Desktop too - how's that for sticking your tounge out?
Kiwi-made visual traceroute with WhatRoute. Pretty graphics!
Annoyed that your nice shiny new Powerbook (or in my case tattered world-travelled broken-keyed dull-coloured iBook) only has one mouse button? Stop whinging and get yourself Sidetrack. Assign the button to left click and pad tap to right click, put vertical and horizontal scrollbars on the sides, put tap actions in the corners and you're better off than any Wintel laptop owner will ever be.