The Promised Lan

One of the side effects of the Ubuntu community being so large, is that it’s now commonplace for software to get packaged for Ubuntu before (and sometimes _long_ before) it makes it into Debian.

That’s been the case so far for chromium, the open source browser sposored by google. But I’ve been wanting to try it. So I went ahead and used the chromium-daily source repository from the Ubuntu PPA and built an amd64 package for Debian testing.

It seems to work fine:
3029
Though I have’nt exactly put it through it’s paces yet. And it took me a minute to find how to make it use the local gtk theme (brown of course!).

Also debuting today is:
repo.thepromisedlan.org

You can follow the instructions there to add the tpl repository to your sources.list, or feel free to just grab the binaries:
chromium-browser
and
chromium-codecs-ffmpeg

So at work we have some rarely used dial-in modems. The users are all configured locally on the router with the modem bank, so modemconfigfile contains strings like this:
!username sam password <removed>

Well, I needed to send a brief message to all of the modem users, so I needed a way to translate a few dozen of the lines above into something I could paste into the bcc: bar of my mua. Also a few of them were not using their real email usernames for the modem.
So given a handy local copy of the mail servers passwd file, here’s what I came up with:
grep username modemconfigfile |cut -d " " -f 2 | for USER in `cat`; do grep $USER passwd > /dev/null; echo $USER $?; done |grep 0 |cut -d " " -f 1 | sed s/$/@ourdomain.com/g | tr '\n' ','

Which does indeed spit out a list of verified email addresses comma seperated, and ready to be pasted. It is still missing the real addresses of those users with different usernames, but there were only a few so I looked them up manually with the output of
grep username modemconfigfile |cut -d " " -f 2 | for USER in `cat`; do grep $USER passwd > /dev/null; echo $USER $?; done |grep -v 0
as a starting point.

Man I really need to learn perl or something. I couldn’t even fit that in an Identi.ca posting.

Update: DOH!, keen observers will have noticed that until this update, the above created output like user1.ourdomain.com, user2.ourdomain.com
Which of course are not email addresses. So s/./@/ and we’re back on track.
I guess that’s what I get for hours of DNS updating just previous. 😛

So I caught Cracker at the SFBC last night.

I also saw them a little over a year ago, they were playing a free show at the Civic Plaza in Albuquerque. That show I really didn’t enjoy. I had the strong sense that they were just dialing it in. But I made lots of excuses for them, how the crowd was not really made up of their fans, how the venue is sub-par etc.

But last night was different, I _think_ the band put on a fine show. But it still just made me feel old, hanging around a bunch of 30+ year old dorks, reliving their teens, and realizing I was one of them 😐

I still may pick up the new album though…

Annoyed by the !BONG! noise that macbooks make when you power them on?

Apparently if you turn the volume down in Mac OS it saves a similar volume as an nvram setting in the EFI. So if you’re dual-booting or somesuch, you can just turn the volume down.

But what about those of us who wiped out the legacy OS in the first few minutes of owning the thing and never looked back?
Well only a few years later 🙂 with the help of the mactel-linux-user list I can now turn off that blasted noise.

With new improved silence!

It goes like this:
#Boot EFI shell (from rEFIt, I don’t have rEFIt installed so i used a CD)
#spend 30 minutes finding the paginate switch for help 🙂
Shell>help -b

#cd to a writable partition (fs0 was the rEFIt CD, so fs1 was the 100MB fat/efi partition)
Shell>fs1:
fs1:\>

#dump the nvram variable
fs1:\>dmpstore SystemAudioVolume -s sav.txt

#edit the the dumped variable with a hexeditor (probably wiser to keep
the original dump and edit a copy)
fs1:\>hexedit sav.txt

#load the new nvram variable
fs1:\>dmpstore SystemAudioVolume -l sav.txt

#exit to refit and reboot
fs1:\>exit

Enjoy the BONGless restart.

So for a while it wasn’t apparent what value to change with the
hexeditor, and tbh, not being familiar with any hexeditor, I’m not sure
I got it right. Further experimentation indicates I may have just borked
it, but apparently that also serves to make it shut up.

The dmpstore’d files (now back in Debian) look like this:

$ cat SystemAudioVolume.txt
$SystemAudioVolume(and some illegible characters with no new line)

$ hexdump -C SystemAudioVolume.txt
00000000  24 00 00 00 53 00 79 00  73 00 74 00 65 00 6d 00  |$...S.y.s.t.e.m.|
00000010  41 00 75 00 64 00 69 00  6f 00 56 00 6f 00 6c 00  |A.u.d.i.o.V.o.l.|
00000020  75 00 6d 00 65 00 00 00  10 61 43 7c 2a ab bb 4b  |u.m.e....aC|*..K|
00000030  a8 80 fe 41 99 5c 9f 82  07 00 00 00 01 00 00 00  |...A.\..........|
00000040  71                                                |q|
00000041

(In hexedit.efi the 00000041 line did not appear.)

Since running dmpstore SystemAudioValume by itself returned output
something like:
00000: 71 “q”
I took a guess and replaced the 71 with 80 (as suggested on the mailing list.) getting:

$ hexdump -C SystemAudioVolume80.txt
00000000  24 00 00 00 53 00 79 00  73 00 74 00 65 00 6d 00  |$...S.y.s.t.e.m.|
00000010  41 00 75 00 64 00 69 00  6f 00 56 00 6f 00 6c 00  |A.u.d.i.o.V.o.l.|
00000020  75 00 6d 00 65 00 00 00  10 61 43 7c 2a ab bb 4b  |u.m.e....aC|*..K|
00000030  a8 80 fe 41 99 5c 9f 82  07 00 00 00 01 00 00 00  |...A.\..........|
00000040  80                                                |.|
00000041

Which turned off the bong and I’m happy. But for kicks I also tried 32
(for 25% more BONG)

$ hexdump -C sav.txt
00000000  24 00 00 00 53 00 79 00  73 00 74 00 65 00 6d 00  |$...S.y.s.t.e.m.|
00000010  41 00 75 00 64 00 69 00  6f 00 56 00 6f 00 6c 00  |A.u.d.i.o.V.o.l.|
00000020  75 00 6d 00 65 00 00 00  10 61 43 7c 2a ab bb 4b  |u.m.e....aC|*..K|
00000030  a8 80 fe 41 99 5c 9f 82  07 00 00 00 01 00 00 00  |...A.\..........|
00000040  32                                                |2|
00000041

But that also gave me silence, so I think I’m doing it ‘wrong.’
However reloading the original (71) file did bring back the bonging. So
I don’t think any of this is particularly dangerous for those who may
want to here the noise again someday. 🙂

Lots of new pictures in the Steve Noble gallery.
Malaysia, Tractor Ride, New Mexico, etc.. Check it out.

Twin towers

Oh man! I knew I should have moved to Brazil!