Perl has made me fat and happy

I’ve found that I have trouble learning other languages. I start a project to learn another language and out of necessity it has to be simple. But once I start on it I quickly start thinking about how much easier and faster I could get it done in perl.

GRRRRRARRRRRRRR! MURDER!

Why is it so hard to demonstrate to tech support people that you know what you’re talking about? I guess it’s because they normally deal with people who don’t know what they’re talking about. I’m sure a lot of those people immediately say they know what they’re talking about.

But I do. In fact, I know more than both the senior guys on the other end of the line. But I get to listen to the polite one have me conduct useless tests and the defensive one tell me my network setup is wrong when he doesn’t really have a handle on networking.

It starts when defensive guy comes to upgrade our stuff. He logs into the provider-owned router and sees some settings he doesn’t recognize so he deletes them. Doesn’t even question their existence. That device was subsequently determined unnecessary and removed but the missing functionality was never configured elsewhere as appropriate. Because the guy assumed it was a mistake and not critical configuration.

CBC-MAC on the command line

openssl enc -e -aes-128-cbc -K 0123456789ABCDEF -iv 0000000000000000 < testdata | tail -c 16 | od -h

The 16 “tail -c 16” corresponds to the block size of the encryption algorithm. If you were using aes-256-cbc you’d want to say 32 instead of 16. I don’t like the “od -h” representation but hex is more common and I care to dig through and just get hex. You could instead use | openss enc -e -base64 if you prefer base64.

New graphics card

I play WoW and like to run my settings high. I found that pretty much all the fog effects kill my frame rate. Eventually I spent about $200 on a EVGA GeForce 260 GTX 216. I cranked every setting in WoW to the max. I flew out of Dalaran over Crystalsong Forest and almost threw up. I could see everything. Normally the distance fog limits what I can see from high up but this time I could see the entire zone. I got a very strong feeling of vertigo from the realness of the altitude that I haven’t previously experienced in a video game.

Holy crap.

KDE 4.0 Screenshots Tour

I went through this KDE 4.0 screenshots tour to check it out. I can’t say I’m thoroughly impressed.

I’ve been using KDE for years and have loved it. I’ve been using a Mac for almost a year and I love that too. Given my experience with the two I think the new KDE looks good and all but I’m really unimpressed. I’ve read elsewhere that 4.1 is supposed to be the real deal. Let’s hope so. The above tour makes it look like they’re mostly just reimplementing features that Mac users have enjoyed for years. I think KDE 4.0 could beat the crap out of GNOME if they put a lot of work into integrating applications with DCOP or DCOP’s successor so KDE users can enjoy things that Mac+AppleScript+Quicksilver have enjoyed for years. I keep making comparisons to Mac because Mac really has created innovation on the desktop. While I think that KDE just isn’t stacking up, given that it’s FOSS I think it’s great.

Sansa e270 + Ubuntu Gutsy + libmtp 0.2.4

If you install libmtp on Ubuntu 7.10 you get libmtp6-0.2.1 which is sorely out of date and does not play well with my Sansa player. Strangely, MTP in Amarok worked fine in 7.04 but Ubuntu identified it as a digital camera. Since it worked I didn’t complain. No such luck on 7.10. I installed libmtp6-0.2.1 and mtp-detect would segfault about 50% of the time.

The instructions I provide worked well for me but they may destroy your system, make you sterile, catch your house on fire, or worse: accidently install a licensed copy of Windows Vista Home Basic Neutered Edition.

Shut down Amarok and any multimedia software you might be running. In your favorite terminal:

sudo apt-get install build-essential checkinstall
sudo apt-get build-dep libmtp

build-essential pulls in the tools you’ll need for compiling while checkinstall is a nifty tool to build a quasi-sane package for your system. The build-dep command fetches the dependencies required to build the currently available version of libmtp (0.2.1) which for our purposes is good enough. Grab the latest libmtp source from http://libmtp.sourceforge.net/index.php?page=download and save it to /tmp. Go into /tmp and do:

tar -xvzf libmtp-0.2.4.tar.gz
cd libmtp-0.2.4
./configure
make

This should hopefully produce the binaries you need. To make a package:

sudo checkinstall

You must answer questions. I elected yes until I got to editing specific fields. I changed summary and name to libmtp6. This is not technically correct as the proper version is libmtp7 but this makes it install as an upgrade rather than a separate package. I With those changes I hit ENTER to continue. The final step to make Amarok happy was to ln the library it was expecting to libmtp7:

sudo ln -s /usr/local/lib/libmtp.so.7 /usr/lib/libmtp.so.6

It should be noted that this is The Wrong Way and it will likely rupture the space-time continuum. That being said, Amarok doesn’t seem to need a stable space-time continuum and functions happily for me with this setup.