Archive for the 'English' Category

Yesterday, I close the lid on my first generation MacBook Pro, unplug it, pack it in my bag and head home from another long day at work. I make a pit stop at the Salon des Métiers D’Arts at Place Bonaventure to pick up some christmas gifts. I feel the urge to check on my finances, so I take the laptop out of the bag, pop it open and behold, nothing. Battery’s dead. I figure, I must have unplugged it somehow while working, or it must have failed to suspend properly, and wasted the entire battery on a kernel panic. This happens sometimes when the Cisco VPN Client kext is loaded and active.

But alas, no. I plug it in this morning, and bang:

Again, for those not speaking french, it means “battery not charging”.

This is the third battery that dies with this laptop. If the laptop broke down, I’d understand. It has a bit over three years of age, which is pretty much the average life span of a laptop-you-carry-around-every-day. But the battery is still young. Bleh.

I went to Arcadia a few weeks ago and this small developement company had a DS dev kit running their game demo, so I snapped a picture of it, telling myself I would post it on my blog when I got home, and then promptly forgot about it. I found the picture on my phone just now and decided to try the wordpress iPhone client. So here goes a lot of fuss over nothing.

Well, you know, in electronics like everything else, we all have to start somewhere. So my “hello world” of sorts, is making a LED blink using an Arduino Diecimila board.

I just want to point out something terribly uncomfortable about Megaman 9.

THEY ARE ALL WEARING THE SAME GOD DAMN HELMET!

Thank you.

So, Mark Hoekstra of Geek Technique has died of a heart attack earlier this week, while riding his bike.

Shit.

Mark was a really huge inspiration to me, I absolutely loved the guy and his work. I really related to his love of SGI gear and various obsolete chunks of hardware. I read geek technique with almost religous, cheerful glee every update.

I can’t believe he’s gone, I truely am sad now. This really is sad day.

Quick windows tip again, if you find yourself unable to access the administrative shares (\\machine\c$, tasks, etc) on a Windows Server 2008 or Vista computer with UAC enabled, using the credentials of a local administrator — don’t panic. This is actually intended.

Turns out local administrators cannot elevate their privileges over the network, with UAC enabled.

Note that this doesn’t affect users in the Domain Admins group!

Now, you could do the dumb “neowin poweruser” thing and turn UAC off, or you could change this particular behavior in the registry. Navigate to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System

And add a new DWORD named LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy with a value of 1, and then reboot. It all should work.

Again, users with Domain Admin privileges are unaffected.

So, there’s a lot noise on the internet in general about an iPhone application called NetShare, that allows you to sort-of use tethering with the iPhone — that is, use its sexy 3G connection from say, your laptop. Unfortunately, Apple seems to be pulling this application out of the App Store, then putting it back only to take it out again, probably while arguing over with AT&T about wheter or not this violates their TOS or the like.

I used to use tethering with my previous Motorola phones via bluetooth, my Treo, and the many blackberries I have owned, and found it was fairly practical to be almost guaranteed internet access from my laptop no matter where I actually am. This enabled me to support clients no matter when, even while in transit between two cities, on a bus.

So, all that NetShare software did was set-up an HTTP proxy on the iPhone. This immediately sprung a lightbulb over my head, as there’s another way to accomplish just that, without the application, provided your iPhone is jailbroken.

The idea is to use SSH, and just tunnel stuff through it. Simple and effective.

Read the rest of this entry »

Just a quick tip, in order to successfully run an ISAPI filter that is compiled for x86 32 bits windows on an x64 version of Windows Server 2008 or Vista, on IIS 7.0, some extra steps must be taken for it to work. I am no longer using the ISAPI filter that required this in production, having decided to can it and find an alternative, but I decided to document this here in case it is helpful to anyone.

So, for this to happen, after correctly adding your ISAPI Filter to your IIS site, enabling it, creating the virtual directory it requires if necessary, etc, you must create an Application Pool for it, or modify the default. You can do this by expanding your server in IIS Manager, and selecting Application Pools.

Once there, select the pool you want to modify, right click on it, and select “Advanced Settings“, and set “Enable 32-Bit Applications” to True. You might also want to select No Managed Code if that Pool is to be used exclusively by your ISAPI binary.

Also note that you can change a bunch of lovely settings there, such as processor affinity.

So, once this is done, your pool will be allowed to spawn a WOW64 environnement for the filter, and it will most likely run fine after that.

I got this bitching new watch a few days ago.

The pictures above don’t do justice to its beauty. It’s just gorgeous.
What I like, save the awesome steampunk or neo-victorian look, is that the watch is entirely mechanical, which only adds to its charm. And now, I can be hit with an EMP blast, and still tell the time! Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll just go back to pretending I’m a neo-victorian, and that this watch just came out of the matter compiler.

So, I came home late today, much like the rest of the week. Working on a rather intensive new website deployment, with tons of deadlines. I’m getting better with Glassfish/Sun Application Server, though.

So, you know, there are times where you’re just tired as fuck, worn out, and you don’t feel like cooking. At all. When these times come around, you eat junk. Or at least, toast.

Well, this is my junk food:

Crisp iceberg lettuce with shredded shrimp and mayonnaise, avocado, palmtree hearts with a dash of balsamic vinegar, vegetable crispers with strong crackerbarrel cheese and pepper paté.

The sad thing is, I had plenty of junk available in the pantry, I just decided that this would be a quickly-done-meal.

I must be getting older.

I really am. I got an iPhone 3G.

Mitigating factors are that the camera is really awesome, and also that I got root on it, voiding my warranty a mere fifteen minutes after unboxing it.

So, on the list of shit I find pretty aggravating in this world, not being able to showcase some technology I’m excited about to its full potential is fairly high up the list. You know what I’m talking about — you get a new video card, for instance. Now you can blaze through the new Half-Life 2 episode, pointing out to yourself how framerate has vastly improved, and how the game no longer stutters, how textures are crisper because you can now up the filter quality quite a bit.

You’re basically engaging into a form of post-purchase masturbation, where you sit in almost religious contemplation, envelopped in a smug sentiment of confidence in your purchase, and how much joy it has brought you.

You then obviously want to repeat the experience with a friend, who will confirm how right you were in your purchase, and perhaps be inspired to get one too, so you can fill countless hypothetical conversations with how much it rocks, over dinners or perhaps even funerals.

But there’s always this sceptical friend of yours who makes a weird face when you showcase the object of your affection to him, who brings his face closer to your giant cinema display as to physically show that he’s making an honest effort to understand what the fuck you’re on about. Read the rest of this entry »

I have compiled version 1.0.6 of Xapian for Windows, and I have built and packaged the Python Bindings for your convenience.

You can find the new version here.

Questions, comments or Mirrors are welcome, as usual

UPDATE: Charlie Hull informs me that he has coerced my hacked-up Distutils file into SVN Head, which means there’s a good chance my packaging environnement will be integrated into mainline Xapian, or into the Lemur Consulting makefiles. Either way, this means one can build binaries a lot faster, which is great.

So, I saw cloverfield, a few minutes ago. It was a really nauseating experience, the handycam shots are really hard to stomach if you’re actually sitting close to the screen.
I did not exactly like it. In fact, I spent a good fifteen minutes with my friend Patrick trying to think of analogies to describe how bad this movie is. Here are some:

“Cloverfield is like hitting your head with a hammer for one hour and forty-five minutes for the sole reason that it feels really good when you stop.”

“Watching Cloverfield was like frying bacon in pan, shirtless, while getting scalded by the hot grease, but still going through with it until the bacon is cooked. Then you realize the bacon went bad a week ago.”

We all mess up in the shell once in a while. Sometimes, while trying to cut corners, we’ll use “>” instead of “>>”, and that will overwrite an important file instead of appending a new line to it.

I was trying to add an unstable keyword to a package in Gentoo, and did just that — I overwrote /etc/portage/package.keywords, and now I can’t for the life of me remember what was in there, apart from Wordpress.

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I just installed Leopard on my Mac Book Pro, waiting to see how all the shit I have installed in /opt and /usr/local would survive before taking the actual leap with my Dual G5, which I still use for a bunch of development stuff that I don’t want to break. Yet.

So far so good. The under-the-hood features are actually great, and I pretty much enjoy the tabs in terminal. About damn time. I have yet to see if special keys work by default without me hacking it up. Oh and dtrace has a really fruity front-end in the developper tools. Fairly awesome if you ask me.

Anyways, the point is, I was finding Coverflow amusing for 3 whole seconds before switching back to the usual view, and decided to browse the network. By the way, this now actually works now. So, if you pay attention to the actual icon used for Windows machines on the network…

Now that’s fairly ballsy. Not too professional, but I chuckled nonetheless.

I have compiled version 1.0.3 of Xapian for Windows, and I have built and packaged the Python Bindings for your convenience.

You can find the new version here.

This time they are available for both Python 2.4 and 2.5. Enjoy.

I now have a /29 subnet at home. This is probably the pinnacle of network geekdom.

I SO feel like running a honeypot…

So, the situation is this. I’m sitting remotely at a client site, and suddendly, due to some sleep-deprived slip-up, ended up erasing part of the configuration for their local server.

Being the kind of guy to plan things through before taking action (usually), I had previously made a test set-up with all the configs in vmware on my local workstation at home, before heading over and installing them. So I pop open my laptop, fire up the Cisco VPN Client, connect over there, leapfrog some routers in between and land on my workstation. Turns out I hadn’t left the vm running, so I can’t access it from the shell by SSH’ing in.

“Hey, no problem!” I thought. “I’ll just mount the disk images with vmware-mount.pl, fetch the configuration files, send them over with a convulted mess of ssh-within-ssh-within-ssh and unix pipes to my laptop! Piece of cake!”

But then something hits me. The Virtual Disk Image (vmdk) file had LVM Volumes as partitions. Which I can’t directly mount from my Ubuntu workstation. Usually, you can get away with issuing the following:

$ sudo /opt/vmware/bin/vmware-mount.pl /path/to/disk-image.vmdk patition_number -t ext3 /mnt/mountpoint

But to much of my dismay, partition 2 on this particular disk image is an LVM Volume, so it can’t be directly mounted. I has to be mapped and a bunch things has to be done before I can get to the data. I’m not even sure I have LVM support on the Ubuntu machine at the moment.

Curses. Unless I fuck around with it to make it work. Which I did. Read on for the details.

Read the rest of this entry »

I have built the Xapian Python Bindings on Windows. They comes packaged with an easy, standard (distutils) installer. This may help with some of the headaches associated with running Xapian on Python and Windows.

Getting the whole thing to compile was not exactly a walk in the park, so I assumed people would be glad to have an easy Binary installer handy. I plan to use this library for a few internal projects, and I want the said project to be as multi platform as possible.

So far, they are only packaged for Python 2.5 but I will try to package them for 2.4 later on today or during this week.

See the details here.

They were built on Windows Server 2003 with MSVC from Visual C++ 2005 Express.

I hope this helps.