Rob's World of Tech

Google Sketchup and Wine: Best Practices

2011-10-15T10:44:00.000-07:00

Having run Sketchup for quite a while under Wine, I highly recommend the following best practices:

Always install and run on a clean Wine prefix

You should use a separate Wine prefix just for SketchUp and never, ever install anything else. I really, really mean this. Installing other applications in your Sketchup wine prefix is likely to break it.

Backup your Sketchup Wine prefix

If you do, for some reason, get the urge to install something else other than Sketchup in your Sketchup Wine prefix, for the sake of the Goddess, back up your Sketchup Wine prefix. You can do this by simply making a backup copy of the directory that contains the Wine prefix. Keeping a backup is still a good idea, because if you encounter a problem, you can always restore from the backup.

Never run with Windows "skins" or "themes"

Do not run with any skins or themes, especially not the Windows XP theme. Themes tend to break dialog boxes, especially web dialogs. You can always tweak the color scheme to match your desktop theme. (Hint: Use something like GColor2 to grab the colors for your desktop and add them as custom colors in winefg)

Don't use your operating system's video drivers

Don't use 3D accelerated video card drivers from your distribution. I know it's a pain in the a**, but manually install the latest video driver from your video card manufacturer. This means you will have to manually re-install that driver after every kernel update. It's a pain, yes, but video card manufacturers fix bugs in their drivers all the time and you really, really need these fixes.

Use an Nvidia card

ATI/AMD cards other than the FireGL cards suck because they don't fully support OpenGL. OTOH, all Nvidia-based cards fully support OpenGL. Use Nvidia.

Load up on RAM

If SketchUp seems slow, throw more RAM at it. Load up your box with lots and lots of RAM. The more, the better. A faster CPU won't make as much difference as more memory will.

Use the latest Wine development versions

SketchUp generally will run better on newer Wine versions. I'm currently using Wine 1.3.29.

Install according to my instructions

Install SketchUp according to the instructions in Getting SketchUp 8 Working in Wine -- Even WebDialogs.

These instructions will eventually be out of date

These instructions will eventually be out of date. If you're reading this years from now, running Sketchup 9 or 10 on Ubuntu Zany Zebra and wondering why it's still not working, go look for newer information. :)

Fixing SketchUp "OpenGL cannot initialize" errors after an update

2011-07-03T09:38:00.000-07:00

If SketchUp starts issuing the "OpenGL cannot initialize" after an update, especially if you are using a manually-installed graphics driver, you probably just need to re-install the graphics driver. There is probably a way of keeping your package manager (APT or RPM) from overwriting files installed by the NVIDIA or AT/AMD driver installers, but you may not want to do that because you almost certainly need to re-install the NVIDIA driver after a kernel update anyway. Comments and other feedback from distro experts are welcome and encouraged. ;)

The 64-bit Saga: WTF are IA64 and AMD64?

2011-06-28T18:53:00.000-07:00

A question I get asked a lot: WTF are IA64 and AMD64 and WTF is the difference? Here's the answer:

A long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away (okay, well, maybe it was this galaxy), Intel produced only 32-bit CPUs and they were looking for a 64-bit upgrade to their much aging “Pentium” line of processors.

At this time, another company, HP, was looking to commoditize their HP 9000 line of Unix machines running HP-UX, which at the time were running processors made by HP called the “PA-RISC” line of processors.

HP and Intel decided to get together and for many years they hyped up something they called "Merced" which would supported 64-bit instructions. Their baby, released 3 years later, was a Frankenstein-esque processor with Intel 32-bit x86 compatibility and a 64-bit instruction set based on PA-RISC. Intel called its new processor “Itanium,” and almost everyone else called it “Itanic”. It was called this because it bombed in the market due to its inability to execute 32-bit x86 code at the same speed as it executed 64-bit code, mostly because the x86 code was executed through an emulation mode on the CPU. OTOH, Itanium did do remarkably well amongst HP-UX shops -- all 3 of them -- mostly because HP-UX machines never need to execute 32-bit x86 code.

Meanwhile, a small microprocessor firm called Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) -- who, at the time, were producing cheaper, faster and hotter(!) CPUs compatible with Intel’s chips because, many moons prior, they had received a perpetual license to Intel’s processor technology due to a little-known agreement between Intel and AMD to produce 8086 knock-offs – looked at their agreement and said “Hey, our license doesn’t cover third-party technology like PA-RISC!” and opted to produce a simple 64-bit extension to the x86 instruction set instead. The upshot was that the processor was able to execute 32-bit and 64-bit code almost equally well.

While all this is going down, a tiny band of rebel kernel hackers were hacking on an operating system began by a Finnish hacker with a strange penguin fetish named Linus Torvalds. Linus always names his software projects after himself, and since his operating system kernel was designed as a Unix clone, he called it Linux -- or Linus' Unix. Linux began as an OS for 32-bit Intel x86 processors, but someone said "Hey, wouldn't it be cool this thing ran on other architectures?" Thusly, this tiny band of kernel hackers rewrote most of the kernel in portable C, which had previously had large sections of 386 assembler code and throughly modularized the hardware support. The upshot was that this operating system kernel was portable to nearly any processor architecture and hardware platform on the planet with a few coding additions.

Thus, very quietly, among the platforms that Linux was able to support from some of Itanium's earliest days was the Itanic -- called by Intel "IA64" for "Intel Architecture, 64-bit." This didn't sit well with various companies that also happened to produce operating systems, so, in time, they also produced operating systems that ran on the IA64 platform. Unfortunately, writing operating systems for the ungainly beast that is Itanic turned out to be more difficult than anyone imagined, so 3 of those operating systems -- Tru64 Unix, Solaris IA64, and Project Moneterey's IA64 port of SCO Unix -- promptly cancelled their plans to support the platform.

Jumping back to AMD for a moment, 2 years after Itanic is introduced, AMD releases their x86_64 technology. Later, they rebranded this technology as "AMD64". Within a year of release, Intel licensed this technology back from AMD and began releasing processors based upon it, initially as "EM64T" and later simply as Intel64.

Well, since IA64 is hard to optimize for, the only operating systems to support IA64 are:

Several GNU/Linux distributions, including Ubuntu, Debian, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Gentoo, CentOS, Fedora, SuSE, and Oracle's Unbreakable Linux
FreeBSD on IA64
HP-UX 11i on Integrity
~~Tandem's~~ ~~Compaq's~~ HP's NonStop OS -- a fault tolerant operating system for high-availability computing
~~Digital's~~ ~~Compaq's~~ HP's OpenVMS
Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and 2008

So, none of Microsoft's client OSes -- Windows XP, Windows Vista, or Windows 7 -- support IA64. If you're running a 64-bit Windows client OS, you are running an AMD64 processor -- even if it's a chip from Intel.

Rob's World of Tech now readable on your smartphone

2011-06-10T20:47:00.000-07:00

This blog should now be readable on your smartphone thanks to Blogger's new mobile templates. It looks nice on my Android 2.3 powered phone anyway.

Why CAD professionals don't take SketchUp seriously.

2011-05-29T15:58:00.000-07:00

And, more importantly, why they should!

Market Case Study: Quickbooks

In 1983, Scott Cook, a manager at Proctor and Gamble, had an epiphany while watching his wife take on the much-hated monthly chore of paying the bills. He went to the campus of Stanford University in search of something Stanford has always had plenty of -- programmers. There he met a young programmer named Tom Proulx. (Intuit, 2006). Together, they would product that set both the personal finance and the business accounting software markets on their ears.

The company they founded was called Intuit, and the product they introduced back in 1984 was Quicken. At that point there were forty-six other personal finance applications on the market; none of them were particularly easy to use. (Intuit, 2006). Our discussion beging with a feature that was, at the time, called “@categories”.

What make Quicken unique among personal finance software is that it used the familiar metaphor of a checkbook. You put your information into Quicken, just like a checkbook, except that you could categorize by typing in the memo field and prefixing the memo with the @ sign. By doing that, you created an @category, which allowed you to do all kinds of things, including printing reports -- even custom reports -- based on this data.

It was this feature, coupled with the familiar checkbook interface, that made it popular with small business owners. Rather than using complicated systems involving confusing terms and concepts like credits, debits and trial balances, small business owners could, for the first time, produce their own accounting reports without the need to hire a CPA, and without the need to learn formal accounting practices.

Sure, Quicken didn’t really support the use of formal accounting practices, standardized reporting. It didn’t even have the features necessary to do payroll. But, according to Intuit, in 1997, “it was discovered that almost a third of customers were using Quicken to track their business finances,” which resulted in Intuit creating a special Home and Business version of Quicken (Intuit, 2006) A year later, Intuit released a new product called QuickBooks, which was originally patterned after Quicken, to exploit the small business market that Intuit had been essentially ignoring for more than 10 years.

Again, as with the personal finance category, there were plenty of small business accounting packaes at the time, everything from Peachtree Accounting to the popular Great Plains small business ERP system. However, as with the personal finance category, none of them were ever particularly easy to learn and use.

Despite the ease of use, accountants hated QuickBooks, feeling that it lacked “the security, audit trail and robustness really needed.” (Loter, 2009). Despite these defects, and the fact that here many other, more capable products on the market, “Quickbooks...quickly established an 80% market share.” (Loter, 2009).

The Low-End Disruption

How could this be? How could a low-end product, with seemingly fewer capabilities than its competition? In The Innovator’s Dilemma, author Clayton Christensen defined the concept of the low-end disruption. It basically goes like this:

A market is established and the established players take their positions.
Customer demand for performance falls within a normal (“bell curve”) distribution, with relatively few customers demanding absolute high-end performance at the high-end, and relatively few customers demanding very low-end performance at the low-end, and most customers falling somewhere in the middle.
Over time, customers at the higher end demand increasing performance, and all customers either demand or absorb the higher performance.
Eventually, external market pressures, or executives falling “in love” with a technology, direct performance vectors in various directions, pushing performance beyond what the mainstream of the market will demand. This results in a market where there the technology performs better -- has more features, etc. -- than what the mainstream market is demanding.
The result is a lower-performance vaccuum where customers begin seeking simpler solutions, but none are available because all the established players -- the sustaining technologies -- have pushed ever harder at the higher edges of the market, meanwhile ignoring emerging markets.
A new player emerges -- a disruptive technology. This technology will be simpler, cheaper, and, most importantly, it will have some new innovation that increases customer convenience.
Companies offering sustainging technologies ignore the disruptive technology because it doesn’t offer the performance of their technologies, it is seen as not being competitve -- until their customers start jumping ship, that is.
Eventually the disruptive technology exceeds the performance median and customers jump ship from the established players to the new, simpler disruptive technology.

The Quicken and Quickbooks story is a classic case of a disruption from the low-end. It offered increased customer convenience, while being “good enough” to cover the mainstream performance demand. Quicken/Quickbooks failed to satisfy the high-end of the market, but over time, it became more than sufficient to cover the middle and lower ends of the market. As Intuit's product mainstreamed, they began offering serious features that higher-end customers -- and accounting professionals -- were able to take make seriously.

SketchUp as a Low-End Disruption

SketchUp is to the CAD market exactly what Quicken and QuickBooks were to small business accounting: a disruption from the low-end. The added convenience, smaller learning curve, and lower price tag today are exactly what QuickBooks was 1998. SketchUp’s smarter snapping features and simpified approach to 3D are to CAD what the checkbook model was to accounting. Higher-end customers and CAD professionals aren’t taking it seriously because they’re still stuck on the sustaining technologies curve. Gradually, customers will and are shifting to the SketchUp bandwagon as higher performance levels are achieved -- in SketchUp’s case, mostly by add-ins.

To know which CAD customers will jump ship, one merely needs to look at the numbers and popularity of the add-ins that are taking it in various directions. It seems that rendering and animation plugins are very popular, along with add-ins that enhance SketchUp’s ability to do architectural work and even mechanical simulations.

So what markets are SketchUp disruptiing? Time will tell, but clearly it is the same types of markets that Autodesk aims at with 3D Studio Viz and AutoCAD, or that PTC aims at with Pro-Engineer. Basically, the middle and lower tiers of the 3D CAD market spectrum, both in the architectural space and in the mechanical space . These companies, and their customers, are those that need to keep an eye on SketchUp, because if Google and their add-in developer community plays their cards right, these are the markets SketchUp will continue to disrupt, now and in the future.

References

Intuit (2006). Virtual Press Kit: The History of Quicken [Internet] http://http-download.intuit.com/http.intuit/CMO/intuit/press_room/vpk_quicken_win/History_of_Quicken.doc
Loter, Denise (2009). History of Quickbooks [Internet] http://business.intuit.com/directory/article-history-of-quickbooks

Finally the jetpack is here

2011-05-29T06:50:00.000-07:00

Now where are the flying cars?

Cygwin: Significant delay for a bash prompt

2011-04-13T06:19:00.000-07:00

If there is a significant delay before displaying a bash prompt when starting Cygwin, either via mintty or via a command prompt, check for network drives in your PATH variable. A quick and dirty way to fix this without modifying the global PATH variable (which you may not be able to do on a corporate Windows machine due to system policies in place) is to add a line like this to the top of your /etc/profile:

PATH=$(echo $PATH | /usr/bin/sed 's/\/cygdrive\/p.*://g')

In this case, all paths referencing a network "P:" drive are removed. For PATH elements on other network drives, lather, rinse and repeat the sed pipe.

Compiling mtr on Solaris: missing symbols wattr_on and wattr_off

2011-03-24T12:44:00.000-07:00

Despite the README file for Matt's traceroute claiming that:

On Solaris, linking usually fails to find "wattr" or something like that. Somehow, I can't seem to be able to automate "configure" finding the right libs on Solaris. So, the solution is that you cut-and-paste the line doing the linking into a terminal window, and add "-lcurses" by hand. Then it will link. Help on how to catch this in autoconf appreciated.

The truth is that adding -lcurses doesn't work and isn't going to. The problem is also not Matt's lack of knowledge about autoconf, it's Matt's lack of knowledge about Solaris and perhaps SysV-derived Unixes in general.

The problem on OpenSolaris is that autoconf picks up curses.h /usr/include/ncurses and then links against libcurses.so in /usr/lib. This is wrong, of courses, because libcurses is actually AT&T's curses, and the curses.h found in /usr/include/ncurses belongs to the open source replacement, ncurses.

So, Matt, the answer is that your autoconf configure script should make sure, at least on Solaris, that only curses gets picked, rather than ncurses. The main reason I'm recommending this approach, rather than detecting if curses or ncurses got picked up and linking appropriately, is that on Solaris the location of libncurses.so varies widely and it's usually not found in /lib or /usr/lib, and there is no way you can guarantee that the filesystem it is on is even mounted. For example, a Solaris admin may be using mtr to determine why an NFS server is down. Furthermore, compiling against ncurses can sometimes cause problems with libtermcap on Solaris.

The quickest and easiest workaround, my fellow intrepid Solaris admins, is to temporarily rename ncurses' curses.h to curses.h.off and recompile after doing a 'make clean'.

Myths, misinformation and disinformation about open source operating systems

2011-01-23T17:21:00.000-08:00

A recent Slashdot submission about a letter written by a reader to Amazon.com's customer
service department regarding their Kindle for PC book reader was very reminiscent of
the silly response I got from Kodak about their ESP printers. The reader asks Amazon why there is no Linux version of Kindle for PC when every other major operating system is supported.

Amazon's response is comical: apparently they are unable to get some sort of "rights" from "Linux" to develop their Kindle application for the Linux platform.

Really? What sort of rights are you expecting to get from an operating system kernel? Do they expect that they need permission from the Linux kernel hackers or a Linux operating system distributor to release an application for the platform?

Amazon is hardly a stranger to the Linux platform, since a number of their
webservers are obviously running it.

There seems to still be a number of misconceptions about licensing and such on Linux, nearly 20 years after development began.

Let me make this clear: no one needs any rights from the Linux kernel developers or any Linux distributor to write Linux applications. There is even a note in the license accompanying the kernel written by Linus Torvalds himself, the kernel's lead developer:

NOTE! This copyright does *not* cover user programs that use kernel services by normal system calls - this is merely considered normal use of the kernel, and does *not* fall under the heading of "derived work". Also note that the GPL below is copyrighted by the Free Software Foundation, but the instance of code that it refers to (the Linux kernel) is copyrighted by me and others who actually wrote it. Also note that the only valid version of the GPL as far as the kernel is concerned is _this_ particular version of the license (ie v2, not v2.2 or v3.x or whatever), unless explicitly otherwise stated.

Perhaps the confusion comes the fact that the kernel uses the GPL license. I wonder if anyone bothered to ask them why there isn't a version for FreeBSD? I suppose they might have gotten the same response, amusingly enough.

Applications on Linux do not need to be offered under any sort of open source license. Adobe seems to have no trouble understanding that; neither does Google. Why should Amazon?

Appnor does the Right Thing(tm) -- WinMTR is GPLed (again)

2011-01-11T07:53:00.000-08:00

Hosting company Appnor has done the Right Thing (tm) and has released its new version of WinMTR v0.91 as open source software under the terms of the GPL v2, thanks, in part, to the demands of the Slashdot community and the actions by me to fork v0.8.

Now the only question remains: what to do with the all the cool Qt stuff I started working on in the last couple of days? Do I keep going with my fork? Is the original WinMTR project interested in my new UI prototype?

BTW--here is the souce for Appnor's WinMTR v0.91. They've evidently opted not to update their CVS repository.

Appnor violating the GPL with WinMTR, so fork them

2011-01-10T07:17:00.000-08:00

In response to Web hosting company Appnor pulling WinMTR from SourceForge and closing up the source in violation of the GPL, I've forked the project and created a new Google Code project for winmtr, complete with a Mercurial repository.

Anyone wishing to contribute code or resources to the project knows what to do.

Is Sandy Bridge's "Intel Insider" DRM?

2011-01-07T18:08:00.000-08:00

Intel has recently claimed that Intel Insider is not DRM.

All I can say is this: Intel's spokespeople are obviously the biggest bunch of very bad liars ever.

What is DRM? DRM is Digital Rights Management. We all know that it's a fancy-sounding euphemism for the older term 'copy protection'. Here's an acid test for you:

Does it prevent you from making a copy of content or software on your machine? Is that the main reason it exists?

If the answer to those 2 questions is "yes" then it's DRM.

A third grader could have figured that out, Intel. Bad Intel! Bad Intel!

SketchUp and OpenGL on Linux + Wine

2011-01-06T20:16:00.000-08:00

This stuff should be obvious to most people familiar with running Linux on the desktop, but in case it's not, here's a little information for you.

First off, yes, you need a video card with decent OpenGL support to use SketchUp on Linux. And no, not all video cards with 3D acceleration are created equal. You really need a video card with on-board memory; the built in 3D-capable graphics cards tend to use system memory, which is generally going to be much, much slower; this means that Intel chipset 3D accelerators, S3/VIA, and even some of the on-board video adapters from NVidia and ATI (the ones without dedicated memory) will tend to suck. The Google SketchUp team seems to recommend NVidia cards on Windows. because the drivers tend to have better OpenGL support than AMD/ATI cards. YMMV on Linux, but I use NVidia chipset cards myself because the Linux drivers appear to be more stable in general. Flames >/dev/null 2>&1

Checking for hardware acceleration

One thing that people supporting SketchUp on the Web will recommend is to check that you are running hardware acceleration. Less helpfully to the Linux+Wine user is that they'll often give you instructions that are Windows or Mac-specific. Here's a little guide that'll help you out.

The easiest way to check if hardware acceleration is working on Linux is to launch a terminal and type:

    glxinfo | grep rendering

If you don't get back "direct rendering: Yes", it's not working. You'll need to install the appropriate graphics driver for your video card. See "Install video drivers" below.

Installing video drivers

There are generally two methods of installing 3D video drivers on Linux. If you're running a distro like Ubuntu that includes the ability to download them through the package manager, you can let the package manager handle it. The other method is a manual installation.

In general, the drivers in your distro are going to be stale. Ubuntu long-term-support releases are every 3 years; the cutting-edge stuff is about every 6 months. Whether the latest and greatest drivers get included upstream is a matter of politics; and sometimes you might want to use an older driver.

There are two major classes of cards that will work: NVidia and AMD/ATI. I really, really recommend an NVidia card, because AMD/ATI cards have some known performance and stability problems on Linux and with SketchUp as well.

NVidia Cards

For automatic installation, see your distro’s documentation. Again, I don't recommend this method because the drivers are likely to be stale or otherwise not the version you want.

For manual installation, you’re going to need the Linux headers, the GNU C compiler (gcc), and the GNU toolchain; for Ubuntu, these packages can be installed with:

    sudo apt-get install build-essential linux-header-$(uname -r)

To do this on other distributions, check your distro’sdocumentation.

Next, you'll need to grab the NVidia Linux drivers from the NVidia download page.

You'll need to uninstall all other NVidia accelerated drivers, such as the nvidia-* packages in Ubuntu or the nouveau drivers, if you have those installed. Use the --purge option to apt-get. Blacklisting vga16fb, nouvaeu, rivafb, nvidiafb and rivatv in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf is recommended, but may not be necessary with all cards.

You need to install this thing without X running. It sucks, but that's how it goes. You might want to print out these instructions, because once you are not in X, you won't be able to see this page. :)

Hit Ctrl+Alt+F1 to switch to the first text console and then login. If you're not directly logging in as root, you can chage to root by doing a:

    sudo -s --

Enter your user password at the prompt. Stop the X server by doing a 'service gdm stop'. Next, you need to run the installer with sh "/path/to/NVIDIA-Linux-[...]" (substituting [...] for whatever the file you downloaded was named)

The installer will walk you through everything. When it's done, it'll ask you to modify your X.org configuration; yes, you want that.

Reboot or simply restart GDM with 'service gdm start'.

ATI/AMD Cards

There are two different acclerated drivers ATI cards: the closed source fglrx driver and the open source driver. The fglrx driver is reported to be faster with some cards while the open source driver supports more older cards and has better dual head support.

For the open source driver, follow the instructions for your distro. The instructions for Ubuntu are here.

For either driver there is good doucumentation that covers most of the major distributions here

Getting SketchUp 8 Working in Wine -- Even WebDialogs!

2010-12-17T19:02:00.000-08:00

Updated 2010/12/22: Updates are shown in red below:
Some SketchUp enthusiasts have created an excellent resource on getting SketchUp working on Linux and Wine. There are a few details they seem to be missing, so I'll cover them here.
To begin with, they mention installing Wine 1.2. However, if you want everything to work, including WebDialogs, the Collada importer and exporter and the Ruby Console, you will need to install the latest and greatest Wine, which, at the time of this writing, is 1.3.8. On Ubuntu, you can just add the Wine PPA Just installing the latest stable Wine won't do.

Before you install - READ THIS NOW

Next, before you install SketchUp, make you sure you are installing in a clean $WINEPREFIX (usually $HOME/.wine). In particular, you do not want any Microsoft native .NET runtime as this is guaranteed to break WebDialogs. I mean it. Don't do it. And if you find later that any WebDialogs don't work, go back and read this paragraph again. If you have other applications that need Microsoft native .NET, then you will need to use multiple $WINEPREFIXes. See this Wine forum thread on using multiple wineprefixes. You may also find 'man wine' helpful.

Installing SketchUp

Now download the SketchUp installer and run it under Wine using your favorite method. If the installer fails (it shouldn't), disconnect from the Internet before running it. (In a typical broadband environment where you are running a cable/DSL router, you can simply do 'sudo route del default' rather than disconnecting your Ethernet card. Disable any network managers first.)
Launch SketchUp. If installing Pro, register or add your licensing information at this point. You should uncheck the little box on the "Welcome to SketchUp" screen that says "[ ] Always Show" as this dialog box can cause problems later.

Turn off the Instructor. Once WebDialogs are running, the Instructor will actually work properly, but for now turn it off.

If you have trouble launching SketchUp, check out my SketchUp on Wine Resources page, which contains several registry settings files for forcing on OpenGL hardware acceleration and forcing off the Welcome and Instructor dialogs.

Making WebDialogs Work

Once you have SketchUp launching, it's time to make WebDialogs work. If you haven't read the section called "Before You Install" above, go do it. Now. Really. I mean it. If you don't, do not e-mail me with questions because I will just tell you to read that section. Really.
Copy "$WINEPREFIX/drive_c/Program Files/Internet Explorer" somewhere else. For example:

    export WINEPREFIX=~/.wine
    cd "$WINEPREFIX/drive_c/Program Files"
    cp -r "Internet Explorer" iebackup

Make sure you have the latest Winetricks installed. As of this writing, the latest version is 20101106. You can find out what version you have by typing 'winetricks -V'.
Now do 'winetricks ie8'. Install IE8 and close the browser after it runs. Next, you need wine-gecko, so do 'winetricks gecko'.
Now uninstall Internet Explorer 8 by doing a 'wine uninstaller'. Don't ask, just do it. When the uninstallation is complete, you need to remove "$WINEPREFIX/drive_c/Program Files/Internet Explorer" and replace it with the backup you created above. For example:

    export WINEPREFIX=~/.wine
    cd "$WINEPREFIX/drive_c/Program Files"
    rm -rf "Internet Explorer"
    mv -f iebackup "Internet Explorer"

Launch 'winecfg', go to the 'Libraries' tab and add an override of (native, builtin) for ctl3d32. This will make the "Component Attributes" and "Component Options" dialogs work correctly.
Launch SketchUp and make sure that "3D Warehouse" loads and operates.

Setting .skp files to open in SketchUp

Create a mimetype for the SketchUp models (*.skp) and associate with this launch script, which you can also use to launch SketchUp from the command line. Creating mimetypes will be specific to your desktop environment, so check your desktop environment's documentation.

Some things SketchUp Sage gets wrong

Under Make SketchUp Beautiful, they mention installing '.msstyles' or '.theme' files to make SketchUp blend into the desktop better. DO NOT DO THIS! In my experience, Windows skins tend to break WebDialogs, to the point of crashing SketchUp, especially those from Ruby plugins.
Instead, you can tweak the colors and fonts on the "Desktop Integration" tab of winecfg. Making your pulldown menu font Bitstream Vera Sans 10pt and changing the controls background to match your current GTK or QT theme will go a long way towards making SketchUp blend in. For extra credit, also tweak 'Menu Background', 'Selection Background', 'Selection Text', 'Gray Text', 'Hot Tracked Item', 'Controls Highlight', 'Controls Shadow', 'Controls Dark Shadow', 'Active Title Bar', 'Active Title Bar Gradient', and 'Active Title Text', not necessarily in that order.

It's a good idea to install corefonts via Winetricks. In addition, you can enable font smoothing with 'winetricks fontsmooth-rgb' or 'winetricks fontsmooth-bgr' (depending on what kind of monitor you have.)

In the Make Plugins work in Wine section, the author seems to think that because you're running SketchUp on Linux, you need Unix format Ruby scripts. Well, no. You don't. The Ruby interpreter, which is embedded in SketchUp, doesn't give a rat's ass about the line endings (cr/lf vs bare lf). You can entirely ignore this section. (Yes, I did test this)

Finally, they miss the 'ctl3d32.dll' assignment, of course.

Performance

SketchUp performance on Wine should be on-par or better compared with SketchUp on native Windows. Really! If it's not, read the relevant section below:

Lots of disk access or swapping: You need more RAM. A practical miniumum is probably about 4 GB. You can also free up memory by running in a light desktop environment or desktop environmentless window manager such as LXDE, XFCE, or OpenBox.
Gittery or stuttering while rotating/moving 3D objects: You may need a faster video card or more video memory. Also, try disabling compiz or other programs that use up GL texture memory. However, try updating your video driver to latest vendor-supplied driver. (fglrx for ATI, nvidia-glx for NVidia). The drivers in your distribution's repositories are often stale.
UI seems sluggish: Use a video card that has good 2D acceleration on X. (i.e., not an ATI/AMD card :-P). Also, close programs using up graphics or X server memory. Also, don't use Windows themes in Wine (but you actually read the "Before You Install" section, so you aren't doing that, right???)

Functionality Issues: Stuff that Doesn't Work (and possible workarounds)

(For Pro users) LayOut doesn't work and won't even launch. You can get drawings printed/plotted by using the DXF exorter to create a 2D DXF and then import the resulting DXF into QCad. Even if you install the native .NET runtime (don't), it'll launch but will still be non-functional.
(For Pro users) Ditto for Style Builder. (see last point). All Style Builder lets you do is create renderings with squiggly lines anyway. You probably want a real rendering package.
Depending on your video driver, the 3D viewer may occassionally become garbled or fail to update. ~~If that happens, just zoom in an out with your mouse wheel, which will force the window to refresh~~. This turns out to not be Wine problem, rather an indication that you should update to latest video drivers for your card. After updating my video drivers, the occasional garbledness in the 3D viewer went away.
The dialog windows tend to "stick" to the mouse cursor and follow it around. Pushing the dialogs to the right edge of the window seems to alleviate some of this if you keep the mouse cursor away from the title bar.
Wine can launch external Linux programs from within Win32 applications like SketchUp. You just need to make a shell script that translates the Windows paths to Unix paths. See my last post about this.
Building Maker. Follow the instructions on SketchUp Sage's Linux Issues page. These are accurate.
Google Earth stuff. Follow the instructions on SketchUp Sage's Linux Issues page. These are accurate.
PNG, JPEG, TIFF and BMP export will show all white or all black. ~~Printing, which exports a BMP image (this is how Windows printing works), will result in the printer printing black pages~~ Instead, you can export EPS (which works) or Piranesi EPX, which actually contains a TIFF file. The EPX TIFF images can be opened in the GIMP and converted.
Curiously, updating my video driver made printing work, but did not fix the image export problem. :-/ They must be using imaging routines for printing and for file export.
SketchyPhysics. ~~I couldn't make animations play -- they just caused SketchUp to crash. Still working on that.~~ Updating to the latest video driver, once again, fixed this. Animations now play without crashing. Actually, updating the video driver didn't totally fix it. Sometimes SketchyPhysics simulations still crash, but I suspect that this a bug in SketchyPhysics itself and not a Wine or video driver problem.
Some images in WebDialogs fail to load. I'm investigating this.

Check back for updates

I'm heavily using SketchUp now, so watch this blog for more updates. All SketchUp posts will be tagged "SketchUp".

Mounting any VirtualBox-supported VDI disk on an Ubuntu or Debian host

2010-11-19T11:56:00.000-08:00

There's a tool circulating in the VirtualBox forums since last year called vdfuse, which is a FUSE-based filesystem package that can mount any VirtualBox VDI image. Unfortunately, there's much confusion surrounding getting this thing installed and compiled.

To get this working, make sure you have build-essential and libfuse-dev installed:

$ sudo apt-get install build-essential libfuse-dev

Next, create a directory in your $HOME directory or whatever usual directory you use for development workspace and call it "vdfuse" Okay, here's where our instructions are going to differ: If you were to follow the instructions at the link, they'll have do a Subversion checkout, which means you end up with a missing VboxHDD.h. Not sure how or why, and I'm not going to look into it right now, but the easiest way to get this going is to get OSE source from APT:

$ cd vdfuse
$ apt-get source virtualbox-ose

Remember: anytime you need to install the source for a package on your system, apt-get source is your friend. Don't bother trying to hunt around the Net for a tarball when it's sitting right there in the APT repository the whole time! Okay. Now symlink from virtualbox-ose-3.x.x/include to the current directory:

$ ln -s virtualbox[TAB]/include .

(where it says {TAB] hit the TAB key. This assumes you're using bash with the standard completion keys. If you're using something else, figure out how to autocomplete yourself!)

Now simply download the linked files. To make it easier for you, copy and paste this into your current shell:

wget http://forums.virtualbox.org/download/file.php?id=2866&sid=d1b8a277642c7ba43302307cbedaf8f9 -O vdfuse.c
wget http://forums.virtualbox.org/download/file.php?id=2864&sid=d1b8a277642c7ba43302307cbedaf8f9 -O vdbuild.sh
wget http://forums.virtualbox.org/download/file.php?id=2865&sid=d1b8a277642c7ba43302307cbedaf8f9 -O vdautomount.py

Now just run the vdbuild.sh script like this:

$ sh vdbuild.sh include vdfuse.c

If you encounter no errors, you'll find a binary executable called 'vdfuse'. Copy vdfuse somewhere in your $PATH ('/usr/local/sbin' is a good idea). You can now mount the VDI file like this:

$ sudo vdfuse -f /path/to/file.vdi /path/to/mountpoint

/path/to/mountpoint will now contain files like 'EntireDisk', 'Partition1', etc. If there's only one partition showing, you probably want that one. So to mount the filesystem, just type:

mount /path/to/mountpoint/Partition1 /path/to/someother/mountpoint

The filesystem should now be mounted on /path/to/someother/mountpoint. And yes, you should now be able to use this instead of the boot CD method for installing or uninstalling WineD3D.

Using Sketchup in Wine: Configuring the External Image Editor

2010-11-18T20:13:00.000-08:00

One thing that Google Sketchup can do is edit texture images by calling an external image editor. This, of course, works great on Windows, but on Linux, even if you have Photoshop installed in Wine, you might not like to use Photoshop as your external image editor because it is bloatware -- it has a fairly large memory footprint and takes a long time to load.

Fortunately, the Wine wrappers around the Win32 Execute functions can do something special: they can call ordinary Linux programs.

By default, your root directory will be mounted on Drive Z:. While you could simply call Z:\usr\bin\gimp, it won't actually work because Sketchup will pass gimp the Windows path to the file. Gimp won't be able to load this. Fortunately, Wine comes with a tool called winepath. The winepath tool can translate pathnames between Unix and Windows variants.

So to make this work, we simply need a shell script. I created my in my home directory, under ~/bin. You could put a similar script /usr/local/bin or whatever. Here's my solution, which I called 'winegimp':

#!/bin/sh
cmdline=$(winepath -u "$*")
/usr/bin/gimp "$cmdline"

Since the script is sitting in my home directory, under $HOME/bin, I simply open Windows -> Preference in Sketchup, select Applications and Browse to My Documents\bin\winegimp Voila! Sketchup texture images are now edited in the Linux-native Gimp application!

The most awesomest sed tutorial page -- EVAR!

2010-10-29T09:28:00.000-07:00

Here is the most aweseomest sed tutorial evar! Now quit asking me "How do I do foo with sed?" :)

Wikileaks blows the lid on 400,000 Iraq War documents

2010-10-22T15:26:00.000-07:00

The 400,000 Iraq War documents were simultaneously released by several media outlets today including TBIJ, IBC, Guardian, Spiegel, NYT, Le Monde, Al Jazeera, Chan4, SVT, CNN, BBC and more. The source of the documents was Wikileaks.

Some reports are available via the Creative Common License at http://www.iraqwarlogs.com/, but the site is being slammed right now.

The raw stuff is now up since moments ago at http://warlogs.wikileaks.org/

WikiLeaks' mysterious downtime.

2010-10-20T16:26:00.000-07:00

Wikileaks has been mysteriously down "for maintenance" since about 3 weeks ago. The only status update since that time was posted today on Twitter. The full text of the tweet is:

WikiLeaks communications infrastructure is currently under attack. Project BO move to coms channel S. Activate Reston5.

No one on #wikichat seemed to know what it means, but it does seem like some sort of coded message.

More to follow as this story unfolds.

My best guesses, based on speculation from #wikileaks and elsewhere is that Project BO == Either "Barack Obama" or "Black Ops". Channel S might be Skype, which Wikileaks has been known to use. Reston5 either refers to Reston, VA, or "Scotty" Reston, who was a journalist for New York Times known to have a special relationship with Henry Kissinger.

Update: It would appear that just moments ago, Wikileaks announced that there will be a major press conference in Europe.

Update 10/22: Looks like Wikileaks latest tweet, linking to this Democracy Now! segment featuring Vietnam War leaker Daniel Ellsburg, who is involved with tomorrow's announcment in Europe, confirms that Wikileaks will, indeed, be releasing those 400,000 documents relating to Gulf War II in Iraq.

TV Out for Old ATI 3D Rage Pro / All-In-Wonder Using Mach64

2010-10-08T21:30:00.000-07:00

Putting together an old PC for use as a MythTV box can be a bit harrowing. I wasn't interested in going out and spending cash on a new MiniITX box the lateset NVIDIA or ATI with TV out. If I wanted to do all that, I'd probably be a bit more likely to just plunk down $150 for one of those already-put-together appliance boxes.

So anyway, I had an old 1.2 GHz Celeron box just lying around doing nothing. Then I found an old ATI 3D Rage Pro All-in-Wonder card, based on the old ATI Mach64 chipset for $5 at a yard sale. (Yard sales are a big thing in Florida. The reitrees down here love them.)

Hmmm...I wonder if I could make this thing work with MythTV? I found the GATOS drivers and tried to get TV out and TV capture working. Well, that was late 2007/early 2008 and I never could get that pesky km module working.

Fast forward to a few days ago, while I'm laid off I figure I'd do a few things around the house, like getting this MythTV box working.

I headed back to the GATOS site and found the project all but abandoned. Seems that the TV out functionality was added to the mainline X.org back around version 7.0 and the km module doesn't seem to have changed much. Unfortunately, the FDO guys chose not to to make the options for the mainline X.org driver the same as those for the GATOS ati.2 driver. Oh well.

I seemed to remember that to make TV out work with the GATOS ati.2 driver, you had to set the video mode to a supported resolution -- that is 800x600, 16-bit color, and also turn it on in X.org. Well, trying the GATOS parameters, they didn't work for the X.org 7 mach64 driver. Looking at 'man ati' tells us only that ati_drv.so wraps other drivers, like r128 and mach64. Doing a 'man mach64' provides no manual. The 'r128' driver doesn't mention any TV out support. Searching the Web just keeps pointing us back at GATOS. Bummer.

So, what to do? I'm going to tell you. But like most of my posts, I believe in giving you the tools to figure it out for yourself.

There are two ways you can go about this. Method one is to USTL -- that's right, Use the source, Luke! So let's get the source!

Now, we want the source that (hopefully) corresponds to the same version that's in our distro. One way we can ensure this is download the source from our distro's package manager. In our case, we're using Mythbuntu, so we'll be using apt -- Debian's advanced package tool.

We need to know what package to grab the source for. Fortunately, apt provides us with a tool to do this for us called 'apt-cache.' The X.org driver packages are all put into separate packages, so we can search for the name of our driver, mach64, like this:

$ apt-cache search mach64
xserver-xorg-video-ati - X.Org X server -- ATI display driver wrapper
xserver-xorg-video-ati-dbg - X.Org X server -- ATI display driver wrapper (debugging symbols)
xserver-xorg-video-mach64 - X.Org X server -- ATI Mach64 display driver
xserver-xorg-video-mach64-dbg - X.Org X server -- ATI display driver (debugging symbols)

Okay, so we know that the package is now called 'xserver-xorg-video-mach64'. Now we need to fetch the source for that package. So make sure you're in a directory where you can write, and then do an 'apt-get source xserver-xorg-video-mach64', which looks like this:

morgan@dagda:~$ apt-get source xserver-xorg-video-mach64
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
NOTICE: 'xserver-xorg-video-mach64' packaging is maintained in the 'Git' version control system at:
git://git.debian.org/git/pkg-xorg/driver/xserver-xorg-video-mach64
--snip--
-video-mach64 6.8.2-1 (diff) [24.4kB]
Fetched 686kB in 3s (197kB/s)                  
gpgv: Signature made Fri 31 Jul 2009 07:21:50 PM EDT using DSA key ID C3DC59FA
gpgv: Can't check signature: public key not found
dpkg-source: warning: failed to verify signature on ./xserver-xorg-video-mach64_6.8.2-1.dsc
dpkg-source: info: extracting xserver-xorg-video-mach64 in xserver-xorg-video-mach64-6.8.2
dpkg-source: info: unpacking xserver-xorg-video-mach64_6.8.2.orig.tar.gz
dpkg-source: info: applying xserver-xorg-video-mach64_6.8.2-1.diff.gz

Now notice that in my case, the signature check failed on 'xserver-xorg-video-mach64_6.8.2-1.dsc', which means that we have no idea whether this file has been tampered with or not. This means if we're being security conscious, we shouldn't compile this code for use on our machine. At all. However, in our case, we're just looking to read the code, we don't actually care (that much) if it's been tampered with. Especially considering that the reason it failed has more to do with the fact that gpgv can't seem to find the public key, rather than any actual detected differences.

Ok. Now if we notice, apt-get/dpkg-source has conveniently downloaded the tarball, extracted it, and then applied the patch applied by the Ubuntu developers for us! Pretty cool, huh? That means our source now exactly corresponds to our installed binary. (And, barring any bugs in apt or problems with the Ubuntu repositories, it does!)

Now, step into the directory, xserver-xorg-video-mach64-6.8.2 and we'll search for what we're looking for by doing a recursive grep. Now what sounds good? I know, we'll search for 'tv', case-insensitively:

$ grep -Rin tv . | less

(The options: '-Rin == '(R)ecursive, (i)gnore case, with line (n)umbers') I won't reproduce the full output here, but if you scroll through the output, you should notice the interesting part, right ... here:

./src/aticonfig.c:150:#ifdef TV_OUT
./src/aticonfig.c:152:        ATI_OPTION_TV_OUT,
./src/aticonfig.c:153:        "tv_out",
./src/aticonfig.c:154:        OPTV_BOOLEAN,
./src/aticonfig.c:159:        ATI_OPTION_TV_STD,
./src/aticonfig.c:160:        "tv_standard",
./src/aticonfig.c:161:        OPTV_STRING,
./src/aticonfig.c:166:#endif /* TV_OUT */

There. See that? The filename 'src/aticonfig.c' pretty much looks like it might be for reading the xorg.conf file. And all on mostly consecutive lines, we have two options: 'tv_out' and 'tv_standard'. Now that looks like what we're looking for! Let's check it out!

Opening the file in a nice text editor like vim or Emacs or scite (for the syntax highlighting, of course!) we can see the code:

#ifdef TV_OUT
    {
        ATI_OPTION_TV_OUT,
        "tv_out",
        OPTV_BOOLEAN,
        {0, },
        FALSE
    },
    {
        ATI_OPTION_TV_STD,
        "tv_standard",
        OPTV_STRING,
        {0, },
        FALSE
    },

The first one, the one that obviously turns on TV output is called 'tv_out' and it's a boolean. So we now know we're going to add something like 'option "tv_out" "true" to the xorg.conf.

The second on is for selecting the TV standard we'll be using. Notice it's not a boolean. How do we know what to put here? Hmph. Well, notice the symbolic name of the option, 'ATI_OPTION_TV_STD'. That gives us a good starting point. Let's pop back to the top of the file and search for 'TV_STD'. Right in the beginning, we see something that looks like what we're looking for:

/*
 * List of supported TV standard names
 */
const char *ATITVStandardNames[ATI_TV_STDS_MAX_VALID+1] = {
    "NTSC",
    "PAL",
    "PAL-M",
    "PAL-60",
    "NTSC-J",
    "PAL-CN",
    "PAL-N",
    "Reserved1",
    "Reserved2",
    "SCART-PAL",
    "None",
    "Invalid"
};

It should be obvious, based on your locale what to put here. For myself, I need 'NTSC'. Now when we go to our Mythbuntu 10.04 box, we notice that there is no xorg.conf. That's pretty common these days, but we can still create one and create one, we shall. If you don't know how to read the xorg.conf, now's a good time to type 'man xorg.conf' to read all about it. If you need to do so, do it now, before you read the final solution. I mean it! No peeking!

Okay, so with all of our new acquired knowledge, we now know what the xorg.conf file should look like:

Section "Device"
        Identifier      "ATI All-in-Wonder/Rage Pro"
        Driver          "ati"
        Option          "tv_out" "1"
        Option          "tv_standard" "NTSC"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
        Identifier      "TV/LCD"
        Device          "ATI All-in-Wonder/Rage Pro"
        DefaultDepth    16
        SubSection "Display"
                Depth   16
                Modes   "800x600"
        EndSubSection
EndSection

From there we can restart the X server or simply reboot. If you did everything right, X should start and display on your connected TV. If not, check your X server output in /var/log/Xorg.0.log, diagnose and try again.

Huh? What's that, you ask? The other method? I'm not sure why you'd want to use it on an open source operating system, but you can always just use the 'strings' command on the actual driver binary, mach64_drv.so, which you'll find in /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers. It's a little tough to try work it out without the source, but all the strings mentioned will appear there. This is useful if you have to figure this out on a non-open source OS, like a commercial Unix. I still recommend the source, though. It's easier. Trust me.

Multiple Inheritance in Python isn't scary

2010-10-01T11:00:00.000-07:00

When you saw this title were you shaking in your boots? Does the idea of multiple inheritance give you headaches? Do you avoid multiple inheritance like the plague because it's too confusing?

You shouldn't be. This stuff isn't really that hard. Take a look at this document. Right now. Really. Go ahead, I'll wait. Still confused?

There's no need to be. For the lazy programmer, we have a secret Pythonic weapon! More secret than even the policeman's third ball. More powerful than even the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch!

Every Python class has a super-secret method called mro(). I call it super-secret because you'll scarcely see it mentioned in the Python docs. The only reference I could find to it is here:

The __mro__ attribute of the type lists the method resolution search order used by both getattr() and super(). The attribute is dynamic and can change whenever the inheritance hierarchy is updated.

It is, in fact, mentioned in the first link in this blog post, but you'll have to dig to find it.
Um. Maybe the Python documentation writers ought to fix that, huh? Anyway, what it does is return the list of classes in the method resolution order, in order, of course.


>>> class A(object): pass

>>> class B(object): pass

>>> class C(object): pass

>>> class D(B,C): pass

>>> class E(D,C): pass

>>> class F(E,C,A): pass

>>> F.mro()

[<class '__main__.F'>, <class '__main__.E'>, <class '__main__.D'>, <class '__main__.B'>, <class '__main__.C'>, <class '__main__.A'>, <type 'object'>]

See how easy that is? One caveat: this only applies to new-style classes. No big deal, because you're already using those. Right?

Installing WineD3D on WIndows 7 running in VirtualBox: the easy way

2010-09-24T14:17:00.000-07:00

As you may know, you can get support for Direct3D in Windows guests running in VirtualBox through the use of Wine's Direct3D OpenGL compatibility layer, WineD3D.
The main problem is getting the installer to work. Even if you know, as I do, how to cross-compile on Linux, I still recommend downloading the pre-compiled binary installer because it helps you to know where all the files go on Windows.

Most seem to be recommending installation in Safe Mode, which only partially works; even Administrator doesn't have permission to overwrite some of the Windows binaries. Rather than beating yourself over the head running the Windows installer, do yourself a favor and download the ISO9660 image, and then, if you don't have one already, obtain a copy of SystemRescueCD, which, if you support Windows machines, you really, really need one of these. Trust me. In this case, you don't have burn it, just download the ISO and put it somewhere convenient.

Okay, here we go.

Launch VirtualBox and edit the settings in your VM. Add the System Rescue CD ISO as one of your CD devices. Add another CD device (if you don't already have two), and then map that one to the WineD3D ISO:

Next, you want to make sure that the boot order is set to boot the CD:

Finally, if you haven't already done so, you need to enable 3D acceleration support. Enabling 2D acceleration support is also a good idea. You need to to set aside at least 32 MB of RAM for video. I 'd go with 64 MB, if possible.

Once you've got all your settings, you need to boot the System Rescue CD. When you (finally) get to a shell prompt, mount your Windows C: drive with something like:

ntfs-3g /dev/sda1 /mnt/windows

Next, mount the WineD3D ISO on /mnt/custom with something like:

mount /dev/sr1 /mnt/custom

Now, change directories somewhere on your NTFS partition, like /mnt/windows/Temp /mnt/windows/Windows/Temp, or you could mount an NFS or CIFS mount somewhere, whatever; you just need somewhere to extract /mnt/custom/wined3d.exe:

mount /path/to/somewhere/writeable /mnt/gentoo # (optional)
cd /mnt/gentoo
mkdir wined3d
cd wined3d
7z x /mnt/custom/wined3d

Now you just copy the contents of $SYSDIR into /mnt/windows/Windows/System32 and the contents of $WINDIR into /mnt/windows/Windows (do not be concerned with the remaining file, $PLUGINSDIR/sm_cleanboot.dll; this is just a plugin for the Nullsoft Installer):

cp '$SYSDIR' /mnt/windows/Windows/System32
cp -r '$WINDIR' /mnt/windows/*

From there, you should manually unmount /mnt/windows before rebooting:

umount /mnt/windows
reboot

Workable NFS on the NAS 200

2010-09-21T16:47:00.000-07:00

Since I use Linux, I intially considered using NFS -- the more "Unix native" networked filesystem protocol. -- on the NAS 200. After reading many reports such as this one that NFS is "too slow" on the NAS 200, I decided to give it a try. I tried the kernel NFS daemon, of course, and the old NFS v2 user-mode server and both were very, very slow. However, I also downloaded the user-mode NFS v3 daemon and found that performance was not only acceptable, it was on par with Linux CIFS and Samba.

Note that unfs3 comes with no file locking support. You may be able to use lockd/statd from nfs-utils, but I have not tested this as yet. If you plan on using unfs3, you will also need the RPC portmapper daemon, which must be running before starting unfs3. Since unfs3 implements both nfsd and mountd, there is no need to launch a separate daemon for that.

Compiling and installing is similar to compiling the other applications and use the nas200_configure.sh I wrote for the other blog entries on NAS 200 hacking.

Note that the security of NFSv3 is not as good as CIFS or NFSv4 due to access control being host-based, rather than user-based. I did not test NFSv4 on the NAS200. I would suspect that it would be horribly, horribly slow as the performance of NFSv4 is poor even on machines with higher resources. (I may try it yet)

I'm also planning on testing netatalk as well, for you Mac OS X Time Machine using people. More to follow.

64-bit Flash 10.1 on Linux is back

2010-09-16T05:09:00.000-07:00

Back in June, Adobe killed the Flash 10.1 Beta on 64-bit Linux (I'm still using 64-bit Flash 10.0 on Ubuntu). Even then, Adobe said that they "remained committed to providing Flash on 64-bit operating systems." Well, it's back, and the 64-bit beta now supports Windows and IE9, in addition to 64-bit Linux.

Earbuds that surprised me

2010-09-15T13:42:00.001-07:00

Lately, I don't rave much about particular products. Especially not tech products. I'm pretty much a guy who has seen just about everything and nothing really surprises me anymore.

I've never been a big fan of earbuds, because 99% of the earbuds on the market sound like crap. They usually have poor bass response, with weak, distorted highs. The result is a sound that is mediocre at best, and positively tinny at their worst. Of course, you can't beat them for convenience: they fit nicely in a pocket or wrapped around your favorite portable audio player or media phone. But the sound usually just falls flat.

That was, until my wife came home with these AUVIO earbuds from the rat shack for my birthday. Okay, they're glow in the dark (which makes them easier for me to see in low light situations; I have visual acuity problems relating to childhood eye disease). But how do they sound?

All I can say is that they sound incredibly good. As good as a good quality (read: expensive) pair of real headphones. Solid bass response, crisp, clear highs. And they sound as good at low volume as they do at higher volumes -- something that will save your ears.

I suspect some of this is due to their shape and size; of course the actual quality of the tiny speakers themselves have something to do with it as well. To be fair, I've only compared them to one other brand of earbuds made in this style, but the sound is truly amazing.

They also have a little rubber piece they wind around and come with an assortment of different tips. And it looks like they come a non-glow in the dark version for $5 less if you're not big on the dayglow colors. Overall, I'd definitely recommend them.