• sudo apt-get install lirc
• Make your /etc/lirc/lircrc look like this:

##### GLOBAL #####
begin
  flags = startup_mode
  mode = smplayer
end

begin
  remote = PackBell
  button = Aux1
  mode = smplayer
end

begin
  button = Mute
  prog   = irexec
  repeat = 0
  config = amixer sset 'Master' toggle
end
begin
  button = VolUp
  prog   = irexec
  repeat = 2
  delay = 1
  config = amixer sset 'Master' 1+
end
begin
  button = VolDown
  prog   = irexec
  repeat = 2
  delay = 1
  config = amixer sset 'Master' 1-
end

##### MPLAYER #####
begin smplayer
  begin
      remote = PackBell
      prog = irexec
      button = Down
      config = if [ $(ps -eo cmd | grep -c ^smplayer) -eq 1 ]; then (smplayer -send-action rewind2); fi
      repeat = 3
      delay = 1
  end

  begin
      remote = PackBell
      prog = irexec
      button = Up
      config = if [ $(ps -eo cmd | grep -c ^smplayer) -eq 1 ]; then (smplayer -send-action forward2); fi
      repeat = 3
      delay = 1
  end

  begin
      remote = PackBell
      prog = irexec
      button = Right
      config = if [ $(ps -eo cmd | grep -c ^smplayer) -eq 1 ]; then (smplayer -send-action forward1); fi
      repeat = 3
      delay = 1
  end

  begin
      remote = PackBell
      prog = irexec
      button = Left
      config = if [ $(ps -eo cmd | grep -c ^smplayer) -eq 1 ]; then (smplayer -send-action rewind1); fi
      repeat = 3
      delay = 1
  end

  begin
      remote = PackBell
      prog = irexec
      button = Display
      config = if [ $(ps -eo cmd | grep -c ^smplayer) -eq 1 ]; then (smplayer -send-action fullscreen); fi
      repeat = 0
      delay = 0
  end

  begin
      remote = PackBell
      prog = irexec
      button = CHUp
      config = if [ $(ps -eo cmd | grep -c ^smplayer) -eq 1 ]; then (smplayer -send-action next_subtitle); fi
      repeat = 3
      delay = 0
  end

  begin
      remote = PackBell
      prog = irexec
      button = CHDown
      config = if [ $(ps -eo cmd | grep -c ^smplayer) -eq 1 ]; then (smplayer -send-action next_audio); fi
      repeat = 3
      delay = 0
  end

  begin
      remote = PackBell
      prog = irexec
      button = LMB
      config = if [ $(ps -eo cmd | grep -c ^smplayer) -eq 1 ]; then (smplayer -send-action pl_prev); fi
      repeat = 3
      delay = 0
  end

  begin
      remote = PackBell
      prog = irexec
      button = RMB
      config = if [ $(ps -eo cmd | grep -c ^smplayer) -eq 1 ]; then (smplayer -send-action pl_next); fi
      repeat = 3
      delay = 0
  end

  begin
      remote = PackBell
      prog = irexec
      button = Zero
      config = if [ $(ps -eo cmd | grep -c ^smplayer) -eq 1 ]; then (smplayer -send-action next_aspect); fi
      repeat = 3
      delay = 0
  end

  begin
      remote = PackBell
      prog = irexec
      button = One
      config = if [ $(ps -eo cmd | grep -c ^smplayer) -eq 1 ]; then (smplayer -send-action rewind3); fi
      repeat = 3
      delay = 0
  end
  begin
      remote = PackBell
      prog = irexec
      button = Two
      config = if [ $(ps -eo cmd | grep -c ^smplayer) -eq 1 ]; then (smplayer -send-action play_or_pause); fi
      repeat = 3
      delay = 0
  end
  begin
      remote = PackBell
      prog = irexec
      button = Three
      config = if [ $(ps -eo cmd | grep -c ^smplayer) -eq 1 ]; then (smplayer -send-action forward3); fi
      repeat = 3
      delay = 0
  end
end smplayer

• sudo /etc/init.d/lirc restart
• You should see the irexec daemon start
• Start smplayer and make it play something
• Push the AUX1 button on your Packard Bell remote
• Now push other buttons.  It should all work.

Thanks to all the blog posts and forum conversations that helped me figure all that out.

Poor Franz Ferdinand.  I’ll bet he’s rolling in his grave.  He should Black (back)Hand that band.

Now, I’ve used Chrome in Linux before, and a few things about Firefox kept me hooked.  Today, though, I was on a mission to change all that.  I wanted basically all the functionality I got from Firefox in my Chrome experience as well.  This article should help others do the same.

Tip: Flash is enabled in newer versions by default, but in old Chrome for Linux versions, you had to start it with –enable-plugins.  I’m using native x86_64 flash for Ubuntu 9.04, and it works brilliantly.  Get it here.

Result

The first thing I did was import all my Firefox settings, which Chrome asks when it starts the first time.  This worked extremely well, even pulling over my bookmarks toolbar.  This is the result of my work:

Tip: To get the bookmark toolbar to show, hit Ctrl-b.

Another Tip: You can remove all the title text from bookmarks to get the bare icons I did above.  It’s actually pretty clean when you have favicons to depend on.

Goal 1: Stumbleupon

Yes, I waste tons of time stumbling.  According to my stats, I’ve given 4,854 pages a Thumbs Up, 447 pages a Thumbs Down, and I’ve hit the Stumble!  button 18,610 times.  This behavior may be unhealthy, but I’m addicted.  The solution to this is the cool toolbar they have.  You can see an example here.  This replaces the Firefox addon toolbar for everything by the initiation of Stumbling, which I made a little bookmark for in my toolbar.

Stumble!

Goal 2:  Instapaper

Instapaper is great for putting those articles in a reading queue that you just don’t feel like reading, and getting them on some mobile device when you’re bored, like on a flight.  It’s easily solved in Chrome with a bookmarklet.  See your account details in Instapaper, since it’s personalized.

Goal 3: Delicious

I love delicious.  It’s seriously helpful, and the delicious addon for Firefox has been on of my reasons for sticking with it for so long.  Yet, I recently found out that a bookmarklet can do all of the functions I use the addon for.  Here it is:

Delicious

Just drag that to your toolbar.

Goal 4: Get rid of that stupid blue theme

Ugh.  That light blue crap reminds me of Windows XP.  Get it away!  Thankfully, Chrome now has themes.  I changed it to the Brushed look, and I like it a lot.

Goal 5: Amazon Universal Wishlist

The Universal Wishlist bookmarklet still works like it did in Firefox.  Awesome.  Get one.

I hope this helps all of you out there with Firefox blues.  Google really has come through on this one.

Goal 6: URL Shortening

I always liked being able to click a button and shorten a URL.  I can get this functionality using PunyURL (the sapo.pt one) using this bookmarklet: Puny

gcc -x c -o /tmp/out - -lgmp <<< '#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <stdint.h>
#include <gmp.h>
void omg_i_love_leonardo_of_pisa(uint32_t num, mpz_t * result) { mpz_t retval, last, tmp; mpz_init(retval);
 mpz_init(last); mpz_init(tmp); uint32_t i = 1; if(num == 0) return; mpz_set_ui(retval, 1U);
mpz_set_ui(last, 0U); for(; i < num; i++) { mpz_set(tmp, retval); mpz_add(retval, retval, last);
mpz_set(last, tmp); } mpz_set(*result, retval); } int main() { uint32_t num; mpz_t fibo; mpz_init(fibo);
omg_i_love_leonardo_of_pisa(1000001, &fibo); mpz_out_str(stdout, 10, fibo); printf("\n"); return 1; }
' && time /tmp/out

It compiles a C program given from STDIN, puts it in /tmp/out, and runs it with time to find the time it takes to run. It generates the 1,000,000th Fibonacci number. Try it!

postgres@tardis:~$ createdb test
postgres@tardis:~$ psql test
psql (8.4.0)
Type "help" for help.

test=# CREATE TYPE rank AS ENUM ('general', 'sergeant', 'private');
CREATE TYPE
test=# CREATE TABLE military (id SERIAL PRIMARY KEY,
test(#   name VARCHAR(128),
test(#   rank rank);
NOTICE:  CREATE TABLE will create implicit sequence "military_id_seq" for serial column "military.id"
NOTICE:  CREATE TABLE / PRIMARY KEY will create implicit index "military_pkey" for table "military"
CREATE TABLE

Notice the use of SERIAL? That’s postgres’ AUTO_INCREMENT, basically. I like it better. Next, it’s time to make a text file with some data and compress it. Here’s what I put in the file (note that the spaces between the words are TAB characters):

general Lee
sergeant  Hartman
private Pyle

And compress it with gzip, making a nice little file:

hank@tardis:/tmp$ gzip file
hank@tardis:/tmp$ zcat file.gz
general	Lee
sergeant	Hartman
private	Pyle

Now let’s actually make a named pipe for postgres to read from:

hank@tardis:/tmp$ mkfifo namedpipe

Now that we have our named pipe, let’s start reading from it:

test=# COPY military (rank, name) FROM '/tmp/namedpipe' WITH DELIMITER E'\t';

The E'\t' part means to escape characters inside the single-quoted string, turning this into an actual tab character. All that we have to do now is use zcat:

hank@tardis:/tmp$ zcat file.gz > namedpipe

Immediately, there’s some output in the psql session:

COPY 3

So, postgres says it got 3 records successfully. Yay! Now, let’s display them:

test=# select * from military;
 id |  name   |   rank
----+---------+----------
  1 | Lee     | general
  2 | Hartman | sergeant
  3 | Pyle    | private
(3 rows)

So, this is a pretty good method to read in compressed files with postgres. I’ve seen many articles that use similar methods with postgres dump files, but it’s useful for bulk delimited data loading as well, as many times it’s prudent to compress bulk data files and not extract them before loading them. See the postgres COPY page for more information about this awesome function.

I usually use Ruby for this because it offers Hpricot, a very nice and fast scraper and XPath interface. This time, I resolved to find something that does RSS generation better, and I stumbled upon RubyRSS, which happens to be in the core ruby distribution!

Here’s what I ended up with after about an hour:

Now this is impressive if you look at the fail of html id and class attributes coming out of the original page. I had to base everything off of the links to the items that were not images, and then the structure up the tree from there (see the liberal use of .parent). I’ve rediscovered that Hpricot is awesome (_why, come back to us!), and that it truly only takes 30 lines of code to generate a nice RSS feed in ruby. The resultant RSS feed for MDShooters Classifieds site is here.

And now, yet another RSS feed generator: MD Super Ads

Here’s the code:

 gpg --gen-random 1 20 | gpg --enarmor | sed -n 5p

Very simple. I may have to use this in the future.

WARNING

This limits you to the Base64 character set, greatly limiting the search space for password cracking.  One should really use something other than enarmor to spit out a random printable ASCII string…

Update

OK, I did it.  It took some time, but it works nicely now, and generates MUCH better passwords:

hank@tardis:/nexus/tardis/hank$ for i in 1 2 3 4; \
  do gpg --gen-random 1 20 | \
  perl -ne's/[\x00-\x20]/chr(ord($^N)+50)/ge;s/([\x7E-\xDB])/chr(ord($^N)-93)/ge;s/([\xDC-\xFF])/chr(ord($^N)-129)/ge;print $_, "\n"';
done
p8$K`frjdkp;i-c2]2a2
glj#""I/eY\aYe3p}2y@
U2cXL&2^2/@7P2d#;?E=
kG)|N?[ZP2t2'bH22e;$

I know that probably looks like gobbledy-gook, but the main part of it is this:

gpg --gen-random 1 20 | perl -ne'print "Your password: ";s/[\x00-\x20]/chr(ord($^N)+50)/ge;s/([\x7E-\xDB])/chr(ord($^N)-93)/ge;s/([\xDC-\xFF])/chr(ord($^N)-129)/ge;print $_, "\n"'

Run that in a terminal, and profit.

echo 2048 >/sys/class/rtc/rtc0/max_user_freq
echo 2048 >/proc/sys/dev/hpet/max-user-freq

Reboot, and you should get better performance from things like mplayer.