Here’s a gross hack for whom is desperate to get it working on Gentoo.

Step 1 : Get the package

You can download the package from here.
Pick the package matching your own architecture.

Step 2 : Convert the DEB package and extract it

Install the package deb2targz if you don’t already have it.

The following command will create a tar.gz file from the .deb package :

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deb2targz spotify-client-qt_0.6.2.291.gcccc1f5.116-1_amd64.deb

You can then extract that tar.gz file like below :

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tar zxvf spotify-client-qt_0.6.2.291.gcccc1f5.116-1_amd64.tar.gz

This will create you a usr directory, containing spotify files.

Toss them at the appropriate places on your system :

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cd usr
mv bin/spotify /usr/bin/
mv share/pixmaps/* /usr/share/pixmaps/
mv share/spotify/ /usr/share/

Step 3 : Fixing library issues

Now this is the ugly part. Spotify is linked against specific versions of some libraries (SSL 0.9.8 and Crypto 0.9.8). In order to make it work, you need to fake those versions by creating a symlink from the wanted version to the existing (you’ll need to figure this out) version in your system.

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cd /usr/lib
ln -s libssl.so.1.0.0 libssl.so.0.9.8
ln -s libcrypto.so.1.0.0 libcrypto.so.0.9.8

Step 4 : Instructing firefox to open the spotify protocol with the Spotify application

You need to register the spotify protocol so that Firefox will know how to deal with those “spotify:” urls.

1. Open the about:config page
2. Create a boolean value by the name of network.protocol-handler.expose.spotify
3. Set its value to false
4. Click on a spotify link (for example a playlist link or such). A popup will open and ask you to pick an application. Use /usr/bin/spotify.

That’s it. All set.
I’m not proud of it…. but I wanted to use Spotify badly

Getting Spotify to run on Gentoo/Linux: A Gross and Cruel Hack is a post from: Tech@Sakana - A sysadmin's blog

1. The BLACKLIST function

Asterisk implements a BLACKLIST function which can be used to check whether a callerID is blacklisted or not, here is the synopsis (which you can get by connecting to thee asterisk server by issuing the asterisk -v command and then core show function BLACKLIST) :

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spaghetti*CLI> core show function BLACKLIST
 
  -= Info about function 'BLACKLIST' =- 
 
[Synopsis]
Check if the callerid is on the blacklist. 
 
[Description]
Uses astdb to check if the Caller*ID is in family 'blacklist'. Returns '1'
or '0'.
 
[Syntax]
BLACKLIST()
 
[Arguments]
Not available
 
[See Also]
DB
spaghetti*CLI>

This is what we’re going to use for this example.

2. Managing the blacklist

You can add callerIDs to the blacklist with the following command :

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spaghetti*CLI> database put blacklist 03001125000 "Mother-in-law from hell"
Updated database successfully
spaghetti*CLI> database put blacklist 03001125150 "FAX machine harassing me"
Updated database successfully

If later on you wish to remove an item from the blacklist (maybe the fax is not that bad after all !), use the following :

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spaghetti*CLI> database del blacklist 03001125150 
Database entry removed.

And of course you can list the content of the current blacklist like that :

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spaghetti*CLI> database show blacklist
/blacklist/03001125000                             : Mother-in-law from hell
1 results found.
spaghetti*CLI>

Use those commands to tailor the blacklist according to your needs.

3. Altering the dialplan to filter out the blacklisted numbers

Next you’ve got to update your incoming context to deal with blacklisted callerIDs. My incoming context is named “incoming-calls” but you might have to adjust that :

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[incoming-calls] ; on declare le contexte de reception d'appels depuis freephonie
exten => s,1,GotoIf($["${CALLERID(NUM)}" = "anonymous"] ? 10) 
exten => s,2,GotoIf(${BLACKLIST()} ? 10)
exten => s,3,Dial(SIP/phone1&SIP/phone2,10)
exten => s,4,Congestion()
exten => s,5,Hangup()
exten => s,10,Answer
exten => s,11,Wait(1)
exten => s,12,MusicOnHold(default)
exten => s,13,Hangup

So here, the rules 1 and 2 are to send both anonymous callers (mostly telemarketers over here) and blacklisted callers to an infinite holding music (starting at line 10). The rules 3,4,5 are to deal with other calls and direct them to 2 SIP phones.

That’s it ! Feel free to ask if you need more details about this set up.

Asterisk 101 : How to get rid of your mother-in-law … is a post from: Tech@Sakana - A sysadmin's blog

So this post will document how to sign up for a GV account as well as how to use it with Asterisk afterwards, in the prospect of using it if you are not in the USA.

In order to be able to sign up for GV, you need to meet 2 prerequisites :

1. You need to have a US IP address
2. You need to have a US phone number, which will be used to validate your GV account

Step 1 is left as an exercise to the reader (“Good luck ! I’m behind 7 proxies !” ).

Step 2 is the one we’re going to describe here, as an example of what you can pull with simple Asterisk configurations.

1. Getting a US phone number

What you really need to find is a DID (Direct Inward Dialing aka DDI : Direct Dial-In) provider. It will provide you with a US phone number and will patch that call either to another phone number or to a SIP address.

GV will only forward calls to US phone numbers, so you need one of those. IPKall is such a free provider. They will provide you an American phone number and will forward it to any SIP or IAX2 address. Creating an account only takes a minute.

Nothing fancy here : Simply fill the SIP account into the SIP phone number field, and the SIP servername or IP into the SIP proxy field.

2. Setting up Asterisk

Now IPKall will gladly forward the calls to your SIP account. You can setup this SIP account as simply as below :

IPKall has a specificity we need to take care of : calls can originate from 2 different servers. We need to have calls coming from both servers to get into the same context. To avoid repeating twice the same configuration block (with just the IP address being different), we’ll use a template.

We’ll also define a SIP account for a SIP phone (or for a softphone).

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[phone1]
type=friend
username=phone1
secret=SecretPassword
host=dynamic
context=myhouse
nat=yes ; if you need to connect from behind a nat
 
[ipkall](!) ; This section is only a template
type=peer
username=ipkall
context=ipkall-in
insecure=invite
 
[ipkall-01](ipkall) ; We import the previous template to setup calls from
host=66.54.140.46       ; the first IPKall server
 
[ipkall-02](ipkall) ; We import the previous template to setup calls from
host=66.54.140.47       ; the second IPKall server

I’ve setup an SIP “number” I’ve instructed IPKall to forward the calls to is “ipkall”. The configuration below must reflect this. Here, phone calls to the “ipkall” extension will be routed to the “phone1″ SIP phone.

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[ipkall-in]
exten => ipkall,1,Dial(SIP/phone1)
exten => ipkall,n,Hangup()

3.Setup a softphone and finally your GV account

Now all you need is a softphone (I like sflphone for that purpose) or a SIP phone to be configured as “phone1″ (check your favorite softphone instructions to do so) and head back to GV to create your account.

GV will assign you a phone number and will ask you to which phone number to route the phone calls. That’s where you’ll specify your IPKall phone number.

GV will then ask you to validate this phone call by giving you a 2 digit number and calling you on your IPKall phone number. You’ll have to pick up the call on your softphone and dial the 2 digit number.

Voila, the account is created and validated !

Any call to your GV phone number will be routed to IPKall which will send it to your Asterisk installation, which will then ring your softphone or SIP phone.

Pretty nifty, heh ?

Asterisk 101 – Ghetto GoogleVoice : Signing up for / using GV even if you’re not in the USA using Asterisk is a post from: Tech@Sakana - A sysadmin's blog

If you need an easy way to confirm that a text file is DOS or UNIX formatted (they differ with respect to the end of line character(s) for example) or if you wish to display normally non-printing characters of a text file, you can use the -vET command line switches of the cat utility.

As explained in the man page :

• -v : will use the ^ and M- notation for control and multibytes characters
• -E : will make ends of lines visible
• -T : will make tabulations visible

For example :

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% cat -vET test.txt
a test message for$
showing the^Iuse of   cat -vET$
^I$
that is all$

and compare it to the following plain cat output, without any command line option :

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% cat test.txt     
a test message for
showing the     use of   cat -vET
 
that is all

You can easily tell what blank space is a space or actually a tabulation for example. If you’d happen to see ^M characters popping out at the end of the lines, then you this is actually a DOS text file (which you might need to convert to UNIX style end of lines with an utility such as dos2unix)

Unix 101 : Showing non-printing characters in text files (ex : DOS files) is a post from: Tech@Sakana - A sysadmin's blog

This snippet is to place into the extension.conf file :

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[incoming] ; incoming calls
exten => s,1,GotoIf($["${CALLERID(NUM)}" = "anonymous"] ? 10) 
exten => s,2,Dial(SIP/phone1&SIP/phone2,10)
exten => s,3,Congestion()
exten => s,4,Hangup()
exten => s,10,Answer
exten => s,11,Wait(1)
exten => s,12,MusicOnHold(default)
exten => s,13,Hangup

This block will check for the NUMber information of the Caller ID and if it is “anonymous”, it will send it to the step 10 which will pick up the call and start the holding music. If the Caller ID is not “anonymous”, it will ring 2 SIP phones for 10 secs, and if no one picks those, send it to congestion mode.

That’s all !

Edit : On a second thought, I think I’ll change that to have Asterisk to pick up the call and let the caller leave a message. That’s still going to catch those telemarketers (waste time & money), while giving a chance to legit callers to speak their message.

Asterisk 101 : How to troll telemarketers (aka automatically send hidden Caller ID to a waiting music forever) is a post from: Tech@Sakana - A sysadmin's blog

Q: If I chmod 777 a file, can someone delete it ?
A: No. To explain that, let’s first talk about directories. You can imagine a directory as a special file which would have one line for each file contained in that directory. On each such line, there would be the inode number, and the name of the matching file.
Deleting a file would be like removing a line from that special directory file which means that you need write permission on the directory containing the file to do so.

Q: What about that 777 mode /tmp directory ? Won’t someone delete all my files then ?
A: No. /tmp ‘s permissions are not actually 777 but 1777. That “1″ is the sticky bit which materialize by the “t” flag showing up in “ls -l”. That sticky bit means that only the owner of the file is allowed to delete it.

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kattoo@roadrunner ~ % ls -ld /tmp
drwxrwxrwt 10 root root 4096 Dec  8 21:53 /tmp/

Q: Knowing that bit about directories being special files, how would you implement a hard links ?
A: Simply have 2 “special file directories” having a line with the same inode number and different (or same !) file names. There you go, alternate filenames for the same on-disk content.

Q: But then, if I delete a file with a hardlink, the “other” filename will point to no data ?
A: No. The inode contains quite a few informations : dates, permissions, owner, group and such as well as the number of hardlinks. Every time you delete such a hardlink, this counter is decremented. Everytime you create a hardlink, the count is incremented. The actual content of the file is only actually deleted when the count reaches 0.

Q: How about soft links (aka symbolic links aka symlinks) ?
A: A symlink is yet another special kind of file. You can imagine that it’s a file which contains the name of another file. Anyone accessing the symlink will actually access the content of the file which name is in the symlink special file. This name resolution being done in-kernel, it’s mostly transparent for userland processes. Notice that you could place the name of a non-existing file in the symlink (dead link !), which is not possible with a hardlink.

Unix 101 : Filesystem basics & Special files is a post from: Tech@Sakana - A sysadmin's blog

You can conveniently set “modes”, which are settings with states you can define and use. You can then fire events upon state change, and so are they very useful to define some sort of macros.

A few examples :

• the “Security” mode could be “on” or “off” : setting it “on” would close the shutters and activate the alarm system; setting it “off” would do the opposite;
• the “Heating” mode could be “day”, “night”, “frost protection only” : setting it on “day” would set the target temperature to 20⁰C, “night” to 15⁰C and “frost protection only” to 7⁰C
• the “Cinema” mode could be “on” or “off” : setting it to “on” would close the blinds and dim the lights; “off” would bring those back to their former states.

This post will show how to setup a mode, we’ll use the “Heating” mode described above as an example.

Coding a mode

The first thing to know is that a mode is nothing but a Generic_Item. By convention, it’s simpler to use an identifier starting by “mode_”.
Here’s the sample code for the “Heating” mode (click to expand):

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$mode_heating = new Generic_Item;
$mode_heating->set_states('day', 'night', 'off');
 
if (state_changed $mode_heating) {
        my $heating_mode_state;
        $heating_mode_state = state $mode_heating;
        main::print_log "Mode = ", $heating_mode_state;
        if ($heating_mode_state eq "day") {
                $thermostat_bureau->setTarget(18);
                $thermostat_living->setTarget(20);
        }
 
        if ($heating_mode_state eq "night") {
                $thermostat_bureau->setTarget(13);
                $thermostat_living->setTarget(15);
        }
 
        if ($heating_mode_state eq "off") {
                $thermostat_bureau->setTarget(7);
                $thermostat_living->setTarget(7);
        }
}
 
set $mode_heating "night"       if time_cron '00 20 * * *';
set $mode_heating "day"         if time_cron '00 06 * * *';

This code is pretty simple : MisterHouse will take all variable definitions and object creations and will execute them, then put everything else in its main event loop. So here the mode is created and then, in the main event loop, actions will be taken if the state of the mode is changed.
It will also switch the state of the heating mode to day at 6am and to night at 8pm as defined with the “time_cron” functionnality.

Integrating the mode within the web interface

To have this mode show up in the web interface, you’ll need to alter the mh/web/ia5/modes/main.shtml and add the following row at the end of the “table” tag :

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<tr>
  <td align='middle'> <!--#include file="/bin/button_toggle.pl?mode_heating&/ia5/modes/main.shtml"--> </td>
</tr>

If the GD graphics library is installed on your system, is supporting JPEG files and you enabled its use by MisterHouse (gd = 1 in mh.private.ini), then MisterHouse will generate and display a graphical button with the current state of the mode. If not you’ll get a text link. No matter what, you can cycle through the different states defined for the mode by simply clicking on it.

If you’d like to have your own graphical buttons, simply place them into the “data” dir (data_dir configuration item of the mh.private.ini) and name them following the convention “modename_item_state.jpg”. For my example modename = mode_heating, and state are “day”, “night” and “frost”, so I’d need the files “mode_heating_item_day.jpg”, “mode_heating_item_night.jpg” and “mode_heating_item_frost.jpg”.

References

• mh/code/common/mh_control.pl : definition of core MisterHouse modes like mode_mh (normal/mute/offline), mode_vacation (on/off), mode_security (armed/unarmed), mode_sleep (awake/sleeping parents/sleeping kids). You can use those as working examples for your own modes.
• mh/web/ia5/modes directory : html files for the “modes” menu web page.
• mh/web/bin/button.pl : script which returns the path to the file for a button and generate it if needed.
• mh/web/bin/button_toggle.pl : script which generates a link which will toggle an object upon click

MisterHouse : Setting up “modes” is a post from: Tech@Sakana - A sysadmin's blog

Method 1 : Using xmodmap

This is mostly the usual way of altering the keyboard map. All you have to do edit the ${HOME}/.Xmodmap file like below :

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clear Lock
keycode 66 = Escape

This file is often sourced when your X sessions is opened, but there are numerous bug reports stating that it’s either ignored or overridden by some windows managers.

You might need to source the file by running xmodmap ~/.Xmodmap at some point after the windows manager is started.

Method 2 : Using XKB configuration

If you let Xorg setup your keyboard by consulting HAL, you can remap the caps lock key to escape by having the following policy file in /etc/hal/fdi/policy/keyboard.fdi

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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<deviceinfo version="0.2">
        <device>
        <match key="info.capabilities" contains="input.keyboard">
                <match key="info.product" contains="Logitech Logitech USB Keyboard">
                        <merge key="input.x11_driver" type="string">evdev</merge>
                        <merge key="input.x11_options.XkbOptions" type="string">caps:escape</merge>
                        <merge key="input.x11_options.XkbLayout" type="string">us</merge>
                        <merge key="input.x11_options.XkbVariant" type="string">intl</merge>
                </match>
        </match>
        </device>
</deviceinfo>

The caps:escape takes care of setting up caps lock as an escape key.

See more about How to setup Xorg according to HAL

If you don’t use HAL and prefer to setup your keyboard through xorg.conf, it will look like the snippet below :

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Section "InputDevice"
    Identifier "Keyboard1"
    Driver "evdev"
 
    Option "XkbLayout" "us"
    Option "XkbVarian" "intl"
    Option "XKbOptions" "caps:escape"
EndSection

To see the other available options, check /usr/share/X11/xkb/rules/xorg

Further readings :

• The XKB Configuration Guide
• An Unreliable Guide to XKB Configuration

Linux + Xorg : Remapping caps lock key to escape is a post from: Tech@Sakana - A sysadmin's blog

Here is the script. It’s pretty simple :

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#! /usr/bin/perl
 
use strict;
use warnings;
 
use WWW::Facebook::API;
use Text::vCard::Addressbook;
use Date::Parse;
 
my $client = WWW::Facebook::API->new(
	desktop => 1,
	api_key => 'XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX',
	secret  => 'XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX'
);
 
my $token = $client->auth->create_token;
 
my $url = $client->get_login_url( auth_token => $token, req_perms => 'friends_birthday' );
system "firefox", $url;
sleep 15;
 
$client->auth->get_session($token);
my $response = $client->fql->query(query => 'select first_name, last_name, birthday from user where uid in (select uid2 from friend where uid1=me())');
 
my $ab = text::vcard::addressbook->new;
# processes each contact and creates a vCard for it {{{
foreach my $contact (@$response) {
	my $vc = $ab->add_vcard;
 
	my $fn = $contact->{first_name} || "";
	my $ln = $contact->{last_name} || "";
	$ln = uc $ln;
	my $bd = $contact->{birthday} || "";
	$bd =~ s/,//g;
 
	$vc->fullname($fn . " " . $ln);
	if ($bd) {
		my ($ss,$mm,$hh,$day,$month,$year,$zone) = strptime($bd);
		$vc->bday(join("-", (1900 + ($year || " "), $month + 1, $day)));
	}
}
# }}}
print $ab->export();
$client->auth->logout;

This is intended as a sample code for using the WWW::Facebook::API perl module (there are way too few working examples out there). Let me know if you need complementary explanations about anything.

The only thing I really need to figure out now is how to proceed if I ever wanted to distribute this code without giving away the application secret. There is a rather good general explanation of the authentication process of a facebook desktop application, but I couldn’t find a working sample code to get started with. If you do know how to do that, please share in the comments.

Facebook API : Exporting your friends birthdays into vCards format is a post from: Tech@Sakana - A sysadmin's blog

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;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
; Copy without formatting
;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
^Ins::
	Clipboard =    ; Purge Clipboard content
	Send ^{Ins}  ; Send the Ctrl+Insert command
	ClipWait        ; Wait till data is present in the Clipboard
	Clipboard = %clipboard%    ;remove formatting
Return

That’s it. When hitting CTRL-Insert, the selection will be copied into the clipboard without formatting.

I am aware there are other ways around this problem, most stripping the formatting when pasting, but I had little success with them.

What are your favorite AutoHotkey hacks ?

AutoHotkey : Copying without formatting is a post from: Tech@Sakana - A sysadmin's blog