Smooth and Flat

[21:09:09] <@Fate> question
[21:09:17] <@Fate> why .ie uses Euro
[21:09:22] <@Fate> and .uk sticks to GBP?
[21:10:01] <+GokieKS> because Ireland is not UK?
[21:10:38] <@Fate> well duh I thought UKGB&NI was in the EC
[21:10:47] <@Fate> nice
[21:11:09] <@Fate> if you take United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
[21:11:14] <@Fate> it has KGB in it
[21:11:30] <@Fate> United KGB and Northern Ireland.
[21:11:34] <+NanohaTakamachi> lol
[21:12:55] <@Fate> even better
[21:13:03] <@Fate> United KGB and the knights who say NI
[21:14:36] * NanohaTakamachi wants a shrubbery
[21:15:28] <@Fate> a not too shabby one, at that?
[21:16:53] <+NanohaTakamachi> one that looks nice
[21:16:59] <+NanohaTakamachi> and not too expensive

So I’ve fixed my mouse; the problem was solved by placing a small piece of insulation tape onto this plastic thing right above the button. That thing that you actually press on when going for the left click.

And about the printer drivers for Windows x86.

Turns out the device name should match completely for the drivers to get installed. My Windows 7 64bit edition autodetected the printer as Brother DCP-7010 USB, and the 32bit driver had “Brother DCP-7010 USB Printer” in the device description. Fixing that string solved the problem for me; it’s yet unclear why can’t Windows just use the device ID to locate the correct drivers.

However, I still think that Windows should apply Windows Update or something for this purpose – on the client computers or on the PC sharing the printer in question, I don’t care.

A few days ago I installed the new version of ESET Smart Security – 4.0 RC1 – on my desktop, to see which new features it brings, etc.

So this morning I was examining the traffic monitor window which I didn’t open for weeks and found out that Messenger has 60 megabytes of outgoing traffic with just 4.5 megabytes in.

Apparently, it sends something every 2-3 seconds (looks like chunks in a size of 15-20 kilobytes). What the hell?.. Removing it from autostart until I find out what the hell is going on there.

This isn’t really a Windows 7 problem, but I hoped that it would already be solved in this new version of the OS.

The printer drivers. And different computer architectures.

While I could care less about Itanium systems, I have both x86_64 (64-bit) and x86 (32-bit) systems around. For example, my Core2-based laptop and desktop both run 64-bit version of Windows 7, while my old AMD Athlon XP-based desktop PC runs Windows XP (32-bit).

The problem here is that I can easily use the printer (it’s a Brother printer/scanner which is properly recognized by Vista, Server 2008, and Windows 7) connected to my desktop from my laptop system – the drivers install automatically with no problems. But I can’t install it on the PC running 32-bit XP (or 32-bit Vista, or 32-bit Windows 7). The reason is that my desktop PC doesn’t have ‘additional drivers’ installed.

However, when I try to install these additional drivers for x86 systems, the OS asks me if I could provide the driver disk. Hello?.. Shouldn’t the driver be already available – if not in the local OS, then from Windows Update? The same OS in its 32-bit edition easily recognizes the printer when it’s connected locally, which means that drivers are there.

Now, speaking of the local 32-bit OS which asks me to provide that driver disk. Why can’t it try searching Windows Update as well? It only has the option of Have Disk, I can’t even browse through the drivers supplied with Windows.

In the end, in case of my printer/scanner, I had to map the LPT1: to the server’s share directly (via NET USE LPT1: \\Server\Printer) and install the printer as a local one. This is not an “obvious” solution.

I’ve been using Windows 7 for a few days now and so far I really like it; however there are some issues.

First of all, desktop gadgets don’t work at all on my desktop PC. There are no problems on the laptop so maybe I should blame my HD3870?.. The process, sidebar.exe, starts and immediately exits whenever I try to choose “Gadgets” in the desktop’s context menu.

Another strange problem, this time happening on the laptop only, is taskbar breaking when I use “Default Programs” applet. The Start button remains in place but the taskbar itself shrinks to a size of 2 pixels and therefore becomes unavailable until I relogin…

The WiFi adapter on my laptop doesn’t want to wake up after hibernation by itself and so far I managed to set it up so that I only need to click “Wireless LAN” in the Wireless Console application to get it to work again. I’m a bit annoyed by this, though.

Update: reinstalling sidebar and rebooting seems to have helped. Yay.

FreeBSD’s ports repository has ejabberd’s version at 1.1.4 even though 2.0.0 came out more than an year ago. I wanted to upgrade it on my server to the current version and since I don’t like installing additional software in a package-less way (i.e. just doing

make && make install

and having to remove the installed files by hand in case I would want to remove the software in question completely), I’ve thought that it would be nice to update the port in FreeBSD’s tree.

Note: Building a ejabberd package is pointless unless you never sway from the RELEASE tag and you never update your ports as well, because Erlang applications like ejabberd (it’s written in Erlang, yeah, Erlang sucks, I know, thank you very much) need to be run with the same version of Erlang/OTP that was used to build it – so a package would only work if all dependencies are kept at their versions used on the package builder system.

The result is a working port from pkgsrc with some corrections to make it work with the FreeBSD ports system. It’s not yet very clean; I’m not an expert at creating and managing ports but it probably should build properly on any FreeBSD system.

There are some slight differences between my port and the original FreeBSD one. I’ve changed the root directory of the Mnesia database, for example (that was done to preserve old database files as I didn’t know if the new version will change the format or something). The original port stores data in /var/spool/ejabberd; the 2.0.3 one uses /var/spool/ejabberd/db/NodeName directory for that purpose (where NodeName is ejabberd by default) – that allows to run multiple nodes in case it’s needed by someone, but that’s an arguable decision. Well, changing the location in the port’s build files would be quite easy. The file which defines the path is ejabberdctl.template;  so the file files/patch-ejabberdctl.template in the port is responsible for it, see the following lines:

10: +EJABBERD_DB=/var/spool/ejabberd/db/$NODE

31: +HOME=/var/spool/ejabberd/db/$NODE

It appears that 2.0.3 reads 1.1.4′s database without problems, so when migrating, it’s possible to just put the old database’s files into the new directory. However, there are some things to consider.

First, 1.1.4 defaults to a node name of ejabberd@`hostname -s`, while 2.0.3 uses ejabberd@localhost. Therefore you’ll need to explicitly specify the old node name in /usr/local/etc/ejabberd/ejabberdctl.cfg:

ERLANG_NODE=ejabberd@shorthostname

(Users who ever changed the system hostname might already know about this; ejabberd’s Mnesia database contains the node name so ejabberd won’t recognize the old data after a hostname change and start with an empty database instead.)

Second, access rights. The old 1.1.4 port defaults to root:wheel, 755 for /usr/local/etc/ejabberd. 2.0.3 installs it with ejabberd:ejabberd, 750. The database is also installed with access rights of 750 and with ownership set to ejabberd. After some thinking, I decided to leave it at that. Therefore, note that when upgrading from 1.1.4 your /usr/local/etc/ejabberd directory might retain the old owner – and that will result in ejabberd crashing with “access denied” error on /usr/local/etc/ejabberd/inetrc - actually, I’ve spent at least two days trying to figure out the cause of the crash until I finally did a ls -l on the directory.

Thanks to NetBSD pkgsrc maintainters for the patches. Those helped me a great deal in understanding a little more about both the pkgsrc and ports systems.

The ‘updated’ (or rather, re-ported) port build directory is in this archive. Please note that it extracts as net-im/ejabberd2 - so you’ll need to extract it in /usr/ports. It even contains distinfo with MD5 and SHA256 checksums of the 2.0.3 source tarball!.. (Not that it’s that amusing or something.)

Added: It seems today the maintainer of the NetBSD package (martti) has uploaded updated patches along with updating the minor version from 2.0.2 to 2.0.3. While my version of the port already used 2.0.3 sources, I’ve updated the tarball with these new patches.

This morning had such a nice weather. Even the sky was clear, which is a rare occasion here during winters. And no wind at all.

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So it’s 2009 now. Guess I should jump or something in awe, et cetera. Congratulations, you’re one (exact) year closer to the day when the Sun turns into a nova.

I don’t feel like it though; I just had a nice meal and watched a good old comedy movie. This local TV station actually broadcasts good movies during the first week of January. Too many advertisement breaks though.

Speaking of which, I wonder if, say, in Europe, or in the US of A you get 5-minute advertisiments every 15-20 minutes while watching a broadcasted movie. Hokkaido for example has some strict laws about that so the amount of advertisements is limited…

Also, I need a Takyasu-kyun. My apartment requires some cleaning.

Actually, these are unrelated.

Weather is quite a strange thing. Climate, temperature (and that “feels like” temperature), humidity, wind.

For daily shifts, I usually wake up at 4 in the morning and go out at 05.15. So today, I checked the temperature outside – found out that it’s -3.  Outside, it felt more like about zero – overall nice and quiet weather. Note, that’s early in the morning.

Then when I get to the city by train, I suddenly notice that it’s freezing. Shouldn’t it be warmer because of lots of houses and stuff like that?

And about podcasts.

Why the hell those podcast authors think that I want to listen to their voice, I wonder? It would be a hundred times better if I could just read it.