Wizball live at the church

This blew me away the first time I heard it. The title tune of classic C64 game Wizball recreated by Reyn Ouwehand. You could watch the embedded movie, but for the full stereo HD experience take a look at the high quality version on Youtube. Reyn explains why he did it:

I also play this track in my C64 live-set but then I got some beats and the arpeggios coming out of Ableton Live. During the live show I couldn’t get Ableton to work and it kept on crashing on me and then Leoni challenged me to do it acoustically without the computer. And so I did….

Truth be told I never got too far in Wizball. It’s a strange shoot-em-up that has many fans and I’m strangely intrigued by it.

There’s even a remake of Wizball for the Mac and Windows. I’ve played it on the Mac and it’s brilliant. The title tune (by Infamous is spot on, graphics are stunning, and gameplay is as I remember it. Very odd and just a bit frustrating and hard.

You can read more about Wizball here or even download the original game on the Commodore 64 too.

Me and my Santa hat

donncha

Thank you Walter for my Santa hat! Walter has created a simple Pixenate app that adds a Santa hat to your Twitter avatar. Check out some of the other Christmas Avatars!

As my Gravatar is used anywhere I comment, I updated that too. It’s been a while since I updated it, and it’s nice to see it’s as simple to update as before. It even stores my old Gravatar so it’ll be simple to change back at the end of the month.

A nice demo of the capabilities of Pixenate, good job Walter!

Backups save the day

Marina City, Chicago A few weeks ago I blogged about my backup system. How I have two 1TB Iomega external drives and how one drive is a duplicate of everything on the other drive, and how I backup everything on my laptop and VPS accounts. It sometimes seem excessive but I’m paranoid.

This morning I’m very glad I went to such lengths. I wanted to copy some stuff onto my Macbook, and there’s nothing like the bandwidth available from a directly connected disk. I unmounted my drive, at least I tried. Something was keeping it mounted. Instead of following my own advice and checking what program was keeping the drive busy, I used “umount -l” instead. Turns out it was Rhythmbox, but I didn’t realise that until later.

Anyway, I disconnected the usb cable, plugged in the one connected to the Macbook (BTW – Ext2 for Mac OS X is useful for reading ext2/ext3 filesystems) and kaboom. The light on the external drive went out. Oh oh.

Long story short, the drive refused to mount again on the Linux box for several minutes. Eventually it did, but with errors. I’m running fsck.ext3 on it but it’s giving me tons of errors and won’t run automatically. I need to buy another drive this morning.

So what’s lost? My 8 years of photos? All the family videos shot over the last 2 years? My mp3 collection? Nope. They’re all backed up. Murphy’s Law states that if something can go wrong, it will. This was the worst time ever for a drive to fail as I had just reinstalled the operating system, and my backup system wasn’t running properly yet. Thankfully nothing irreplaceable was moved onto the broken drive in that narrow window of time when things weren’t being backed up.

I now want to get that new drive installed before the second goes belly up! Paranoid? You betcha!

How to fix ssh timeout problems

If you use ssh a lot, you may have noticed that your ssh session times out and you’re logged out every once in a while. Annoying isn’t it?

Read from remote host ocaoimh.ie: Connection reset by peer
Connection to ocaoimh.ie closed.

There’s a quick fix for that. Actually, there are 2 ways to fix it. You only need to do one of them so choose whichever one is easiest for you. You’ll need root access, so for most people it’s probably safer to do the client fix rather than the server fix.

  • On the server, login as root and edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config and add the line:

    ClientAliveInterval 60

    According to man sshd_config, this line,

    Sets a timeout interval in seconds after which if no data has been received from the client, sshd(8) will send a message through the encrypted channel to request a response from the client. The default is 0, indicating that these messages will not be sent to the client. This option applies to protocol version 2 only.

    Don’t forget to restart sshd on the server after you save the file.

  • The other way, and easier and safer way is for your desktop machine to send those keep alive messages. As root on your desktop (or client) machine, edit /etc/ssh/ssh_config and add the line:

    ServerAliveInterval 60

    That will send send a message to the server every 60 seconds, keeping the connection open. I prefer this way because I login to several machines every day, and I don’t have root access to all of them.

I knew I had blogged about ssh timeout problems before, but I hadn’t mentioned the client fix so it’s worth a revisit!

Fixing Ubuntu 8.10

I suppose you could say I’m a long time Debian/Ubuntu Linux user, but the recent upgrade to 8.10 completely messed up my desktop machine.

  • Sound was broken in Flash. That’s happened before and doing an aptitude install flashplugin-nonfree-extrasound fixed that, but from time to time sound would break and I’d have to killall -9 pulseaudio;pulseaudio -D to get it working again.
  • My shiny new Xbox360 controller refused to work correctly in Ubuntu 8.10. Despite assurances on various Ubuntu sites that a fully updated system should now work, it didn’t. Moving the analogue stick moved the mouse pointer.
  • Editing a spreadsheet in Open Office proved impossible as whatever key or action I last took would repeat if I used the cursor keys. Hit “a” and “a” would appear in every cell when the cursor was moved. I used the mouse and TAB a lot while working on my last VAT return.
  • I wrote a DVD+RW just fine on Monday, but 3 days later when I tried to erase it, Gnomebaker complained it didn’t have permission to access /dev/sr0 (I think). I tried to mount another CD and Ubuntu complained it couldn’t read ISO9660 CDs.

I tried recreating my user account in case that helped. It didn’t. The only way to fix my broken Ubuntu 8.10 was to reinstall from scratch. After backing everything up onto one of my external drives the install couldn’t have been easier.

So, now? Any problems? ‘Fraid so.

  • I had to install flashplugin-nonfree-extrasound to get sound working in Firefox and Flash. Yay, Youtube is sounding sweet again! No lockups yet.
  • My joypad still didn’t work, despite the fact I had upgraded everything. Thankfully this bug report came to the rescue. If your Xbox360 controller refuses to work in Ubuntu, try this:

    $ xinput list
    See which device number the Xbox controller has…
    $ xinput set-int-prop THATDEVICENUMBER ‘Device Enabled’ 32 0

    I’ll probably have to add that to the Gnome Session so it’s permanent.

  • OO.org works fine thankfully. That was a showstopper bug. I even considered using Mac OS X for a moment.

Backuppc is reinstalled and configured. It now has nice RRD graphs! I’m also blown away by the folder sharing in Nautilus. This might have been available in 8.04 but I never noticed. Sharing folders via SMB has never been so easy!

I haven’t reinstalled everything I need yet, but I’m happy that my desktop is working again.

2 candles and an apple pie

2 candles and an apple pie

So, I enter my 33rd year on this planet. Highlight of the day was our lunch in the Castle Hotel in Blarney where Adam was on his best behaviour and I was surprised with an apple pie and a rendition of “Happy Birthday” sung by my wife and 2 of the staff!

The burger I had for lunch was delicious too. Yum.

WordPress 2.6 Easter Egg

This is new to me, even though others have known about it for months. There’s a Matrix Easter Egg in WordPress 2.6 and in the betas of WordPress 2.7. To activate it:

  1. Edit a post.
  2. Scroll down to the revisions section of the page and click the latest revision.
  3. On the next page, scroll down again and select the same revision for comparison.
  4. The Matrix has you..

Danger !
Self-comparison detected.
Initiating infinite loop eschewal protocol.
Self destruct in… 3
2
1
Wake up, Donncha…
The Matrix has you…
Don’t let this happen again. Go Back.

WordPress MU 2.6.5

The beauty of Burnham Beeches

WordPress MU, the multi blog version of WordPress that runs on such sites as WordPress.com has been updated to version 2.6.5 to address an XSS vulnerability in the feeds offered to users.

More details will be forthcoming but for the time being, there’s also the WordPress.org announcement post.

This release also has a number of bug fixes, including a fix and improvements to rss caching. This is a required upgrade, so please install it as soon as you can.

After you’ve upgraded, check out the nominations for the 2008 WPMU Awards and vote for your favourite!

In related news, a new version of WP Super Cache is also available. This version hopefully fixes:

  1. Issues with clients seeing compressed pages incorrectly
  2. Cache clean up
  3. Warnings if Apache modules are missing
  4. Better support for WordPress MU. The wp-content/cache/.htaccess rules are now displayed on the admin page
  5. Better documentation on file locking
  6. WP Cache files are written to a temporary file first
  7. Use WP_CONTENT_URL in mod_rewrite rules generator

It also adds a number of filters:

  1. “supercache_dir” filter so the supercache directory can be manipulated. “wp_cache_key” cache_action to modify the key the wp-cache file is named after. Using both of these should make it easier for plugin authors to manipulate the cache based on user agent or other criteria. ie. iPhone theme? Unfortunately .htaccess rewrite rules will have to be updated manually.
  2. Added “wpsupercache_buffer” filter so the current page can be manipulated before being stored in the cache.

State of the Art by Spaceballs

This Amiga demo blew me away when I first saw it. There are better ones out there but I think the dancing figures were such an unusual feature at the time it struck a chord with a lot of people.

Check out the follow up demo, Nine Fingers and other releases by Spaceballs. Of course, you should grab the original disks for State of the Art and 9 Fingers and watch on a real Amiga rather than watching a low quality Youtube video!

Skimming the web

The way I see it, there are three stages to web browsing:

  1. The web is new. You visit the blogs of friends and colleagues every day. You use Gmail or Yahoo mail and check in on your favourite sites a few times a day.
  2. It quickly becomes tiring visiting websites every day that may not have any new content. You discover feed readers and play around with a few of them. You find that Google Reader is a pretty good one and you start subscribing to every single interesting blog or feed you find.
  3. Not long after you suffer feed fatigue. There are just too many blogs. Too much noise, too much chaff. You discover Stumbleupon, Friend Feed and Twitter (I’m ‘donncha’ on each of those if you’d like to subscribe/follow!). Now the feeds or sites you read are recommended by your trusted circle of friends. You’ll still dig into your feed reader but it seems to happen less and less and that unread items count keeps going up and up.

Now if only I had time to check out Friend Feed properly. I find I’m skimming through the web these days. If I can’t scan a blog post and understand the main points of the page within a few seconds I’m gone. It’s a sad state of affairs.

If you’re time poor, how have your web surfing habits changed? (paradoxically, if you have time to comment here, you’re not that time poor. What a bind!)

Close

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Consider installing a browser extension that blocks ads and other malicious scripts in your browser to protect your privacy and security. Here are a few options.

  • uBlock Origin is a free, open source, ad blocker for your browser.
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  • Set the private DNS settings on your phone to dns.adguard.com to block adverts and trackers.