Mohammed Sameer's Online Aggregator

Only 5 days left! Still alive and kicking. Got sick and tired of ubuntu , so I installed debian etch and added testing , unstable and sidux repos. Feels a lot better.

Regarding my previous post about the recovery mode security hole :
http://phaeronix.net/content/crappy-security
where some people didn't believe me, an update was just pushed that fixes this:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/friendly-recovery/+bug/220986

Posting this from my laptop right now !

Turns out my laptop's motherboard was covered with an extended warranty because there was a design defect that caused the malfunction.

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On this page I will try to list any FOSS stuff that I have relation to :

• Alsa configuration file
• Phaeronix logo
• Patches
• gDevilspie

2008-06-20T21:00:00+02:00downMarried!1440 left till getting married.

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Site has been successfully upgraded to 6.2, and is now mollom enabled. Thanks Msameer for the suggestion.

Let's see if I can get the gallery back.

Due to security concerns, I upgraded from drupal 4.7 to 5.7. Image galleries and captcha modules lost. I like this theme, until I fix the old one. Next up 6.2

The Rabbit Vibrator is one of the most popular sex toys in the industry. If you are in the market for a vibrator, this is one that you will definitely want to consider. Not only does the Rabbit Vibrator offer optimum performance, but it is popular for a reason; because it works. Before you head out to purchase a Rabbit Vibrator, you will want to first get a better idea as to what it has to offer. Sure, you know that it is a popular sex toy, but there is much more to consider.

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my laptop is b0rked. it turns on but the screen remains blank and there is no evidence of booting activity. i am posting this from my mobile.

Trying to find a simple DVB watching program :

• VLC can't handle channels.conf, can read a custom m3u playlist.

• mythtv is too big and messy.

• gnome-mplayer crashes when I choose watch TV from the menu.

• totem / gstreamer stutters and plays choppy video.

• me-TV ; the gui is unresponsive while watching and there is no use of EPG here.

• ghdtv looks promising didn't know about it, didn't try it.

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As if I didn't have enough USB gadgets sticking out of my laptop already, I just traded the two extra RAM modules I had for a Twinhan starbox USB DVB-S device. Clearly a winning bargain, thanks Nabil; you're the best.

Connecting it for the first time to a stock hardy kernel it got recognized but complained about firmware. For some reason this was not easily available, but eventually I found it. I'll attach it here, stick it in /lib/firmware and you're all set. Here's what the kernel should say if everything is kosher :

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During the hardy development cycle I discovered this horrible "feature"; While booting up choose a "recovery mode" item from the grub menu, and ubuntu boots into single mode. So far so good. Now at the end of the boot process it will present you with a nice ncurses menu to "fix xorg" , "root shell" and something else. Choose "root shell" and you get one without even being asked for a password!

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holy ****

Getting used to my new phone. I say SE-UIQ3 beats the hell out of Nokia's Symbian Series * , sorry Msameer.

The earphones have little rubber buds that wedge into your outer ear canal and block any noise from the outside. It really is amazing, over an hour in transportation without hearing any noise ! Peace and serenity, reaching home calm and not drained !

The earphones are clear and loud , without being too loud to cause ear damage.

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Got my wireless USB adapter! Wireless, sweet!

It is an 3Com OfficeConnect Wireless 54Mbps 11g Compact USB adapter ( model-547 ). Works on Ubuntu hardy out of the box using the "zd1211rw" module, and matching firmware.

Appears in lsusb as : "0ace:1215 ZyDAS WLA-54L WiFi"

Now I have 2x512Mb DDR2 DIMMs and a Broadcom mini-pci WLAN card for sale. Any takers ?

To learn pyGTK I made gDevilspie : A user friendly interface to the devilspie window matching daemon, to create rules easily.

Project page : http://code.google.com/p/gdevilspie/

Gnomefiles entry : http://gnomefiles.org/app.php/gDevilspie

The devilspie project : http://burtonini.com/blog/computers/devilspie

The devilspie referencde : http://foosel.org/linux/devilspie

Yesterday my laptop's wireless card , a broadcom one , stopped working. No errors , no hangs , nothing. It just disappeared from lspci.

The HP service center told me that they will have to replace the mainboard because it is the mini-PCI slot that is broken. They added that this is a known issue with these motherboards.

Replacement would mean a hefty cost, and selling the laptop isn't feasible right now. So I ordered a 3COM USB wirelss card.

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Very hectic days.. yet I squeezed in another activity, sports ! I'll be training every Sunday and Tuesday for an hour in an attempt to save my body from me.

Just released gdevilspie-0.3 :)

Can I say OLPC is great despite the glitches ? I have the privilege of working on it at OpenCraft, and I will try to contribute something good.

I got a Sony Ericsson W960i to replace my aging N70 , and so far I am loving it. Still haven't tried to communicate with it from linux, except for mass storage mode.

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Hello everyone, important date marked in my calendar .. I am getting married on 20th of June 2008 !

The "katb ketab" is going to be in the Police mosque, everyone is invited :)

See you there.

My host, Msameer has been hosting me for free all this time. Thanks mohammed :)

He was even nice enough to move me to his new server, so phaeronix.net now has a new home. Thanks again.

In other news, gdevilspie is coming along nicely, 0.2 released, 0.21 bugfix release soon to be released and I have users!

Great!

Just released the 0.1 version of gdevilspie. It's not feature complete, but it works and as they always say "release early release often".

http://gdevilspie.googlecode.com/files/gdevilspie-0.1.tar.bz2

Didn't have a good title.. but just wanted to ramble.

February was a bad month, in different ways. However, looking back on it, we earn experience from difficult situations.

Amazingly gdevilspie is already functional and I am preparing a 0.1 release soon. Already almost 60 revisions in svn http://code.google.com/p/gdevilspie/source/list

I am more confident about programming specially in

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I have created a project at google code, and no it is not a livecd.

It is a pygtk interface to devilspie, and it is still under construction.

Have a look at it here : http://code.google.com/p/gdevilspie

I noticed this improvement in nautilus, which I assume is a desired side effect of moving to GVFS, glib's replacement to gnome-vfs.

Copy operations now show total and done amount, multiple copy operations share the same dialog with separate progress bars. You can close the dialog to let the copy operations continue in the background, and summon the dialog again from a system tray icon.

I hope they are planning to add a pause/resume button, which would really rock!

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You know you are alive when :

The past comes back to haunt you,

Actions you did in the past nag you,

You are confronted by decisions you have to take,

You have to live with the consequences of the decisions you took,

Fate presents crossroads with signs both ways,

Time passes too fast and too slow at the same time.

Maybe I am just high.

At last the problem causing the early boot hang triggered by hwclock that happens on some compaq and HP laptops has been diagnosed and a workaround patch is available. Look here for details : http://lwn.net/Articles/263418/ see my name there ? My name is in the linux kernel :)

The LKML thread where the problem was discussed has to be the lengthiest and most intricate I ever followed.

This goes along nicely with the kernel 2.6.24 release which has a lot of improvements specially the b43 driver

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• These days when I get angry my nose bleeds internally and it all appears at the end of the day.

• House renovation in preparation of marriage is really difficult, tedious and most of all expensivee!

• Working with someone outside Egypt causes problems; they expect you to be available on Fridays.

• The difficult thing about relationships are the strings attatched.

• I wish I had extra sensory perception powers.

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I'll spare you the obligatory whining and ranting about the current mess I am in regarding the medicine / IT career choice stuff.

Instead, I'll post about a little thing I did that might help someone. I like to watch movies in 1:1 size , in the corner of my screen. Instead of moving and resizing the player window everytime manually, I use devilspie and xdotool to do it automatically.

• Get devilspie http://burtonini.com/blog/computers/devilspie

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Thanks to a tip from samo about xcompmgr, I have avant-window-navigator back in my workflow. Still the single right side panel is very nice and consolidated.

The theme, clearlooks-compact, saves a lot of space on a laptop display.

No it's not what you think!

Yesterday after work we played an OpenArena tournament on the LAN.

Open Free kernel + Open Free System + Open Free Game = Legal Free Fun

Just back from exile, into a meeting. Talk about context switching.

The main problem I faced was the dirtiness of the place. There isn't a worker assigned to the unit yet, and everything is disgustingly dirty.

I spent the time playing C&C3: tiberium wars.

Now I lounge in a cafe`, sipping mocha, surfing wirelessly with my laptop, playing with patches for the linux kernel.

Tomorrow I go to faraway land called kom-el-raml ( heap of sand literally ! ), where there is no phone, no food and barely any cellular coverage. The unit doesn't have a worker, who is reposnible for cleaning, cooking and running errands.

Pray for me.

For a long time I have been silent about the nature of my IT related work. It was mostly freelancing and doing small projects for people, to excersize my knowledge in Linux, Livecds and embedded.

After a hiatus during part of my medical training year I started working in a long term project on a 3 days per week basis, and for the past 6 months, I have been employed at OpenCraft.

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In an unexpected turn of events I was denied the choice I made that ( in my opinion ) should have balanced my life for a few months to come.

This brings me to my life "crossroads" much faster, or so it seems; things are still unclear. The fallout in the few following days should clear up things.

Sometimes I regret having a diverse and complicated life.

As you would know if you were following my twitters, I was back and forth to Bani Sweif trying to reach a comfortable middle ground with the administration there. Things are better now, but I have to make a difficult choice now.

The choice involves affecting my plans for the future, career choice, income source, time management.. everything. It might even force me to leave IT completely.

More on that later.

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Yesterady I was trying to connect my N70 mobile phone to windows using bluetooth to try out the nokia suite.

I thought, I could do a lot of things in linux already with my phone, but I want to see what is missing?

I plugged in my bluetooth adapter to be greeted with a cryptic "Windows error code 43". Two days later and lots of hours wasted on hacking stupid "bth.inf" files and installing hordes of third party software; it still does not work.

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I know some people would burn me at a stake for this, but I am running a -git kernel ! Right now 2.6.23-git11.

Why?

For starters the mac80211 wireless stack merge ( formerly devicescape ), which has the new broadcom wireless driver. My wireless now is more stable, and performant.

Also the tickless support for x86_64 is back, although for me a bug in the lapic renders it unusable as the system cannot switch to high resolution timers ( needed for clockevents ). I hope this gets fixed.

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I upgraded my gutsy to 2.6.23, everything is working just fine now :)

I have moved to gutsy. I actually wanted to try the upgrade path so that if it crashes and burns, I have an excuse to move back to gentoo before getting my connection at home.

The move was quite smooth! So far I like gnome-2.20 and I have updated my avant-window-navigator from bzr and everything is wonderful.

http://phaeronix.net/node/217 http://phaeronix.net/node/218

Done with upgrade. That's gnome-2.20 and avant-window-navigator from upstream bzr. Seriously cool.

Upgrading to gutsy.

I am starting a page about the settings and quirks of my compaq presario v6000.

http://phaeronix.net/node/mylappy

Anyone has experience with formatting such pages ? Anything to share or add ?

00:00.0 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation C51 Host Bridge (rev a2)
00:00.1 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation C51 Memory Controller 0 (rev a2)
00:00.2 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation C51 Memory Controller 1 (rev a2)
00:00.3 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation C51 Memory Controller 5 (rev a2)
00:00.4 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation C51 Memory Controller 4 (rev a2)
00:00.5 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation C51 Host Bridge (rev a2)

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I first read this on planet.gnome.org due to this blog post : http://intr.overt.org/blog/?p=59

And now it is official : http://list.drzeus.cx/pipermail/sdhci-devel/2007-September/002023.html

So now I can use my MMC card without a USB card reader!

Now if I can only find that darn half-size to full size adapter, so I don't have to fish out the MMC card with tweezers every time.

Hello everyone, I am still alive.

My sabayon dvd is almost done downloading, yay I will be back on gentoo. On the other hand I am almost done customising the ubuntu livecd for our upcoming eglug install fest. Read all about it over there.

Why ubuntu you ask ? Well, for starters it is very popular among noobs, and it is also very easy and quick to customise the livecd. I will post full details later. However what I don't like about it is the VERY long boot time, and useless extra services started.

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Hello everyone, I am still alive.

My sabayon dvd is almost done downloading, yay I will be back on gentoo. On the other hand I am almost done customising the ubuntu livecd for our upcoming eglug install fest. Read all about it over there.

Why ubuntu you ask ? Well, for starters it is very popular among noobs, and it is also very easy and quick to customise the livecd. I will post full details later. However what I don't like about it is the VERY long boot time, and useless extra services started.

read more

My current ubuntu fiesty amd64 , it's not bad , but I am already planning going back to gentoo.

My current ubuntu fiesty amd64 , it's not bad , but I am already planning going back to gentoo.

So I currently work as an ER doctor for 2 days in a hospital in bani sweif, and last week there was a horrible accident on the highway nearby. We got a flood of patients in very bad shape.

I did ok for a first time I guess. Yes I did meet such situations during training at medical school, but it is different when you have less equipment and less doctors.

I did my first rigid bone cast too.

So I currently work as an ER doctor for 2 days in a hospital in bani sweif, and last week there was a horrible accident on the highway nearby. We got a flood of patients in very bad shape.

I did ok for a first time I guess. Yes I did meet such situations during training at medical school, but it is different when you have less equipment and less doctors.

I did my first rigid bone cast too.