Debugging flash in firefox

Install Adobe Flash Player Debugging Version:
(first I recommend you to uninstall any flash version you have installed)
wget http://download.macromedia.com/pub/flashplayer/updaters/10/flash_player_10_linux_dev.tar.gz
tar zxvf flash_player_10_linux_dev.tar.gz
cd flash_player_10_linux_dev/plugin/debugger
tar zxvf install_flash_player_10_linux.tar.gz
cd install_flash_player_10_linux/
./flashplayer-installer
Follow instructions.

Install the Firebug and Flashbug extensions.

I couldn’t install extensions… it seems an Ubuntu 10.04 well-known issue. Workaround here: disabling ipv6 dns in firefox.
Restart firefox.

Now in the Firebug panel, enable “Flash Console”.
Enter a page with flash and you will start to see the debug information 🙂

What is it useful to?
I know that there are extensions like FlashGot to do it, but I wanted to download the video embedded in a flash player that you can watch here: Erasmus Paradiso (Repor).

And in fact, the url pointing to the flv file was there! 😉

IDEAS:
This mechanism saves a lot of time that you could have spent dissambling the flash player.

One of my ideas is creating a plugin to be able to watch in Totem last news as shown in RTVE (spanish radio television). Being able search videos in their archives or e.g. sorting last news videos by category.
To sum up, the same that the current youtube plugin does in Totem.

Updated 2/Jun/2010:
I’ve found in a blog how to download RTVE videos using RTMDump.
Actually it seems that there’re some people working to get rtmp support in GStreamer, that would be the optimum solution 🙂

Bugzilla: How to receive email notifications with your own changes

One thing that was disturbing me is that by default, in gnome bugzilla you won’t receive an email notification if you, e.g. add a comment in a bugreport, or change the priority of a bugreport, because it’s YOU who have done it.
Instead, in freedesktop bugzilla you will receive it by default.

I find it useful, because you can follow in your mailbox all the changes and contributions you have done in one evening and because it eases reading bugreports from email. Otherwise, if someone mentions you, you will have to go to the bugreport webpage to know what you said, because in the message thread for that bug, your comment won’t appear.

Fortunately it was easy. It’s enough going to “Preferences” and then “Email Preferences” and then uncheck all the checkboxes in the last row, which says “The change was made by me”.

Starting repository migration of portland to Git

Using CVS is a pain for me and nowadays it’s pointless using it. Actually there are enough open source alternatives, distribuited or not.
Unfortunately the portland project hasn’t still migrated to cgit.freedesktop.org. It’s one of the few that is still stuck.

Today I have imported the repository as Git and then I have uploaded it to GitHub. I will try to keep it updated and synchronized with CVS. For it, I have opened a bug report to notify it and to ask what to do about the rewriting names task. Git has a field in every commit to specify who was the author of the patch and who has committed it and their email addresses. This is very useful to keep authorship even if the author hasn’t an account to commit. As CVS lacked it, we have to “rewrite” the past. Also, CVS used a nickname to identify the author of a commit. With Git it’s usual to specify your full name and your email address.

By the way, as I say in the bugreport, the new git repository can be found here:
http://github.com/PabloCastellano/portland

Let’s go for the 1.0.3 release! (1.0.2 release was in June 2007 :-/)




And we are not the only ones who rewrite the past! See:
Texas schools board rewrites US history with lessons promoting God and guns (what a shame)
Nineteen Eighty-Four

GUADEC Hispana ya tiene página en Wikipedia

Me he enterado esta misma tarde de que la VII GUADEC Hispana se hará en La Coruña durante los días 22 y 23 de julio. Aunque casi seguro que para esa fecha haya ya vuelto a España, no sé si iré porque no sé cómo andaré de liquidez. Ya había también mirado la GUADEC en (La Haya, Holanda del 26 al 30 de julio), pero también se me salía un poco de presupuesto. Así que de momento me conformaré con haber ido este año a la FOSDEM y a la RootedCon, de las que aún tengo pendiente hacer unos resumencillos 🙂

De paso, he creado en la Wikipedia la página para la GUADEC Hispana, ya que desde GUADEC se enlazaba varias veces y nadie la había creado aún. De momento no tiene mucho, más o menos lo mismo que la de GUADEC, pero es informativa y espero que más gente cuando pase por la página se eche un commit. También le he dado una pequeña pincelada a la de GNOME Hispano, (que por cierto tendría que mirar para hacerme socio) y he hecho que GUADEC-ES también redirija a GUADEC Hispana.

Maybe your HP Pavillion tx2000 is not dead at all…

(End of March 2010…)
This morning when I woke up, I found that again I had fallen asleep in the bed reading in the computer.
I tried to switch it on but I couldn’t.

Everytime I pressed the button, all the LED lights became blue as usual but then less than one second later  the computer switched off suddenly.

I was afraid. Maybe the battery was faulty, but it was plugged to the electricity.
I went to lessons thinking that I would have to find a place to repair it.

During the lessons I found in the HP website that the symtomps pointed that it needed to be repaired but with other symptoms you could do a ‘Hard Reset’ and it would be working again.

When the lesson finished I came back home quickly and I did it. And it worked!! 🙂

‘Hard Reset’ consists on:
1. Take out the battery
2. Unplug the AC cable.
3. Press and hold the power button at least 6 seconds.

I’m posting it because it was not so easy to find the procedure. Now I’m happy again 🙂 and I wonder how many laptops that have been shipped to be repaired could have been fixed doing that… And how much did it cost to the owners 😦

BTW, I started some time ago a page in the ubuntu wiki to get everything working in this HP Pavillion model. It’s still in construction and some bugs need to be fixed before in the kernel. I’m working on it.. 🙂
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Testing/Laptop/Reports/HPPavilionTx2000es

Update 10/Apr/10: hard reset is not working anymore, my laptop seems dead 😦

Update 4/May/10: I just saw my laptop inside its cover under my desktop and with a bit of sadness decided to try to turn it on. Luckily and enigmatically IT WORKS AGAIN :)))

Hypothesis:
It seems that some internal capacitors had kept charged. In fact, what Hard Reset did, was trying to uncharge them. One month later it seems that they got finally uncharged.

Getting your OS spanish event sponsored

I have just discovered that the CENATIC foundation (Centro Nacional de Referencia de Aplicación de las Tecnologías de la Información y la Comunicación (y olé)) is sponsoring spanish free software related events in Spain.
In 2010 there are two deadlines to send your applications, one in February and another one in July.

Isn’t it awesome?? 🙂

Convocatoria de patrocinios de CENATIC para eventos SFA.

Recovering files from a pendrive with scalpel

I have no idea how it happened but I had to give today a housework in the university and it wasn’t in the pendrive. At the moment I have recovered 1 of 2 files with scalpel (I just love the name of foresnic tools :D).

From the website:

Scalpel is a fast file carver that reads a database of header and footer definitions and extracts matching files from a set of image files or raw device files. Scalpel is filesystem-independent and will carve files from FATx, NTFS, ext2/3, or raw partitions. It is useful for both digital forensics investigation and file recovery. Scalpel resulted from a complete rewrite of foremost 0.69, a popular open source file carver, to enhance performance and decrease memory usage.

Steps:
Create an iso image from your pendrive:
sudo dd if=/dev/sdc of=pendrive.iso
Have a look to the example configuration file (required) or copy it to $PWD:
cp /etc/scalpel/scalpel.conf .
As I had to recover a C file I added to the end of the config file this line:
echo “c     y       11000     /**” >> scalpel.conf
Which means “find files with ‘c’ extension, but not ‘C’ (case sensitive) and read 11000 bytes from the header.
I played with a bit of advantage as I knew for sure the file started with comments as the professor gave us a skeleton file. The length field is not so important but I knew that I had not written 10K of code.

Run scalpel:
scalpel -c scalpel.conf -o recovered pendrive.iso

After that, in the recovered folder I had a log file named “audit.txt” and a folder named “c-0-0”. Inside the folder there were a lot of “.c” files, all with length 11000 and that started with “/**” and manually I have found the one that I searched and removed the trailing 11000-true_bytes bytes.

Appart from this manual usage I did, it has preconfigured headers for a lot of filetypes like jpg, avi, doc, pdf, pgp, zip… so that you only need to uncomment the line in scalpel.conf of the files that you are searching.

My pendrive was formatted with FAT32 but it’s filesystem-independent.

Kudos to Scalpel!

rtl8187se, realtek and ndiswrapper

My new netbook uses the rtl8187se wireless driver and this is another post complaining about Realtek support to linux users.

It would be a nice piece of news that it works out-of-the-box if the driver wasn’t so unstable in WPA protected networks. I suffer from drops in throughput every 5-10 minutes, sometimes even less, that make the connection unusable.

In this ubuntu bugreport there are also users that claims that they have the same issue (2 years ago).

Unfortunately, I lost all my hopes with Realtek in things related to fixing drivers. My experience (in this post) is that I wrote them 5 months ago about the sound driver issue in my HP Pavilion Tx2000 and they haven’t even replied a “Thanks for the report. We will have a look at this issue”. It’s also worth to mention the shoddy piece of work that they did with the rt3070 driver (see this other post).

At the moment, I’m using ndiswrapper with the winXP drivers. It works like a charm and I recommend it to everyone having this issue.

You can download the Windows drivers here:
http://www.realtek.com/downloads/downloadsView.aspx?Langid=1&PNid=21&PFid=40&Level=5&Conn=4&ProdID=172&DownTypeID=3&GetDown=false&Downloads=true
Direct link:

ftp://WebUser:Ds8MtJ3@202.134.71.22/cn/wlan/8187SE_WindowsDriver_5_6.9109.1029.2009.zip

I also discovered that there’s a pyGTK GUI for ndiswrapper very suitable for your granma who wants to connect to her WPA wireless at home, but she can’t do it out-of-the-box because Realtek didn’t care about providing a decent driver. It’s called ndisgtk and looks like this:

Email to Realtek about issues in their sound driver

This is the email I sent to Realtek related email addresses on 3/December/2009.
I sent it to: kailang@realtek.com.tw, shou@realtek.com.tw, and from their Contact section in their webpage.
I hope that posting it here in public, they feel a bit more ashamed.
I haven’t received a minimal answer 5 months later. I wonder how important are users for them once that they have bought their product. Do they care a minimum?

Hello,

my name is Pablo and I own a tablet PC “HP TX2000es” (spanish version of HP TX2000).

My cause of my email is that the current linux driver for the realtek model of sound card I own isn’t optimum. And I think it would be the same for the others, not only in the spanish model.

Currently I’m using Ubuntu 9.10 which runs 2.6.31-15-generic and today I have downloaded 2.6.32 to see the changes but it seems that there were not improves on it.

The troubles I have found so far are:

– By default, when you connect your headphones the sound continues being played through the speakers.
I solved it by loading snd-hda-intel with the parameter model=hp. But instead, when I load snd-hda-intel like that, the microphone stops working (is not detected, none of both).
So the current scenario is to choose between using microphone or hearing the speakers with headsets.

I have also tried with other model parameters like model=6stack-digout or model=3stack but it’s like by default (speakers continue playing).

According to lspci, my device is:
00:10.1 Audio device: nVidia Corporation MCP51 High Definition Audio (rev a2)

00:10.1 0403: 10de:026c (rev a2)
    Subsystem: 103c:30e5
    Control: I/O- Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- ParErr- Stepping- SERR- FastB2B- DisINTx-
    Status: Cap+ 66MHz+ UDF- FastB2B+ ParErr- DEVSEL=fast >TAbort- SERR-
    Latency: 0 (500ns min, 1250ns max)
    Interrupt: pin B routed to IRQ 17
    Region 0: Memory at 80020000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
    Capabilities:
    Kernel driver in use: HDA Intel
    Kernel modules: snd-hda-intel

I have seen there is a macro SND_PCI_QUIRK in
/usr/src/linux-source-2.6.31/sound/pci/hda/patch_realtek.c that is used with specific models of this laptop:

patch_realtek.c:12526:    SND_PCI_QUIRK_MASK(0x103c, 0xff00, 0x3000, “HP TX25xx series”, ALC268_TOSHIBA),

patch_realtek.c:15171:    SND_PCI_QUIRK(0x103c, 0x30bf, “HP TX1000”, ALC861VD_HP),

But there’s no QUIRK for 103c:30e5 (my model)

I hope I explained well myself and you could understand my problem (well, the problem of all owners of this model) and you can now help us to solve it. I have no experience with the kernel.

Please contact me if you need to test new patches or you need more information.

Thanks in advance.

Regards,
    Pablo. 

Fill in the blank

What’s the missing number in this sequence?
12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 22, 24, 30, 33, 102, ? , 10010

Seen in http://neworder.box.sk/forum/topic41509-fill-in-the-blank.html