In Traction

Neil Wilson contacted me about the Vibrantink colorscheme for Vim I created a while ago based on John Lam’s settings. He wanted to include it in the vim-rails package, which might be distributed with Ubuntu Gutsy, the next release of the Ubuntu Linux distro.

The vim-rails package is a collection of vim scripts that make editing Rails applications much easier. Neil also included another Vibrantink clone for Vim: vividchalk by Tim Pope, the author of rails.vim.

Here is a comparison between the original TextMate color scheme, vibrantink.vim and vividchalk.vim. Vibrantink.vim is less colorful than vividchalk but it resembles the original TextMate theme the most, although it applies the wrong color to the class method attr_reader.

I would like to have good syntax highlighting for other languages besides Ruby (e.g. C# and LaTeX) in the future. Who knows, when I find some spare time …

I had some fun writing a Python wrapper around libphidgets for an RFID reader we had lying around here. To do so, I used ctypes (”apparantly”::http://ailab.ch/pipermail/libphidgets-discuss/2006-February/000442.html the Python bindings for libphidgets were broken). To check for a connected RFID reader, I interfaced with hal through dbus. Afterwards I created a simple GUI for the device with PyGTK.

Here is the result:

I experienced some weird permissions problems though. The device could only be opened with root privileges. Takis helped me step through libphidgets to see if there was a bug in it. In the end, we solved it by changing the /etc/udev/rules.d/permissions.rules file (in my case it was called 40-permissions.rules). I’m not sure if there are any security problems with this though.

I changed these lines:

# USB devices (usbfs replacement)
SUBSYSTEM=="usb_device", MODE="0664"

to:

# USB devices (usbfs replacement)
SUBSYSTEM=="usb_device", GROUP="plugdev", MODE="0664"

I will probably put the code online when I have some spare time (and after I cleaned it up a bit).

I managed to destroy my Windows XP partition a few weeks ago while trying to resize it. Fortunately I made a backup. I decided to try to run Windows inside a virtual machine. After removing the broken NTFS partition, I reused the free space to create a new /home partition.

I created a disk image with QEMU, and ran a Windows XP installation on it through VMware Player. And I must say, it works perfectly. I am even able to connect to USB devices such as a PocketPC.

In the picture below I am debugging a Compact .NET Hello World application in Visual Studio in Windows in VMware. The application is running on the PDA that is attached to the PC.

Here is a screenshot of Visual Studio running the PocketPC emulator:

Speed is not an issue: the image runs almost at native speed thanks to the kernel modules. Whenever I need Windows (I rarely do), I just fire up VMware Player, and I am able to dig right in because it saved the previous state. And when I’m finished I just suspend the virtual machine.

I don’t think I’ll go back to a dual-boot system soon.

When I the installed Ubuntu Dapper testing releases, my sound card didn’t work anymore. It is a HDA Intel card, part of the Dell Dimension 5100 computer I use at work. The card was recognized but the volume seemed to be muted. The master and PCM channels were all maximized though.

I thought this problem was going to be fixed in the final release, but when Dapper was released my sound was still muted.

Today I came across a bug report describing the same problem and a solution.

It appears the surround control was muted, which caused everything to be muted as well.

So after also showing the surround control, and unmuting it in the Gnome volume control, my problem was fixed:

I hope this is useful for people who experienced the same problem.

Edit: apparantly this also fixes the sound problem on Macbook Pro laptops.

There are new packages available for Uiml.net. Previously, when you just ran uiml.net.exe, it would exit saying that it could not find the frontend UIML files. These are now included in the packages, meaning that you get a nice graphical interface for choosing a UIML file to render. There is now also a dependency on at least one of the rendering backends.

Takis also moved his repository to another server. To install Uiml.net or Cassowary.net packages, just add this line to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://issaris.be/breezy/ ./

In other news, Takis has been playing with a Nokia 770 lately:

As I mentioned earlier, there was still some news that I needed to blog about.

Takis created Ubuntu Breezy packages for both Cassowary.net and Uiml.net. I wanted to test them on a clean Ubuntu Breezy install first, before making a public announce. We haven’t tried them on a Debian system, but they might work. Feel free to try it out, and let us know!

To use them, just add this line to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://lumumba.uhasselt.be/~takis/breezy/ ./

The following packages are available for Uiml.net:

• uimlnet
• uimlnet-gtk-sharp
• uimlnet-swf
• uimlnet-compact-swf
• uimlnet-wxnet
• uimlnet-xml-rpc
• uimlnet-all

Cassowary.net consists of just one package:

• cassowarynet

Thanks to Takis’ work, the infrastructure is now in place to easily provide updates to our packages.

His repository is still growing. If you’re looking for bleeding edge Ubuntu packages, you might find what you need there (e.g. Vim 7, Gaim 2.0 beta, daily git builds, etc.).