Ministry of Intrigue

Wow, where the hell have I been?!

It’s two days shy of a month since I last posted, which is an eternity online. As is probably obvious, I’ve been really busy with work and all the other interesting things that life can throw at you.

My software for work is rapidly approaching the deadline testing date, and in the world of personal programming projects I decided to completely redesign the database for the diplomacy server from scratch. I’ve learned a few things in the last couple months that illustrate some of the more fundamental errors in my previous model. I’ve also been busy trying to learn how to use the Symfony framework for PHP, as well as beginning to do some dabbling in Python and Ruby. We’ll see how that goes…

Of course the thing that’s been taking up the most of my former blogging time has been my new baby. I built him myself.

I apologize for the low quality of the photos, they are just a couple quick “post-delivery” shots I took with my cell-phone right after I had it up and running.

This was my first build, something I’ve wanted to do for a while, and I am really happy with it. Since I put it together I’ve been having a ton of fun tweaking and optimizing all of my BIOS settings, customizing my Gentoo installation, setting up the old computer as a home file and database server, and checking out the performance of my new system.

The Specs:

• Case: Thermaltake Armor Full ATX Tower (it’s really huge, but an awesome cooler with a ton of space)
• CPU: AMD Athlon 64 bit X2 (dual core) 4400+ (currently at 2.2Ghz, but I haven’t even started overclocking the CPU yet)
• CPU Fan/Heatsink: Zalman CNPS7000B-CU LED (blue LED cooling fan, super quiet and takes great care of the CPU)
• Motherboard: ASUS A8N-SLI Premium
• Memory: 2GB Corsair Twin DDR Ram
• Video Card: GeForce 6800 XT 256MB Overclocked
• Sound Card: Audigy 2 ZS
• First Hard Drive: SATA Western Digital Raptor 10,000 RPM 74GB w/ 16MB cache
• Second Hard Drive: 3.0 GB/s SATA Western Digital Caviar 7200 RPM 250GB w/ 16MB cache
• First IDE: NEC ND-3550A 16X DVD+/-RW Burner
• Second IDE: SONY DVD-ROM 16X
• And a floppy in case I need to flash the BIOS

Since my old computer was being relegated to server duties, I took my nice Creative speakers and Westinghouse 19” LCD flat panel and gave them to my new computer. I administrate the old one through ssh and sftp (mostly because I’m too lazy to set up a standard ftp server and sshd gives me sftp for free).

Oh yeah, and I also recently discovered the joys of gaming in Linux, so that’s been distracting too.

I’ll be back with more frequent posts from now on, I promise.

Skype has released a new version for Linux with ALSA support built-in, which allows it to run even with other sound applications. Hurray!

Get it here!

However, it is important to note that the original HOWTO I wrote on recording Skype conversations won’t work with the new version. So I’ve added a set of updated instructions that you can find in the original post here. Those should get you up and recording again.

Happy Skype-ing!

Not everyone has use for this kind of feature, but I use it almost every day for a wide variety of uses. For example, I can check on a lengthy compilation process, test a theory using a one of the applications native to my Linux system, or to bypass a corporate internet filter when it has mistakenly blacklisted a site I need to access for code reference.

This kind of functionality is also handy if you want to share your desktop with other remote users. For example, if you are having difficulty and would like to give a friend the ability to take over and help you fix the problem.

Enter: the VNC protocol. VNC is a method of sharing X sessions across a network between a server and client. There are a variety of options available for you on both the server and client side, some servers will even generate a new X session for each user although this defeats the purpose of sharing a single desktop.

KDE users will find themselves tempted to use Krfb, which is KDE’s native desktop sharing server: Don’t.

Krfb is somewhat unpredictable and your mileage with it will vary greatly between distributions. However, in my experience it had a tendency to crash often and lock out further connections, which is frustrating when you are in the middle of something very important. It ran mediocre with about 15 minutes of use before the first crash on Kubuntu, and roughly 10 minutes on SuSE 9.3 and Gentoo. Don’t even bother with it.

The answer is the x11vnc server. Small, fast, easy to use and best of all, it just works. Check if your distro maintains a package for it, if not you can download the source from the above link and compile it yourself. Gentoo users can get it as easy as typing:

emerge -va x11vnc

The man pages document the server options extremely well, but I’ll run you through what I do to configure the server.

Set a password: A necessity, or else it will just be an open door once you start the server. To set a password and store it for future use pick some filename like foo.pwd and then enter the following command:

x11vnc —storepasswd yourpasswdhere foo.pwd

Your password is now stored encrypted in the file foo.pwd.

Start the server: You have a lot of options here, by default the server shuts down after the first user connects and then closes their session. This is a nice security feature as it will also lock all other users out. However you can use the -forever option to keep the server running until you manually stop it, and you can even use the -share option to allow multiple people to connect at once. I’m not going to cover all of the options, as there are a TON.

Usually what I do is ssh into my environment remotely and start the server when I need it as a one shot execution using the following command:

x11vnc -rfbauth foo.pwd -display :0

Basically this command tells the server to start using its defaults plus the specified options. The two options specified in my command are absolutely essential. -rfbauth instructs the server that the password to use is located the foo.pwd and that the server should use the encoded rfb protocol to verify the password. If you use any other option, passwords will be transmitted in clear text!!!!! Your mother taught you that clear text was bad for that, right? The second option indicates tells the server that the X session is located at display 0. Unless you have some kind of crazy configuration because you felt like dicking around, this will almost always be the case.

You’ll see a whole bunch of output, but don’t worry that means it is working. If you see this line than everything is ready to go:

The VNC desktop is localhost:0 PORT=5900

Obviously your local computer’s name will appear instead of “localhost”. Take note of the port number as this will be needed to connect to the server later.

Connect with a client: I highly recommend the TightVNC client for all your remote desktop needs. It works very well on both Windows and Linux. Windows users can download an installer from the above link, Linux users probably have it in their package manager. Gentoo users:

emerge -va tightvnc

In Windows you will have a handy-dandy popup that will allow you to specify your host and port thusly: yourIPhere::5900 where “yourIPhere” is the IP address of the computer you are connecting to. You can also use the more generic display option (yourIPhere:0) but I prefer to use a port number. You’ll also want to specify encoding options. So, your full command will be:

vncviewer -encodings “copyrect tight zrle hextile” localhost:0

You will be prompted for the VNC password you set, and upon authentication you will have access to your desktop via the TightVNC viewer which I find to be very fast and reliable. Whoo-hoo!!!!

When you are done, simply close the TightVNC viewer window and it will disconnect. Unless you have specified the -forever option for your server it will also shut down.

This may seem like a lot on the screen, but you’ll be surprised at how easily and quickly you can get it up in running. I was able to install, run the server and connect to it in roughly five minutes.

Have fun!

What can I say? I’m in love.

I haven’t posted in a few days, in part because I’ve been pretty busy, and partly because I’ve been overhauling my system with a brand new Linux distribution.

I’m now running Gentoo and I absolutely love it. For those of you unfamiliar with it, Gentoo is special flavor of Linux that gives all the control back to the user. Absolutely every detail of your environment can be optimized for your hardware and configured to your taste. In addition, Gentoo uses a brilliant and practical approach to package management: Portage. With Portage, all packages are downloaded and compiled from scratch in order to ensure compatibility with your system. Best of all, Gentoo provides an environment variable called USE, that allows you to define what options Portage should use when compiling, which allows you to avoid needing to download a lot of excess dependencies that will only bog down your system if you have no intention of using those features. For example, if I set part of my USE variable to “-gnome kde”, my software will not be compiled with any Gnome support, which is just fine by me as I hate Gnome and never use it. Only the KDE components of the package will be compiled which saves me a lot of time and space in the long run.

Of course, like all good things this flexibility comes at an intimidating price. In order to install Gentoo, you need to manually install and compile your whole system from source. Certainly a non-trivial task, and it scared me away from it for a while. I actually attempted installing Gentoo a while ago, and successfully wrote my configuration files, compiled my kernel and was able to boot successfully into my new environment. Unfortunately, the automated configure scripts for my X server were not able to identify my graphics card and after a couple days of frustration as I tried to manually write my xorg.conf file, I gave up and went back to SuSE 9.3. I had projects I was working on and couldn’t afford the time away from my graphical desktop to fiddle with it. Oh, but it haunted me.

You see, I knew that Gentoo was what I really wanted, and it frustrated me that I gave up on it. My inner geek was emasculated by my failure to complete the installation. It ate at me day after day, and I found myself idly surfing the Gentoo forums debating to try another seven hour installation process.

The final straw was when Gentoo released their graphical LiveCD installer disk. The graphical installer is still experimental as is the dialog based command line installer on the disk, which is fine as those application are designed to make the process faster NOT easier. If I hadn’t had experience with the Gentoo manual install I would have had no idea what I was doing. Now, I don’t say this to scare you all away, but I just want to make sure no one goes and downloads the LiveCD iso thinking that it will do it all for them. I cannot stress enough how important a solid understanding of the manual install process works (which you can still use the LiveCD for). The graphical installer certainly did speed up the process quite a bit, but the best part of the new LiveCD is not the installer, it’s the embedded Gnome environment with sample applications. During the long compilations I was able to browse the web, chat on Gaim and play a few games, which made the installation time fly by. In addition, if you are using the graphical installer and instruct it to install Xorg then it will copy its dynamically generated xorg.conf file to your new system configuration, which you may need to tweak later, but it will be functional.

Since then, I’ve been playing with Gentoo, adding programs and tweaking my configuration. I did have some initial trouble getting my OpenGL acceleration working, which turned out to be a hardware problem with my computer’s chipset. Simple solution: I picked up an ATI Radeon 9250 video card, which I really should have gotten a while ago anyway. I recompiled my kernel (which is really no sweat once you’ve done it once or twice and gotten past the intimidation factor), installed the new drivers from Portage and ran the configuration script. It works beautifully!

Gentoo is certainly not for weak of heart, and you have to be willing to spend some time getting it all set up. However, once it is up and running it is one of the fastest and most stable distros I have ever used. If you work for it, you will be rewarded.

The purpose of this guide is to show you how to record your Skype conversations for legitimate purposes. Remember to respect your local laws regarding the recording of telephone calls, and to respect your local copyright laws in any recording endeavor. UPDATE: If you are using Skype 1.3 beta, see below for additional instructions.

The basics of how to do the recording can be found here. However, since the linked article is targeted to Ubuntu users I will provide a more generic guide.

You will need vsound, sox and lame (for mp3 encoding goodness) to satisfy the dependencies of this process. If your distro does not have a binary build of these, you can download the source from the above links and compile them manually. Don’t fear the command line.

Then, simply stop by Twisted Little Gnome and download the skype-rec script. Currently down, see below!

Extract the package to your magical home of choice and open a terminal. Change directories to the directory skype-rec-kraken and run make. The program is now ready to go, but you may want to set options specific to your system to ensure correct execution.

To configure the program, open the file skype-rec in your favorite text editor. There are several variables you can set for your personal options. In most cases you won’t have to change anything so long as you can run Skype by just typing skype on the command line. If this is not the case, enter your terminal command for executing Skype for the $SKYPE option. You may also want to change the default encoding rate to 96 kbps from 128 unless you want to start generating massive files. Save your file and wash your hands.

Now, on the command line (in the program’s directory of course) type: ./skype-rec. If you’ve configured your file correctly, Skype will start. Upon exiting Skype, all your conversations from that session will be converted to mp3 format at the bitrate you chose. It will appear in the program folder and have some wacky name like v00000000.mp3.

Rename the file to something more meaningful and move it to your folder of preference. There will also be two *.au files in that directory. Go ahead and delete them so the program doesn’t try to encode the conversation again. Or you could set the configuration of the program to automatically wipe those files upon completion by setting the $CLEANUP_ORIG option in skype-rec to 1.

Whoo-hoo! Now you can record your Skype conversations without additional hardware, so long as you are running some flavor of Linux. It works beautifully on my SuSE distro.

UPDATE: Twisted Little Gnome appears to be down. So I shall host the script here as well, as that is permitted under its license.

Download the script here! Please use the script below.

UPDATE: The above instructions will not work on the Skype 1.3 beta. In order to record off of that Skype version, you will need the new version of the skype-rec script which is available here.

Download the new script and extract it to its own folder. Change directories to the new folder, run make and make install. Then open the file skype-rec.rc in your favorite text editor and edit the options to meet your needs. There are a few more choices in this version, including a stereo remixing of the conversation which I’m still trying to get to work for me (doesn’t work for the Skype beta at least), and ogg encoding, which is a welcome sight. As an added plus, it also converts your conversations as you complete them, rather than rolling an entire session into one huge sound file.

After you’ve set all your options, copy the file to your home directory and rename it to .skype-rec.

$ cp skype-rec.rc $HOME/.skype-rec

Please note that you will have to have Skype in OSS mode in order for the script to work, so you’ll lose your shiny new ALSA goodness for your recording session. You can always set it back when you are done.

I’ll continue hosting the old script here, although I highly recommend you upgrade using the new script available over at Sourceforge.

UPDATE: For whatever reason, I still can’t seem to get this script to work since I upgraded to a 64-bit environment, so if you are an early adopter of 64-bit *nix and it works for you, drop me a line so we can figure it out for everyone.