or, How to disable Bug Buddy in recent Gnomes

Apparently Bug Buddy is now a Gtk module. This is great because now every Gtk program gets it for free, not just libgnome applications. But it turns out to be kind of annoying when you're hunting a GHC bug using a test case that uses Gtk2Hs, and it keeps popping up in your face, crying that it doesn't know how to report bugs in the test case.

Some rummaging revealed that it's enabled by gnome-session setting GTK_MODULES=gnomebreakpad at login, so you can export GTK_MODULES= to shut it up.

Update: Sjoerd Simons pointed out that setting GNOME_DISABLE_CRASH_DIALOG=1 is probably what I actually mean. There might be other things in GTK_MODULES which you actually want, so blowing them away might be detrimental to your health.

(Brought to you by the why does Google not give me a useful answer to the search disable bug buddy? department.)

I have a Grandstream GXP2000 SIP phone, courtesy of a special offer and a parent who likes SIP. It's kind of bulky, and is overkill for my uses of it: I don't actually care about it automatically downloading my address book from an arbitrary server, or running quizzes on its OSD. (Seriously, why would anyone do this?) But once I upgraded the firmware (to 1.1.2.27, which apparently you can get from Grandstream if you whine loudly enough, but I just grabbed it from, uh, GrandstreamSucks.com) to stop it crashing whenever I made or received a call (which only happened on one LAN I tried it on), it is pretty good at making and receiving calls, which is what I want it for.

You can stick custom ring tones on it, but they have to be in some bizarro format. Happily, Grandstream ship conversion tools, both for Windows and for Lunix. So I downloaded the latter; it turns out to be a modified SoX. And, oh look: they don't provide the source, or an offer to provide the source. *sigh* So, I requested the source, pointed out that they're violating section 3, and remarked that they could just throw a tarball into the same place they threw the binaries and never deal with any emails like this ever again.

I got a reply pretty quickly!

Attached per your request.

Attached was a zip file, expanding to:

% ls /tmp/sox
handlers.c  ring.c  sox.c  st_i.h

which is clearly not the complete source, and does not include build scripts.

You did not include the scripts used to control compilation. May I have the Makefile, please?

They sent me the Makefile (in a zip file).

% make
make: *** No rule to make target `Makefile.in', needed by `Makefile'.  Stop.

It appears that you have omitted the autoconf-related foo.

Please may I have complete working build scripts, please?

They sent me Makefile.in (in a zip file. This makes it much faster!!!). Of course, the rest of the build scripts and source still aren't there, so this still won't work. But let's play along:

% make
make: *** No rule to make target `configure.in', needed by `configure'.  Stop.

No double pleases this time:

Is it really too difficult to just zip up the entire directory and send it to me?

And apparently showing some anger did the trick:

We were using sox 12.17.4. You will need to use the patch based on that version.

Lo! A tarball containing the entire modified source tree, which when compiled works identically to the static binary they distribute. They still provide no source offer, but I got bored at this point. Here's a copy of the source in case you don't feel like repeating this process to get it.

(I meant to write this back in September, but never got around to it. I finally got sick of the thread sitting in my Inbox. It turns out that I never actually bothered making a custom ringtone...)

Dear Lazyweb,

Recently my Compose key stopped working in applications using the X input method (such as rxvt-unicode). Gtk applications using either the default Gtk input method or SCIM work fine; setting GTK_IM_MODULE=xim breaks them. I have Option "XkbOptions" "compose:ralt,ctrl:nocaps" in /etc/X11/xorg.conf. xev correctly reports that Multi_key is being pressed when I push the right alt, but rxvt-unicode et al. totally ignore it when I push it at them.

I have no idea why this happens. I asked the #rxvt-unicode people, and they have no idea either. I would love someone to tell me what to examine next!

Edit (2007-10-10): Fixed!

It was all my fault. I had a .XCompose file with an entry for Compose-t-m giving ™, but did not have the magic line include "%L" which makes all the normal compose sequences for your locale be loaded. Thanks to Simon for helping me figure this out!

Dear Lazyweb,

My external keyboard has an "eject" button. When I prod it, if the CD in the drive is not in use it is unmounted and the drive ejected; if the CD is in use, nothing happens. This is pretty much the behaviour I expect and want.

My laptop's keyboard does not have an eject button, so when I'm somewhere other than home I have to unmount the disk manually. Is there a sensible way to make the eject button on the drive behave like the software eject key, rather than working iff the disk is not mounted?

This proposes "a fix", which is to not lock the tray while the disk is mounted. This sounds like a really bad idea — "Hey! Program doing useful stuff with that disk when I accidentally poked the eject button! You lose! Ha ha ha!" — particularly since sensible software methods exist.

I remember seeing a program somewhere on the 'tubes that polled the drive every second or so to see if the button had been pressed and if so called eject. Submount exists, but my brief investigation suggests that it polls, too. I'm uncomfortable with the idea of such frequent polling. Surely there must be some file in /proc or something that such a program could block on, waiting for an event?

Love,

Will

Feel free to ignore this post if you don't like time-wasting rants!

I took some photographs the other day. I would like to upload them to Farcebook! Farcebook resizes photos to some silly small size after you upload them; my camera takes them at 1546x2048. Perhaps I will resize them before uploading them to avoid saturating my pathetic upstream for about a week!

I live in a happy Gnomebuntu world, so I will use F-Spot to manage my photographs! I will choose the Vertigo/07 MT 7th tag, select all photographs, and choose Edit/Resize.... Oh, no, I won't. Hrm. Is it in a right-click menu somewhere? Hrm. Maybe I can't do batch resizes. That's a bit rubbish. I guess I'll resize them individually. Oh wait! No, I won't, because there is no way to resize photographs in F-Spot.

I guess I'll fall back to creating new versions (the built-in versioning is good — it and tagging are the reasons I switched to F-Spot) of all the photographs, and applying mogrify to them. Except you can't batch-create new versions. I'll open them all in the Gimp, choosing the "yes, create a new version to protect my snaps" option, and wait ten minutes for it to finish loading them all! Or I could just go back to using gthumb, which works!

I'm glad that this thing is replacing gthumb as Ubuntu's standard Gnomey photo management tool. I mean, it's not as if batch processing and resizing and actually understanding the metadata that my camera includes about the orientation of the photograph matters to me. Yeah, I know I can go fix it rather than complaining, but I'm a bit bemused. The batch processing stuff I can (almost) understand being omitted at version 0.3.4 of a photo management tool, but ... resizing? I guess all the F-Spot people have massive pipes and hard disks, so don't ever need to resize. This has been part n of "resiak tries to live the Gnomebuntu dream and fails dismally!". Thank you for listening!

Edit: Solutionized!

The internet's Stuart Langridge has provided a handy answer: if you choose to export the photographs to, say, a directory, you can resize them in the process. He also provides a sensible quality-preservation explanation. I maintain that it's not obvious... Thanks, Aq; lazyweb strikes again!

A Stroopwafel-flavoured coda!

My parent brought me some maple syrup stroopwafels back from Canadia to replenish my supplies! Yay! However, the misleadingly-sized packaging made me sad.

(Yes, this is another technical post. Sorry, embitteredpoet. For those of you uninterested in the rest of this post, take a look at a stuffed squirrel riding a go-cart for sale on eBay.)

Like most geeks, I am not a big fan of HTML email. This is partly because my email client is mutt, which is text-only, and partly because HTML email tends to be full of mad flashing things, images and other badness.

When I write email, I tend to use text formatting similar to that of Markdown. By design, Markdown source is human-readable, so it's a pretty sensible set of conventions to use for emphasis, links etc. in plain text. This works pretty well for people with similar tastes in email clients, but is suboptimal for people who use things capable of rendering rich text. Ideally, those people would see the text as rendered by running it through the markdown command — that is, as HTML. One way to accomplish this would be to write plugins for every graphical email client under the sun; the other, more practical way is to render it before I send the email and send HTML email.

I'm instinctively offended by the suggestion, but neither of my reasons for hating HTML email apply here: I'd still send the Markdown source as the plain text version, and the messages wouldn't be any more full of crap than they are in plain text. I think I should duct tape this functionality onto the side of mutt. My Googlings have not found anyone else who's done this before, but I figure I should check: dear Lazyweb, have you seen scripts to do this that I could use rather than writing my own? I'd probably write a script that acts as /usr/sbin/sendmail as far as mutt is concerned, but which checks the plain-text bit for Markdown syntax and generates the text/html part if necessary.

(Also, I should make pyljpost.vim understand Markdown, but that involves learning Python.)

I'm sure I knew this at some point, but if you put set spell spelllang=en_gb into your .vimrc, you get spell chucking. If you have syntax highlighting on and you're editing code, it'll only spell chuck comments and strings, not the code itself. Neat. (:help spell for more info, etc.)

Small crisis here: our Netgear WGR614v6 cable modem/router/access point badger has performed its “No! I'm not going to actually respond to wireless traffic! Ha ha ha ha!” trick again. This happens periodically, for no readily apparent reason. (I think it's to do with enabling or disabling the MAC-based access restriction stuff, but it's not easily reproducible, mainly because we can't figure out how to make it work again other than waiting for a few weeks. The real solution is just to replace the router, and I'm doing this.) Anyway, those of us in the same house as the router don't have a problem, because we can just use wires, but those next door kinda can't. One of them has an essay due tomorrow and needs at least one blagotube to finish the essay, so I decided it was time to turn my laptop into an access point.

That's enough tech stuff for now. I'll post some Amsterdam photos and stuff soon, I promise.

Right, I'm up with my grandma for Christmas. She (and a few others from this branch of my family) live on Rousay in Orkney. If you run over to Google Maps and look at Rousay, you'll see that it's ... isolated. Needless to say, I'm back to dialup. I made my Toshiba Satellite A50-112 laptop's software modem work! It seemed to be harder this year than it was last year. Here's what I had to do. Maybe someone else will find this useful!

Right, that's enough from me. Sorry for spamming the planets. You can kill me when you next see me if you want to.

I have been a happy Galeon user for quite some time. Recently, the Galeon team decided that their time would be better spent adding all of the superiorities of Galeon to Epiphany (as extensions where possible, to the core otherwise), and so I decided to try Epiphany. It turns out that Epiphany can do most of the cool things I use Galeon for already, and quite a few more: it has a GreaseMonkey extension, for instance. However, there are indeed a number of things missing. I never bothered to switch back to Galeon, because I could live without them.

Until now, because I just lost part of an application for a summer job at IBM because it doesn't fucking well respect the "emacs"-style keybindings I have configured GTK to use. Of course, I keep forgetting this and trying to use ^W to delete the last word. Bye bye browser tab. I should have learnt by now never to write anything even vaguely substantial directly into a browser rather than into gvim, but it's still useless. What's the point of using a toolkit if you randomly break bits of it?

(This is already mentioned in http://live.gnome.org/Epiphany/GaleonIssues, so no need for me to file a bug.)