So over the last few days I decided that I wanted to upgrade my distro from Ubuntu 10.10 to something a bit newer. I like that debian has tons and tons of packages available to them…..add their backports repo and you have tons of new packages too!

After trying the latest Fedora 15, Debian Testing (wheezy), Xubuntu 11.04 and Ubuntu 11.04 I settled back to the tried and true Ubuntu. I’m not really digging this whole unity interface (which is why I put off the upgrade to 11.04 for so long) but I’ll deal with it.

The only thing missing from the equation were lots of new packages…..so I decided to add the debian-backports repo to my ubuntu install:

Create /etc/apt/sources.list.d/debian-backports.list with the following contents:

deb http://backports.debian.org/debian-backports squeeze-backports main contrib non-free
deb-src http://backports.debian.org/debian-backports squeeze-backports main contrib non-free

Add this in /etc/apt/preferences.d/debian-backports

Package: *
Pin: origin backports.debian.org
Pin-Priority: 100

Finally, run this:

sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver hkp://subkeys.pgp.net AED4B06F473041FA
sudo aptitude update

So what the hell does all this do exactly?

1. We added a new repo to our package manager…standard issue…
2. We “pinned” the packages from the debian-backports repo to be very low priority. We don’t want them being pulled in because they are potentially unstable and untested. So we want to prioritize tested, stable ubuntu packages first.
3. We have to import the key for the debian-backports repo because it doesn’t come standard in the keyring

sudo aptitude <package>/squeeze-backports

sudo aptitude -t squeeze-backports <package>

aptitude versions <package>

So I recently reformatted my laptop and I wanted to checkout one of our BZR repositories so I could get some work done. Unfortunately (fortunately?) the bzr checkout command kept spitting back this error:

After much fiddling with the server and my local settings (yes the username and password were correct) I stumbled upon the most bazaar solution. Running:

$sudo apt-get remove python-pycurl

Solved all my problems and I was able to perform a successful checkout.

Hey All,

I apologize for not having any updates. I’ve been busy with work and haven’t really done any personal projects or coding =(

However, I finally got some free time and I’ve been wanting to fix something that has bugged me for a while now. I have my wonderful HTPC and it’s setup up to use XBMC to play all the media that stored on my fileserver. In the past I’ve always had to press the button on my case to turn the darn thing on. Well I got tired of that and I figured there had to be a way to turn on my computer with the remote. It’s got a USB dongle that stays lit up, so that means it’s powered and the OS is waiting for commands. (BTW I made sure to enable wake on USB in my bios for this to work!)

As the old saying goes, necessity is the mother of all invention, well I needed to become more lazy so I wrote this little script that finds a gyration remote dongle on your USB subsystem and allows for it to be used as a device to wake the system from the S3 (suspend) state. This init script runs on boot to keep the settings persistent after a reboot.

#!/bin/bash
# gyrationWakeFromS3.sh

#
# Author: Robert Navarro 9/11/10
# Contact: crshman[at]gmail.com
#
# This init script finds a usb device by 'device' and makes it so it can be used to wake up a system from the S3 state

# Set /proc/acpi/wakeup to allow USB devices to wake the system
# sudo sh -c "echo USB3 > /proc/acpi/wakeup"

device='Gyration'

# Grab the pci ID for our device
pciID=$(cat /proc/bus/input/devices |grep -A2 -m1 $device |grep S\: |awk -F'/' '{ print $4 }')
#echo $pciID

usbID=$(cat /proc/acpi/wakeup |grep $pciID |awk -F' ' '{ print $1 }')
#echo $usbID

echo $usbID > /proc/acpi/wakeup

Just drop that script into your /etc/init.d/ folder and run the following:

#sudo update-rc.d gyrationWakeFromS3.sh defaults

Whala! You should now have resume support from your Gyration device. A little note here, in the init.d file you can certainly change which device wakes your system by changing the value of the ‘device’ variable.

Drop me a line if you have any questions about this!

Hey All,

I REALLY REALLY apologize for not updating this thing. School has been quite ridiculous for the better part of this year. Nonstop labs and homework, I can’t wait until the end of this quarter…I may actually be able to breath!

So today’s blog post is about a little script that has been working faithfully for me for some time now. However, I have decided to just recently release it to the public. I’m not sure how much exposure it’ll get, but it’s out there now…well almost!

This script is used to organize your digital movie collection (you know, all the rips of your legitimately purchased movies?) I personally think this script is the best thing since sliced bread, but as the author I may be slightly biased… The script will look in your movie directory for an imdb.txt file that contains the imdb URL for that movie (it’ll also look in .nfo files) Once it finds the imdb URL the magic begins! The script pulls the official movie title from imdb along with the release year. The script also grabs posters and backdrops from TMDB to make your collection XBMC friendly. Once armed with this information it moves your movies into the specified directory and renames all the folders with the format: “<Movie Title> (<Release Year>)” The script takes into account special characters that Windows can’t stomach. (Such as :, which gets translated to ; )

As Billy Mays would say….But wait! There’s more!

The script also reads the original source directories for the strings 720p and 1080p. If it finds either of these strings the resultant output folder name will change to:” <Movie Title> (<Release Year>) HD <resolution>” Eventually I’d like to add support for reading the media files themselves and checking what resolution they really are, but for now folder names will have to do.

I am a fan of Asian films, primarily Korean Dramas and Japanese Action flicks. I personally choose to isolate this genre of film from my regular movie set. As such, this script has the added bonus of separating films that it deems are “asian”. (This is user controlled of course!)

Now for the goodies, where do I get it?

You can clone the source (and report bugs) from my codaset project page:

http://codaset.com/phiivo/movie-magic

Hopefully this script benefits some people as it has benefited me. This has saved me loads of time and has help to unify my media collection in a singular format. Once again, sorry for the lack of posts…I’ll try to keep updating this thing as I’ll probably have some more time after this quarter.

Hey All,

So for the past few hours I’ve been reading a fantastic book that Jeff Atwood mentioned at Dev Days LA and also posted about on his blog. He’s a really cool guy and chit chatted briefly <– really briefly about http load balancers. During that conversation he mentioned that he was really a “noob” with hardware and all the underlying stuff, I was shocked and now have a much greater respect for the man. I was thinking he was going to be some snobby I know it all, TOTALLY NOT the case!

Anyways, he recommended Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming and I figured I’d give it a shot. I’ll be honest, I “procured” this book using some unconventional methods, but 2 chapters in….and I bought it. It’s a FANTASTIC overview of what some of the most respected, and quite humble, minds in the programming world have to say. It’s really easy to connect to the different developer interviews and I feel like I’ve learned a few things just reading the first couple of chapters.

One underlying message that I feel from this book is that communication is key for successful programmers. These days you can’t be huddled up in your room coding away on your own, interaction is the way of the future and I think it’s a great thing.

Thanks for the heads up Jeff!