the-shrike.net

aka (赤)
Originally uploaded by curson

I’ve finally decided to publish my irssi IRC client theme. It’s kind of a coming out, I’ve been tuning this theme to my liking for the past 5-6 years, bits by bits, slowly adjusting to what I prefer.
I really hope someone would find this interesting and appealing as his/her own theme. I’ve sent an email to the irssi team in order for it to be added on the main gallery of the irssi.org website, which would be quite c00l for an irssi lover as I am.

Any eventual feedback is of course very welcome.
The file is here: aka.theme. Just put it in .irssi/ and load it by issuing the command /set theme aka in Irssi.
Enjoy! ;)

I’ve been struggling quite a lot lately with my beloved Opera browser and flash video (read: YouTube and so on).
Even if the configuration of the flash player/plugin on my Gentoo looked perfectly working (Firefox was playing flash video flawlessly…), I was unable to enjoy them with Opera, which is my main browser.
Well, looking at the fact that I am in Tokyo enjoying all the pressure of my JAL training, I didn’t actually looked deeply into the problem trying to find a solution, until this afternoon, when straight back from the training center I don’t know why, but I found unbearably annoying to have to open another browser just to watch a video… my geek side took the command and a quick jump into Gentoo’s Forum gave me all I needed to solve the problem (refer here for the relevant post!).

Apparently, was just a matter of re-linking the plugin:

# ln -s /opt/netscape/plugins/flashplayer.xpt
/opt/opera/lib/opera/plugins/flashplayer.xpt
# ln -s /opt/netscape/plugins/libflashplayer.so
/opt/opera/lib/opera/plugins/libflashplayer.so

plus changing the /opt/netscape plugin path in Opera Preferences Downloads to the /opt/opera path (2 Mime types) works. In a new setup Opera takes the right path automatically, when the symlinks are made first. So only putting these 2 symlinks in the ebuild would be an (ugly) temporary fix…

Needless to say, now everything is working!
I’m missing following the OpenSource community (I really don’t have time even to keep the pace with all the news around…), but it’s good to see it’s still helpful as ever! ;)

Lately I started to notice minor problems and weird behaviour with the way gaim was dealing with my friends’ avatars on MSN. Ok, I know it’s not something vital, but sometimes a little of eye candy is what you need… anyway: I noticed that with people that have already upgraded to Windows Live Messenger (the evolution of MSN messenger? O_o) gaim got crazy, messing up the avatar and pratically not displaying any of them anymore for those contacts. I was about as sure as I’m still called Federico that the problem wasn’t directly gaim-related, but that the cause was probably somewhere in a new way the new impressive (yes, sarcasm is in excess in this post tonight…) MSN client of mother Microsoft has chosen to manage the avatars… but hey, I was still stuck with gaim-2.0.0_beta3-r2, and was worth a try updating.
Gosh, mommy alwyas tells me it’s better to stay with what you have, if it’s working. But I’m not used to listen to much to what she tells anyway, so I emerged the last beta6 available in portage. It’s uglier than how it was before, but seems definitely more stable and less buggy than the previous beta version, which is good.

But then the problems came… apparently having updated gaim resulted in a now “broken” library linking for the d-bus sub-system. ARGH! (someone could explain to me what exactly d-bus is on my system for, after all? It’s always a pain messing with it and its dependencies). A whole bunch of program were by then complaining with the same message:

error while loading shared libraries: libdbus-1.so.2: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

and of course not starting at all.
After a couple of re-emerging of some of them, hoping for a re-linking of the missing library or the installation of it in a new slot, I found out I was still in the same situation as above.
What to do? Of course, google it.
This was te relevant result. Following this post and doing:

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libdbus-1.so.3 /usr/lib/libdbus-1.so.2

solved the problem just fine, even revdep-rebuil stopped complaining. It probably isn’t the cleanest solution around, but it’s working just fine.

Sometimes my Gentoo just scares me (not that this won’t make me upgrade again the next time I’d feel the itch :D).

As some of you may know (or may not) I’m the happy owner of a Video iPod G5 (30 GB).
Support under Linux is well known, and let me say that I really find myself more confident in using programs like GTKPod & GPixPod rather than that big fat elephant that is iTunes (yes, I tried it on windows… I promise to not boot that again. Really!). They work, and they work well, but something that is still missing is the ability to import (and thus to convert) video files to the shiny iPoddy which seems to have quite difficoult tastes when dealing with video, speaking of video and audio codecs.

But mplayer (and mencoder) is a powerful thing, and you’re using an intelligent Operative System: get advantage of that.
Someone (not me) did exactly that, and wrote down a simple script to do all the work [*].
Great.

Now, this works well, it actually stress my CPU quite bad, but that’s mainly because Haldir is a very old folk. Just remember a few Gentoo tips to correctly setup your system to work with video2ipod (or whatever you’d like to call it).

• Be sure to emerge mplayer with encoder and aac support, thus using something like USE="aac encoder" emerge -a win32codecs mplayer. Of course you’ll need all the other codecs too, but that’s a fundamental part for the script to work: it needs aac audio codecs up and running.
• Remember to emerge the relative codec too: emerge -a faad2.
• Remember to activate the flag for “aac codecs” when emerging ffmpeg too: USE="aac" emerge -a ffmpeg

That’s good, you should be done with a system able to run the script an to convert your .avi, .mpg, .wmv... file to the .mp4 format you need for your iPod. Then upload them via GTKPod as if they were musical files, and that’s it: a fashion and cool way to discharge the battery of your Apple friend ;)))

[*]: The original script page is no longer available. Here you can find a local copy of the script hosted on my server. If you’re using Gentoo, this is a good place where where to start looking for info on the converting process.