Stefan aka Noneus

I have to use Matlab for university. But starting it is annoying. You can’t link directly to the matlab-startup-script in a .desktop-file, because it crashes, if it is not started from a terminal. To overcome this hurdle I start matlab with a xterm. The xterm minimizes itself once started. You can find icons in <matlab-basedir>/X11/icons. The command I used is: xterm -iconic -e <matlab-basedir>/bin/matlab.

UPDATE:
I’m currently testing Kubuntu. Starting matlab in KDE can be done without an taskbar entry with kstart:

kstart –skiptaskbar –iconify xterm -e /home/noneus/Programs/matlab/bin/matlab

Last weekend I decided to start my MTB season. I didn’t want to go too deep into the alps because of possible snow so I chose Tegernsee. After an one hour drive I arrived at my starting point for the day.

I started with the Tour #17614: Tegernsee – Aueralm zum Sonnbichl Downhill. It’s a pretty nice tour. The uphill part was pretty bumpy  and steep at times. The downhill part was a lot of fun after I passed the snow at the top. Alot of highspeed stuff.

Next I wanted to make Tour #16542: Fockenstein – Von Bad Wiessee nach Stinkergraben – Bike & Hike. But I should have looked a bit closer on the track, because I started it the wrong way around. After about an hour with a lunch break and an annoying chainsuck later I finally figured it out. So I went to the parking-lot. Now I started the tour the right way. After a short uphill at the start it was just some highspeed roads to the first uphill. The uphill was fine for about 500m. After that it was snow for a couple of hundred meters. So I carried my bike through snow. NO FUN! Once I was done I got to a nice flat road which led to a single trail I had to go uphill :/ But the reward was nice The Aueralm. After some beverages I carried and rode my bike uphill the last few 100m’s. Now it was downhill to the parking-lot. A lot of muddy fun I crashed every 30m or so

Overall a fun day. But I’ll wait for at least another week to ride again. Carrying your bike through snow is no fun.

GPX-Track:

2009.05.10 – Sonnbichl – Stinkergraben

I just added preliminary support for EXIF ranming. EXIF data is created by digital cameras and contains information like shot-date. The new nmrename feature renames files based on a pattern. here’s an excerpt from the help text:

-exif [PATTERN] : New Pathnames will be replaced by PATTERN.

PATTERN can have the following keywords:
Date:
%Y: year
%M: month
%D: day
%h: hour
%m: minute
%s: second

Other:
%o: original filename

Here’s an example output:

mrename 100_0505.jpg -exif “%Y%M%D_%h%m%s__%o.jpg”
>> Adding ’100_0505.jpg’ to filelist.
>>
>> Replacing pathnames with exif data from pattern ‘%Y%M%D_%h%m%s__%o.jpg’:
>>
>> ’100_0505.jpg’ –> ’20080125_185311__100_0505.jpg’
>>
>> Start renaming?
<< [y/n]:n

You can download it from Subversion. Take a look at the nmrename-Download-Page.

I got Left4Dead fever. Left4Dead is a shooter by valve. Unfortunatley only for Windows. So I need wine or one of its forks to play the game. First I thought Wine was the deal. But it was not. It doesn’t support the advanced graphics stuff. I had to turn down all graphics in order to get playable perfomance with wine. But there was still stuttering.

Cedega on the other hand works much better. Decent Framerates right out of the box. I was really suprised how much better cedega works with source games. Just make sure to start the Games with their CDDB profile from the cedega UI and NOT from the Steam Games List.

I recently bought a cheap Logitech mouse for my EEE Pc. But the mouse came with a very long cable i didn’t really need. So I tried my luck shortening the cable. It’s pretty easy. Just open the mouse. unplug the usb-cable from the pcb and cut the cable. Strip the wires. Stripping the wires without a wire striping tool can be really hard, because the cables are really thin. Next I simply twisted the wires and put a bit of solder on there. Put on some electrical tape, so there is no chance the wires can touch. Put it all back together and tada!

So I bought the Android for a reason. Developing. And that’s what I did. Since there is no really great Podcastfetcher for the Android Platform I decided to write my own. It’s called APodder. (Guess what the A stands for. ) After a few days of work. I got some base functionality going:

• Downloading and parsing RSS2.0 feeds
• Storing podcasts and their shows in a SQLite databse
• An Interface that has a podcast-view and a show-view (see the pictures below).
• Possibility to download shows with showing a progressbar (see the pictures below).

Not everything works 100% as I have it in my mind. But I’m getting there. This is my first bigger project in Java. Until now I only developed in C++, C and Python.But thanks to Eclipse and its awesome AutoCompletition I’m doing quite fine. Expect to see more APodder news in February. I have exams in university in the end of january. So I will minimize developing hours.

I couldn’t resist… I bought an Android Developer Phone. It was quite expensive. The device itself was 399$. Getting an Android Market Account 25$ and a whopping 91.71$ for taxes. 42.60$ for shipping. So in Total I paid about about 550$ for this phone. Shipment from the US to Germany took about 5 days. I won’t make a review about the phone-software. Just search Youtube for G1 Android Review. But I will review the Development Tools shortly in this post (In more detail in about a month).

But first things first. The device came in a simple white box. There was no fancy boxing. No CDs. Just the device with a charger for America (I charge the phone through USB), and USB-cable and Headphones:

The box of my Android phone.

The Box opened with the phone inside.

Contents of the Android Box.

You can find the complete specs for the phone on Wikipedia. A great feature is the supported UMTS speeds. 7.2MBit/s down and 2.2MBit/s up (in theory). The build quality of the device could be better. Especially the mechanism to open and close the keyboard. When the device is closed the display wiggles, which is kind of annoying. But enought about the device. Let’s talk developing.

Read the rest of this entry »

I decided to write my own isomounter. Of course there are enough isomounters. I’m currently doing an internship with a lot of python programming. So I decided to write the whole thing in python with gtk is the toolkit. After 3 hours I have the base functionality working:

It can mount and unmount isos. It’s currently done with sudo mount -o loop,user -t iso9660 <iso> <mountpoint>. But you need the NOPASSWD option in sudo for that. Either I only make the mounter available as root or I integrated the gksu stuff. It doesn’t require any settings atm, because the mountlist is read with mount | grep ‘type iso9660′ | grep ‘/dev/loop’.

NISOMounter will be part of a whole set of iso managing utilities. I plan to make a converter and creator. Both this apps will be a frontend for poweriso. But first I want to clean up the mounter make some pretty icons and read more about uidesign.

UPDATE: Source in: http://trac.noneus.de/nisotools/browser/trunk

Since I can’t get ffmpeg-mt work I tried my luck with coreavc and coreavc-for-linux again. I actually got it working. I can now play h264 1080p without stuttering! I made a package for AUR. Hope it works for you too.

I recently decided to use Kde4 again. I ran in a problem with phonon. It didn’t use my dmix setup. Well I got it working. Phonon detects devices with a new alsa command in the asound.conf called ‘hint’. Here is my new /etc/asound.conf and ~/.asoundrc:

pcm.!default {
type plug
slave.pcm "dmixer"
}
pcm.dsp0 {
type plug
slave.pcm "dmixer"
}
pcm.dmixer {
type dmix
ipc_key 1024
slave {
pcm "hw:0,0"
period_time 0
period_size 1024
buffer_size 8192
rate 44100 #many new cards are 48000 only
}
bindings {
0 0
1 1
}
hint {
show on
description "Onboard Soundcard"
}
}
ctl.dmixer {
type hw
card 0
}

On the lines 25-28 is the part so Phonon find it. Now you can setup Phonon with your new sound device. It has to be on top for all outputs. (I had to set all of them separately.)