Broken/unmaintained Mephisto replaced with Drupal 6

Posted Mon, 03/08/2010 - 02:23 by andrew

... with an eye to upgrading to Drupal 7 it's released and things are ported to use it (notably some decent themes and the OpenID identity provider).

Now that I have a working website/blog again, hopefully I'll get back in the habit of posting useful things!

Getting power button events with HAL

Posted Fri, 05/30/2008 - 08:10 by andrew

I needed to teach the product I’m working on about the ACPI power button, so I fired up dbus-monitor --system to see what events are emitted when the button is pressed. It was easy to find the device in question in d-feet afterwards. Unfortunately, the HAL device objects (/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/computer_logicaldev_input_N) that emit the events for the various ACPI buttons change between machines and even between reboots, so it’s necessary to dynamically discover them by querying HAL for all devices with the “button” capability.

So, how much does Vista's UAC really solve?

Posted Fri, 01/04/2008 - 15:01 by andrew

So, I was hacking on some code on Windows the other day. The DRM for a piece of proprietary software I had a legitimate license for wasn’t working, and thus I had to seek out some… licencing facilitation software. Since such software usually originates from the sketchier regions of the Internet, I ended up infecting my copy of Vista with a trojan horse. That’s one demerit point on my Geek Licence!

Here’s the manifest from the executable:

  1. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>

Setting Emacs 22 for Windows' font to Consolas

Posted Thu, 01/03/2008 - 10:16 by andrew

Emacs 22 for Windows, unlike its X11 counterpart, supports anti-aliased TrueType fonts.

Thus, it looks much better if you set it to use the shiny new Consolas monospaced font included with Vista (or indeed, any other TrueType font you care to use):

Add this to ~/.emacs:

  1. (set-face-font 'default "-outline-Consolas-normal-r-normal-normal-15-112-96-96-c-*-iso8859-1")

Building CSound

Posted Mon, 02/26/2007 - 21:47 by andrew

Just a quick note to myself and others who might want to run TamTam under sugar-jhbuild:

  1. scons buildInterfaces=1 dynamicCsoundLibrary=1
  2. sudo ./install.py
  3. # appears to be correct incantation to install CSound.

It might also be necessary to remove “import csnd” (which was for importing the old CSound python binding) from Util/CSoundClient.py in TamTam itself.

Don’t assume this will actually help you run TamTam itself, though, as the whole thing promptly dies with a floating point exception (logged as signal 8 in the Developer’s Console) on my laptop. :(