nicam.ch

Time Machine with Netatalk on Lion

nicam — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 12:42:48 +0000

After the OS X Lion upgrade I couldn’t get my Time Machine to work with my Ubuntu based Nas. It turns out Apple bumped the required AFP commands to make it work with TimeMachine. You need AFP 2.2 under Ubuntu to make it work. As I was to lazy to compile it myself I found a easier solution.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:stefanor/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install netatalk

Afterwards your TimeMachine should work again.

If you can’t see your TimeMachine Share in the Disk Selection of TimeMachine make sure you executed the following command:

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

Bonus:

If you want to limit the size Time Machine will use just append volsizelimit:500000 to your Time Machine share in /etc/netatalk/AppleVolumes.default

500000 is 500 GB

Example of my /etc/netatalk/AppleVolumes.default:

/media/nas/TimeMachine/ TimeMachine options:tm,usedots,upriv,volsizelimit:500000

Offline storing dynamic content

nicam — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 20:29:57 +0000

As you probably know we’re at liip are doing the HTML5 based Webapps. Now our customer wishes to have his iPhone / iPad HTML5 to be accessible offline.

As I found this topic super interesting I started writing a proposal how in my opinion this goal could be achieved best. As our content is highly dynamic (news articles) the normal html5 cache manifest just won’t cut it.

Off course we will store css, js and static images in the cache manifest. But from what I read it is just not the right place for highly dynamic content.

Now let’s cut to the cheese and come to my plan:

Caching the Page

Responses from the backend will be stored by their url in the local storage. Example:

key => /2011/09/05/schweiz
value => foo bar page content

We wrap the YUI IO Object and upon each request we check if the requested URL is not already stored in our local storage. If so we will call the callback function directly and feed it the response from the local storage. That way the user will have a super fast experience if the response is already in the cache.

Caching the Images

Caching the images is another problem as the browser gets their content on his own. They also get stored by their path in the local storage. Example:

key => /image/large_cropped/article/2011/09/05/N_IVTZU/image/IWIGD-ein-davoser-als-ehrenbuerger-des-suedsudans

The value in this case needs to be base64 encoded value of the binary stream. The backend image API will offer the option to request the image base64 encoded rather than just returning the normal image.

The pictures nodes that are not fed by the cache manifest won’t have a src tag anymore on the iPad / iPhone view. Their url is stored in some other attribute. In this example I’ll use base64Src=”" as the attribute. This will prevent the browser from loading the pictures whenever it’s actually online. That way we prevent the browser from fetching content we already have.

Once a request is loaded / delivered from the cache, we will loop through all the tags and populate the images. To do that we can simple read the base64Src attribute. If they’re not yet cached we will request them through XHR. Afterwards we can fill the images with a little javascript trick:

document.getElementById("hero-graphic").src='data:image/jpeg;base64,' +
localStorage.getItem('/image/large_cropped/article/2011/09/05/N_IVTZU/image/IWIGD-ein-davoser-als-ehrenbuerger-des-suedsudans')

Prefetching

All this fancy caching won’t give much benefit if we don’t build a prefetching mechanism. Once the page is fully loaded and in a somewhat “idle” state we will start prefetching content.

To know what should be prefetched, we will request a list from the backend which contains the urls of all pages that need to be prefetched as well as all the necessary images. Doing it like that gives a few very nice possibilities:

The backend is in control which pages are stored localy, so it can easily change every day.
We fetch content sequentially, this means in case of interruption the user doesn’t lose all of his download, just the data from the currently active request.
As we already know how many articles and images we have to fetch we can calculate a quite accurate progress bar
We have the possibility to pause the downloads at any time. The user would only lose the current request.

This whole approach would give us a solid prefetching without having to touch much of existing code. We can also implement nice UI features like the ability to see the download status as well as making it configurable how much content should be stored.

The only problem I see currently is that we don’t have a way to tell if the iPhone / iPad is online or offline. We could try to detect that based on the IP the request has in the backend or in the time it takes to prefetch the first article. Sadly there’s no isWifi boolean exposed to javascript as far as i know.

What do you think about it? Any comments, corrections or better approaches are appreciated.

Enable JsLint in Sublime Text 2

nicam — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 20:15:51 +0000

I develop quite a lot javascript these days and a perfect tool to ensure code quality is JSLint. Back then I had it integrated into TextMate, the same can be done to Sublime Text 2 through it’s build Environments.

I’m going to show you how to do it:

1. Create a new Build Environment in Sublime Text:

Afterwards a file will open, paste the following text into it:

{
"cmd": ["java", "org.mozilla.javascript.tools.shell.Main", "/Users/YOURUSERNAME/Library/JSLint/jslint.js", "$file"],
"selector": "*.js"
}

Save the file at this Location:

/Users/YOURUSERNAME/Library/Application Support/Sublime Text 2/Packages/User

Replace YOURUSERNAME with your username e.g. nicam

2. Install Rhino on your system

$ curl ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/js/rhino1_7R3.zip > /tmp/rhino.zip

$ cd /tmp

$ unzip rhino.zip

$ mkdir ~/Library/Java

$ mkdir /home/nicam/Library/Java/Extensions

$ mv /tmp/rhino1_7R3/js.jar ~/Library/Java/Extensions/

3. Install JSLint

$ mkdir ~/Library/JSLint

$ curl http://dl.dropbox.com/u/419439/jslint.js > ~/Library/JSLint/jslint.js

4. Enjoy

In your SublimeText 2 just hit CMD+B to execute the build.

Remote Control iTunes with Android

nicam — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 11:13:31 +0000

I used to have an iPhone and what I really liked was the ability to control iTunes through the Apple Remote app. Now there’s an App for that on Android. It’s called TunesRemote+. The Process is the same as it was with the iPhone:

1. Install the App
2. Pair your device with your iTunes
3. Enjoy!

Grab it in the Android Market:

Taking a break from Ubuntu

nicam — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 19:22:41 +0000

I tried Ubuntu 10.10 now for 14 days and I think I need a break and will return to Mac OS X. Trying to find out what I really want and really like. The main reason is that I currently have to learn so much new stuff in the office and are pretty busy with school so I dont have much spare time figuring stuff out. The Experiment so far was fun but still proves that it’s not quite ready yet. There are things that I liked but other things that I dont like so much.

Good things:

memory usage is lower
boot time is lower
ThinkPad specialties: trackPoint is awesome!, powered USB Port
Integrated WWAN
Android Teethering works out of the box and far more stable than in OS X
Workspaces, You only see the apps of the current workspaces when you do Alt+Tab
Aptitude and Ubuntu Software Center
Switching Tabs in Chrome using the scroll wheel

Bad things

The screens are not hotplugging, everytime I plug in the screen I have to press the “Beamer” Button a few times until I get what I want

Network transfer speed is slow. I tried a lot of things and in the end I managed to get about 18 mb/s which is far lower than OS X with 45 mb/s. It might seem that I over react here but since I’m having all my data on my nas, Network speed is really important to me. Loosing more than half the speed is just inacceptable.

Scrolling really sucks. It took me 6 hours to find a way to increase the scroll speed in chrome which in the end is just a hack. The hack itself is pretty buggy, imwheel dies a few times a day which is pretty annoying. It’s no fun do debug basic stuff like that, especialy since there are tickets asking for a scroll speed setting back from 2003.

Panel items are moving when switching screens. I’m really starting to think that Ubuntu is not made for dual screens. I constantly have to rearrange the applets and icons in the top panel after I change from internal to external monitor on my notebook. This is annoying, I tried to “fix” them in position but that’s not helping either.

Sleep is funky. Sleep works out of the box but it’s not as nice as in OS X, you’ll have to wait a while till it goes to sleep or wakes up. If you have an external monitor connected you always have to move the cursor a bit so X Server becomes active. Also if you send it into sleep while beeing plugged into the external screen and wake it after you removed the screen you’re unable to log in. It somehow shows the normal login box as If you just started the machine but doesn’t let you login, it just loops five times over the login procedure and sleep status text and then gives you a blackscreen. Also often stuff doesnt work anymore after sleep. In the beginning the trackpad scrolling stopped working after sleep, if you have a “.*” rule in imwheel it also stops working after sleep. Figuring stuff like that out takes a lot of time.

GPU Acceleration for IntelHD isn’t ready yet. On nvidia GPU Accelerated Video works fairly well. On Intel HD it doesnt really work. The out of the box drivers encoding 1080p very sluggish with lots of artifacts. After spending hours installing bleeding edge drivers and compiling xbmc by hand I got it playing ok but still not really watchable.

Application Problems

Workspace overlapping windows dont resize. If you increase a windows size, say using a big external monitor and then unplug it, the window doesn’t change it’s size to fit the internal screen. They overlap to another workspace. In OS X you can fix that by click on Window > Zoom. I didn’t find anything like it in Ubuntu.

No Photomanager Application that’s close to Apperture. I tried different photo applications but couldn’t find what I was looking for. Shotwell does A good job but is more like iPhoto. Nowhere close to Aperture.

Skype version is super old. I really liked it when they changed the Skype layout a few weeks ago on OS X. Even harder is it to go back to an ancient version of Skype which is the only one available for Linux. It can’t disable notifications for certain chat’s which is extremly annoying because people are constantly changing they “Personal Messages”.

Backup – I tried different Backup Tools in Ubuntu, they are ok but dont really work out of the box if you want to have a full copy of your disk like in Time Machine. I settled for “Back in Time”. When I told it to backup on / it started to backup all mounted network shares as well as devices which is messed up. Second try was to apply it only on the homefolder. Problem was that it started to backup certain hidden .files which contained mounted volumes which had a infinite recursion effect. Luckily I noticed before it was to late.

JDownloader has graphical issues. Jdownloader sometimes has problems displaying captchas in the interface, this is really annoying as I use it a lot.

Missing Applications

Some application alternatives I chose weren’t as good as the ones I used before, which increased my desire to switch back, this was mostly caused by:

Textmate
Aperture
Office 2011 for Mac
VMware Fusion

Also I should mention that I really liked Gwibber as a Twitter application, I will miss you little friend

Final Conclusion

As you see on my list it’s pretty obvious. The very few advantages just dont justify the disadvantages. So far I’m happy with Ubuntu as my Server and Media Center but I cant yet use it as my everyday system. I think the biggest problem right now for me is the multi monitor support. It works but is to flacky for me. If you’re just browsing the web and listen to some music Ubuntu is good for you but currently it doesn’t fit my needs. I really hope they’ll improve the multi monitor support and make it possible to adjust the scroll wheel speed. The hardware related issues will probably never be fully gone. If you think how less OEM support they get how much is working is really awesome, on the other hand it’s not enough for me. Why doesn’t ubuntu pair up with a hardware manufacturer like HP, Lenovo or Dell and create hardware that works perfectly on Ubuntu and will in the next few releases? Yes I’m aware that there’s Ubuntu ready and Ubuntu certified but that’s not hard- and software that were made for each other it’s just told to be working. IMHO this is what makes Apple’s notebooks so good at the moment.

That’s mostly all I have to say right now. I hope my experiment could help you to get a bit a better picture about Ubuntu’s current state. I’m not sure if I will try it again soon or just sell the notebook and stick with my mac. I’m backing up my current Ubuntu install as I write this so there’s always a way back.

Mac OS X – Ubuntu switching Grid

nicam — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 22:50:08 +0000

Just a short list that Displays the Software alternatives I chose when I switched to Ubuntu from OS X

Music: iTunes => Banshee
Twitter: Tweetie => Gwibber
IRC: Linkinus => XChat-GNOME
Office: MS Office 2011 for Mac => Office 2007 (Wine) *
Photo Library: Aperture => Shotwell Photo Manager
Picture manipulation: Photoshop CS5 => Photoshop CS5 (Wine)
Virtualisation: VMware Fusion => VirtualBox OSE
Feed Reader: Gruml => Liferea Feed Reader
Editor: TextMate => Sublime X (Alpha)

* I went with Wine for Office because of School related Reasons. I need to make sure they look alright on the teachers machine – who uses Microsoft Office.

Also I should mention that a lot of my every day programms run native on Linux:

Chrome
Firefox
VLC
Thunderbird
Skype
JDownloader
Dropbox
Mysql
PHP

How to increase Scroll speed in Google Chrome / Chromium

nicam — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 21:12:04 +0000

I was searching like crazy to increase the scrollspeed in chrome because it only was 4 lines per scroll which caused my finger to hurt like hell. It’s not really a fix merly a workaround. Remember to put Imwheel into your autostart programms.

$ sudo apt-get install imwheel

place the following in ~/.imwheelrc

“^google-chrome$”
None, Up, Button4, 2
None, Down, Button5, 2
“.*”
None,Thumb1,Alt_L|Left
None,Thumb2,Alt_L|Right

The thumb stuff is because otherwise imwheel breaks your thumb buttons.
Then run imwheel from the command line.
$ imwheel

2 is the value in which will be used to multiply your scrollwheel speed

Improve your Gnome with nicer Icons

nicam — Mon, 27 Dec 2010 00:03:25 +0000

Just stumbeled over these Icons, they improve the overall feeling in Gnome a lot

Check them out:

http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php/Faenza?content=128143

How to get better Transfer speeds with Realtek r8168

nicam — Sun, 26 Dec 2010 19:29:47 +0000

The Realtek r8168 which is in the Lenovo Edge 13 is recognised as r8169 in Ubuntu 10.10 Maverik. I only got 15 mb/s Transfer, after following this Guide (1) I got between 15 and 20 mb/s. Not much but at least something

(1) http://www.rvdavid.net/how-to-get-gigabit-speeds-from-rtl81118168b-pci-express-gigabit-ethernet-controller-on-ubuntu-linux/#comment-3054

Hope this helps someone

Fixing fullscreen flash issues with Ubuntu 10.10 and Intel HD in Chrome

nicam — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 19:07:23 +0000

Ubuntu had a problem displaying the fullscreen view of youtube videos. Luckily it is fixed in the new Flash 10.2 beta which also takes a lot of load of the CPU and uses the GPU for video. Installing it was a bit tricky first.

First you have to download libflashplayer.so from Adobe. Download it here
Close your browsers.
Afterwards you’ll need to put it into /usr/lib/flashplugin-installer and overwrite the existing one.
Afterwards you open chrome again and go to: about:plugins, click on Details on the left Side.
Look for flash. You’ll see that you currently have 2 versions installed, disable “Shockwave Flash 10.1 r103″

In the Flash section you should see Shockwave Flash 10.2 d151 now.

Have fun with full HD Video on Chrome.

This tutorial is based on: http://lifehacker.com/5705588/how-to-get-the-flash-102-beta-working-in-google-chrome