Troubleshooting- gnegg

Nokia N900 and iPhone headsets?

For a geek like me, the Nokia N900 is paradise on earth: It’s full Debian Linux in your bag. It has the best IM integration I have ever seen on any mobile device. It has the best VoIP (Skype, SIP) integration I have ever seen on any mobile device and it has one of the coolest multitasking implementations I’ve seen on any mobile device (the card-based task/application switching is fantastic).

Unfortunately, there’s one thing that prevents me from using it (or many other phones) to replace my iPhone: While the whole world agreed on one way to wire a microphone/headphone combination, Apple thought it wise to do it another way, which leads to Apple compatible headsets not working with the N900.

By not working I don’t just mean “no microphone” or even “no sound”. No. I mean “deafening buzzing on both the left and right channel and headset still not being recognized in the software”.

The problem is that I already own iPhone compatible headsets and that it’s way easier to get good iPhone compatible ones around here. I’m constantly listening to audio on my phone (Podcast, Audiobooks). Having to grab the phone out of my bag and unplugging the headphones whenever it rings is inacceptable to me, so I need to have a microphone with my headphones.

Just now though, I found a small adapter which promises to solve that problem, proving once again, that there’s nothing that’s not being sold on the internet.

I ordered one (thankfully one of the international shipping options was less than the adapter itself – something I’m not used to with the smaller stores), so we’ll see how that goes. If it means that I can use a N900 as my one and only device, I’ll be a very happy person indeed.

Windows 2008 / NAT / Direct connections

Yesterday I ran into an interesting problem with Windows 2008’s implementation of NAT (don’t ask – this was the best solution – I certainly don’t recommend using Windows for this purpose).

Whenever I enabled the NAT service, I was unable to reliably connect to the machine via remote desktop or even any other service that machine was offering. Packets sent to the machine were dropped as if a firewall was in between, but it wasn’t and the Windows firewall was configured to allow remote desktop connections.

Strangely, sometimes and from some hosts I was able to make a connection, but not consistently.

After some digging, this turned out to be a problem with the interface metrics and the server tried to respond over the interface with the private address that wasn’t routed.

So if you are in the same boat, configure the interface metrics of both interfaces manually. Set the metric of the private interface to a high value and the metrics of the public (routed) one to a low value.

At least for me, this instantly fixed the problem.

Google Buzz, Android and Google Apps Accounts

I was looking at the Google Android Maps Application that is now providing integrated Google Buzz support, showing buzzes directly on the map and allowing you to buzz (around where I live and work, there has been a tremendous uptake of Google Buzz which makes this really compelling).

However, there’s a little peculiarity about the Android maps application: If your main Google Account you configured (that’s the first one you configure) on the phone is a Google Apps account, Maps will use that for buzz-support (apparently, there’s already some kind of infrastructure for inter-company Buzzing in place). This means that you would only see buzzes from other people in your domain and, because there’s no official support for this out there, only if they are also using an Android phone.

“Mittelpraktisch” as I would say in German.

The obvious workaround is to configure your private gmail account to be your primary account (this is only possible by factory-resetting your device by the way), but this has some disadvantages, mainly the fact that the calendar on the Android phones only supports syncing with the primary account and as it happens, usually it’s the work-calendar (the Apps one) you want synchronized; not the private one (that lingers unused in my case).

To work around this issue, share your work calendar with your private Google account.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t do that as I’m posting this, because the default in the domain configuration is to not allow this. Thankfully, I’m that domain’s administrator, so I could change it (small company. remember.), but it seems to take a while to propagate into the calendar account.

I’ll post more as my investigation turns out more, though it is my gut feeling that this mess will solve itself as Google fixes their Maps application to not use that phantom corporate buzz account.

Snow Leopard and PHP

Earlier versions of Mac OS X always had pretty outdated versions of PHP in their default installation, so what you usually did was to go to entropy.ch and fetch the packages provided there.

Now, after updating to Snow Leopard you’ll notice that the entropy configuration has been removed and once you add it back in, you’ll see Apache segfaulting and some missing symbol errors.

Entropy has not updated the packages to snow leopard yet, so you could have a look at PHP that came with stock snow leopard: This time it’s even bleeding edge: Snow Leopard comes with PHP 5.3.0.

Unfortunately though, some vital extensions are missing, most notably for me, the PostgeSQL extension.

This time around though, Snow Leopard comes with a functioning PHP development toolset, so there’s nothing stopping you to build it yourself, so here’s how to get the official PostgreSQL extension working on Snow Leopard’s stock php:

Make sure that you have installed the current Xcode Tools. You’ll need a working compiler for this.
Make sure that you have installed PostgreSQL and know where it is on your machine. In my case, I’ve used the One-click installer from EnterpriseDB (which persisted the update to 10.6).
Now that Snow Leopard uses a full 64bit userspace, we’ll have to make sure that the PostgreSQL client library is available as a 64 bit binary – or even better, as an universal binary.Unfortunately, that’s not the case with the one-click installer, so we’ll have to fix that first:
1. Download the sources of the PostgreSQL version you have installed from postgresql.org
2. Open a terminal and use the following commands:
```
% tar xjf postgresql-[version].tar.bz2
% cd postgresql-[version]
% CFLAGS="-arch i386 -arch x86_64" ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/mypostgres
% make
```
  make will fail sooner or later because you the postgres build scripts can’t handle building an universal binary server, but the compile will progress enough for us to now build libpq. Let’s do this:
```
% make -C src/interfaces
% sudo make -C src/interfaces install
% make -C src/include
% sudo make -C src/include install
% make -C src/bin
% sudo make -C src/bin install
```
Download the php 5.3.0 source code from their website. I used the bzipped version.

Open your Terminal and cd to the location of the download. Then use the following commands:

% tar -xjf php-5.3.0.tar.bz2
% cd php-5.3.0/ext/pgsql
% phpize
% ./configure --with-pgsql=/usr/local/mypostgres
% make -j8 # in case of one of these nice 8 core macs :p
% sudo make install
% cd /etc
% cp php.ini-default php.ini

Now edit your new php.ini and add the line extension=pgsql.so

And that’s it. Restart Apache (using apachectl or the System Preferences) and you’ll have PostgreSQL support.

All in all this is a tedious process and it’s the price us early adopters have to pay constantly.

If you want an honest recommendation on how to run PHP with PostgreSQL support on Snow Leopard, I’d say: Don’t. Wait for the various 3rd party packages to get updated.

Alt-Space

Today, I was looking into the new jnlp_href way of launching a Java Applet. Just like applet-launcher, this allows one to create applets that depend on native libraries without the usual hassle of manually downloading the files and installing them.

Contrary to applet-launcher, it’s built into the later versions of Java 1.6 and it’s officially supported, so I have higher hopes concerning its robustness.

It’s even possible to keep the applet-launcher calls in there if the user has an older Java Plugin that doesn’t support jnlp_href yet.

So in the end, you just write a .jnlp file describing your applet and add

<param name="jnlp_href" value="http://www.example.com/path/to/your/file.jnlp">

and be done with it.

Unless of course, your JNLP file has a syntax error. Then you’ll get this in your error console (at least in case of this specific syntax error):

java.lang.NullPointerException
    at sun.plugin2.applet.Plugin2Manager.findAppletJDKLevel(Unknown Source)
    at sun.plugin2.applet.Plugin2Manager.createApplet(Unknown Source)
    at sun.plugin2.applet.Plugin2Manager$AppletExecutionRunnable.run(Unknown Source)
    at java.lang.Thread.run(Unknown Source)
Ausnahme: java.lang.NullPointerException

How helpful is that?

Thanks, by the way, for insisting to display a half-assed German translation on my otherwise english OS: Never use locale info for determining the UI langauge, please.

Of course, this error does not give any indication of what the problem could be.

And even worse: The error in question is the topic of this blog post: It’s the dreaded Alt-Space character, 0xa0, or NBSP in ISO 8859-1.

0xa0 looks like a space, feels like a space, is incredibly easy to type instead of a space, but it’s not a space – not in the least. Depending on your compiler/parser, this will blow up in various ways:

pilif@celes ~ % ls | grep gnegg
zsh: command not found:  grep
pilif@celes ~ %
pilif@celes ~ % cat test.php
<?
echo "gnegg";
?>
pilif@celes ~ % php test.php
PHP Parse error:  syntax error, unexpected T_CONSTANT_ENCAPSED_STRING in /Users/pilif/test.php on line 2

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_CONSTANT_ENCAPSED_STRING in /Users/pilif/test.php on line 2
pilif@celes ~ %

and so on.

Now you people in the US with US keyboard layouts might think that I’m just one of those whiners – after all, how stupid must one be to press Alt-Space all the time? Probably stupid enough to deserve stuff like this.

Before you think these nasty thoughts, I ask you to consider the Swiss German keyboard layout though: Nearly all the characters use programmers use are accessed by pressing Alt-[some letter]. At least on the Mac. Windows uses AltGr, or right-alt, but on the mac, any alt will do.

So when you look at the shell line above:

ls | grep gnegg

you’ll see how easy it is to hit alt-space: First I type ls, then space. Then I press and hold alt-7 for the pipe and then, I am supposed to let go of alt and hit space. But because my left hand is on alt and the right one is pressing space, it’s very easy to hit space before letting go of alt.

Now instead of getting immediate feedback, nothing happens. It looks as if the space had been added, when in fact, something else has been added and that something is not recognized as a white space character and thus is something completely different from a space – despite looking exactly the same.

As much fun as reading hexdump -C output is – I need this to stop.

Dear internet! How can I make my Mac (or Linux when using the Mac keyboard layout) stop recognizing Alt-Space?

To take air out of the eventually arriving troll’s sails:

I won’t use Windows again. Thank you. Neither do I want to use Linux on my desktop.
I cannot use the US keybindings because my brain just can’t handle the keyboard layout changing all the time and as I’m a native German speaker, I do have to type umlauts here and then – actually often enough, so that the ¨+vocal combo isn’t acceptable.
While running Mac OS X, I’m stuck with the mac keyboard layout – I can’t use the Windows one.

Above JNLP error (printed here just in case somebody else has the same issue) caused me to lose nearly 5 hours of my life and will force me to work this weekend – who’d expect a XML parser error due to a space that isn’t one when seeing above call stack?

Update: A commenter on reddit.com has recommended to use Ukelele which I did and it helped me to create a custom keyboard layout that makes alt-space work like just space. That’s the best solution for my specific taste, so thanks a lot!

802.11n, Powerline and Sonos

I decided to have a look into the networking setup for my bedroom as lately, I was getting really bad bandwidth.

Earlier, while unable to stream 1080p into my bedrom, I was able to watch 720p, but lately even that has become choppy at best.

In my bedroom, I was using a Sonos Zone Player 100 connected via Ethernet to a Devolo A/V 200MBit power line adapter.

I have been using the switch integrated into the zone player to connect the bedrom MacMini media center and the PS3 to the network. The idea was that powerline will provide better bandwidth than WiFi, which it initially seemed to do, but as I said, lately, this system became really painful to use.

Naturally I had enough and wanted to look into other options.

Here’s a quick list of my findings:

The Sonos ZonePlayer actually acts as a bridge. If one player is connected via Ethernet, it’ll use its mesh network to wirelessly bridge that Ethernet connection to the switch inside the Sonos. I’m actually deeply astonished that I even got working networking with my configuration.
Either my Devolo adaptor is defective or something strange is going on in my power line network – a test using FTP never yielded more than 1 MB/s throughput which explains why 720p didn’t work.
While still not a ratified standard, 802.11n, at least as implemented by Apple works really well and delivers constant 4 MB/s throughput in my configuration.
Not wanting to risk cross-vendor incompatibilities (802.11n is not ratified after all), I went the Apple Airport route, even though there probably would have been cheaper solutions.
Knowing that bandwidth rapidly decreases with range, I bought one AirPort Extreme Base Station and three AirPort Expresses which I’m using to do nothing but extend the 5Ghz n network.
All the AirPort products have a nasty constantly lit LED which I had to cover up – this is my bedroom after all, but I still wanted line of sight to optimize bandwidth. There is a configuration option for the LED, but it only provides two options: Constantly on (annoying) and blinking on traffic (very annoying).
While the large AirPort Extreme can create both a 2.4 GHz and a 5 GHz network, the Express ones can only extend either one of them!

This involved a lot of trying out, changing around configurations and a bit of research, but going from 0.7 MB/s to 4 MB/s in throughput certainly was worth the time spent.

Also, yes, these numbers are in Megabytes unless I’m writing MBits in which case it’s Megabits.

Playing Worms Armageddon on a Mac

Last weekend, I had a real blast with the Xbox 360 Arcade version of worms. Even after so many years, this game still rules them all, especially (if not only) in multiplayer mode.

The only drawback of the 360 version is the lack of weapons.

While the provided set is all well, the game is just not the same without the Super Banana Bomb or the Super Sheep.

So this is why I looked for my old Worms Armageddon CD and tried to get it to work on todays hardware.

Making it work under plain Vista was easy enough (get the latest beta patch for armageddon, by the way):

Right-Click the Icon, select the compatibility tab, chose Windows XP, Disable Themes and Desktop composition and run the game with administrative privileges.

You may get away with not using one option or the other, but this one worked consistently.

To be really useful though, I wanted to make the game run under OS X as this is my main environment and I really dislike going through the lengthy booting process that is bootcamp.

I tried the various virtualization solutions around – something that should work seeing that the game doesn’t really need much in terms of hardware support.

But unfortunately, this was way harder than anticipated:

The initial try was done using VMWare Fusion which looked very good at first, but failed miserably later on: While I was able to launch (and actually use) the games frontend, the actual game was a flickery mess with no known workaround.
Parallels failed by displaying a black menu. It was still clickable, but there was nothing on the screen but blackness and a white square border. Googling around a bit led to the idea to set SlowFrontendWorkaround in the registry to 0 which actually made the launcher work, but the game itself crashed consistenly without error message.

In the end, I’ve achieved success using VirtualBox. The SlowFrontendWorkaround is still needed to make the launcher work and the mouse helper of the VirtualBox guest tools needs to be disabled (on the Machine menu, the game still runs with the helper enabled, but you won’t be able to actually control the mouse pointer consistently), but after that, the game runs flawlessly.

Flickerless and with a decent frame rate. And with sound, of course.

To enable the workaround I talked about, use this .reg file.

Now the slaughter of worms can begin :-)

New MacMini (early 09) and Linux

The new MacMinis that were announced this week come with a Firewire 800 port which was reason enough for me to update shion yet again (keeping the host name of course).

All my media she’s serving to my various systems is stored on a second generation Drobo which is currently connected via USB2, but has a lingering FW800 port.

Of course the upgrade to FW800 will not double the transfer rate to and from the drobo, but it should increase it significantly, so I went ahead and got one of the new Minis.

As usual, I entered the Ubuntu (Intrepid) CD, hold c while turning the device on and completed the installation.

This left the Mini in an unbootable state.

It seems that this newest generation of Mac Hardware isn’t capable of booting from an MBR partitioned harddrive. Earlier Macs complained a bit if the harddrive wasn’t correctly partitioned, but then went ahead and booted the other OS anyways.

Not so much with the new boxes it seems.

To finally achieve what I wanted I had to do the following complicated procedure:

Install rEFIt (just download the package and install the .mpkg file)
Use the Bootcamp assistant to repartition the drive.
Reboot with the Ubuntu Desktop CD and run parted (the partitioning could probably be accomplished using the console installer, but I didn’t manage to do it correctly).
Resize the FAT32-partition which was created by the Bootcamp partitioner to make room at the end for the swap partition.
Create the swap partition.
Format the FAT32-partition with something useful (ext3)
Restart and enter the rEFIt partitioner tool (it’s in the boot menu)
Allow it to resync the MBR
Insert the Ubuntu Server CD, reboot holding the C key
Install Ubuntu normally, but don’t change the partition layout – just use the existing partitions.
Reboot and repeat steps 7 and 8
Start Linux.

Additionally, you will have to keep using rEFIt as the boot device control panel item does not recognize the linux partitions any more, so can’t boot from them.

Now to find out whether that stupid resistor is still needed to make the new mini boot headless.

Windows Media Encoder: File not found

Today I have come across an installation of a Windows Media Encoder that refused to actually encode media. Whenever I started the encoding process, the encoder quit with the error 0x80070002 and gave the very helpful unformation that “the system cannot find the file specified”.

The problem appeared quite suddenly after working perfectly fine for the last three months. As the system is behind a very air-tight firewall and is the only machine in the network segment (aside of some IP cameras), the system hasn’t even been updated via Windows Update. So I have to conclude, that the problem appeared out of the blue. One day it worked, the next it stopped working.

I’ve tried everything to fix this (the encoder in question was encoding a live stream for a client of ours): From reinstalling the Axis capture driver to reinstalling Windows Media Encoder – nothing worked – the error message stayed the same.

Even googling proved all but helpful: There are quite many pages apparently mirroring all and the same MSDN forum on which someone actually posted the same problem but never got an answer. How annoying is that? You find 10 or more hits, everyone having your problem right in the title and everyone on a different page, but in the end, it’s all the same posting mirrored by different sites and plastered with advertisements.

On a hunch though, I have deleted “%Localappdata%MicrosoftWindows Media” and “%Localappdata%MicrosoftWindows Media Player” seeing that these folders stayed intact after a reinstallation while also being somewhat Windows media related.

Of course that helped!

So if you ever are in the same problem and Media Encoder suddenly stops encoding, it’s maybe caused by a corrupted cache of sorts. In that case, remove the cache and be encoding again, but note though, that if you are on a client machine with all your media on, removing these folders may be unwise as they could contain some meta information about your media.

In my case that didn’t matter though.

Listen to your home music from the office

My MP3 collection is safely stored on shion, on a drobo mounted as /nas. Naturally, I want to listen to said music from the office – especially considering my fully routed VPN access between the office and my home infrastructure and the upstream which suffices for at least 10 concurrent 128bit streams (boy – technology has changed in the last few years – I remember the times where you couldn’t reliably stream 128 bit streams – let alone my 160/320 mp3s).

I’ve tried many things so far to make this happen:

serve the files with a tool like jinzora. This works, but I don’t really like jinzora’s web interface and I was never able to get it to work correctly on my Ubuntu box. I was able to trace it down to null bytes read from their tag parser, but the code is very convoluted and practically unreadable without putting quite some effort into that. Considering that I didn’t much like the interface in the first place, I didn’t want to invest time into that.
Use a SlimServer (now Squeezecenter) with a softsqueeze player. Even though I don’t use my squeezebox (an original model with the original slimdevices brand, not the newer Logitech one) any more because the integrated amplifier in the Sonos players works much better for my current setup. This solution worked quite ok, but the audio tends to stutter a bit at the beginning of tracks, indicating some buffering issues.
Use iTune’s integrated library sharing feature. This seemed both undoable and unpractical. Unpractical because it would force me to keep my main mac running all the time and undoable because iTunes sharing can’t pass subnet boundaries. Aside of that, it’s a wonderful solution as audio doesn’t stutter, I already know the interface and access is very quick and convenient.

But then I found out how to make the iTunes thing both very much doable and practical.

The network boundary problem can be solved using Network Beacon, a ZeroConf proxy. Start the application, create a new beacon. Chose any service name, use «_daap._tcp.» as service type, set the port number to 3689, enable the host proxy, keep the host name clear and enter the IP address of the system running iTunes (or firefly – see below).

Oh, and the target iTunes refuses to serve out data to machines in different subnets, so to be able to directly access a remote iTunes, you’d also have to set up an SSH tunnel.

Using Network Beacon, ZeroConf quickly begins working across any subnet boundaries.

The next problem was about the fact that I was forced to keep my main workstation running at home. I fixed that with Firefly Media Server for which even a pretty recent prebuilt package exists for Ubuntu (apt-get install mt-daapd).

I’ve installed that, configured iptables to drop packets for port 3689 on the external interface, configured Firefly to use the music share (which basically is a current backup of the itunes library of my main workstation – rsync for the win).

Firefly in this case even detects the existing iTunes playlists (as the music share is just a backup copy of my iTunes library – including the iTunes Library.xml), though smart playists don’t work, but can easily be recreated in the firefly web interface.

This means that I can access my complete home mp3 library from the office, stutter free, using an interface I’m well used to, without being forced to keep my main machine running all the time.

And it isn’t even that much of a hack and thus easy to rebuild should the need arise.

I’d love to not be forced to do the Network Beacon thing, but avahi doesn’t relay ZeroConf information across VPN interfaces.