APB - AP Blog

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• English • Software • Technikspielzeug •

23. Juni 2007, 17:30

Secured Systems with Fedora

I found some time to update my page about encryption in Fedora. There have been some changes since Fedora Core 5 and the article was a little bit outdated. Fedora 6 and 7 provide more native ways to create encrypted swap and /tmp partitions and it should be mentioned in such a document.

I hope you like it.

Written by AP on 2007-06-23 17:30:44, last change on 2007-06-23 17:37:36.

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• English • Software •

31. März 2007, 00:47

Again patches for Firedrop

I realized that some of my pages, which I've created with Firedrop don't validate as XHTML. Since this is my little ambition, I patched Firedrop sources to produce at least XHTML valid <br> and <hr> tags.

Another proble I faced: if you use markdown together with Firedrop's macros and your macros produce block level elements (like div or dl), it is likely that markdown will mess things up and add additional p tags around it. I already have a patch for this problem, too.

You can find those patches on my Firedrop page.

Written by AP on 2007-03-31 00:47:27, last change on 2007-03-31 15:01:13.

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• English • Software •

15. Oktober 2006, 20:02

Another patch for Firedrop

Here comes another patch for Firedrop. The menu entry Styles -> Weird stuff -> rot13 produces an error messages. The number of parameters which are passed to the encoding function has changed, but the fuction's code was not adapted. See my Firedrop page for a RPM and other Firedrop stuff.

Written by AP on 2006-10-15 20:02:41, last change on 2006-10-15 20:08:09.

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• English • Software •

20. September 2006, 19:52

Templates for Firedrop2

Today I've made a template for Firedrop. It uses HaloScan comment system and MovableStyle CSS style sheets. As a gimmick you will find a calendar inside. It's not very sophisticated, but it works.

I made some very dirty hacks inside this template. Since Firedrop does not provide much information at the template level, I parse the archives' IDs and output filenames to decide for which month the calendar is to be shown. But right now it seems to work. If you encounter some problems with it, please let me know.

You can find these templates on my Firedrop page

Written by AP on 2006-09-20 19:52:57, last change on 2006-09-20 20:07:22.

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• English • Software •

14. September 2006, 21:46

Firedrop patches, again

There were still some bugs or strange behaviour I was not content with. And since I had some time left, I've created new patches for Firedrop. I've also posted them to the mailing list, maybe they will be included in the next release.

But now, you will find all patches and a precompiled RPM package on my Firedrop page.

There are two new patches and one corrected patch, since the last one had a side effect I was now aware of.

1. You can change the default entry style in entry.ini in Firedrop's configuration directory (textile, sextile, markdown, etc.), but this information has been ignored until now.
2. The file entry.ini in the configuration directory has been set to defaults and rewritten every time the dialog for new blog entry was opened.
3. The Open button's label (and other buttons as well...) becomes blue when the mouse pointer hovers over it and remains blue. Afterwards the button does not respond to mouse clicks. I've corrected this one, so it now does apply to the buttons at the bottom of Firedrop's window.

Written by AP on 2006-09-14 21:46:32, last change on 2006-09-14 22:02:48.

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• English • Technikspielzeug •

10. September 2006, 18:00

D-Link DWL-G122 USB WLAN-Adapter (RT2570) is unstable

Now it's settled...

I wrote about this USB WLAN adapter in three other articles (#2, #3 and #14). It looked like nothing could help to get this device working stable. When I moved the computer to the basement for a short while the WLAN connection was almost useless, because the link was lost every few minutes for several minutes each time.

Now I have found an article in the german computer magazine c't about USB WLAN adapters for Mac. It says about the D-Link DWL-G122 (translated by me, sorry for errors):

„(...) Encrypted connections - whether via WEP or WPA - were basically unreliable and also with unencrypted connection the joy did not last for long: at the measure points at 1 meter and 10 meters distance one could establish an usable internet connection, but that's all. At 20 meters the dongle did not manage a single stable connection among 20 tries. On the other hand all other candidates managed this distance test smoothly. (...) In this form one has to disadvise against this device.”

„(...) Verschlüsselte Verbindungen - ob via WEP oder WPA - waren grundsätzlich instabil und auch bei unverschlüsselter Kommunikation währte die Freude nur kurz: Auf den Messplätzen in 1 Meter und 10 Metern Entfernung ließen sich brauchbare Internet-Verbindungen aufbauen, aber das wars auch schon. Auf 20 Meter Entfernung brachte das Dongle unter 20 Versuchen nicht eine stabile Verbindung zustande. Hingegen absolvierten alle übrigen Kandidaten die Reichweitenprüfung reibungslos. (...) In dieser Form muss man von dem Gerät abraten.”

Source: c't Magazin 19/2006, p. 174

Written by AP on 2006-09-10 18:00:00, last change on 2006-09-17 10:06:53.

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• English • Technikspielzeug •

13. August 2006, 22:34

Synchronisation with Hanspring Visor fails with kernel 2.6.17.6 [suppl.]

The problem I've described in article #36 has disappeared after an upgrade to kernel 2.6.17.8.

Now I suspect my configuration for this bug, but I can't find anything I did wrong. The kernel changelog lists one fixed bug in the UHCI USB driver - maybe that did it?

Written by AP on 2006-08-13 22:34:58, last change on 2006-08-13 22:48:21.

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• English • Technikspielzeug •

23. Juli 2006, 11:26

Synchronisation with Hanspring Visor fails with kernel 2.6.17.6

I've encountered a problem with the new kernel. Untill now I used kernel 2.6.16.18 (never had time to update). But as the serious bugs in the 2.6 kernel series were published I finally decided to upgrade.

After the update I went on holiday for two weeks, so I had no opportunity to test (or simply to use) my new kernel. After my holiday I realized that the synchronizing software hangs. The USB port get opened but no data is transferred.

A quick test with the old kernel shows it's not a problem with pilot libraries or pilot-xfer. The command I use is

pilot-xfer -p /dev/ttyUSB1 -l

This command should show the contents of the palm device. It works with kernel 2.6.16.18 but fails on 2.6.17.6 (and 2.6.17.4 as well). I have no explanation for this behaviour and I have found nothing similar on the net - maybe it's only my fault, I don't know. Right now I'm still testing. If I find something out, I let you know.

See also article #41

Written by AP on 2006-07-23 11:26:26, last change on 2006-08-13 22:55:09.

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• English • Software •

18. Juni 2006, 21:18

Wax RPM

I've created a Wax RPM as well, since Firedrop needs it and Sourceforge has no RPMs. Look at my Firedrop page.

Written by AP on 2006-06-18 21:18:24, last change on 2006-09-14 21:39:11.

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• English • Software •

15. Juni 2006, 16:59

Patches for Firedrop2

I've created two patches for Firedrop (an offline blogging client), which correct two bugs I've found. The Open button, which does not respond to mouse clicks and the file firedrop.ini always created in the current working directory.

You can find both on my separate Firedrop page.

Written by AP on 2006-06-15 16:59:03, last change on 2006-06-15 17:29:21.

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• English • Software • Technikspielzeug •

19. Mai 2006, 21:26

Additional mount options for external devices in Fedora Core 5

Fedora Core 5 uses HAL for mounting external devices, but it does not providy any possibility to include additional mount options. Every device is mounted with default option, which I think is insufficient. For example I would like to restrict rights on VFAT filesystems to user-only. To do so I had to patch Fedora's mount script.

Apply the following patch to /usr/share/hal/scripts/hal-system-storage-mount

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--- hal-system-storage-mount.bak        2006-04-26 17:27:34.000000000 +0200
+++ hal-system-storage-mount    2006-05-12 22:05:46.000000000 +0200
@@ -166,6 +166,10 @@
        fi
     done
 fi
+# Append additional options.
+for OPTION in $HAL_PROP_VOLUME_MOUNT_ADDITIONAL_OPTIONS; do
+       MOUNTOPTIONS=$MOUNTOPTIONS,$OPTION
+done

 # echo "options = '$MOUNTOPTIONS'"

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Now, any options set in volume.mount.additional_options will be appended to the mount command. Here is a config file I use to append additional file mask and directory mask for VFAT filesystems.

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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?> <!-- -*- SGML -*- --> 
<deviceinfo version="0.2">
  <device>
    <match key="linux.hotplug_type" int="3">
      <match key="volume.fstype" string="vfat">
        <append key="volume.mount.additional_options" type="strlist">fmask=177</append>
        <append key="volume.mount.additional_options" type="strlist">dmask=077</append>
      </match>
    </match>
  </device>
</deviceinfo>

Written by AP on 2006-05-19 21:26:00, last change on 2006-05-19 21:46:48.