Archive for April, 2007
Eins Zwei Polizei..
Apr 23rd
I saw this video the other day for Eins Zwei Polizei by the Italian techno group Mo-Do:
It reminded me of the heady days of MTV Europe back in the early 1990s when all sorts of dodgy euro pop used to be shown and production values were cheap 
Ah such cheesiness..
From the desk of Mrs Maureen Haughey…
Apr 17th
Normally these things are two-a-penny and I don’t pay too much attention to them, however
there is a 419 scam doing the rounds at the moment that can’t have any other purpose than to
entertain:
…The Irish government thinks it can shave and reduce me to a poor widow but I have the winning ace.A few years ago, when we weren’t sure if my Charlie would be convicted, he kept some money in trust for me in a Security and Finance company. He did not open the account in our names so it will not be traced to us to enable the past remain the past. The name on the account is Cedric de Vregille. I never thought Charlie would leave me so soon and it never occurred to me to ask if this name were fictitious or not or a name of any of his friends. I have tried to find this man but to no avail. The amount he deposited in this name is 30,000,000 (Thirty Million Euros)…
Read the full thing here.
Virtual sound channels in FreeBSD
Apr 11th
Following on from my earlier post about nspluginwrapper and Firefox; I noticed that the plugin likes to keep its file handles open even after you’ve finished viewing a flash-based site. This is a bit of an issue with things like the sound device – /dev/dsp0:
[rob@tachikoma] >> fstat | grep dsp
rob mplayer 80327 9 /dev 45 crw-rw-rw- dsp0.1 w
rob npviewer.bin 80305 63 /dev 42 crw-rw-rw- dsp0.0 rw
rob npviewer.bin 80299 63 /dev 42 crw-rw-rw- dsp0.0 rw
So if you happen to forget about this and go to play an mp3 or something later on, you’ll be left scratching your head. I didn’t feel like running a sound daemon like esound or arts, luckily FreeBSD has a kernel-based solution to this problem in the form of virtual sound channels which can be configured using the standard sysctl MIBs.
So we’ll try to allocate out 4 virtual sound channels:
[rob@tachikoma] >> sudo sysctl hw.snd.pcm0.vchans=4
hw.snd.pcm0.vchans: 0
sysctl: hw.snd.pcm0.vchans: Device busy
Oops, of course we must first close any programs that are using the sound card.
[rob@tachikoma] >> sudo sysctl hw.snd.pcm0.vchans=4
hw.snd.pcm0.vchans: 0 -> 4
[rob@tachikoma] >> sudo sysctl hw.snd.maxautovchans=4
hw.snd.maxautovchans: 0 -> 4
hw.snd.pcm0.vchans is the number of virtual channels pcm0 has and hw.snd.maxautovchans is the number of virtual channels given to new devices. All the virtual channels are automagically allocated using devfs.
I was then able to view flash sites, and open up audio applications afterwards without any problems – I’m starting to see the benefits of the move to devfs
nspluginwrapper
Apr 5th
Rong-En Fan mentioned the recently added www/nspluginwrapper port in his blog. It’s a compatibility layer for Firefox/Netscape that lets you use Linux plugins such as Adobe Flash, Acrobat natively.
I installed the port and ran
nspluginwrapper -ai
…which picked up plugins I had installed previously, adding them to my ~/.mozilla/plugins directory. A quick restart of Firefox and an about:plugins showed I now had Flash (7) and Acrobat available. I was then able to view all those – previously annoying – Flash-based sites as normal. Nice!
Flash was previously available through the linuxpluginwrapper port, however the Flash plugin was withdrawn due to licensing issues. I’d written up a page a number of years ago describing the old method for getting Flash etc.. to work in FreeBSD, guess it’s time to update that
If you’re an opera user, Linux plugin support has also been available for a while through the opera-linuxplugins port.