Everybody else is doing it, so why can't we?

During the last weekend I wanted to have some fun with QJson. So I came out with this idea: retrieve from last.fm the tour dates of my favourite artists and display the locations using Marble.

After some hacking I created this small application: rockmarble…

If you have a last.fm account rockmarble will import your favourite artist list. Otherwise you can add one artists at a time.

The tour location will be displayed inside Marble, using openstreetmap.

Requirements

In order to build/run it you will need:

• Qt4
• marble
• QJson

Installation

You can grab the source code of rockmarble here.

If you are an openSUSE user you can use 1click install:

Issues

Geolocalization

The geolocalization data are given by last.fm, so if you discover that Metallica are going to give a concert in the middle of the Pacific Ocean please don’t bother me :)

Special names

It seems that QJson doesn’t handle properly special characters. Maybe you will some artist with a blank name. I’m going to fix this issue asap.

More details

Visit rockmarble website

Future

Who wants to integrate it into amarok’s context view? ;)

We have released a new version of Web-YaST with following changes:

• Added translation support on the client side.

• Added ruby-gettext

• Split off ruby-rpam and ruby-polkit in single packages.

• Switch off IPv6 in lighttpd cause it has produced some undefined errors. (esp. on 64bit)

• Added package dependencies concerning rails. The last few weeks have shown that RAILS versions are not really compatible. So many problems have been happened due different RAILS versions on the systems where YaST-Web has been installed. Please use RAILS 2.1

• Cleanup code.

The newest packages can be found here:
https://build.opensuse.org/project/show?project=home:schubi2

Or

https://build.opensuse.org/project/show?project=YaST:Web

It would be nice to get some feedback. Bugzilla would be a nice option 

Thank you !

#define to_cpumask(bitmap)                                              \
     ((struct cpumask *)(1 ? (bitmap)                                \
                         : (void *)sizeof(__check_is_bitmap(bitmap))))
static inline int __check_is_bitmap(const unsigned long *bitmap)
{
     return 1;
}


The above macro is nothing but just
#define to_cpumask(bitmap) (struct cpumask *)(bitmap)

But it also does a compile-time checking that the parameter passed is of type
(const unsigned long *). If it is defined as an function all these ugly magic is not
needed. But a function cannot be used as a static initializer. Try declaring a variable,
static int a = printf("ok");
and one would get an error, "Initializer element is not constant".

I really wonder whether gcc might one day optimize out your type-checking call to the unused
function in tha above macro?! A solution could be providing an official gcc extension to assert types?!
Also the above code compiles fine without sizeof constification as well i.e., just return a void * from the
__check_is_bitmap() and remove the sizeof and casting.

I found the above code in the linux kernel. See http://lkml.org/lkml/2009/3/25/22
for the discussion. Even the ubiquitous printf, printk or any vararg code does not check for types. So
I wonder whether kernel developers need such tricky^Wugly code just for type checking, given that
the callers would likely read the definition of the macro as well. It is not a closed api.

Any other project uses such type-checking macros?

I’m almost as sick of this Conficker stuff as I am going to be sick of April Fools Day stuff when I wake up tomorrow (not to mention I think this is a big promotional stunt for a movie called ‘Conficker’ coming out soon. You watch!), but I have to laugh when I see all these mainstream news organizations falling all over themselves to tell people how to get rid of this malware. In reality, all you have to tell your friends and family is to use one product that will protect them from Conficker and future viruses:

No joke. Happy April Fools Day, I guess.

We (Thomas Göttlicher, J. Daniel Schmidt and Arvin Schnell) have use all our
remaining ITO for this really cool feature.

Normally compiz (more precisely the cube module) shows each desktop on the
surface of a cuboid. Since we don’t have several desktops during installation
we decided to show the “wizard” steps on the cuboid. Pressing “Next” or “Back”
rotates the cuboid around the y-axis:

Entering a “subwizard” rotates the cuboid around the x-axis:

Fortunately most computers are fast enough to render the 3D-scene even without
special hardware support that we lack during installation.

Will be available in Factory within the next weeks. Comments are welcome.

I am using OpenSUSE on my main computers, so LUKS is a good option to encrypt my external hdd. I can use Truecrypt if I want to use the hdd with mac or windows, but here is not the case. You can also use LUKS under windows with FreeOTFE.

Here are the steps to encrypt the hdd:

1. be sure that the device is not part of filesystem

umount /dev/sdd1

2. Option 1: write some random data on hdd if you had critical files before

#slow method to fill hdd with semi-random data
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sdd1

3. Option 2:

#use next two commands to fill the hdd with "zero" data, much faster
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sdd1 count=2 bs=1M
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdd1

3. start the encryption setup

cryptsetup -v --key-size 256 luksFormat /dev/sdd1
cryptsetup luksDump /dev/sdd1  #details for encrypted partition
cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sdd1 buffalo

4. format hdd as ext3

/sbin/mkfs.ext3 /dev/mapper/buffalo

5. mount the encrypted hdd

mount /dev/mapper/buffalo /mnt/buffalo

6. add the entry in /etc/fstab

/dev/mapper/buffalo     /mnt/buffalo      ext3    acl,user_xattr        1 2

7. Optional step: try tune2fs -L MYLABEL /dev/mapper/buffalo if you want a nice label for your hdd.

Enjoy!