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By Matthieu, 2009-09-30 20:11

I got tired of clicking Get Info and Change all… and found this handy prefpane
http://www.rubicode.com/Software/Bundles.html#RCDefaultApp

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By Matthieu, 2009-09-30 20:02

Yes, I know it’s Wednesday. However I feel that the first half of this week has been eventful enough to merit a blog post. I’ll start right from Sunday.

Sunday looked like it was going to be a low-key day. All I had planned was to clean up my room and do my laundry. Early in the afternoon, I got a call from Charlie who told me that they were having a surprise party for Alina’s belated birthday at Diane’s condo. Naturally, I had to go. Had quite an awesome time, between guitar, sushi, mafia and just hanging out, it was a great night.

[youtube_hd 4HjMokTvFFk]

Monday also started off pretty quiet. (Literally, because since David is away on vacation in Europe, we don’t have Fréquence 3 playing in our office) Then I got an e-mail from upstairs telling me that my new Macbook Pro had arrived. I must say, it is a damn fine piece of equipment – glossy and brushed aluminium, no evidence of air vents, backlit keyboard, large trackpad… kudos, Apple. That afternoon, I was about to go into a meeting (where a whole lot of new projects were discussed) when Emma called. The boss was waiting, so I called her back later. Turns out the laptop I gave her was stolen from her living room while she was sleeping. Not a very nice thought/feeling. I went over to her place after work and had dinner with her Alina, Charlie and Muna. We watched the season premiere of House (a week late) and talked, again a pretty good night.

Tuesday I woke up on the couch (a very comfortable retro couch 😉 ), got ready for work and said goodbye to Emma. Outside, I found a parking ticket. (No overnight parking on Baldwin St. without permit apparently. Also, I think it’s pretty cool that the parking ticket was printed on plastic… Is that weird?) I then proceeded to drive to work. I took Bathurst St. north from College to Finch, most pleasant commute I’ve had in a long time, probably because it was refreshing to see some old downtown neighbourhoods that I’ve never seen before.

Today was the least interesting day of the week so far, not that it was a bad day, just didn’t particularly stand out. Pretty busy day, sorting through cerberus, making phone calls, installing jabber clients, troubleshooting access points… I also discovered a fantastic FREE personal finance software for Mac, iCompta. As with most mac apps, it’s pretty, and it works very well. (merci Mathieu).

So, thus ends the week (so far) in review. But the week’s far from over. Yet to come are Dance Cave on Friday, Nuit Blanche on Saturday… and a haircut, sometime.

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By Matthieu, 2009-09-27 00:37

1. MacBook Pro Unibody – Mac OS X 10.6/Windows 7/Ubuntu 9.10
2. ASUS P5W DH Deluxe – Mac OS X 10.5/Ubuntu 9.04
3. Dell Inspiron 640m – Ubuntu 9.04/Windows 7
4. Dell Latitude D610 – Ubuntu 9.04
5. ASUS P5N73-AM – Ubuntu 9.04 and Debian Lenny hybrid with OpenVZ/KVM
6. ASUS ITX-220 – Ubuntu 9.04
7. ASUS ITX-220 – Mac OS X 10.5
8. Zotac ITX Wifi – Windows 7
9. Toshiba Satellite A40 – Ubuntu 9.04
10. Dell XPS M1330 – Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise/Ubuntu 9.04
11. Dell PowerEdge 1400SC – Kubuntu 8.04
12. Acer AspireOne – Linux Mint Gloria (Ubuntu 9.04)
13. Acer Aspire 3623 – Mac OS X 10.5
14. Acer Aspire 5570Z – Windows 7
15. Nokia N810 – Maemo/Debian ARM
16. 3* iMac G3 – Mac OS X 10.4/openSUSE
17. IBM ThinkPad T21 – Windows XP
18. IBM Ispirati A10i – Windows XP
19. ECS P4VMM2 – Windows XP
20. Apple TV – Apple TV OS (Mac OS X 10.4)
21. Linksys NSLU2 – Debian armel
22. Broadcom-based routers – DD-WRT/Tomato

http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=8014131&postcount=902

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By Matthieu, 2009-09-26 21:53

My cousin was having some issues with missing desktop icons and taskbar on a Windows box. Some googling brought up ComboFix. Reading the description, it looks like it could be a handy tool, and from a trusted computer repair/diagnostics site.

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By Matthieu, 2009-09-24 10:42

UPDATE: Google has posted a document explaining the service disruption. Google Service disruption – Sept 24/09

Gmail seems to be down right now… ( Sep 24, 2009 @ 10:42)

To monitor Gmail and other Google Apps services in the future: the Apps Status Dashboard

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By Matthieu, 2009-09-22 19:56

My faithful readers (all 0 of them) may notice that the site is considerably faster now. My blog is now hosted on a proper server over at iweb in Montréal instead of on my home server, leaving it free for other tasks.

As seen previously, I was attempting to set up a combination MythTV/OpenVZ server. Well, I finally got it working:

1. Install Ubuntu Jaunty (9.04, 64-bit) and update until the update manager won’t update no more 😉
2. Install and configure MythTV backend. This step’s difficulty may vary depending on the tuner card. My Hauppage HVR-1600 was supported by Ubuntu out-of-the-box.
3. Add the Debian Lenny stable and update repos to /etc/apt/sources.list and apt-get update.
4. Download Linux driver for Intel Pro 1000 PCIe card.
5. Install vzctl, linux-image-2.6-openvz-amd64,  linux-headers-2.6-openvz-amd64, update-grub if necessary.
6. Reboot, make sure openvz kernel is running.
7. Make && make install Intel e1000e driver.
8. (Optional) Install Proxmox VE by adding proxmox repo.
9. (Optional) Install mercurial and hg clone v4l-dvb. The main branch was broken, so I used one of the dev’s personal repos. make && make install v4l-dvb; cx18 now works again.

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By Matthieu, 2009-09-18 20:33

Went to the U2 concert in Toronto yesterday. Absolutely AWESOME show, definitely worth the crazy $265 tickets. They played a great mix of older songs and enough tracks from “No Line on the Horizon” to get me to really like the new album (a bit like when I went to Coldplay’s Viva la Vida show in Ottawa). Sadly though, I didn’t manage to get any pictures or videos, I brought my DSLR but alas, there was no SD card in it. A colleague managed to get some great shots though (to be posted soon).

Video by David Cote

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By Matthieu, 2009-09-11 22:45

Ouf! First real week of school means lots of technical support tickets. And BlackBerrys. And phone calls. All in all, a pretty busy four-day week. Anyway, it’s Friday, which means time to relax. I made a bad habit this week of staying up ’til 1AM, despite knowing that I have work next day. We had absolutely beautiful weather this week, sunny and ~20°C every day; as Père Antoine said, last weekend was the nicest weekend of summer ’09.

So the Beatles remastered albums were released this week, I must say they sound a lot clearer, but I kind of like the old sound…. But at least now I can listen to Eleanor Rigby without feeling like I’m going deaf in one ear. I also realized that Queen has 3 Greatest Hits albums; I was wondering why mine didn’t have “I Want it All” or “Under Pressure” on it.

Weekend plans:

• Get my File/Web/MythTV/Media/KVM/OpenVZ server running properly
• Clean up my room properly/Buy a dresser or other furniture, probably fro Ikea
• Help a friend get her ADSL connection working
• Try to figure out RSP and investments and other money things

Looks like the weekend will be fairly busy too.

Last thing: http://xkcd.com/635/ Oh, Ender’s Game. Best book of grade 10. If only we could all become powerful by means of WordPress.

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By Matthieu, 2009-09-10 21:41

For unix-like systems (Mac OS X, Linux). A simple shell script to convert flac to lame mp3.

Install flac, lame and id3tool

#!/bin/bash
for a in *.flac
do
OUTLAME=`echo "$a" | sed s/\.flac$/.mp3/g`
ARTIST=`metaflac "$a" --show-tag=ARTIST | sed s/.*=//g`
ALBUM=`metaflac "$a" --show-tag=ALBUM | sed s/.*=//g`
TITLE=`metaflac "$a" --show-tag=TITLE | sed s/.*=//g`
GENRE=`metaflac "$a" --show-tag=GENRE | sed s/.*=//g`
TRACKNUMBER=`metaflac "$a" --show-tag=TRACKNUMBER | sed s/.*=//g`
YEAR=`metaflac "$a" --show-tag=DATE | sed s/.*=//g`
flac -c -d "$a" | lame -m j -q 0 --vbr-new -V 0 -s 44.1 - "$OUTLAME"
id3tool --set-title="$TITLE" --set-track="${TRACKNUMBER:-0}" --set-artist="$ARTIST" --set-album="$ALBUM" --set-year="$YEAR" --set-genre="${GENRE:-12}" "$OUTLAME"
done

Edit: Apparently this has been done before…
http://pastebin.com/f641a9b21

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By Matthieu, 2009-09-10 20:59

You’re not crazy. Google has done it again. They made a small change to the look of their website today: the font size and buttons on the home page and search result page are larger. I suppose this shows how ingrained Google is into everyday life, how even the smallest change is noticed by millions. Just like back in May’08 when they changed their favicon.

Internet users tend to dislike change for change’s sake. There is already a userscript that reverts Google to the “classic” look.  Another good example of user discontent is the launch of New Facebook, which incited much grumbling. Ultimately though, the whole thing blows over and the face of the Web is changed forever, old designs lost in the depths of the Wayback machine.