Skype is a quite popular at work – used for most of our online conversations with the Seattle office.

This means I tend to have bothкомпютри Pidgin and Skype active at any one time. As well as having a single consolidated view of all my I.M. accounts… I personally prefer the Pidgin interface;

Just came across Skype API Plugin for Pidgin – created be Eion Robb.

UPDATE: after using this for a few days… I turned it off again. Pidgin was unstable, Skype didn’t always start automagically in the background.

Last night I spent a bit of time attempting DVD playback on the latest Ubuntu – Hardy Heron Beta.

Whether I tried vlc / totem / ogle / mplayer – I was getting the following hard crash

X Error of failed request:  BadAlloc (insufficient resources for operation)

I was running my Sony SZ Laptop in ’stamina’ mode – which uses an Intel i810 graphics card. I had to sift through quite a few pages before I came upon a solution that worked:

Add the following line to the Device section of your xorg.conf file:

Option "LinearAlloc" "16000"

Also checked out bluetooth-alsa again – came across this site to ease the installation of a2dp (stereo bluetooth headset) on Linux. Worked incredibly well – comes with a nice script to toggle between speaker/headset. VLC & Amarok play nice as soon as you select the ASLA device as ‘bluetooth’.

(Watched a fair bit of TV over the weekend; West Wing, Lost, Southland Tales, Meet the Spartans, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford)

I’ve been using Vodafone Ireland as my mobile operator since my first mobile phone – so probably for the last 7 or 8 years now. I’m tied into a damned contract with them until early Jan 2008. I’ll hopefully be switching to 3 Ireland then because of their groovy mobile phone data plans – 100mb for €6 a month or unlimited for €20.

Now couple the “3 Ireland” data price plan with the Linux + Bluetooth + Mobile + GPRS tutorial below and I’ll be laughing.

1. Turn on bluetooth on your mobile phone (ensure visibility is enabled)

2. Find out your mobile phone mac address is:

sean@viper:~$ hcitool scan
Scanning ...
        00:19:2D:43:00:D9       button

3. Find out what channel DUN (dial up networking) is running on your device:

sean@viper:~$ sdptool search DUN
Inquiring ...
Searching for DUN on 00:19:2D:43:00:D9 ...
Service Name: Dial-Up Networking
Service RecHandle: 0x10002
Service Class ID List:
  "Dialup Networking" (0x1103)
Protocol Descriptor List:
  "L2CAP" (0x0100)
  "RFCOMM" (0x0003)
    Channel: 2
Language Base Attr List:
  code_ISO639: 0x454e
  encoding:    0x6a
  base_offset: 0x100
Profile Descriptor List:
  "Dialup Networking" (0x1103)
    Version: 0x0100

4. Establish a connection with your mobile’s DUN. With Ubuntu Feisty this will trigger an automatic pairing of your device if you haven’t already done so. Also this will automagically create a /dev/rfcomm0 device if all goes well.

sean@viper:~$ sudo rfcomm connect 0 00:19:2D:43:00:D9 2

5. Configure wvdial (this is how I do it at the moment – should be trivial to configure Ubuntu’s swish NetworkManager applet to do the same with a similar configuration). I’ve included both Vodafone and 3 Ireland settings below for completeness – both have been tested and work well.

sean@viper:~$ sudo vi /etc/wvdial.conf 

[Modem0]
Modem = /dev/rfcomm0
Baud = 115200
SetVolume = 0
Dial Command = ATDT
Init1 = ATZ
Init3 = ATM0
FlowControl = CRTSCTS

[Dialer vodafone]
Username = "vodafone"
Password = "vodafone"
Phone = *99#
Stupid Mode = 1
Init1 = ATZ
Init2 = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0
Init3 = AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","isp.vodafone.ie","",0,0
Inherits = Modem0

[Dialer three]
Username = "none"
Password = "none"
Phone = *99#
Stupid Mode = 1
Init1 = ATZ
Init2 = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0
Init3 = AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","3ireland.ie","",0,0
Inherits = Modem0

6. Launch wvdial

sean@viper:~$ wvdial vodafone

7. Ping google.com and shout “I am so wireless right now”

With all of the above in mind – why would one want the USB/PCMCIA GPRS modems these operators offer – which in some cases are more expensive?

I signed up with Smart Telecom early December, I was hooked up finally by mid January, broadband was working – but no dialtone on the phone line Two weeks ago close to midnight my net connection went dead and when I checked there was no voltage coming from the phone socket. So finally last night after a call to Smart almost every day I’m back up and running! If things with Smart stabilize from now on in – I’ll forgive all – 3mb down 256kb up and no bandwidth cap.

The first thing I did was upgrade my Dapper Drake install. Helluva lota updates in two weeks! And guess what – some kind soul has put compiz in the universe repository… Wobbly windows and cube goodness! It really is slick and the F12 zoom feature is very genuinely useful. It all made me a bit woozy though – looking at those windows womble about the screen.

The good people of Linden Labs have released their promised Second Life Linux Client. It’s in alpha, but I’ve found it very usable, stable and smooth. Ever since I first heard about it – it’s captured my imagination the way the MetaVerse did in Snowcrash. Poor Impulse Control.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been hand replacing my xorg.conf file with xorg.conf.dfp or xorg.conf.dfp.crt or xorg.conf.dfp.tv etc… Until today! Finally gave the README of nvidia-glx a read and noticed I can specifiy TwinView as true but set a NULL entry for one of the monitors in the meta-modes. Cool! Now I can changes the resolution and monitor setup on the fly from within X.

I spent this weekend playing with getting hibernate via suspend2 working on my laptop and getting a xgl/glxcompmgr/compiz demo up and running on my desktop. Both attempts failed basically. Suspend to ram/disk never worked on my laptop even though Ubunutu provides menu options for both. I got a suspend2 patched kernel compiled and rejigged my partition layout to have a bigger swap space partition. Booting to a single user shell with a limited amount of kernel modules installed hibernate on my laptop gets to ~50% and crashes. An FAQ from the suspend2 website indicates this is most likely a problem with an unsupported kernel module. Well Phooey! On the flip side I have configured the booting of Ubuntu on my laptop quite a bit… it’s much faster now; with some services in and out. mmm why doesn’t Ubuntu come with a nice equivalent graphical sysv-rc-conf tool? The xgl/glrxcompmgr/compiz experiment was looking good when i manged to get a wobbly window up and running very briefly – but was flakey and played awfully with the window manger. Mmmm… I discovered quite a cool tune, “Telepopmusik – Just Breathe”, on pandora.

Today with the release of IntelliJ 5.1 – we can now all look forward to the new EAP cycle and IntelliJ 6.0. I’m getting ahead of myself of course; but the Demetra Roadmap sure looks packed full of goodness. I really need to get my act together and start coding plugins!