Amazon mp3 store w/ 64-bit linux

I purchased Pink's "Raise Your Glass" from Amazon, and discovered that I had downloaded an .amz file.

Huh?

Oh, that's the file extension for files that are meant to be downloaded by the Amazon music downloader. Unfortunately, Amazon doesn't have a 64-bit downloader for linux.

Help comes from Pymazon (http://code.google.com/p/pymazon/). I installed pymazon (using the

current mercurial branch), and "pymazon -c AmazonMP3-1295025407.amz" was enough to download the file. It even made it through the corporate firewall. Cool!

Ice in Houston

Ice in Houston, originally uploaded by g2boojum.

Not something we see every day.

Taken with a 2G iphone.

juniper ssl vpn w/ Fedora 14

I use the juniper ssl vpn client to connect to my work's internal network. Although there is a linux client, it requires the Sun (Oracle) jre to work, which doesn't play well with selinux on Fedora 14. (It's not Fedora's fault, it's a bug in the plugin.)

Temporary fix:

# setsebool allow_execstack 1

It's not persistent, so it's not a permanent hole, but it would be best if I figured out what needed to be set for the various files involved. *Sigh*

Intel atom D510 motherboard, take 2

The cpu in my home server is dying, so I decided to replace it with an atom motherboard. All was going well, until the screen went wonky, and the computer shut itself down. I rebooted, there was a large pop, followed by the delightful smell of ozone. Ah, well. I now get to experience the Intel warranty system. Wish me luck!

Twitter via weechat + tircd

I've been accessing twitter through the weechat irc client using tircd. That worked pretty well until twitter switch to OAuth authentication for all twitter API clients.

Helpful hints:

1. http://code.google.com/p/tircd/ has directions for oauth, but leaves out the fact that a (fake) password is still required, even after setting the username to "oauth". http://code.google.com/p/tircd/issues/detail?id=80&q=oauth
2. The download version of tircd (0.10, although when run it thinks it's 0.08) doesn't seem to work with oauth. See http://code.google.com/p/tircd/issues/detail?id=84&q=oauth, and then download a forked version from http://github.com/drags/tircd.
3. weechat expects "/stats" to be run in a window connected to the server. For twitter there wasn't yet one, because the oauth handshake still needed a PIN to be sent. As the tircd homepage suggested, I used "/quote -server twitter stats pin MYPIN", where my weechat config uses "twitter" as the internal server name for tircd configuration.
4. The twitter oauth PIN seems to have been cached somewhere. I've no idea where, so I'm sure this will bite me eventually.

Using the mythtv to record from a VCR

It seems that how one uses a WinTV PVR-250 to record from a VCR has changed since the last time I did it. Here's what I ended up doing, after temporarily killing mythbackend. I have my directv box plugged into the SVideo and stereo audio ports, while the VCR was attached by coax.

# list the allowed frequency names
ivtv-tune -L
# set the tuner (to the wrong channel, but oh well...)
ivtv-tune -tus-bcast -c2
# search the web, and eventually learn that ivtv-ctl functionality
# has mostly moved to v4l2-ctl
v4l2-ctl 
v4l2-ctl --all
v4l2-ctl -T
# list possible outputs; I want the tuner
v4l2-ctl -n
# choose the tuner (coax input)
v4l2-ctl -i 0
# choose the s-video input (to test, since it works w/ the mythtv)
v4l2-ctl -i 1
v4l2-ctl --all
# copy a bit from the s-video input
cat /dev/video0 > foo.mpg
ls -l foo.mpg 
totem foo.mpg
rm foo.mpg
# switch to the tuner
v4l2-ctl -i 0
# copy fuzz since I'm on the wrong channel
cat /dev/video0 > foo.mpg
# switch to the right channel
ivtv-tune -tus-bcast -c3
# run a test
cat /dev/video0 > foo.mpg
totem foo.mpg
# success!

Rpy2 on ubuntu

python -m 'rpy2.tests' was failing because libR.so wasn't being found when using the latest dev version of rpy2 installed in my home directory.

Ugly, simple fix: sudo ln -s /usr/lib64/R/lib/libR.so /usr/lib/libR.so