Joe Wreschnig, Quod Libet’s author, suggested that this could be implemented as a plugin. After an email conversation with him, and seeing a patch posted to the bug in launchpad, I started writing the plugin last night. Now the multimedia keys work again in Quod Libet. The plugin can be downloaded from launchpad or from here (rename to dbusmmkey.py). Simply put this file in ~/.quodlibet/plugins/events/ and enable it in Quod Libet.

PS. Python is so much fun!

Meanwhile, I use this procmail recipe:

:0B
* ^Symbol: +[A-Z][A-Z][A-Z][A-Z]
* ^Current Price: +\$[0-9]\.
* Term Target( Price)?: +\$
/dev/null

This one recipe alone reduces my daily spam by about half! I get about 500 to 1,000 spam emails daily. This is the only reason I reactivated my procmail. My Bayesian filter, which has been working wonderfully for years now, caught all the penny stock spam just fine, it’s just that it’s really annoying and harder for me to go through these penny stock spam when checking my spam folder for false positives.

I wanted to do a rough benchmarking on how fast our email app can pump messages to the MTA. Of course I don’t want to actually send the emails, I don’t care where it’s sent to or what the content is, the MTA should just accept then drop them straight away.

I’m using Postfix. So I have the email app send 50,000 emails to x@blackhole.localdomain, where x is a number between 1 and 50,000. You can also do this easily with smtp-source program that comes with Postfix. In /etc/hosts I added 127.0.0.1 blackhole.localdomain, and then I set $transport_maps to hash:/etc/postfix/transport and in /etc/postfix/transport I added blackhole.localdomain blackhole: and ran postmap /etc/postfix/transport. This will make everything sent to blackhole.localdomain to be sent via the ‘blackhole’ transport, which we need to define in master.cf as follows:

blackhole unix  -       n       n       -       -       pipe
    user=nobody argv=/bin/true ${user}

The mail logs should tell us whether it’s working or not.

Another thing that sometimes I wanted to do is to capture the actual emails sent after it reaches the MTA but without the MTA actually sending the mail to the recipients. This is to get a better picture of how the emails will look like to the recipients. This is useful, for example, to verify that headers, newlines, charset, encoding, MIME, etc. are generated correctly. With Postfix, I used content_filter and did something like this in master.cf.

pickup    fifo  n       -       -       60      1       pickup
    -o content_filter=dbgcapture
20025     inet  n       -       -       -       -       smtpd
    -o content_filter=dbgcapture
20026     inet  n       -       -       -       -       smtpd
    -o debug_peer_list=127.0.0.1,192.168.1.0/24
    -o content_filter=dbgcapture
dbgcapture unix  -       n       n       -       -       pipe
  flags=FR user=ronny argv=/usr/bin/tee -a /tmp/capture.mbox

Mails sent via SMTP to $inet_interfaces:20025 and sent via /usr/sbin/sendmail will be captured in /tmp/capture.mbox. Similarly, port 20026, with additional SMTP debugging in the logs. Port 25 still works as usual. If you don’t want /usr/sbin/sendmail to go to dbgcapture simply comment out the -o content_filter line right after the pickup line. Note that using /usr/bin/tee here may not be the most efficient/correct. It works most of the time, but it’s asynchronous and it doesn’t guarantee all mails will be written in the correct order (or at all) in the mbox. If you can suggest a better way with similar level of ease, please let me know.

I was also looking at capturing mails with Sendmail. It’s possible using MIMEDefang milter with action_quarantine_whole_email() followed by action_discard(). It works but somehow it ran slower than a snail. I’m not that familiar with Sendmail. Meh. No big deal. I left the tests running, I went home, and check the test results the next morning.

In the next few months we will be doing a lot more of this kind of tests, so I’m planning to do similar thing with qmail and Exim to cover a lot more base.

Courtesy link for the uninitiated.

It turned out that Mutagen (and Quod Libet) are in the Dapper universe repository, so I easily did sudo apt-get install python-mutagen to install the library. Based on the tutorial, I quickly wrote a very simple Python script to remove all the APEv2 tags from my music files:

import os.path
from mutagen.apev2 import APEv2
from mutagen.apev2 import APENoHeaderError

# Work in current directory, and 
# assumes all files are regular files.
for file in os.listdir("."):
    try:
        a = APEv2(file)
        a.delete()
    except APENoHeaderError:
        pass

So that’s done.

I was curious about Quod Libet, though. So I did a sudo apt-get install quodlibet quodlibet-ext quodlibet-plugins to check it out. I was happy, and now I can proudly say that I have switched from Rhythmbox to Quod Libet. Rhythmbox is not bad, but it just feels so limited after trying amaroK, Muine, Listen, Banshee or even iTunes. The only things that have kept me using Rhythmbox are multimedia keys support, ease of use, intuitiveness, and resource friendliness. Being included in the Ubuntu repositories is merely a bonus, not a requirement.

Some of Quod Libet’s features which I like:

• Powerful built-in tag editing. Why Rhythmbox waited so long to support tag editing is beyond me. I had to rely on EasyTag to tag my music files when I was using Rhythmbox. Not anymore. I can just edit the tags straight in Quod Libet. I can even edit multiple files easily, rename all the files using a pattern that I specify, automatically fill the tags based on the file names, etc. just like in EasyTag. Quod Libet also comes with Ex Falso, a standalone tag editor that uses the same backend as Quod Libet, i.e. Mutagen.

• Multimedia keys. I have one of those keyboards that have multimedia keys, so I can play, pause, skip to the next/previous track, mute, increase/decrease volume, and so on by just pressing the corresponding buttons directly on my multimedia keyboard. And it works globally in GNOME, so I can skip to the next track while I’m typing this blog entry in Firefox, without changing the application focus or touching the mouse at all.

• Plugins. I like the Download Album Art plugin. I had to edit it a little bit to make it work with Quod Libet 0.18 (the current version in Dapper), simply comment out the line that imports SongsMenuPlugin, and change the class DownloadAlbumArt to inherit from object instead of SongsMenuPlugin.

• There’s a “refresh library” function that can scan the contents of your library folder for changes and update Quod Libet’s library accordingly. It does not depend on other system like inotify, gamin, fam, etc., but it’s not automatic. Which is OK for me. It doesn’t take more than one minute to rescan my library (slightly less than 8000 files). The latest version probably supports watching a folder for changes to automatically update the library, but I’m not sure.

• Many ways to manage and view the library. You can even use regular expressions for filters if you want!

• System tray icon with configurable tooltip display.

• It remembers the last song played, the last view opened, the last filter, etc.

Other interesting features that I have yet to try:

• ReplayGain support.

• Download lyrics (via plugin).

Regarding resource usage, more specifically memory, Quod Libet uses slightly more memory (~10MB according to htop) compared to Rhythmbox. Meh. It’s good enough for me. The only thing that didn’t work for me was MPEG4-AAC playback (viewing and editing tags in MPEG4-AAC files worked, though), I don’t know whether it’s only supported in the newer version or I need to install something else first. Having said that, it’s been a happy experience overall.

In this day and age, who honestly still uses XMMS or Winamp to manage their music library?

Update: MPEG4-AAC didn’t work because the package gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad was not installed. The wiki page on RestrictedFormats did not mention anything about it, so I updated the page.

When I was still using Gentoo, most of the times I could easily write a simple ebuild and put it in my local portage tree overlay, so that I could emerge it (and unmerge it later if I want to).

Not that easy in Debian or Ubuntu. Or, so I thought, until I found checkinstall. It’s available in Ubuntu’s universe repository. So I just do ./configure && make as usual, then instead of running sudo make install, I just do sudo checkinstall -D, answer a few questions, and I’d get a deb package that I can install with dpkg -i. Sweet. checkinstall can also create a Slackware package and an RPM package, by the way.

Note: the website seems to be down at the time of writing. Here’s a cached version.

I think that’s just not the right question to ask.

Error messages are there to help inform the user that there might be something wrong. It’s analogous to somebody screaming “Fire! Fire!” in a quiet neighbourhood. Instead of wondering how to make them stop screaming, it would be better to understand what it is they are screaming about, and why, just in case there actually is a real danger. Don’t you agree?

Average Joe users tend to ignore error messages as if the error messages are created just to make it more complicated and look more techie. Now, I agree that some error messages are cryptic and leave a lot of room for improvements so that they can be useful to average joe users. However, system administrators should be more willing to investigate the error messages further and try to understand what’s happening instead of trying to ignore the messages. At the very least, it wouldn’t hurt to try to paste the error message verbatim in Google.

So I’ve had it with Gentoo Linux. Goodbye Gentoo, I’ll always remember the good times, and the bad times. It’s not that Gentoo is bad or anything, it’s good in many ways, don’t get me wrong, but it also has some drawbacks, at least for me. I think I’m not that interested anymore in living on the bleeding edge. I just can’t be bothered to compile, tweak and tinker with a lot of stuff anymore nowadays, I just want to get my work done. If I need something, I want it quick and painless. Hey, apt-get install something sure beats emerge something most of the time, time-wise. Sure, there’s a price to pay, but nothing is free, there’s always going to be some trade-offs. I think I’m going to have to learn to live with it.

My Ubuntu install was almost glitch free. I already have some LVM volumes from my Gentoo systems, so I simply want to activate them in Ubuntu. The installer (partman?) would not let me finish the partitioning step if I enabled LVM. So I had to skip the LVM during the installation, and it was really trivial to add the entries to /etc/fstab afterwards and do mount -a from runlevel 1, et voilà, everything is there like it should be. Of course, a little bit of preparation beforehand helps. Based on my previous bad experience, I printed a text file containing the output of df -h, fdisk -l, cat /etc/fstab, pvdisplay, vgdisplay, and lvdisplay. So if shit happens (they do happen, trust me), I will have something to refer to. I also made, beforehand, a list of applications that I use daily, so I could quickly apt-get install them by following the list. Oh, and backups! Did I mention backups? It’s crucial to backup properly before doing something like this. At least the home directory and everything in /etc.

I’m not quite finished with the setup yet, but I’m very pleased so far. With Google by my side, everything was easy breezy (pun intended) to install and configure (there’s nothing much to configure really), the only thing left is setting up Harvard BibTeX and Ruby on Rails. There’s a rails package, but it’s out of date, so I’d prefer to install it from rubygems, unfortunately there’s no rubygems package. Looks like I have to install them manually, just like I did Sun Java, Azureus, and AllTray. Ironically, I could simply emerge all of them in Gentoo. Heh.

Barusan saya upgrade Drupal (sistem CMS yang digunakan oleh linux.or.id) ke versi stable terakhir. Entah apa gara-gara tempo hari saya workaround disable xmlrpc waktu ada security bug dan waktu itu belum sempet upgrade.

Ada ide?