For portability, I made it cross platform, and have tested it on Windows XP, Mac OSX, and Ubuntu 9.04. Some of the debugging text seems to be a bit buggy, but it otherwise works. It’s just a stand-alone commandline executable, so you’ll have to run it from the command prompt. (I can’t be bothered to build 3 different GUI front-ends for the different OSes, even though GTK is an option)

I’m not currently posting the source code, and I don’t currently have access to my Ubuntu installation & binary executable, so all I’m posting for now is the Win32 & Mac OSX binaries.

Download:
audiostreamer.zip [610KB, Win32]
audiostreamer.tar.gz [37KB, Mac OSX 10.5+]

Here is the commandline usage:

usage:     audiostreamer.exe <type> <port> <hostname>
<type>     specifies whether we are running as a server or client
           Values: 's' (server) or 'c' (client)
<port>     specifies the host/port to listen on (as server) or to
           connect to (as client)
<hostname> specifies the host to connect to (as client). No effect
           as server

I made use of portaudio, libpthread (win32) for this project.

Audiostreamer will use your default input (For win32 – I haven’t implemented ASIO support yet, so it uses your WAVE input. For Mac OS, it should take your default CoreAudio input – I haven’t actually tested audio input on Mac OS)

Audio is streamed through the TCP port of your choosing. You NEED a fast network connection for this, or you may experience buffer underruns. Make sure you forward your port if needed (through your firewall/router)

Let’s say you have 2 files which are supposed to be identical, but each of them is MISSING a chunk from the whole file. An example is that you’re downloading 2 torrent files, one downloaded the 1st half, but the other only has the 2nd half. They both have the same file size, though.

This tool for Win32 will allow you to merge them:

DOWNLOAD HERE (585KB)

WARNING: I didn’t spend much time on it, so it’s very basic – doesn’t even have an icon or taskbar entry. In fact, it may be buggy and may crash. Who knows?

I decided to write my 2nd plugin to counter this, it seems to work on my single google talk account, in that it keeps my proper status message when going idle. I have no idea whether it works with other types of accounts, or with multiple accounts, if you test it, please tell me the results!

You can download it HERE [keepstatusonidle.dll, 525KB].
USE AT YOUR OWN RISK!

Installation steps
Before anything, make sure that you’re running version 2.5.0 of Pidgin or higher.

1) Download the file and place it in your Pidgin plugin folder (e.g. C:\Program Files\Pidgin\plugins). Note: You could try %APPDATA\.purple\plugins folder alternatively.
2) Select Tools > Plugins from the Pidgin menu.
3) In the Plugins window, tick the checkbox for “Keep status message on idle”

You’re good to go! If anything seems amiss, you can delete the dll file!

Refer back to my post on manually editing and compiling pidgin source code to get rid of the problem for more details on what I did previously.

I decided that the old way was messy, and recompiling all the time didn’t make much sense. So… I decided to write my first pidgin plugin to deal with the problem! Unfortunately I only have my windows computer with me right now, so it’s only win32, but the source should compile on other platforms as well. Contact me if you want the source!

You can download it HERE [leaveconvo_notify.dll, 526KB].
USE AT YOUR OWN RISK!

(NOTE: It only works on jabber accounts, e.g. google talk)

Installation steps
Before anything, make sure that you’re running version 2.5.0 of Pidgin or higher.

1) Download the file and place it in your Pidgin plugin folder (e.g. C:\Program Files\Pidgin\plugins). Note: You could try %APPDATA\.purple\plugins folder alternatively.
2) Select Tools > Plugins from the Pidgin menu.
3) In the Plugins window, tick the checkbox for “Left conversation notification”
4) Click “Configure Plugin” and select your preference. (You probably want to uncheck the option)
5) Now you can close those chat windows and not worry about your friends commenting about it!

Yay for Pidgin! Hopefully it works, being my first plugin. Just delete the dll file if something goes wrong!

Anyway, maybe I’ll write more later, but this is just a test post to make sure things are working ok!

I’ll update more later.

https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+question/15560

So I did what they mentioned:

sudo echo 'fbcon' >>/etc/initramfs-tools/modules
sudo echo 'vesafb' >>/etc/initramfs-tools/modules
sudo update-initramfs -u -k all -v
sudo nano -w /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-framebuffer
  (comment out vesafb, i.e. "#blacklist vesafb")

and restart. Yay, finally my ttys were working!

And I also sudo nano’ed /boot/grub/menu.lst and added “vga=792″ to the kernel boot options, and now I have nice 1024×768 resolution in my ttys!

Awesome.

Note: In the first image the original words should actually be “Hoong Ern has left the conversation”, just that I changed it!

So, people who are sensitive would be saying, “How could he close the conversation with me?” Not that nice indeed, so how will we deal with this situation? By not sending the ‘left conversation’ notifications!

Delving into pidgin’s source code to accomplish this, it’s actually very simple to disable, although I must say, it’s a cheap hack, not really a ‘proper’ one. But hey, it works!

Go over to http://pidgin.im, download the tarball for (currently) version 2.3.1 and untar it to the place of your liking. Then, we change the following:

In /libpurple/protocols/jabber/message.c around line 565, add the bolded lines:

case JM_STATE_GONE:
    child = xmlnode_new_child(message, "gone");

    if(!purple_prefs_get_bool("/pidgin/conversations/enable_left_conversation")){
        xmlnode_free(message);
	return;
    }

    break;

and in /pidgin/gtkprefs.c around line 1017, add the bolded line:

pidgin_prefs_checkbox(_("Use smooth-scrolling"), PIDGIN_PREFS_ROOT "/conversations/use_smooth_scrolling", vbox);
pidgin_prefs_checkbox(_("Send 'left conversation' messages"), PIDGIN_PREFS_ROOT "/conversations/enable_left_conversation", vbox);

That should be it!

If you want to change the default “<user> has left the conversation” message like I did, you can find that in /libpurple/protocols/jabber/message.c around line 106:

g_snprintf(buf, sizeof(buf),
    _("%s has abandoned the conversation! Traitor!"), escaped);
g_free(escaped);

Just change the line within the ” “s

Now go ahead and

$ ./configure && make && sudo make install

from the main pidgin-2.3.1 folder and run it! (assuming you’re on linux) You may need to install some extra dependency packages, but hopefully not too much!

Now in the preferences page:

Notice the new option “Send ‘left-conversation’ messages” below the smooth scrolling one. You’re good to go! Go close all your chat windows without worrying anymore!

First I just got rid of all the javas I didn’t need:

sudo update-alternatives --config java

and sudo apt-get remove-ing all the versions I didn’t need, just leaving sun-java6-jre sun-java6-plugin, I got the following:

$ sudo update-alternatives --config java
There is only 1 program which provides java
(/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/bin/java). Nothing to configure.
$ java -version
java version "1.6.0_03"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_03-b05)
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.6.0_03-b05, mixed mode, sharing)

Because firefox kept on wanting to default to a Blackdown Java Linux 1.42 (something like that) – even though only java-6 was installed, I finally solved it by just creating a symlink in the ~/.mozilla/plugins folder:

cd ~/.mozilla/plugins
ln -s /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-1.6.0.03/jre/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so

now about:plugins gives me

File name: libjavaplugin_oji.so
Java(TM) Plug-in 1.6.0_03

Yay!

I just performed maintenance on my server – including reformating, upgrading stuff, etc, and also fixing hardware problems – my motherboard’s northbridge chipset fan had failed. Sent me and my dad on a 2 day wild-goose chase looking for the fan, which no one seemed to stock at all. Finally bought another fan, and just glued it on top of the broken fan.

MySql failed! Corrupted databases… That meant that all the posts were gone. I restored from an old backup, from april, so everything since then is mostly gone forever. Oh well. So this has sucked up all my time the past 2 days trying to solve the problems and get the server back to where it was previously.

Other than that… things are ok now, I suppose. Shall update more later!