If you see an error like the following:

… when you are attempting to generate documentation, then you need to install an older version of the libxml-ruby gem, and modify rubyosa slightly.

If this issue is fixed in rubyosa, a simple gem update will override the sed line you just ran, so you don’t need to worry about it again, unless you reinstall rubyosa-0.4.0.

You might have tried the following:

• Disabled security on your WiFi network
• Regressed to WEP security
• Told everyone not to use the wireless

Clearly, none of these work-arounds is ideal. There is hope.

The problem is among OS X 10.5 – VMWare Fusion / Parallels Desktop – the TKIP WPA2 security protocol. For some reason, installing the VM programs creates a situation on the wireless network that causes a TKIP MIC (or a “Michael“) message integrity check error. In short: OSX and your router think that the network is being cracked, because of a way that the VM programs use or abuse the networking interface stack.

The solution is to regress the security, but by as little as possible. Simply turn of TKIP or “TKIP+AES” encryption on your wireless device, and only allow AES encryption. This is not ideal, because the Michael check is trying to warn you about network intrusion, however, it simply does not work.

Caveat: if you find that AES encryption does not work on some devices, you are probably use the stock Linksys firmware on your router. Consider upgrading to the DD-WRT firmware. Read the docs, go over notes for your router model, and take the plunge. The stable Linux-based environment for your router will make your network work, as well as offering you more features, such as local DNS, for example.

First, when installing OpenSolaris 2008.05, choose VMware setup options for “Solaris”, and either 32-bit or 64-bit depending on your preference. I wanted, 64-bit, but “Other / Other 64-bit” setup option resulted in strange errors at vm boot time.

You can now mount the VMware tools via the menu option “Virtual Machine” -> “Install VMware Tools”. A CD icon will appear on your desktop. Double-click the CD, and the tar file inside there. Untar the files onto your desktop. Open a terminal. Become root. Before you run the script, we need to create some directories to help the installation complete.


# su -
(password)
# mkdir -p /usr/dt/config/Xsession.d
# mkdir -p /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d
# cd ~/Desktop/vmware-tools-distrib
# ./vmware-install.pl
(run the script)
# cd /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d
# ln -s /usr/dt/config/Xsession.d/9999.autostart-vmware-user.sh


What we did above was create and old directory the install script wanted to use, a new directory that will be used by gdm (the login manager), and then linked the files accordingly.

If you log out (or reboot), and log back in, you will now see:


$ ps -ae |grep vmware
794 ? 0:03 vmware-m
868 ? 0:07 vmware-g
12428 ? 0:04 vmware-u

The vmware-u is the vmware-user process that needs to get launched, so that features like autoresize and copy & paste will work.

Now — on to play with ZFS!

• a new Mac laptop with a fast hard drive, but one that is smaller than all the data you need to backup
• A backup hard drive you’ve used on Windows and Linux, but is formatted NTFS, and is much larger than your new laptop’s HD
• You have files named on your system that needs to be backed up that aren’t kosher for NTFS

So, being a Linux geek, you realize “Ha! I’ll just tar my files up, copy it to the backup drive, over to the new system, and untar.”

Yes – you do just that, but then you need to use your laptop for work; so instead of waiting to untar the file, you copy the very large backup tar files from the external HD to your new laptop.

Now, here’s the problem: you can’t untar the entire tar flle w/o running out of space. What do you do? Un-tar a bit at a time; delete; continue.

Untar a bit of the archive you want, delete it from the tar, and continue until you have more space on your HD than the rest of the tar file.

# tar xf MYBACKUP.tar This/directory/I/want
# tar --delete --file=MYBACKUP.tar This/directory/I/want


This method works surprisingly well, considering the tar file crossed all three major operating systems.

If you are unsure of what is inside the archive, you can use:

# tar --list --file=MYBACKUP.tar


Since we all use OSX as our main dev boxen here, as well as Gentoo Linux machines, I long ago started hacking and helping on the Gentoo-Alt Prefix Portage project, so that I could help create one software repository we all use here. I found it very time consuming, before hand, to help other devs install and configure pieces of software every time they needed something — they’re not n00bs or anything, just UNIX CLI stuff isn’t their usual cup of tea.

I’m in the process of (re-)becoming an official Gentoo developer, focusing on Prefix Portage this time (last time was GNUstep). Until that goes through, I have a prefix-portage overlay, which is accessible through layman, or you can use SVN to check it out at http://www.dicianno.org/svn/PrefixPortage/branches/overlay-fafhrd/.

So, to summarize the point of this post, shortly, I got SSL support working in the Apache ebuild that was already in my overlay, at least on OSX. So, get to it!

I spent much to much time trying to figure out the right combination of video/audio encodings that would would from an RTSP streaming server (went with a RealServer demo, for now) to a variety of clients (QuickTime Player, VLC, various phones, etceteras.)

First, VLC is a champ. Every time I tried a new streaming server, VLC could play the stream with video and audio. QuickTime Player was not so kind. Even the phone we were streaming to — the Nokia N95 (tech specs) — could play streams that QuickTime Player could not.

I tried a variety of tools, from the venerable ffmpeg to QuickTime Player’s export functionality to create stream-able videos (mainly for QuickTime, since it was being very picky). The tools I used were the following:

• ffmpeg from FFMPEG project
• faac from AudioCoding
• mp4creator from MPEG4IP

Here is a simple bash loop I made to iterate over .mov’s in the current directory and create MPEG4 video, MPEG4 audio (AAC LC), in an MPEG4 container that was hinted. You should set FRAMERATE and SIZE (as “WxH”) as environment variables. Note that the first line has -ac 1 which sets the audio to mono. Also, edit the -qscale to your liking (or remove it).