Orca on Ubuntu Lucid (10.04)

My brother-in-law is blind, so I've been interested in linux accessibility for a long time. Not interested (or talented) enough to actually improve accessibility, but interested enough to keep an eye on the matter.

Long ago, I couldn't get Festival or Orca to work at all on my laptops. Mainly hardware support issues. One particular problem had to do with the software requiring the audio card to allow sampling at a rate that was twice what my audio card could do.

I just tested Orca on Lucid though and it's looking very good. Just enabling Orca took all of 5 seconds. I was a little confused since some things worked (firefox and the Orca preferences) and others didn't (gedit, gnome-terminal running man). Logging out and logging back in fixed that. I suppose just enabling Orca but not restarting didn't allow Orca to get its hooks deep enough into Gnome so it could intercept X11 display and keyboard/mouse events.

It took a few retries and hour and a half to get a reasonable set of Orca flat-view keybindings that didn't conflict with the regular gnome keybindings. I like using the Windows key (Super or Super-L) as a command key for Orca since it isn't used in Linux, exists in all new keyboards and is convenient. I don't much like Orca using the Caps-Lock key for that. Using the Windows key would be a problem if Orca ran in Windows but as far as I can tell (from the Orca website it doesn't run in Windows.

I was a little confused that Orca had firefox-specific keybindings, but they probably had to implement that to have similar behavior as JAWS (the dominant windows screen reader, and therefore the dominant screen reader in the world).

So Orca has some generic keybindings for general flat-view and other functionality. It can have app-specific keybindings. And it's scriptable (says the web page, although I haven't looked at what scripts might look like or how powerful they are).tt

It's also been pretty stable (tested on three laptops, all of which are pretty old). The only instability I saw happened when trying to close the Orca program via the GUI. Gnome and X hung so completely I had to go to a terminal and kill/restart gdm.

That's no big deal though since blind people would normally *always* have Orca on. And when I killed Orca from the command line (orca -q), it died gracefully and didn't take Gnome or X with it.

But all I've done so far is play with it a bit. I haven't used it extensively at all. Instability might become a lot more noticeable after hours or days of use. Maybe I'll try to get my brother-in-law to test-drive it on one of these laptops (instead of his Windows+JAWS laptop) for a day or two.

getting the vodafone usb modem working on ubuntu

http://ip-62-105-171-197.dsl.twang.net/bvportal/forums/index.html?threadId=ff80808122654e6f01227632fff8503c&postId=ff80808122654e6f01228e6f22484bb4

tomcat thread dump at work

At work, if tomcat isn't responding, send it a kill -3 to get it to produce a thread dump.

xhost

I run three or four different browser profiles for security. There's a general browsing profile for reddit.com and links I follow from there, there's a more secure profile for gmail and facebook, and there's a most secure profile for internet banking.

Not only do I run these separate profiles, I also run them as separate users under sudo -H -u [user] [browser] [other-params].

But in order to do that I need to have an xhost setting that allows these browser profiles (running as users other than me) to display on my root display. To enable that, I have this line in ~/.xinitrc.

xhost local:

bash for loop

Oooh, I just saw Bash for loop examples.

I definitely like:

for i in {1..100}
do
...
done


I don't usually need to step forward in increments greater than 1, but for that there's


for i in {1...100..2}
do
...
done


Of course there's also


for (( c=1; c<=100; c++ )) do ... done

which is what i've used in the past, but I always forget about the double parens.

grandr on toshiba satellite karmic dual monitor setup

When I first installed a second monitor on Ubuntu Karmic, the dual monitor setup was trivial. The built-in method (System | Preferences | Display) worked very well.

Lately though (possibly due to a package upgrade) that method stopped working perfectly. It couldn't identify the external monitor model (showing it as Unknown), and when I'd select the correct resolution for it (1440x900), on gnome restart or laptop reboot, some icons on the left of the desktop would be all scrunched up together, dragging a window from the external monitor (left) to the laptop monitor (right) would have the window end up partly on the left and partly on the right. It wouldn't go all the way to the right edge of the laptop monitor. As if the virtual screen width had changed to something a *lot* shorter.

I just installed grandr and ran that. It sees better than an Unknown monitor, and the virtual screen width is back to normal. I don't know yet if this fix will survive reboots. But it probably will. And if it doesn't, well, it'll be a reasonable workaround until I upgrade to Lucid.

gnucash OFX

I started playing with gnucash a month or so ago. I ran into a bunch of problems and it turns out they're mostly due to export file format I chose.

My bank supports OFX-MS-Money, OFX-Quicken and Quicken. I saw a post that said to avoid quicken because there were issues with identifying transactions as having already been loaded (when loading the same transactions twice, either because the same export file was loaded twice, or because two export files intersect). So I avoided Quicken and OFX-Quicken.

Unfortunately OFX-MS-Money has a worse problem. For some reason, the export files produced by my bank (might be the bank's problem, might be a gnucash bug, or it might just be a bogosity in the file format, or an obscure interaction among these and other features), would load into gnucash, but for the checking account, some transactions would be lost. I doubt if the transactions were really missing, but gnucash was somehow not seeing them.

I tried the Quicken file format the other day. All transactions loaded correctly and so importing a month's worth of data was very little effort. Gnucash also asks for particular expense sources (this grocery, that pharmacy, that other restaurant, etc) to be identified as to which kind of transaction they were. That's nice since for future months, those expenses will be correctly allocated to the correct account.

Unfortunately, Quicken has a weakness in that the transaction entries were missing a lot of information. For withdrawals, for instance, OFX-MS-Money would indicate which ATM card (Sol's or mine), as well as what ATM branch the transaction was made at. The Quicken format would just have a description of WITHDRAWAL and a memo field of ATM. And it was similarly silent for a lot of other transactions.

So, while the Quicken imports very nicely and has some great usability shortcuts, I can't use it since I forget what particular transactions are about IN THE SAME WEEK, let alone a month or two later.

Fortunately the OFX-Quicken format (which gnucash calls QFX) has *most* (not all, but enough) of the information from OFX-MS-MONEY, and the accuracy of loading of the Quicken format. We don't have a *huge* number of transactions per month. It only takes 30 minutes or so to load a month's worth of transactions and correctly assign expenses to the correct account. And I don't have to walk through the checking transactions doing a binary search for missing transactions.

At some point we'll have bank accounts at other banks. When that happens I'll be able to compare accuracy of other bank OFX-MS-Money files and determine if the bug is in gnucash or in my current bank's export file :-). I'm betting on a gnucash bug, myself. But now that I've got OFX-Quicken working, I don't care enough to replicate the bug. Maybe I'll do that on the easter weekend, if we don't go anywhere.

common git branch tasks

I like

Zorch's workflow examples on starting a new branch on a remote git repository.

[Here as a reminder so I can search on site:monotrematica.blogspot.com git branch]

NZ School goes completely open source

There's a great story at CIO about how a New Zealand high school switched to open source servers going from 48 servers to 4. It's pretty good to save 11/12ths of your hardware, electricity and server maintenance/sysadmin budget.

fireEvent when keyPress, keyDown, keyUp don't work

Evil Tester writes about fireEvent, so I don't need to

I found this (and Nick Bartlett's summary) when doing a google search for selenium IDE where type, keyPress, keyDown, keyUp, etc weren't working as expected.

I'd actually found and used fireEvent a few months ago when I was working with some selenium tests for the Mahara e-portfolio open source system. But I'd since forgotten.

In the problem at hand, there was an input textbox with an onkeydown which detected what key was pressed and if it was the ascii(13), would call this.blur(). The solution was just to "fireEvent | locator | onblur".

[Posted here so that I'll be able to find it when I do a google search on "site:monotrematica.blogspot.com selenium IDE keyPress keyDown onblur" :-]

Parameterized jmeter threadgroup and loop count settings

as pointed out in the mailing list post,

run jmeter with user specified jmeter parameters, e.g.,

jmeter -J threads=10 -J loopcount=5

and then, in the threadgroup, set the relevant fields to, e.g.,

${__P(threads)} and ${__P(loopcount)}

In the beanshell sampler, parameters can also be accessed via:
JMeterUtils.getProperty("threads");

Gnome panels on external monitor

The new monitor works very well, but some things aren't great. The fact that it's a rectangle (and there is invisible space above the laptop top panel is one. But I'll adjust to that.

I did need panels on the external monitor though. It's not convenient to have tasks on both monitors over on the laptop panel since I couldn't get a panel on the external monitor.

Then I found several solutions at answers.launchpad.net.

I used the gconf-editor solution. But after reading downward, I learned about the Alt-drag trick. That works too, and is much simpler. To put a panel on the second monitor, just create it first (it'll go on the first monitor). Then press Alt and click and drag the panel to the other monitor.

Services not coming up

After a recent package update on my work computer (AMD64), services were not being started on boot (no apache, ssh, etc). Strangely enough, gdm *does* start, so I get to log in to gnome.

runlevel says "unknown" though.

A bit of googling points to this: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/upstart/+bug/497299

and also https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/upstart/+bug/461725

I don't understand the whole thing. There seems to be a race condition when init tasks run in parallel. And also bugs in updating /etc/network/interfaces.

It's fixed for me by forcing upstart to the previous version (0.6.3-10). I then pinned that. If a 0.6.3-12 version comes up I may download it and test. Or maybe I won't, since 0.6.3-10 works and I doubt if newer versions in karmic will actually give me much reason to upgrade.

[Update]
Sol's laptop (upgraded to karmic the other day) has the same problem. I'll fix it the same way tonight (can't ssh into it since the services didn't start :-).

[Update]
boy, upstart-0.6.3-11 officially sucks. I updated the toshiba laptop and had the same problem. The Durabook is fine though. That's three computers out of four. Might become four out of five after I upgrade sol's desktop at work to karmic.

Problems with 32bit java on AMD64 on karmic

I prefer to run 32 bit java on my desktop since I only have 2GB of RAM. 64bit buys me nothing, and it eats twice the RSS.

With Jaunty (and Gutsy before that) I'd followed derek's advice on building a 32bit .deb.

I ran a downloaded 32bit eclipse.

Karmic seems to have broken something (probably SWT) and 32bit eclipse with 32bit JDK isn't usable.

Posting this here so I can find Derek's article again and start with that to get 32bit eclipse and 32bit sun-jdk working together again.

[update] It looks like Miroslav Hruz has a solution to the 32bit SWT issue. I'll try that on the weekend (remotely).

[update] I got things working without really understanding (or logging) what I did. After a bunch of uninstall, reinstall, all without notes (and some of it was in synaptic, so not in .bash_history), 32-bit sun-jdk and 32-bit eclipse started working again without me needing to do anything as in the links above. I did export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1 though. Thus ends this unhelpful post :-).

No audio? Is skype running?

I was looking at newly uploaded (from camera) videos of Timmy and John and I was confused because the videos were weird:

Totem said they where *playing*, but the progress bar wasn't moving and there was neither sound nor video.


The time counter (shows how many seconds/minutes into the video/song you're in) wasn't moving.


I thought it was something wrong with the newly mangled videos (made smaller via ffmpeg) so I tried some MP3s. Same symptoms as for the videos.

So I looked around at the modules, and at dmesg. Everything looked good. Until I moved my mouse to the bottom of the screen and the hidden status panel popped up. Skype was running. Apparently, on this machine, it takes over the sound card.

Slow vim startup -- solved

I've had some frustration due to slow vim startup.

time vim -c 'q'

real 0m6.138s
user 0m0.096s
sys 0m0.024s

Found the solution though. a blog post at samdorr.net says to use -X.

So now I have two new aliases in ~/.bashrc

alias vi="/usr/bin/vi -X"
alias vim="/usr/bin/vim -X"

I was a little confused because the slowness was there in screen, but when I opened a new terminal, there was no slowness (even without the aliases). I think it's because I've restarted X since I started screen. So $DISPLAY in the screen sessions is :0.0, but possibly there's some other X authentication cookies that refer to the old X session. Ok, I just looked, there's an XDG_SESSION_COOKIE, maybe that's it, or if not, something similar. So the X authentication still succeeds, but only after a timeout.

The poster at samdorr had a different problem. His server probably didn't have X at all, or maybe vim is trying to connect via ssh X forwarding, back to his graphical terminal :-). But the solution he gives is an axe that solves my problem too since I don't need vim to talk to X at all.

Hmmm, someday I'll just need to catch up to the modern world and use gvim, and probably syntax highlighting even :-).

Vodafone "Vodem" -- very easy

A friend of mine has a vodem (that's a USB HSDPA modem that works with the Vodafone NZ network). I borrowed it and tried it out on my Jaunty (Ubuntu 9.04) laptop at home.

I was confused initially since I had no manual or anything else. My friend said that on windows there's a CD, it installs a bunch of things and then just works. I didn't think to ask if authentication via login/password was required.

After some messing around, I found a hint on ubuntuforums that pointed me in the right direction. NetworkManager in Jaunty automatically detects the modem. It even automatically detects the network. It then presents a dialog asking which country (NZ is already default selected) and which Network to use. There are three networks ("Vodafone", "Vodafone (restricted)", and "Vodafone (unrestricted)"). My confusion was that I chose the first and the modem immediately disconnected.

I should have chosen the third. Upon choosing "Vodafone (unrestricted)", the vodem connects immediately to the Vodafone network and then just works. No further management needed. This is pretty cool. Too bad vodafone data charges are still so high. When the data charges drop by a factor of 10, this will be a real player. For now, it's a nice toy that I'm soon going to return to its rightful owner.

On recruiting software developers

John Fuex has a great article, 19 Tips for Recruiting Great Developers

Now, not all companies are going to be needing the superstars this article focuses on, but the points made there should be relevant to, say, the top 85-90-95 percent of developers.

Perhaps the tips can be relaxed according to the quality of the developer needed by the company (although the company, HR division or recruiter who is conscious of the actual target percentiles [instead of being hypnotized by some mantra about hiring "only the best"], is likely very rare on the ground).

Switched back to gnome

I had switched to xfce4 in Ubuntu because it gave me some memory savings. I found, however, that on my work desktop, I got *far* more savings by installing and using a 32-bit JDK (and 32-bit eclipse to go with it).

I didn't really need to switch back to gnome, but gnome is a bit smoother than xfce in the total experience, and I found myself using gnome applets in xfce (mainly the user switcher, but some others too).

I didn't switch back to gnome immediately since I *much* preferred xfce's Alt-F2 behavior to gnome's. The application chooser is much smarter even than Gnome-do. But then I realized that I could use xfrun4 in gnome. And after testing that at work, I've switched to gnome+xfrun4 at home too.

I forgot how I was running firefox as another user for security :-). After some fumbling, I figured it out again (although, really, I should just have logged back into xfce and looked at the launcher :-).

sudo -u [other_user] -H /usr/bin/firefox-3.5 -a [profile] -P [profile]

The -H is necessary because if it's not given then it'll use your own home directory rather than the home directory of other_user.

Ubuntu 9.04 gphoto2/libgphoto2 borken for my Canon Digital Ixus 700

I use gthumb for downloading camera pictures to my computer. I have a script that takes the filenames produced by gthumb and renames and creates resized copies of the images and videos. gphoto2 talks to the camera in PTP mode.

For a while gthumb worked on my laptops. It's stopped working now though and I don't know why. There are bugs posted with Ubuntu regarding this. Adding yet another bug confirmation won't do any good.

At one point I had gphotofs working enough to mount the camera filesystem. But I didn't want to mess with the filesystem directly. And anyway, gphotofs isn't working anymore now (it runs, returns, but doesn't actually mount the filesystem, and gphotofs keeps running in the background [which is OK, that's what it needs to do as a fuse filesystem provider]).

So now I have a horrendous hack for grabbing the images :-). I installed Ubuntu Intrepid under VirtualBox, gave it access to the USB devices, and I run gthumb there. Then I just scp the files over to the host box and halt Intrepid.

Yech. It works, but is hoogly :-). Maybe this'll be fixed in Karmic.

Overall, I find Ubuntu a pretty good platform for doing everything I need to do, but there certainly are the little niggles like this that demonstrate it's not really ready for regular users. Or it is, but they'll come up against walls every once in a while, get frustrated, and go back to their windows viruses.

[Update]
Ah, pulled in gphoto2, libgphoto2 and libgphoto2-port0 from karmic (downloaded the debs manually and installed with dpkg -i) and gthumb is now downloading the pictures. I understand about lack of resources, but it does seem a bug that this fix wasn't backported to work with Jaunty.

[Update]
I'm now actually on Karmic. The dist-upgrade reverted a separate and necessary fix. Gnome has a gvfs module for gphoto2 and when it's loaded, gthumb can't read the pictures/videos from the camera since the PTP port is already in use (by the gvfs gphoto2 module). Solution is to disable that. There might be a neater way, but I just did

chmod a-rwx /usr/lib/gvfs/gvfsd-gphoto2.