Coherent Blahs

After my last Canon i960 broke down, got a Canon MX860 all-in-one. The first hiccup was finding the drivers.  There was no supported driver available for this at Canon USA support site. Strangely, there was a supported driver for Linux available at Canon Australia site.

Although the driver allowed me, with a bit of tweaking, both printing and scanning over wired and wireless connections, the print dialogs didn’t have all the necessary config knobs. This is due to missing functionality in the PPD file for the printer that has been distributed with the driver.

Google to the rescue. I found this discussion with the solution:

FYI, add this to /etc/cups/ppd/Canon-MX860.ppd 

and You can set resolution, quality and greyscale 

snip ------- 




*OpenUI *Resolution/Output Resolution: PickOne 

*DefaultResolution: 600dpi 

*Resolution 600dpi/600 dpi: "<</HWResolution[600 600]>>setpagedevice" 

*Resolution 1200dpi/1200 dpi: "<</HWResolution[1200 1200]>>setpagedevice" 

*Resolution 2400dpi/2400 dpi: "<</HWResolution[2400 2400]>>setpagedevice" 

*CloseUI: *Resolution 




*OpenUI *CNQuality/Quality: PickOne 

*DefaultCNQuality: 3 

*CNQuality 2/High: "2" 

*CNQuality 3/Normal: "3" 

*CNQuality 4/Standard: "4" 

*CNQuality 5/Economy: "5" 

*CloseUI: *CNQuality 




*OpenUI *CNGrayscale/Grayscale: PickOne 

*DefaultCNGrayscale: false 

*CNGrayscale false/Off: "false" 

*CNGrayscale true/On: "true" 

*CloseUI: *CNGrayscale 




snip ----- 

I had some problems with the newer releases of Firefox. And Google just enabled extensions for Chrome browser. Time to switch. And boy, am I happy!! It renders the websites much MUCH faster than Firefox, imported all my bookmarks, and most importantly, search keywords, from Firefox.

I did face one problem though. On my Ubuntu 8.04 LTS laptop, it didn’t support Java out of the box. Flash worked fine, but no Java.

However, found the fix pretty easily on the web. You need to do the following if you are facing this problem:

sudo mkdir /opt/google/chrome/plugins

cd /opt/google/chrome/plugins

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/lib/i386/libnpjp2.so

Not all Emails are made equal. And some have the priority that they cannot wait.  Given that, I was looking for a way to filter out mails, and get a quick notification on some high priority Emails.
Since I have an Android phone, the best way for me to get notified is either through SMS, or through Google Talk. SMS costs money. So, I wanted the notification to come over GTalk.
My work Email resides on an Exchange server, and it has no way to filter an Email and generate a GTalk notification from it. So, I had to look for some client side solution.
Looking around the web, I found GTalk uses jabber as the underlying protocol, and I can use xmpp libraries to communicate with it.
(continue reading…)

We have a vacation coming up next month, and I was wondering how to best use my Garmin nuvi 350 for the trip. It became more necessary since the accomodation we’ll be staying at will not have any Internet access (so, no access to Google Maps).

Google Maps have the nice feature where you can send a Point of Interest (POI) directly from Google maps to your Garmin GPS. However, it has a few shortcomings:

1. Garmin issue: It has only Windows XP (No Win2k) and MacOSX support. So, no Linux support. Bummer!! It’s not Google’s fault, since Garmin has not ported the plugin for Linux. This is a double bummer since Garmin now uses Linux in most of its GPS lines. Since they are getting so much commercial value from Linux, I’d expect them to give a little back and port their software for Linux.
2. Google Issue 1: Only the POIs that show up in the search of google maps can be sent to the GPS. No Custom placemarks can be sent. This is surprising since most GPS’s take co-ordinates for POIs, which is readily available in Google maps.
3. Google Issue 2: Either I am missing something, or Google just completely didn’t get it. There is no way to completely send a whole Saved Map to a Garmin (or any other GPS) device from Google maps. That’d mean, if you have a saved map with many placemarks, you’ll have to send them individually. It’s just not cool.

However, the best news is, there is a solution around all these issues. The steps to get this done are:

• Create a new Map in Google Maps. For this, click on My Maps:
• Then click on “Create new map”. Put a suitable name to your map:
• Now you can add placemarks, either by searching for them, or by right clicking and selecting “Add a placemark” anywhere in the map. The added placemarks for the map will show up on the left side:
• After all the placemarks have been added, get the link for your saved map. You can get the link from the top right corner:
• Then go to http://www.takitwithme.com/ and insert the Google Map link into the textbox. Click “Load MyMap” and TakeItWithMe will load all the placemarks from your Google Map.
• Click on the Download GPX button, and you should be able to save all the Google Placemarks as a .gpx file. This .gpx file can be converted into different GPS formats. In our case, we need to convert it to a .gpi format.
• For Windows users, you can use the POI Loader directly to load the GPX file into your Garmin GPS.
• For Linux users, the GPX file needs to be converted into GPI format, and manually loaded. For this, use gpsbabel. The command for converting it to the Garmin gpi format is:

gpsbabel -i gpx -o garmin_gpi -f Yellowstone.gpx -F Yellowstone.gpi

Yesterday, I plugged in my Logitech QuickCam Fusion webcam into my Jaunty Desktop with Kubuntu, and it didn’t work out of the box. Searching online showed the Webcam should be supported natively in the kernel using the uvcvideo kernel module. So, what went wrong:

A quick look at /var/log/syslog showed:

May 17 11:40:41 newcompy kernel: [  876.134221] usb 1-1.1.4: USB disconnect, address 8
May 17 11:40:45 newcompy kernel: [  880.404316] usb 1-1.1.4: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 9
May 17 11:40:45 newcompy kernel: [  880.673393] usb 1-1.1.4: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
May 17 11:40:45 newcompy kernel: [  880.673482] uvcvideo: Found UVC 1.00 device <unnamed> (046d:08c1)
May 17 11:40:46 newcompy kernel: [  881.672050] uvcvideo: Failed to query (135) UVC control 1 (unit 0) : -110 (exp. 26).
May 17 11:40:47 newcompy kernel: [  882.672039] uvcvideo: Failed to query (129) UVC control 1 (unit 0) : -110 (exp. 26).
May 17 11:40:47 newcompy kernel: [  882.672042] uvcvideo: Failed to initialize the device (-5).
May 17 11:40:48 newcompy kernel: [  883.636047] 9:3:3: cannot set freq 16000 to ep 0×86

So, the module was failing to initialize, and as a result no /dev/video or /dev/video0 was getting created automagically.  A little googling got me the solution.

Basically, the issue is, for some webcams, including this one, the audio device has to be initialized before the video device can be initialized. But, for the kernel, it detects the video device first, and goes ahed to initialize it, causing the issue.

The easy, manual solution is… after booting the machine and connecting the webcam, run the following command on a shell prompt:

sudo rmmod uvcvideo

sudo modprobe uvcvideo

The first command removes the uvc video module (driver for the webcam), and then re-initializes it using the second command. Since the audio section is already initialized, this goes through fine. You should expect something like the following in the /var/log/syslog file on running these.

May 17 11:42:50 newcompy kernel: [ 1005.135784] usbcore: deregistering interface driver uvcvideo
May 17 11:43:08 newcompy kernel: [ 1023.761270] uvcvideo: Found UVC 1.00 device <unnamed> (046d:08c1)
May 17 11:43:08 newcompy kernel: [ 1023.788759] input: UVC Camera (046d:08c1) as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1a.7/usb1/1-1/1-1.1/1-1.1.4/1-1.1.4:1.0/input/input6
May 17 11:43:08 newcompy kernel: [ 1023.790091] usbcore: registered new interface driver uvcvideo
May 17 11:43:08 newcompy kernel: [ 1023.790227] USB Video Class driver (v0.1.0)

Looks like my search for a reasonable Movable Types blogging client on Linux is coming to an end. I just installed Bilbo Blogger 0.9 and am blogging from it right now. It meets all the basic needs I have from a blogging client. I could edit older entries easily. Formatting is nice. Unicode support is there.

The only problem I have encountered so far is, it couldn’t sync my list of Categories properly. Hopefully they will fix it soon.

The blogger needs KDE 4. So, it cannot be used in older versions of KDE. The interface looks pretty nice. Here is a screenshot for you (click on it for full view).

Tab completion, when invoked alone (press tab twice on bash prompt), shows how many commands are available at your disposal.

~$
Display all 3778 possibilities? (y or n)
Now 3778 is a pretty impressive number. I’m sure there are many commands that we have no clue existed. So, I’ll write a series on some of the obscure ones under the category “Linux Commands”.

A slide from Steve Ballmer’s presentation seems to be pointing at that Linux market share in the desktop market is bigger than Apple’s.

Full report

   As part of my work, I had to look at some Visio files that were saved in proprietary, undocumented .vsd formats. This was not possible on Linux, as the standard oodraw, dia applications didn’t support it (apparently for some legal issues). However, if you have access to a Windows machine with visio, there is a way out. You can open the file in Visio, and then save it as “XML Drawing”. This will save the file as .vxd format, which Dia can open and edit fine. Apparently, the XML Drawing format, although proprietary, is more documented and supported. So, if you get .vsd files sent regularly by your collegues, ask them to save them in .vxd instead, which will allow both Visio and other cross-platform programs to view/edit them.

KDE 4.2, codenamed “The Answer” got released today.

Waiting for it to reach Kubuntu 8.10 repository. Hoping for a much more feature complete KDE4 with 4.2. There is a pretty nice visual guide to 4.2 available at KDE site.