Usually, when you connect the phone via USB, it asks if you want “PC Suite mode” or “Data Transfer mode”. The “Data Transfer” mode has the phone show up as a standard USB storage device, which allows for easy transfer of MP3 files, photos and videos to and from the phone, without any nokia-specific software. However, it only works for the external SD card, so you can’t use that to access SMS messages or contacts.

I usually only need “Data Transfer” mode, so I changed the default to that. Today I regret that decision, as it cost me a couple of hours’ work. I called the Orange hotline, and they did their best to help me, including trying to blind-guide me through the menus, which failed because the menus are actually dynamic and I didn’t have the default setup. They actually got me 90% of the way there – here’s the solution I found: Hit the red (disconnect) button, and type the Soft Reset GSM code: *#7780#. Now press the “left menu” key (not the left key, nor the menu key – the left of the two “dynamic” keys) – this part was what the Orange hotline missed, because it seemed so obvious. Then hit 12345 (this is the default “secret code”), and the left menu key again. I found this by watching a demo of the soft reset on YouTube.

At this point I used VirtualBox and the Nokia PC suite (both are free-as-in-beer) to do the heavy lifting. I now have a text file with all of my contacts, a CSV file with all of my SMS messages, and all of my images saved both to my computer and a DR site. Now I just need to upgrade my military phone (Mirs)…

The second, more important feature, is the exact one I’ve been missing and talked about in the previous post – hit Edit->Preferences->Start playing files from last position, and Totem will keep track of your last playback position when you close the video. Reading the implementation patch shows that there is a certain threshold for this – the position won’t be saved if you’re too close to the beginning or end of the video. So there, my show downloading stack now has every feature I’d want from Miro, without the downsides I’ve mentioned.

Everything I describe in this post can be done using miro. It’s a neat piece of software, which lacked polish in version 2.4 (2.5 is out now though), but there are a few things I don’t like about it:

• You have to be graphically logged in for it to run. Among other things, this means that if someone reboots your computer, there’s no way to get it to start automatically. (I’ll be very happy to know if I’m wrong about this)
• It doesn’t give you as much control as I’d like over torrents.
• Its BitTorrent client doesn’t perform as well as rtorrent.

However, Miro does one thing which I haven’t figured out how to do myself yet: It keeps track of your position within watched shows. That is, stop watching a show -and next time playback will resume from the same place.

The first thing you want to do is get a good RSS feed for your show. Unfortunately, Revision3’s shows (many of which are quite good), are direct HTTP download links, as per the advertiser’s request. For other shows, you can find torrent RSS feeds, which make much better use of everyone’s bandwidth. Also, downloading will be handled by our trusty rtorrent, which we can configure for bandwidth limiting.

To download RSS feeds, I use flexget. It does its job well, but doesn’t support bandwidth limiting. It accepts a simple YAML configuration file, and has good logging. I run it as a cron job – its locking mechanism prevents multiple instances from running simultaneously. For non-torrents, I set the output directory to ~/torrents/inbox. For torrents, I set the output directory to ~/torrents/from_rss.

For downloading torrents, I use rtorrent. It’s a curses-based client which performs very well. My .rtorrent.rc file looks like this:

download_rate = 30
upload_rate = 2
directory = /home/ohad/torrents/in_progress
on_finished = move_complete,"execute=mv,-u,$d.get_base_path=,~/torrents/inbox/ ;d.set_directory=~/torrents/inbox/"
session = /home/ohad/torrents/.session
schedule = watch_directory,5,5,load_start=/home/ohad/torrents/from_rss/*.torrent
schedule = untied_directory,5,5,remove_untied=
schedule = throttle_1,23:00:00,24:00:00,download_rate=0
schedule = throttle_2,05:00:00,24:00:00,download_rate=30
port_range = 6881-6889
encryption = allow_incoming,enable_retry,prefer_plaintext
dht = auto
peer_exchange = yes
scgi_local = /tmp/rtorrent-scgi.socket

Interesting things to note here are:

• Downloads live in one directory, but get moved to the inbox directory when they’re done.
• The session directory is important – this allows rtorrent to resume downloads if it’s shut down.
• The from_rss directory is watched for new torrent files. When the relevant downloads are stopped, remove_untied occurs and the torrent files are deleted.
• Throttling is fully customizable.
• The SCGI socket is useful for rtgui – we’ll get to that.

I have a “watchdog”-style cron job which makes sure it’s running if the computer is up. This is not as elegant as starting it from an RC-script, but keeps the whole setup confined to the limits of my own user. Again, rtorrent has a lock-file which prevents multiple instances from running.

#!/bin/bash
# A simple script to make sure I am running rtorrent in a screen

set -e

SCGI_SOCKET=/tmp/rtorrent-scgi.socket
SESSION_DIR=~/torrents/.session

screen -d -m -fn -S rtorrent -s /bin/bash -t rtorrent -m nice rtorrent

while [[ ! -S $SCGI_SOCKET ]]; do sleep 1; done

if [[ -S $SCGI_SOCKET ]]; then
	chgrp www-data $SCGI_SOCKET
	chmod g+rwx $SCGI_SOCKET
fi

RTGUI provides a nice web-based interface. It’s a bit tricky to configure, and you’ll need to use an HTTP server – preferably lighttpd, as it has support for SCGI UNIX sockets (as opposed to SCGI TCP sockets). This lets you keep the number of open network ports to a minimum. This is all well-documented on the RTGUI site.

Finally, I’ve written a little python script called check_shows which uses libnotify to show a pretty pop-up whenever downloads complete. It’s a tiny little hack which uses inotify, which is lots of fun.

That’s it. Any neat tricks are welcome

# Zone    NAME                GMTOFF  RULES/SAVE  FORMAT  [UNTIL]
Zone      IsraelIDT           2:00    01:00       IDT

Now, this almost works. The problem is that both is_dst is set and timezone = -10800 (3 hours – should be 2, as it should represent local standard time), so some software double-compensates here for a grand total of GMT+4:00. After some research (walking through __tzfile_read gave the biggest hint), it turns out that timezone is set according to the minimal local time type which is transitioned into. So I came up with this file:

# Rule  NAME    FROM  TO    TYPE  IN   ON       AT    SAVE  LETTER/S
Rule    ZionIDT min   1939  -     Jan  1        00:00 1:00  D
Rule    ZionIDT 1939  only  -     Jan  1        00:00 0:00  S
Rule    ZionIDT 1940  max   -     Jan  1        00:00 1:00  D

# Zone    NAME                GMTOFF  RULES/SAVE  FORMAT  [UNTIL]
Zone      IsraelIDT           2:00    ZionIDT     I%sT

Sounds about right, nay? Even my handy little pyzdump confirms that it looks about how I want it to:

./pyzdump.py /usr/share/zoneinfo/IsraelIDT
Transitions:
['At Sat Dec 31 23:00:00 1938, switch to IST',
 'At Sun Dec 31 22:00:00 1939, switch to IDT']
Types:
[<TZType IDT: UTC+10800 dst=True>, <TZType IST: UTC+7200 dst=False>]

(pardon the lack of syntax highlighting – my prettyprinter fails me)

However, it still doesn’t work. A test program:

int main() {
    tzset();
    time_t t = time(NULL);
    printf("Timezone name is %s, timezone=%ld\n", __tzname[1], timezone);
    printf("The time is %s", ctime(&t));
    printf("Timezone name is %s, timezone=%ld\n", __tzname[1], timezone);
    return 0;
}

And its results, as run at 14:42:17 UTC, which is 19:42:17 IDT:

Timezone name is IDT, timezone=-7200
The time is Sat Apr 18 14:42:17 2009
Timezone name is UTC, timezone=0

Or, as I described it to a friend:

Me: Hi computer, do you know what timezone are we in?
Computer: Yeah, it’s Israel Daylight Savings time, GMT+2:00 for standard time.
Me: OK, and what time is it?
Computer: 14:42
Me: No, that’s 3 hours late. What timezone are we in?
Computer: Umm… UTC?
Me: You just said IDT.
Computer: Nuh-uh.

I’ll get to the bottom of this eventually :/

Addendum: It seems that the problem is even more complicated. For the following timezone file, C programs seem to work fine:

# Rule  NAME    FROM  TO    TYPE  IN   ON       AT    SAVE  LETTER/S
Rule    ZionIDT min   1939  -     Jan  1        00:00 1:00  D
Rule    ZionIDT 1939  only  -     Jan  1        00:00 0:00  S
Rule    ZionIDT 1940  2030  -     Jan  1        00:00 1:00  D
Rule    ZionIDT 2030  max   -     Jan  1        00:00 0:00  S

# Zone    NAME                GMTOFF  RULES/SAVE  FORMAT  [UNTIL]
Zone      IsraelIDT           2:00    ZionIDT     I%sT

However, Python programs still show timezone = -10800. Examining Python’s code, I found this:

        if( janzone < julyzone ) {
            /* DST is reversed in the southern hemisphere */
            PyModule_AddIntConstant(m, "timezone", julyzone);
            PyModule_AddIntConstant(m, "altzone", janzone);
            PyModule_AddIntConstant(m, "daylight",
                        janzone != julyzone);
            PyModule_AddObject(m, "tzname",
                       Py_BuildValue("(zz)",
                             julyname, janname));
        } else {
            PyModule_AddIntConstant(m, "timezone", janzone);
            PyModule_AddIntConstant(m, "altzone", julyzone);
            PyModule_AddIntConstant(m, "daylight",
                        janzone != julyzone);
            PyModule_AddObject(m, "tzname",
                       Py_BuildValue("(zz)",
                             janname, julyname));
        }

And since June and July have the same timezone in our case, there's a good chance that this is what's going wrong.

The moral of the story seems to be this - I should go with the first, simplest "always-DST" solution. Programs should ignore the timezone variable, as in our context it isn't reliable. In general, all internal time handling should be done in UTC; when reading times from the outside world, if they are in local time - use mktime. If they are in a specified timezone, use timegm and compensate manually. I'd love to hear better ideas in the comments.

1. master branch is same code as currently in upstream.
2. Working to resolve issue #1234 pertaining to “Performance for gizmo”, I work on a branch 1234-gizmo-performance.
3. I mail a peer, John, with this information, as well as my repository location.
4. John adds my repository as a remote, lutzky. Then he branches review1 (or review2 if that is taken, and so on) at lutzky/1234-gizmo-performance.
5. John adds comments with nice big “FIXME” tags, which are highlighted in any decent editor. He commits this, the commit-message stating that it was code review.
6. John tags his final review commit (or, if he had no comments – lutzky/1234-gizmo-performance) with a “reviewed1” (or reviewed2, etc.) annotated tag. Since the annotated tag includes all the necessary information (who tagged, when, and what), the number doesn’t really matter.
7. I merge john/review1, incorporate the changes (or reject them) and remove the comments. If no further review is necessary, I submit this – and once submitted, I merge this back into master.

It’s a nice system. I wonder what other methods there are of doing this.

Today I went to visit my grandparents, and it turned out their computer wouldn’t boot. BIOS would load up fine, and I could browse the menus fine – but once it tried to go on from there, it would simply blink what looked like half a cursor (that is, half of a “_”-style cursor). I figured it might be the HDD – so I took it home, and decided to connect it to my own box. Upon disconnecting my DVD drive, I destroyed the SATA cord – it had an annoying little metal tab which had to be pushed in before it would release, and it just wouldn’t give, and the connector just broke, exposing and bending the wires.

Checking if the computer still boots, the BIOS took much longer to display hard drive status, and while Ubuntu would start booting, it would fail in the process and tell me that my root hard drive (by UUID) isn’t available. Looking at dmesg, the ata2 module was indeed reporting that the hard drive was too slow – but a few seconds later it would finally access the drive, and mount properly. This problem, however, disappeared once I connected my grandparents’ drive! (Mounting it would fail, telling me that I either have a hardware error or need to connect it to a Windows machine, which I don’t have, and run some diagnostic commands). Sure enough, when the HDD is connected by itself, it gets quite flaky, but once I connect a second drive (back to the DVD, eventually), everything works properly. This probably has to do with the fact that both drives are connected on continuations of the same power cord – but I’ve never experienced such a problem, where you must connect devices to both connectors on the power cord. A hardware guy I know says he’s never heard of such a problem either.

Naturally, these things never happen when I mess with hardware at work, where there are plenty of spare parts…

For gaming, I can appreciate the need for a color screen. My point has to do with cellphones. True, most cellphones today come with cameras, are able to play video, and are rather capable mobile gaming platforms (when compared to the Game Boy, that is). All this does, in fact, require a color screen. However, I believe that there is a market for cellphones which do not support these features, but do support neat things like 3G internet connectivity (GMail and RSS on the phone is a major Win, in my opinion), and have a comfortable SMS interface. These features actually suffer from having a color screen: Battery life (for the powerful backlight), viewing angle, and screen resolution take a hit. While it’s true that color LCDs have come a long way since the Game Gear, so have black & white display technologies (E-Paper, anyone?).

Of course, my wish for a modern B&W-screen cellphone will likely never come true. The simple reason is that they would be totally unmarketable. Even business-types like color screens nowadays. So I’ll just keep holding out for a folding E-Paper mobile browser.

Host beta
	Hostname 1.2.3.4  # IP Address of beta
	ProxyCommand ssh alpha nc -w 1 %h %p

This requires you to have nc (netcat) installed on alpha. Once you do that, you can run ssh beta directly from your own box.

#!/bin/bash
# A simple script to make sure I am running rtorrent in a screen

if ! ps -o uname -C rtorrent | grep -q `whoami`; then
	screen -d -m rtorrent
fi

#!/bin/bash
date >> ~/time_tracking
vim ~/time_tracking +

Now, if I could only get vim to automatically hit “A” and space for me afterwards… (I’m betting there’s a way to do it, but AFAIK vim can only receive ex-mode commands as parameters).

Edit: …and, of course it’s possible. Here’s the new version:

#!/bin/bash
echo "`date` " >> ~/time_tracking
vim ~/time_tracking + -c 'startinsert!'