The Ignition Project: Category Howto

Spotify on Linux: Easy Edition

Keith Gable — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 22:50:00 -0500

Here’s a script I just wrote that installs Spotify on Linux with Wine. Works great with Wine 1.3.24 on Gentoo Linux x86_64 with PulseAudio (which works great and isn’t choppy or anything).

P.S. In the Spotify installer, don’t tell it to start when done.

#!/bin/sh

# Download spotify and winetricks
wget http://download.spotify.com/Spotify%20Installer.exe -O /tmp/spotify.exe
wget http://winetricks.org/winetricks -O /tmp/winetricks
chmod +x /tmp/winetricks

# Configure $WINEPREFIX
export WINEPREFIX="$HOME/.wine-spotify"
wineboot

# Set some various registry keys (Spotify recommends you use 44100/Emulation)
wine reg add HKEY_CURRENT_USER\\Software\\Wine\\Drivers /v Audio /t REG_SZ /d pulse /f
wine reg add HKEY_CURRENT_USER\\Software\\Wine\\DirectSound /v DefaultSampleRate /t REG_SZ /d 44100 /f
wine reg add HKEY_CURRENT_USER\\Software\\Wine\\DirectSound /v HardwareAcceleration /t REG_SZ /d Emulation /f

# Install some required packages (IE6 may provide WinInet, if so then it's safe to remove that)
/tmp/winetricks wininet ie6 corefonts tahoma winhttp wmp10 secur32

# Copy the WMP10 MP3 decoder on top of Wine's, tell Wine to use it instead.
cp -fv $WINEPREFIX/drive_c/windows/system32/l3codecp.acm $WINEPREFIX/drive_c/windows/system32/winemp3.acm
wine reg add HKEY_CURRENT_USER\\Software\\Wine\\DllOverrides /v winemp3.acm /t REG_SZ /d native,builtin /f

# Install Spotify.
wine /tmp/spotify.exe

# Remove temporary files
rm /tmp/spotify.exe
rm /tmp/winetricks

WekeRoad Ink for Visual Studio with Ruby in Steel

Keith Gable — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 10:35:00 -0500

Just started playing with Ruby in Steel and I had to add some styles for Ruby/Rails to the WekeRoad Ink theme. Here they are:

<Item Name="Ruby Constant" Foreground="0x00AF912B" Background="0x02000000" BoldFont="No"/>
<Item Name="Ruby Method Def" Foreground="0x02000000" Background="0x02000000" BoldFont="No"/>
<Item Name="Ruby Method Call" Foreground="0x02000000" Background="0x02000000" BoldFont="No"/>
<Item Name="Ruby Symbol" Foreground="0x00FFFF00" Background="0x02000000" BoldFont="No"/>
<Item Name="Ruby IVar" Foreground="0x003248DA" Background="0x02000000" BoldFont="No"/>
<Item Name="Ruby GVar" Foreground="0x02000000" Background="0x02000000" BoldFont="Yes"/>
<Item Name="Ruby CVar" Foreground="0x003248DA" Background="0x02000000" BoldFont="Yes"/>
<Item Name="Ruby Class Def" Foreground="0x006DC6FF" Background="0x02000000" BoldFont="No"/>
<Item Name="Ruby Module Def" Foreground="0x00AF912B" Background="0x02000000" BoldFont="No"/>
<Item Name="Ruby Regular Expression" Foreground="0x00FF1CFF" Background="0x00000000" BoldFont="No"/>
<Item Name="Rails Attribute Name" Foreground="0x02000000" Background="0x02000000" BoldFont="No"/>
<Item Name="Rails Attribute Value" Foreground="0x005CC2A5" Background="0x02000000" BoldFont="No"/>
<Item Name="Rails Element Name" Foreground="0x006DC6FF" Background="0x02000000" BoldFont="No"/>
<Item Name="Rails Entity" Foreground="0x000000FF" Background="0x02000000" BoldFont="No"/>
<Item Name="Rails Server-Side Script" Foreground="0x00BB9768" Background="0x02000000" BoldFont="No"/>
<Item Name="Rails Tag Delimiter" Foreground="0x00FFFFFF" Background="0x02000000" BoldFont="No"/>

Accessibility Issues You Wouldn't Think About

Keith Gable — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 08:23:00 -0500

When you write web pages, accessibility should be a key issue on your mind. Everyone should be on the alt bandwagon, and hopefully thinking about how someone with an aural or a visual disability might parse your web page. But there are some things you just don’t even think about and anyone pointing it out would just be helping you, right? :)

The issue I’m speaking of is writing content with phrases in it that require aural or visual ability. For example:

Please look around on our site.

Can you look around a site if you can’t see it? I wouldn’t think so. “Please browse our site” might make a little more sense but it has a separate issue of basically begging your visitor to browse your page without giving them any information as to what they’re browsing to. Give them a short list of awesome things you can do: “You can learn about X, Y, and Z on our site.”

Click here.

If a tree falls in a forest and nobody’s around, does it make a sound? If you press a mouse button and can’t hear it make a sound, does it click? Well, no. You should always link to a phrase or word that makes sense. “Click here to schedule a tour.” is inferior compared to “Schedule a tour today to learn about X, Y, and Z.”

Another thing I’ll bring up is the Oxford comma. Growing up, they taught us to always use an Oxford comma, so pardon me if I sound biased. Anyways, I always say to include it because screen readers are stupid and won’t put the right emphasis on a list consistently unless you explicitly delineate the list. Plus, the US government printing office requires it, so that seems like a good enough reason to include it in sentences.

Howto: Use GNOME media keys with Amarok 2.0

Keith Gable — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 23:45:00 -0600

Actually, this will work for anyone, regardless of desktop environment. GNOME users are the most affected, because GNOME doesn’t send keys to Amarok for it to process.

Anyway, this is really simple. First you need to know what your media keys are. I have a Das Keyboard Professional so it lacks media keys; I use Meta and the numberpad to control my media stuff.

First, install xbindkeys. You probably already have it. Next, turn off Caps Lock, Numlock, and Scroll Lock, then use xbindkeys --key and press the key or key combination you want. You will likely get a name for the key like XFMediaPlayPause. Failing that, you’ll get a code. Either will work. Copy the code or better yet the name.

Edit ~/.xbindkeys. Make yours like this:

"amarok --play-pause"
  Mod4 + KP_Multiply

"amarok --next"
  Mod4 + KP_Add

"amarok --previous"
  Mod4 + KP_Subtract

First line isn’t indented and is the command to execute. Second is indented two spaces and the code you got previously.

Add xbindkeys to ~/.xinitrc (you may need to create it, chmod +x it, and put #!/bin/bash at the beginning of the file).

Hopefully that helps!

Fix: Dolphin hijacks the GNOME Places menu

Keith Gable — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 00:16:00 -0600

I had a problem where items in the GNOME Places menu were opening in Dolphin (and weren’t working). Somehow Dolphin hijacked the file:// protocol. The fix is simple though is something I just found by looking around in GConf Editor.

Why would I have Dolphin installed in GNOME you ask? Amarok 2.0 needs it. By the way it’s nice.

Do this as your normal user (not root):

gconftool-2 --set --type=string /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/file/command 'nautilus "%s"'
gconftool-2 --set --type=bool /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/file/enabled true
gconftool-2 --set --type=bool /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/file/need-terminal false

Hopefully other users find this through Google, because having the GNOME Panel’s Places menu launch Dolphin instead of Nautilus sucks, and this fixes it! :) (that’s a paragraph of keywords, folks)

(If you use a different file manager, replace the command as needed)

My Deinterlacing and Post-Processing Scripts

Keith Gable — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 09:05:00 -0600

At work, we put up a lot of Flash video. I use On2 Flix Pro for the Flash encoding part. But I get the content in a variety of formats. Perhaps the most common format we get is 480i MPEG-2 video interleaved. I’m encoding on a Mac, and QuickTime cannot correctly feed the audio stream into Flix Pro because it’s interleaved in the video stream. Also, Flix Pro’s deinterlacer sucks. So, I use mplayer and mencoder to fudge the video around and deinterlace it. It’s working very well. Oh yeah, you’ll need Perian.

Read it after the break.

Wait, how do you get mplayer and mencoder on a Mac? mplayer is included in MPlayer OSX. Show Package Contents, Resources, External_Binaries, mplayer, Show Package Contents, MacOS, and bam, your binary for mplayer is in there. mencoder, on the other hand, is hard to find. I ended up using ffmpegX’s mencoder, which is “MEncoder dev-CVS-060307-04:23-4.0.1”, compared to my mplayer which is “MPlayer dev-SVN-r25648-4.0.1” and way newer.

First, I have to strip the MP3 audio stream and the MPEG-2 video stream, into separate files. I have my video rips folder set up with a “scripts” subfolder and a “work” subfolder. Here is my script to dump both streams:

#!/bin/bash

# Takes $1 and dumps it into two files in work/
./scripts/mplayer "$1" -dumpvideo -dumpfile work/dump.m2v
./scripts/mplayer "$1" -dumpaudio -dumpfile work/dump.mp3

Next, I run cropdetect, which is a stupid script to save me typing:

#!/bin/bash

# Runs crop detect on the stream we dumped.
./scripts/mplayer work/dump.m2v -vf cropdetect -vo null -ao null

Next, I run a deinterlacing and cropping filter. And postprocessing maybe, but I’m not even sure if it works in mplayer like it works in mencoder. I’m sure the latest mencoder can let me combine this step with the next one. But as it stands I need to do this in two steps.

#!/bin/bash

# Takes work/dump.m2v and applies the crop in $1
# and deinterlaces, outputting to work/dump.deint.yuv

./scripts/mplayer work/dump.m2v -vf crop=$1,pp=de,yadif=0 \
    -vo yuv4mpeg:file=work/dump.deint.yuv

Finally, I put both streams together, doing final postprocessing. I also convert it to HuffYUV because QuickTime can play it with Perian. Again, I think the latest mencoder has the yadif deinterlacer, which would let me combine the previous script and current script in one step. BTW - A/V sync gets off if you leave out harddup.

#!/bin/bash

# Takes files in work and compiles them into work/output.avi
# $1 if specified is a list of additional filters to apply.

if [ "x$1" == "x" ]; then
    ./scripts/mencoder work/dump.deint.yuv -noskip -vf harddup,pp=de -ofps 30000/1001 -ovc lavc \
        -lavcopts vcodec=huffyuv:format=422p -audiofile work/dump.mp3 -oac copy -o work/output.avi
else
    ./scripts/mencoder work/dump.deint.yuv -noskip -vf harddup,pp=de,$1 -ofps 30000/1001 -ovc lavc \
        -lavcopts vcodec=huffyuv:format=422p -audiofile work/dump.mp3 -oac copy -o work/output.avi
fi

Also, if you noticed, the previous script lets me specify additional filters on the command line if I want. Usually I have to run hqdn3d, but not always.

Oh, and this will use about 1 GB per minute of content, times two because it’s creating an uncompressed file twice (the final AVI and the intermediate .deint.yuv). Don’t run yourself out of disk space! :)

Windows + Apache + SSPI + SSL + NTLM + IE + POST data got you down?

Keith Gable — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 17:47:00 -0500

For some reason, when using NTLM authentication on Apache through the mod_auth_sspi module (combined with SSL, but that might not be a requirement), Internet Explorer will refuse to send POST data along with a request at random points in time. It will still send a POST request, but it just doesn’t send data.

This seems to only affect IE users on domains with Integrated Windows Authentication (IWA). My CrossOver-emulated IE6 works fine with Basic authentication over the secure site we have set up doing IWA (of course I have to type in my credentials). But my Windows machine authenticating using IWA drops POST data!

After tireless Googling, I think I have a solution. It sucks, but it’s the best I can do. Suggestions welcome:

SetEnvIf User-Agent ".*MSIE.*" ssl-unclean-shutdown
MaxKeepAliveRequests 1

What this does is for MSIE, it tells mod_ssl to uncleanly shutdown. And it makes KeepAlive/HTTP Pipelining on, but only for one request. With KeepAlive turned off, IE doesn’t work at all. It gives a “Page Cannot be Displayed” error… probably because it’s attempting to NTLM authenticate, lost the socket, and dies.

What’s this mean for everyone else that follows the rules? They don’t get any benefit from HTTP pipelining. Which totally sucks. So hopefully you don’t have this problem…