Matt Colyer

iPhone Icecast from Rhythmbox

Matt — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 23:24:30 +0000

So I wanted to stream music from my laptop to a Bose iPod speaker set over wifi. It seemed like this should be simple right? Not really.

Apparently Icecast2 doesn’t support streaming the way that the iPhone OS expects it to. Luckily some kind souls wrote a patch to fake the iPhone/iPod touch into working.

Here are the instructions to get you going on Ubuntu Karmic:

sudo apt-get install rhymthbox icecast2 build-essential dpkg-dev
Install the shout2send plugin for rhythmbox
Change the plugin to send mp3’s instead of oggs by replacing
“_GST_BIN = (‘audioresample ! audioconvert ! vorbisenc ! oggmux ! shout2send ‘” with
“_GST_BIN = (‘audioresample ! audioconvert ! lame name=enc ! shout2send ‘” in ~/.gnome2/plugins/shout2send/__init__.py
cd /usr/src
sudo apt-get source icecast2
sudo apt-get build-dep icecast2
cd /usr/src/icecast2-2.3.2/debian/patches
sudo wget http://matt.colyer.name/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/1002_iphone_streaming.txt -O 1002_iphone_streaming.patch
Add “1002_iphone_streaming.patch” as a separate line in the files “series”
cd ../..
sudo dpkg-buildpackage
cd ..
sudo dpkg -i icecast2_2.3.2-2build1_*.deb

Selenium IE7/8 in Vista/Windows 7

Matt — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 05:10:23 +0000

So after spending too many hours trying to get selenium to work in Windows Vista/Windows 7, it turns out that you must run the selenium server from an administrative command shell.

The easiest way to do this is to search for “cmd” in the start menu and then right click on the “Command Prompt” item that comes up and select “Run as Administrator”. After you have the shell open cd to the correct directory and run “java -jar selenium-server.jar”. You can then run your selenium tests from a normally privileged shell.

libiphone/ifuse 0.9.5

Matt — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 16:26:05 +0000

So it’s been quite a while since I first started this journey, but iPhone support in Linux has progressed to the point that you can sync your music and even read some of your contact/calendar data.

Today we take another step forward with the latest release of libiphone/ifuse.

See the project page for more information.

Google Chrome OS on Dell D600

Matt — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 16:59:30 +0000

So unless you have been hiding under a rock (in the online world) you’ve heard of Chrome OS, Google’s lightweight netbook operating system. Yesterday it was released as open source and I decided to give it ago. (The steps below are for Ubuntu Karmic, but you should be able to translate to other linux platforms.)

The first thing you need to do is get a precompiled image of the OS.
Extract the vmdk file from the download and then use “qemu-img convert -f vmdk -O raw ide.img“
Then run “sudo dd if=ide.img of=/dev/sdX” where /dev/sdX is the name of your usb stick you want to flash. BE CAREFUL to get this exactly right otherwise you might delete your entire hard drive.
Then down this file and extract it using “dpkg –extract linux-firmware_1.24_all.deb /tmp/firmware/” and then run “cp /tmp/firmware/lib/firmware/ipw2100-1.3.fw /media/C-ROOT/lib/firmware/“
Then unmount the USB stick and plug it into your D600.

Should be all set. If you have questions leave them below.

VNC to OSX in Ubuntu

Matt — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 18:40:11 +0000

So I’ve had a Mac Mini for a while and I prefer to access it over VNC so I had been using xtightvncviewer. However it would occasionally not update parts of the screen or lose the mouse and I would have to login again. For the most part it worked.

Well today I had enough and decided to fix it. It turns out all you have to do is use gvncviewer. I hope this saves someone else some frustation.