Author: root42

New Book: Modeling and Tools for Network Simulation

There is a new book out, for which I contributed part of a chapter: Modeling and Tools for Network Simulation. The book is meant to be a textbook for everyone who needs to simulate computer networks. From the physical layer to the application layer, some best practices are described. Contrary to Amazon and Springer’s webpages, the book has more than 256 pages. It’s got more than 500 pages, so it is rather comprehensive.

Shortcuts on OS X

I use Spark for defining global shortcuts to tools, applications etc. One of the best things is shortcutting to the login window. This way you can quickly lock your screen, which is not bindable by default in OS X. Also useful: shortcuts to AppleScript, e.g. for opening a new Safari window. This is what Spark looks like, when you edit the shortcuts:


Yellow pages when printing with Debian?

We had the problem of yellow tinted printouts on our Debian Testing machines. With my OS X machine, I did not have this problem, although both system use CUPS 1.4.3 for printing. It seems that Ghostscript was the culprit. The pstopdf filter to be exact. This bug report in the Debian bug tracker describes the exact same problem. The idea is to comment out the “-dUseCIEColor” option. I am not sure in how far this will also change the colour reproduction, but since our systems are not colour calibrated anyhow, I think this will not matter.

Typo3: Filelinks are not actually links

Whoever named the Typo3 filelinks, should be fired. Out of a cannon. Into the sun. This is because the filelink, does not actually link to a file, but it copies it to some folder (upload/media by default). Why this is so, is beyond my understanding. When you add a simple link in the RTE, and link to a file, you get the expected result: You get an <a> tag linking to the corresponding file in the fileadmin/ folder of Typo3. But when using the filelink, the file will be copied to the upload/media/ directory.

I have tried to use the DAM extension (digital asset management), but that is such a convoluted, under-documented beast, that I got rid of it very quickly. Now I still do not have a solution, but I welcome every hint on how to solve this.

Switching flyspell dictionaries on the fly

Since I am using Emacs for most of my text processing, and it comes with the nice Flyspell mode, and I do write English and German the most, I found this nice snippet from the Emacs wiki:


(defun fd-switch-dictionary()
    (interactive)
    (let* ((dic ispell-current-dictionary)
    (change (if (string= dic "deutsch8") "english" "deutsch8")))
      (ispell-change-dictionary change)
      (message "Dictionary switched from %s to %s" dic change)
      ))

(global-set-key (kbd "<f8>")   'fd-switch-dictionary)

On OS X, I recommend to use emacs-app or emacs-app-devel from MacPorts. For flyspell to work correctly, also make sure to install aspell and e.g. aspell-dict-de. Otherwise the above function will complain, most probably.

Cisco VPN Client triggering system crashes?

I am not quite sure, but I suspect my Cisco VPN Client for OS X is triggering some crashes on the MacBook Pro. Only when I have been using the VPN Client, suspend the machine, then wake it up again, the system becomes unstable in some cases. Once, I got a OS X death screen right away, the other time I just got the blue screen, and the activity LED on the front was just off. This so far only seems to happen after I have been using the VPN Client. The current release of the client is 4.9.0180, and is already pretty old. Funny enough the Cisco webpage lists only OS X 10.4 and 10.5 as supported, and not 10.6, which has been out for what… 9 months or so? If I find anything new on this, I will update this post.

Update: There is Tunnelblick, a free UI for OpenVPN, which can be used as well. Trying this out now, to see if it is any better.
Update: So far no more crashes. I’ve used Tunnelblick for some weeks now. So I guess the Cisco client indeed is the culprit

Arrow keys broken for console applications in OS X 10.6.3

I was just trying to configure some project using the curses based ccmake tool. I noticed that I cannot do that, since the arrow keys on my keyboard stopped responding when running ccmake. Turns out, Apple broke curses in OS X 10.6.3. Workaround is to copy the ncurses dylib from a 10.6.2 system, which I don’t have at hand right now. Funny enough, the keys are also broken when using xterm instead of the standard terminal, so there is definitely something very broken in ncurses right now.