My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything
Hi
I just upgraded the blog software and took the opportunity to also update to a new version of the wp-andreas01 theme that I have been using for my blog since day one. The new theme is more versatile, fixes some rendering bugs, draws a wider pane (1024 instead of 800 pixels) which I think is a more pleasant reading experience.
Please refresh your browser cache if you see graphical glitches. I had to rescale the banner images too, but they still look good:
Eric
Well, I guess it is time to dump good old Google Toolbar.
In a previous post of mine, I showed you how to allow Firefox to keep using the Google Toolbar even though it lists as “unsupported” since firefox-5. But this is not a long-term option of course – at some point the plugin will become incompatible because it is no longer being developed and it will de-stabilize my browser.
So I was thinking, what are the reasons why I wanted to stick with the Google toolbar for so long? The plugin has some great features which I really don’t want to miss. Let me list them here, along with ways to get the same or similar functionality in Firefox but without using the Google Toolbar.
Well that was not all that many reasons for needing the Google Toolbar, but even then: their value is high because of the way they allow me to be more productive and efficient in my work. I guess I will have to give the alternatives a try and see if I can live without the Google Toolbar. Realizing that I have to, I can only say “so long, and thanks for all the fish” to the people who have been developing this plugin over the years.
While I am at it, I think I am also going to try out Right-Click-Link (opening URLs in a new tab that are listed in a page as plain text), which seem to be useful as well.
Eric
Hi!
A number of big packages are coming up fairly soon. There will be a new LibreOffice (3.4, a major release), and VLC as well will probably have another release shortly. Also, I should be working on KDE 4.6.3.
I am looking at ways to make this manageable for me. Compiling LibreOffice packages takes forever, even for a single Slackware release. Building LibreOffice packages for both Slackware 13.1 and 13.37 will simply take too much of my time.
So, I am interested to find who is running my LibreOffice 3.3.2 package on Slackware 13.37. Do you have issues? Is it working well? I can tell you that I have no issues with that package, and I am using it on my Slackware 13.37 laptop. I will make a decision based on the feedback I will get from you.
For any other package, I will probably switch to creating them for Slackware 13.37 exclusively. You will have no problem compiling your own version of a package for an older Slackware, using my sources. It’s just that you do not want to compile something like LibreOffice yourself!
Please leave your comments below the article.
Thanks, Eric
This weekend, I setup a Wireless Ethernet Bridge.
What the heck, I hear you say! I’d better explain why I did this, and what it actually means.
I have a wireless network in the house that extends to a large part of the rooms. Unfortunately we have thick walls and ceilings with a lot of steel-reenforced concrete, and this causes less-than-ideal wireless reception in parts of the house. The thick concrete walls do not invite drilling a lot of holes for CAT5 cables. I had to think of something else that minimized the drilling of holes and still gave me a network that covers all of the house.
I have been using a WRT54GL (its selling point being that it can easily be flashed with alternative Linux based firmware) until now. This gave me a wireless speed of 54 Mbit/sec (802.11g) maximum. I have flashed this router with an alternative firmware, tomato, which really helped me getting my Internet router stable and feature-rich while at the same time I was able to raise the transmission power a bit… but not enough.
Linksys WRT54GL
So what I did was to buy a new wireless dual-band router with 802.11n speeds (300 Mbit/sec) which gives the existing wireless LAN a boost. This new router had to be capable of running tomato firmware too (because I am fond of it) and the dual-band gave me a way to leverage the old WRT54GL without killing the speeds of the larger wireless LAN: a dual-band router basically has two wireless access points built-in. I found the Cisco/Linksys E3000EW at a very interesting price (it is being followed up by a new device, the E4200). It also has an USB port (for connecting a hard drive or a printer) and I found that the tomatousb firmware (a successful mod of the tomato firmware) fully supports this device.
Cisco/Linksys E3000-EW
The E3000EW was switched on and two minutes later, the poor bugger was running tomato firmware! A firmware upgrade through HTTP upload using the standard Linksys firmware worked flawlessly.
Now the first task was to copy the configuration of the old WRT54GL to the new E3000EW. That was not too hard. AlsoI setup the two internal access points with two different ESSIDS of course. Then I quickly swapped the two (after “cloning” the WAN MAC address so that I would not have to go through my ISP’s provisioning setup again) and I had freed the WRT54GL for re-configuration into a Wireless Ethernet Bridge.
What was my plan? To position the WRT54GL in the house, nearby the area where wireless signals were weak because of the steel and concrete. Its position would be where I do have a good wireless connectivity. From that point on, I would run CAT5 cable from the WRT54GL to the computers that needed to be connected. This would mean, much less cable and much less drilling.
Actually, that was the final plan, which I implemented. Originally I wanted to create a distributed wireless network using WDS, which is a technique (supported by the tomato firmware) to connect multiple wireless access points. However, when I started reading about these techniques, it turned out that WDS effectively cuts your wireless network speeds in half with every “hop” that you create in your network. And I was not prepared for lower speeds… even though the advantage would be that I did not have to run new CAT5 cables. Access points with WDS still accept client connections, so all I would have to do was put the second AP in a location where it gave good coverage to the computers that suffered from problematic wireless reception.
The thing with Wireless Ethernet Bridging (WET) is this: the second Access Point, deployed to connect to the “master” and create the bridge, dedicates its wireless link to that bridged connection. It will no longer accept connections from wireless clients. It means that the computers need to connect to it using conventional cable!
It was a matter of weighing the pros and the cons. I decided on creating the bridge and using cables, because that would keep the maximum network speed acceptible.
So the old WRT54GL was reconfigured (using a network cable of course, you can not do this wirelessly). And it works surprisingly well! I am writing this article while my laptop is connected to this device using a cable and the traffic is bridged across the air. So, whoopee!
There are a few gotcha’s that I ran into, before I finally found out what it takes to successfully create a wireless bridge.
Remember, when you setup a bridge, you are extending your network transparently. A network bridge passes network packets back and forth without dividing the network in two segments. Computers in the LAN will be unaware of the bridged connection – it does not show up in a traceroute. There is another solution for my problem that I have not gone deeper into, and that is to setup the WRT54GL as a “wireless client”. This creates a new network segment though… which requires that you run a DHCP server on the WRT54GL for the wired client computers that you connect to the device.
And yet another option is to install the “dd-wrt” firmware and configure the WRT54GL as a Wireless Repeater which allows you to connect your computers wirelessly to the device… but dd-wrt is not nearly as userfriendly as tomato. Pick your choice.
This is the network diagram I ended up with (courtesy of oldspeak where I also obtained the final piece of the puzzle):
Wireless Ethernet Bridge
And what about powerline / homeplug, you ask?
I have considered that, and sometime ago, when my wireless conneciton problems became aggravating, I even wanted to buy a set of 200 Mbit Devolo mini adapters. They would give me 100 Mbit effective network speeds, but I still would have to buy a second wireless access point if I wanted to extend my wireless LAN, or else I would have had to use conventional cable. That made me decide to pick the geeky solution.
Eric
A few sounds I wanted to share with you.
I have a broad musical taste, ranging from classical to metal, from ethnic to industrial. I am drawn to all these kinds of music because of the physical and emotional impact. Music has to move me – I have never been a follower of hit lists. It’s not about the song texts, more important is the atmosphere conveyed by the song text. I like to be surprised by sounds I have never heard before, or a musical direction that is new to me. Ethnic music especially appeals to me – perhaps because as a young child, my dad used to let me listen to cassette tapes full of eastern and african music.
On the topic of ethnic music, which is what this post is about, what I appreciate in music is when it achieves a fusion of cultures. For instance, combining traditional ethnic melodies and instrumentation, with contemporary music and production. In a broader sense, mixing the old with the new. That is what keeps the old music alive and gives the contemporary music a new soul. Germany is full of bands that create an exciting mix of medieval and ethnic song structures with electronic or rock music. Musical purists have a hard time appreciating these blends… I have had discussions with friends and family about how old music is being killed by fusing it with modern rhythms. Well, to each their own taste. I enjoy myself immensely and to me that is the important bit.
I rarely listen to radio stations these days. When I was young, I was hooked to my stereo because that was my source of musical education. Now of course there is the endless ocean that is the Internet… I visit a lot of music blogs and let myself be inspired by the stories told. If you’re interested, you may want to look at the Totally Fuzzy music blog aggregator.
Recently, I have been listening to some contemporary Mongolian folk music that was mentioned on one of these blogs. Mongolia is a country that has been influenced by its big neigbors China and Russia, who both ruled there in the previous century. Several hundreds of years earlier, Mongolia’s culture was touched by Tibetan Buddhism, but of course we all know it best for Genghis Khan, the ruler of the Mongol Empire some 800 years ago.
I was intrigued by the discovery that contemporary Mongolian bands practice the same “throat singing”, also called “overtone singing” or “höömii” that I was familiar with… but assumed to be limited to Tibetan Buddhist monk chants. What do you know.
A nice example of the art of throat singing, accompanied by an ancient mongolian musical instrument (in this case, a morin khuur) is displayed in the following video (exemplary is the comment “cameraman at 4:38 trying to identify where that sound is coming from – then? he’s like WTF?!?!“):
I was pleased to learn that there is a thriving musical scene in Mongolia, centered around its capital city Ulan Bator. I also found that I missed several concerts in the Netherlands and Germany that I could have attended if only I had known… but there are some good video registrations which I will link to further below.
Egschiglen is a group that has been around for some 20 years now. Their music has a trance-like feeling to it. It is inspired by works of classical Mongolian composers, and their instrumentation is fully acoustic and authentic. Quite different from the more modern sounding folk/rock groups I will discuss next, the two albums by Egschiglen I heard (Zazal and Gereg) touched me on a deep level. Perhaps because I have not really experienced a lot of traditional Chinese music? I found it magical.
I found a recording of a live performance in Berlin (the band has a second home in Germany) by three of Egschiglen’s members, followed by a larger set where you can experience the full band including their female singer:
Of the bands that produce contemporary music, perhaps I like Altan Urag best. There’s so much energy and originality here! The song “Khukh Tolboton (Blue Mark)??” of their album “Made in Altan Urag” featured during the closing credits of the movie “Mongol” (2007). Here is a link to a video that was made by joining shots of that movie with shots of the band (the song is played at a slightly higher pitch than the original album version, probably to make it fit with the movie credits):
Completely different atmosphere in their song Requiem:
And then there is Hanggai – a Beijing based group founded by a former member of a punk band who rediscovered his Mongolian roots. If I interpreted correctly, they are the most successful Mongolian band outside Asia.
Hanggai make quite an appearance! See this video which is a live performance at the Midi festival in Beijing of the song “Xig Xile” from their 2010 album “He Who Travels Far”:
A studio take of the same song can be seen here:
The unique aspect of these bands is how their music successfully fuses their own cultural roots with the world they live in today. In China, that is certainly an achievement. To me, this was a worthwhile addition to my musical library.
Enjoy! Eric
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