Navigation Bar

To get a navigation bar, we need to change two things. Firstly, in the Banner Header add after the blogname description the navigation bar, e.g.

<div id="custom_nav" class="custom_nav">
    <a href="http://www.richproductions.de/lunix">LUNIX</a> |
    <a href="http://www.richproductions.de/nz">New Zealand</a> |
    <a href="contact.html">Contact</a>
</div>

Secondly, we add some css to the Stylesheet, e.g. to get separation lines above and below of the navigation bar:

#custom_nav {
    border-top: 2px solid #6699CC; /* d8e8f5 */
    padding: 7px 0;
    text-transform: uppercase;
    border-bottom: 2px solid #6699CC;
}

.custom_nav a:hover {
    color: #000000;
}

That’s it, rebuild your page and you should see the navigation bar!

Copyright Note

To have your copyright at the bottom of the page, add the following to the Banner Footer template at the appropriate place (which updates the year automatically btw):

&nbsp;&copy; 2002 - <MTDate format="%Y"> richproductions

Justify Blog Entries

In order to justify the blog entries, add to the Stylesheet the following lines:

.asset-content {
    text-align: justify;
}

Pagination

Get Pagination, follow the instructions and install it. After that I got the following error when accessing pages of my blog:

The requested URL /~ritschi/~ritschi/text was not found on this server.

To get it working, you have to allow symbolic links in the apache configuration for the directory of you blog, e.g.

<Directory "/srv/www/mt">
    Options +FollowSymLinks
</Directory>

The plugin I wrote for GIMP applies the multiresolution filter I investigated in my diploma thesis to grayscale images. The filter smooths an image while it preserves the details of interest. The filter was implemented using CUDA and runs on the GPU. Compared to a fully parallelized CPU version on a Xeon Quad Core a speedup of 25-35 can be achieved on a graphics card like a GeForce 8800 GTS. For normal CPUs the speedup is even higher. As seen in the screenshot below the size of the filter can be adjusted (geometric spread) and also a threshold value, which determines up to which level details of the images get smoothed (photometric spread):

The source of the plugin can be downloaded here and requires at least CUDA 2.0, the CUDA SDK, as well as gimp and its development libraries. Since kernel templates are currently not supported anymore in CUDA 2.0 I changed the code and use function overloading now, so don’t blame me for the bloated code ;) Tomorrow I will also upload the plugin to the CUDA Zone and to my homepage at work.

ROOT=/boot_image USE=”static” emerge -av suspend

Used /usr/sbin/s2disk to write the image to my encrypted raid1 swap partition and rebooted. When I called the resume binary (/usr/lib/suspend/resume) nothing happened, even no warning or error message. So I compiled the resume binary myself and added some debug information to the resume binary and got the following message:

The system snapshot image could not be read.

It turned out that the resume image was corrupted. After some googling I found this thread, which says basically that s2disk doesn’t handle raid properly. As a matter of this when the raid is assembled on reboot the disks are not in a clean state and resync themselves, which leads probably to the corrupted image (at least resume thinks so). In the thread they suggest to set a variable in the sysfs that the raid should be assembled read-only and hence the resync would be delayed:

echo 1 > /sys/module/mdmod/parameters/startro

However it turned out that this doesn’t help anything, the raid starts to resync anyway. After some more investigations I found the solution: You can tell mdadm to assemble the raid under the assumption that the raid is clean avoiding the rebuild of the raid:

mdadm —build —assume-clean /dev/md1 —level=1 —raid-devices=2 /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1

Finally I got it up and running :) After I added this to my init script I could resume from the resume image on my encrypted raid1 swap partition. Unfortunately after I removed all the debug stuff and used the resume binary from the boot image again, it stopped to work :/ I got the following error message although I didn’t use encryption of the image:

resume: Encryption not supported

As it turned out the 32bit resume binary can’t read the image stored by the 64bit s2disk binary. Thus I used a 64bit binary also on the boot system and got suspend to disk eventually working.

First get the snapshot, unpack it and update it:

wget http://de-mirror.org/distro/gentoo/experimental/x86/embedded/stages/stage3-x86-uclibc-2008.0.tar.bz2
tar xvfz stage3-x86-uclibc-2008.0.tar.bz2 -C bootsystem/
mount -t proc proc /boot/bootsystem/proc
cp -L /etc/resolv.conf /boot/bootsystem/etc/
chroot /boot/bootsystem /bin/bash
env-update && source /etc/profile
emerge sync
emerge -auDv world

after that make a directory for your boot system and emerge all required packages:

mkdir /bootimage
ROOT=/bootimage USE=”static make-symlinks” emerge -av busybox mdadm
ROOT=/boot_image USE=”static” emerge -av =gnupg-1.4.9 cryptsetup

create the config for mdadm:

/sbin/mdadm —detail —scan >> /boot_image/etc/mdadm.conf

Having the system set up, we still need to build an initrd or initramfs, which can be both loaded at boot time. I choose the latter one and you have just to tell the kernel where your boot system resides. This is done by setting the CONFIGINITRAMFSSOURCE in the kernel config. Mine looks like this:

CONFIGINITRAMFSSOURCE=”/boot/bootimage /boot/cpiolist”

/boot/bootimage is the system create above and /boot/cpiolist contains some nodes required at bootup (early userspace), which are not created by busybox:

# supporting directories
dir /proc 0755 0 0
dir /sys 0755 0 0
dir /root 0755 0 0
dir /dev 0755 0 0
#initial device files required (mdev creates the rest)
nod /dev/console 0600 0 0 c 5 1
nod /dev/null 0666 0 0 c 1 3

After trying heaps of tools with unsatisfying results, I finally found a package called leptonica-progs, which provides a tool called converttops to convert images directly into ps files while preserving good quality and holding down the file size.

Install leptonica-progs:

aptitude install leptonica-progs

preprocess images to reduce filesize:

convert input.jpg - resize 50% output.jpg

convert jpg to ps:

/usr/bin/leptonica/converttops input.jpg output.ps

convert ps to pdf:

ps2pdf *ps

join the pdf files into a single one:

pdfjoin *pdf

Basically it performs the following mapping:

• next slide: >
• previous slide: <
• last slide: >>
• first slide: <<
• start/stop presentation mode: play
• zoom in: +
• zoom out: -
• zoom to fit: ++
• actual size: —

In order to start synergy automatically when you log in, you have to use launchd for Leopard. Create a plist file for launchd with the configuration for synergy, e.g. /Library/LaunchAgents/net.sourceforge.synergy2.plist:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN"
"http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
    <key>Label</key>
    <string>net.sourceforge.synergy2</string>
    <key>ServiceDescription</key>
    <string>Synergy Client</string>
    <key>OnDemand</key>
    <false/>
    <key>ProgramArguments</key>
    <array>
        <string>/opt/local/bin/synergyc</string>
        <string>--no-daemon</string>
        <string>--no-restart</string>
        <string>--debug</string>
        <string>WARNING</string>
        <string>--name</string>
        <string>MacBook</string>
        <string>192.168.1.1</string>
    </array>
    <key>RunAtLoad</key>
    <true/>
</dict>
</plist>

After this adjust the permissions of the file:

sudo chown root:wheel /Library/LaunchAgents/net.sourceforge.synergy2.plist

and to load or unload the daemon tell launchd to load the script:

sudo launchctl unload /Library/LaunchAgents/net.sourceforge.synergy2.plist
sudo launchctl load /Library/LaunchAgents/net.sourceforge.synergy2.plist

sudo env ftp_proxy=”http://proxy.rommel.stw.uni-erlangen.de:80” port -d -u upgrade outdated

In addition you have to tell port to honour these variabled in your macports.conf (/opt/local/etc/macports/macports.conf):

extraenv httpproxy httpsproxy ftpproxy allproxy noproxy

hardstatus alwayslastline
hardstatus string ‘%{= 9g}[ %{G}%H %{= 9g}][%= %{= 9w}%?%-Lw%?%{= 9R}(%{W}%n*%f %t%?(%u)%?%{= 9R})%{= 9w}%?%+Lw%?%?%= %{g}][%{Y}%l%{g}]%{= C}[ %m/%d/%y %c ]%{W}’

This gives you a transparent status bar at the bottom of your screen session showing the hostname of your box, active and open sessions as well as date and load. For more examples, have a look at gentoo wiki’s TIP on using screen.

I had also some trouble getting bash’s profile sourced in Leopard when using screen, because no login shell was started by default. However adding the following line to my .screenrc solved this issue:

shell -/bin/bash