Copying a DVD under Linux wasn’t a problem for a long time. I always used k3b. However lately I failed to copy a DVD. k3b would say: "failed to retireve all CSS keys" or in german "es konnten nicht alle CSS Schlüssel geholt werden". k9copy would say: "libdvdread: Error cracking CSS key for /VIDEO_TS/VTS_03_1.VOB (0x0031ccb6)!!" First I thought k3b didn’t have access to libdvdcss. However it turns out that aparently some DVD drives won’t return data from some sections of a disc if the region code of the drive is not set. Read on

OpenStruct is a nice tool to work with. However… Let’s say you do this: user = OpenStruct.new( :name => "Franca Botanica", :uid => "777" ) address = OpenStruct.new( :user => user, :country => "Paraguay" ) some_stuff = [] some_stuff << user some_stuff << address and now you want to iterate over the some_stuff collection and want to dump all those “containers” you created. But how do you find out which fields those OpenStruct instances have? Read on

When I run the statically bound Mojotron executable, as downloadable from sourceforge under Ubuntu Interpid, then it doesn’t recognize the arrow/cursor keys. I.e. changing the direction of the shots is not possible. This can be “taken care of” by changing the Mojotron configuration file: $ diff -u ~/.mojotronrc.orig ~/.mojotronrc --- .mojotronrc.orig 2009-04-13 12:43:57.000000000 +0200 +++ .mojotronrc 2009-04-13 12:44:43.000000000 +0200 @@ -8,11 +8,11 @@ section Player1 { usekey = 62 (type=integer); movement = wasd (type=string); - aiming = cursorkeys (type=string); + aiming = ijkl (type=string); } Tomáš Pospíšek Read on

Sourcepole war an der FOSSGIS vom 17.-19. März 2009 an der Leibniz-Universität in Hannover mit dem Vortrag “Kartenaufbereitung für Tile Map Services mit Cloud Computing” vertreten. Die Folien stehen hier zum Download zur Verfügung. Read on

Some of the more or less officially recommended documents describing how to set up SMTP time spam scanning suggests calling (?) Spamassasin from Exim as user “nobody”. However under Debian the User nobody intentionally has no home directory and thus, depending on how you’ve set up Exim4 and Spamassassin, Spamassassin will try to save its settings in its $HOME, resulting in the following error (visible in /var/log/mail.log): Mar 2 09:55:59 mail spamd[4896]: config: cannot write to /nonexistent/. Read on