Akom's Tech Ruminations

I'm not quite sure why a working example of doing this is so hard to find!

As far as I can tell, at the time of this writing there are two choices of ready-made (and free) apps that do this: GDocBackup and php-google-backup, a tiny php script (on google code) that uses Zend libraries. The former is a windows binary and is said to run in Mono. The latter is a php script which currently partially works (can't handle spreadsheets or PDF's). Not wanting to run Mono (an emulator - I might as well write this in Java), and not satisfied with only backing up .doc's and presentations... I hacked up my own.

Here is how I did it

Continue reading "Backing Up Google Docs automatically from Linux"

I am signed in to google talk from many places - blackberry, laptops, desktops, etc - and every once in a while, IM's don't go to the right one. Since I lock my workstation at the office whenever I get up, I figured it'd be nice to have Pidgin log off at the same time.

I am not sure how you would do this in Windows, but in Linux (Ubuntu in my case), I did it like this:

Changed my screen lock hotkey (Ctrl-Alt-l for me) to run the following:

xlock -startCmd "purple-remote setstatus?status=offline" -endCmd "purple-remote setstatus?status=available"

That's it. If you want specific screensaver modes you can stick them in them too:

xlock -mode blank -startCmd "purple-remote setstatus?status=offline" -endCmd "purple-remote setstatus?status=available"

Problem:

I've had this issue for many months but obviously I don't use flash enough to really figure it out. The first few youtube videos would play, but with no sound. If you seek back and forth, or play sound from another player (eg audacious), you may get skipping sound for a little while. Eventually the whole player stops advancing, though you can still seek.

Solution:

• You may have installed a dozen version of flash by now. As long as they are all ubuntu packages, you can leave them all installed (or you can remove them all)
• Install the official release from adobe: Adobe Flash, current version is 10. Pick .deb format for the download.
• Now run sudo update-alternatives --all
  ... This will ask you for all alternatives there are for your system, but among them there will be 5-10 flash-related questions for each browser (including text browsers, apparently). Pick the newly installed adobe-flashplugin like so:
  

    There are 2 alternatives which provide `mozilla-flashplugin'.
  
    Selection    Alternative
  -----------------------------------------------
  *+        1    /usr/lib/flashplugin-installer/libflashplayer.so
            2    /usr/lib/adobe-flashplugin/libflashplayer.so
  Press enter to keep the default[*], or type selection number: 2
  

• Bounce Firefox and you should be all set



Software Mixing

Once I got this fixed up, I now had reliable flash playback with one little problem... There was still no sound half the time - if another audio application grabbed my sound card before firefox (eg rhythmbox). Took me a while to figure out what to search for (usually the biggest issue, right?). Apparently the issue is twofold:
1. My onboard sound card either doesn't do hardware mixing, or the drivers don't support that
2. Alsa should have figured that out, and turned on Software Mixing, but for some reason it doesn't do that in Ubuntu
Once I understood this, I used This page to help me out. Grabbed their ~/.asoundrc, restarted all the audio apps, and all seem to be sharing the sound card peacefully now.