03:06.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Corporation BCM4306 802.11b/g Wireless LAN Controller [14e4:4320] (rev 02)
Subsystem: Belkin F5D7000 v1000 Wireless G Desktop Card [1799:7000]

Some years ago, this card was working perfectly fine with the bcm43xx module. However, this module became deprecated and got replaced by the b43 and b43legacy modules. My card now had to use the b43legacy module and that’s where the problems started:
The connection speed was very slow and the connection dropped every few minutes. Trying to download a larger file became a pain. dmesg was full of these messages:

b43legacy-phy0 ERROR: PHY transmission error

Pasting that into google showed me that I was not alone with these issues, the only fix that seemed to work was dropping the b43legacy module and using ndiswrapper with a windows driver file. It took me some while to find a 64bit Windows driver file for that specific card [contact me if you can't find one] because it’s quite outdated, but I finally got one.

So I went ahead, installed ndiswrapper and the driver for it…

adi64@tux ~ % sudo ndiswrapper -l
bcmwl5 : driver installed
device (14E4:4320) present

…but wlan0 wouldn’t show up, despite the fact that ndiswrapper found the device:

adi64@tux ~ % sudo rmmod b43legacy
adi64@tux ~ % sudo modprobe ndiswrapper
adi64@tux ~ % iwconfig
lo        no wireless extensions.

eth0      no wireless extensions.

There were no errors or any debug info from ndiswrapper in either dmesg or /proc/net/ndiswrapper/debug.

After googling the hell out of keywords like b43legacy, bcm4306, ndiswrapper etc. I found the Comprehensive ndiswrapper troubleshooting guide on the Ubuntu forums which finally helped.
In a nutshell: The ssb module claimed the device although being unable to do anything with it, therefore ndiswrapper couldn’t take control of the device.

Knowing this, the solution is simple. You need to blacklist the b43legacy and ssb modules and tell the kernel to load the ndiswrapper module.
I opened up the new file /etc/modprobe.d/b43legacy_blacklist.conf and pasted in the following:

blacklist b43legacy
blacklist ssb

Then I added ndiswrapper to my MODULES Array in /etc/rc.conf.
Doing a reboot and BAM! The card was working fine. Note however that you won’t be able to do things like Monitor Mode etc. with ndiswrapper as device driver.

application (preloaded/non-preloaded)

codeblocks (16s/18s)

keepass (5s/5s)

opera-next (6s/8s)

I’ve noticed that it makes a huge difference whether you start codeblocks for the first time on a freshly rebooted linux or not (no matter if you use any extra preload software): Starting it the second time takes only about 7 seconds on my system. So for the above test values, I have always restarted my machine.

Conclusion: not worth it :p

Compared to others, its main difference is that it only accepts connection change requests, when you add your login ID as GET parameter. The login ID gets assigned every time you login and thus it is always different. AFAIK most other routers handle sessions via cookies, so for those reconnect scripts can easily be made from within JDownloader for example.

Anyway, if you happen to own one of these little machines, feel free to use my reconnect script. I wrote it in AutoIT3, source license is GPLv3.

On first start a .ini file gets generated and opened, where you can type in the login information. It will also open if the script can’t login (but never more than one window).

I think other Level One routers may either work without or with little hacking of this script. So users with similar routers might enjoy to  make it work with their routers. If you do so, please share your results in the comments.

Enjoy

PS: The configuration file gets written to the same path as the program is in, so make sure you put it somewhere with write access (C:\Users\you\Apps\reconnect for example).

Download:

• 1.0
• source-1.0

The work shown in this article builds up on the ideas on article in the linux.com archives. Please have a look there, otherwise the stuff presented here will be useless for you.

mutt alias

abook offers an option for generating mutt aliases from its contact database. Fortunately, a little shell magic is able to help:

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#!/bin/bash
# File: cbook2alias.sh
 
# where did you save your contacts file?
CBOOK_DIR=~/.cbook
 
MAIL_LIST=(`grep '^Email:' "$CBOOK_DIR" | egrep -o '[^ ]+$'`)
INFO_LIST=""
NAME=""
 
for ADDRESS in ${MAIL_LIST[*]}; do
  INFO_LIST=(`awk 'BEGIN { RS = "###"; FS = "Email: " } ($2 ~ "'$ADDRESS'") { print $1 }' "$CBOOK_DIR"`)
  NAME=${INFO_LIST[0]:0:1}
  echo "alias ${NAME,}${INFO_LIST[1],,} <$ADDRESS>"
done

Example:

# File: ~/.cbook
Ron Wesley
The Burrow
1337 Somewhere
Email: ron@weasley.hog
Birthday: 12.12.9000
###

$ ./cbook2alias.sh
alias rweasley <ron@weasley.hog>
As you can see, the first name is shortened to its beginning letter and prepended to the last name. A small modification in line can undo this:

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NAME=${INFO_LIST[0]}

$ ./cbook2alias.sh
alias ronweasley <ron@weasley.hog>

Birthdays

Some birthdays are made to forget. To avoid those peculiar moments, one can use a script to generate a list of birthdays to come from the contacts file:

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#!/bin/bash 
# File: cbook_birthdays.sh
 
# Variables
CBOOK_DIR=~/.cbook
 
# This var  holds a list of all the birthdays in the contacts file
BD_LIST=(`grep '^Birthday:' "$CBOOK_DIR" | egrep -o '[^ ]+$'`)
# This var will hold a list of information for the person corresponding to a birthday in BD_LIST
INFO_LIST=""
# The persons name
NAME=""
# The flag that is relevant for output
ONE_MONTH_FLAG=false
# Current date and delimiter
CUR_DAY=`date +"%d"`
CUR_MONTH=`date +"%m"`
CUR_YEAR=`date +"%Y"`
# Birthday segment indices, delimiter and format
BD_DAY=2
BD_MONTH=1
BD_YEAR=0
DELIM="."
FMT="ymd"
# helper variables
TEMP=""
NUM=0
 
# Functions
function print_usage {
    echo "Usage: `basename $0` [Options]"
    echo "Description:"
    echo "This script helps you remember birthdays. You can pass it"
    echo "some options concerning the date format. Then you"
    echo "will get to see a list of birthdays to come for this year."
    echo "Options:"
    echo "-m"
    echo -e "\t print only the birthdays for this month (the ones that are to come"
    echo "-f <FORMAT>"
    echo -e "\t the date format, choose one of [dmy,mdy,ymd]"
    echo -e "\t d for day, m for month, y for year"
    echo "-d <DELIMITER>"
    echo -e "\t the date delimiter"
    echo "-h, --help"
    echo -e "\t display this message"
}
 
# Argument parsing
while true; do
    case "$1" in
        -h | --help)
               print_usage
                exit 0
                ;;
        -m)
                ONE_MONTH_FLAG=true
                shift
                ;;
        -f)
                # The date format of the birthday
                FMT="$2"
                shift 2
                ;;
        -d)
                # The date delimiter
                DELIM="$2"
                shift 2
                ;;
         *) shift; break
                ;;
    esac
done
 
#===============
# The main work
#===============
 
 
# find out the date segment indices
if [ "$FMT" != "ymd" ]; then
    TEMP=(`echo $FMT | fold -w1`)
    NUM=0
    while [ $NUM -lt ${#TEMP[*]} ]; do
        case "${TEMP[$NUM]}" in
            d)
                BD_DAY="$NUM";;
            m)
                BD_MONTH="$NUM";;
            y)
                BD_YEAR="$NUM";;
            *)
                echo "OMG! Error!"
                exit 2
        esac
        NUM=$(($NUM+1))
    done
fi
 
for BDAY in ${BD_LIST[*]}; do
        INFO_LIST=(`awk 'BEGIN { RS = "###"; FS = "Birthday: " } ($2 ~ "'$BDAY'") { print $1 }' "$CBOOK_DIR"`)
        NAME="${INFO_LIST[0]} ${INFO_LIST[1]}"
        # Decide wether the birthday has already taken place
        TEMP=(`echo $BDAY | tr "$DELIM" "\n"`)
 
        # Print the month-only birthdays first
        if [ $CUR_MONTH -eq ${TEMP[$BD_MONTH]} -a $ONE_MONTH_FLAG ]; then
                if [ $CUR_DAY -le ${TEMP[$BD_DAY]} ]; then
                        echo -e "$BDAY\t$NAME($(($CUR_YEAR - ${TEMP[$BD_YEAR]})))"
                fi
        elif [ $CUR_MONTH -le ${TEMP[$BD_MONTH]} ]; then
                # if were in here, it is this month or some month in the future
                if [ $CUR_DAY -le ${TEMP[$BD_DAY]} ]; then
                        # if we're here, it has not yet passed
                        echo -e "$BDAY\t$NAME($(($CUR_YEAR - ${TEMP[$BD_YEAR]})))"
                fi
        fi
done

Example
Using the contacts file from above:
$ date +%Y
2011
$ ./cbook_birthdays.sh -f dmy
12.12.9000 Ron Weasley(-6989)

Advantages

Using small scripts there are virtually no limits to what format you can transform your contacts file. Of course, that means work and a little headache, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be done

This article is not cast in stone. The scripts will be developed a little further in the future, so you might want to check out my repo on github.

There’s that great freeware music player called foobar2000. I really use it a lot to, play music, rate music, sort music, apply good ID3 tags and so on. Sadly there’s no (official) linux version of it, so this post will be all about windows. You might be able to run both Virtual DJ and foobar2000 with wine though.

Anyway, my preferred DJ mix tool is Virtual DJ. Foobar can only do very basic crossfades which mostly sound acceptable, if you set the crossfade duration to 20 seconds and activate the skip silence DSP. However, if you would like to pump some good beats while changing the tracks at your party, you are better off using a real mixing software. Here’s where Virtual DJ comes in. Its transitions can sound waaaay better than these automated crossfades.

The only downside is, that it comes with a very bad music browser interface: It can not recognize tags of ogg and flac files, the search is very limited and it does not support custom tags on files, where it does actually scan them. Lately I found out that it is possible to drop songs directly on a deck from any application. Wohoo, that’s fucking awesome!

So let’s see, we’ve got a crappy music browser, which we want to replace with foobar. The only thing you are required to get exactly that is editing your preferred VDJ skin.

As they are zip compressed xml files, stored in My Documents\VirtualDJ\Skins, you need to unpack your favorite one and open it up in an editor.

Somewhere in the first line, you’ll see the height of the skin. Change it to what you like (type in some less value), rename and repack the zip file and you are ready to go. For performance reasons, you might want to delete the the <browser>…</browser> stuff.

I recommend to set foobar2000′s output to your headphones, because then you have yet another deck for previews. (yes, there are more than 2 possible with virtual dj too, but they do not really sync well)

Oh and here are some foobar2000 plugins you might want to use with this combination:

• foo_bpm shows the beats per minute
• foo_wave_seekbar shows a waveform seekbar like on the Virtual DJ decks
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