Andrej's notes

It turnes out moving to a different city takes more time and effort than I originally expected, so I’m skipping FOSDEM this year. That’s unlike I originally planned to spend the beginning of February — I had my flight booked already, but apparently that’s not the best idea ever to go travelling right in the middle of relocation :)

Few days ago I was discussing my last blog post with a colleague of mine, Lukaš Tvrdý, and he’s mentioned that it actually is possible to harmlessly decrypt the TrueCrypted filesystem in online mode, resize it, and encrypt it back again. Well, I decided to try, because I have had some problems with that setup. Apart from init script reordering I had to make (not covered in the post, as I did it later and haven’t found time yet to write about that), I ran into a trouble while trying to enable swapping. As the only partition I had was formatted into NTFS, placing a swap file there isn’t the best idea ever. I actually tried doing so, but after two deadlocks I had in few hours I had to rethink that. Indeed, as NTFS is implemented in the user space using ntfs-3g, as soon as this process gets swapped out, the system is left helpless. The swap is on the file system driver of which is in the swap, which is on the file system driver of which is… well, you get the idea.

After I have changed my job recently I had to meet the security policies which are enforced in the company I’m now working for. First of all, I’m not allowed to use my own laptop, and the company-provided laptop has Windows installed. As my job is, unfortunately, not directly related to Linux, I’m not allowed to re-install the OS. However, working in the comfortable environment is what I really need to do my job effectively, so I have designed a workaround.

I’d like to bring some attention to activity of a person mostly known as Bohdan Zograf. If you Google that name, you’ll find that he seems to be a person who knows Belarusian language very well, and is interested in translating as many texts as he can into Belarusian for no money. Unfortunately, he isn’t. Trust me, I’m really a native speaker, I was born in Minsk, Belarus, and have lived there for 25 years of my life (at least this person: (1, 2) may prove I really am the person I’m telling you I am, if you’re interested). Said that, I think I really have a right to say: those translations are fake. These texts are just machine-translated versions of the original articles or web pages, published in some strange weblog at some strange web site without being structured or systematised. This already has been pointed out by Jonathan Wakely, but, well, some people may not believe him as he doesn’t seem to know Belarusian.

Strange and interesting thing has happened to me recently. I’m a user of Dell D620 laptop, which has Intel’s HDA controller and Sigmatel’s STAC9200 codec. This has always worked perfectly fine, and in my mixer I could see at least two volume controls: Master and PCM. Changing volume using both worked.

Once I’ve upgraded my Linux 3.2 to 3.4, and have noticed that Master volume control is no more. What’s up I thought, but did nothing. Update to 3.5 hasn’t fixed the problem. Okay, it’s time to bisect stuff.

It’s a well-known problem that Android offers no easy way to completely remove the primary Google account, at least sometimes.

Well, there’s one not really easy for people not involved with computer stuff, but at least it works.

Once you have adb shell working, you need to log into your Android device and type sqlite3 /data/system/accounts.db. That’s the place where accounts are actually stored. In that database, there are tables named accounts, grants and authtokens. Those you need to clean up:

A new version of ifupdown has been uploaded to experimental yesterday, which brings some important changes.

First of all, now it’s possible to specify default values for various interface configuration options. This eliminates the need of hard coding of them in C source, as Ubuntu has been doing for some time. End users are not affected by this change at all, of course.

Second, now ifup behaves differently when it’s called with --all option. Previously, that was causing all interfaces marked as ‘auto’ to be brought up. Now, it does exactly the same if --allow option isn’t used. Otherwise, it brings up the interfaces which are declared to belong to a specified class using allow-* directive. In other words, ‘auto’ directive indeed declares interface as belonging to a class ‘auto’, and the default class for ifupdown is also ‘auto’, so when user runs ifup -a only those interfaces are brought up.

Ever wanted your GTK+ 3 look better? Unsatisfied with the default settings of Adwaita theme? Add these configuration files to your ~/.config/gtk-3.0:

gtk.css:

.menu {
    border-style: solid;
    border-width: 1;
}

.menubar .menuitem *:prelight,
.menubar .menuitem:prelight {
    background-color: @theme_selected_bg_color;
    color: @theme_selected_fg_color;
}

This will add some nice borders to menus as well proper background to menu items.

settings.ini:

[Settings]
gtk-theme-name = Adwaita
gtk-fallback-icon-theme = gnome
gtk-font-name = Sans 9

And this will set font to Sans 9 and not anything else which is for some reason is the default.

Those who had chance to be in the ‘Stolitsa’ shopping mall in the centre of Minsk yesterday, could enjoy a wonderful performance which was happening there.

There’s a grand piano installed in the central hall of this mall. I guess that piano was supposed to advertise some company which sells them, but that day there was something completely different. That piano wasn’t silent yesterday. A young man was playing classics on it.

Recenly I’ve decided to register at Sixxs to be able to use IPv6 at my new location as they seem to use tunnelling protocol which bypasses NAT, so that was exactly what I needed. I’m a long time HE.NET user, so I expected the same quality of service and ease of use. I went to their website and filled in the registration form.

Soon I got the reply: ‘User Rejected’