The “production” version of my website has now been upgraded to WordPress 2.0 after sufficient testing in my development area. The development environment (http://jaredquinn.info/dev) will be updated regularly with the current development version of WordPress for my own testing/development.
Upgrades to version 2.0 for my clients will be continuing this month, if you are interested in having your WordPress install updated by someone with loads of WordPress experience follow the “Contact Me” link and send me a note.

I recently had the fortunate experience of aquiring a Onkyo TX-900 Receiver and DX-702 CD Player along with a pair of Infinity Reference EL speakers. They “weren’t working”, because of a spilt coffee into the amp, however around 4 hours of gentle coaxing with some acetone and cotton tips, lots of patience and perseverence the circuit board was free of coffee.

The CD Player was in immaculate condition, except the exterior of the case (which was the same for the receiver) covered in spider webs and insects. It had been sitting in someone’s garage for quite some time. No work or cleaning was needed here.

Plugged in and testing with the Receiver and CD player I noticed the speakers were not handling the bass at all, so time to rip the covers off them (probably should have checked them out sooner, but no matter).

Out come the speaker and we find that the padding used in the box isn’t in good shape at all, so it came out. Next a gentle nudge on the speaker surround foam caused it to completely disintegrate.

The tweaters however are in perfect condition, so the setup is currently:

• Onkyo TX-900 Stereo Receiver
• Onkyo DX-702 CD Deck
• Behringer Eurodesk 802A Mixer
• Focal FAV-1 Crossovers
• Infinity Reference EL Speakers (currently tweaters only)
• Panasonic SB-AK45 Speakers

Currently I’m tracking down some foam speaker surrounds for the Infinity speakers and will attempt to replace them myself, full details of which will be posted as it occurs. If you have any idea where I can get decent foam surrounds in Sydney for a reasonable price please let me know. I am currently thinking Queensland Speaker Repair (E-Bay Shop) is the best way to go.

This afternoon I stepped in to assist Haseeb when he corrupted his upgrade to WordPress 2.0. His comments on my assistance can be found here

I needed to generate a list of URLs to submit to Yahoo’s SiteMap upload feature, and couldn’t (quickly) find a WordPress plugin to generate this for me.

Instead of a full blown plugin, I quickly hacked together the relevant code to do the job as a standalone script and have published it. You can find it here.

If you have any questions/comments, ask here.

Recently my partner’s (insufficiently backed up) laptop disk bit the dust which happened at the most inconvenient time. We’ve just moved, no broadband yet (agh!) and the only things handy were some outdated Debian and Mandrake installers and some recentish Ubuntu disks.

While we’ve both relied on Ubuntu Live on many occasions (surviving friend’s Windows computers when visiting) we haven’t ever considered an Ubuntu installation.

It took a little convincing on my part that it would be worth the effort (my partner is a Gentoo girl through and through) and well she has an adversion to Mandrake/diva.

When installing Ubuntu it is absolutely essential to add the “restricted” packages to apt, however there is also a bunch of packages from the great guys at the Penguin Liberation Front who i’d come across before when I was running a Mandrake/diva desktop for work. These guys do all of the stuff the distros won’t touch (DivX etc).

You can add the Ubuntu repository with:

then do an “apt-update” and search, seek and install the bits you need (e.g. DivX decoders etc).

The Ubuntu Saga continues. Today we look at getting the fiddly bits of playing multimedia files to work.

There are some neat packages in the plf (see yesterdays article), but still some of the movies I hoped to play haven’t worked. Let’s take a look at how to get them to.

• libavifile-0.7c102
• w32codecs
• gstreamer0.8-alsa
• gstreamer0.8-multiverse
• gstreamer0.8-misc
• gstreamer0.8-mad
• avifile-divx-plugin
• avifile-win32-plugin
• avifile-xvid-plugin
• avifile-mad-plugin
• avifile-mjpeg-plugin
• avifile-vorbis-plugin
• avifile-utils
• realplay
• lame
• lame-extras
• libxine1
• xine-ui

In order to get these to install using ‘apt-get’ I had to add some additional distributions to my sources.

My ubuntu sources line looks like:

(You can see the entire file here)

After you update your sources, make sure you run:

I prefer xine as a player, add to that the atitvout package (for ATI card users anyway, using a ATI Mobility M7 on a Dell Latitude notebook) and switch-to-tv works perfectly.

Due to the fact that I am no longer using OptusNet - I am no longer supporting the OptusNet Usage Plugin for FireFox.

I encourage someone to take up the framework and expand upon it, however in the more recent months some (probably) better designed/more flexible solutions have appeared.

The existing page and downloads will remain online. They will not be updated until further notice, nor will support be provided for them.

Getting the NVidia GeForce2 MX440 video card to work successfully with GLX on Gentoo Linux wasn’t as difficult as first seemed, however there were a few hurdles I ran into.

You will need the kernel and X packages emerged (you can grab the settings package as well if you like). The glx package in Gentoo requires the kernel package, so all you need to do is emerge the nvidia-glx package.

This resulted in the following packages being emerged from portage:

• media-video/nvidia-kernel-1.0.6629-r4
• media-video/nvidia-glx-1.0.6629-r6

I then edited my /etc/X11/xorg.conf file and simply changed the driver to nvidia (from nv), however this caused major issues when X next restarted.

I continued playing with various settings for a while and eventually found running startx would work but xdm would fail miserably when starting (causing screen flashing and putting the machine in a state that only a hard reset would fix!!)

My full XOrg.conf file.

The important points with configuration are:

• Turn off dri support
• Keep your initial configuration simple (my struggle with TV out will come soon!)

I finally bit the bullet today and re-worked the entire CSS for this site, which I hate to admit had become quite a mess.

The new CSS has been completely re-formatted and duplicate overriding options mostly removed, and cleaned up. I am also working on removing some other slight inconsistancies to keep the site look and feel uniform.

The CSS code was standards compliant previously, but now it will be alot more managable. I do intend to do a few more slight changes to the layout over the next few days. I haven’t tested the new CSS in Internet Explorer yet, but I am waiting on a result from browsershots.org. If you notice browser-wierdness, please let me know.

My CSS rework was inspired by a lot of CSS i’ve seen lately where each individual property is grouped together. This way at a glace all objects who share a property are grouped together and shown with the appropriate value. I think writing a small php tool to process a CSS file and allow varying ‘views’ of it may be something to work on in the not so distant future.

The CSS can be found here.