Wireshark is my new Toy. Let me tell you why.

Ever try to save a Youtube video?

Save a streamed song or lecture?

In Canada, both actions usually are protected as long as it is for private or personal use. Practically, saving flash embedded content is a pain.

Aside It is possible to examine the browser cache directory or install plugins to intercept the embedded content. If that works for you great.

That is where Wireshark comes in. It is a cross platform network protocol analyzer based on Ethereal.

What does that really mean? Well it lets you examine the traffic coming into your computer, including the embedded content.

First grab Wireshark here: http://www.wireshark.org/

Next, install it and fire it up.

The following are instructions for capturing video from Youtube:

1. Start capture on network card.
2. Navigate to youtube video page, wait for video to completely load into the cache.
3. Stop caputure on the network card.
4. In the ‘Filter:’, paste ‘frame.len == 1434′, this should match the length of the segments of the video as it was downloading.
5. Right click on one of the segments and click on ‘Follow TCP Stream’.
6. This will assemble the TCP stream of the video with the headers.
7. Click on the ‘Save As’ and save locally.
8. Open a editor, like textpad and strip all the headers out of the top of the file.
9. Test it in a player like vlc.

Similar steps are required for flash files.

For more details see my Wireshark notes.

The transition was reasonably painless, a few adjustments to make, like using init.d instead of service. I made some notes for myself that others might find helpful:

Ubuntu Notes

Ubuntu KVM Host notes

Ubuntu KVM Guest notes

When asked to Open or Save, open it with iCal and it should prompt you which calendar to add the event too.

UPDATE: Outlook 2003 displays an error ‘Cannot import vCalendar file. Could not complete the operation. One or more parameter values are not valid.’ More current versions might work.

Also, you might consider adding alerts to these events once they have been exported to iCal.

Well guess what, you can adjust the closer. Shocking, I know.

Most closers have two screws, one adjusting the ‘sweep’ the other the ‘latch’ pressure. The sweep is the stage where the door is wide open and the latch is the last few inches, before hitting the latch.

I had to adjust my latch screw, which was the bottom one in the picture. Some closers are labeled, mine wasn’t, so I guessed.

Turning the screw in slowed the door’s speed, turning the screw out increased the speed.

Now no more slamming doors and upset neighbors.

In a few steps you can.

1. Choose your song in iTunes, right click, choose ‘Get Info’.
2. Under the ‘Options’ tab there is a ‘Start time’ and ‘Stop time’, edit your song so that it plays only what you want. Don’t worry you can undo the Start and Stop times when we are done.
3. Click ‘Okay’ to save changes to your Start and Stop times.
4. Right click the song again and choose ‘Create AAC Version’. This will create a new file and add it to iTunes. You should see it right below your old file.
5. Right click the old song and under the ‘Options’ tab reset the Start and Stop times.
6. Right click the new song and choose ‘Show in Finder’ (or equivalent PC option).
7. When you find this new file, rename the extension from m4a to m4r.
8. Now delete the new file in iTunes, right click on the new file, choose ‘Delete’, then ‘Remove’ but choose to ‘Keep File’.
9. Now drag your .m4r file back onto the Library icon in iTunes.

You’re done!

Reminder: make sure you are syncing your ringtones to your phone.

My dad’s ring tone is now Yakety Sax, I figure Benny Hill would be proud.

(Tested on iTunes 9.0.1 for OS X.)

I tried remapping the key binding in OS X to match Windows, but some applications (like Firefox, see bug 316459 and xcode) did not play nice.

So remapping the OS X keys in Windows was the next best thing, partly because the Windows Key doesn’t get used by many apps.

There are many hot key / macro apps out there but AutohotKey seems to work really well for me.

AutohotKey is an Open Source task tray app that has some pretty comprehensive macro calls. It even allows me to remap the keys on my Apple Aluminum keyboard, such as Print Screen.

My Autohotkeys script is behind the cut.

UPDATE: Script got mangled, please see this page instead.

When I step away from my desk I like to pause my music when I lock it. Also, I dislike having to navigate to iTunes to change the song or adjust the iTunes volume.

I found AutoHotKey which has a scripting language, active forum and licensed under GPL.

So I have Windows Key + space bar bound to play/pause and the arrow keys mapped just like they are in iTunes. I also have Windows Key + G mapped to Google and Windows Key + N mapped to my notes.txt file for quick ideas.

This script isn’t perfect, it just maps the key presses into iTunes, so it is possible to be moving the cursor through playlists rather then changing the volume. There are more complicated scripts for iTunes control, but this works well for me for now.

I took this from the AutoHotKey forums, thanks to the original author:

#NoTrayIcon #SingleInstance force

#s::Run http://del.icio.us/GordonTurner67/speed-dial

Update:

I added another hotkey to check to see if Firefox is open (if not, it opens it) and then create a new empty tab:

#t:: IfWinExist ahk_class MozillaUIWindowClass { WinActivate } else { Run C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe WinWait ahk_class MozillaUIWindowClass WinActivate } Send, ^{t} return

Here are the rough steps that I went through to convert a linux guest that was on a LVM partition to a raw file on my Windows Desktop that the VMWare player could use.

Software: Redhat Fedora Core 6, Xen, LVM, VMWare Player 2.0.0

1. The Xen guest is a running a paravirtualized kernel, hopefully I will upgrade the cpu soon. So, if you are running a Xen specific kernel like I am, you must install the regular, non-paravirutalized kernel. Login as root onto the guest and run: [root@xen-guest ~]# yum install kernel.i686

2. Restart the guest and confirm that the new kernel is in the grub startup menu and that the default kernel is still the paravirtualized kernel (don’t want to mess up the existing system). Once confirmed, halt the guest.

3. Map the LVM partition. As root on the Xen Host type:

[root@xen-host ~]# kpartx -av /dev/VolGroup00/ImageData00 add map ImageData00p1 : 0 6281352 linear /dev/VolGroup00/ImageData00 63

(I have always done the mapping, I am not sure if this is required.)

4. Using dd, copy the partition to an image file. As root on the Xen Host type:

[root@xen-host ~]# dd if=/dev/VolGroup00/ImageData00 of=/some/path/ImageData00.img bs=512 6291456+0 records in 6291456+0 records out 3221225472 bytes (3.2 GB) copied, 276.703 seconds, 11.6 MB/s

This step will take a while, the of should be somewhere with lots of space.

Note: copy down the number of records in/out, this is needed later.

5. Unmap the LVM partition. As root on the Xen Host type:

[root@xen ~]# kpartx -dv /dev/VolGroup00/ImageData00 del devmap : ImageData00p1

6. Run fdisk on the image file to get the disk geometery. As root on the Xen Host type:

[root@xen FileBackedHosts]# fdisk /dev/VolGroup00/ImageData00

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/VolGroup00/ImageData00p1 * 1 391 3140676 83 Linux

Note: copy down the head, sectors/track and cylinders values.

7. Copy the image file to the Windows desktop, I used pscp to move it over.

8. Grab a copy of an empty VMWare virtual machine (here is mine). Edit the *.vmdk file to:

version=1 CID=e37454cd parentCID=ffffffff createType="monolithicFlat"

ddb.adapterType = "ide" ddb.geometry.sectors = "63" ddb.geometry.heads = "255" ddb.geometry.cylinders = "391" ddb.virtualHWVersion = "3" ddb.toolsVersion = "0"

Replace your sectors, heads and cylinders with your values from earlier. Replace “6281352″ with your records in/out number.

9. Start the VMWare image. On first boot, choose the regular kernel in the grub startup menu, edit it to remove the “console=…” and add “single” to boot into single user mode.

10. Once booted in single user mode, edit the /etc/inittab to comment out “co:2345:respawn…” and uncomment other “1:2345:respawn…” consoles. Reboot and choose the regular kernel again.

11. Once booted, edit the /boot/grub/grub.conf and change “default=1″ to “default=0″, this should be the regular kernel. From now on, the regular kernel should boot with no problems.

In order for the WordPress emails to go out properly, I had to setup Sendmail to connect to my Internet Service Providers SMTP server.

More details after the cut.

For most hosted providers, Sendmail is automatically configured. However, if yo are hosting your server on a private machine at home like I am, with no mail server, you have to use your ISP to send mail.

Here are the instructions on how to do this on Fedora Core 6, with thanks to Dave Pavao.

- All of these steps are done as root. - Install sendmail-cf:

yum install sendmail-cf

- Edit the sendmail.cf file:

vi /etc/mail/sendmail.mc
...
define(`SMART_HOST', `smtp-rog.mail.yahoo.com')dnl
define(`confAUTH_MECHANISMS', `EXTERNAL GSSAPI DIGEST-MD5 CRAM-MD5 LOGIN PLAIN')dnl
FEATURE(`authinfo',`hash /etc/mail/isp-info')dnl
...

- Edit the rogers-info file, here juser and password are your credentials provided by Rogers:

vi /etc/mail/isp-info
AuthInfo:smtp-rog.mail.yahoo.com "U:juser@rogers.com" "I:juser@rogers.com" "P:password"

- Run make:

cd /etc/mail
make

- Create the isp-info.db file:

makemap hash /etc/mail/isp-info < /etc/mail/isp-info

- Restart sendmail:

service sendmail restart

That should be it, this will make it into my wiki eventually.

GT.