After Callum let me know that the Linux binary of the character counting plugin for Pidgin worked on Fedora 8, I decided to spin a RPM built on Fedora 8 proper. After a bit of reading and hackery, I have produced a x86 RPM for Fedora 8. Here’s the source, which includes the patch and the .spec file, as well as the RPM:

• pidgin-convcharcount-plugin-2.4.1.tar.gz
• pidgin-convcharcount-plugin-2.4.1-1.fc8.i386.rpm

I’ve also spun a new Debian binary, as well:

• pidgin-convcharcount-plugin_2.4.1-1_i386.deb

And, if you’re looking for the Win32 binary, you can still get it off this page.

I’m glad so many of you out there who use Pidgin find this plugin useful. Thanks for all the positive feedback.

Tags: Pidgin, Twitter, Fedora 8, RPM, Debian

I’m setting up a virtual machine using VirtualBox on Ubuntu Gutsy, running Win2000 as the guest OS. I’ve gone and installed Cygwin and MinGW and MSYS in order to build Gnash on Win32. I came across a funny bootstrapping problem trying to install pkg-config: pkg-config 0.22 requires glib 2.x in order to compile. No sweat, I go and download glib 2.13.6 and configure it … and the configure script stops with an error when it can’t find pkg-config installed!

Circular dependencies suck.

Of course, in the README.win32 for pkg-config, Tor Lillqvist acknowledges this at the end of the document:

On Unix, pkg-config is built using its own copy of GLib 1.2.8. On Windows, we use the normal GLib available for Windows (2.0.x). Yes, this does introduce a kind of circular dependency. But, that can be worked around. The circular dependency only appears if one uses the configure mechanism to build GLib. GLib’s configure script checks for pkg-config. pkg-config depends on GLib. Thus, starting from scratch, with no GLib and no pkg-config, using configure, there would indeed be a Catch-22 situation. However, GLib can be built just fine using the manually written makefiles for mingw or MSVC. And if somebody does want to build GLib on Win32 using configure, she can first install a prebuilt pkgconfig.

Unfortunately, as of glib 2.13.6 at least, only the automake files are included–no ordinary makefiles for Win32, either MinGW or MSVC, even. Fortunately, older releases of pkg-config source are still available, and glib 2.13.6 will build with pkg-config 0.14 or newer. pkg-config 0.14 includes glib 1.2.8 and tries to build it as part of its build, so I went ahead and tried to build pkg-config 0.14. Since nothing is ever easy, I ended up having to make a slight change to glib 1.2.8 to get it to compile, adding these lines to the top of glib.h, after the #include <glibconfig.h>:

#undef G_MAXINT
#define G_MAXINT 0xFFFF
#define SIGCHLD 17
#define g_ascii_strcasecmp(a, b) strcmp(a, b)
#include <fcntl.h>
#include <winsock.h>

I also discovered that gthread.o wouldn’t compile right due to some libtool weirdness, so I had to compile everything somewhat manually with this:

$ cd glib-1.2.8/gthread
$ gcc -I.. -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -DG_OS_WIN32 -o gthread.o -c gthread.c
$ touch gthread.lo
$ cd ..
$ make libglib.la
$ cd ..
$ make CFLAGS="-DG_OS_WIN32" parse.o
$ make pkg-config.exe
$ cp pkg-config.exe /mingw/bin

After all that, I finally had a compiled and installed pkg-config 0.14! I went ahead and used it to build glib 2.13.6 and installed that, then went and built pkg-config 0.22 with it.

So, which came first? The chicken or the egg? :-)

Tags: Open Source, MinGW, glib, pkg-config

What have I been furiously hacking on the last few nights? Gnash, the GNU Flash player. Specifically, I’ve been doing a lot of hacking on support for Win32. More specifically, I’ve been working on npgnash, the plugin that embeds Gnash inside Firefox using the Mozilla NPAPI.

I’m not going to get into the ugly details of what I went through to get as far as I have, but I’ll summarize it as: a hell of a lot harder than it ought to have been. I’ll save my rant for why C++ sucks, so badly, for another day. What you really want to see are screenshots, I know!

First, here’s the entry for npgnash from Firefox’s about:plugins page:

Okay, big deal, so I can load a DLL. Here’s npgnash playing gravity.swf from the Gnash testsuite, right in the browser:

Who doesn’t love a big bouncing smiley-face animating across their browser, right? But, the true test is playing my favorite YouTube video … to test with, at least:

Yup, that’s no joke … it’s a screenshot of npgnash playing a YouTube video inside Firefox 2.0.0.12 on my WinXP machine. It’s using the Anti-Grain Geometry (AGG) rendering engine, along with SDL/ffmpeg for audio … and they both work, albeit not very well, yet.  Still, not bad for three or four days of hacking, right?

Despite all this progress and these screenshots, it’s still not ready for general-purpose use, yet. The underlying Gnash code is still isn’t fully re-entrant/thread-safe and the cleanup code isn’t fully baked so I can’t even load one SWF after another without it crashing. I also haven’t implemented any mouse/keyboard support, so you can’t actually use any of the player buttons you see in the YouTube video, etc., yet.

Still, it’s a great start and hopefully by the time the 0.8.3 release is ready in a few months, there will be a lot more forward progress.

Tags: Gnash, GNU Flash, Firefox, Mozilla NPAPI, Win32

Yesterday, Maki asked on Twitter, “I would love to have a ‘Quick unsubscribe’ button for Google Reader…a greasemonkey script would be terrific. Anyone wanna do one?” Of course, it seems I have a thing for hacking out little web toys for people I know on Twitter, so I gave it a whack.  Here’s the result:

• google-reader-unsubscribe.user.js

Here’s a screenshot showing what it does:

It’s a pretty simple script. The hardest part was reverse-engineering Google Reader’s packed/minified JavaScript, but that wasn’t too hard.

Do you have a useful idea for a web toy? Perhaps if you run it by me and it interests me, I’ll hack on it for you, too.

Tags: Google Reader, Greasemonkey, scripting, hacks

I finally got around to learning how to create a Debian package using the excellent Debian New Maintainers’ Guide so that I could finally create Debian binaries for the character counting plugin for Pidgin that I whipped up last year.

There’s a screenshot of Pidgin 2.3.1 running on Debian 4.0 (etch) with the plugin loaded. You can download it here:

• pidgin-convcharcount-plugin_2.3.1-1_i386.deb (8.5 kB)

If you need to build the plugin for a different architecture (I only have i386 readily available to me), here’s what I used to package this:

• pidgin-convcharcount-plugin-2.3.1.tar.gz (10.6 kB)

If anyone wants to take this and make an RPM out of it, that’d be nice. If you do, leave a link to it in the comments so others can find it. Thanks!

Tags: Pidgin, plugin, Debian

I’ve installed DD-WRT on a WRT54GS and configured it as a router that bridges the wireless AP, the ethernet and WAN connection. I didn’t want DD-WRT configured as a “gateway” as that means NAT and I didn’t want that: my firewall is already doing NAT, so I wanted DD-WRT to just route traffic upstream.

Here’s a diagram of how I set things up:

I wanted the WRT54GS to bridge the 172.16.113.0/24 network on the WAN port (interface vlan1) to the firewall with the 172.16.113.0/24 network on the wireless AP side (interface br0). The firewall’s NIC was configured as 172.16.113.1. The WRT54GS’s WAN port was configured with a static IP of 172.16.113.254 and gateway of 172.16.113.1. The local IP was configured to 172.16.113.253 and no gateway. The VLANs were configured so that everything was assigned to the “LAN” bridge, all 4 wired switch ports, the WAN port, and wireless.

This looks like it all should have worked, but it didn’t. What I finally ended up having to do was to set a small startup script to make the final adjustments. I’m going to share the steps to set that script here, since I know I’ll forget it:

nvram set rc_startup='
echo 1 >/proc/sys/net/ipv4/conf/br0/proxy_arp
echo 1 >/proc/sys/net/ipv4/conf/vlan1/proxy_arp

ip route add 172.16.113.1 dev vlan1
ip route delete default
ip route add default via 172.16.113.1 dev vlan1
'
nvram commit

And with that, everything works. Clients can connect wirelessly or wired, get assigned an IP via DHCP in the 172.16.113.0/24 network, get routed up to the firewall which enforces all my security and routing policies.

What I’d like to do next is play with the AP isolation setting to keep the wireless clients from being able to snoop on the wired connections. I like to keep this configured as an open wi-fi access point, but I don’t want someone who roams up to be able to see the activity of the wired clients. But, for now, what I’ve got working is good enough.

Tags: Linksys WRT54GS, DD-WRT, router, bridge, HOWTO