Debugging flash in firefox

Install Adobe Flash Player Debugging Version:
(first I recommend you to uninstall any flash version you have installed)
wget http://download.macromedia.com/pub/flashplayer/updaters/10/flash_player_10_linux_dev.tar.gz
tar zxvf flash_player_10_linux_dev.tar.gz
cd flash_player_10_linux_dev/plugin/debugger
tar zxvf install_flash_player_10_linux.tar.gz
cd install_flash_player_10_linux/
./flashplayer-installer
Follow instructions.

Install the Firebug and Flashbug extensions.

I couldn't install extensions... it seems an Ubuntu 10.04 well-known issue. Workaround here: disabling ipv6 dns in firefox.
Restart firefox.

Now in the Firebug panel, enable "Flash Console".
Enter a page with flash and you will start to see the debug information :)

What is it useful to?
I know that there are extensions like FlashGot to do it, but I wanted to download the video embedded in a flash player that you can watch here: Erasmus Paradiso (Repor).

And in fact, the url pointing to the flv file was there! ;-)

IDEAS:
This mechanism saves a lot of time that you could have spent dissambling the flash player.

One of my ideas is creating a plugin to be able to watch in Totem last news as shown in RTVE (spanish radio television). Being able search videos in their archives or e.g. sorting last news videos by category.
To sum up, the same that the current youtube plugin does in Totem.

Updated 2/Jun/2010:
I've found in a blog how to download RTVE videos using RTMDump.
Actually it seems that there're some people working to get rtmp support in GStreamer, that would be the optimum solution :)

Starting repository migration of portland to Git

Using CVS is a pain for me and nowadays it's pointless using it. Actually there are enough open source alternatives, distribuited or not.
Unfortunately the portland project hasn't still migrated to cgit.freedesktop.org. It's one of the few that is still stuck.

Today I have imported the repository as Git and then I have uploaded it to GitHub. I will try to keep it updated and synchronized with CVS. For it, I have opened a bug report to notify it and to ask what to do about the rewriting names task. Git has a field in every commit to specify who was the author of the patch and who has committed it and their email addresses. This is very useful to keep authorship even if the author hasn't an account to commit. As CVS lacked it, we have to "rewrite" the past. Also, CVS used a nickname to identify the author of a commit. With Git it's usual to specify your full name and your email address.

By the way, as I say in the bugreport, the new git repository can be found here:
http://github.com/PabloCastellano/portland

Let's go for the 1.0.3 release! (1.0.2 release was in June 2007 :-/)




And we are not the only ones who rewrite the past! See:
Texas schools board rewrites US history with lessons promoting God and guns (what a shame)
Nineteen Eighty-Four

GUADEC Hispana ya tiene página en Wikipedia

Me he enterado esta misma tarde de que la VII GUADEC Hispana se hará en La Coruña durante los días 22 y 23 de julio. Aunque casi seguro que para esa fecha haya ya vuelto a España, no sé si iré porque no sé cómo andaré de liquidez. Ya había también mirado la GUADEC en (La Haya, Holanda del 26 al 30 de julio), pero también se me salía un poco de presupuesto. Así que de momento me conformaré con haber ido este año a la FOSDEM y a la RootedCon, de las que aún tengo pendiente hacer unos resumencillos :)

De paso, he creado en la Wikipedia la página para la GUADEC Hispana, ya que desde GUADEC se enlazaba varias veces y nadie la había creado aún. De momento no tiene mucho, más o menos lo mismo que la de GUADEC, pero es informativa y espero que más gente cuando pase por la página se eche un commit. También le he dado una pequeña pincelada a la de GNOME Hispano, (que por cierto tendría que mirar para hacerme socio) y he hecho que GUADEC-ES también redirija a GUADEC Hispana.

rt3070

Some days ago I bought a SMCWUSBS-N3 EZ Connect™ N Wireless USB 2.0 Adapter. The reason is that I have installed Ubuntu to my parents and the old ZyXEL ZyAIR B-220 wasn't working with network-manager because of this bug.

I decided to buy this model in particular first because it was only 12,50€ (!!) and second because I saw in the official webpage that they were (unfortunately surprising) providing linux drivers. The chipset it uses is called RT3070USB (ralink).

At first, I imagined that they were providing that cheap link because it was already included in the official linux kernel tree and they just wanted to say "hey, we are cool people and support linux!".

But I was wrong! When I connected the device once I arrived home nothing happened. Nothing interesting in syslog. dmesg neither. So I decided to download their driver and give it a try.


They did a really quick and ugly hack of an already existing RT2870 driver. They didn't even care about renaming the files or changing the constants in the Makefile (this is bad, ralink guys.. we have a family to take care of and we cannot spend how much time we want on it...). And... it didn't work out-of-the-box(tm).

I have to admit that I lost my hope to get it working but fortunately an ubuntuforums.org user made me recover it because he succeeded.


I had a great hacking satisfaction when I got it working :) and I was going to explain my workaround but now I see that it's already very well explained in this post.

Also, the SMC site provides the link to an old release of this driver, which won't compile with 2.6.31. You'll need to get the last one from the ralink site.

Here is the changelog: 

Version [V2.1.2.0]
1. Support Linux kernel 2.6.31
2. Add iw support.

Version V2.1.1.0
1. Linux kernel 2.6.29 support.
2. Fix eFuse write from BIN file bug.

Version 2.1.0.0
1. New generation schema for multiple OS porting
2. Fixed Ad-hoc ping failed in noisy environment.
3. Modified iwpriv ra0 get_site_survey:
4. Change FastRoaming in DAT file to AutoRoaming.
5. Support kthread.
6. New IEEE802.11r functionality.

Version 2.0.1.0
1. Finished verifying RT3071 STA support.
2. Fix eFuse bug on big-endian platform
3. Fix WMM problem for RT3071/72
4. Fix bug for ATE TX power handling and ATE frequency offset bug.
5. Fix RT307x AMPDU throughput bug after interface down/up
6. Fix RT307x difficult to enter power save mode issue.
7. Fix bug that is hard to connect with hidden-SSID AP.
8. Update RT307x new firmware.



TODO: When I get some new free time, I will try to give a look at the driver and collaborate to get it merged in the kernel. Or at least provide a working out-of-the-box tarball with the driver ;-)

A similar bug report in bugzilla.kernel.org