During my vacation I read the first two books Game of Thrones (magnificent! I loved it! Now I finally can watch the TV show. ) and two Pratchetts, but Game of Thrones and Pratchett are known enough as it is. Something that I bet isn't as widely known is the first book I read during my vacation: «Night of the Living Trekkies» by Kevin David Anderson and Sam Stall.  It's a mixture of Star Trek (from the fans point of view in the current time) and the zombie genre, which I'm really new to. Without knowing much about zombie movies and books, it seems to be the typical story, mixed in with a bunch of guys at a Star Trek convention, trying to survive. I like those parody books and it is especially fun to find it mixed into another genre. An example of the books style, I want to show you two things. The first is the disclaimer at the beginning:

Image at the beginning of the book

ATTENTION ALL STARFLEET PERSONNEL

The following text is an original work of fiction/horror/parody. Night of the Living Trekkies is not sponsored by, affiliated with, or endorsed by the owners of the Star Trek® brand. Any personnel claiming otherwise will be sentenced to one year of hard labor in the penal colony of Rura Penthe.

And the second thing is this image you can find also at the beginning of the book here on the right. Those two things were enough for me to buy this book and if you like Star Trek or maybe Zombies, you should too!

Two things I discovered today, that might be important for some of you:

• Even though you normally don't do that, I had the installation script in a path that contained a space. The install script is sadly badly enough written that it didn't work with that. But that is easily corrected.
• The second problem is that without deeper knowledge on that topic it seems as if the 64bit client package from Netvault contains 32bit binaries. So the installation fails because some 32bit libraries are missing. Running getlibs revealed that the following packages need to be installed prior to installing netvault, because the install scripts already calls them: ia32-libs lib32bz2-1.0 lib32nss-mdns lib32z1 lib32ncurses5 lib32asound2
  I'm not sure if they are all needed, but it works now without any problems.

And as always: Please don't forget to vote for it on the wordpress plugin page. Thanks!

• added reaction_buttons_click_count($post_id) to include number of reactions per post in own themes. Returns the accumulated number of clicks of the specified post.
• added the possibility to only allow only one vote per post. (Thanks Vlad for most of the code!)
• added the option to show a javascript popup if you try to vote twice. (Thanks Vlad for the idea and most of the code!)
• added the option to show the results only after the user voted.

It might be neccessary to modify your CSS if you don't use the integrated stylesheet. Hope you like the new features and update without problems. As always, I'm happy about good ratings on wordpress.org!

Download: Reaction Buttons

(evince:22792): EggSMClient-WARNING **: Failed to connect to the session manager: None of the authentication protocols specified are supported
(evince:22792): Gtk-WARNING **: Attempting to read the recently used resources file at `/home/lenfers/.recently-used.xbel', but the parser failed: Datei »/home/lenfers/.recently-used.xbel« konnte nicht geöffnet werden: Permission denied.
** (evince:22792): WARNING **: Error creating last_settings file: Fehler beim Öffnen der Datei »/home/lenfers/.gnome2/evince/last_settings«: No such file or directory

As I found out, that is caused by AppArmor, a surely useful innovation to secure your computer, but new enough that I haven't took the time to get to know it. AppArmor is activated by default on Ubunut 10.04 (and IIRC 9.10 and maybe 9.04 as well) and restricts access of programs on certain files. Due to the change of my home directory, evince tried to access files which for AppArmor are in /data/home/lenfers/ and consequently disallowed access to them.

The solution to this is easy, after I found it: Make your new location for home directories known to AppArmor: Add the path of your home direcories to the HOMEDIRs var in  /etc/apparmor.d/tunables/home. Now the line looks like that for me:

@{HOMEDIRS}=/home/ /data/home/

Now back to work.

Download the current version directly through the plugins menu or from wordpress.org.

My hack I will be using for the world cup the next four weeks is the following: I described how to stream the world cup at your office for all your colleagues a few days ago. I will do that at home too, and then just play that stream, in which the video and the audio are really in sync, at least for my ear. I have to play the stream, because the VDR still has control over the DVB devices and VLC couldn't open them. And the VLC on my VDR is quite ancient, since I'm using an older version of c't-vdr.

So, on one computer I start VLC with the following options (all in one line):

cvlc  http://vdr:3000/S19.2E-1-1101-28106  ":sout=#rtp{dst=226.42.42.42,port=5004,mux=ts}"

You can get the URL for each channel from your vdr at http://vdr:3000/channels.html.

And on all the computers that are supposed to view the stream, VLC has to be started with the following command:

vlc rtp://@226.42.42.42:5004/

Sure there is now a slightly higher delay (two streams), but I don't mind those three seconds when we can watch the games with synced audio. You can get a bit more information about streaming in my world cup streaming post and a lot more in the VLC streaming documentation.

Oh and from a geeks point of view I found the license quite curious: Creative Commons - Deed Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works Kudos to that!