Google’s Privacy Policy over the Years

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Google’s Privacy Policy is going to change this March in order to unify up to 60 different policies across all the services Google has to offer. While reading through the new terms, I compared what did change exactly to see if the coverage in other blogs and media is correct.

As older versions are still available, I noticed that the beginning of this Privacy Policy has changed over the years. There used to be a first sentence explaining the general approach Google takes towards your data. But read yourself:

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Performance improvements in the upcoming Subversion 1.7 release

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I just tried out a build from the Subversion 1.7.x branch which appears to come close to a final release. Instead of creating .svn directories everywhere, the new working copy layout switches to a central storage using SQLite. You will only see a single .svn at the top most directory of the working copy. Details are outlined in the preliminary release notes.

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Mission Control grabbed my keyboard shortcuts

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The previous so called “Spaces” are now part of “Mission Control” in Mac OS X 10.7 Lion. It implements multiple work spaces as known from common Linux desktop environments.

Unfortunately it grabs the global keyboard shortcuts Ctrl-1, Ctrl-2, …, Ctrl-0 and Ctrl-Option-1, Ctrl-Option-2, …, Ctrl-Option-6 to switch to the corresponding space by default. This prevents using any of these shortcuts in an application. I had defined some of those for use with my favorite editor vim, where the shortcuts ceased to work after the upgrade to Lion.

Even more unfortunate, it’s a tedious task to stop Mission Control from allocating these keyboard shortcuts. The GUI offers the configuration check boxes only for spaces which are currently enabled.

So the solution was to enable all possible spaces, which are capped at a maximum of 16, using the Mission Control interface. Then disable the check box for each of them in System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts.

As said a tedious task, but works. I was hoping to provide some defaults write command here, but I was unable to determine where these settings are stored.

tvtime on Linux kernel 2.6.38 without V4L1 API

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My favorite application for watching analogue TV is tvtime. Unfortunately it has not been updated for a few years now. As is the rule for unmaintained code, the upstream version finally is no longer compatible with Linux kernel 2.6.38. The V4L1 API has now been removed after being deprecated for a really long time.

But Devin Heitmueller from KernelLabs invested some time to remove the parts from tvtime that still needed the old API. The source is available from this mercurial repo.

hg clone http://www.kernellabs.com/hg/~dheitmueller/tvtime
cd tvtime
autoreconf -i -f
./configure --prefix=/usr/local --disable-nls
make
make install

There is also a report in Gentoo’s Bugzilla with a new ebuild attached, but I haven’t tried that. Installing the new patched tvtime to /usr/local works for now.

I am all ears if anyone can recommend an alternative to tvtime. I know about xawtv, but the interface is poor and offers less features than tvtime.

Hauppauge WinTV HVR-1300 with Linux kernel 2.6.38

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After the upgrade to Linux kernel 2.6.38, the boot process for my machine hang quite long while Populating /dev with existing devices through uevents. After investigations it turns out that the cx88 driver used for my Hauppauge WinTV HVR-1300 tv card was not correctly converted to the new mutex system while removing the BKL. This is being tracked in the kernel bugzilla as bug #31962.

Fortunately, there is a patch attached to the mentioned bug report which resolves the problem:

cd /usr/src/linux
wget -O cx88-2.6.38-fix-driver-deadlocks.patch 'https://bugzilla.kernel.org/attachment.cgi?id=53722'
patch -p1 < cx88-2.6.38-fix-driver-deadlocks.patch

[Edited on 2011-04-23: replaced patch 52902 with 53722]

After applying the patch, build and install your kernel as usual. But there are still some more problems with 2.6.38 related to tvtime. See also my next post.

I do not follow kernel development close enough to know in which git tree this has to show up to confirm if it has been merged yet. Hopefully this patch will make it into the next kernel release.