that disk did not die the clicking death

When I put a FRITZ!Box 7390 in place here more than 2 years ago, one of the features I discovered with big joy and that I started to make use of, was that it powers down USB attached ATA disks after a user defined period of inactivity. You can also have a USB hub in between, and I started making use of that as well.

The ATA disk (#1) I attached, is actually a notebook disk with its own external housing. It got formatted with ext2, because I prefer that over the DOS file system.

In the beginning of 2012 that disk (#1) was no longer accessible. First I was sure, that it had died the clicking death. But when I attempted to replace it with another one (#2),
it turned out, the source of irritation was actually the USB hub, because after eliminating the USB hub and attaching disk #2 directly to the FRITZ!Box disk #2 was "perfectly" accessible again.

So I gave disk #1 another try, mounted it somewhere else, and that worked without problem.

I thought, I should note this somewhere, because it might occur to others as well.

Of course, why should live USB hubs live for ever? But I was rather, rather astonished to understand this scenario.

Well, it's not absolutely unlikely, that disk #1 will die for ever after being in use in another environment for another while. That's a behavior I found documented elsewhere.

No, the housing (external case) wasn't the reason for the problem, at least it worked with other disks.

Firefox-3.6 and certain extensions

Whenever we are offered another nice major release of Firefox, I always fear, certain extensions won't run any more and I have to find replacements for them. Now, when 3.6 and it RCs got released, there were a couple of weeks of big uncertainty (at least for me), during which I really didn't know, whether these extensions would follow this release step.

There is Sage, the lightweight RSS and Atom feed reader, (article on wikipedia (I just updated it), its home page). If you follow more than two or three feeds, what other tool can you actually use? I hope, its developers will never abandon this very nice piece of software.

There is "Live HTTP headers" (aka "LHH"), an extension for tracing the HTTP protocol traffic between you browser and the HTTP servers you are talking to. It has a mozdev home page.
This is a Firefox extension intended to be used by software developers.
There are also extensions to this extension like LHHreplay.
There is an extension to Microsoft's IE by the name of ieHTTPHeaders, that is rather similar to LHH.
I heavily depend on both of them (LHH and ieHTTPHeaders), as I use their trace files in order to generate (raw) perl scripts from them to mechanize web server accesses.
I started several years ago with several such projects to run a lot of my daily tasks, tasks like downloading market data or downloading bank account statements. And I add a few such scripts every year. Just recently I created a script to download the call record from my telephone+Internet router, an AVM fritz box.
A couple of weeks ago, there was a chap from Microsoft, who told me, he wanted to try my software for personal use. After I sent him my software, I never heard from him again.
Maybe my software is just too bad read and too ugly (a colleague of mine (a rather ego-centric guy) keeps saying so), but maybe he is just not very polite.

creating phone book and diary entries from incoming calls on my router

If you read this title, how mad do you think I am? Honest!

Alright, "as you know" (so of course this article only applies to some sort of computer nerds), my router is a FRITZ!Box 7270, it's also the base station for my (wireless) phones, and a lot more ... -- certainly one of my most important toys or gadgets. And I have 2 of them, one for at home, one for anywhere outside, where I can only connect to the Internet through UMTS.

So alright, back to the title of this article!

• It's nice to record your incoming and outgoing calls in your diary, right? (my diary is emacs style)
• It's nice to get something descriptive displayed on your phone, when somebody calls, right?
• It's nice to extend your phone book through time as easily as possible, right?

Well, my router is running Linux as its operating system kernel, and BusyBox on top of it. On each incoming phone call it runs a shell script with a few parameters, of course the caller's phone# (if available) and also the callee's phone#. (I do have more than one phone#, and why not also record the called phone#, just for the record?) It tries to associate a name with the caller's phone#, if there is a matching entry in the phone book.

Quite a while ago I started implementing such a shell script, and obviously (as it is almost an ordinary (bash) shell script), I can develop and test it on any of my computers, that can run shell scripts, like any of my openSuSE computers, any WinXP computer running cygwin, a Mac running OS X, ... . Yes, I cannot create a full blown shell script, I will not pipe a lot through one-liner perl or ruby scripts on my router, but still: it's a handy and useful, not so tiny shell script.

So far it appears to me, as if no such executable gets called on the router for outgoing calls, but I can still mimic this behaviour by calling that script on my main development box.

Having said this, my script (fritz_box_calllog.sh) fulfills all the requirements, that I listed above in that bullet list.
For incoming calls without caller id and/or without a matching entry in the phone book it creates a piece of XML text, that I can paste into my FRITZ!Box XML phone book, and where I can fill in a phone# and a name or any descriptive text, so next time, I want to dial that phone# myself, I can select it from the phone book. And maybe another time that person will call you with caller id, and then you will be able to greet that person with her/his name. Wouldn't that be nice?

The implementation of this software also got inspired by Matthias Hühne's "Dial!Fritz", that I run on my iPhone. But of course his software is far completer and nicer, and it's well integrated.

how to print from my Mac OS X machine through a Netgear print server

A Netgear knowledge base article named Recommended Unix printer configuration for PS110 explains, why it's good to use the LPD printing method.

Now my Mac is the UNIX-ish machine on my LAN with the richest printing capabilities:

• It can print through a 7270 AVM FRITZ!Box (my router++) on a Samsung CLP-315 colour laser printer attached via USB.
• It can also print through a Netgear PS110 (my print server) on a HP LJ1100A and a HP LJ4L, both pretty ancient but functional b&w laser printers, attached through parallel cables.

What is still missing in the team is my Canon PIXMA MX310, a combi device that I mostly use for batch scanning enterprise documents and for sending documents by fax. That device is attached via USB to a rather simple (and fanless) machine (a NEO) running WinXP, running through pretty all of the year.


Just for the completeness of the presentation: Incoming fax documents get received by that FRITZ!Box, and that lovely devices creates PDF-s from them and forwards them as e-mail attachments to one of my IMAP mail boxes out there.

my Mac now connects through my UMTS USB modem

I have been using my "XS Stick W12" from 4g-systems.com for almost a year on my EeePC running WinXP and also on my FRITZ!Box 7270.
Now I can also make use of it on my Mac Book Pro. Splendid.
Looks like 4g-systems.com now sell their current model (XS Stick W14) w/o branding and SIM-lock for EUR 100. Not bad, question is, whether the 7270 supports it.

my Mac now prints on the colour laser printer attached to the FRITZ!Box router

The Samsung CLP-315 gets accessed via "HP JetDirect". Yesterday I wasn't able to set it up as network printer and let it find the driver on Samsung's CD. Today I let Samsung's printer installation routine set up a local printer (which isn't actually installed), but at least the driver got installed somewhere on OS X, and then I could assign the right driver to the network printer configuration. Now I successfully printed my 1st page on my very own Mac.
Alright, alright, I admit it: I vaguely remember already having successfully attached my ex's (i.e. "-1") Mac Mini (which isn't officially hers ...) my FRITZ!Box ..., so I knew it would work sooner or later.
Now this is really a nice CUPS printer set up underneath!!!
I wished my openSuSE-11.1 computers would accept the CLP-315 driver as well!
Until then I only create PDF-s on them and print them via Windows or OS X.

I really love this set up: the laser printer attached via USB to my 7270, acting as a network printer.

AVM's description on how to attach a printer to the 7270 through USB was actually very helpful.