Play C64 SID files under Linux

VLC didn't work, neither did totem, and couldn't get sidplay to work.

Install audacity

then install the "exotic" plugins package, namely audacious-plugins-exotic

There you go. You can load and play your sid files from within audacity.

ASP.Net OData V4 with inherited key: A primitive value was specified; however, a value of the non-primitive type '' was expected

At the time of writing this, there is absolutely no help on the net on this error I keep on getting. By trial and error, I've been able not to explain the message, but at least find the cause.

In my case, I have two classes:

class BaseClass
{
  public int ID {get; set;}
}
class DerivedClass : BaseClass
{
  public string A { get; set; }

}

And in the modelBuilder configuration (which may not be necessary here but in my case, the builder would treat some other property as the primary key instead of this one and caused other cryptic errors):

builder.EntitySet<DerivedClass>("DerivedClasses").EntityType.HasKey(c => c.ID);

Now in my DerivesClassesController ODataController, if I try to access the derived class like so:

http://someaddress/api/DerivedClasses

I get this OData V4 formatted error (in french) :

{ "error":{ "code":"","message":"An error has occurred.","innererror":{ "message":"The 'ObjectContent`1' type failed to serialize the response body for content type 'application/json; odata.metadata=minimal'.","type":"System.InvalidOperationException","stacktrace":"","internalexception":{ "message":"Une valeur primitive a \u00e9t\u00e9 sp\u00e9cifi\u00e9e alors qu'une valeur de type non primitif '' \u00e9tait attendue.","type":"Microsoft.OData.Core.ODataException","stacktrace":" \u00e0 Microsoft.OData.Core.ValidationUtils.ValidateIsExpectedPrimitiveType(Object value, IEdmPrimitiveTypeReference valuePrimitiveTypeReference, IEdmTypeReference expectedTypeReference, Boolean bypassValidation)\r\n \u00e0 .............................

(Here I used to suggest defining a "new int ID" in the DerivedClass which worked but was kind of dirty and defeated the whole base class purpose. Here's a better way:)

The trick is to map the base class' ID property:

builder.EntityType<BaseClass>().HasKey(c => c.ID);

And do not remap the key on each derived class or you'll end up with a cryptic "The sequence contains more than one element" error.

The problem with this, however, is that the builder will try to map every entity that is inherited from the base class which you might or might not want. As of this writing, there is no way of preventing this automatic discovery.

So another trick is to explicitly ignore all derived types and only after that, remap wanted entities. Doing this by hand would be problematic wouldn't it. So here's a nice reflective loop that'll do the ignore part in a couple of lines. Place this just after the base class key definition so you end up with:

builder.EntitySet<DerivedClass>("DerivedClasses").EntityType.HasKey(c => c.ID);

var types = AppDomain.CurrentDomain.GetAssemblies()
 .SelectMany(a => a.GetTypes())
 .Where(t => t.IsSubclassOf(typeof(AbstractModel)));

foreach (var type in types)
 builder.Ignore(types.ToArray());

Then proceed on the derived types mappings as usual.

ASP.Net: OData V4 Controller giving 406

What an obscure one...

If you have a seemingly complete controller and opening this url:

http://yoursite/api/Products

returns actual OData v4 results BUT this:

http://yoursite/api/Products(1)

returns a 404 error with:

No type was found that matches the controller named 'Products(1)'

then make sure your "using"s are adequate in your controller:

using System.Web.OData; <-- this should be used

vs

using System.Web.Http.OData;

By default, the WebAPI 2 ODataController template generates a class with the latter, and it gave me trouble.

ASP.Net: Web API 2 + Help Pages + OData

Doing each of them separately is fairly easy and there's lots of tutorials on how to do it. But as for mixing them together, I've not seen much. Some blogs claim it's not possible and buggy and mostly lead to 404 and 406 errors. Well, out of luck, I made it work. The secret is in the ROUTING!

I don't understand all the concepts behind this and I believe most of us don't, and don't care to. Still, feel free to explain the unexplained in the comments.

So, I started with a ASP.Net Application project. I Selected Web API for the template so I could have the help pages ready. Then I added the needed stuff for OData V4 following this really nice tutorial. Last, I had to configure the ROUTES, and that is where all hell resides (well, that's what all the blog posts and obscure SO questions lead me to think). THe following has been taken from my SO answer.

The order in which the routes are configured has an impact. In my case, I also have some standard MVC controllers and help pages.

Global.asax:

protected void Application_Start()

{
 AreaRegistration.RegisterAllAreas();
 GlobalConfiguration.Configure(config =>
 {
  ODataConfig.Register(config); //this has to be before WebApi
  WebApiConfig.Register(config);

 });
 FilterConfig.RegisterGlobalFilters(GlobalFilters.Filters);
 RouteConfig.RegisterRoutes(RouteTable.Routes);
}

The filter and routeTable parts weren't there when I started my project and are needed.

ODataConfig.cs:

public static void Register(HttpConfiguration config)
{
  config.MapHttpAttributeRoutes(); //This has to be called before the following OData mapping, so also before WebApi mapping
    
  ODataConventionModelBuilder builder = new ODataConventionModelBuilder();
    
  builder.EntitySet("Sites");
  //Moar!
    
  config.MapODataServiceRoute("ODataRoute", "api", builder.GetEdmModel());
}

WebApiConfig.cs:

public static void Register(HttpConfiguration config)
{
  config.Routes.MapHttpRoute( //MapHTTPRoute for controllers inheriting ApiController
     name: "DefaultApi",
     routeTemplate: "api/{controller}/{id}",
     defaults: new { id = RouteParameter.Optional }
  );
}

RouteConfig.cs:

public static void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes)
{
  routes.IgnoreRoute("{resource}.axd/{*pathInfo}");
    
  routes.MapRoute( //MapRoute for controllers inheriting from standard Controller
    name: "Default",
    url: "{controller}/{action}/{id}",
    defaults: new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional }
  );
}

This has to be in that EXACT ORDER. I tried moving the calls around and ended up with either MVC, Api or Odata broken with 404 or 406 errors.

So I can call:

localhost:xxx/ -> leads to help pages (home controller, index page)

localhost:xxx/api/ -> leads to the OData $metadata

localhost:xxx/api/Sites -> leads to the Get method of my SitesController inheriting from ODataController

localhost:xxx/api/Test -> leads to the Get method of my TestController inheriting from ApiController.

Linux: Slow wifi with Intel and iwl3945

I have this lovely Thinkpad T60 on which I replaced the Atheros Wifi card for an Intel one a few years ago. I'm using Fedora 20 on it and noticed the wifi connection, although negociated to 54Mbps wouldn't get any better actual speed than 1 Mbps. I was on the edge of getting an Atheros back but here's what I did to fix the problem:

As root, add a new file:

/etc/modprobe.d/iwl3945.conf

With content:

options iwl3945 disable_hw_scan=0

then:

modprobe -r iwl3945 

modprobe iwl3945

No need to restart, the changes were instantaneous.

I don't know if it also helped, but prior to that I had removed NetworkManager and installed wicd instead. Look around on how to do this if the above solution alone didn't work. One thing though if you install wicd-gtk, I had to add my user to the "users" group and then reboot. This had nothing to do with the problem. I reinstalled NetworkManager and everything was still fine.

All thanks to this comment on ubuntu launchpad. It's from 2011 but still works.

WatchGuard: failed to open shared memory for openvpn command

I was having problem connecting to a VPN using WatchGuard Mobile VPN with SSL. Here's my log:

2014-11-17T10:16:27.568 VERSION file is 5.23, client version is 5.23
2014-11-17T10:16:27.851 failed to open shared memory for openvpn command (error: 2), please check the WatchGuard SSLVPN Service
2014-11-17T10:16:27.851 Failed to launched openvpn. retCP=0

I tried various things, and it turns out that I was using version 11.9.1. I uninstalled the client and reinstalled the version located on the firewall, which was 11.7.3 and now everything works.

Along the hair pulling and googling, the typo in the last log line made me laugh a bit.

jQuery default JSON parser for AJAX calls

By default, jQuery auto detects the response format of an AJAX request and uses a predefined list of converters to use. Here's how I set the default converter when an AJAX call returns JSON data:

$.ajaxSetup({
    converters: {
        '* text': window.String,
        'text html': true,
        'text json': parseDotNetJson,
        'text xml': jQuery.parseXML
    }
});
function parseDotNetJson(data) {
    return JSON.parse(data, function(key, value) {
        if (typeof value === 'string') {
            var a = /\/Date\((-?\d*)\)\//.exec(value);
            if (a) return new Date(+a[1]);
        }
        return value;
    });
}

I place this code in the root of a script file. I use this to convert dates parsed to JSON by ASP.Net MVC.

More info

jQuery auto detects types

jQuery.ajax default converters

jQuery.setup

Convert .Net MVC Json dates