Ramblings about life the multiverse and everything

2008-12-30T19:50:00.000Z

I feel a sense of recognition. Today I got my first email from a company saying one of my domains is about to expire (which it isn't it's good till may). The small print however transfers it to their registrar...and they tried to charge 20GBP which is a lot since I only pay 7USD a year for it.

Never trust a company called domain renewals!
Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device

2008-12-30T14:10:00.001Z

My pc (desktop) is acting up so I'm trying to repair it, I pop in my windows cd...it bsod on me! I've never seen that! Turns out bios settings had corrupted some how :/
Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device

2008-12-27T23:49:00.001Z

I was just flicking through the tv listings and on the "God channel" it had "UFO Conspiracy" I think someone got that wrong...
Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device

Vista UAC Warning

2008-12-24T19:16:00.001Z

I have several old games (age of empires 2 and older) which don't like running on vista without admin rights...but then UAC creeps in..so I switch it off (I only use vista for gaming), but then ARGH! Annoying security center warning!

Solution

Regedit > HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Security Center > add a new dword called UacDisableNotify and set the value to 1 > reboot

W00t!

On another note this is my 100th post!!! Weee

Oh and merry xmas everyone

Windows explorer crashes on right click

2008-12-22T23:37:00.004Z

I kept having this problem when I right click a .exe file in windows, windows explorer would crash.

This is where shexview comes in! Download, run, turns out I had a flakey java extension, disable all works!!

2008-12-13T14:51:00.003Z

*grumbles about tech support and not notifying of updates* I wake up >.> find out the dh server has been down for 2 hours...my control panel has been updated and my firewall link has gone missing (firewall still works but the editor is missing) looking at the bandwidth logs which only exist from the 11th of december..I can have a pretty good guess when it was updated.

The convos of nerds...

2008-12-12T01:38:00.002Z

I was just talking to my friend ame about..thermosi..(plural for thermos) and how cool they are! I have one now (got it for free long story) which can carry 4 hot cups of tea for days! It's awesome!!...anyway after discussing the intricacies of thermosi we moved onto...mag lites!!! and the different cell capacities!! Awesome huh?

Komodo edit lagging on big files...

2008-12-12T01:03:00.003Z

I use komodo edit to edit my php, html, whatever files and sometimes when editing large files (1k+ lines) it lags when typing, this tends to happen mainly when editing strings in php files...well to get around this next to the syntax checker results there is a bit that says what language is in use i.e. PHP changing this to "Text" removes the slow down yay xD

Nearly perfect

2008-12-10T16:12:00.000Z

Well I just got my M255 test results back, nearly perfect >.> one mark off a distinction, ah well no biggie I got what I expect and need a grade 2 pass XD now onto my next course!

Sudo shell command via apple script

2008-11-28T06:25:00.001Z

Handy little thing I found here

http://www.mac-help.com/forums/showthread.php?t=725

If you want to run a shell script as admin (i.e. at startup) in my case running apache and mysql then if you write the following

do shell script "sudo yourscript" password "yourAdminPassword" with administrator privileges

As an apple script it will work, yay!

Virtual Box 2.0.6

2008-11-27T21:36:00.002Z

Virtual Box 2.0.6 has been released and the bug I reported has been fixed!

Windows host installer: ﬁxed default installation directory on 64-bit on new installations (bug #2501)

Komodo Edit Portable 4.4.1 & 5.0.2

2008-11-26T22:37:00.002Z

I have migrated my Komodo edit portable release to sourceforge.net and added version 5.0.2 to the repertoire as well as updating version 4 from 4.4.0 to 4.4.1.

I'm just committing them to SVN (this could take a while, thousands of files)

On another note my blog has hit over 100 unique visitors! W00t!.

The weird conversations and how the internet makes them weirder

2008-11-25T15:09:00.001Z

I'm sat in the car and see a sign saying 'keep two chevrons apart' and wondered what the orgins of the word chevron are....after searching several pages of wikipedia I am now well versed in the uses of a chevron but not in it's origins.

So onto dictionary.com according to them it originates from a latin derivative "caper goat" what a chevron and a goat have to do with each other I have no idea...
Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device

Mac VNC from windows problem

2008-11-24T18:13:00.002Z

I was having a problem connecting to my mac using vnc (I tried ultra vnc, tightvnc and realvnc non worked). Whenever I tried the screen would either just close automatically or error "incompatible version" or "no matching security types" very weird.

After experimenting and googling I found this

http://forums.macrumors.com/archive/index.php/t-380251.html

If you set it to full colours (high speed on tight vnc, ultra on ultravnc) it works, it's a little laggy but im on a LAN so it's not bad!

Very odd.

Mac version of alt-tab

2008-11-17T21:34:00.001Z

I randomly just pressed the wrong key ob my mac and found out mac has a version of the windows alt-tab (cycle through open programs) it's cmd-tab. Cool!
Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device

Blackberry os reinstall

2008-11-15T09:56:00.001Z

Lately my blackberry 8800 has been crashing a lot when running 2 or more applications (god knows why). Anyway yesterday I deicded today I would reinstall the operating system to see if that worked.

So I downloaded the os from O2 (my service provider).

Then I installed the os onto my desktop, hooked my blackberry up, launched the blackberry desktop manager and it asks me if I want to update.

I press yes! I let it update takes around 5 minutes.

Now my blackberry is uber fast again I have googlemail, yahoo go, opera mini and beejive all open as I write this.

No idea why it fixed it but who cares? It's fixed!
Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device

M263 TMA 01

2008-11-10T17:28:00.001Z

I've just finished M263 TMA01 done, dusted and submitted, it's due Dec 1st so I have a while to wait until marking....onto TMA02 (I wonder how many I can do in a day?)

Blogger Validator

2008-11-09T18:03:00.001Z

I've made a new script that validates blogger sites to xhtml transitional, it can be found here

Insert brain...oh wait it's 4:30am it's missing...

2008-11-07T04:30:00.001Z

I just realised 4:30am makes me dumb.....I was trying to share my mac dvd drive with windows via smb..set all the permissions up etc...couldn't get in...oh look disable and enable my macs firewall...it works...>.> took half an hour to work that out, even geeks get stumepd by the obvious somtimes!

Keep windows software up to date

2008-11-05T18:42:00.002Z

I found a handy piece of free software to keep your computer up to date
http://secunia.com/vulnerability_scanning/personal/

It checks 1,000s of software programs and notifies you of patches. Handy!

Virtual SVN and Project Managment

2008-11-02T17:25:00.003Z

Well I've finally finished my latest venture.

I wanted to have a portable SVN server and apache/mysql server. Why? Well I like to travel a lot and for long periods of time so I take my work with me so leaving a SVN server on my desktop at home isn't really a good idea.

Now I could put it on my laptop but I'm not always using it I like to be able to switch pc. So here's the plan.

1) I have an old laptop with a faulty mouse pad so it's not really useful anymore, it has a 60GB hard drive and a couple of gigs of ram so can handle a virtual machine.
2) Migrate my svn and apache server to a virtual machine on my desktop for testing purposes to make sure it will work
3) Migrate the virtual machine to the laptop
4) Connect the laptop to my network via ethernet and enable wake on lan
5) Enable virtual machine to start on laptop bootup

So firstly, what operating system should I use? The laptop has no OS on it so I looked at linux. I tried Open Suse, Fedora, CentOS, Ubuntu (8.10), Mandriva and Slackware.

In the end I chose Fedora 9, here is why.
Open Suse worked well a little slower than the others but when installing Xampp for linux I kept getting access denied messages for php pages, god knows why so onto the next system.

CentOS, pretty good but Fedora has more up-to-date software which seemed to agree with VirtualBox better.

Ubuntu 8.10, disabled root user as standard didn't help since virtual box doesn't work to well under non root user, and it didn't give me an option to set a static IP at install bleh next!

Mandriva..looks really pretty...crashed when installing virtual box...next!

Slackware...too complciated to install I want simple and quick.

Fedora..just plain works XD Some issues setting a static IP but not hard to resolve.

OK Operating system for the laptop decided...I decided to use fedora for the virtual machine as well.

For the virual machine at first I tried host networking, this isn't so easy on linux since you have to create network bridges etc which is a bit of a pain so I decided to switch it to NAT and just forward the ports it only takes a few minutes to set up.

Migrating the SVN and web server was easy enough that has been covered in a previous post.

The laptop needed wol enabled this has been covered in a previous post, now onto the last part setting the virtual machine to start on boot. I created a script in /etc/init.d/ and here it is:


#!/bin/bash
#Virtual Box Start up script

PATH=/bin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/usr/sbin

case "$1" in

 start)
     echo -n "Starting"
VBoxManage starvm VirtualMachine -type vrdp
 ;;

 stop)
     echo -n "Stopping"
     ssh -oPort=23 -i /root/.ssh/localhost root@localhost -t shutdown now
sleep 30
VBoxManage controlvm VirtualMachine poweroff
sleep 5
VBoxManage snapshot VirtualMachine take snapshot`date +%s`
sleep 2
 ;;

 restart)
     $0 stop || true
     $0 start
 ;;

 *)
 echo "Usage: /etc/init.d/virtualbox {start|stop|restart}"
 exit 1
 ;;

esac

exit 0

To add the script to startup use the following command

/sbin/chkconfig --level 35 virtualbox on

On bootup this will start the machine in vrdp mode which is handy since I can remote in, on shutdown it will ssh into the machine (I port forwarded port 23 (old telnet port which I don't use) to the machine) and tells it to shut down, this is becace acpi shutdown on fedora virtual machines just logs off. Then it runs the power off virtual box command after 30 seconds to make sure it is off, then it takes a snapshot.

All done. The only thing left to do is edit the hosts file on my client machine to point to the ip address of the new machine, if I ever move the machine all I need to do is change the ip in the hosts file. Easy as pie!

Test Results

2008-11-02T00:06:00.002Z

W00t!! I just got part1 of my first test for my M263 course back 95%! Only one mark wrong, this means I can start on part 2!

Fedora Wake On Lan

2008-10-31T22:31:00.002Z

Fedora by default when shutting down powers down the network adaptor hence disabled wake on lan, to enable it open terminal as root, type the following and press enter

echo "/sbin/ethtool -s eth0 wol g" > /etc/rc.d/rc.local

Replace eth0 with eth1 etc whatever your network connection is set to (probably eth0 or eth1).

Reboot, then next time you shut down it will be ready to wake on lan.

Mac Null character file in trash

2008-10-31T17:41:00.002Z

I've had this happen twice now you open your trash and see an odd file with some weird null characters with an "o" in the middle.

This is caused by the trash flaking out on an ntfs or fat32 partition when running bootcamp (or at least that's what causes it on mine).

To solve, log into windows, delete all .Trashes files and folders on the drives (note they will be hidden). That should fix it, if it doesn't use windows to run check disk on all drives.

Auto login for Fedora9

2008-10-31T17:03:00.002Z

Ubuntu has an autologin feature, when I switched to Fedora I missed this, but you can enable it (sort of) by editing /etc/gdm/custom.conf adding the following lines


[daemon]
TimedLoginEnable=true
TimedLogin=usernameofuseryouwanttologin

Then edit /etc/gdm/gdm.schemas

Scroll down until you find daemon/TimedLoginDelay and change the bit in the default tags to however long you want, i.e 1 , 5 , 10 etc