Michael Wood

I Wanted the latest version of bluefish on my Fedora Core 1 (new rpm’s arn’t now released as it’s in legacy) server so had to compile it. Had to install gtk2-devel and pcre-devel and their dependencies (thanks apt for rpm), then to make it actually work in the Fedora Core way I had to do this:
ln -s /usr/local/share/bluefish/ /usr/share/bluefish

ln -s /usr/local/bin/bluefish /usr/bin/bluefish

I’ve been working on my own CMS recently, should be released soon for the world to use.

For some reason my sound card kernel module wasn’t loading at startup (PEBCAK) error, modules which are loaded on startup in ubuntu are held in the file /etc/modules - it’s a debian thing

Been having a few problems with a house mate hopefully he will take a hint.

At work I’ve mostly been co-ordinating (and doing) the customer upgrades roll out of the latest version of AchieveForms of which I have had quite a lot of imput to via the testing stages it has gone through. Upgrading is always quite a tricky thing because we’re expected to put everything back to how it was even if the product has changed.
Outerweb - the primarily IRC based network that I run has sucessfully merged with AthemeNet http://www.atheme.net/ OuterWeb will continue to exist and we should as soon as the servers have been updated have a linked server. In the mean time we are using their servers. The services database has been merged into AthemeNet’s services as best as possible if there are any problems please tell me. (grouped nicks and vhosts are known issues at the moment)

Thanks to everyone for sticking it out during the disruption caused by the merger. Also thanks to the AthemeNet staff who have been very patient and helpful.

Very pleased with my desktop’s performance at the moment. I’ve got a WD Raptop 74GB SATA drive which runs at 10,000rpm as aposed to the nromal 7200 rpm. Also the 1.5GB of ram which I put in it has vastly speed up using VMware in particular (of which the player is now freee!) the only problem with the player is that you don’t get a graphical editor for the vm, but you can easily edit the .vmx file for the VM - it’s pretty simple.

Easter holiday was good - Went to Hatfield House which is our “local” stately home, which was pretty interesting especial a document was a “family tree” which linked the Queen (happy birthday) to pretty much every “great/hero” including directly Adam and Eve. Went to london with family for a concert in St Martins-in-the-fields (of Trafalgar Square) we heard Handle - Messiah (we like sheep etc.. you know the one) performed by The english chamber choir and belmont Ensemble if london

Tech stuff Jump to non tech stuff

Here are 2 things recently that google didn’t provide me with a useful result.

I needed a linux server to forward two ports to another machine. This is the script i put in the rc2.d (/etc/rc2.d/) so that it would apply on start up.
#!/bin/sh

IPTABLES=”/sbin/iptables”

# enable ip forwarding
echo “1″ > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward

# flush existing tables
$IPTABLES -F
$IPTABLES -t nat -F

# our forwarding policy is to deny
#$IPTABLES -P FORWARD DROP

# enable masquerading on the eth0 (private) network
$IPTABLES -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE

# forward some ports
$IPTABLES -t nat -A PREROUTING -i eth0 -p tcp –dport 7575 -j DNAT –to 192.168.62.61:7575
$IPTABLES -t nat -A PREROUTING -i eth0 -p tcp –dport 7676 -j DNAT –to 192.168.62.61:7676
(thanks to a collegue who help with this)

The other thing was I needed to crop an image that i don’t have any control over:

It’s generated by last.fm so i couldn’t just crop it and put it in the blog template, It would be possible to crop it using another script but that would add to the processing the page needed especially as this image is generated each time a new song is played.
So to crop it and not resize it and adhear to XHTML 1.0 I decided to use CSS to crop it:

.croplastfm {
display: block;
max-width: 220px;
height: 135px;
background-image: url(’http://imagegen.last.fm/minimalLightRecent/recenttracks/X3N.gif’);
}
The max-width means that it doesn’t go over the edge, height is the actual height of the image. Then the background is the actual image.
and then in the template of this blog i just use a div, like so;

“< div class="croplastfm" />”
To make this valid in this particular template i had to add it into the li with a link in it.It’s a bit hacky, but it’s valid and it works.

I needed to make some vob files (raw dvd files) smaller so I use transcode to change them into xvid

This works for me pretty much every time with vobs: transcode -i /place/the/vob/is/VTS_01_7.VOB -o /pub/output.avi -y xvid4,ffmpeg -F mpeg4 –export_prof DVD -Z fast -z

occasionally the -z option needs to be taken off ( it flips the video stream) and sometimes the option to swap the colours round (blues and reds)  you can do this with -k

Life stuff

I made a profit on a can of coke from the vending machine at work today, someone had left a load of change in the machine which came out when i went to purchase my drink.

I bought my two (desk) neighbours a chocolate bar. I don’t believe in personal gain from someone elses missfortune. I once found a £10 GBP note down my road, I donated it to charity. If I didn’t I would feel guilty, I know if i lost some money i would rather it go to chairty rather flitered away on someone’s wants. What goes around comes around anyway.
Water pipe has been fixed and the washing machine is working fine now. Got a lot done at work today - I need to find out what I can and can’t say.

http://remindme.outerweb.org is now up and running properly - it allows forgetful people like myself to send emails to myself reminding me of things I need to do.

I’m currently on the look out for an IRC network to link with outerweb to help secure it’s future.

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