Shortbread

One thing I’ve been hoping for since the start of this whole “fast-up-date-cycle” is the that add-ons stop breaking every time a new version is released. The new versions most of the time don’t necessarily bring any new features where plugins are concerned. So why force all plug-in writers to recheck their code to make sure it works every single time a new version comes out?
This might not seem like much of a problem for some of the bigger add-ons like AdBlock (and yes they really should be testing them), but for smaller, less used add-ons like Geiriadur Cymraeg (Welsh dictionary), which is rarely updated, then the version numbering makes the whole add-on process much more of a chore.

So I say, hooray bring on the lack of version numbers, and find an alternative way to let add-on makers know that they’ll be safe with their current plugin configuration for a while longer.  After all end users don’t need to know which version they’re on, but programmers and sysadmins do.

The buzz associated with facebook places and it’s possible drawbacks have all been highlighted, However most have been Dom a theoretical stand point. Over the weekend I visited Alton Towers with a few friends

As it turns out location isn’t something I want to share with everyone. I tried checking into Stoke station on the Saturday for reasons of my own, nothing dodgy, but then people started asking why on earth I’m there. my dad and cousin, people who usually don’t post to my Facebook wall or comment on anything. These people were suddenly asking for reasons for why I was somewhere where i had my own decent reasons for being. Not something I’m comfortable with.

I also checked in 3 people whilst waiting for a ride at Alton towers. Within an hour or two, friends of my girlfriend were texting her telling her to have a nice day. All lovely messages but she didn’t tell anyone she was going, for her own reasons. So when she received the texts of the same nature she was more than a little confused. These on top of the usual, people know you’re not not at home reason, all make for fairly decent reasons to disable Facebook places

So there’s nothing wrong with the technology, there are already plenty of places to “check into”, but the reasons to share your location, and I’m yet to find a decent reason, are heavily outweighed by the reasons not to. It’s not about the technology but people who use the service.

So for now, I’ve disabled Facebook places and may be going back  to Gowalla.

Well yesterday was my first visit to a work based conference so I wasn’t sure what to expect so I thought I’d share.

First of all, train travel, I’m not a big train traveller and living in the heart of Wales where train travel is in essence no better than walking in the rain without a coat. The trains are slow and infrequent to and from Aberystwyth and as Jeremy Clarkson once noted, someone always smells. And an odd peculiarity about the Aberystwyth train is it splits in half about 30miles from home so you *need* to be in the right coach and if it doesn’t split you’re probably going to have to get of and get a lazy coach ride from there to home. If there’s one thing I hate more than trains, it is coaches.

So enough of the ranting, what did I learn from the conference? Storage vendors are all the same, they all want to sell you the most expensive solution (profit margins), but in this day and age if you’re like the Welsh Books Council you’re funding is likely to be cut or has been cut so spending £30,000 on a backup solution that isn’t even a fully fledged tape backup solution, is just waaay out of the question. The following bits of advice may be more directed at vendor and solution provider conferences but may be helpful for general technology conferences.

I’ll start off with a fairly obvious one, go to the conference with a set of issues you’d like to solve, the event I went to yesterday was only small with 50 vendors, but that still a lot to get around with only a limited amount of time.

Ignore vendors spamming you with information, go in with direct questions and don’t be afraid to stop them half way through the blurb if they can’t give you any price figures.

Have fun,

Leave all the free stuff for me to collect!

So I’ve now got SharePoint with the Welsh Language pack working. Turns out the first install was corrupt somewhere along the line and wouldn’t show the option to change the language to Welsh. Without a complete re-installation it was looking like a £220 phone call to Microsoft.

WordPress is now on version 3.0. I’m sure I’ve tried in the past to manually upgrade and it wasn’t this easy, but it’s all working and a short DB upgrade later it’s all working. The only issue I had was with my host not allowing my enough memory to upgrade the system automatically, but hey we can’t have everything can we?

Now I’m off to try an configure Windows Server backup to a remote location, it might have to come down to tricking it into using iSCSI as a “local drive”.

So I’ve been battling getting VMWare running on CentOS and Ubuntu for the past 2 weeks (and the rest).
Last week enough was enough, I’d spent too much time trying to get the modules re-compiled and working with some sort of stability. In that amount of time I could have paid for the Windows license in the wasted time I’d spent trying to get it working. I’d followed all the guides to the letter, and trying following them with some imagination, but nothing seemed to work

I’m now running Server 2008 R2 Core as the VMWare host, it runs a slightly higher load than Linux, but with most services not installed as a default it’s much better than your average Server installation.

So if you’ve spent more than your fair share of time on VMWare, just take the bullet and go for a Windows VMWare host.

I can’t say it has much better performance or, I no benchmarks to prove it, but it does *just work*.

If anyone reading this blog uses Thunderbird 3 and is Welsh then you might be interested to know that Russ Taylor has change both the British and Welsh dictionaries to be compatible with Thunderbird 3.

I thought I’d wait a week or so before I wrote my review for the WD HD TV player.

First things first, it’s small and sleek. Next to my 22″ Samsung TV, it still looks tiny. I was expecting it to be around the size of the WD MyBook but it’s quite a bit smaller. That’s saying something for such a well kitted out device.

As all the specs say, HDMI out, Digital out, component out, 2x USB support

The device is as simple as:

• copy your files to a USB stick (make sure it’s formatted as FAT32)
• plug it into your WD TV HD
• WD TV HD will look on the newly inserted drive for content
• Play

Moving through film/tv show is simple, but I would recommend getting a fast access USB stick or HDD as when fast-forwarding through a large chunk of video the WD player can take a while to sync up again.
The only obvious thing missing from the product is ethernet support. I’m hoping to correct this next week when I pruchase a USB-Ethernet adaptor. Once I’ve attached it I’ll report back.

OK so that’s all the usual buisness sorted what I’m more interested in seeing is how the modded firmware from B-RAD can extend the WD TV HD player. At the moment I’m not getting the full use out of the kit so I’m going to buy the prementioned USB-Ethernet adaptor and a USB hub to extend it to a torrent box and FTP server.

Side-note: Another reason for buying this was to reduce my power usage. turning on my PC everytime I wanted to watch a movie is a pain in the butt. However no where in the specs mention power usage. So from experience the power usage figures are unsurprisingly good, with a USB HDD plugged into this docking station it uses around 20W 7W when playing a video. Not bad coming down from my PC which uses about 200W when watching TV shows and movies..

—–

I’ve now purchased these two little add-ons for the box from Amazon:

NEWLinkUSB ethernet adaptor and the Akasa USB 2.0 HUB +Card reader (I plan to buy a nice chunky compact flash card to keep everything on at a later date)

It’s now slowly turning into a NAS box and web server. Luckly I’ve had B-RAD’s guides to follow.

Following the instructions is all quite easy. Lightthp server + PHP and it’s all running. I’m planning to install Ruby 1.9 and Rails when everything else is up and running and hopefully the little box should take the load!

In short IPKG once you get used to how it works, is great. The learning curb is quite small. After an evening of hacking around following the guide and adding in extra things like OpenSSH it’s all running happily. Now to get the Windows box to be able to see the usb drives and external HDD!

Before I start I’d like to thank the SOAP4R Group for giving me a helping hand.

So we’ve got to access a SOAP interface from Ruby. Ruby’s built in library is OK but updating the library (which is an old version of the SOAP4R library) will give you some bug fixes and more features as you’d expect.

You can download the Gem from here: Link That page contains a few links to more help on SOAP4R.

From ground up following this guide (I wont rewrite mark Thomas’ guide it’s pretty concise)  I chose the “Generate classes from WSDL”. It’s just a bit more convenient and you can see which methods you can run.

So you’ll hopefully end up with file such as

• DefaultClient.rb
• default.rb
• defaultDriver.rb
• defaultMappingRegistry.rb

You’ll need 2 more files. I’ve called them main.rb & soapAuthentication.rb. Extracting the Authentication header extension out to it’s own file:

require 'soap/header/simplehandler'

class SoapAuthHeader < SOAP::Header::SimpleHandler
NAMESPACE = 'http://namespace'
DIGEST  = 'digest'
ENCODING = 'none'
SIGNATURE  = 'signature'

  def initialize()
super(XSD::QName.new(NAMESPACE, 'Trust'))

  end

def on_simple_outbound
{
"Encoding" => ENCODING,
"Digest" => DIGEST,
"Signature" => SIGNATURE
}
end
end

The above code adds Encoding, Digest and a Signature to the header when sending the SOAP envelopes. So for example on outbound it now adds:

   <env:Header>

      <n1:Trust xmlns:n1="http://questionmark.com/QMWISE/" env:mustUnderstand="0">

         <n1:Signature>9354A730B02651997F02ED97BEA3B439</n1:Signature>

         <n1:Digest>8C6504C136A975BBFC420499B4444BC3</n1:Digest>

         <n1:Encoding>none</n1:Encoding>

      </n1:Trust>

   </env:Header>

Within main.rb I’ve got

require ‘defaultDriver.rb’
require ‘soapAuthentication.rb’

## Create SOAP Driver
wsdl = “your WSDL location”

obj = DefaultSOAP.new()
obj.wiredump_dev = STDERR if $DEBUG #add some debugging to the command line

trust = SoapAuthHeader.new #create a new authentication header
obj.headerhandler << trust #adds the header to outbound envolopes

If you’ve found this useful (or wrong) leave me a comment.

The hell of getting postgresql and ruby to work finally is over.

gem install ruby-postgres

however this doesn’t fully install the driver. Locate a copy of sleay32.dll, libpq.dll, comerr32.dll, libintl-2.dll, krb5_32.dll, libeay32.dll, libiconv-2.dll from here postgresql-8.3.4-1-binaries-no-installer.zip or when I upload the files, from here.

to check whether it’s installed correctly or not.

M:\>irb
irb(main):001:0> require ‘postgres’
=> true

If this is true. Go play.

I finally found a nice simple way to update Ruby Gems when you’re behind a proxy thanks to Nigel Thorne (blog now dead).

set HTTP_PROXY=http://[username]:[password]@[proxyserver]:[port]

or if your proxy doesn’t use authentication

set HTTP_PROXY=http://[proxyserver]:[port]

Since the Gem software looks for the upper case HTTP_PROXY variable when executing it’ll take this from the environment variable and work it’s magic. This makes everything a lot simpler and gives me one less reason to use NetBeans, as I never liked it inability to choose from gem updates.