Author Archive

Wednesday, June 30th, 2010 | Author: Dan Webb

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”.

Category: Work  | Tags: ,  | Leave a Comment
Monday, February 08th, 2010 | Author: Dan Webb

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*.

Thursday, January 21st, 2010 | Author: Dan Webb

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.

Thursday, July 30th, 2009 | Author: Dan Webb

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!

Category: review  | Tags: , , ,  | Leave a Comment
Tuesday, February 17th, 2009 | Author: Dan Webb

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.

Category: Ruby  | Tags: ,  | Leave a Comment
Thursday, October 23rd, 2008 | Author: Dan Webb

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.

Category: Ruby  | Tags: , ,  | Leave a Comment
Wednesday, October 15th, 2008 | Author: Dan Webb

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.

Category: Uncategorized  | Tags: , ,  | Leave a Comment
Wednesday, October 08th, 2008 | Author: Dan Webb

Looks like I just couldn’t stay away from Aberystwyth. I’ve landed a job in Information Services up at the University doing “systems development & support” on web based services at the Uni. At the moment I’ve been playing around with my own SharePoint site for the last 2 hours.

Being my birthday today the weather’s great and I’m off out for a drink tonight. Cheers!

 

Friday, June 27th, 2008 | Author: Dan Webb

Well I’m there at last, and I managed to pull a 2:1 out of the hat. My dissertation result of 65% must have pulled my grade up a fair few marks, which I’m really glad about. I spent many a sleepless night on it and without a few key people (who know who they are) I definitely wouldn’t have gotten as far as I did.

I’ve just landed a job at the NHS doing 3rd line technical support, or more precisely phone support for near on 1,000. It’s only temporary for now as I’m still thinking of moving to Bristol at the end of summer

There are a few projects in the pipeline, such as “The Magazine” which is primarily a web based venture covering topics from the arts to psycho-geography. If you don’t know what psycho-geography is head on over for an explanation from Luke. There is another project in the pipeline which is advertising based, however that’s all I’ve been told so far about the job specification so it’s anyone’s guess at this point that the system will do.

Finally, my passing out ceremony is on the 18th of July and is broadcast live from the University which you can get to from <this link> if you’re bored and fancy watching people look silly in gowns.

Dan

Saturday, May 17th, 2008 | Author: Dan Webb

If you’re interested in Ruby and programming issues in general some of the following links might be useful:

Zen and the Art of Programming – A general Ruby, Rails blog, the RSS feed from this is great if you want to keep track of goings on outside the Rails community.

Ongoing - An interesting read for those who want a recap of the “interesting” bits of programming conferences like JavaOne. At the time of posting this he’s gone into full flower-picture-taking-mode, andsome of them are fantastic.

Stevey’s Blog Rants – this one is great only if you’ve got a lot of time on your hands. There’s an interesting article about the come back of dynamic lanaguages and some methods/tools to speed them up that are just around the corner.

IT Signals – useful for finding out how plug-ins that he uses work. Maybe useful, might not be.

Too-biased – musings on subjects from CouchDB to ActiveShipping (A rails merchant plug-in) and then some…

If you’ve got any more interesting sites that you regularly read along the same lines as any of the above leave me a comment and I’ll add it to the list.

Dan

Category: Rails, Ruby  | Tags: , ,  | Leave a Comment