http://www.aquarionics.com/category/linux en-gb Aquarion (nicholas@aquarionics.com) Site Admin (nicholas@aquarionics.com) Fri, 08 Aug 2008 14:12:00 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 http://www.aquarionics.com/journal/2008/05/04/Hate_Technology Thursday, 22:00: Accidentally buy an XBox 360 Decide it needs to talk to the network (before playing any games on it) Current Network: Desktop (“Tsunami”) & 360 plugged into Belkin Wireless Router, laptop and Wii talk to it remotely. Cable modem is upstream on Router. 360 cannot phone home due to closed ports. Open ports All ports not documented. Fuckit(1): 360 in... http://www.aquarionics.com/journal/2007/12/25/Import_ant I have had it with Windows Mobile Devices. My main phone has been a HTC Wizard, sold by O2 as the XDA Mini. I bought it because it has a nice screen, a built-in keyboard, and will run PuTTY, which is handy when I’m pretending to be a sysadmin. It’s useful, in that it’s a pretty good Internet Device – though one of the new Nokia tablets would be better – but it... http://www.aquarionics.com/journal/2007/08/24/Snippit a=0;for fle in *; do b=`for c in $(seq 0 $a); do echo -n " "; done`; mv "$fle" "$b"; a=$(($a+1)); done http://www.aquarionics.com/journal/2006/10/10/The_Iceweasels_Come The Mozilla Corperation don’t want people to change the source code of Firefox, recompile it with extra bonus bugs and possible API incompatibilities, and release it – as Firefox – to people who might use it and blame them for bugs that aren’t their fault. Linux distros – such as Debian and Ubuntu – routinely maintain their own forks of open source... http://www.aquarionics.com/journal/2006/07/29/LUGRadio_Live_2006 Okay, third time lucky… Last weekend I went to LUGRadio Live 2006. I had a blast from the moment I got to the initial Friday lunch meet to the moment I left, annoyed I couldn’t stay for the after show party (Damn hotel bills). Good Things Talks I didn’t go to very many talks, mostly because I was too busy shooting the breeze with people and playing computer games. In... http://www.aquarionics.com/journal/2006/03/01/MLP What if Microsoft redesigned the iPod packaging? And if you can tell me the name of the track that accompanies most of this, I’ll be your friend forever. http://www.aquarionics.com/journal/2006/01/19/Mail So, this is how my mail works: Mail going to things at aquarionics go to Sneaky Mail going to things at gkhs go to Jar Other mail goes to POP accounts All mail is pulled from POP/Sneaky/Jar to Atoll, my home server I read mail over IMAP with Mail.app, Thunderbird, or Roundcube, depending on where I am. So, on Friday, DNS on Sneaky goes away, meaning mail can’t get to it for... http://www.aquarionics.com/journal/2005/12/22/PHP_sessions_in_Debian_Sarge This is how debian Woody (and all sane systems) clean up PHP disk based (the default) sessions: Every x (default: 1000) requests, PHP will delete all outdated sessions. This is how Debian Sarge does it: Every half hour (at 9 and 39 past) run a script This script runs a second shell script that parses the PHP config file with a regex to get the value for how long sessions should... http://www.aquarionics.com/journal/2005/12/13/New_Flat_Adventures_-_Setting_up_IPCop How to set up IPCop with a Conexant ADSL Modem (AKA Dynamode ADSL PCI Modem) Put PCI Card into machine Put network card into machine Download and burn IPCop ISO Install it. Put the ADSL Settings in the ADSL Settings Page. Do something more interesting with the time you saved not [m]ucking around. http://www.aquarionics.com/journal/2005/05/10/Faff So, I saw gonzui and thought it might be useful. wget http://kent.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/gonzui/gonzui-1.1.tar.gz tar zxvf gonzui-1.1.tar.gz cd gonzui-1.1 ./configure (Fail) sudo apt-get install ruby ./configure (Fail) sudo apt-get install bdb apt-cache search bdb sudo apt-get install libdbm-ruby1.8 ./configure (Fail) (Google) cd .. wget... http://www.aquarionics.com/journal/2005/04/16/Cedega%3A_Shaking_my_confidence_daily As of this day, I am paying three of my hard-earned pounds every month to the folks of the Transgaming project, in return for software. Transgaming is an oddity in the F/OSS world. It started off as “WineX”, a fork of Wine (Wine is “not” an emulator) with DirectX support, then they became a commercial thing. Because WineX (Now known as Cedega) contains GPL code (A fork... http://www.aquarionics.com/article/name/Making_the_Lexmark_Z515_work_under_Debian_Linux Lexmark printers are notorious for being crapper than a crap thing on St Craps day, whilst playing Craps in a pile of crap on the planet “Crap” within the solar-system “Crap”, especially under Linux. Nevertheless, I bought one. Because it was cheap. (It does, I should warn potential followers in my footsteps, come with a half-filled colour cartridge and no black.... http://www.aquarionics.com/journal/2005/01/20/Random_screams_of_fear Lack of posts. Here’s why: My main problem with Zope is the documentation which is either a) for a version in advance of the one I’m using; b) has a prerequisite level I can only aspire to; or c) Doesn’t answer the question I have (like ‘What parameters do I feed it?’) whilst being the comprehensive, only documentation on the subject. I’ve switched to KDE... http://www.aquarionics.com/journal/2004/11/13/Dayze So, the week then. Tuesday I got home from work at about 20:00 as usual. I discovered that atoll, my main server and home to my life, documents, music and email was thrashing at a 50.00 load average and the terminal was spewing out line upon line of “DriveSeek Failed” errors. This was not an unknown error, Atoll’s previous hard drive (Identical make and model) died in a... http://www.aquarionics.com/article/name/How_to_convert_AMR_files_to_MP3 The Nokia 7600 (And - I'm told - some Erikson phones) record in a format called "AMR". After a little digging, I was able to convert these to a usable format (MP3) on my Linux box. This is how I did it: You will require: sox (via your package manager) lame (Or some other encoder, see below) The 3GPP reference converter files The first is easy, sensible people should be able to... http://www.aquarionics.com/article/name/Xinerama-a-rama How to get Dual Head working on Dell's Latitude c610 With one monitor plugged into the monitor port and the LCD display, you too can have a dual-head setup. It's great. You do it like this: In XF86Config: Section "Device" Identifier "radeon_one" Driver "radeon" BusID "PCI:1:0:0" Screen 1 EndSection Section... http://www.aquarionics.com/journal/2004/07/15/Here_and_back_again Things that have happened in the last five days since ‘Threadnaught’: I’ve learnt that the secret to chocolate sauce is to shake the bottle with the lid closed. Brown shows up on white curtains, seven feet from the table where there was ice cream and a limited amount of chocolate sauce. And the carpet. Also the television, speakers, post and furniture. Do not... http://www.aquarionics.com/journal/2004/06/10/Today%27s_Trick Today's Spambeating Trick Of The Day: zcat ~/mail/sentArchive/* | grep "(^To|^CC)" | perl -e "while (<STDIN>){print /(w*@[w|.|-]*)/; print "n"}" | sort | uniq | xargs --replace -exec echo "whitelist_from {}" >> /home/aquarion/.spamassassin/user_prefs Where it fails: When there is more than one address on the To: line. Why I don't care: I don't often send mail to more than one person. http://www.aquarionics.com/article/name/Loopholes_in_Operating_Systems (Reposted here partially in response to Aquarius on the subject) “Martin Underwood” wrote: “Johnny” wrote: “Conor” wrote: It means your PC won’t become a trojan infested pile of stinking crap That sounds like Windows to me, ever increasing in size too. I’ve always wondered: do Linux and MacOS have any security loopholes? Is part... http://www.aquarionics.com/journal/2004/06/03/Packaging_the_future What I want, you see, is for the requirement that a popular linux app support nine different packaging formats to go away. In this utopia, there would be *an* – for example – ‘Open Office for Linux i386’ in the UPF which you download and and it then hands a list of dependances to apt-get, rpmdrake, rpm or whatever which then translates them into packages and gets them by...