Recently in Techie :: Techno :: Category

First of all a big heartfelt thanks to everyone who posted comments both here and on Twitter when I asked for assistance in choosing a digital camcorder.

Earlier today it arrived:

I took a couple of more shots of it once I'd unboxed it. What really impressed me was how small it is:

I played around with it a bit once the battery had charged and it seems pretty easy to use. Obviously it's got loads of fancy options that I don't fully understand yet, though if I spent some time with the user manual it might help!

The display is nice and clear and the touchscreen commands seem easy to manage.

I'll hopefully get a chance to play with it properly over the next few days and will be able to take it to Rome next week ...

I had a chat the other afternoon with Bernie Goldbach about video and digital camcorders. Bernie pointed me in the direction of a camera which he thought cost a few hundred dollars, but it turns out he'd left out a zero!

Since I'm heading off to Sydney in June for a couple of weeks I'd really like to be able to video some of the sights etc., but I'm at a total loss when it comes to choosing the "right" camera.

What am I looking for?

I'm not 100% sure, but I have a few ideas.

It needs to have a reasonable number of inputs / outputs, as I don't want to be too constrained. I'll be editing / processing footage on a Mac.

I want to avoid proprietary formats.

Optical zoom is essential. Digital zoom is nice and all, but I know from still cameras that you really need proper optical zoom.

I'm not overly concerned about the storage format, though proprietary is "out".

Battery life - better would be preferable

Size - smaller is better. Apart from anything else I don't want to carry extra weight.

In terms of budget.. I've no idea how much I want to spend, but ideally below 1000 euro. I'm not interested in getting a "cheap and nasty" camera, as that's a false economy.

So can anyone make any sane (or insane) recommendations?

A few months ago Stewart mentioned Sweetcron as a "lifestream" solution (You can see his here).

A "lifestream" basically acts as an aggregator of all your online activities, as many of the online services that people use, such as Twitter, Flickr etc., publish your activity via RSS.

I'd already been experimenting with Movable Type's Motion, which is a pretty cool addition to an existing MT powered site, however having a separate, standalone, solution was not without its attractions. I registered michele.ie a few months ago, but apart from using it to test our Exchange mail hosting I hadn't really done anything with it.

So last night (and very early this morning) I decided to setup Sweetcron on one of our shared hosting plans. Our hosting system allows you to split your domain up across multiple hosting plans and platforms, so while the main site is now on a Linux web server the email is still on Microsoft Exchange.

I chose to setup the webspace to use PHP5, since PHP4 is defunct. In terms of the database I opted for MySQL5, since it's also the more recent version.

I'll have to admit that I hadn't used FTP for a long time. I have a habit of just doing things from the command line, but once I'd got over that it was easy enough to setup.

The documentation for Sweetcron is a bit sparse, but the basic install is easy enough. On our system you just need to remember that the MySQL database server is NOT "localhost", as the basic configuration file assumes that you're running everything on a single server.

The one step that isn't documented clearly is how to setup a simple cronjob to automate it for you. Fortunately someone else had done that already, so adding the cronjob via the hosting control panel was fine.
You just need to execute the following command every few minutes (or hours):

curl http://your/true-cron/url

You can find the actual URL in the Sweetcron admin panel. So just set that command to run via the cronjob manager and off you go.


The basic install ships with two themes, but there are several other themes available which range from the very simple to the incredibly complex. I still haven't settled on which one I actually want to use, as they all handle parts of your "stream" differently. In order to avoid duplication issues I think I'll stick with a theme that doesn't pull in the full content from blog posts and just provides a link to the original source.

So if you're bored and want to know what I'm up to you can head over to my new personal space and see!

This is more a note for myself than anything else ...

By default a lot of php scripts will send emails that appear as coming from the Apache user, which makes tracking down a rogue script really annoying and time-consuming.

You end up with entries in the mail logs similar to this one:

Apr 27 18:22:29 servername postfix/qmgr[23581]: 0F53421C1FA: from=<www-data@servername.com>, size=929, nrcpt=1 (queue active)

Which isn't particularly helpful if you have more than one site (vhost) on a particular server.

Making it a bit saner can be done via a simple addition to the Apache vhost config:

php_admin_value sendmail_path '/usr/sbin/sendmail -t -i -f address@domain.tld'

So now any emails sent from that vhost will reference the email specified instead of the Apache user:

Apr 27 19:40:34 servername postfix/qmgr[2469]: 16A8F21C1FA: from=<address@domain.tld>, size=358, nrcpt=1 (queue active)

There are other additions to Php that can log the path to the script itself, though until such time as someone makes it available for Debian / Ubuntu I don't really fancy having to compile it in manually

I've made another couple of minor changes to the RSS feed from this site, so any feedback would be appreciated.

What's changed?

I've added a daily delicious bookmarks thing as well as my Flickr feed.

If you think these shouldn't be there let me know and I'll remove them

I'm currently looking for a headset so that I can Skype on my Mac.

Funnily enough I already have "a" headset, but the connectors are the wrong size, thus rendering it unusable. For sanity's sake a USB connection might work better, though I could be completely wrong about that.

I want something that is compact enough to fit in my laptop bag and offers good audio quality (VOIP can be taxing enough without using shoddy equipment!)

I'm not overly concerned about the price, as I'd prefer to have a good quality product that lasts, rather than something that breaks after a couple of months.

Any and all recommendations open!

I've been having some issues with Pidgin on my Ubuntu desktop since I upgraded recently. No matter what happens it seems to be using a lot more CPU than I would like as well as crashing randomly.

In order to fix this I'm currently trying a different installation method which has been provided by the Pidgin developers:

Ubuntu ships Pidgin but does not update it after a release (except for security issues). For those users who desire new releases of Pidgin, we have packaged Pidgin in a PPA. If you encounter problems with these packages, try building from source and report the bug.

To setup the PPA, copy-and-paste these commands into a terminal:
  sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com \
      67265eb522bdd6b1c69e66ed7fb8bee0a1f196a8
  . /etc/lsb-release
  echo deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/pidgin-developers/ppa/ubuntu \
      $DISTRIB_CODENAME main | \
      sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pidgin-ppa.list

Once this PPA is setup, Pidgin updates will show up in Update Manager along with the usual Ubuntu updates. The PPA will need to be re-setup only after upgrading Ubuntu.

Whether this installation method will rectify my CPU spikes issues or not remains to be seen, but I'm willing to try just about anything at this juncture!

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• Pidgin 2.5.5 (mneylon.com)

When I got my Nokia E71 back before Christmas I immediately fell in love with the device.
One of the options that we setup was MFE (Mail for Exchange) which was pretty functional, although a bit limited.

However while we were working on our Hosted Exchange service launch Paul came across a really nice bit of software that takes the E71 and Microsoft Exchange 2007 to a whole new level.

The software - RoadSync - is really cool and makes full use of ActiveSync on Exchange server 2007. Basically it means that you can get "email push" without having to spend a fortune on expensive addons for your Exchange server.

Configuring RoadSync is pretty easy. You just enter your login details on the device you're using and off you go.

If you're connecting into an Exchange Server 2007 setup, like we are, then you can turn the synchronisation to use ActiveSync, which means that you'll get your email on your phone almost instantly.

The other features that give RoadSync that extra "edge" are its support for HTML emails (MFE simply can't handle them) and sub-folder support. Since I get so much email every day I have a rather complex set of rules to filter emails off to different folders depending on subject lines, senders and addressees. MFE simply cannot deal with the subfolders, whereas RoadSync does a reasonable job of it.

All in all moving my business email onto my phone has made things a lot easier. I don't feel as "tied" to my desktop / laptop as before and can receive emails easily while on the move. While admittedly a lot of this would have been possible on my N95 the full keyboard on the E71 takes "possible" to "comfortable", which in my mind is a pretty important difference.

The only problem with any of the mobile email software seems to be an inability to handle multiple Exchange accounts, which is understandable. Unfortunately it means that I can't move my personal email onto our Hosted Exchange cluster, which I wouldn't mind doing ...

The Onion produces some incredibly amusing content, but this one about a Sony product has to be one of their best yet (warning - strong language):

If you want to publish job listings from TechnicalJobs.ie there are a couple of options open to you.

For the more technically minded the site offers RSS, both global and by job category.

But if, like me, you just want something nice and simple, then you can grab a little Javascript widget

Enjoy!