Recently in Linux Category

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 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)

BBC's iPlayer labs have recently released a new version of their software that will work on both Mac and Linux.

Pity that other media companies, such as Sky, haven't followed suit yet.

Not everyone uses PCs Microsoft Windows!!

(via)

UPDATE: Since everyone has rightly pointed out, the usage of the word PCs in my original post was inaccurate. It has, instead, been replaced with the word "Windows"

Trying to get sites to display identically across multiple browsers and multiple operating systems is awkward. This site probably doesn't display particularly well on all browsers, but I'm not a professional web designer / developer, so you'll have to excuse me. It's also not a corporate / business website trying to sell products or services to the public.

Screenclick, however, is a business website.

Earlier this evening I decided to visit it on my Mac using Firefox. Apart from the really annoying splash page, which doesn't do anything useful, the main page does not load correctly in Firefox 3 on the Mac:


Now if you open the same page in Safari you seem something totally different:
Why?

Seemingly somebody decided to use Microsoft's Silverlight, but didn't bother to do a simple plugin check that would either prompt the user to install the plugin or gracefully degrade.

I won't be able to view their site on my Linux desktop either, as Silverlight isn't available for Linux (there is a port, but last time I checked there wasn't a native Debian / Ubuntu version available)

UPDATE: I've now moved to my Ubuntu Linux desktop and this is what I get:

The wonderfully helpful splash page (do they honestly expect me to continue browsing after seeing that?)



and the inner page (for some odd reason it's actually telling me that I need Silverlight now, whereas it wasn't on my Mac!)

I've used the Mackers SMS script on and off over the last couple of years, but I don't think I've ever mentioned how cool and useful it is.

I tried to get the OSX desktop widget to work, but it threw a rather annoying and unhelpful error message. Fortunately the Debian / Ubuntu version is a total breeze to install, so I was up and running again in a couple of minutes.

I'm not a very heavy texter, but I can't see the point in paying for something if I don't have to ie. I get a certain number of free texts every month, so I might as well use them!

When I was playing around with Firefox 3 several months ago one of the biggest annoyances for me was the "autocomplete".

As you type a URL Firefox suggests links from your browser history.

While that might be useful the way they've implemented it is incredibly obtrusive and, therefore, really really annoying.

As I mentioned previously I couldn't upgrade to Firefox 3 as my main browser for a number of silly reasons. Since then those issues have been resolved, so I've started using FF3 on my home desktop.

So what about the annoying auto-complete?

Well it's easy enough to disable if you know how.

Luckily somebody out there did!

Like so many Firefox settings it can be configured via the advanced configuration menu, which now comes with a health warning!

In your location (address) bar simply type "about:config" (no quotes).
The variable / setting you need to change is found under:

browser.urlbar.maxRichResults

I've set mine to "1", as I really don't need more. I can always change it later if I really want to.

Restart Firefox and finally sanity is restored!

Whoever is behind XKCD is a genius.

Today's gem is pure geek, but linux zealots will appreciate it (click to enlarge):

If you want to check which version of Ubuntu is installed on a machine run the following command:

lsb_release -a

On Debian the command is:

cat /etc/debian_version

The redhat equivalent, which would work on redhat derivatives as well, is:

cat /etc/redhat-release