Recently in Open Source 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

So I decided last night I'd upgrade my Ubuntu desktop to the latest release...

The upgrade process itself was quite painless, but the post-upgrade "cleanup" is driving me mad.

After rebooting into the new version of Ubuntu the audio had stopped working. Loading up alsamixer from the command line and playing around with it for a while eventually resolved that.. though it was pretty much a case of "hit and miss" working out which option would resolved it.

So now I have sound again...

Tracker shipped without a full set of binaries and was eating CPU (see bug report here)

What I didn't have, either, was the ability to click on links in Thunderbird. Sure, I could click on them, but nothing happened.  The resolution to that issue was to do a fresh install of Thunderbird, as I may have had an "odd" version installed (no idea how, but since it's now working I'm not going to complain too loudly!)

Evolution, which would have been an option to consider instead of Thunderbird, does not support Microsoft Exchange 2007, so that's no use to me either.

I watch video files using VLC, but that's also changed quite annoyingly, so instead of having the player controls in the same window as the video you're watching, you now end up with two windows. I spent about half an hour trying to work out if there was some sane way of changing that behaviour, but I still haven't found it.

Other annoyances ...

Every time anyone logs onto MSN or ICQ you get a disproportionately large notification on your screen.

There are probably loads of really nice features in the latest release, but I wouldn't rush to do an upgrade

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)

The online chatter today is buzzing around the announcement by Google that they are cutting back on several or their services - including Jaiku.

I've always preferred Jaiku's web interface to that of Twitter, as Jaiku supports threading - ie. you can actually follow a "conversation" without losing your mind!

Seemingly Jaiku isn't being fully shutdown, but it won't be developed any more and is going open source

Maybe this is a good thing?

If, like me, you don't use Windows, then you probably rely on Adium or Pidgin for instant messaging.

As of this morning neither Adium or Pidgin has not been able to connect to the MSN messenger servers for instant messaging.

If you're on a Mac you can install the Microsoft Messenger for Mac software or you can downgrade Adium to an older version.

The Pidgin developers are aware of the issue and are promising to release a fix, though when remains to be seen

For more in depth technical details check out the post on the Adium blog

JobberBase is an open source job board application written in php / mysql.

It's pretty powerful and is open source, so I've decided to use it for one of my many sideline projects that I promised myself to get off the ground this year.

Unfortunately there wasn't any SQL for the counties of Ireland, so I did up a simple one last night.

You can grab it here

Thanks to Paul from BlackDog for recommending the script!

If you're trying to setup a multiuser chat in Pidgin see this entry on doing it in Gaim - the process hasn't changed!

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!