Category Archives: Techy

Tehcy related posts, for the slightly geekier thoughts!

Magic pidgins

Posted on by
7

Pidgin is my instant messaging client of choice. It means my MSN, Gtalk, Yahoo, ICQ and other contacts are all in one place. Today I have taken that to the next level with three new plugins.

Skype Pidgin Plugin

I need to have skype installed and running, but now I can send / receive messages from within pidgin. On linux, this is a big deal. The skype interface sucks. It lacks spell check, among other things. Now I can even send encrypted, deniable messages through Skype with the Off The Record plugin. All my other pidgin plugins work with Skype. Fantastic. Get the plugin here. (It works for poor people on Windows also).

Facebook Chat on Pidgin

More and more people have started talking to me on Facebook chat. The interface was a little ropey, I much prefer talking to people in Pidgin. For example, when somebody sends me a message, a web site has no way of letting me know. So if Facebook is open but not on the screen (say on another tab) I miss the messages. Pidgin on the other hand is great for that. Now pidgin supports facebook chat.

Twitter via Pidgin

I haven’t actually activated this plugin yet, but I have installed it. I believe it allows you to set / get Twitter messages via Pidgin. I like that idea a lot. I really liked Twitter’s IM service (before it died). But now I’m using ping.fm (invite code vivalaping) to update all my statuses in one go. So Twitter only via IM might be a bit weird. I can post to ping.fm through IM no problems, they have a Jabber interface.

Plugin Pack

Before I forget, I recently installed the available plugins from the Ubuntu repository. I grabbed all the pidgin related plugin packs that looked good. That made a big difference. Added Extra Prefs and Off The Record Messaging which were the biggest changes I think.

Pidgin is on a new level today. :) Here’s a pretty picture for all you visual / non techy types out there.

Backup, backup, then backup some more

Posted on by
7

I’ve had a couple of backup reminders recently. John suffered a hard drive failure. Then his backup failed. It reminded me that I need to sort out a backup for my server. This server! Then I accidentally deleted my whole address book. Thankfully I was able to restore from backup quite painlessly. Thank you dear, sweet rsync.net. :)

I thought I’d take this opportunity to share the message with YOU. When did you last backup? Do you have an automated backup plan? Have you tested it? Do you know you can actually recover your data, or do you just hope? Do you keep your backup drive next to your computer? How would you be affected by fire or theft?

Backup is a little bit like insurance. It’s tempting to drive without insurance, until you have a crash that is. Then, of course, the insurance seems like a bargain. Why not decide today is a good day to check over your backup procedure? Maybe even run a little test restore just to be sure.

Here’s a picture from amanky completely unrelated to backup which appeared in a flickr search for backup all the same.

Sharing wifi connections

Posted on by
1

I’m staying at Delight Resort on Koh Pha Ngan with my brother. Ferg paid 700 baht (~$20 USD) for a week of internet. I spent some time time working out how best to share the connection. Here’s my solution.

I connect to the internet on my laptop. Then I add a second IP on my wireless card and enable IP forwarding from that IP to the internet. Other machines on the network then connect to the internet via my laptop. This relies on a couple of things. Firstly, you need to be able to run 2 IPs on the same card. Secondly, the wireless network needs to allow machines to talk to each other.

Here’s the commands to set it up.

  1. Add a second IP on the wlan0 connection with the command:
    $ sudo ifconfig wlan0:1 192.168.7.1
  2. Enable ip forwarding:
    $ echo 1 | sudo tee /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
  3. Add the iptables rule to masquerade (network address translate) traffic:
    $ sudo iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o wlan0 -s 192.168.7.0/24 -j MASQUERADE

Now connect the other machines to the network, then change their IPs to 192.167.7.2-255, their default gateway to 192.168.7.1. Leave the DNS server as the one supplied by the wifi access point, or if you have dnsmasq (or another dns server installed) set it to 192.168.7.1.

The first command `ipconfig wlan0:1 192.168.7.1` adds a new virtual ethernet device called wlan0:1 and sets the IP of that device to 192.168.7.1. This means you now have two IPs on the same NIC.

The second command enables ip forwarding in the kernel.

The third command adds the iptables magic. The command `iptables`. Modify the routing table called nat `-t nat`. Append a rule to the POSTROUTING chain `-A POSTROUTING`. On the wlan0 interface `-o wlan0`. Iptables doesn’t recognise virtual devices, so it’s not possible to specify `-o wlan0:1` here. Instead, we specify the source IP range `-s 192.168.7.0/24`. Then tell the rule to masquerade the IPs `-j MASQERADE`.

Somebody might find this useful. It took me a while to figure out. I was firstly using my wireless router as a second wireless card on my machine and sharing the connection that way. This seems much simpler.

For my non-technical readers, here’s a picture of me geeking out by the pool.

Geeking out on Koh Pha Ngan by the pool

Mobile broadband is go!

Posted on by
Reply

Huawei E220I bought a Huawei E220 last week. It took a week or so to arrive. Then I wanted to get myself a 3 mobile broadband account. That turned out to be a pain in the ass. You need to sign a contract, so you have to go through a credit check. As I don’t have any paperwork in Aus, Ross kindly agreed to sign the contract. Alas, having only been in the country a few months, he failed the credit check. After some initial skepticism, Toppo kindly agreed to sign on the dotted line. Bravo!

So, today, this post comes to you via mobile broadband.

There were some initial glitches though. It took some serious farting around. I tried installing vodafone’s linux software, that didn’t work. It could see the modem most of the time, but it wouldn’t connect. Not sure why, some weird wvdial errors. Yet wvdial on it’s own would work fine.

Then I tried umtsmon. It worked ok. But it’s an ugly little application and it wouldn’t disappear into my system tray. Plus, NetworkManager thought there was no connection, so all my programs thought they were offline. Pain in the ass.

Finally, I upgraded NetworkManager to 0.7. Then bingo, it works like a charm.

I want to keep an eye on bandwidth consumption, so I’m using the Net Monitor screenlet. It’s not quite perfect as it tracks usage by calendar month. But it’ll do as a start.

Ubuntu

Top marks to Ubuntu. You plug in the modem and it “just works”. No farting around switching modes or any of that nonsense. In fact, if you know the init strings, you can just dial and go. Once NetworkManager 0.7 goes final and makes it into Ubuntu, mobile broadband will be a cinch.

Username as password salt

Posted on by
9

Is there any reason why one should not use the username as the password salt? Storing md5( username . password ) instead of md5( password ) in the password column.

It seems like a very simple idea, so I’m sure there’s a good reason why it’s not in popular use. Hopefully somebody can tell me that reason! :)

First impressions of the Nokia N810

Posted on by
Reply

I spent 4 long hours on public transport today. I was eager to collect my new Nokia N810 as soon as possible. I twittered some first impressions. It’s a lovely device. Very tactile. It feels very solid. I was initially skeptical about the keyboard, but once I booted the device and started using, it’s great. So far I’m very impressed.

Unfortunately, the 5 way navigator button is faulty. The left side of the button doesn’t work, and the right side is super sensetive. So I can scroll right but not left. Bummer. It’ll have to go back to Nokia to be fixed. So much for getting my new machine in a hurry! A good opportunity to practice patience. Plus, it gives me some time to experiment. Once it’s fixed I’ll wipe all the settings and start fresh.

For all you picture lovers, here’s a shot of Mahjong:

Playing Mahjong on the Nokia N810

Considering a Nokia N810

Posted on by
5

Nokia N810 Internet Tablet picture from WikipediaI’m thinking about buying a Nokia N810.

  • Email, web out and about
  • Music, movies, books, on the go
  • Skype / SIP calls
  • Instant Messaging, IRC
  • Meeting notes instead of a laptop
  • Instead of a laptop for short trips

Anyone have any feedback? Have you got one? Does it work well? Is the keyboard easy to use? Does the GPS system work well? Do you have to buy the maps? Can they be torrented? :)

Media Template – outrageous bandwidth charges

Posted on by
8

Cog clock - taken by balakov on flickrI’m pissed.

Happy Cogs recently did some work on the admin upgrade for WordPress 2.5. Through them, I found the hosting company Media Template. The pitch was appealing. They seemed professional, personal, all the things you’d want from a hosting company. That is, until I started digging.

One of their virtual server products costs $150 per month, and includes 2Tb of bandwidth. Excess bandwidth is charged, per Gb, at $2.56. Or, if you pre-purchase 1Tb, at half that price, $1.28 per Gb. That means that your first 2Tb cost $150, while your next 1Tb would cost $1’310.72, or 17.5 times more than your first 2Tb (1’748% to be precise).

Astounded by this absurdity I contacted their sales team. I was expecting the response to be in line with their website. Intelligent, considered, rational. I was sadly disappointed. It felt like the typical, corporate, monkey follow order, response you’d expect from Hewlett Packard or some other Indian outsourced outfit.

Not content to let matters lie, I have started a campaign. I have described my outrage at GetSatisfaction. Then I posted it to digg. Now I’m posting it here. Then I’m going to email all the links to the CEO and see what happens. Maybe, just maybe, I’ll get an intelligent response. Otherwise, I’ll publicise the fact that their ticket system allows you to view the email addresses of people who contact them.

Follow the Mars landing on twitter

Posted on by
Reply

You can follow the mars landing on Twitter. Ain’t that awesome? :)

Twitter really has become ubiquitous technology. Everyone’s on it. If only they could come out with a revenue model, make some money, hire some more brains, and sort out their reliability issues. On a plus note, they’re recently blogging about failures or outages, which is nice.

Goodbye svn hello bazaar

Posted on by
2

Star cookies by the Frankfurt SchoolI’ve spent a lot of this week fighting with svn. Things that should have been simple, somehow kept failing. I was merging changes from a read-only http repo into a local working copy, which is checked out from an https repo. For some reason, that doesn’t work. Normally it does, but on this large merge, it just borked.

Thankfully the remote repo is also available over https. That solved the first problem. I merged, tidied up, and was ready to commit. Then the commit failed because svn was trying to do something fancy with the merge-from repo. I don’t know what or why, but it wouldn’t commit the files. So then I spent hours and hours trying various things. In the end I reverted all the newly created files, then added them back to the working copy, and finally it would commit.

What a pain in the ass.

I’m planning to explore bazaar for all my own version control needs, and if it works well, I’ll switch all our projects over. I’m hoping, like Ubuntu, it just works. :)

Ubuntu is go

Posted on by
5

I have installed Ubuntu. It all seems to be running quite smoothly. VMWare is working, which is nice. I had some initial sound issues with Skype but it looks like it was a volume issue, sorted now. Waiting for Zend studio to download, hopefully that will be an easy install.

Overall, the process was rather painless. I’m loving synaptic package management. It really is much better than RPM. The desktop effects are taking a bit of getting used to. I can’t drag / drop windows onto the workspaces, but that’s not too big a deal.

So far, I’m pleased with the switch. For all you visual people, here’s a wee screenshot of the workspace switcher.

The desktop switcher on Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy

Some things that impressed me:

  • Media buttons “just work”, I can play / pause / forward / etc music, beautiful.
  • Installing copyright “questionable” plugins (MP3s, divx, etc) was painless and granny easy.
  • The windows key does stuff, out of the box, not very useful stuff, but still stuff!
  • I could import my pidgin, Evolution and something else data from Fedora. Nice.
  • Desktop effects are enabled out of the box (compiz for the techies).
  • Stuff prompts for configuration during install, for example ddclient. Handy.

I’m pleased I’ve switched over to Ubuntu. I’m a little wary that the #ubuntu channel is quite busy. Ubuntu seems to be popular with new linux users so there seem to be a lot of “newby” questions on there. Good they’re being answered, but it can be a pain for more experienced users.

Early adventures with Ubuntu

Posted on by
4

I’ve been thinking about switching from Fedora to Ubuntu. I downloaded the latest Ubuntu version a few weeks ago. Today I took the plunge and booted it up.

First thing I noticed, no wireless networks. It detected my card and it seemed to work, but no networks were listed by NetworkManager. I unplugged the power and went through to the living room to plug in with a good old fashioned ethernet cable. Fairly quickly I found a solution. So back to my desk on wireless.

Appearance

At first glance, Ubuntu is just not as pretty as Fedora. The graphics seemed a bit too Windows 3.1 for me. I switched to one of the other included themes. It was a bit better. I think I’d have to hunt around for a nicer Ubuntu theme. Personally, I think this is a big failure for Ubuntu. In aiming to bring free software to everyone, appearance matters.

For a Windows user, comparing Windows Vista with Ubuntu 8.04, I think Vista wins on appearance. For many users, that’s an important factor. Personally, it’s not a deal breaker, but I will do something about it.

Installing software

The package manager in Ubuntu is streets ahead of Fedora. Straight away it just works. It feels nice and clean. It tells you the expected download time until all your packages have downloaded. It strikes a great balance between the fine grained control I get with yumex and the simple interface of the default Fedora package manager. Thumbs up for Ubuntu.

Proprietary formats

Playing MP3 files, avi files, or any other non-free format is a little tricky on Linux. You need to install software which can be “questionable” in terms of it’s copyright position. Fedora gets round this problem by not shipping any of that software. Instead you grab that stuff from livna. However, livna is not installed by default. You have to manually add it yourself.

In Ubuntu, I tried to play an MP3 file. It asked if I’d like to search for the codecs. Then it warned me that I was installing software from the Ubuntu community. A minute or so later, the song started playing. Whatever magic happens behind the scenes in Ubuntu happens automatically. A big plus for Ubuntu, particularly for new users.

Installation

By default, Ubuntu boots in Live CD mode. So no changes are made to your hard drive. It’s a great option for new users. You can test the operating system. Check all your hardware works. Then choose to install if you want to. It was at this point that Ubuntu crashed. I’m not sure what went wrong. I could move the mouse, and the clock was ticking, but nothing else. I tried a ctrl-alt-backspace to restart X, no luck.

Ironically, I was proceeding with the install when it crashed. Now I’ve booted back to Fedora. I’m still swaying on whether to try Fedora 9 or not. If I do go with Fedora 9, I almost certainly won’t switch to Ubuntu. In Ubuntu’s favour, I already have the CD. I’ll have to go to the local library to download Fedora 9. That might end up being the deciding factor! :)

Conclusion

I recommend Ubuntu to anyone interested in trying Linux. I think they work really hard to make it easy to use, and largely succeed. Personally, being fairly experienced with Linux, I don’t think there will be much difference. Package managing is better in Ubuntu. TrueCrypt ships .debs and not .rpms, so that’s a bonus. I’m just not sure if it will be worth the effort of switching.

For new users, Ubuntu is great. Personally, time will tell.

I submitted a patch to Zen Cart

Posted on by
Reply

My brother has been having some trouble with his ZenCart powered store. Customers couldn’t check out using PayPal’s Website Payments Pro, or something like that. Anyway, today, he finally convinced me to look into the problem. So I dug into the code. Wow. Zen Cart is not a developer’s dream.

It took me forever to get my head around it. Eventually, I tracked down where the issue was coming from, and between Ferg and I, we solved it. I’m pretty confident we found the underlying cause of the problem. So I whipped up a patch and headed off to submit it. Again, Zen Cart is not very developer friendly. I had to file a bug report in this forum and then attach my patch.

I think there’s a huge market for an open-source ecommerce platform. Something with the power and flexibility of Zen Cart but simpler to use, install and manage.

Excess bandwidth charges in Australia

Posted on by
Reply

What is bandwidth?

A quick explanation for non-techies. Think of an internet connection like a water pipe. You can choose what size of pipe to order. The bigger the pipe, the higher the water pressure. Internet is the same. But as well as the speed / size of your pipe, you also have to think about your total usage. So how many litres of water you pull through the pipe. In internet terms, that’s bandwidth usage.

Typically, in the UK / Europe / US / Canada, you choose your size of pipe, and that’s it. You can run the water almost as much as you like. If you leave all your taps on all the time, the company will complain. But otherwise, you’ll be fine. Not so in Australia. All connections charge you per litre, or in internet terms, per gigabyte. It’s the same in South Africa.

It’s not such a bad deal. The more water (or bandwidth) you use, the more you pay. Seems fair enough.

Australia

You choose your quantity up front. So you might pay for 2Gb or 4Gb or even 40Gb. The pain comes if you should go over your pre-ordered usage. Your pre-ordered bandwidth will cost you anywhere from $2.50 to $10 per Gb depending on how much you buy. Once you go over that, the excess charges are typically described as “15c per Mb”. That’s $150 per Gb.

Your first 6Gb cost $10 each, then use one more by mistake, oops, here’s a bill for $150. Arrrgggghhhhhh.

In South Africa when you run out, your connection shuts off. Then you can call your company and pay for some more. At a little over the regular price. In Australia excess bandwidth costs 15 to 60 times more than standard bandwidth. If I were an Australian citizen I’d campaign to have this type of excess charging banned.

WP Mail SMTP v0.7

Posted on by

I released version 0.7 of the WP Mail SMTP plugin a couple of days ago. To make support a little more manageable I’m going to switch the comments from the plugin page to a post for each version. So please ask in the comments here for all support questions related to version 0.7. If you’re using a previous version, please upgrade and then post your questions here! :)

Please be sure to look back at previous questions before posting here. If you’re having a problem where mails are not being sent, or anything of that nature, please post your debugging output. Send a test mail, then copy / paste the response into the comments. Remember to delete any passwords. I’d recommend you replace any @ symbols with something else (at), [at], #at#, etc.

WP Mail SMTP v0.6 released

Posted on by
Reply

Just released a new version of the WP Mail SMTP plugin. There were a stream of similar questions about one particular error message over the last few months. Hopefully this new version will provide more detailed debugging output. I’d recommend upgrading to anyone having problems. There are no bugfixes or security fixes in this update, so it’s not a priority release.

Update: I’ve released version 0.7 today as well. This version fixes a long-standing bug where the plugin would overwrite the from name and email, even if they had been set by another plugin (or WordPress itself). I recommend everyone update to 0.7 as soon as possible.

Installed a sitemap

Posted on by
3

I’m on a mission to take the top spot when searching for “Callum”. I’m currently number 2 on Scroogle and number 21 on Yahoo. In my continuing efforts for worldwide Callum domination, I’ve installed the XML Sitemap Plugin. Hopefully this will help these search engines to realise the error of their ways and promote me to my rightful position as number 1!

Pidgin character count plugin on Fedora

Posted on by
3

If you’re a pidgin and Twitter user like myself, it’s hard to keep your tweets under 140 characters. Dossy created a character count plugin for this very purpose.

To install on Fedora (and possibly others) simply grab the .deb file Dossy kindly published here. Open the .deb in archive manager. Open the contained data.tar.gz file. Then drop the contained “convcharcount.la” and “convcharcount.so” files into your /usr/lib/pidgin/ directory. You’ll need to do this as root.

Now open Pidgin (restart is not required), Tools > Plugins, and tick the conv. input character count plugin. Bingo, it works like a charm for me on Fedora 8 with Pidgin 2.4.1. Thanks Dossy. :)

IE and CheckBoxElement

Posted on by
2

If you name a class anythingCheckBoxElement it will cause wonkiness in IE. Very frustrating. Took me almost 6 weeks to figure this out.

The behaviour I experienced was that a div wouldn’t move properly when other divs around it were moved. Changing the class name of a child table row to filterCheckBoxElement2 resolved the problem. It would seem that CheckBoxElement is a reserved word and may not appear at the start or end of any names. Weird.

Naturally, the vastly superior Firefox has no such limitation! :)

Twitter is borked

Posted on by
1

It’s taken a while for me to notice, but I don’t get any messages from Twitter any more. I no longer receive SMS notifications, or IM notifications, or anything else for that matter. I just don’t get updates. I’ll probably have to start reading twitter via RSS. Bah.

Apparently this is old news.

I wonder how it will affect Twitter’s business. They’re so popular the system can’t cope. Yet they still haven’t shown a clear revenue model. Who’s crazy enough to be paying for the whole thing? It all sounds very .com bubble to me.