Darren Patterson

I've been working on a Facebook plugin for the Regrettable Music Blog and discovered that Magpie RSS needs a bit of prodding to cooperating with the output from our WordPress feed. I've seen lots of questions asked on forums about "how to fix the question marks that show up" instead of single quotes, hyphens, etc. I found that setting the encoding worked to fix that issue:

define('MAGPIE_INPUT_ENCODING', 'UTF-8');

define('MAGPIE_OUTPUT_ENCODING', 'UTF-8');

Our ancient Panasonic 900Mhz phone + answering machine suddenly stopped recording incoming messages. It would play our recorded message, but then it would play a loud tone for 3 seconds and disconnect (instead of recording).

After trying a bunch of stuff, I finally got it to work again by unplugging it for 30 seconds, plugging it in, pressing erase twice to erase all messages (even though there were no messages on the machine), then pressing the "answer on" button twice (to turn off answering, then turn it on again). I'm not sure if all the steps were needed, but that's what made it work for me.

I had a few moments this morning before 'Khi woke up so I wrote up a quick plugin for Serendipity to insert a generated Shelfari shelf. Click here to download the Shelfari Shelf Serendipity Plugin.

I use a modified nautilus script to resize and attach images to mozilla thunderbird email (Attach_to_Thundrebird_Email, circa 2005, by Eddy - ed42 at free dot fr).

When I upgraded to Ubuntu Gutsy, the script stopped working because mozilla-xremote-client disappeared. After searching a bit, I found it in the "xulrunner" package.

I adjusted the last few lines of the script (starting around line #122) to use the renamed thunderbird and new location for mozilla-xremote-client and everything is happy again.

# Test if Thunderbird is running to make properly the attachment.

MOZ_ON=`ps -ec | grep -c thunderbird`

if [ $MOZ_ON != 0 ]; then



  /usr/lib/xulrunner/mozilla-xremote-client -a thunderbird "xfeDoCommand(composeMessage,attachment=$ATTACHMENT)"



else

  thunderbird -compose "attachment=$ATTACHMENT"

fi

I was fiddling around with mrepo today and discovered it can work just fine with RHEL5, but the gensystemid utility needed a tiny fix to work with RHEL5.
Below is the diff from the little change I made to make it work with RHEL5 + RHN. Copy this text into a new file named gensystemid.diff and run:
patch < gensystemid.diff

After applying the patch, you can use this to get a new systemid:
gensystemid -r 5Server -a /var/www/mrepo
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

--- /usr/bin/gensystemid.new    2007-03-20 16:28:55.000000000 -0700

+++ /usr/bin/gensystemid        2007-03-20 13:24:29.000000000 -0700

@@ -12,6 +12,7 @@



 def checkrelease(release, arch):

        releases = {

+               '5Server':  ('i386', 'x86_64'),

                '4AS': ('i386', 'ia64', 'ppc', 's390', 's390x', 'x86_64'),

                '4ES': ('i386', 'ia64', 'x86_64'),

                '4WS': ('i386', 'ia64', 'x86_64'),

Update
For RHEL 5 Desktop, use '5Client' for the release name, not Desktop.

I just got a Treo Bluetooth Headset for my Treo 650. I ran into some issues shortly after pairing it with my 650. I decided I would try it out on my MacBook Pro as well. That broke the pairing to my 650, and I couldn't get the device to show up to setup the pairing again.

After fiddling with it for like 20 min, I figured out that if you hold the multi-function button (blue flashing light button) for roughly 30 seconds, the headset complety resets and it will be come discoverable and pairable again.

It would really have been nice if this was documented somewhere...

It seems that in RHEL4 there are issues trying to send attachments from OpenOffice.org. The /usr/bin/thunderbird script won't take/pass the correct options directly to Thunderbird. It would open a new email message, but the TO: field would have something like "attachment://tmp/...".

After looking around a bit, I realized that if you set the email application (in OO options) to the /usr/lib/thunderbird-/thunderbird binary (where is the thunderbird version installed), it passed the correct options directly. I did have to try two or three of the provided email program config options - I think I used Mozilla mail option #2 for my Thunderbird 1.5.0-8 to get it working in the end.

A rather annoying problem that I'm quite glad is fixed now...

I use a Treo 650 for work related stuff and occasionally I like to use TuSSH to connect to my workstation while on the road. The problem is that TuSSH 0.82 would halve the terminal size after a few commands, and version 0.83 would freeze my Treo 650 when I disconnected so I would have to perform a soft reset. (As a note, TuSSH is great. I highly recommend it!)

On a recent train trip (that was delayed substantially), I spent some time fiddling with it. After trying several combinations of settings, I found one that prevented the lock-up.

Under the Options menu, the only value is set is Protocol -> SSH2. All other values are unchecked. Make sure "Enable Copy" is unchecked as well as "Long Timeout" and "Drop On Disconnect".
Select OK (to save settings) and exit TuSSH.
Re-open TuSSH and verify that all your settings were saved as they should have been.
Try to connect to a server.

If you experience a freeze when trying to exit TuSSH again, go to the Server List and create a new entry to use.
If you still experience a freeze when trying to exit TuSSH again, go to Terminal Settings and make sure your terminal is set to VT100, try setting the font size to "small" and sound to "quiet".

Posted from the train using my Treo 650 GPRS + Bluetooth shared network + MacBook Pro

Shelfari - For those bibliophiles out there, there is now a great social networking site to assist you in sharing your books. You can easily share your bookshelf with friends, review and recommend books, as well as contribute to discussions. The interface makes it easy to add books and friends as well as express your opinions on your favorite (or least favorite) books.

Personally, I think this is a great idea tnat will really take off. I really enjoy discussing books and sharing opinions and reviews of books.

Check out Shelfari.com and sign up for an account. You can find a link from Digg.com (I digg it!).
http://www.digg.com/tech_news/Shelfari_like_YouTube_for_Books

This morning I came into work and found my workstation was misbehaving. After fiddling a little, AFS gave a nice kernel panic and I had to hard power cycle the system. On reboot, vmware did not start like it should have. When I connected with the vmware console and tried to start the guests I got the informative and helpful error, "Unable to change virtual machine power state. The process exited with an error: End of error message."

After googling and finding nothing, I remembered how the earlier beta had deleted /dev/vmnet* and /dev/vmmon sometimes. I went back to look for these files and found them missing. Another quick google turned up how to add them with a loop. I added the below to my /etc/init.d/vmware script just above the "start" case:

# fix for devices disappearing!?

for a in `seq 0 9`; do

 mknod /dev/vmnet$a c 119 $a > /dev/null 2>&1

done

mknod /dev/vmmon c 10 165 > /dev/null 2>&1

Update:
Another reason for this error is incorrect permissions on the VM guest files and/or folders. EG: make sure they are owned by root.

While I was at it, I disabled the debug code which is suposed to speed up the free vmware server:

su

service vmware stop

cd /usr/lib/vmware

mv bin-debug bin-debug.bak

ln -s bin bin-debug

service vmware start

I tested out using the GSM network from my Treo 650 on my Mac Book Pro (OS 10.4) shared via bluetooth while driving today. I was able to keep my network connection for ~20 minutes between San Mateo and the first 1/4 mile on the University Ave exit in Palo Alto. I wasn't getting blazing speeds (6-8Kbps), but it kept the connection so my email would check and my IM client stayed online. My cell calls sometimes drop in that particular area as well, so I'm not surprised I lost the data connection

I'm happy that it kept the connection for that long. I'm going to be driving to San Diego, then to Tucson, AZ next week. I'll see if I can use it to get some work done along the drive.

Instructions for setting this up can be found here: http://captnswing.net/howto/treodun/ It took me quite a few tries to get OS X to use the Treo dial-up networking, but it eventually worked after I fiddled with it for about 20 min.

I've been playing with the free VMware (beta) server lately and was annoyed to find that the installation RPM didn't handle any package dependencies. Especially under 64-bit this was a frustration. The below works with VMware-server-1.0.0-24927.i386.rpm.

Under RHEL/CentOS v.3/v.4 32-bit the package/package-group requirements are:
gcc
"@X Window System"

Under RHEL/CentOS v.4 64-bit the package/package-group requirements are:
gcc
(i386) xorg-x11-libs xorg-x11-Mesa-libGL fontconfig zlib freetype expat
(x86_64) chkfontpath xorg-x11-xfs ttmkfdir xorg-x11-font-utils xorg-x11-libs xorg-x11-Mesa-libGL
"@X Window System"

I don't know what the correct yum syntax is, but with up2date:
up2date --arch=i386 xorg-x11-libs xorg-x11-Mesa-libGL fontconfig zlib freetype expat
up2date chkfontpath xorg-x11-xfs ttmkfdir xorg-x11-font-utils xorg-x11-libs xorg-x11-Mesa-libGL gcc
up2date "@X Window System"

I thoroughly enjoy food. In fact, I've made it a point to find good food wherever I go. Whenever I travel, I look for the more interesting restaurants to sample from.

In Half Moon Bay, I can highly recommend these places for decent food without breaking your pocket book:
3 Amigos (Tres) - Lunch or Dinner
Fajita Burrito, Fajitas, Shrimp (camarones) Burrito, etc

San Benito House - Lunch
The best ever sandwiches. They make their own bread and roast their own meats.

Siam Restaurant - Lunch or Dinner
Curry, Pineapple Fried Rice

Cameron's Restaurant and Inn - Lunch or Dinner
The best burger on the coast!

It's Italia Pizzeria Restaurant - Lunch or Dinner (slightly more pricey)
The Links (pizza), Montara Mountain (pizza, also OK without cheese), Spanish Town (pizza, also OK without cheese)

Spanish Town (mexican) - Lunch or Dinner
General Mexican fare. Usually a little more expensive.

I've been disappointed with Bankok House (lunch/dinner) because of their small portions and high prices.
Happy Taco (lunc/dinner) is a partial recommendation for mexican fare.
Half Moon Bay Coffee Co. (breakfast/lunch/dinner) has been hit and miss in my experience. I've been there sometimes when the food and deserts are great, but I've also had the food and deserts when they have been bad. Breakfasts are usually good.

If you're willing to drive to Pacifica, I can recommend Tam's (lunch/dinner - usually very good chow fun).
In Millbrae, Thai Stick (lunch/dinner) has decent food but usually very slow service.
El Super Burrito in Millbrae is also acceptable if you stay away from the "regular burrito" and don't want your food quickly.

So my old server died. Really. I've moved to a new host and I'm sorting out the issues related to changing hosts after 5+ years. It is a beautiful thing when a dual pII 266 with 1GB of RAM can perform as well as it did for so many years. It finally came down to my curse of bad hard drives. I've killed more drives than anyone I know. The box was very well ventilated and the disks never overheated, I was just one for getting drives that would fail every 9 months.

I'm updating the blog software and trying to recover as much stuff off my old system as possible. I'll hopefully get my old blog db back and import it into the new software.