Category: computing

General computing topics covering everything I deal with or am interested in.

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this week (wk 5)

work

  • CRM
  • System: 
  • Products/Quotes system
  • Update profiles
  • Sales
    • 1-2-1s with visdes’s
    • Tie down opps
  • Systems:
    • Update shared accounts to new limits
    • MTA switch
    • Check and update VS disk space
  • PHP 
    • Admin panel tasks
    • build
    • test
    • release
  • Checkout testing
  • [recurring] Organise
    • networking group training 
    • arrange visitors
    • sales leads / prospects / meetings for next week  

    life

    • Kung Fu
    • Salsa
    • Swim

    misc

    • Beer with fellow geek

    last week (wk 4)

    work

    • PHP admin panel tasks
    • scope
    • create / implement
    • test
    • release
  • [recurring] organise
    • networking group training 
    • arrange visitors
    • sales leads / prospects / meetings for next week
  • the ongoing resolution of remaining issues on ccart 0.1 🙂
  • configure router
  • VS sales
  • outline test plan for ccart 0.2

    • life

    • shop for new trainers

    misc

    • complete migration of personal email
    • decide which tech books to get 🙂

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    this week (wk 4)

    work

    • PHP admin panel tasks
    • scope
    • create / implement
    • test
    • release
  • [recurring] organise
    • networking group training 
    • arrange visitors
    • sales leads / prospects / meetings for next week
  • the ongoing resolution of remaining issues on ccart 0.1 🙂
  • configure router
  • VS sales
  • outline test plan for ccart 0.2

    • life

    • shop for new trainers

    misc

    • complete migration of personal email
    • decide which tech books to get 🙂

    last week (wk 3)

    work

    • organise
    • networking group training
    • sales leads / prospects / meetings etc.
  • financial year end
    • archive digital & hard copies
    • start new file
  • configure Cisco router
  • implement PHPUnit / Zend Framework unit testing
  • the ongoing resolution of remaining issues on ccart 🙂

    • life

    • organise
    • documents
    • photos
  • reading plan

    • misc

    • complete migration of personal email (50% complete)

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    Linux User & Developer magazine
    – a good read while having your car MOT’d

    I was delighted to take my car to Swiftest in Aldershot this morning, for one simple reason (see pic – and no, it wasn’t because of the coffee, although that helps!)

    Female Friendly policy:
    A Good ThingTM

    In fact, there are two good reasons to use Swiftest in Aldershot.  Three, actually.

    First, the aforementioned reading material.

    Second, the professional, helpful and polite staff (Rob, James & co).

    Lastly, it has to be the “Female Friendly” policy.  I was there first thing (7:30am) for my car to be MOT’d, and the only other two customers to come in at this early hour were both female.  I’d say that was testimony enough.

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    /lib/ld-linux.so.2 missing? libXext.so.6 can’t be found?

    I recently [at the original time of writing] installed Fedora 11 [x86_64] on a test machine, to see how the development desktop build of my favourite Linux distribution is doing – and it’s very nice indeed.

    I tried to install Zend Studio 5.5 and soon came across problems, which I found out related to not having 32-bit versions of Xorg and glibc installed. To remedy this, ensure you follow these steps:

    su -c 'yum groupinstall Java'
    su -c 'yum install glibc.i686 libXext.i586'

    Once installed, I was able to fire up the Zend Development Environment:

    /usr/local/Zend/ZendStudio-5.5.1/bin/ZDE

    .. and it was running on the native (OpenJDK) 64-bit JAVA runtime! How’s that for progress!

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    I confess: this is a problem without an obvious solution.

    As a server administrator managing tens, possibly hundreds, of domains via Parallels’ Plesk control panel system, you may be forgiven for getting frustrated, from time to time.  It happens.

    While Plesk is a big time-saver for many tasks, there are occasional quirks which only help to irritate.  One of these being SSL certificates.

    Security warning in Chromium

    The Plesk control panel comes with a standard SSL certificate which is used to encrypt all HTTPS connections to/from the server by default.  Most server administrators will probably want to replace this with a certificate that correctly identifies their specific server.

    The usual route, through Plesk 9.5.x would be to log in, click Settings, click SSL Certificates, and then create / delete certificates accordingly until you have a new default server certificate.  The final step would be to tick the checkbox next to the new default certificate and click “Secure Control Panel”.

    This gives you the impression that the new certificate is now used by the control panel.  It isn’t.

    So, the next morning, you’ll probably receive one of these by email:

    ################# SSL Certificate Warning ################

     Certificate for hostname 'plesk', in file:
        /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.pem

     The certificate needs to be renewed; this can be done
     using the 'genkey' program.

     Browsers will not be able to correctly connect to this
     web site using SSL until the certificate is renewed.

     ##########################################################
                                     Generated by certwatch(1)
    "Hmm", you think, "this should have been updated when I 'Secured the Control Panel'".  Yes, it should.  So, the next logical step would be to edit httpd.pem and replace the Key and Certificate values of this file with those displayed through Plesk's SSL Certificates section.  Then simply restart the web server.  Ha ha! Fail!  Browsing to the control panel still results in the security warning. What gives?!! 
     
    After you have restarted the web server many times, both via the operating system's /etc/init.d method and via /usr/local/psa/admin/bin/websrvmng, you conclude that, actually, this is also not the certificate that requires updating.  So, which certificate file stored on the system is the one being served by Plesk?

    Good question.  While you're searching for an answer, try checking/editing /usr/local/psa/admin/conf/httpsd.pem  and  /usr/local/psa/etc/httpsd.pem.  Nope?

    Oh well, how about just resorting to a reboot and taking down everyone's services for a moment? ... Not ideal, but it works.  But this is not the right way!!!  :-(
     
    ********* UPDATE 23/11/2011 ***********
     
    I have stumbled upon the right way to do this.  In a shell: 
    cd /usr/local/psa/etc/
    mv httpsd.pem httpsd.pem.old
    cp /usr/local/psa/admin/conf/httpsd.pem .
    service psa restart
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    I remember once watching a documentary on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s bodybuilding career (or was it this one?) in the ’70s and early ’80s.
    All of the bodybuilders in that golden era had their own training programme managers and promoters.  I recall that one manager/promoter, working for another bodybuilder, loved his own quotes.
    These quotes would range from the urbane, “the pen is mightier than the muscle”, to somewhat more characteristically humorous: “remember the golden rule: he who has the gold, makes the rules“.
    Well, in the completely unrelated world of PHP programming, this perl of wisdom (sic joke) is worth hanging on to.  Why?  Well, if you have ever used PHP’s variable variables, knowledge of the correct syntax is worth its weight in gold.  It’ll save hours, if not days, of debugging.
     So, anyway, I’ve been coding a calendar system for a valued client for the past ten days or so.  My first attempt I pretty much scrapped as it got too complex and almost impossible to debug.  The second version is much better, except for one issue which has been giving me grief until now.
    Variable variables in PHP are extremely useful, but I throw in a word of caution immediately: use them sparingly.  It can be easy to quickly lose track of what’s called what and why it’s there.  Especially if any single script is 400+ lines long.
    To set a variable variable, it’s easier to start off giving a value to an ordinary variable:
    $myVar = "myVarVar";
    Now, I want to create a variable variable with the name $myVarVar, so this is how it’s done:

     $$myVar = "this is my variable variable";
    To see the contents of the variable variable, you can do either of the following:

     echo $$myVar;     // or
     echo $myVarVar; 
    Both will output “this is my variable variable” to the screen/page.
    Snooker Loopy
     Things start getting interesting when you introduce arrays and loops. Take the following example:

     for($i=0; $i<4; $i++) {
     $myVar = "myVarVar".$i;
     $$myVar = "  Variable variable £".$i;
     }
     creates and produces:
     
     echo $myVarVar0; // "Variable variable #0"
     echo $myVarVar1; // "Variable variable #1"
     echo $myVarVar2; // "Variable variable #2"
     echo $myVarVar3; // "Variable variable #3"
     
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    (to view all photos in this article, visit my flickr photoset) 
    I’ve been needing a netbook for work for a little while.  So, chancing upon Martin Lewis‘s wonderful MoneySavingExpert web site, this article on cheaper netbooks was the prompt I needed.
    My main criteria for a netbook were:
       
    • Battery life as long as possible.
      •  
    • With my large hands, it must be as ergonomic and accommodating as possible.
      •  
    • Preferably without Windows.  What’s the point of paying for something I won’t use? 
      •  
    • Linux must work well on it.
      •  
    • As light & small as possible. 
    Given that nearly all early (pre dual core) netbooks are based on Intel’s Atom / 945 mobile chipset, most of the above criteria were already met.  Ergonomically, I’d read that each netbook had its foibles, so this point was moot.  The battery life was, for me, the deciding factor, which is why I chose a Samsung N130: the only model in the discounted range which ships with a 6-cell battery.  In ideal circumstances, this will last 6 hours.


    Order process, shipping, packing and unpacking
    The Argos outlet on eBay accepted only PayPal payments, but this didn’t matter to me.  The purchase process was as painless as you could expect.  I ordered the unit on a Friday morning.  On a Monday morning, at my office, it arrived courtesy of a cheery DHL delivery chap.  No complaints so far!
    The packing itself was as you’d expect: satisfactory for the job, with nothing much else to note.  Unboxing the unit was a quick affair, and before long I had a shiny netbook on my desk.  Considering this unit is classed as “refurbished”, I could see absolutely no defect or mark on it whatsoever.  I would have been very happy were this brand new.
    Plugging in, powering on, first impressions
    When unpacking the device, I was impressed with the general feel of it.  The plastic shell feels robust and the lid action is smooth.  Instead of a clasp, the lid clamps to the base by means (I’m guessing) of a magnet arrangement, which has a lovely feel about it.  Furthermore, Fedora behaves as expected, going straight into standby when the lid is closed.
    The weight of the unit was good too.  Before I put the battery in, that is.  After that, the weight felt subjectively like it had more than doubled, which would put some people off I’d imagine. However, it’s hardly as heavy as my laptop so by my standards it’s still very light.  A positive effect of the battery unit is in providing more stability while on a desk, and more resistance to the motion of closing/opening the lid.  All together, it works well.
    Along the front, left of the touchpad, are 5 LEDs.  I question the value of having an “on” LED in addition to a “charging” LED, but these are tiny devices so power consumption is likely to be equally tiny.  Besides, if unplugged, the charging LED isn’t illuminated. Again, another moot point.
    The feel of the keyboard is good. There isn’t a compromise in terms of key press action, although to fit in a full QWERTY keyboard, some compromises in layout have had to take place. As you can see, the hash (#)/tilde and right square-bracket/brace keys are squashed in, but the compromise is acceptable.
    Fedora installation and general usage
    I use Fedora, CentOS and Red Hat in my day job, so for me it’s the architecture that I prefer due to familiarity (which, in this case, has not yet bred contempt!).
    Using the usblive-creator tool in F13 on my laptop, I was able to set up a USB drive with a Fedora 12 live CD image, ready to boot and install on the netbook.  I’d opted for F12 because I’ve had issues with mobile broadband on F13 that worked fine on F12, and mobility is the primary goal here.  A quick change to the boot order in the BIOS and it was good to go.

    I was surprised how quickly the installation completed.  After having read about Atoms generally being slow processors, I’d expected an unhealthy dose of lethargy when installing the OS.  The first boot wasn’t particularly tardy either (and this is running on a 160GB Toshiba hard drive with Fedora’s default encrypted LVM set up).  It’s comparable to my HP laptop (2007 model) with a Turion TL-60 (@2GHz) w/4GiB RAM (@667MHz).  In usage, though, it’s somewhat slower than the AMD laptop, taking considerably longer to load up Firefox (with half as many extensions, too).
    As hoped, my Huawei E270 mobile broadband dongle worked straight away.  I was also pleased that the webcam worked with no effort whatsoever (screenshot shows Cheese; ’nuff said)! So, what doesn’t work straight away?
       
    • Brightness controls on the keyboard.  Probably fixed easily by identifying the char code generated with the keystroke and binding it to the dim/brightening function in GConf (he says, having no real clue..)
      •  
    • Wireless.  I believe a Broadcom 4312 is under the bonnet, so this shouldn’t be a hard fix with a quick visit to linuxwireless.org.
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    • Some things I haven’t tested yet, like monitor switching and the built-in microphone.  But everything else seems to work fine.
    A bit more on ergnomics
    It has taken me a little while to get used to the layout of the keyboard and touchpad.  A problem I am overcoming slowly is that the touchpad’s two buttons are actually a single, rocker-style button.  It sits flush to the surface of the base, and this lack of tactile feel I find awkward.  I often find my thumb in the wrong position, mistakenly pressing on the bottom of the touchpad rather than the left button.  The pointer then jumps across the screen instead of clicking on the intended widget.  A small but annoying issue.
    Also, the keyboard is great to use while typing (as I do here, writing this review on the N130) but for cursor positioning it can become more tricky.  Hitting CTRL-End to position the cursor at the end of some text, for example, is now CTRL-Fn-PgDn(End), given the multi-function aspect of the PgDn(End) key.  Likewise, the cursor keys are just a shade on the small side.  But these are minor complaints in the overall picture.
    Final analysis
    Taking into account the annoyances, weighing them against the needs of the many… I would have to have to award this machine 8/10.  At £150 (incl VAT) + £4 postage, it has exceeded my expectations.  Sure, it’s not perfect, but the price, utility and solid build get my vote.  I would recommend one for a partner, friend or colleague….. maybe even a parent 😉
    Oh, there is one thing about it that I couldn’t understand.  There was this sticker on the top which made no sense (“Designed for Windows XP”).  Surely you design an operating system for target hardware and not the other way around..?  Well, regardless, I think the new location for the sticker makes much more sense.  🙂

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    Well, thank the heavens.  It finally happened. Google saved the web.
    The Register reports that Google has released the VP8 video codec which it gained last year through its $124M acquisition of web video business, On2.
    On2 have been producing video codecs for years.  It open sourced VP3 around 2003, if memory serves, which then became the basis for the Theora codec; the preferred choice of the open source community. Theora is a royalty- and patent-free codec that many open source advocates – myself included – have promoted the use of due to its free nature (free as in freedom… but that’s another issue).
    However, as Steve Jobs recently hinted that a patent pools was being established to destroy Theora (and ultimately line his pockets further), Google have done just what Microsoft and Apple probably feared. Pulled the rug out.
    So, all YouTube video will be re-encoded to use VP8 rather than H.264 (the proprietary codec supported by Apple and Microsoft), and browser builders Mozilla and Opera have already come out in support of it. As has Adobe.  And, of course, Chrome will support it too.
    And VP8, being open source and royalty-free, can also be supported by Microsoft and Apple. All source code and documentation is available on line, so there really is no excuse not to support it.
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    Well Apple-lovers, you sure do choose interesting products. Like the iPod; a “revolutionary” portable audio player, being probably the first to have a non-replaceable battery. I might be wrong, having done no research on the subject, but this was enough to turn me off. Let alone the insistence of using iTunes.
    Or the iPad; the computer-but-not-a-computer consumer device that let’s you do anything you want with your media.  So long as it is on Apple’s terms.  I don’t get why someone as apparently intellectual as Stephen Fry gets so excited about it.  Yes, it’s so exciting, in fact, that I’d go immediately to iPad.com and check it out!
    The iPad. I mean, for goodness sake, it’s a  laptop without a keyboard, but with potentially harmful restrictions, a proprietary operating system and about as much appeal as a colonoscopy. According to Fry, it also has no “multitasking, still no Adobe Flash. No camera, no GPS”.  But it does have a touch-screen and 3D desktop effects… Perhaps that’s why the Free Software Foundation dropped “Freedom” Fry’s video from their homepage: who’d want to appear as hypocritical as that?
    And then there’s the iPhone. This is the biggy. Apple are using typical Microsoft-like tactics here.  Make an “irresistable” upgrade, probably for free or very cheap, and subtly attach some conditions to it. This time, as exposed in Giorgio Sironi’s blog post, The Apple of Sin, the condition is that you must only develop iPhone applications in languages prescribed to you by Apple.
    The reasons, given by Giorgio, are pretty clear: Apple want to kill any chance of Flash appearing on the iPhone, else it might be inconsistent with the new iPad policy.
    So, Mac users, be aware that your choice of platform may well come to haunt you in a year or two, when Apple extends this anti-Flash policy to OS X.  There is one nice aspect of this, though: Apple might just force Adobe to open-source Flash.  Then will follow a review-and-embrace process, where Flash gains recognition as an open standard.
    Then we’ll see if Apple is embracing open standards as it “seems” to be with its current policies.  If not, then you’ll get more choice of hardware and software if you choose Windows. And even more if you opt for Linux and, not only would that be cheaper, you would also retain your right to choose what you do with it.
    Sorry about that.  😉
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    I recently ‘dented’ (tweeted on identi.ca) a question to a group of software developers: what music do they listen to that is conducive to coding?I received a variety of answers, with just as wide-ranging tastes as you could expect, really. Clearly, I hadn’t conducted a very economic experiment. Perhaps I was asking the wrong question.
    The question I should have asked is this: which music do you listen to that evokes a calm, creative and logical state of mind? In other words, I needed to key-word the question to (a) elicit greater impact on the reader and (b) give the question more scope, more context.
    The premise of the question is the science behind brainwaves. Apparently, alpha waves in the brain (those which occur at between 8-13Hz [cycles per second]) are the most conducive to creative AND logical thinking. It is commonly associated with a meditative state of mind, deeply relaxed, daydreaming, fantasizing and creatively visualising various scenarios.
    This dispels some notion that left brain/right brain dominance exists. I can’t remember which is which, but it is said that the right hemisphere is more creative and the left, more logical/analytical. Or vice versa.
    But this alpha wave state could, in fact, also support such dominance, if it allowed for the idea of submission of the dominant region during periods of relaxation. In other words, we will have one personality profile when active, busy, even stressed, and another profile when relaxed, calm, clear.
    It follows, then, the people seeking to produce creative works – whether it be software code, writing, visual art or music, should always seek the best environment to create alpha brain waves. Music is just one component; meditation, light scents, lighting, physical comfort and staying hydrated also contribute, as does the avoidance of caffiene and alcohol.
    But for me, most of all, it’s music.  And quite often, that’s trance. 😉