NFS is a pain because you need to have the same UIDs on different systems. It seemed easiest to change my UID on my Ubuntu box.
usermod -u 1234 phil
Simple enough and it even chowned the files in my home directory. But I still have files everywhere which have my old uid. I’d like to find and own them, seems like a pain, could take ages? Easy with GNU find:
sudo find / -uid 1000 -exec chown phil \{\} \;
My kids like to play games on my personal laptop which happens to have WinXP Home on it. Of course they don’t like to get off it when it’s time for dinner, bed, bathing, school, … Going in there and making them shut it down can be a challenge.
So the solution a mash-up Apache and psshutdown now available from Microsoft. My apache was installed through cygwin so I have all the shell powers available for my cgi scripts.
Just make some cgi scripts and off we go.
You will need to make a dummy script to accept the licence using the /accepteula switch which needs to be run once or the scripts will just all fail.
I added the sysinternals tools to my system environment path so they will get picked up without addng the path.
Then the following script is dropped into
/srv/www/cgi-bin/shutdown
#!/bin/sh
# disable filename globbing
set -f
echo “Content-type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1″
echo
echo Force shutdown of computer
echo
psshutdown -kf
I also set up a static IP address for the laptop.
Now I just put a bookmark in my browser http://192.168.1.199/cgi-bin/shutdown and clicking on this shuts that laptop down without any arguments.
I have Wi-Fi capable mobile phone so put the bookmark in there and I can easily shut it down from there too, which is really handy as I’m not always in front of a computer screen.
Just upgraded Wordpress to v2 and it was a single click with fantastico!
I like to use a command line interface whenever possible. Sometimes though a windowed application is required. In MS Windows you use the start command to bring up the default app, (don’t use this much). In Cygwin I use the cygstart command.
So I was using my Ubuntu system and wanted to do something similar. The command it turns out is gnome-open. Bit of a mouthful so I have this aliased in my .bashrc file to cs for either cygstart or gnome-open which is much more snappy.
Finally gotten around to organising my Blogroll and Podroll for podcasts. Maybe in 2008 I’ll add a theme other than the default one!
My favorite blog has to be Marc Abramowitz while I’m not a Mac head he has so many geeky Unix/Linux tips and tricks it’s well worth the read.
My favorite podcast has to be Technorama for their wonderful humor and light hearted look at the geeky side of things.
Just renewed for another year with Pronethosting as my web/email/blog hosting provider.
They have been absolutely rock solid in the last year. I forget if I’ve been with them for three or four years now.
The plan provides everything you might want.
Here’s a snip from my plan details (linux 1)
150 MB web space
- 4000 MB transfer
- unlimited email
- webmail
- unlimited MY SQL
- PHP, Perl, SSH
- cPanel control panel
- Fantastico
- online statistics
The fantastico feature is really cool you can do things like almost one click install of Wordpress 
SSH is really nice as you can get down and dirty if you want to change/fix something if you want.
I was backing up some data yesterday and had a problem.
The first rule of backups should be :
Backup often (and before your data goes bad).
I’m not so good at this by try to get round to it as often as I can.
The second rule of backups should be:
Always verify your backups
This is where I could have had a problem. Fortunately I had the verify data box ticked and the bad media was detected. Running the backup again everything went smoothly. Wheew!
I don’t have my office number mobile yadda yadda on my Skype profile as I don’t want all and sundry to phone me. I would be happy for my contacts to phone me. There should be a privacy setting for this and I would add them in so people could phone me. They probably would do this with Skype. So there is a business driver for this change to happen as well as making my life easier.
For skype out I often add someone and their mobile number. These should be organised as a single contact just like they are on my Nokia phone. Less messy and easier to organise.
I like to use Firefox wherever possible and it’s becoming more possible by the day. I have to use one particular site which uses ActiveX and is very broken in Firefox. There is the IETab Extension which allows you use to IE embedded in Firefox - IE Tabs. You can also set it so that certain locations always open in IE.
There have been bugs with it in the past but it seems to be stable on the current release cool extension!
I had some jpeg images of a scanned document which I wanted to mail out to someone. The obvious way to do this is as a pdf rather than make them open a new image for each page. It turns out ImageMagick is rather good for this. My images are called pg01.jpg, pg02.jpg, and so on. Type at the bash prompt the following:
$ convert -page A4+0+0 pg*.jpg doc.pdf
And the result is a single pdf with all the images in order. Ooops page 2 was upside down
$ convert -rotate180 pg2.jpg pg2a.jpg
$ rm pg2.jpg
Convert again as above and all done.
ImageMagick is available pretty much whatever you are running Windows, Cygwin, Mac, Linux, BSD, Solaris etc.
Every New Years Day I change the battery on my smoke alarm. It’s an easy one to keep but it could save your life.
This month I changed my ADSL supplier. I was with Metronet. I have to say I was very pleased with Metronet from the day I got broadband to the day I left. So why did I leave?
It used to say on the front page of the website
They were bought by plusnet , and suffice to say the traffic shaping and speed throtling statements are gone. The usage cap statement has been changed to cost capped. It seems obvious to me the difference. Plusnet are quite open about what they intend to do with the Metronet network. See the second to last point about traffic shaping and prioritisation.
My view is that this kind of thing is generally bad for the following:
Take VOIP for example. I use Skype quite a lot. ISPs are providing their own VOIP solutions these days so it’s in their interests that their packets get the best QoS . The next step is for a partner to come along and say to the ISP if you give our packets better QoS on your network we can come to an arrangement. We then end up with a closed fractured network, where the big boys move in and can push small VOIP suppliers out because of poor QoS.
This need not just apply to VOIP it could be any technology where there is a driver to make it happen. Taken further we could see a dual stream internet with the sponsored version working well and the regular version with poor QoS.
If you download/upload then you should pay by the bit - but it should be driven by the customers needs not by the shareholders. Use less pay less, use more pay more.
As I’m writting this Andy Abramson has just blogged about QoS but from a slightly different angle see Point 10 .
I was going to add where I’ve gone too and what I think of my new ISP but that will have to wait ’til I have time next to post.
This site is my home page and as such a blog seems fitting. It started off with vim handcrafted HTML and then I decided a wiki would be faster/easier. Today I’ve moved over to a blog, as this seems more relevant easier still.
The old site is still around but I’ll nuke it when I have added the content that’s not outdated here. I’ll also be adding categories sorting out the theme, blogroll yadda yadda.
Comments on here are moderated by me before they see the light of day so don’t even think about sending your bots round here spammers!