Graham Macleod's blog

2011-02-08T11:01:00.002Z

I just received my first Arduino through the post. I went with the Arduino Duemilanove ATmega 328 which I bought on eBay from the seller arduino.hk who I can highly recommend. Their feedback speaks for itself.

I haven't had a chance to properly play around with it yet due to a house move but I will post something later on about it.

URemoteDesktop skipping 2 tracks on Rhythmbox

2010-12-31T16:48:00.003Z

I downloaded an Android App called URemoteDesktop and when trying to skip a track on rhythmbox it skipped 2 instead of 1.

To fix this (Not sure if it buggers up something else so do this at your own risk), comment out the following lines in vd.sh.

xte "key XF86Back"
xte "key XF86Forward"

I'm guessing these are put in the if statement for programs that don't use XF86AudioPrev & XF86AudioNext.

Streaming video from Ubuntu to Xbox 360 via BT Home Hub

2010-03-13T10:20:00.004Z

Before my PS3 shit a brick and I replaced it with a Xbox 360, I tried to get Mediatomb streaming video from my Ubuntu machine to my PS3. Although it worked to some extent, there seemed to be a buffering issue. Videos would play for a few minutes then stop to load up more of the video.

While trying to set up uShare I came across the same problem. The obvious constant here was my router so while dicking around with the settings of my BT Home Hub I managed to solve the problem.

Here's what I did.

Open the home hub's web page. The ip address should be 192.168.1.254.
Click on Basic Config.
Click on Wireless.
Under "Wireless channel" change Channel selection to "Manual" and Channel to "11".

That's it. Give it a minute then crank up uShare.

Using awk as a floor function

2010-03-11T09:58:00.004Z

I was searching the internet trying to find out if awk had a floor function when I realised awk IS a floor function.

graham@graham-laptop:~$ x=3.5
graham@graham-laptop:~$ echo $x | awk -F. '{print $1}'
3
graham@graham-laptop:~$

You could always change $1 for $2 and it becomes a mod function.



Selecting beginning of financial year in Oracle
2010-03-04T10:41:00.004Z
I recently had to work out how to return the beginning of the financial year from an Oracle database. After trawling the internet, everything looked rather complicated for what I was after.


Below is what I came up with. It's pretty simple to change. If April is not the month you want to return, change the +4 at the end to the number of the month you want to return.


select trunc(add_months(sysdate, - (12 + to_char(sysdate,'MM'))+4),'MM')
from dual



OpenSSH for windows not recognising rsa authentication
2009-10-19T11:12:00.002+01:00
It appears there is a bug in OpenSSH running on windows where it will not allow public key authentication.

To fix this simply edit sshd_config file in the /etc/ directory and change the strict modes line to show as

StrictModes no

Hopefully this saves some of you time.


Creating a launcher for FreeMind on Ubuntu
2009-01-28T20:47:00.004Z
You've installed the FreeMind Software by using
graham@graham-laptop:~$ sudo apt-get update
graham@graham-laptop:~$ sudo apt-get install freemind
and you've exported your shell variables by using (if bash is your default shell, other wise substitute .bashrc for your shell startup script.)
graham@graham-laptop:~$ echo export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-sun-1.5.0.13/ >> ~/.bashrc
graham@graham-laptop:~$ echo export PATH=$PATH:/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-sun-1.5.0.13/bin/ >> ~/.bashrc
but you would rather not have to type
graham@graham-laptop:~$ freemind
to start the software. (According to https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Freemind the launcher should appear under Applications->Office but mine didn't)

Lets face it, we like pointing and clicking on pretty icons. It makes you feel like a man.

First off, we need an Icon, and some kind guy called malefico andauer has created some. Here the are.




Save the image you want to use, I'm going to use the biggest one, into the directory where FreeMind has installed. Should be in /usr/share/freemind. As you will have to be a superuser to copy files to this location, type

graham@graham-laptop:~$ sudo cp /home/graham/Desktop/freemind_icon/48x48/freemind.png /usr/share/freemind/freemind.png

Once that's done, Right click on the Applications menu and select "Edit Menus".

I'm going to place FreeMind by kdissert (in Accessories) because I'm going to be testing both programs but you can put it wherever you want.

Click "New Item" and in the panel that appears type the following
Type=Application
Name=FreeMind
Command=/usr/share/freemind/freemind.sh
Comment=Mind Mapping Application

Then click ok.

If you want it to appear in your top panel, you can right click on the top panel and select "Add to Panel...". Then select "Custom Application Launcher" and enter the info above.

To select the icon, click on the spring button, click browse, then browse to /usr/share/freemind then click "Open". Select the icon then click "Ok".

That's your Launcher ready. Just click close and enjoy.


Removing line feed characters from dos files for use in UNIX
2008-08-28T15:48:00.005+01:00
Here are a couple of commands to remove line feeds from files created in windows for use in UNIX.
I had a list of usernames in a csv which I wanted to run an ldap search on however the line feed characters were causing this to mess up the command

To get around this you can either run

dos2unix current.csv newfile.csv

or you can open the text file in vi. The text file looked like this

johnhe02^M
paulke04^M
marymc04^M
elainp02^M
jimfor01^M
markad01^M
johnmc12^M


then basically open up your command prompt by pressing the colon key ":", and enter the following

%s/^M//g

Note to get the ^M character you hold down ctrl and press V and then M (V and M must be pressed while holding down ctrl)

Another way to acheive the same results as dos2unix is by using the flip command. Thanks to Jadu Kumar Saikia for pointing this out :o)


Online FTP client and file editor
2008-07-02T09:16:00.006+01:00
The online ftp client, http://www.net2ftp.com/, I have been using for a while, to get around my works firewall and update my website is for some reason inaccessible. For anyone looking for an alternative, http://www.web2ftp.com/ is quite nice. I used to use it previously, and then the host shut it down due to misuse, which was the reason I started using net2ftp in the first place. It is not as feature rich as net2ftp, but it does what it says on the tin.

UPDATE (3rd July '08)
I tried to log in to web2ftp this morning and got the following error.

Web2FTP deactivated !!!Sorry, but we had to deactivate our free service Web2FTP.We have introduced new security functions as logging User actions, Ip-Numbers and blocking whole IP-Ranges from Asian and African networks, but some users continued to upload Phishing sites. We are working on a new solution for registered user.Leverkusen, 03.07.2008


Setting up jUploadr for ubuntu
2008-06-21T09:36:00.002+01:00
jUploadr is a nice little java application which allows you to upload photos to flickr, zooomr and any other photo sharing site you are a member of which allows api access. When you read the FAQs for linux, which are virtually non existent, it basically says that you have to run the application by typing the following into the command line.

./jUploader

This is a touch on the crappy side as many users may not be confident enough with command line working, It also means that you need to remember where you stored to directory and run cd to change to that directory.

It's much easier to add the application to the top panel and here's how you do it.
Download jUploadr for linux
Once you have extracted the contents of the tar file to your desktop, enter the following into your command line.
sudo mv jUploadr-1.1.2-linuxGTK-i386 /usr/bin/jUploadr-1.1.2-linuxGTK-i386

Note that jUploadr-1.1.2-linuxGTK-i386 should be changed to whatever the version you have is called. Run ls on your Desktop to find out and allow an easy copy and paste.
Right click on the top panel and select "add to panel"
Select "Custom Application Launcher"
The main bit here is to browse to the file "jUploadr" within the directory you just moved to /usr/bin.
Click on the little spring platform image and this lets you select the icon to chose. Navigate to the directory you just moved to /usr/bin and click open, you then have the choice of 3 image files to select.
There you go. Just click and this will open jUploadr.



Nominate Ubuntu for SourceForge's OSS award
2008-06-06T08:13:00.003+01:00
SourceForge are holding their annual Community Choice Awards for open source software. I have nominated Ubuntu Linux. If you want to nominate Ubuntu as well, click the link below.



You can view last years winners and nominees here, http://sourceforge.net/community/cca07.


Gmail displaying annoying error about full cache
2008-06-05T10:46:00.008+01:00
When I upgraded to Internet Explorer 7, on Windows XP SP2, I started getting an error on gmail which says

Your browser's cache is full and may interfere with your Google Mail experience.

Since clearing my cache did not help in the slightest so I tried a few other things.


Tools > Internet Options > Advanced tab. make sure that “Do not save encrypted pages to disk” is unchecked.
Tools > Internet Options > Browsing History Settings, Change “Check for newer version of pages at every visit” to "automatically". This originally worked for me but then something happened on my laptop and then it started again.
The size of my cache was sitting at 1024MB so I lowered this to 250MB. (From Browsing History Settings again)
The final thing I tried ended up getting rid of the error. I added mail.google.com to the list of allowed sites.
Somewhere advised that deleting your temp Internet files and recreating it might help but I didn't try this, nor can I advise if it works.
If anyone has anything else that can be added please leave a comment and I'll add it in.
UPDATE: The message came back after adding mail.google.com to my list of allowed pop ups. After further rooting around I found that if you access gmail through https://mail.google.com/ using secure http the message disappears. As far as I'm aware you still need to go into your internet options on explorer and ensure that “Do not save encrypted pages to disk” is unchecked.
This poses a problem if you access your gmail through google toolbar however, google allows you to edit the xml behind the custom buttons such as gmail. Here's what you have to do in order to get your gmail button on your google toolbar pointing to https://mail.google.com/.
Click the settings button on your toolbar.
Click on "Custom Buttons"
Find the gmail option and click "Edit"
Click "Advanced"
Press ctrl + f and search for http://mail.google/ and change all instances to https://. There should be 3 urls you need to change.
If you like, you can change the message you get which tells you that you have new gmail. Search for or just and between the tags, put something like, "Hey bawbag! Check your email."
You can also do this "advanced edit" in forefox's google toolbar, however firefox doesn't cause gmail the confusion that internet explorer does.
UPDATE (again) - gmail now offers you the option under "settings", to always use https. Tick this option and this whole problem goes away which is good because the iGoogle gadget still takes you to the http: site.



Dogpile search gadget for iGoogle
2008-05-27T14:37:00.004+01:00
While comparing Google with Dogpile I discovered that there was no dogpile search gadget for iGoogle so I created one.

 Use this button to add the uk dogpile search gadget to your iGoogle page


 Use this button to add the dot com version of dogpile to your iGoogle page.


Enjoy


Find out where spam came from using Gmail
2008-05-27T09:54:00.004+01:00
When registering for an account on any online service it's always best to check the site's privacy policy to see what a site will do, or will not do, with the details you provide.

Personally I can't be arsed with all that fannying around so I just fire in my details and hope my spam filter is up for the challenge, and to be honest, Gmail's spam filter is very good. A way in which you can find sort this out is to sign up with your email address as username+sitename@gmail.com. So if I was a wary customer signing up for Blogger, I would enter mine as graham.macleod+blogger@gmail.com.

You can even have these filtered accordingly, by going into Gmail and select Settings, then Filters and Create a new filter. Add in the address which you signed up with into the To field, and on the next step select Apply the label and then create a new label, I.e. Blogger.

If any spam comes in, you can view which email address it was sent to and therefor tell which site's admin's balls you can go and break. Make sure you don't select Delete it at step 2 of the filter making process as you will still want to receive authentic emails from that site.

This doesn't always work and sites with more advanced registration processes may not accept it. It can't hurt though, unless you have had to enter a mountain of personal info and because an error was detected, you have to start again. But in that case, the website is shit and you should think twice about registering in the first place.


Getting high off nutmeg
2008-05-22T13:31:00.007+01:00
Have you ever thought to yourself, while sitting home on your own on a Friday night, "I miss those nights when I used to go out clubbing, get mashed and stay up until 10pm the next day feeling shit."? Well to recreate that feeling legally and inexpensively, all you need is a nutmeg seed and a grinder to get completely off your tits. WARNING: May be the shittiest high of your life.



Grind up a tablespoon of fresh nutmeg (not the ready ground stuff) and mix it with milk and add sugar to taste. Neck it and wait an hour. If you still don't feel anything after an hour, repeat. I've heard that up to 3 tablespoons is "safe" but any more and you risk having a pretty shit time, like not being able to walk for a few hours, nasty hallucinations for example, feeling like you are melting.

To start with you might feel slightly nauseous.

Then you get dry mouth and red eye.

After a couple of hours you'll start to feel drowsy.

WARNING: Nutmeg contains an MAO which should not be mixed with any other MAOs for example antihistamines, alcohol etc. for a full list of MAOs see the Erowid site.

It has been rumoured that you can hallucinate while on nutmeg but I reckon it's all bollocks. I'd be interested in hearing anyones experiences on nutmeg.


Devastatin' Dave The Turntable Slave is my new hero
2008-05-21T14:52:00.004+01:00
Look at him there with his can-do attitude and shiny leather trousers. How can you not idolise the man who gave the world lyrics such as...

Zip dip zap, a zip wit a wabbit,
Zippy dipa wippa got a cocaine habit,
Scooby dooby bip a zip bop blam,
It started with a quarter now it is a gram.

Let's just stop and think for a second. (Like you needed any prompt to start thinking, after such a thought provoking blast of lyrical wizardry.)

You ready for another? OK here goes...


Zoom zoom with a scooby doo bop,
Buy yourself into projects you're tryin to cop,
Rip and a rap I wrote with a rhyme,
I think you better call the cocaine hotline,

Yeah. did you hear that? That's the sound of a million wraps of cocaine beign flushed down the toilet. Dave, or DDTTS as his mates know him, and AIDS are the only 2 things from the 80's worth writing about. One will fuck you up... and the other is AIDS. Recognise.


Why do we still get gmail invites
2008-05-20T12:43:00.003+01:00
Back in the day it was necessary to beg the lucky few who actually had a Gmail account, to send you an invite, in turn you dished these out. The reason for this was to keep the load on Google's servers to a manageable level.
You started out with a few invites which, as Google's capacity increased, also increased. eventually I ended up with 100 or so. I have dished out 15 as can bee seen in the screenshot below.

Why is Google still displaying this facility to invite other people to Gmail, when you can simply go to www.gmail.com and sign up for one by clicking on a link on the homepage?

Come on Google. I know we can minimise it so that it is barely noticeable but it's still there. At least give us an option to hide it completely.


Sharing folders between host and guest on VirtualBox
2008-05-16T10:19:00.004+01:00
While trying to share folders between VirtualBox and ran into a few problems. Here is a run through of how to do it so that hopefully you don't have to suffer for a couple of hours searching google.

Note: This was done using Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy as the host and Win XP as the guest.

1. Ensure you are not running the OSE version of VirtualBox.
2. Start your virtual machine and click Devices > Install Guest Additions. If nothing happens click Devices > Unmount CD/DVD-rom, then try again.
3. Click Devices > Shared folders
4. Click the add button and on the next screen and enter the path of the shared folder I.e. "/home/graham/whatever" (without the quotes|) and then add in the name for the shared folder. This name you have just given the folder is the important part.
5. Open a DOS command prompt and enter the following
net use z: \\vboxsvr\whatever

The "whatever" part is the name that you gave the shared folder while specifying the path.
After this the Z drive or whichever drive letter you assigned it to should appear under "My Computer".


XHTML 1.0 Strict Java Applets
2008-05-12T13:35:00.010+01:00
While coding a program for a college submission, I spent ages trying to get the page to validate as XHTML 1.0 strict. I eventually came across Shayne Steele's webspace (link no longer working) at Florida State's computer science department which has this page that explains the various parts required by the object tag.

Check out Shayne's page ot just copy and paste the code below. all you need to change is the Class name and the height and width of the applet/object.


<object type="application/x-java-applet"
  height="500"
  width="500"
  classid="java:YourClassName.class">
  <!--[if IE]>-->
  <object classid="clsid:8AD9C840-044E-11D1-B3E9-00805F499D93"
     height="500"
     width="500"
     codebase="data"
     type="application/x-java-applet">
     <param name="code" value="YourClassName">
  </object>
  <!--<![endif]-->
</object>



Encrypting mailto: links to avoid spam
2008-04-22T10:21:00.008+01:00
Anyone who has placed a mailto: link on their website may or may not have noticed an increase in spam email. Gmail has an excellent spam filter so I never really have much of a problem.

There have been a few different ways suggested on how to put a "Spam Proof" email link on your website.

Linda Roeder suggests using javascript although the main argument I have against this is the same reason I keep my javascript to a bare minimum... What if javascript is turned off?

Another way that has been suggested is to make an image with just your email address but this involves any users to take a note and manually type in your address into an email.

You can also put a form on your site allowing people to send you feedback, but what if you actually want people to know your email address for future correspondence?

The best way I have found so far is by encrypting your email address. This works by substituting each letter in the address including the "at" and any dots into html character code.

This might sound like a lot of hard work but web designer Rob Spangler provides a quick and easy to use tool on his blog. Simply enter your email address and if you don't want your email address to display to users, what text you want to display in the link. This then transforms a plain text version of your address, easily trawlable from the web. Into a nicely encrypted mailto link such as the one below

graham.macleod@gmail.com (view the page source to see the encrypted version)

Keep in mind, it's always best to give users the choice of using a mailto link and also a feedback form since not everyone uses a mail client and for some people, clicking on a mailto link will cause
an unconfigured outlook express to open up.

How long it will take for the spammers to pick up on this method I don't know but at least our mailboxes will be safer for a while.


Garfield minus Garfield
2008-04-05T10:10:00.003+01:00
One of the cleverest and simplest, projects I've stumbled upon while surfing is Garfield minus Garfield.



"Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life? Friends, meet Jon Arbuckle. Let’s laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness in a quiet American suburb."

I would recommend subscribing to the blogs rss feed as you get one or two per day and they always manage to make me piss myself luaghing.


Trip to Amsterdam
2008-04-03T11:57:00.005+01:00
2 of my mates, Tommy and Rosco, my girlfriend and I flew out from Edinburgh Airport at 2pm on Thursday the 27 of March for 3 nights. I can't remember that much of it to be honest.
I do remember however, sitting in a pub in the red light district trying to convince Rosco to get a reach around from a skanky ho' (she wasn't actually that skanky to be fair) and then him falling off his stool and breaking the leg (of the stool).
You can see the photos on my flickr.
Most of the days were spent either in the coffeeshops or pubs.

Some of the coffeeshops we visited were

Rookies - purchased some Santa Maria
Stix - purchased some Bubblegum
The Seville - Played pinball and the machine broke
On the last night, before we went out, we had a game of cards while getting pissed up. You can see my funky victory dance below
You can't say I don't have mad skillz.
P.s. Rosco never did get his reach around. The romance was shattered as soon as we saw a guy wearing an anorak walk into her window and her closing the curtain after him.


Dokuwiki it is
2008-03-06T13:15:00.003Z
So far DokuWiki has performed extremely well. Since my team will all be using IE v7, setting the wiki as one of the search providers will provide a quick and simple way to search the Knowledge Base.





We are currently waiting on management giving us the go ahead for the server space and the domain name but we are stocking up our test wiki with knowledge procedures and the usual miscellaneous information that is kept on the file server with no way to usefully search it.


We may have to use DokuWiki instead
2007-11-19T11:54:00.000Z
It would appear that the server team doesn't want to support MySQL servers so MediaWiki might be out the window for the time being. Instead, we may use DokuWiki as our knowledge base. It saves all pages as text files so this will avoid the issue of MySQL not searching for 3 letter words which are an all too common occurrence in IT.


Setting up a knowledge base using Mediawiki
2007-10-19T10:38:00.001+01:00
Working on a helpdesk, I am constantly expected to know how to solve the issues of users who phone the desk. With 6 1st line support technicians on the desk, between us we have a wide range of knowledge but as is always the case, said knowledge is locked away in the skulls of the staff. Being a fan of Mediawiki i decided to test it's effectiveness as a knowledge base.

Our current Knowledge base is part of our helpdesk software, Assyst 6.5 by Axios, which although is a fantastic piece of software unfortunately it lacks certain aspects which in my opinion are a must for a useful knowledge base.

The key points to consider when choosing the software were (in no particular order)...
Must have a search feature.
Search must be fast and powerful enough to be able to consult quickly while on a call to a user.
Must support images.
Must be easily accessible.
Must be easy to update.
Mediawiki fulfills all the above requirements.
I started with a free hosted server and installed mediawiki with the following set up.
Mediawiki: 1.10.1
PHP: 5.2.4 (apache2handler)
MySQL: 5.0.45-Debian_1-log

Extensions installed:
CreateArticle (version 0.9 beta) - Generates create article input forms allowing for articles to be created with a variety of prefixes and suffixes.
Inputbox - Allow inclusion of predefined HTML forms.
TagAsCategory - This Extension provides "folksonomy"-type tagging to articles, using Categories as the underlying functionality.
Soon to be implemented is an LDAP authentication feature in hopes that the 2nd line support technicians log in and provide some knowledge procedures.