Web Development, Linux, F.O.S.S and Music Production

Ok so I continued the tradition I have started  of making my Sunday afternoon recording sessions the alcohol fueled  punk rock explosion they should be. Sticking with the short, fast and loud concept I decided I would record a song by my favorite band eva NOFX.

Again I fucked up by trying to do this from memory and as a result I played it in a key that is a little lower than Mike and the boys play it. Anyway it suited my voice better.. yeah.. thats it… meh..

So um yeah .. here is Geoffro and the Geoff-Geoff’s doing cover of the classic NOFX track My Name Is Bud.

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So I was having a few too many Boags Premiums on a Sunday afternoon and after a big plate of BBQ I decided I would test out my drunken recording skills. I was thinking a short, fast, punk rock song with simple lyrics.

Well the first song that came to mind was an old favorite by the mighty Brisbane super-star ska band BLOWHARD called “Fuck the dance clubs”. It fit all the criteria, it was short, fast, punk rock and the lyrics were of course quite easy

Now I was pretty drunk when I did this and I did most of the song from memory so apologies in advance for that Anyway Benny Blownose showed me these chords some years ago and I just sort of made up the drums from what I could remember :$

So yeah after recording it and doing drunken lyrics myself, I asked my house mate Mc Dirty D(an) to get on the Mic and belt it out like he was Rolo lol

P.S: Ian the Lama lover is on there at the end too hehe

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sshfs is a nice neat way to share sections of your file systems between servers over SSH (quite easy on Debian or Ubuntu of course)

The only down side to this I can see is that performance might suffer as read and write operations happen over a network. If this is a concern then you might want to look at rsync instead. Anyway it  is not really much of a problem when they are on the same LAN or in the same data centre. It even seems to perform well enough when you are sharing file systems between 2 EC2 instances. If using EC2 thought it is best to launch them in the same availability zone

I have not tested this with any sort of “Server Load”.

So to install sshfs..

apt-get install sshfs

sshfs -o allow_other,uid=[user-id] ,gid=[group-id] [ip-addresss]:[directory-to-share] [local-mount-point]

This would mount /var/www/ from the server  with the IP 192.168.0.1 on the local machine at the same point /var/www/

sshfs -o allow_other,uid=33,gid=33 192.168.0.1:/var/www/ /var/www/

The certificate for omega.contacts.msn.com could not be validated. The certificate chain presented is invalid.

Getting this error from Pidgin?

It seems there is a problem with the MSN cert omega.contacts.msn.com in the current release I have installed.

To fix it on my Ubuntu machine I did the following from the command line. You need to replace $HOME with your home directory. For example if you log into your Ubuntu machine as the user “geoff” then replace $HOME with “/home/geoff“. The commands you must enter come after the ubuntu-desktop:~#.

ubuntu-desktop:~# cd $HOME/.purple/certificates/x509/tls_peers/
ubuntu-desktop:~# rm omega.contacts.msn.com
ubuntu-desktop:~# wget http://www.brainstorm.net.au/files/omega.contacts.msn.com.txt
ubuntu-desktop:~# mv omega.contacts.msn.com.txt omega.contacts.msn.com

Then I restarted pidgin

I found the fix to it here. I have also hosted the cert here.

This is a website a friend of mine had a hand in creating and promoting. It is a pretty cool idea and I like their approach, very novel.

http://shareyoulove.com wrote:

“ShareYourLove.com is about celebrating what we love to help some of the poorest people in the world….”

It does this by donating the advertising profits to water aid.

http://shareyourlove.com

Here is a simple php script that sends an email from the command line using php. It sort of assumes you have the PHP CLI installed (“#apt-get install php5-cli” on debian). The aim is for a quick way you can test if your localhost SMTP server is sending emails from PHP. Of course there are some more sophisticated classes written if you need to do something fancy.

#!/usr/bin/php
<?php

/* USAGE: #./.php test@email.com 'this is a bit of text' */

$headers = 'MIME-Version: 1.0' . "\n";
$headers .= 'Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1' . "\n";
$headers .= 'From: Command Line' . "\n\n";

echo "Sending mail to ".$argv[1]."...\n";

if (mail($argv[1], 'test email', $argv[2], $headers)){
  echo 'success!'."\n";
}else{
  echo 'failed!'."\n";
}

exit;

?>

Basically I had to install Razuna for the Monash Pharmaceutical  crew to test it out as a Digital Assets Manager for their Pharmville project.

I am doing this on my Debian server and I don’t want to play around with Debian’s Tomcat 5.5  install as I am not a Java head and never have much luck with it I will just install Java and the stuff needed to run the Stand Alone Version of Razuna from the download page on the Razuna website.

These software packages are required to get Razuna up and running so a bit of apt-get action is needed..

1. Java 1.6 Runtime Env
2. Install ImageMagick
3. Install FFMpeg
4. Install Exiftool
5. Install Ghostscript

On Debian or Ubuntu its just a matter of doing this as root or with sudo..

#apt-get install imagemagick ffmpeg libimage-exiftool-perl ghostscript sun-java6-jre

So yeah now set your JAVA_HOME which on Debian and Ubuntu I usually modify the /etc/profile file to include the following somewhere after the export PATH. I do this so JAVA_HOME is available globally. I mean unless your being very strict on your permissions why not?

JAVA_HOME=”/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/”
export JAVA_HOME

Anyway best to make that live with the source command…

# source /etc/profile

Now I unpacked the zipped up file from the Razuna website and changed directory to the tomcat/bin directory. When I unzipped mine I had to chmod the .sh files in tomcat/bin so I could start up the Tomcat server with the startup.sh script.

# ./startup.sh

And that was pretty much it to get Razuna going. I did hit one last little Gotcha which on Debian Lenny required me to update the server.xml file in the tomcat/config directory.

I had to locate the following line and make sure that the docBase=”/razuna/assets/”  value had the full path to the Razuna assets  directory that I had unzipped.

<Context path=”/assets” docBase=”/razuna/assets/” crossContext=”false” debug=”0″ reloadable=”true” />

Razuna looks really good too for those with lots of Digital Assets to manage. I am going to run some benchmarks on it. I will blog about that at some point.

Problem deleting data with FOREIGN KEY constraints in MySQL….

Ah yes. Your working on that system that uses the MySQL FOREIGN KEY constraint on some tables.

You want to truncate a table but get an error message because you have already truncated the data in the related table.

“Cannot delete or update a parent row: a foreign key constraint fails”

Fear not you can disable the constraints in the mysql shell…

mysql> SET foreign_key_checks = 0;
mysql> TRUNCATE some_table;
mysql> SET foreign_key_checks = 1;

I was recently working on moving some PHP software from one server to another for a client of mine and ran into a spot of trouble.

The previous developer that was maintaining the software and the “production” environment is a mate of mine so I won’t bag him too much in public, although he knows who he is and the pain he caused me .. lol ^_^

Anyway suffice to say the move did not go 100% according to plan. Even with many years of experience deploying websites and running Linux servers, I was not really ready for what I was about to face.

You see I originally installed this Debian server many moons ago (back in the day when Q-mail Rocks was the set up to have) and in good Virgo fashion I left it in a very nice and ordered state in the hands of my mate. The server subsequently had a couple more guru Linux cooks brew a few concoctions up on it.

Anyway the point of all this drivel is that my mate and the other cooks in their infinite wisdom had decided that the humble symbolic link was the weapon of choice to ensure proper and extensive (and I mean extensive) “code reuse”.

Let me tell you it was like moving a house of cards from one table to another.  In there were symlinks that linked to other symlinks which in turn were symlinks to development files. WTF???

There were image directories that had symlinks to other image directories which in turn had symlinks back to the original image directory. You should have seen the size of the tar files it was trying to create! Anyway lets just say an accurate description would be a bowl of spaghetti crossed with a spider web made by mr crack spider.

I am still finding missing symlinks but have since found this cool bit of code that re-curses through the directory tree and finds all the broken symlinks.. yay!!

for i in `find ./ -type l`; do [ -e $i ] || echo $i is broken; done

Anyway there are plenty of better ways to re-use code kids. Symbolic linking is not really the most maintainable option!

Think before you symlink!

pushLMS as bold as the name suggests  is an attempt at developing a type of Learning Management System.

pushLMS is the name of a new project I am working on with the crew at OSVR, Monash University Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences and Victoria University.

Combining Virtual Worlds like Open Simulator and Second Life with some PHP software written using the cakePHP MVC framwork, we are creating what could be called “Virtual Education Environments” in the form of assessment for the Students.

We aim to eventually make it open source (well that is what OSVR is about) and I will no doubt blog a bit more about this as the software develops.

More info on this project can be found at the pushLMS google blog for now.