Jono Lange was committing acts of great evil in Bash earlier today. I gave him a few pointers and we agreed that it was sufficiently evil that it deserved a blog post.
So, if you find yourself wishing you could get pretty desktop notifications when long-running shell commands complete, see his post here for the details.
Monday, 23 January 2012
Friday, 6 January 2012
HP Microserver Remote Access helper
I've only had the Remote Access card installed in my HP Microserver for a few hours and already I am bored of accessing it by first logging into the web UI, then navigating to the right bit of the UI, then clicking a button to download a .jnlp file and then running that with javaws(1).
Instead, I have written some Python that will login for you, fetch the file and execute javaws. Much better!
You can find the code: here and you'll want to have python-httplib2 installed.
Instead, I have written some Python that will login for you, fetch the file and execute javaws. Much better!
You can find the code: here and you'll want to have python-httplib2 installed.
Thursday, 5 January 2012
HP Microserver Remote Access Card
I've been using an HP ProLiant Microserver (N36L) as my fileserver at home, for about a year and it's been a really reliable little workhorse.
Today I gave it a bit of a spruce up with 8GB of RAM and the Remote Access Card option.
Since it came with virtually no documentation, and since I can't find any reference online to anyone else having had the same issue I had, I'm writing this post so Google can help future travellers.
When you are installing the card, check in the BIOS's PCI Express options that you have set it to automatically choose the right graphics card to use. I had hard coded it to use the onboard VGA controller.
The reason for this is that the RAC card is actually a graphics card, so the BIOS needs to be able to activate it as the primary card.
If you don't change this setting, what you will see is the RAC appear to work normally, but its vKVM remote video feature will only ever show you a green screen window, with the words "OUT OF RANGE" in yellow letters.
Annoyingly, I thought this was my 1920x1080 monitor confusing things, so it took me longer to fix this than it should have, but there we go.
Today I gave it a bit of a spruce up with 8GB of RAM and the Remote Access Card option.
Since it came with virtually no documentation, and since I can't find any reference online to anyone else having had the same issue I had, I'm writing this post so Google can help future travellers.
When you are installing the card, check in the BIOS's PCI Express options that you have set it to automatically choose the right graphics card to use. I had hard coded it to use the onboard VGA controller.
The reason for this is that the RAC card is actually a graphics card, so the BIOS needs to be able to activate it as the primary card.
If you don't change this setting, what you will see is the RAC appear to work normally, but its vKVM remote video feature will only ever show you a green screen window, with the words "OUT OF RANGE" in yellow letters.
Annoyingly, I thought this was my 1920x1080 monitor confusing things, so it took me longer to fix this than it should have, but there we go.
Tuesday, 11 October 2011
What is the value of negative feedback on the Internet?
I'm sure we've all been there - you buy something on eBay or from a third party on Amazon, and what you get is either rubbish or not what you asked for.
The correct thing to do is to talk to the seller first to try and resolve your problem, and then when everything is said and done, leave feedback rating the overall experience.
Several times in the last year I have gone through this process and ended up feeling the need to leave negative feedback. The most obvious case was some bluetooth headphones I'd bought from an eBay seller in China that were so obviously fake that it was hilarious he was even trying to convince me I was doing something wrong.
In each of these cases, I have been contacted shortly after the negative feedback to ask if I will remove the feedback in return for a full/partial refund.
This has tickled the curious side of my brain into wanting to know what the value of negative feedback is. The obvious way to find out would be to buy items of various different price and then leave negative feedback and see how far the sellers are prepared to go to preserve their reputations.
The obvious problem here is that this would be an unethical and unfair way to do science. Perhaps it would be possible to crowd-source anecdotes until they count as data?
The correct thing to do is to talk to the seller first to try and resolve your problem, and then when everything is said and done, leave feedback rating the overall experience.
Several times in the last year I have gone through this process and ended up feeling the need to leave negative feedback. The most obvious case was some bluetooth headphones I'd bought from an eBay seller in China that were so obviously fake that it was hilarious he was even trying to convince me I was doing something wrong.
In each of these cases, I have been contacted shortly after the negative feedback to ask if I will remove the feedback in return for a full/partial refund.
This has tickled the curious side of my brain into wanting to know what the value of negative feedback is. The obvious way to find out would be to buy items of various different price and then leave negative feedback and see how far the sellers are prepared to go to preserve their reputations.
The obvious problem here is that this would be an unethical and unfair way to do science. Perhaps it would be possible to crowd-source anecdotes until they count as data?
Thursday, 6 October 2011
Dear Apple
I just woke up here in London and saw the news about Steve Jobs. It's early and, as usual for this time of day, my seven month old son is playing next to me. He has no concept of what my iPhone is, but it holds his fascination like none of his brightly coloured toys do. Only iPad can cause him to abandon his toys and crawl faster.
I'd like to thank you all, including Steve, for your work. You have brought technology to ordinary people in a way that delights them without them having to know why.
Please keep doing that for a very long time
I'd like to thank you all, including Steve, for your work. You have brought technology to ordinary people in a way that delights them without them having to know why.
Please keep doing that for a very long time
Friday, 23 September 2011
Terminator 0.96 released
I've just pushed up the release tarball and PPA uploads for Terminator 0.96. It's mainly a bug fix release, but it does include a few new features. Many thanks to the various community folks who have contributed fixes, patches, bugs, translations and branches to this release. The changelog is below:
terminator 0.96:
* Unity support for opening new windows (Lucian Adrian Grijincu)
* Fix searching with infinite scrollback (Julien Thewys #755077)
* Fix searching on Ubuntu 10.10 and 11.04, and implement searching
by regular expression (Roberto Aguilar #709018)
* Optimise various low level components so they are dramatically
faster (Stephen Boddy)
* Fix various bugs (Stephen Boddy)
* Fix cursor colours (#700969) and a cursor blink issue (Tony Baker)
* Improve and extend drag&drop support to include more sources of
text, e.g. Gtk file chooser path buttons (#643425)
* Add a plugin to watch a terminal for inactvity (i.e. silence)
* Fix loading layouts with more than two tabs (#646826)
* Fix order of tabs created from saved layouts (#615930)
* Add configuration to remove terminal dimensions from titlebars
(patch from João Pinto #691213)
* Restore split positions more accurately (patch from Glenn Moss
#797953)
* Fix activity notification in active terminals. (patch from Chris
Newton #748681)
* Stop leaking child processes if terminals are closed using the
context menu (#308025)
* Don't forget tab order and custom labels when closing terminals
in them (#711356)
* Each terminal is assigned a unique identifier and this is exposed
to the processes inside the terminal via the environment variable
TERMINATOR_UUID
* Expand dbus support to start covering useful methods. Also add
a commandline tool called 'remotinator' that can be used to control
Terminator from a terminal running inside it.
* Fix terminal font settings for users of older Linux distributions
Saturday, 16 July 2011
Migrations
To the cloud!
I'm officially done hosting my own Wordpress blog. Not because it's particularly hard, but because it's quite boring. I would have done a straight export/import into a wordpress.com blog, but their options for hosting on a personal domain are pretty insane - if you want to host your blog on domain.com or www.domain.com you have to just point the entire domain at the wordpress.com DNS servers.
I'm not prepared to trust my domain to a bunch of PHP bloggers, so instead I've shoved the blog over to Blogger (by way of a very helpful online conversion tool), but this still presents a few niggles around URLs.
You can have Blogger send 404s to another vhost, so for now I just have a tiny little vhost somewhere else which uses mod_rewrite to catch the old page names and attempt to catch the blog post names. Ideally I'd fetch all the old post URLs and make a proper map to the new ones, but I can't really be bothered to do that, so I just went for the approximate:
RewriteRule ^/archives/([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{2})/([0-9]{2})/([a-zA-Z0-9\-]{1,39}).*$ http://www.tenshu.net/$1/$2/$4.html [R=301,L]
Another obvious sticking point is that Wordpress categories become Blogger labels, so another rewrite rule can take care of them (although not so much if you've used nested categories, but again I can't really be bothered to account for that):
RewriteRule ^/archives/category/(.)(.*) http://www.tenshu.net/search/label/${upmap:$1}$2 [R=301,L]
Also cloudified so far is the DNS for tenshu.net - I'm trying out Amazon's Route53 and it seems to be pretty good so far. Next up will be email and then I can pretty much entirely stop faffing around running my own infrastructure :)
I'm officially done hosting my own Wordpress blog. Not because it's particularly hard, but because it's quite boring. I would have done a straight export/import into a wordpress.com blog, but their options for hosting on a personal domain are pretty insane - if you want to host your blog on domain.com or www.domain.com you have to just point the entire domain at the wordpress.com DNS servers.
I'm not prepared to trust my domain to a bunch of PHP bloggers, so instead I've shoved the blog over to Blogger (by way of a very helpful online conversion tool), but this still presents a few niggles around URLs.
You can have Blogger send 404s to another vhost, so for now I just have a tiny little vhost somewhere else which uses mod_rewrite to catch the old page names and attempt to catch the blog post names. Ideally I'd fetch all the old post URLs and make a proper map to the new ones, but I can't really be bothered to do that, so I just went for the approximate:
RewriteRule ^/archives/([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{2})/([0-9]{2})/([a-zA-Z0-9\-]{1,39}).*$ http://www.tenshu.net/$1/$2/$4.html [R=301,L]
Another obvious sticking point is that Wordpress categories become Blogger labels, so another rewrite rule can take care of them (although not so much if you've used nested categories, but again I can't really be bothered to account for that):
RewriteRule ^/archives/category/(.)(.*) http://www.tenshu.net/search/label/${upmap:$1}$2 [R=301,L]
Also cloudified so far is the DNS for tenshu.net - I'm trying out Amazon's Route53 and it seems to be pretty good so far. Next up will be email and then I can pretty much entirely stop faffing around running my own infrastructure :)
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