mehblog

This morning I did an upgrade on my plesk server to 8.2.1. This mostly went ok, but the main problem afterwards was that webmail was no longer working for domains.

Instead webmail.domain was redirecting to the default domain on that box. The solution is to rebuild the web server config files with the following command:

/usr/local/psa/admin/sbin/websrvmng -a -v

Credit for this solution goes to poster on plesk forums…

I have upgraded my blog to Typo version 4 and it went mostly seamlessly.

The box that hosts this blog is running plesk which wasn’t a problem.

I tried just installing the new version of typo over the old 2.6 version and while this appeared to work it caused some problems, notably with the migrations.

In the end I deleted my old typo install and ran these commands:

This box is running Centos 4 . I had sqlite installed but not the header files. These are required to get the sqlite gem files to install which are required by typo.

yum install sqlite-devel

Install the typo gem:

gem install typo

Install typo in my webroot:

 typo install /var/www/PATH/httpdocs

The next command should have changed the configuration from mongrel and sqlite to apache and mysql but it didn’t work for me for some reason:

typo config /var/www/PATH/httpdocs web-server=external database=mysql

I had to manually change the settings in database.yml and I also had to create a .htaccess file in the public folder to get fastcgi working.

Then

rake migrate

to update the database tables.

I have moved the blog a few times over the last year or so and along the way various things got broken, so it is nice to have everything working again.

So we are making the big move this weekend. For a long time now I’ve vowed to pay someone to help us move when we finally get around to it. And I got my way.

This morning two guys and a van from Man with a Van showed up first thing and man were they fast! In two hours they loaded up their Luton truck thingy with nearly everything we have. It got to the point were I had to decide to get them to leave most of the stuff in the bedroom as we have loads of friends and family turning up tomorrow to help us move. If I had let these guys there wouldn’t have been anything left for them!

So, top marks to the men with a van. Awesome service.

My good pal Busta has recently posted his latest mix.

Check it out for some dark jungle mix lovin.

The week before christmas I grabbed a ryanair flight home for a long weekend with the family. In the thirteen years I’ve been in the UK I’ve usually managed to be at home for christmas. This year however myself and N are buying a house and there was a slim chance that we would be in our new lovenest by christmas. ‘Twas not to be.

As first time buyers we are in a stong position. One of the primary advantages being that we are not in a chain. Pfft. We are in a chain, just at the ass end of it. We’ve found a place we like, had our offer accepted, had the mortgage approved, surveys are done etc. We could move in tomorrow! However the sellers have found a place and are now waiting for their seller to find a place. Oh well, such is life. Hopfully we’ll get moved this month.

Anyway, the weekend in Ireland was great. It was good to see everyone at this time of year. Then back to brighton and a short sprint in the office to the christmas break.

I had great intentions of getting lots of work done but on christmas eve I was laid low by a stonker of a cold. What shitty timing. I never get colds!

So christmas day was a bit muted, but thankfully there was plenty to watch on the telly from bed.

Mr IP arrived down for new year’s eve and I quaffed as best as I could considering I only had one working air hole. New years itself was spent in the usual place despite our best intentions. On the way home we were witness to some hooligan bus vandalism first hand which was (I’d say memorable but things are a bit hazy) interesting.

Poor bus driver getting partially throttled by a little shit with too many chemicals in his bloodstream. Apparently at this point I did my happy drunk act and went to the drivers aid appealing for calm, only to be berated by IP. Something along the lines of ‘there are 8 of them and they are between us and the exit of the bus’. Got away with it anyway.

Back to work today with lingering coldness. Bonkers workload.

HNY!

The recent announcement of video calling in Skype 2.0 prompted me to download it and have a look

For some reason I haven’t looked at it before.

Anyway, downloaded it and it worked first time, something I have yet to see with other voip providers.

The interface is polished, theres no setup to speak of and their pricing is very competitive as far as I can tell (I primarily use voip to call the family back in Ireland, none of whom have a landline…).

Good stuff.

We’ve been using Asterisk here in the office for several months now. It handles our voip phones and also incoming faxes.

We have always had a problem with the fax line ‘jamming’. Every now and then the fax would get stuck while receiving a fax. To rectify this we would have to restart asterisk.

This morning one of our clients couldn’t get a fax to us. It kept jamming at our end. They must have tried about four or fives times. Same problem each time.

So I decided to try and fix this problem.

To cut a long and boring post short, I found this posting to the Asterisk Users mailing list which has a fix. It involves increasing the gain on the card that has the fax line.

I gave it a go and on the next attempt the client’s fax came through perfectly. Coincidence?

Perhaps, but this tip from Paul is definitely worth a look.

There is a wee problem with the latest version of typo.

One of the lib files is in the wrong place.

Find the fix here

Last week was unseasonably warm; around the 20 degrees mark. This week however winter has arrived, with a vengence. The air temp has dropped and its been lashing down over the last few days.

Personally I don’t really mind this as I quite like winter. I’m built for the cold rather than the warm as they say.

Dark, wet weather always reminds me of christmas for some reason. Sitting indoors, the lights are on. All warm a snuggly.

Ahhh.

Want to find out how many records there are in a table?

You could do a table.<a href="http://api.rubyonrails.com/classes/ActiveRecord/Base.html#M000674">find_by_sql </a> "select count(*) from table",

You could get all the records from the table and then count them, say records = table.find(:all).

Or you could do count = table.count.

How cool is that!