mehblog: Category General

Plesk upgrade removes webmail

paul — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 10:54:00 +0000

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…

Upgrade to Typo 4

paul — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 09:58:00 +0100

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.

Moving House

paul — Fri, 17 Feb 2006 11:46:00 +0000

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.

Busta - Latest Dark Jungle Mix

paul — Mon, 23 Jan 2006 20:36:00 +0000

My good pal Busta has recently posted his latest mix.

Check it out for some dark jungle mix lovin.

Happy new year!

paul — Tue, 03 Jan 2006 19:22:00 +0000

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!

Skype is actually rather good

paul — Fri, 02 Dec 2005 09:36:00 +0000

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.

Asterisk faxes jamming

paul — Thu, 01 Dec 2005 11:53:00 +0000

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.

typo 2.5.8 issue & fix

paul — Wed, 09 Nov 2005 13:40:00 +0000

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

winter is here

paul — Wed, 02 Nov 2005 13:33:00 +0000

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.

How to count the number of records in a table...

paul — Wed, 28 Sep 2005 11:30:55 +0100

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!

ruby on rails country_options_for_select helper

paul — Fri, 23 Sep 2005 00:21:55 +0100

So I’m still working away on this project using Ruby on Rails, and generally I’m loving it. It really is a great piece of software. Progress is good, but I often find myself stumbling on what should be the simple things.

Today for example, I wanted to use the country_options_for_select() form helper to generate a list of countries as a dropdown in a form, with a number of countries prioritised at the top of the list.

The list was being generated but the prioritised countries where not be generated. The code I had was something like this: country_options_for_select(priority_countries = ['United Kingdom','United States']).

Now the method signature in the api docs is this: country_options_for_select(selected = nil, priority_countries = nil), and I assumed that the selected = nil didn’t need to be included as it was the default.

Not so. Once I added the selected = nil argument to the method it worked.

And the lesson is?

Assumption is the mother of all feck ups I guess.

How to properly turn off comments

paul — Tue, 22 Feb 2005 17:50:39 +0000

I was still having problems with getting sh*t loads of spam via the old posts on this site, even though I had turned off all commenting in the admin as far as I could tell. Seems I needed to sort out some settings on the old posts. Info on this can be found in this post on the wordpress site.

Specifically:

UPDATE wp_posts SET comment_status = ‘closed’, ping_status = ‘closed’ WHERE comment_status = ‘open’;

Ahhh, peace at last.

Update: and now I can gleefully look at all those feeble attempts to spam me in my logs. :)

turning off comments

paul — Sun, 06 Feb 2005 12:43:53 +0000

I’m getting more comment spam on this blog than email spam to the half dozen or so domains I have registered so I’m just going to turn off comments for now. It’s really annoying but spam just really gets on my nerves, and I really don’t like the idea of these spammers burning up my bandwidth or more importantly my time.

If anyone wants to get in touch with me about this blog or anything else the follow the 'about me' link top right to my main site where there is a contact form...

nesting variables in smarty

paul — Tue, 01 Feb 2005 19:58:33 +0000

Ever need to use nested variables in smarty? I know its not very mvc, but on more than one occassion I’ve found myself needing to . So here is how to do it, as a reminder to myself more than anything tbh.

Improve Spam detection in Thunderbird mail client

paul — Wed, 20 Oct 2004 18:28:36 +0100

I’ve noticed recently that the junk mail filtering in the Thunderbird mail client wasn’t as good as I would have liked. So I had a hunt around and found this thread on the MozillaZine forums with a good tip to improve its spam detection rules. Warning, involved some hand editing of preference files…

wordpress update

paul — Tue, 12 Oct 2004 10:08:03 +0100

There is a new version of wordpress out, 1.2.1 . It is a bug fix release I believe. I was able to just copy the archive straight into my wordpress folder and all is well. Admin system tells me I am now running the new version.

chkconfig for debian?

paul — Mon, 12 Jul 2004 11:37:29 +0100

I recently switched to debian for my linux box at home. I have previously been using redhat (various versions and variants). Most of the boxes I work on and manage are redhat based in some way so I had become familiar with the way it is laid out. So, I recently installed ddclient to update my dynamic dns records at dyndns as I am on DSL at home with a dynamic IP. In the installation instructions one is told to use chkconfig to ‘turn on’ ddclient as a service. The problem is that (as far as I am aware) chkconfig does not exist on debian. Hmm. So a bit of searching led me to the debian policy documtent, which explains the debian equivalent of chkconfig, i.e. update-rc.d . That doesn’t roll off the tongue as easily as chkconfig but it does the job. Specifically check out this page<<" alt="" />~~-nextpage~~-> for info on how to use it.

In my case I just ran update-rc.d ddclient defaults (after copying the file ddclient from my distribution folder to /etc/init.d ) and it created symlinks from /etc/init.d/ddclient to the various init folders. I suppose I should really have choosen just the runlevels I needed but it was early and I hadn’t quite woken up …

hth.

latest IE scare

paul — Fri, 25 Jun 2004 22:16:09 +0100

Following on from todays revelations that various sites are spreading malware via IE, I’ve just updated my xp pro box to service pack 2, rc2. So far so good. Apparently this patch secures IE against this particular vuln. I must say I’m happy with the improvements so far. If you want to update to sp2 rc2 then you need to update your windows update client here: and then just do windows update as normal. Easy.

wordpress update

paul — Mon, 31 May 2004 13:16:02 +0100

I’ve just updated wordpress here form v 101 to 1.2. A few hiccups (should have checked where the tar file was headed…) but everything seems ok now. Some cool new featues too…

welcome back Mr Beattie

paul — Mon, 31 May 2004 13:01:00 +0100

Russell Beattie is back, posting away on his blog after a bit of a break. Good stuff.

QT & GTK

paul — Sun, 04 Apr 2004 21:27:39 +0100

I’m looking at writting some apps for the Linux desktop at the moment, probably using wxPython, but one thing that has been really confusing for me of late is the various toolkits for the two main linux desktop environments, namely Gnome and KDE. So, as a bit of an aid de memoir for myself, QT is kde and GTK is gnome.

the future of the OSS desktop

paul — Mon, 22 Mar 2004 15:31:23 +0000

Recently a discussion has begun about the future direction of the Linux desktop. Well perhaps ‘started’ isn’t the right word, but this article written by Havoc Pennington seems to have sparked off something of a blog war between himself and Miguel de Icaza. The crux of the discussion seems to be about what platform the future linux desktop is going to be based upon. On the one hand one has Mono which is an open source implementation of Microsoft’s ’.NET framework’, and on the other hand we have Java. And of course the current C/C++. Now, to be honest until recently I was pretty much ignorant of what all the fuss was about, but having read numerous blog posts and articles I am beginning to get it. It would seem that each ‘alternative’ has its benefits and drawbacks (like most things in life I suppose). Java has a lot of momentum behind it, and is backed by companies such as Sun and IBM. So there is a lot of support for it. However, as Java is not open source it can be troublesome for some developers, particularily when you add the GPL into the mix. Mono is completely open source and is backed by Novell. However, many open source developers are reluctant to use Mono as it is perceived as being linked to Microsoft, i.e. an OS implementation of a MS product. And there are lots of people who are nervous about the multitude of patents that MS holds with regard to .NET. Understandable I suppose. I have used java on and off over the years but I am certainly no expert. I quite like java in many respects. I hadn’t ever tried Mono though, so I downloaded it and installed the CLI and the compiler onto one of my boxes (a pleasantly painless experience I might add) . I compiled a simple HelloWord script and compiled it. It ran just fine. I then copied the binary to one of my Windows XP boxes which has the latest version of the .NET runtime on it, and the binary ran just fine there too which was pretty cool (ok, I wasn’t exactly stretching things with this example). Apparently the start of the binary file holds instructions for windows to run the file through the .NET VM or something like that, so on windows you can just double-click the file and it runs properly. Neat. Going beyond the HelloWorld example, there is GTK# for writting GUI applications. The Mono project is using GTK# instead of windowsForms as I believe a lot of the patent issues involve the windows forms classes, so using GTK# avoids the whole problem. Right, this post is getting very long and is turning into a review(ette) of Mono which wasn’t the intention. More later …

Happy Paddy's Day

paul — Wed, 17 Mar 2004 20:08:39 +0000

Hope everyone has a great day remembering their Irish roots. ;) Most notably today is my Dad’s birthday. Happy birthday MPD!

wax on

paul — Sat, 24 Jan 2004 19:16:18 +0000

Hans Nowak has written what can best be described as a wrapper for wxPython which is a Python port of wxWindows, an open source C++ GUI framework to make cross-platform programming child’s play. Well, almost.
Almost indeed. As someone who is new to python, and also to wxWindows, Hans’ wax is a godsend. It wraps up all of those nasty, hard to remember apis in nice simple objects. So, I should finally get around to doing some of these GUI projects on my list.

Hurrah, nokia are listening

paul — Thu, 22 Jan 2004 19:15:33 +0000

Just spotted this article on the The Register about rumours of Nokia potentially evaluating Python for their series 60 platform. Outstanding. Its a bit of a pity that its a limited trial initially, but I suppose doing the trials in a controlled manner should lead to quicker and perhaps better quality feedback.

Perl on the Series 60!

paul — Sun, 18 Jan 2004 08:12:32 +0000

It would seem that Nokia are going to release a version of Perl for their series 60 phones. This is very cool indeed. Why? Well, at the moment if you want to develop for mobiles (and series 60 phones in this case) then you have to either use C++ (steep learning curve, lots of power) or Java and J2ME (easier to learn, nowhere near as much power). Having a ‘third way’ is going to be great. Actually there is OPL which is quite usable but as I don’t have a series 60 phone (yet) I don’t know for sure. Of course, whether or not Perl is the right choice here is open to debate. Personally I would have preferred Python ...