Avi :)

Category: Computers

  • Per-extension logging in MediaWiki

    This is another of those things that took me rather longer to work out than I would have liked, so hopefully this’ll appear in the sorts of searches I should have done. MediaWiki has this nifty feature where you can split the logging for particular extensions out into individual files by doing things like this:…

  • Allowing uploads of arbitrary files in MediaWiki

    I did RTFM and I did what it said, and still my Mediawiki complained when I tried to upload executable files and things with funny file extensions or mime types. if $wgFileExtensions is empty but $wgEnableUploads = true and $wgStrictFileExtensions = false it should just let me upload anything. I can’t think what other behaviour…

  • Tagging images by path in Shotwell

    I’ve finally decided to use an image manager, and since it comes with Ubuntu this week I’ve gone with Shotwell. I’ve got a directory hierarchy containing most of my images which is sort-of sorted already, and I’m probably going to keep adding to it, if for no other reason than force of habit. I know…

  • Postfixadmin with clear-text passwords

    One of my projects at the minute is converting vpopmail mail servers to postfixadmin. One _really_ handy thing about some of these vpopmail machines is that they store a cleartext copy of all the users’ passwords, so I can feed them straight into the new system. So, I’ve now got a postfixadmin system that stores…

  • Fail2Ban and date formats

    Fail2Ban is utterly daft in at least one respect. Here’s me testing a regex on a date format it doesn’t recognise: # fail2ban-regex ‘2010-12-14 15:12:31 – 80.87.131.48’ ‘ – <HOST>$’ Found a match but no valid date/time found for 2010-12-14 15:12:31 – 80.87.131.48. Please contact the author in order to get support for this format…

  • Why I won’t be mirroring Wikileaks

    I have a fair amount of ‘spare’ server space, and some very understanding service providers, and so it makes sense for me to mirror things in general, which I do. So when Wikileaks went down, mirroring it seemed quite a natural response. They need mirrors, and I have a mirror. I’ve been looking for something…

  • Getting root on a UK T-Mobile Galaxy S

    It’s a bit weird. The process was really easy, but none of the tutorials I found worked; each stopped working at one point or another. So, assuming other people will hit the same barriers and want a Just Works way to get root, I’ve gone through my terminal history for the bits that worked. Obviously,…

  • Windows Browser Ballot

    Mildly controversially, MS have found themselves compelled to offer Windows users in the EU a ‘browser ballot’ screen in an effort to make IE a less default choice, which is fairly understandable (if perhaps not understandably fair). But MS have decided for some reason that the best way to do this is is render it…

  • Windows’ find command

    It would appear that, not-entirely-contrary to my common rant that Windows offers no text processing tools at all, Windows does offer a find command which is like a severely crippled grep. It has five options: U:\>find /? Searches for a text string in a file or files. FIND [/V] [/C] [/N] [/I] [/OFF[LINE]] “string” [[drive:][path]filename[…

  • UI Fail: scanpst.exe’s incompatibility

    Sometimes, on trying to scan a PST with MS Office’s bundled scanpst.exe, you get the below error: And a log that ends: Fatal Error: 80040818 What MS meant to say was: You’re scanning an Office 2003 PST file with the scanpst tool that shipped with Office 2007. For some reason, we decided that while Outlook…

  • Joining the Canonical =~ Microsoft fray

    I’ve had this knocking about for a while in various forms. Following TheOpenSourcerer‘s post, I figured I’d get it in while he’s getting the flack. About a year ago, I remember there being some rejoicing at the prospect of Canonical open-sourcing Launchpad, their bug/issue/ticket tracking web application. I also remember being a mite confused by…

  • Splitting massive MySQL dumps

    As I posted yesterday, I have a massive MySQL dump to import. I tried BigDump, but one of the tables kept producing errors and so BigDump would exit. I don’t need the whole db imported, so I wrote this to split it by table. It produces a new sql file for every table it finds,…

  • Massive dumps with MySQL

    hurr. *insert FLUSH TABLES joke here* I have a 2.5GB sql dump to import to my MySQL server. MySQL doesn’t like me giving it work to do, and the box it’s running on only has 3GB of memory. So, I stumbled across bigdump, which is brilliant. It’s a PHP script that splits massive SQL dumps…

  • Whoo! Theme update!

    I’ve updated the theme, and applied my handy modifications that make it more grey. Here’s the diff on the css file, if you’re wondering what I did (and for next time when I forget). I despise CSS, so it’s all nice and easy. The changes are to give the <pre> tags a grey (#EEE) background…

  • Generating Fluxbox menus for VNC (Vinagre) connections

    One of the lovely things about Fluxbox is the text-driven menu. One of the nice things about Vinagre (Gnome’s VNC client) is the xml-based bookmarks file. Here’s a handy script to create a Fluxbox submenu out of your Vinagre bookmarks: #! /usr/bin/perl use strict; use warnings; use XML::Simple; my $HOME = $ENV{ HOME }; my…

  • Dell Warranty Info

    I hate navigating the Dell website. It’s inconsistent and messy and noisy, and all I generally want is a single date (when the warranty expires or expired on a given box). So I wrote this. It scrapes the Dell website, and returns the warranty info for the service tag it’s been passed. I’ve CGI’d it…

  • Getopt in Perl

    Oddly, it’s taken me until this afternoon to have real need for using getopts in Perl. After a not-overly-brief look around, I’ve settled on Getopt::Long for the purpose. It’s marginally more complicated than the alternative (Getopt::Std), but more flexible and better at error checking. To use it, you pass a hash of valid options to…

  • Giving Android a swap file

    I don’t know if it’s because I’m doing more with it than I used to, or the rose-tinted specs that come with the novelty value have worn off, or if the later updates have been designed for more powerful hardware, but my G1’s been lagging a bit recently, so I figured I’d have a look…