Avi :)

  • 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…

  • Blimey, that was chilly

    So the original question is answered – it *is* possible to ride from Land’s End to Lowestoft overnight on the night of the solstice. It’s also a really stupid idea. And you can still give money to homeless people. I’ve stolen Joel’s pictures and stuck them online here. While in Penzance, we checked the weather…

  • 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…

  • Sponsor Me!

    I’ve had a silly idea, and figured I should get sponsorship for it: ride motorbikes from the most westerly point of the UK to the most easterly, during the night of the winter solstice. Basically, we’re to leave Land’s End at about dusk on the 21st December and arrive at Lowestoft by dawn on the…

  • 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…