Avi :)

  • 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…

  • Cyanogen on my G1

    I’ve just upgraded to Cyanogen on my G1 and it’s lovely. Well, I got root, which is basically what I always wanted. I basically followed the instructions on the Cyanogen wiki and everything worked exactly as described, I’ve nothing really to add here except to say it’s brilliantly easy and everyone should do it. One…

  • PHP error on fresh install of PHPWiki:
    Non-static method _PearDbPassUser::_PearDbPassUser() cannot be called statically

    I’ve just installed PHPWiki 1.3.14-4 from the debian repositories and out of the box I got the following message on trying to log in to it: Fatal error: Non-static method _PearDbPassUser::_PearDbPassUser() cannot be called statically, assuming $this from incompatible context in /usr/share/phpwiki.bak.d/lib/WikiUserNew.php on line 1118 The problem appears to be that, as of PHP 5.something,…

  • Munin plugins are really easy to write

    Munin plugins basically need to output variable names and values, and a little bit of config. They’re tremendously easy to write. My plugin is mostly useless – it graphs the value returned by /dev/urandom, and the random constants from debian and dilbert. Current graph is here and the code is as follows: #! /bin/bash case…

  • Android G1 factory reset

    With the phone off and the battery in, press and hold <power>+<back> for 20 seconds or so. You’ll get the standard G1 splash screen, then a screen with an exclamation mark. Press <alt>+<L> to get to the System Recovery screen. Here you’re presented with four options: reboot system now [Home+Back] apply sdcard:update.zip [Alt+S] wipe data/factory…

  • DDR RAM identification and naming conventions

    All (modern) PC memory is SDRAM (Synchronous Dynamic RAM). DRAM, the predecessor, responded to requests as soon as it could after the control voltages changed, SDRAM replies according to a clock cycle (which synchronises it with the system bus). Pretty much all modern PC memory is also DDR, Double Data Rate. With Single Data Rate…

  • Simple complex password generator

    These are really easy to write, but it’s always handy to have your own. This one lives here in its cgi form. #! /usr/bin/perl use strict; use warnings; ## Let the browser know what we’re sending it print “content-type: text/html\n\n”; ## Spew some HTML since we’re not going to get away with plain text formatting…

  • *buntu 9.10

    It’s out! Torrents here and here.

  • Some notes from configuring rTorrent

    In anticipation of the new *buntus tomorrow, I’m configuring one of my servers as a torrent node for it, and for reasons unknown I’ve settled on rtorrent which is in the repos. The documentation is a little lacking (but does tell you how to do things like download torrents. Read it), and the most popular…

  • Android Issues

    Some of this might well be rendered obsolete by the 1.6 update I’ve just received. GMail Client No bottom- or inline-posting, only top-posting. And, while you’re at it, there’s no way to read the quoted text while replying. You have to read to the bottom of the email to get to the reply button, which…

  • Removing user list on Ubuntu Karmic log-on screen

    This doesn’t work any more Install XDM instead. ;) Karmic ships with a new version of GDM (2.28) which is rewritten, and by default presents a list of usernames, in much the same way as XP does by default. Lots of people dislike this. It’s also currently lacking a graphical config tool (it is in…

  • UI Fail: Windows XP ‘runas’ dialogue box

    On right-clicking an executable ((Though not every executable. If you want to run something in the control panel, probably the most common place to want to runas, you need to shift+right-click. Several MSI files don’t do it, and nor do any apparent CAB files. Let alone the inability to directly open a non-executable file as…

  • Threaded mail in Outlook (no, not really)

    As close as it wants to get: View -> Arrange By -> Custom Group By: Conversation (Descending) Sort… : Received (ascending) It should be noted that ‘conversation’ actually means ‘subject line’, so emails wth either no subject line or a common one get grouped together into one conversation. Still, it’s a bit better than nothing,…

  • Exporting email addresses (and other stuff) from Exchange

    csvde (CSV Directory Exchange) seems to ship with MS Exchange, so should be on anything running it. Syntax is: csvde -f -d “” -r (mailname=*) -l [properties] -p subtree Where: <file> is the csv file to dump the output to. <dn> is the dn of the OU you want the data from (the ‘d’ in…

  • Rearranging BT Meridian csv reports

    This is a pretty specific-use script, but I’ll stick it here anyway since I keep losing it. It’s to rearrange the output from a BT Meridian switch reporting on the usage of its DNs. What it does is to space the DNs such that each DN appears in a row with a number equal to…

  • TCX Sport SS Boots

    First Impressions Er, pretty good, really. Not expensive, not Gore Tex either. Fit really well, are light and comfy. Feel very thin. Zip looks a little weak. About a week later I bought these two days before riding to Newquay, which might’ve been a gamble, but actually turned out to be incrediby fortuitous. I bought…

  • Schuberth C3

    I’ve finally replaced my aging Airoh, and have got a shiny shiny white Schuberth C3, in preparation for a ride to Land’s End next weekend. First Impressions Really good. Really very good. It’s light, comfortable and airy, and the view is fantastic. The visor sits a lot lower than the other helmets I tried on,…