Me and my brother went to visit this small site. It was a nice day and got chance to play around with some of the settings on my Nikon D40X Digital SLR camera. I was mainly setting the F-Spot, ISO and shutter speed and consequently the photos do vary in quality, look and feel, especially [...]
The result of the independent tribunal hearing into the Carlos Tevez affair was very heart warming. Finally some justice although it is far too little, far too late. The tribunal has ruled against West Ham over the Tevez affair, according to my beloved Sheffield United and its about time too!! SUFC will be claiming millions of [...]
I found this great site on the weekend - a blog of professional cake disaster pictures. It's only been around for a relatively short while as well, so it's not too much of your day to read the whole lot.
http://cakewrecks.blogspot.com/
My favourites:
I introduced my right thumb to some sharp metal this evening. It didn't hurt, but there was quite a bit of blood and a 4cm skin flap (that's total cut length). No real damage thankfully. After an hour and fifty minutes at A&E I am the proud owner of four stitches. They're my first ever. I'm pleased with the hospital experience, I wasn't sat around too much and all of the nurses were friendly and happy to answer all of my questions.
It does put me out of hockey for a bit though, bugger.
Update:
I gave in before Sunday and had a peek. It was feeling much better. The nurse obviously over egged the size of the cut (I didn't look too closely at the time). Doesn't exactly look pretty still...
** UPDATE ** ok ok so maybe i over reacted and blocking all slicehost customers isn't the way to go at all...Sowwwee 
Stop being a prick and trying to connect to my server. Yes i have reported you to slicehost, if you don't stop then i'll just block all of slicehost it's not a problem for me
Sep 04 14:39:53 xen-web-ubuntu proftpd[19634] localhost.localdomain (209-20-87-244.slicehost.net[209.20.87.244]): no such user 'Administrator'
Sep 04 14:39:53 xen-web-ubuntu proftpd[19634] localhost.localdomain (209-20-87-244.slicehost.net[209.20.87.244]): USER Administrator: no such user found from 209-20-87-244.slicehost.net [209.20.87.244] to 10.10.10.220:21
Sep 04 14:39:53 xen-web-ubuntu proftpd[19634] localhost.localdomain (209-20-87-244.slicehost.net[209.20.87.244]): Maximum login attempts (2) exceeded, connection refused
Sep 04 14:39:53 xen-web-ubuntu proftpd[19634] localhost.localdomain (209-20-87-244.slicehost.net[209.20.87.244]): FTP session closed.
Sep 04 14:39:53 xen-web-ubuntu proftpd[19635] localhost.localdomain (209-20-87-244.slicehost.net[209.20.87.244]): FTP session opened.
Sep 04 14:39:53 xen-web-ubuntu proftpd[19635] localhost.localdomain (209-20-87-244.slicehost.net[209.20.87.244]): no such user 'Administrator'
Sep 04 14:39:53 xen-web-ubuntu proftpd[19635] localhost.localdomain (209-20-87-244.slicehost.net[209.20.87.244]): USER Administrator: no such user found from 209-20-87-244.slicehost.net [209.20.87.244] to 10.10.10.220:21
©2008 paulmellors.net | Paul Mellors. All Rights Reserved.
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Fun link posted on irc - race typing against others through your browser. http://play.typeracer.com/ It's a very neat idea because you're typing passages from books/films and when you've finished they show an Amazon link to buy what you were just typing. I'm sure they'll get a much better click through rate than other types of advertising.
My best so far is 83 wpm - aside from my bad technique, I'm mostly hindered by making too many mistakes.
The website http://www.publicprofiler.org/worldnames/ was featured in an article on the BBC. The site allows you to search for surnames and see their distribution about the world. Exciting stuff and I defy you to say otherwise.
Now I don't want to spoil your own enjoyment too much, but I hope you'll forgive me a little.
I was going to write about others as well, but the website has gone down. I did look at a load of other names already (including my own of course!) but closed the windows and I want to post this. I'm sure you'll get a chance to look for yourself at some point.
Chatting on irc earlier, some people were talking about the position of their site in google when you search for their name (point being that facebook was listed higher, boo). So I put my name in to see how I did (second) but also found what looked to be a very scary t-shirt that someone had made through cafepress. The page was "I Love Roger Light T-Shirt - CafePress". Turned out that it wasn't me they love, but all Rogers. Aw.
#©2008 paulmellors.net | Paul Mellors. All Rights Reserved.
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I have a domain name that i'm interested in doing something with, ubuntuskills.org, i'm thinking of some kind of "i use ubuntu desktop/server and here's my skill set" site, but other than that i'm not sure....any ideas? Answers on a post card to......
©2008 paulmellors.net | Paul Mellors. All Rights Reserved.
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©2008 paulmellors.net | Paul Mellors. All Rights Reserved.
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#©2008 paulmellors.net | Paul Mellors. All Rights Reserved.
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I saw this image here, i hope they don't mind me using it :) Although it does say Ubuntu, you could just have any flavour in there.....suse, fedora
©2008 paulmellors.net | Paul Mellors. All Rights Reserved.
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It was interesting to hear views from the Free software movement pioneers, you should watch it yourself.....
You can watch the film on youtube, but it's always nice to have it on DVD
"REVOLUTION OS tells the inside story of the hackers who rebelled against the proprietary software model and Microsoft to create GNU/Linux and the Open Source movement."
©2008 paulmellors.net | Paul Mellors. All Rights Reserved.
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©2008 paulmellors.net | Paul Mellors. All Rights Reserved.
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On IRC earlier, Joshua chided me for not making technical posts about what I've been doing, even though we might chat about it. The quote goes "I'm sick of reading about your trivial life, I want to read about the codes! ;-)". Not that he's got much of a leg to stand on with respect to any blog posting. Been doing anything interesting with inotify and thermal zones maybe? Or get a new job perhaps? :P
Anyway, the reason that we were chatting is that I've been refactoring my gds2pov code. Back in 2004 I originally started writing it in C but quickly changed over to C++ - but obviously written by a C programmer, using malloc/free and handling strings myself. This has bugged me for a while now so I've started to fix it and am now well on the way. I've changed array storage to use STL vectors rather than my own class, am doing string handling with the string class and have got rid of a fair bit of stuff that was unnecessary. This has resulted in a change in the number of lines of code from 6632 to 5561 (a reduction of 1071 lines) with no change in functionality. Good going.
I say that's no change in functionality, but in truth that does include a small change. In previous incarnations of the code, we knew what file format we were going to export to at the time the gds2 file was being loaded. This is pretty obvious really - we're never going to use gds2svg to export to the POV-Ray format. I have bigger plans now - namely a gui to work with. You'd load in a gds2 file and possible an associated process file (which contains layer information). Any missing layers would appear on the layer list and you could edit/disable them for export as you want. The whole gds2 cell hierarchy would be available in a tree view and all of the cells (and children) could be enabled/disabled for export. There would also be a panel displaying the current hierarchy in 3D, with only the layers and cells as selected. You could position the 3D view and then export to pov with the appropriate camera settings, or just export to svg. It's going to be great. The difference is that when we load the gds2 file we don't know which file type it will be exported to. This change is the small new "feature" that exists, although it's of no real interest to the end user.
It's worth pointing out that the command line tools won't disappear and should get better as well.
I'm reluctant to do a proper release given the library breakage that has occurred and is likely to still occur, but if you want the source you can grab it from the mercurial repository at http://hg.atchoo.org/gds2pov with the command "hg clone http://hg.atchoo.org/gds2pov"
# Gwibber is good..... #©2008 paulmellors.net | Paul Mellors. All Rights Reserved.
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I've been creating DVD's recently from my DV camcorder, it turns out it's quite easy, but on my laptop [due to it not having much processing power] takes ages. So here are the steps.
1, i'm port your video into kino, export it to MPEG [8 DVD]
2, make sure you have dvdauthor and mkisofs installed on your pc, a simple apt-get install will do it for you
3, run the following commands from the folder where the MPEG is
1, dvdauthor -o dvd -t
2, dvdauthor -o dvd -T
3, mkisofs -dvd-video -o dvd/
4, burn off your ISO using your fave burning app [i use k3b]
Watch and Enjoy
©2008 paulmellors.net | Paul Mellors. All Rights Reserved.
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Picasa is software that helps you instantly find, edit and share all the pictures on your computer. Every time you open Picasa, it automatically locates all your pictures (even ones you forgot you had) and sorts them into visual albums organized by date with folder names you will recognize. You can drag and drop to arrange your albums and make labels to create new groups. Picasa makes sure your pictures are always organized.
Download it here - http://picasa.google.com/linux/download.html
I downloaded the 32bit deb for Ubuntu and it works a treat
©2008 paulmellors.net | Paul Mellors. All Rights Reserved.
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Well I officially fail at writing things up. Never mind. LugRadio Live was good fun. I helped crew which means I spent a lot of time filming and making sure that speakers (people) were happy. Not that much different to being their as a paying guest as I got to choose which talks to go to anyway. Huzzah.
I got an OpenSuse lizard and have it on my monitor at work. Stuffed toys, yeah!
Anyway, I also managed to obtain a spare LugRadio t-shirt and have put it on ebay and will give the proceeds to the Open Rights Group because they're doing really important stuff in the UK. Someone else says it much better.
As most of you know, my wife and i are expecting in a few weeks, which to be honest i'm excited :). However i wanted a camera to take loads of pictures. My current camera is a single shot wait 5 mins then take another type [yes i'm exagerating a little] so i decided to move to the next level, a digital SLR.
What type? Well a few friends and a lot of reviews have told me about the Nikon D60 and to be honest this looks like it's a nice camera. I was a little worried about the images it produces until i looked on google and most of them are stunning for what i need it for, then i noticed this page, it was exactly what i wanted to see, family images using the D60, after all that's mostly what i'll be using it for.....Thanks mate....sold :) [oh great he's a Architect Evangelist for Microsoft:)]
©2008 paulmellors.net | Paul Mellors. All Rights Reserved.
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One of the projects i've noticed and liked the look of is the rapache project, to quote from the site
©2008 paulmellors.net | Paul Mellors. All Rights Reserved.
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At the moment my main machine is a 1.75ghz laptop running heron, i had a DVD to make from a movie on my camcorder, not a hard job at all, but my god, don't do it on a laptop it takes aaaaaaaaaaaaaaages :).
1, use dvgrab to grab the video from the camcorder
2, import movie into kino and add a few text items
3, Encode the video using the DVD settings which output it to an mpeg file [this took 3 hours]
4, use dvdauthor to make the vob files and various other things.
5, use mkisofs to make the dvd into an .iso file to burn with your fave application.
Did all that and 3.5!!!! hours later had a dvd to watch, surely, apart from the obvious and get a faster machine, there has to be a better way? I'm seriously looking into macs.
©2008 paulmellors.net | Paul Mellors. All Rights Reserved.
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Someone from the University of Newcastle got in contact with me a while back about gds2pov. Just today they got back in touch to say that they'd made some good pictures with it and put them online. It's not often I get to even see the results people get, let alone have them available for other people to see. If you take a look at the bottom of their gallery page you'll see a number of pictures, including two 3D pictures. They look fantastic. Quite possibly the best ones I've seen.
Thanks go to Robin for sharing!
Mental note, don't try to install the windows version of the vmware server console under wine it b0rks your system. Well it did mine :( Always try and go with the native install no matter how rubbish the installer is.
©2008 paulmellors.net | Paul Mellors. All Rights Reserved.
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Discovered this today, thanks to John M Anderson for the heads up
©2008 paulmellors.net | Paul Mellors. All Rights Reserved.
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I had some blood drawn today. I'm not sure it was a good idea after a hard weekend (more on that in a later post), but there you go. The reason I was having blood drawn is that one of the PhD students in my office at work needed some as a comparison for something or other with the work they're doing. I'm also a nice person, so I could hardly refuse when asked. Bugger.
I was dead impressed with the setup - the plan was to take 50ml in five 10ml bottles. I had my arm stuck with a needle attached to what looked like a syringe body, and then the bottles were placed inside the body and magically filled up. Presumably the needle extends into the body and pricks the self healing membrane on the bottle. Good stuff, even if I'm sure it's been standard forever - I haven't seen it close up before.
One of the bottles didn't fill up fully (stupid arm), so the nurse asked if I'd mind doing another one. This meant she had to cross the room and get another bottle, leaving me holding the needle. "Don't push it in", she said. It was all fine until after everything was finished when I started to feel pretty faint, which is a horrid feeling. I was covered in sweat and had to lie down for at least five minutes to recover.
I'm annoyed by this. Intellectually I have no problem with needles and whatnot. That's not to say I enjoy injections, but they don't freak me out. It's just my body that wants its own way.
Given that ~55mL ain't exactly gallons, I was interested in the volume of blood given when donating and the volume in the average human. According to wikianswers, the approximate blood volume of a 75kg male is 5625ml. I therefore gave ~1% of my blood compared to the 8-10% of your blood volume that the National Blood Service say is taken during a donation. Golly, I fail.
The really intesting thing for me were the other numbers on the wikianswers page, notably the difference in mL of blood per kg for males and females, which is 75ml/kg and 65ml/kg respectively. That means an average 75kg male/female will have a difference of 750ml of blood. How very interesting!
Dear Lazy web
To the prick that cut me up this morning, "fuck you" and don't ever let me find you.....
©2008 paulmellors.net | Paul Mellors. All Rights Reserved.
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I've been playing with a minimal interface on my Ubuntu Laptop lately. I've been using the ion2 window manager, and becuase of this i've wanted to find decent command line applications.
The first one ive found is Opheus, it's a command line audio player, take a look here for a screen shot [apologies to the author, if you let me know your name, i'll credit you with the link]
To read more about it, check out the website
The hunt continues.....
©2008 paulmellors.net | Paul Mellors. All Rights Reserved.
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Another thing I didn't intend writing about...
Inspired by them appearing on Clurb's blog, I've added support for displaying gravatars in comments. That's the only reason to enter your email, it doesn't get used for anything else.
It seems there are a few things I want to write about here, but I don't want to do a load of posts all at once. This isn't what I wanted to write about today though. Grr.
Anyway, as those of you following me on twitter will be aware, the house next door to me was on fire this morning. As I was getting up and getting ready I heard someone banging on a door very vigorously and shouting as well. Looking out the window I saw - oh bugger - a fair bit of smoke coming out of the first floor flat next door. The fire brigade turned up in due course and were very efficient, although I'm not entirely sure that three tenders and a car were strictly required for this particular fire. No ambulance arrived and there was no evidence anybody was hurt which is good, but the engines didn't block me in at all so I still had to go to work.
What is the moral of this story? Always leave your camera charged up so you can take pictures to put on the internet.
I need to go on holiday, but I ain't sure where to go. Suggestions, recommendations, condemnations please!
Grand day today. I managed to combine slobbing around with other more useful things. Huzzah. I went to town, bumped into a couple of my running partners from work and had a chat and then even managed to buy things. I bought shoes. I dislike buying shoes most of all things. As I was trying shoes on, I was chatting to the girl who was fetching the shoes for me. She mentioned that she too dislikes buying shoes... but had bought six pairs the other day. This seemed a bit at odds to me, so I quized her some more - it seems that three of the pairs were sandals, but it was ok because she is going on holiday in a few weeks. The mind boggles. I've decided that in an ideal world the solution is to buy shoes a touch more frequently. My problem is that I tend to only buy new shoes when the old ones are falling (fallen) apart. By that point, they're so well moulded to my feet that anything else just feels wrong. By buying more frequently I could have a period of overlap where I have two pairs of shoes that are usable. Crazy talk I realise.
I also bought trousers. I did try to buy jeans as well, but it seems that the vast majority of the jeans these days are slim or super slim cut so I gave up in despair. The jeans I have now "fit well" to my thighs as it is thanks very much.
There was also a mini "French" market in the centre of town. I say "French" because most of it wasn't (unlike the German markets around Christmas time). I did see someone who would've worked an absolute treat as a female bond villain. Blonde, with a particular type of hair style and glasses - think the 80's and Roger Moore era Bond. German or possibly Scandinavian. With this still on my mind I saw another one - dark, slick back hair, big sunglasses and definitely German, definitely evil. No sign of any spies though (or explosions).
I was also tickled by the natural health product type stall with natural pumice marked as "not tested on animals". Er, pumice? Right. Glad to know. Other odd things I noticed during the day were the sign outside a pound shop - "use a basket, save your arms" (they're obviously anti-gravity baskets) and the cherry picker with bootees on its tyres (think formula 1 style tyre warmers). Why? I don't know.
After cooking a yummy spaghetti carbonara (too much spaghetti), I popped along to the cinema for the first time in ages and saw Hancock. I enjoyed it, but I'm not really sure it decided what it wanted to be. It didn't really seem to get going that much, but maybe that's just me (it seems to happen a lot these days).
Edit:
I knew I'd forget something. I got engaged in eye contact by a charity-person-with-a-clipboard. Joy. Actually this doesn't bother me too much unless I'm in a hurry. This one was pitching shelter to me and did a reasonable job. I like to think that I'm slightly more demanding than the average person they talk to (I like to see how much information I can get out of them that isn't directly related to the charity) but the only question she couldn't answer was whether they were making any difference or not (well, more or less). The actual question was "how many new people are there becoming homeless each year?" (given she'd said there are 1.9 million kids on the street and they helped 170,000 last year it'd be useful to know how much of an impact they're making. Are they turning it around? Drowning in a flood)? I didn't sign up.
Just for your updates, i'm no longer using twitter, you can now follow me at http://identi.ca/moodoo
©2008 paulmellors.net | Paul Mellors. All Rights Reserved.
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Wordle.net just popped up on some blogs I read, so I just had to have a play with it. So many fun things, so little time.
I'm a bit of a rush at the moment so here are just the links to a couple of images I created:
I've had rather a large amount of connections to my FTP server lately trying to login with the username of administrator, it turns out that they are all ip's from china. I've known about iptables for awhile, but never really learned about them. My first instinct was to just drop the IP with the command
sudo iptables -A INPUT -s xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx -j DROP
This worked a treat and is all well and good but i didn't fancy typing in that line for every IP that tried to bugger my connections so here's what i did
1, sudo touch /etc/iptables.sav
2, sudo chmod 777 /etc/iptables.sav
3, sudo iptables-save > /etc/iptables.sav
4, vim /etc/iptables.sav and add these lines into it. The lines with DROP at the end are IP ranges from china and surrounding areas. The last 4 lines tell the system to drop the ip after 3 failed connections for 120 seconds.
-A INPUT -s 222.0.0.0/255.0.0.0 -j DROP
-A INPUT -s 220.0.0.0/254.0.0.0 -j DROP
-A INPUT -s 218.0.0.0/254.0.0.0 -j DROP
-A INPUT -s 210.0.0.0/254.0.0.0 -j DROP
-A INPUT -s 202.0.0.0/254.0.0.0 -j DROP
-A INPUT -s 124.0.0.0/254.0.0.0 -j DROP
-A INPUT -s 120.0.0.0/252.0.0.0 -j DROP
-A INPUT -s 116.0.0.0/252.0.0.0 -j DROP
-A INPUT -s 114.0.0.0/254.0.0.0 -j DROP
-A INPUT -s 60.0.0.0/254.0.0.0 -j DROP
-A INPUT -s 58.0.0.0/254.0.0.0 -j DROP
-A INPUT -s 200.0.0.0/254.0.0.0 -j DROP
-A INPUT -s 188.0.0.0/254.0.0.0 -j DROP
-A INPUT -s 186.0.0.0/254.0.0.0 -j DROP
-A INPUT -i eth1 -p tcp -m tcp --dport 22 -m state --state NEW -m recent --set --name DEFAULT --rsource
-A INPUT -i eth1 -p tcp -m tcp --dport 22 -m state --state NEW -m recent --update --seconds 120 --hitcount 3 --name DEFAULT --rsource -j DROP
-A INPUT -i eth1 -p tcp -m tcp --dport 21 -m state --state NEW -m recent --set --name DEFAULT --rsource
-A INPUT -i eth1 -p tcp -m tcp --dport 21 -m state --state NEW -m recent --update --seconds 120 --hitcount 3 --name DEFAULT --rsource -j DROP
5, save the file and run sudo iptables-restore < /etc/iptables.sav
6, run sudo iptables -L and make sure all your rules are added [please note if you've a big list this can take awhile as it does do DNS lookups.
©2008 paulmellors.net | Paul Mellors. All Rights Reserved.
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I've moved my Ubuntu webserver to a VMWARE platform, as i've done this i now have a spare machine, with 3 hdd's in it. So i figured i'd use this as a backup server. now what's the best way to do this? samba? rsync over ssh? Nah i'm going to use NFS. Here's how i did it. Thanks to Ubuntu Geek
On the Server
On the Desktop/Other Server
©2008 paulmellors.net | Paul Mellors. All Rights Reserved.
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Chatting to Lizzy at Lestival, the Leicester juggling convention, today (which was a really good day) she mentioned some of the photos that she'd taken at the EJC in Ireland. This got me thinking - what did I do with mine? I've found them and will be uploading them when I can (there are some good ones as well), but in the meantime I'd like to share a video with you. Remember this?
I'm playing with mail servers at the moment, so if you know me and would like a mailbox that's pop/imap/smtp and webmail and you don't mind that it's only 10 meg storage, and @fabmail.org then can you email me at paul.mellors@fabmail.org with the username [the bit before @] and i'll set you one up.
Please note if you do use a mailbox on my server, it's not quick, it's not a commercial server and it can go down at any time for any length of time [my own email is on there so i do like to keep the server up]
I'm only doing this for 100 users at the moment. First come first served.
©2008 paulmellors.net | Paul Mellors. All Rights Reserved.
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I took the time out this afternoon and last night, to move my webserver to Heron. It was running CentOS [which is a damn good OS and close to what we use at work RHEL], but i wanted to be a Ubuntu house….and apart from my Windows mail server, i am
It pretty much went
1, install ubuntu
2, install apache, mysql and php
3, restore my mysql db’s, the apache confs, etc
4, ENJOY
Creating a webserver is rather easy, and i’m hearing of a little project that might make things even easier, check it out here - rapache
©2008 paulmellors.net | Paul Mellors. All Rights Reserved.
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Just got my hands on a creative labs webcam, model PD1130 which looking at my mug in cheese, works out of the box
1, tail -f /var/log/messages
2, plug in the mouse look for this
Jun 13 14:29:06 desktop kernel: [20558.848138] usb 4-1: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 3
Jun 13 14:29:06 desktop kernel: [20559.021990] usb 4-1: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
Jun 13 14:29:06 desktop kernel: [20559.028415] /build/buildd/linux-ubuntu-modules-2.6.24-2.6.24/debian/build/build-generic/media/gspcav1/gspca_core.c: USB GSPCA camera found.(ZC3XX)
3, start up cheese and produce something like this If you have a cheese pic [no not the food as some of my friends have sent me] then send them to paul at paulmellors dot net
©2008 paulmellors.net | Paul Mellors. All Rights Reserved.
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Now that the Ubuntu Membership has been split into regional boards, I’ve noticed the amount of new people on Planet Ubuntu is increasing on a daily basis, i really need to start thinking about membership, but that’s where the problem lies. What can i do? I’m not a developer, designer, i can’t write docs very well, i don’t speak any other languages to help with translations and with a baby due in September i don’t have the time to promote Ubuntu to the people in the street….help!!!!
I suspect this is a problem with a lot of Ubuntu users who want membership….am i wrong?
©2008 paulmellors.net | Paul Mellors. All Rights Reserved.
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One of the great things about ubuntu is the Wubi, you can install Ubuntu without partitioning your machine, people say it’s not as fast as actually installing it, but to tell you what. I’ve not really noticed a difference. OK so it’s a little slower on boot, but once it’s in it seems great.
I’m wondering when the other distros will have something like this. How many people want to try Linux without having the hassle of partitioning or destroying their windows partition?
©2008 paulmellors.net | Paul Mellors. All Rights Reserved.
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Just installed the beta 3 install on my laptop, and it’s good I’m really surprised just how quick the install is, and it looks a lot better than the previous version. The only problem i had was with the graphics, i had to run the monitor detection program again so i could add the 1280×800 wxga to my setup, other than that it worked fine. Now just have to download the 1009 updates maybe with 21 days to go i should have waited for the release? NAH!
I’ve been using openSUSE for a bit, and am starting to like it [not enough to actually install it on my laptop rather than the VirtualBox], i’ve also decided to start an SUSE diary so i can blog about my trials and tribulations, rathen than have it hog the ubuntu planet my posts from this blog get syndicated on, i’ve created it in another blog set up. Announcing SUSE Diary
©2008 paulmellors.net | Paul Mellors. All Rights Reserved.
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Aparently i’m not the first with this idea, [thanks treb0r]
So my idea scrapped - go visit - http://ubuntuweblogs.org
©2008 paulmellors.net | Paul Mellors. All Rights Reserved.
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Number 1 - “If you are an Ubuntu Member, and would like your blog aggregated here”
Now this is on planet.ubuntulinux.org, hmmm i’m guessing it’s a privalege of ubuntu membership, but what if i’d like to get my blog [ubuntu related] out to more people?
Cut to the chase, i’ve created http://www.planetubuntu.org
There are no requirements, if you use ubuntu and are anywhere in the world and want to plug your self, visit the site, click the “email paul link” and i’ll add your feed.
Yes i know there are other planets out there, but not one that everyone and any one can use, i mean i’m not going to get on the new york loco planet am i [do they have one?]
/me waits for the flack and negative comments.
I’ll pretty-fi the graphics soon.
** UPDATE **
Aparently i’m not the first with this idea, [thanks treb0r]
So my idea scrapped - go visit - http://ubuntuweblogs.org
©2008 paulmellors.net | Paul Mellors. All Rights Reserved.
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Reading New Scientist today, they had an article on "Five things humans no longer need" (which are the Vomeronasal organ, Goose bumps, Darwin's point, Tail bone and Wisdon teeth apparently).
The one that caught my eye was Darwin's point (also known as Darwin's tubercle is "a congenital ear condition which often presents as a thickening on the helix at the junction of the upper and middle thirds". It is present in "approximately 10.4% of the population". I'm intrigued because I'm sure that I have that feature and I didn't think it was that uncommon. So tell, dear reader, do you "suffer" from this congenital disorder? (check the wikipedia link for a picture).
I don’t know about you but if i’m using the terminal my screen tends to get cluttered if i’m using a few of them, enter Terminator - Multiple GNOME terminals in one window.
Think this says it all - link
I’m using Hardy Heron, the command below will install it.
sudo apt-get install terminator
©2008 paulmellors.net | Paul Mellors. All Rights Reserved.
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As i’m running a test envioronment using Fedora9, i thought i’d have a go at installing the live cd onto a USB key, turns out it was quite simple
1, download the fedora9 live cd
2, install the livecd-tools - yum install livecd-tools
3, determine where your USB key is mounted - use the df -h command, /media/disk is the USB key so it’s /dev/sdb1
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00
35G 6.8G 26G 21% /
/dev/sda1 99M 19M 76M 20% /boot
tmpfs 501M 12K 501M 1% /dev/shm
/dev/sdb1 2.0G 0 2.0G 0% /media/disk
4, cd to the folder with the livecd iso and as a super user
livecd-iso-to-disk –overlay-size-mb 1000 Fedora-9-Live-i686.iso /dev/sdb1
If i’m not mistaken, the overlay gives you 1000mb space for your own files.
You’ll then get something like
Verifying image…
Fedora-9-Live-i686.iso: 17d675e98a44754d41ba0d93f485ffa3
Fragment sums: 7dba468e8adf87c776ae4a15a871426ba74dba1187adb2a6807c1e124a34
Fragment count: 20
Percent complete: 100.0% Fragment[20/20] -> OK
100.0
The media check is complete, the result is: PASS.
It is OK to use this media.
Copying live image to USB stick
Updating boot config file
Installing boot loader
USB stick set up as live image!
5, Reboot
Note, in order to boot your USB key, you need to make sure your BIOS is capable of booting from a USB device, not all motherboards support this. If it does, change the boot order to boot from USB first. ENJOY
©2008 paulmellors.net | Paul Mellors. All Rights Reserved.
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While Fedora 9 appears to be a great release they have to go and spoil it by bundling Firefox 3, what a bag of shite that is turning out to be, especially on my laptop, i can hardly type a sentence/URL without it locking up….garbage. Luckily i’ve installed the epiphany web browser which doesn’t appear to be behaving in the same way….If it was a problem with Fedora i wouldn’t moan, but it’s not, imo it’s what ever distro it’s bundled with has the same problem. How many “but it’s only beta” comments am i going to get i wonder?
©2008 paulmellors.net | Paul Mellors. All Rights Reserved.
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From the announce list.
An ancient text prophesised this day would come, detailing the fate of all who are willing to accept what is offered to them: http://docs.fedoraproject.org/release-notes/f9/index.html And that day has come: the Computer said “I will convert these unbelievers, and now that I have Sulphur it will be easy.” At that, the heavens opened and burning Sulphur descended upon all the world, taking on many different forms. First to hit were the live USB keys. The heathens cried out for mercy, but were powerless to resist. The sticks were damn persistent and non-destructively formatted - non-destructively! They showed up everywhere, casting out demons from computers infected by the dark one of the interwebs and rescuing lost data from the influence of the evil crackers. Then, when they thought it couldn’t get any worse, the whole world was cast into shadow. Lit only by the dim light from their computer screens, they discovered a mysterious message scrolling across: “K K K K K K K K 4 4 4 4 4 4″. The screens flickered, and the light flooded out so that the shadow was lifted. After their eyes had adjusted they saw something so beautiful, teeming with so much potential that they began to break down. KDE 4 was on their desktops! The descent gathered pace; next to hit the ground was FreeIPA. At first this puzzled what remained of the heathens, but then they realized…they realized that it was going to make system administrators lives a lot easier! A web interface and command line tools, interacting with Windows domains and Active Directories? It was all getting too much for them. Conversions were happening faster and faster, only aided by mobile broadband, static IP addresses, and much much more in NetworkManager. Now, only a few doubters remained and what pushed them over the edge? The community, stupid! Tirelessly working to push out great code, great documentation and great artwork, inviting everyone to join where ever they were in the name of freedom. http://join.fedoraproject.org And the Computer, seeing that his work was accomplished and it was good, decided to rest. Pointing his browser at the Fedora mirrors, he switched off his monitor and waited for his Sulphur to return to him through the internet tubes, ready to enjoy another great release from the Fedora Project. http://get.fedoraproject.org http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/9/ReleaseSummary
©2008 paulmellors.net | Paul Mellors. All Rights Reserved.
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After posting earlier about having problems with Ubuntu Server and mysql I was given a little lesson in command line mysql by Philip Newborough [thanks]
I think i’ll pass it on. My problem was creating mysql users/databases via phpmyadin which left me unable to import my .sql files. Here’s what i had to do.
1, mysql –user=”root” –password=”your_root_password” - This connects to the mysql server as root
2, CREATE USER ‘new_username’@'localhost’ IDENTIFIED BY ‘password_for_new_username’;
3, GRANT ALL ON *.* TO ‘new_username’@'localhost’;
4, create database databasename;
I could then import my .sql files using -
mysql -u<username> -p database < databasefile.sql
If you’re reading this post then you’re reading it on my shiny new install of Ubuntu Heron Server 8.04 LTS.
©2008 paulmellors.net | Paul Mellors. All Rights Reserved.
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I was using CentOS as a web server and while it worked fine i wanted to use a debian based server. I downloaded the Heron LTS iso and installed it, rather than install a LAMP system from the install i did a basic install so i could install the AMP parts manually. All went well until i wanted to restore my mysql databases. I use phpmyadmin to create databases because i’m lazy and it’s easy to click the priveleges link, add the usename/password job done but when i used the mysql command to import the .sql files, this is where it went tits up. For some reason it kept giving me
ERROR 1045 (28000) : Access denied for user: ‘myusername@localhost’ (Using password: YES)
I knew the username and password was correct but apprently it’s something to do with the user information being wrong in the user table….don’t ask me what, i gave up after a while and installed debian etch which i knew would work straight away…….
I’ll figure it out but until i do, debian [which i think is actually quicker on my machine than CentOS] will stay on it.
©2008 paulmellors.net | Paul Mellors. All Rights Reserved.
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1, download the rpm from here
2, install pam-devel [ a requirement for VirtualBox]
3, rpm -Uvh the VirtualBox rpm
4, add your username to the vboxusers group
5, reboot
6, ENJOY
©2008 paulmellors.net | Paul Mellors. All Rights Reserved.
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It was my brother's wedding this weekend. I went down to Bedford on Friday night and chatted and ate with the other people that were there - most notably my Uncle Stephen who was over from America as well as various people from the bride's arena. All good fun, especially when my Mum produced presents for the couple in the form of a book of memories of Stewart. I spent a good while looking through it, remembering things and having a good laugh at others. Not that I was the only one - Helen and her bridesmaids were highly amused by Stewart's hair in days gone by.
Sleeping arrangements were slightly unfortunate. I was sharing a room with Stewart for the first night, but somehow the hotel had run out of twins / messed up somewhere so for his last night of freedom my brother was sharing a bed with me. He slept much better than I did and only tried to cuddle me the once.
It was quite nice with the wedding being at 2pm because there wasn't really much to do in the morning - well for us at least. The women were having hair appointments and what not whilst we were slouching around in jeans. Once at the church we had a bit of a run through with the vicar, who was a fantastic bloke. I was best man so actually had things to do. After that there was general waiting around with people coming in and all asking Stewart whether he was feeling nervous.
I've not really thought of weddings from the point of view of when you're stood waiting. Everybody looks at the bride walking up but the groom and best man just have to stand there and take it on faith that she's there. The ceremony went as you'd expect with one exception - Helen's sister Laura sang Ave Maria which was just amazing. After the signing I was given the wedding certificate to look after. Eeek! More responsibility. The weather held out for the photos (it was nice all weekend actually). My Mum has been very industrious and got some photos online already: http://photos.helenandstewart.com/.
Back at the hotel there were more photos for the couple and arrival drinks for everybody else. After the receiving line we were ready for the meal. Bugger - speeches before eating. Both the father of the bride and my brother gave great speeches and then it was down to me. I'd practised quite a bit and knew what I wanted to say, but then (as when I did a speech at my sister's wedding) went on to change it quite a bit. Funny thing that. The gist of the main bit of it was that Stewart hurts himself spectacularly sometimes (only slightly awkward at points - audience unsure as to whether to laugh at him breaking his back for instance :). It all went well really though and when I produced some swimming arm bands for him in case he went swimming when on honeymoon it was definitely well received. Hurrah!
Post food I tried to chat to as many people as I could. This was made slightly easier by having been given a chunk of cash to buy people drinks with rather than having an amount behind the bar. It's even better like that because I got the glory for buying the drinks even though it wasn't really me doing the buying. At one point I was talking to some of Helen's colleagues and my Mother wandered over and proceeded to tell them that I was a nice boy and single. Thanks for that Mum :)
Sunday consisted of tidying up, waiting for people to leave and then going for lunch at a pub with some of S&H's friends and then on to home.
i had a thoroughly good time, chatted to lots of people, discovered that Helen has about a million cousins and even had a bit of a boogie. I'm very glad that today is a bank holiday and I'm not at work though...
More weddings please.
Not happy. Walking home after a late night celebrating a colleague's 30th, I witnessed a guy getting the stuffing kicked out of him on the other side of the road. There were at least five or six people involved so being of the sensible type, I put my head down and carried on just like everybody else.
Having got out of sight, I waited until they'd buggered off and started back off up the street. The people involved all decided to come out of the house they'd gone into, so I was forced to keep on going again.
As the guy on the floor hadn't moved at all since they'd stopped, I made my first ever 999 call. Which service do I want? Well I'm honestly not sure. A bit of everything would probably be about right. Having explained the situation briefly I got put to a very competent and pleasant despatcher for the police. I was told that someone else had mentioned something similar and that they'd sent an ambulance and police to the scene. All good.
I start heading back and there's nobody around, so I cross over and chat to the guy. He's obviously in a fair amount of pain. I tell him that an ambulance is coming and that I'll stick around until it arrives and try to keep him talking, but he isn't terribly responsive. Annoyingly, a police car goes by and I don't notice so don't flag it down. Some official presence would've put me much more at ease at that point. An ambulance goes past on blues.
Someone else passes around now and stops to make sure the guy is ok. A further person comes out of a nearby house having "heard a commotion". The first guy seems to share knowledge with the second guy that I don't. An ambulance pulls up, which is good because I was feeling distinctly as though I was treading closer to areas I don't want to visit. Paramedic number one gets out and starts to deal with the victim. Paramedic number two is on the radio. I wander round to the door and when he gets out give him a quick run down of what I've seen (which is probably more annoying than useful). Mindful of a certain Reynolds, I tell him to take care and keep up the good work.
The victim is sitting up now and everything seems to be under control. I'm pretty surplus to requirements, so I head off home. As I'm leaving a police car pulls up. I hope the guy is ok.
Am I a good samaritan? Well maybe. The truth of the matter is that I can't live with myself when I don't do the right thing in those kinds of situations. If I knowingly didn't do anything it'd plague me forever.
It's now quarter to four. Long day!
