Max says…

Avatar

thoughts of a web developer

Pastures New

It is with a heavy heart that I leave Valley Technology today.  As is becoming increasingly common at present, Valley Tech have had to reign in expenses, and unfortunately redundancies are a necessary evil in these hard times.  I am a hard working and enthusiastic web developer with a broad range of skills – so if anyone is hiring, please do get in touch.

Continue in Interactive Bash Loop

Came across a useful keyboard shortcut to continue to the next iteration of an interactive bash for loop.  Let’s say you have something like:

for i in $(cat server_list.txt); do
   ssh -q $i hostname
done

If one of the servers is unresponsive, you can continue to the next iteration with

ctrl + \

Goodreads

I’ve just come across goodreads – another social-networking site, with a difference.  The site lets you add books  you’ve read with arbitrary tags, giving reviews, ratings etc.  The site also offers a REST API that returns XML based on request URIs using OAuth for authentication where required.  I’m going to add some books to it and have a play with the API.

Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex

Having upgraded my Hardy distribution to Intrepd, I can say that I’m impressed.  The changes to the desktop, although subtle, are very much welcome.  I haven’t had any teething troubles with any of my hardware; the only ‘glitch’ I’ve noticed involves the title bars of open applications, it goes transparent now and then – but I’m sure I can put up with it until it gets fixed.  Good work Ubuntu!

Find Excluding SVN

So, you need to take a copy of a subversion working copy, but it has local changes that you also need to copy.  This precludes the use of `svn export` since the local changes won’t be included.  One option is to do an `svn export` anyway, and then `cp -ra` the local changes.  Another solution is to use a find command that excludes subversion metadata, and then copy the resulting files:

`find . -path ‘*/.svn’ -prune -o -type f -print`

I did something similar some time ago, but forgot the command, so here it is for posterity.

Cheezburger Not Ripe Yet

http://icanhascheezburger.com/2008/10/15/funny-pictures-cheezburger-not-ripe-yet/

Playing With Perl Sockets

At work, I have a Snom 360 IP phone that is hooked up to our internal Asterisk PBX.  If I’m listening to music with my headphones in, I’m not always aware that my phone is ringing – some Perl and PHP hacking later, I’ve got a crude (and work-in-progress) solution. [Read more]

Samba: Linux to Linux Gotcha

It’s been a long time coming, but I’ve finally got my machine at work set up using Ubuntu 8.04 rather than Windows XP.  I’ve been using Ubuntu at home almost exclusively for nearly a year now, so it’s good to be able to maintain my workflow from home to work.  One of the problems I had was mounting  my home directory on a server.

On windows, this works fine: you specify a username, a password, and the share you want to connect to and it just works.  The same is almost true with linux: you specify the username, password and share (either on the command line or in /etc/fstab).  However, chances are your local UID will differ from the UID used on the server, so although the mount will succeed, permissions may be a bit iffy.

The solution was to use CIFS rather than the outdate smbfs, and to use the extra uid option:

$ sudo mount -t cifs -o username=user,password=pass,uid=1000 //server/share /local/mount/point

This makes sure that the share you mount is owned by the local user.

Banshee 1.0 – iPod Compatible Media Player

I’ve spoken before on this site about Songbird, a viable Linux alternative to iTunes. Since my original post, I haven’t really kept up with Songbird; perhaps I should have; perhaps I will. However, in the meantime I have had Banshee 1.0 brought to my attention.

I originally used Banshee as it’s UI is similar to iTunes. I have also spoken before that although I am right at home with Ubuntu and Linux in general, I do miss a good media manager; iTunes ticks all the boxes for me and is indispensable since I use an iPod. Banshee has pulled out the stops with the recent release of it’s first major release, version 1.0

Banshee 1.0 is a massive improvement on the older version that I had initially dismissed as being too clunky; so much so that I’m going to use it instead of Rhythmbox. Although not compatible with the most recent iPod software, it is fully compatible if you reinitialise your library and use an older version of the software on your iPod. Since I don’t really use video or images on my iPod that’s fine by me.

The interface is much cleaner and it is clear that a lot of time has been spent polishing it. Last.FM is built in, as is a ‘favourites’ and ‘recently added’ play list. These last features were missing from Rhythmbox and I really liked them in iTunes. In addition, there is an “Unheard” playlist – now I can make a point of listening to the tracks that I forgot I even had!

In summary – a big thumbs up from me to the Banshee development team. Banshee 1.0 is a more mature and usable piece of software that it’s predecessor and I look forward to seeing it develop further. Having said that, I will take another look at Songbird…

Juno

I’ve just finished watching Juno and I can say it is a fantastic film.  Well written, well performed, and a great sound track.  Well worth a watch!

Next,