Joe Fleming dot net

I know I said before that I would be replacing WordPress with Drupal around here, and I did start working on that. However, the more I read about Drupal, the harder it seems to do custom things. Actually, it’s more a problem of poor documentation than it is a lack of flexibility. Still, if I don’t know what I’m doing, it’s hard to learn anything.

Granted, I could easily replace WordPress for the sake of my blog here (and probably still will at some point), but that’s not why I was planning to learn it. I wanted something that would allow me to crank out new pages quickly without constantly restarting from scratch. I do have a very weak framework I’ve written to try to achieve this, but every time I start a new site, I feel compelled to re-do at least part of it, so in the end I don’t save any time. In fact, I lose time because I have to re-learn the changes I made for each site when I need to maintain them.

So, I had some Real Media (rm) videos that I wanted to view in Linux. But, like so many other sane people out there, I didn’t want anything to do with the official Real Player for Linux. I’ve never been a fan of Real and I’ve always thought their software was a bloated mess. Plus, why install yet another media player when I know I can get the job done with the mighty Mplayer?!

A quick search on Ubuntu Forums yielded this post. Following the link posted, here’s how I got it working from the command line:

$ sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/hardy.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d medibuntu.list
$ wget -q http://packages.medibuntu.org/medibuntu-key.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add - && sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install non-free-codecs w32codecs

After that, the videos fired right up without a hitch. Brilliant! One thing to note: these codecs may be illegal in the US. I’ve read warning about them in the past anyway, though I didn’t happen to see any this time around. It’s kind of a legal gray area I guess, and while you’re not likely to get in trouble for using them, it’s something you should probably know. In any event, if you’re having problems playing videos in Linux (especially rm files), give this a shot.

In an effort to save time when I put together sites for people, I’ve been working on a universal engine I can use. It is modeled loosely off the MercuryBoard code and, for the most part, has served me pretty well. Recently, I’ve tried to revamp it with more object oriented code, integrating PEAR and a few other niceties. Still, the more and more I use it, the more I realize it saves me very little time. In fact, it actually costs me time when I have to go back and update the sites. It seems, sadly, the idea of a flexible CMS or framework is just too abstract for my skills.

I’ve spent some time reading about Symfony, which looks like an amazing project. I’m positive I can make it do anything I would need, but the learning curve is pretty steep and I’m worried that the time I’d take to learn it wouldn’t really pay off in the end. I like a lot of the concepts, but I’m just not completely sold on it.

So what does that have to do with WordPress? Well, I’ve recently revisited a project that I spent some time with in the past but never really did much with. That project is Drupal.

Apparently one of the people Aaron works with called him out on his programming and computer use history and he posted his response on his blog. In that blog, he took the liberty of calling out a few of his friends, myself included. I put off responding because my computer crapped out on me again. Now that I’m back up and running, here is my response. Enjoy.

I’ve always been a “do it yourself” kind of web developer, but after reinventing the wheel time and time again and struggling to make my code work in the various different browsers out there, I’ve come to appreciate that I can save a TON of time through different libraries and toolkits. I’m no Javascript pro (though I am the resident guru at work), but I find the language interesting. Ever since Google came along and showed the world that Javascript can be used for more than just popups and other web annoyances, I’ve been enthralled with some of the cool things people have done with Javascript. From AJAX to Comet, simple DHTML to animations, it’s simply been an amazing evolution.

About a year ago, Aaron tipped me off to the magic of Javascript toolkits, specifically Dojo. For a while, I was a proponent of it, opting to use it exclusively to drive an internal application that I had written from the ground up at work. It’s an extremely powerful toolkit which has been steadily adding more functionality as it ages to that point that it’s arguably the most powerful toolkit on the market. Unfortunately, I’ve also found it to be one of the most poorly documented toolkits available as well, which I’m sure was due in part to my lackluster understanding of some of the more advanced Javascript concepts. Still, looking at some of the more advanced Dojo examples I’ve seen from Aaron and other sources online, most of the syntax escapes me completely, even as I continue to learn more and more about Javascript.

Many ISPs these days employ traffic shaping to make their networks run smoother. In the most basic sense, they give priority to more critical traffic, like VoIP for instance, and slow down less important traffic, like HTTP and Torrents. Lately, many ISPs have been doing their best to slap down any peer-to-peer (p2p) traffic, especially Bittorrent, because users are are consuming more bandwidth than the ISPs can handle. This is a result of the ISPs grossly overselling their networks and expecting most consumers to use a tiny fraction of their connection, a practice that worked great until more and more users became heavy consumers thanks to sites like YouTube and technologies like BitTorrent.

Now, I’m not saying that ISPs are doing anything wrong in overselling per se, but I do have a problem with them not properly planning for the future. Now that they have this bandwidth problem, instead of expending their networks to try and meet demands, they are using more and more restrictive filtering, sometimes even resorting to hacker-style packet injection in their traffic, nearly crippling whatever technology it is that people would like to use (and pay to use). Not only is this a very shady thing to do on their part, but in nearly all cases, they hide this fact from consumers and outright deny that anything is going on. They get away with all of this thanks to their monopolies in their select markets. But I won’t get in to all of that.

As in any other situation where one party tries to control another party, people are finding that there are many ways to get around this type of filtering.

I’ve seen all kinds of really cool projects that use the fancy new Arduino microcontroller. I’m not the biggest fan of C or C++ (to be honest, I hate them both), but the Wiring model and the Processing environment seems interesting. So much so that I decided over this long weekend that I wanted to get in on the fun on purchased a kit from Adafruit. Sure I could have gotten it cheaper and ditched all the extras, but it seemed reasonable given that it comes with the Protoshield, breadboard, a couple power options, USB cable and some extra goodies to get me started out of the box. I figured it was all worth it.

I have some ideas for the normal automated plant watering, temperature-based fan controls and email and chat LED alerts, but I don’t have any revolutionary plans for the device. Talking to Jason, he gave me the idea of controlling motors with the unit which got me thinking back to the Assembly-based cars we coded for in college. I can see putting together a little car that can sense and route around obstacles and he suggested mounting some IR transmitters to turn TVs in the area on and off at random, which would be pretty fun too. I caught this “Large scale DOT Matric printer” on Hackaday too, which made me think about feeding images into the device and having it drive motors to actually create them on a large scale either like a DOT Matrix printer or a planer.

Anyway, we’ll see how much I do with this thing and how far I get. If nothing else, it’s an excuse to get back into hardware hacking. And if things go well, I can actually start posting projects up here. If you have any ideas for cool things to try out or questions about the unit, please post in the comments.

I’ve been growing increasingly concerned with the quality of hard drives being made today. It used to be that a hard drive would last you many years before you’d see a failure out of it. In fact, I still have hard drives that date back to the early 90′s that continue to work to this day. I can’t say the same for more recent drives, especially those that have been made in the last year or two, as I’ve just been constantly dealing with failed hard drives on my machines. I’ll preface my most recent experience with a little history first.

The Preface

I recently upgraded my raid machine, which is simply a low-power PC in a large case with four hard drives in it all set up as a Linux software RAID-5 array. Previously, I had used four 160GB IDE drives hooked up in the machine using a PCI controller card. That was fine for storage a few years ago when I built it, but recently I’ve managed to fill the thing, so it was clearly time for an upgrade. Considering that the entire array was less than a single 500GB drive, it’s not too surprising.

My plan was to buy four 500GB drives and increase the array to 1.5TB, but before the planned migration, I decided to buy a new 500GB drive on which to back up the current array. Sure I could have replaced the drives one by one, rebuilding the array each time and expending the partition when I was all done, but the machine was never quite set up the way I wanted it to be, and since I wanted to switch from IDE to SATA, I would have had a lot of tweaking to do. I also wasn’t sure how far I was stretching the PSU in the machine, because while it was running a low power VIA CPU, it was still powering five hard drives (the array and the main system drive). Backing everything up to another drive and starting a new array from scratch just made more sense, so that’s exactly what I did.

As you may or may not know, Ubuntu doesn’t include a build environment by default. What this means is that in order to compile program from source, you’ll need to get the build environment on your own. This is simple enough though, as outlined below:

sudo apt-get install build-essential checkinstall

This will install 2 things, the build environment (build-essential) and a program that will allow you to install your compiled code as a .deb package (checkinstall). Installing your code as a deb means that you can easily remove it on your own using apt instead of hunting down files and removing them by hand. Instead you just issue apt-get remove PACKAGE as root and it’s gone.

I learned this while getting a VPN tunnel through Torrent Freedom working. In order to use their service, you have to be running a Beta build of OpenVPN. Since the version in the Ubuntu repository is NOT the Beta, it won’t work with that version. So, you have to roll your own, but it’s easier than you might think.

Well, as you can plainly see (assuming you’ve been here before), the site has gotten a facelift. Now that Aaron has his blog up and his looking really nice, I felt compelled to try and jazz up mine a little too. It’s not done, but it’s nicer than it was. I’ll probably add a touch of color to the theme, but it’ll work for now. BTW, it’s based off the Milc 3.5 theme. The code isn’t super pretty, but it was a good start.

While I was working with the design, I realized that I needed to send over my old bit of code that opened links in new windows. As anyone trying to make valid XHML pages can tell you, the target attribute is no longer valid, so if you want pages to open in a new window and you still want your design to validate properly, you have to do a little scripting. I actually found this script a couple years ago to make MediaWiki links open in new windows and it’s served me quite well ever since.