Joe Fleming dot net

If you Google “ubuntu flash sound” you’ll find a LOT of information about flash sound problems and how to fix them. The consensus seems to be installing alsa-oss and configuring Firefox to use it. However, try as I may, I couldn’t get it to work. Then I read somewhere that you needed to set other programs to use Alsa instead of OSS, and that did the trick. YouTube seems to lock up Firefox from time to time so I’m still waiting on a more permanent fix, but this works well enough for now.

All of the domains that I oversee (and those of most all my friends as well) all live on a server on DreamHost. Their plans are amazing; tons of storage space, tons of bandwidth, unlimited domains and emails, shell access and a slick administration tool. That being said, I’ve always stuck with PHP because it’s all I know and it’s very simple to get working. That all changed recently when a friend of mine and I decided it would be fun to learn Python.

DreamHost is an amazing hosting company. Not the best or fastest servers in the world, but by FAR the cheapest and plenty enough for our needs (and apparently the needs of MANY others too). I learned this weekend that their support for running python over their FastCGI (which you have to use) doesn’t work as advertised though. And even when I scoured the ‘net for answers they all said the same thing. The defacto tutorial seems to be A tale of Pylons, Python and FastCGI on Dreamhost, referenced by several sources and many people in the forums. Sadly, that tutorial doesn’t work as-is, if it ever did. It’s extremely close, but not complete. I also found a tutorial for rolling your own Python and combined the two (along with this forum post) to get it all working. This worked for me and I’m guessing it’ll work for a lot of other people trying to run Python on a DreamHost server (and not using Django I should add).

I’ve been using VirtualBox for a while now after finding it in Automatix in Ubuntu. Anyway, until now, I’ve been perfectly happy not using USB devices with it. For the most part, I still am, but I was curious how hard it was to set up, so I looked it up. Here’s what I found (originally posted here)

-Install the other OS

-Create a group called “usbfs” and add yourself to it.

groupadd usbfs
usermod -aG usbfs 

-Edit /etc/fstab and add the following, changing the group ID to match that of the usbfs group you just added (tail /etc/group)

# 1002 is the USB group ID
none /proc/bus/usb usbfs devgid=1002,devmode=664 0 0

-In terminal, issue the following command to see available USB devices

VBoxManage list usbhost

-Use the output of this command to set up the filters for USB devices under VirtualBox.

-Reboot your machine. This is required to both recognize the new group and new mounting options

*USB DEVICES HAVE TO BE UNMOUNTED BEFORE VIRTUAL MACHINE CAN RECOGNIZE THEM*

There it is. Now, simply unmount the USB device from the host OS before booting the guest and you’re good to go.

I’ve set up Mediawiki in a few times now, both at work and for personal use. Each time I do it, I end up having to learn how to set up access restriction again. That is, creating custom namespaces and restricting access to those namespaces to people that belong in specific groups.

The reason I do this is to keep of people out of articles that only privileged users should really be seeing. Articles about server configurations, software development, new ideas for sites, etc. Making a hidden namespace and allowing only specific groups to access it is the simplest way to go about this task.

Doing this is pretty straightforward. I won’t get in to all the specifics though; instead I’ll post links to the exact information you’ll need to pull it off.

User Rights
Custom Namespaces
Group Permissions
Setting permissions for a Group on a whole new Namespace

There you have it, nice and easy! Now I just need to fix/reinstall our personal wiki….