Jun
17
2005

Other Things To Fix

(Add / View Comments) (0)Friday, June 17, 2005 - 11:37:11 pm
(Posted Under: Development)
Other things I need to fix:

  • Sorting of the !weblog index - it appears sorting within a day by time isn't working 100%
  • Features for the !weblog. Calendar navigation. Something I definately want to write. Oh, I'm becoming such a blog whore. If I ever write a 'comments' module, someone please tell me I've gone too far!
  • Limiting the !weblog by month - or something. I was really keen on the whole all on one page thing, but the page is starting to get damn long, wouldn't you say? I'll still keep an option for displaying them all though
  • Update the form for posting, so if I want to edit, which I always do, I don't have to open vi and deal with XML directly. Oh god, Mark, what are you saying? Yes, I know it goes against everything I believe in, but the fact of the matter is the encoding of the new lines is a bit painful for editting directly. A way to edit an entry through the form would be awesome. Man, it would have been so handy while I was in the US too. Ahh, ssh over dialup, such fun! [razz]
  • Having a default ID generated for each entry. While in the US of A I unintentially came up with a standard scheme, and I really should do some code so it does it automatically, as opposed to making myself type it each time!
  • A whole bunch of other stuff I can't think of right now. Oh, by god, I really need to get my new website (y'know, what you're looking at right now) finished and properly online (not just on my home server). Update on the Alphalink situation, they installed the DOMXML extensions for PHP for me the other week. Kick ass ISP. Really need to finish the codebase, and get the damn thing online online, not just on my server online. Oh yeah, and sort out those damn Internet Explorer CSS problems. Or just force 'Standard' to be the default theme if the user agent is Internet Explorer, and let you Micro$oft-ites feel the wraith of your substandard browser if you choose a theme that has the funky pull down menus. (No Mark, tell us what you really think! [wink] ) The Classic theme at least seems to work well in IE. As a side note, I couldn't believe my parents were viewing this in Netscape 4.x while I was away. Talk about sexy rendering! [wink]
So much code, so little time. [wink]

I'm sure it'll be much more fun than dealing with the god awful ugly code I'm cleaning up / enhancing for work at the moment. [razz]
Jun
17
2005

Need To Fix My Bittorrent Scripts!

(Add / View Comments) (0)Friday, June 17, 2005 - 11:16:13 pm
(Posted Under: Development)
So quite a while ago (maybe a year ago) I wrote this cool system, using just shell scripts, to bring programs up and down based on Alphalink usage tarrifs. Basically so I could have my downloads happen at night. Moduled largely on the SysV init system. (Which I don't overly miss *hugs Gentoo's init system*). Not soon after, I modified the bittorrent script to not kill the torrents, but suspend them when I didn't want them running. The motivation was two fold - 1) saves the md5sum checking of files every night, and 2) there was no good way to automate starting bittorrent inside of a screen - I think. Again, memory hazy!) This worked so nicely on Debian.

However, once I changed to Gentoo (November '04), which I'm sure I'll blog about when I have some time, they stopped working flawlessly. Basically it's a problem with determining the PIDs of the bittorrent process - I write 3 to a pid file, rather than one. It's really becoming a pain in the ass - each time I start a new torrent, I have to make sure the right single pid is in the pid file. Must fix when have time.

Speaking of which, I pulled down another Poison DVD (amature recording before you gasp and call your lawers! [wink] ) last night. Sweeeet.

It'd be hilarious if there were people still reading this and being able to make sense of any of the entries under 'Geek' or 'Development'! [smile] Katie, you don't count! Okay, okay honey, you do. [smile]
Jun
17
2005

Cygwin ping

(Add / View Comments) (0)Friday, June 17, 2005 - 06:03:21 pm
(Posted Under: Cygwin)
I was playing around with the Cygwin setup the other day. No, actually I was building the latest version of bind in cygwin, and wanted to setup a minimal Cygwin installation on a server - particularly to run bind, to bounce DNS requests to a VPN I connect to via it. (Using ipsec with a 2.6 kernel, neither end points of the VPN can talk down the VPN, blah blah blah. Oh man, it's so nice finally getting local VPN DNS for work by forwarding requests to those zones to another bind server on a machine not hosting the VPN). Hating the Cygwin installer so much (which is a whole nother blog in itself), I was looking into creating a nice base Cygwin installation that I can carry around with me on CD. God it'd be handy, I hate sitting at a machine without Cygwin. And I hate the actual installation process, setup.exe sucks.

So, I didn't actually get around to doing that (actually started working on a replacement for setup.exe), but I did notice that ping is now part of the Cygwin distribution. Way cool, I never have to deal with the crappy Windows ping again! At least not on one of my machines. [wink] No more 'ping <address>' oops ctrl+c 'ping -t <address>' when I forgot I'm in Windows. Cooooool!

Gee, talking about taking long enough to get to the point. [smile]
Jun
17
2005

Internet Usage Stats

(Add / View Comments) (0)Friday, June 17, 2005 - 08:28:06 am
(Posted Under: Geek)
For quite a while I've thought it'd be really cool to have my internet usages stats on my LAN webpages.

Basically I have a local portal on my server, and each page has a left pane with stuff like my server's uptime, whether my internet connection is up and how long it's been up. For a long time I've thought it'd be cool to also have my usage stats on there. However, the only way to get the stats is via a webpage on my ISP - which would have been fine typically, however it's a secure site, with a funky authentication process. Basically meaning that a simple wget and page scrape was out of the question. I've thought about it several times, and figured it just wasn't possible to automate downloading the page.

However last night I had a play around with curl and after about 40 minutes, got it working. Freakin' sweet! An hourly cron job to get the page and parse it, and biggity bam, I now have the usages stats on my portal. Awesome! Beats the hell out of keeping a seperate browser tab open constantly refreshing the page.

I love Linux!

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