I bought a totally sweet Acer TravelMate 8200 for $330 from GraysOnline. It's got 2GB RAM with an Intel Core Duo 2GHZ. It's super quick. Even has a dual layer DVD burner and a 256MB ATI video card.

I just put Hardy Heron on it and it all worked fine. Except for the wireless, which required me to apt-get install linux-ubuntu-modules-.... The wireless light still doesn't come on with the wireless button, but it does turn the wireless on and off.

I'm not even going to bother dual-booting Windows XP on this laptop. That's partly because I'm so amazingly elite, but mostly because all I do on Windows is play Rome: Total War and it's hurting my social/love life.

I get this problem a lot.

perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
        LANGUAGE = (unset),
        LC_ALL = (unset),
        LANG = "en_AU.UTF-8"
    are supported and installed on your system.
perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C").
locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_MESSAGES to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory

I think possibly this solves it.

$ sudo apt-get install --reinstall language-pack-en

It says comforting things like...

Generating locales...
  en_AU.UTF-8... done
  en_BW.UTF-8... done

Update: Except it didn't work. But maybe this will.

$ sudo localedef -i en_AU -f UTF8 en_AU.utf8

I've disabled image hotlinking on the smurf server because I didn't know how to measure what bandwidth hotlinked images were consuming and I suspected they were using a lot. It shouldn't have any impact on anyone unless you're hotlinking images. If you don't know what hotlinking is, then you aren't doing it.

Using Lighttpd and FastCGI for Rails you can use Lighty's HTTP Authentication to "protect" an application. But the equivalent doesn't work with Apache 2. Putting the Apache authentication stuff in a <Directory> block will protect all the styles and scripts but no the application itself. You need to use a <Location> block for that.

<Location /*>
    AuthType Basic
    AuthName "Beta Testing"
    AuthUserFile /path/to/htpasswd
    Require valid-user
</Location>

It took me a while to figure this one out, because I'm totally unelite.

Section "Monitor"
  Identifier    "Dell 2408WFP"
  Option        "DPMS"
  HorizSync 30-83
  VertRefresh 56-75
EndSection

Section "Screen"
  Identifier    "Default Screen"
  Device        "ATI Technologies Inc RV380 [Radeon X600 (PCIE)]"
  Monitor       "Dell 2408WFP"
  Defaultdepth  24
  SubSection "Display"
    Modes       "1920x1200" "1280x1024" "1152x864"  "1024x768"  "832x624"   "800x600"   "640x480"
  EndSubSection
EndSection

xorg.conf

I've finally ditched lighttpd + fastcgi and replaced it with Apache on smurf. Lighttpd was good, but fastcgi was a total dog. It broke all the time and it got to the point that I didn't want to host my friends sites anymore. Every time I went on holidays fastcgi seemed to fall over and all the sites would be down for a day or three.

So I've gone back to the stable world of Apache, although not on the important server. In all the years I used Apache and mod_php it gave me no problems at all. A total rock. I was seduced by lighty's memory footprint, but I was a fool.

I'll move the other server over to Apache as well at some point, the one with Thoughtful Foods and KSAsub.. I thought rewriting all the configuration files was going to be a pain, but it was actually really quick. RewriteCondition with -f is bloody marvellous.

For my birthday, Anmol bought me the most amazing toaster I have ever seen. It has extra-wide slots and high-lifter. And guess what – it has crumpet control! The best invention since the toaster. Thanks Anmol.

Perhaps everyone else has already figured this out. You can't easily get music onto an iPod, but you can get it off. And, at least in Windows XP, it's pretty straight forward.

Go to the iPod_Control folder on the iPod and then do a search in Music for *.mp3 *.m4p etc. You can add Artist and Album to the columns of a search results. If you sort by those fields you can copy just the stuff you want. Move the files somewhere and then import them into iTunes. The ID3 tags should mean it doesn't matter that the files have weird code names. If you have iTunes managing your songs it will rename them for you.

I have moved all the Wordpress blogs to my new server at SliceHost. The server is called smurf. I don't think I screwed up the database or left it out of sync or forgot to change the permissions for images. But we will see.

If things are going wrong, it's probably not your fault.

Since moving this blog to SliceHost the page load time has dropped from over a second to 100-200ms. Sweet. I don't even have the cache turned on anymore.

I'm in an internet coffee in Kompong Thom. My computer has a little sign.

AQUA The brand of new trend for high preference 2030 go.

I've installed Wordpress MU on my happy little server. So if any of those footboot.net folks languishing on Movable Type want to move their blogs you should let me know. If you want some theme it's easy to throw it in there too. There are heaps of good themes for Wordpress.

I'm started renting a dandy server in America for $13 a month. It's pretty sweet. Full root access. 128MB ram. 5GB hard disk space. More bandwidth than you can poke a stick at. I moved this blog there yesterday, and it took all of about 10 minutes. I might move more important things there if all goes well.

One of the fun things is that you can install any of about 15 different Linux servers onto it with a little click. I've already been through two versions of Ubuntu and a version of Debian vanilla. I'm thinking I'll stick with Ubuntu Dapper now though. Seems pretty sweet. Lighttpd is finally in the repositories.

I've finally managed to install ISPConfig for Debian 3.1 on OpenVZ when 128MB of RAM and 8MB of swap. It took many attempts, and the ISPConfig installer doesn't exactly make life easy.

The trick was to stop all the services on the machine before starting the installer. That includes all the services that ISPConfig needs you to have - bind, postfix, courier, apache, mysql. The installer will start Mysql without asking part way through the installation and you'll need to stop it reasonably quickly when that happens, because not long after there's some fairly memory intensive compilations. Make sure you don't make any mistakes with stuff like passphrases for the SSL certificate, because you'll have to start the whole thing again.

Eventually it will ask you for the name of your Mysql host. I started Mysql again and gave it the details it needed. From there it should install by itself happily.

I wasn't very optimistic after seeing the installer but the ISPConfig application itself is actually pretty sweet and well-made.

My server is a very strange fellow. At 6:26 on some mornings the web servers stops and has to be restarted. I wrote a thingy to check it and restart whenever it needed it, and I started to notice that it happened at exactly 6:26. It isn't every morning. But sometimes it is several mornings in a row. But since it's only once a day I guess it isn't the end of the world. I'm trying to think what one minute a day of downtime does to the to the implicit SLA I have with blogfeed readers and bloggers.

I bought some Logitech X230s a couple of years ago now for about $80AUD and they are really good. The bass is a bit heavy, but overall they sound tops - far better than a lot of micro hifi systems I've listened to. And they go much louder than I would really need, without distorting at all. Although my printer perches on top of the subwoofer, and the printer starts to vibrate audibly when the volume goes up too much.

I love my computer at uni work. Word has been leaking memory all day, and it's up to 400MB now. When I noticed I was worried the computer was going to crash, but I looked and there's still 300MB of physical memory left.

This could apply to the Samsung ML-1710, ML-1740 and ML-1750. It could possibly apply to others as well.

I'm running Ubuntu Breezy 5.10, and have had the ML-1740 working on that and on Hoary. I believe it also works on Dapper.

I had problems using the Samsung Linux drivers.

You'll be having problems printing, and problems administering it. Initially I was unable to print, although administration worked OK. Despite being unable to print (I got distracted), I attempted to share it using a combination of this and this. The sharing didn't work, but it did break the administration. At first when I tried to add a printer it simply didn't work. No new printer was installed after the "New printer" process had been completed. Returning to backups didn't solve the problem. I removed and reinstalled all the cups-related packages, but that didn't work either. I'm still not sure what actually changed to break the administration.

I got this error when running System > Administration > Printing:

CUPS server could not be contacted.

And this error when running gnome-cups-manager from the command line:

Removing the Allow from x.x.x.x for IPs other than 127.0.0.1 in the <Location /></Location> part of /etc/cups/cupsd.conf fixed the administration problem.

This process let me print.

editing /etc/cups/mime.types and uncommenting the line application/octet-stream also editing /etc/cups/mime.convs and uncommenting the line application/octet-stream application/vnd.cups-raw 0 -

From myhandyrestaurant

footboot.net is broken because its zone file got broken by someone. It may broke for the next day, or less if your machine updates the DNS things quicker.