Paul Mellors

Ubuntu Developer Summit

2011-11-26T08:21:00.001-08:00

Ever wondered what goes on at an Ubuntu Developer Summit?

Windows 7 + Print Spooler

2011-11-25T07:21:00.001-08:00

While printing some photos for family, i ran out of ink halfway through the print job, as there were a few items in the spooler, i thought i'd cancel them, replace the ink and restart the printing.

Getting the ink change was a doddle, but geting the jobs removed from the queue was a right pain. No matter what i tried i couldn't get them deleted, so i did it the old fashioned way and deleted them via command line

net stop spooler
del %systemroot%\system32\spool\printers\*.shd
del %systemroot%\system32\spool\printers\*.spl
net start spooler

Restart printing, Bobs your uncle.....:)

Job at Heart Internet

2011-11-23T03:07:00.001-08:00

Sorry for the non ubuntu/fedora related post, although thought it might be of interest to some of you.

Technical Support Role

What we need from you:

• Good grades at school and college. A degree helps.
• An interest in computers and Internet technology.
• A problem solving mindset and terrific enthusiasm.
• A calm and patient nature.
• Desire to learn and move up in the world!

Skills that would be a great bonus on your application:
• An understanding of HTML, CSS or JavaScript.
• Experience of programming in PHP, Perl or ASP.
• Experience of publishing and managing a website.
• Applications skills like using Outlook, Word or Excel.
• Web Application skills like using WinSCP, Putty, FTP or Dreamweaver.

What you will be doing:
• Helping our customers to get their website online and get their email.
• Problem solving server side programming and email issues.
• Identifying system problems and bugs and liaising with 2nd line support to resolve these issues.

What you will get from us:
• Competitive salary.
• Great pension benefits.
• Free snacks, fresh coffee and soft drinks.
• No dress code.
• Relocation assistance for those who qualify.
• A technical environment that encourages learning.
• Free Web Hosting!

Salary:- Negotiable, depending on experience
Job Type:- Permanent

If you're interested then please send you're C.V to employ@heartinternet.co.uk

Job is based at our offices in Nottingham

Feel free to mention my name - Paul Mellors

http://jobs.heartinternet.co.uk/

Fedora | Contributor | T-shirt

2011-11-22T08:42:00.001-08:00

The Fedora Project would like to thank all its contributors for the hard work that they have done. At this time we have 30 Fedora T-shirts available to give away to contributors. If you already have one of these shirts please wait for another raffle so one of your fellow contributors who doesn't have one gets a chance. Winners will be contacted at the email address on record in the Fedora Account System for size and shipping information. We will do our best to match sizes subject to availability.

Restrictions

Must be in one of these groups

You must have signed the cla and be in at least one other group

Additional Restrictions

You must be able to accept shipments from FEDEX or UPS to receive a prize. You may not live within the following countries: Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan or Syria. You must be over the age of thirteen.

If you don't meet the restrictions above, you will be able to enter the raffle but we will be unable to award you any prizes.

https://admin.fedoraproject.org/raffle/

Fedora 16 + Flash

2011-11-16T15:06:00.001-08:00

I'm running the new Fedora 16 on one of the laptops and it's rather nice, then again all Fedora releases are quit nice, however i'm using 64bit. Flash for me has always been a problem on 64bit Fedora, but not any more. You can install it in 2 easy steps.

1. su -c 'yum install http://linuxdownload.adobe.com/linux/x86_64/adobe-release-x86_64-1.0-1.noarch.rpm'

2. su -c 'yum install flash-plugin.x86_64'

Restart your browser and voila.....64bit Flash :D

Ubuntu Community Appreciation Day

2011-11-09T07:24:00.000-08:00

If you use Ubuntu, then first of all, awesome, secondly you're probably aware of the amazing community that surrounds it. With this in mind, have a look at this - https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UCADay - Ubuntu Community Appreciation Day

So what do i need to do?, well the only thing you really need to do is say "Thanks".

From the site

Tips for the Day
Jump in some IRC Ubuntu channel and leave a thank you
Send an Email to some mailing list; you can do it to a LoCo mailing list; they will love that
You can do it at the local LoCo at a meeting Call some LoCo colleagues and say thank you
You can use Facebook, Google plus, Twitter, Identi.ca and every possible means to express it

Remember - November 20th every year.

UCADay

Rosie Victoria Mellors

2011-09-18T09:21:00.001-07:00

My daughter Rosie has now been with us a week, it’s been wonderful to have this last week off spending time with family, luckily I've two weeks off so get to spend more time hanging around, having fun with first born Jimmy and latest addition Rosie

We’re not a family to do things by half, so a little explaining is needed. Bec started her contractions at about 4 in the morning, we phoned the relevant people and it was advised to come in to hospital. From 5 till about 11:45 she was 3cm dilated, we thought we’d have to come home, but the midwife spoke to the ward sister and it was decided we’d stay just in case. Glad we did an hour later “I’m going to push now” came out. And at 12:27 on Sat 10th Sept Rosie Victoria Mellors was born.

We had to stay in the hospital for about 6 hours, but at 7pm in the evening we were let home.

Rosie now has a big brother to look after her, and they seem to be getting on fine.

Ok so this wasn’t a long blog post, but you get the idea, now for the strange part. Let’s look at Mellors family birthdays.

Paul [Dad] – 15th April 1972

Rebecca [Mum] – 15th April 1972

Jimmy [Son] – 10th September 2008 yes if you look at the date it’s 100908

Rosie [Daughter] – 10th September 2011

Hang on a min that can’t be right, yup it’s correct, mum and dad, born on same day, kids born on the same day How many families can say that?

Ubuntu Members

2011-09-07T00:01:00.000-07:00

I just wanted to say a big congratulations to all the new Ubuntu Members, once again it was a very interesting meeting :)

One of the new Ubuntu Members was our very own Tony Whitmore [tonytiger]. Well done Tony, you deserve it. It was also great to see so many people supporting each individual. The Ubuntu community certainly do rock :)

Working smarter not harder....

2011-09-06T04:21:00.000-07:00

I put up a tweet the other day asking for sure fire ways of making money, a number of the responses we're pretty encouraging, so i sat down and thought to myself are there any other ways?

Well yes there are, in my case i've gone down the affiliate route, you'll notice, if you're reading this post on my site that i have a CWCS logo up in the top right. It basically means that if you click this banner and then purchase something from their site, i get commission for it, which i can use for their services. This is great if i want to use their hosting/dedicated servers etc. Which in time i will want to.

Another thing i discovered is flattr, you can read my previous post about it here. It's a way of contributing funds to posts other online stuff that you like, and if someone likes your post, they can flattr it too and you get a cut.

I'm sure there are more ways to make your blog post work for you to increase your income, it's just finding the right one and making it work for you.

cronlog - Debian Squeeze

2011-08-26T01:30:00.000-07:00

The other day i installed debian squeeze as a webserver, but one of the things that drove me nuts, was the fact there wasn't a cronlog, it appears that cron dumps all messages into the generic log /var/log/messages. I didn't want that, i wanted to view the cronlog as it's own seperate file. Nothing obvious on the internet, but trawling through various files i finally found it.

vi /etc/rsyslog.conf

Look for the following line and remove the comment [#]

#cron.* /var/log/cron.log

restart the rsyslog

/etc/init.d/rsyslog restart

You now have a cronlog at /var/log/cronlog

It was 20 years ago today....

2011-08-26T01:09:00.000-07:00

Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play.....

Well actually that's not actually what i meant, if you're a FOSS user, then you already know what i'm referring to. Yes that's right, it's 20 years ago today that Linus Torvalds posted an interesting post to a newsgroup, you can read it here.

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.os.minix/dlNtH7RRrGA/SwRavCzVE7gJ

The rest is, as they say.....HISTORY.

Happy Birthday Linux :D

Flattr

2011-08-25T05:40:00.000-07:00

After a recent event, OGGCAMP, which unfortunately i wasn't able to attend, i happened to be in their irc channel #oggcamp on irc.freenode.net, and happened to come across someone who was going to do a last minute talk. It was going to be about Flattr, now i'd never heard of this, and i'm sure you never have either, but i've looked into it a bit and it is rather quite interesting.

Some links first

http://flattr.com/

So here's what happens, or what i think happens :D

You create an account, you put an amount of money in there for use. You use the internet in the usual way. You come across something you like the look of, whether it's a blog article, a piece of code, just something you like which has a flattr button on it. You click that button. At the end of the month, the money you have put into your own flattr account gets divided up between all these posts etc you've clicked the button on. The authors get a piece of your cash :) it's like making a little donation for their efforts. The good thing is that if you've got a button on your post, they can do the same thing. You never know you might get paid just for writing blog posts? Sounds awesome....I'm giving it a try.

If you like this article and have a flattr account, give my little button a little press ;) [no you don't have to really :)]

I suppose i should thank maloki [@kinkymal] for introducing me to this....looks like a fun way to give back to the community :)

Here is @kinkymal doing her talk at @oggcamp - https://blip.tv/episode/5487951

Zend PHP Certification

2011-08-24T03:35:00.001-07:00

It's about time I did some certification, I'm in the process of doing a few Microsoft Exams, but i wanted a change. I've been PHP coding for a bit, and need to give myself a goal to work to. In this case it's the Zend PHP Certification exam. I need to keep my brain active i guess. Anyone else done this exam? Has it helped in your career?

Movies on demand.

2011-08-17T00:10:00.001-07:00

The blog post isn't what you expect from reading the title, however it is kinda related. My DVD collection, let me rephrase that, my 2.5 year old sons DVD collection is starting to build, and if you're a parent, i'm sure you're sick of, can i watch that, then 2 seconds later, don't like it, and want to watch that, repeat over the next 8 hours ;)

I wanted a solution that would be better than changing the DVD every 5 mins. The most obvious choice would be to rip, sorry, backup, the DVD to a hard drive and use that. Oh i should point out that my TV does have a USB port on it, so will read from a USB device. How Rocking is that?!. The only problem was that the "ripper" i used to only output the DVD to iso, and this is one format the TV didn't play. [i was using a windows tool at the time]

A few seconds [and yes that's pretty much how long it took], later and i found a tool called acidrip [google has plenty of results for it]

Just pop in the dvd, select the chapter you want to copy and click start. That's it in it's simplest form. I did have to select that i wanted to rip to xvid but there wasn't much more i had to do. I wasn't sure if this was going to play on the tv from the hdd, so i selected a small chapter about 10 mins long, small chapter, shorter encoding time. Copy the avi to my hdd, plug it in to the TV and keep the fingers crossed. IT PLAYED :) Awesome. The only bad thing now is that i have to spend hours encoding all my DVD's.....hmmmm think i may need a bigger drive :)

What i've done.....

2011-08-13T01:33:00.000-07:00

I've noticed a lot of blog posts this week that are just bullet lists of what people have done this week, so i'm going to follow trend.....it's not very interesting, in fact i probably shouldn't of written this post, maybe i'll get a meme out of it.

* Got up, went to work
* Came home, kicked Ubuntu in the face
* Went to bed
* Got up, went to work
* Came home, kicked Fedora in the face
* Went to bed
* Got up, went to work
* Came home, kicked Windows in the face
* Went to bed

Yeah i'm not having fun with my os's at the moment.....i'm so impatient.

On a lighter note, my camera club is asking for people to do talks for next years schedule. I've put my name down for one "Photoshop - The Alternative". Basically i'm planning on talking about the alternatives to windows and photoshop. Hope i get accepted :)

Wordpress + Comments

2011-08-08T01:35:00.000-07:00

I have a website that i use for our local church, it's just a wordpress blog that has information/dates, history etc. One of the things that make it look a little tacky for me is the fact that, due to me disabling comments from pages and posts, it has "Comments are closed" at the bottom of each page. This looks a little crappy.

I trawled the net for ages and there are hundreds of little fixes that say they'll work but don't in the end. I don't really want to edit .php files for wordpress or my theme.

Cut a long and boring story short, the answer was simple, and all i needed to do was edit the themes styles.css and add the following to the bottong of the page.

.nocomments{display:none;}!

Simple eh!

Vmware + NAS

2011-08-03T01:50:00.000-07:00

Currently i have a VPS with Memset [memset.com], it's a fab little box and I've had no troubles with it what so ever. It runs about 5 of my websites, both for personal and business use. However with a new baby on the way it's time to take stock of things and make cut backs. Unfortunately the VPS has to go :(

My problem now is, where do i host my websites? Luckily I work for an ISP so if necessary could host them there, but i'm a techy and a geek, where would the fun be in that?

Here's what I have at home. A desktop PC with 2.5GB, 120gb hdd and a 500GB NAS....ok you can see from the title where i'm going here :)

I've installed VMWARE esxi on the machine, and installed Windows 2008 server onto the box. I wanted all the drive space for backups etc. [This setup i'm using isn't ideal and if i had multiple, dedicated machines i'd do it totally different]. I then wanted a webserver, i was going to purchase a new hdd for it and put it directly into the box, but as i mentioned earlier, i'm making cutbacks.

VMWARE has the ability to create storage areas on volumes other than the dedicated HDD's in the machine, this is where the NAS comes in. You need to enable NFS on the NAS as this is what VMWARE will connect through, and create a share. Once done you can use VMWARE to create a storage volume on the NAS that you can use to create a new VPS on.

I did have a problem with my NAS at first, the latest stable firm where for the Netgear Nas Duo wouldn't allow the server to connect to it, so creating a volume was impossible, it just wouldn't work. I trawled the internet and no one had a definitive answer...it was driving me nuts. What's this Netgear? A Beta version of the new NAS firmware.....ah sod it let's give it a go [I wouldn't recommend doing this as it could potentially hose your hardware, but i'm a nutter and didn't really care :)]

Install firmware BAM! VMWARE storage on NAS BAM! Sorted...Brilliant.

Ok so now i have

VMware running on my desktop machine, which has windows 2008 running on it's local HDD, i'm also running Centos Linux from the NAS, it seems ok, however there is a little lag when using mysql but for what i use it for it's usable.

Migrating all my sites as we speak, then i can cancel the Memset VPS [when i have more funding i'll be back :)]

It's not the most ideal of setups and is certainly hacked together badly, but it seems to be working OK, i'll leave it running for a bit and see what happens, i can always move over to works systems.

Fedora 15 Shutdown

2011-07-22T02:19:00.000-07:00

I've been playing around with Fedora 15 and to be honest it just rocks, but one thing i noticed when trying to shutdown the machine, er where is the shutdown option? All there appears to be is Standby.

I don't want to standby, sigh shutdown -h now from the command line....bit silly by hay.

What do you mean just press the alt key when you're in the menu? Well yeah it's as simple as that, if you want the shutdown option to appear, just press alt, it will change from standby to shutdown. Easy when you know how.

I'm still not satisfied i want it there all the time....now what? Well google to the rescue

su -c "yum install gnome-shell-extensions-alternative-status-menu"

Sorted everything how i want it :)

ta ta for now.

Ubuntu Community Week

2011-07-18T05:11:00.000-07:00

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuCommunityWeek

If you're not aware, this week is the beginning of Ubuntu Community Week.

The above link explains what it is and what you can do to participate. I love this paragraph as it sums it right up

Your Gateway To Amazing Ubuntu Community

Ubuntu Community Week is a series of online presentations and Q+A sessions about the rock-and-roll world that is the Ubuntu community where you can:

Learn about the Ubuntu community (How, What, When, Where, Why?)
Find people around you that are into Ubuntu

Talk to some of the key "movers-and-shakers" from the Ubuntu project worldwide
Participate in an open Q&A with Jono Bacon, our global Community Manager

Our very own Alan Bell, Laura Czajkowski and Alan Pope all have sessions, why not attend to show them your support...

What's your t-shirt?

2011-07-14T00:42:00.000-07:00

I've not started a MEME in awhile, so i thought it was about time i did one. Anytime you see a techy they are wearing a t-shirt, yeah yeah yeah i know it's not everyone, so my meme today is. What's your t-shirt.....what are you wearing right now? I'm wearing the one pictured, i would of posted a pic of me wearing it, but the camera on my phone is playing up, and besides you don't want to see my ugly mug :)

Upload a photo of you wearing your t-shirt, let's see what type of t-shirts people wear...link in my comments or do your own blog post :) hmmm wonder how many comments i'll get from my Fedora buddies ;)

Fedora EMEA ambassadors Meeting

2011-07-13T07:49:00.001-07:00

For all you Fedora EMEA ambassadors

Just a quick heads-up for you to not forget the

Fedora EMEA ambassadors meeting

for all ambassadors in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

* Date: Wednesday, July 13th, 2011
* Time: 20:00 UTC (check [1] for your local time)
* Location: #fedora-meeting

Meeting agenda:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Meeting:EMEA_Ambassadors_2011-07-13

Please add your topic before the meeting and join us tonight!

Tweetdeck + Ubuntu Natty + 64bit

2011-06-29T14:47:00.000-07:00

I like tweetdeck, there i said it, but being a pain in the ass, there isn't really a 64bit version of Adobe Air. There is however a work around. So if you want Tweetdeck running on a 64bit Ubuntu Natty Narwhal install, try this. Worked for me :)

wget http://airdownload.adobe.com/air/lin/download/2.6/adobeair.deb

mkdir tmp

dpkg-deb -x adobeair.deb tmp

dpkg-deb --control adobeair.deb tmp/DEBIAN

sed -i "s/i386/all/" tmp/DEBIAN/control

dpkg -b tmp adobeair_64.deb

rm -rf tmp

sudo dpkg -i adobeair_64.deb

Finally install tweetdeck - http://www.tweetdeck.com/desktop/

Prime Example Of Phishing

2011-06-29T00:56:00.000-07:00

Came into work today and checked my email, and came across this one. Now you might remember a post the other week regarding emails and what to delete/look out for. Well this one is a prime example. This is the email.

Dear Account User,

This message is from our data base center to all Hotmail account owners. We are currently upgrading our data base and e-mail account center. We are deleting all unused accounts to create more space for new accounts. To prevent your account from closing, you will have to update it below so we will know that it's a presently used account. To do this, You have to click on your reply button to reply back to this message and then you fill the information below.

* Name:
* User Name:
* Password:
* Date of Birth:
* Country Or Territory:

Warning!!! Account owner that fails to verify his/her account after two weeks of receiving this warning will lose his or her account permanently.

AFTER VERIFICATION,A MESSAGE WILL BE SENT TO YOU AFTER WHICH YOU ARE ADVISED TO CHANGE YOUR PASSWORD IMMEDIATELY.
Sincerely,
The Windows Live Hotmail Team

No all looks good, the email is nicely populated with windows images, family pictures etc. This is one way they phish you in. If it looks like with images you can relate to, why would it be fake?

Hmm just look who the email is from, it might say Windows Live Team but the actual email address is festinvitro@hotmail.com [this isn't a Microsoft email address]

Another reason people might be worried is this line

Warning!!! Account owner that fails to verify his/her account after two weeks of receiving this warning will lose his or her account permanently.

What a load of cods-wallop....

When you see this kind of email, just look at it carefully, and think to yourself. OK so if i pass on my

* User Name:
* Password:

what would actually happen.....well duh they would have access to your email account, login, change your password and potentially have all your personal and private email.

So what do you do about this?

Well that's the easy part.....DELETE IT. As it was an email sent to my hotmail address, i can click on Mark As .... Phishing Scam.

Job done.....pillocks.....

Why work for Canonical?

2011-06-23T06:26:00.001-07:00

Caught this via facebook....interesting.

LoCo Council Meeting

2011-06-22T01:33:00.000-07:00

Last night was the Loco Council meeting, apart from a couple of other items, the meeting was to re-approve Local Community Teams [LoCo Teams]. As i've never been to one, i wanted to know what happens when a team is up for re-appoval, mainly because it's the UK's turn in a few weeks. The re-approval process in itself quite simple, the council grill heavily the LoCo point of contact until they bleed, well it's more like, tell me what your team has been doing recently and what your plans are for the future but i can imagine it being quite stressful for the person answering the questions, Once the council are satified they vote, +1 = yes, -1 = no and +0 = abstain. All in all this part of the re-approval process is quite painless, however........

Re-approval is the end part of the process, from what i saw, pre meeting is where all the work is done.

The team needs a re-approval application, apologies to the Irish Team i'm using your stuff as an example :) oh and well done on re-approval

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/IrishTeam/IrishTeamReApprovalApplication

If you take a look, it contains a lot of what the team has done since they last had to get re-approved, and as you can see it's quite concise.

At the end of the day, if you put in the effort then your re-approval process should go smooth, if you don't prepare properly, then expect to fail, it's happened before and no doubt it will happen again.

As a member of the UK LoCo, I think we need to get our finger out :)