This also works well when you’re trying to work out where your details get sold on to so you can block them easily.

Caveat: Some SMTP servers are unable to handle the routing of these types of email addresses. I would suggest using a Gmail account for testing as these labelled email formats work like a charm.

Hopefully I’ll have the imagemap with code examples up in the next few days too.

Combined, the images, sigils and chant make the ritual.

Stay for a while and see what appears. Click on a sigil to refresh the page and get a fresh one.

Caveat

It won’t work very well in IE but it was a test. I may revisit this in the future to add some functionality to share favourites.
There are hundreds of photos left to resize and put up.

I’m dog-tired as I write this but I’ve been out and about in Kreuzberg to get a feel of the place and it doesn’t seem too bad.

Our apartment is an old soviet-era building and has coal fires in every room and as it’s currently -5˚C it became a matter of urgency to learn how to light one effectively. Luckily it’s quit toasty in my room now and my desk is set up comfortably so I can get back to working tomorrow.

We’ve arrived right at the beginning of the Transmediale festival. There’s a list as long as my arm of great exhibitions, performances and music that I could attend. I think I’m going to limit myself to one gig and a couple of exhibitions though so I don’t get overloaded.

As I missed Lisbon when I left I’m sure I’m going to miss Leipzig just as much. I’ve been so incredibly lucky in the last half year of European travelling to have lived with some great people in fantastic houses in awesome cities. I’m a bit shell-shocked at the moment as I’m not sure I was really ready to leave Leipzig but I know that if I stayed too long I would find it even harder to leave than I already did.

It’s only an hour and half away on the train and all my friends from there seem to visit on a semi-regular basis so hopefully it won’t feel too bad.

Another reason that it’s good to be here is that flights back to the UK, specifically Bristol, are much more regular and therefore cheaper. I really need to consider a brief UK trip to sort out some business stuff and to visit my father who rather worryingly had a mild heart attack last week. If it hadn’t been for his quick thinking friends he wouldn’t still be around for me to worry about.

Anyway, just a quick update to say hi and that I’m fine.

I might try a little experiment with this one, if you’re interested in downloading the DVD image and playing it on a variety of hardware, fill in the contact form and I’ll send you a link so you can download it. The format DVD as an .img so it will mount or burn exactly like an .iso so there’s no need to worry about formats and supported operating systems. I’m not into collecting your data for anything, I’m far too lazy and uninterested for anything like that. I just want to see my hard work being shown somewhere.

The proviso is that you have to film it and bang it on YouTube with the tag “Doom Organ” and if you can be bothered tell me about it and add it as a response to the original. They do still do that on YouTube right?

Other submissions

I’ve had a couple of requests for the image from interested viewers to which I’m awaiting video from. If those parties send me video footage I’ll post the results here.

In the meantime my good friend Mário Rui Carranca from carranca.net posted a response to this last night:

Which you can also see on his site here:
www.carranca.net

Another one was posted by James Morrell this morning:

James is an SEO expert from the UK and his site is here:
http://jamesmorell.com/

One more from Dave Sayer in deepest darkest Wales. Noisiest yet I think:

Dave is not only a talented freelance web developer, he’s also a damned fine photographer and good guy.
You can see his work here:
www.bathdesign.co.uk/ and here www.luxumbra.co.uk

A late submission from Howie, author of the rather fantastic and terrifyingly technical feat Network Weathermap:
wotsit.thingy.com/haj

He’s also a good friend and music and art fanatic.
Howie’s managed to rope six machines into this noisy debacle.

A belated one from Nesos, an aspiring iPad and iPhone developer from London.

This one’s very quiet so you’ll have to crank up the speakers to hear it.

Hopefully more to come.

This week marks the end of the ZAAT show in Lisbon. I’m sad that it’s over but also happy that I got the chance to exhibit as part of such a cool project. I might try and enter some more work in one of the other ZAAT shows next year.

I’ve been working on a few projects recently, some web-related and others are more video and DVD installation stuff. The website I’ll be showing next week or so but the video stuff I can give you a sneak preview of now.

This is all preliminary work for “Doom Organ” which I know will rock my own small world at least.

It sounds disjointed and “clippy” at the moment due to us all playing the DVD image through VLC which diesn’t like short clips ~1 sec or so. This is being remedied at the moment and I hope to have a newer video to show for my efforts in the next few days. I’m also fading the audio in and out and doing the same for the video and also adding some rests to make it feel less cacophonous.

This is predated by another piece called “One to Ten” where two (or more but I think three is about as far as I’d like to push it) DVD players and televisions count in unison and go in and out of synchronisation. Like Dark Dancer and Traffic it’s about endurance and video as performance.
Sadly this video doesn’t really do it justice as the machines being used differ in their specification, a matching hardware environment gives better timing in the clips. I’m hoping to have a film of a paired performance soon.

Alongside these pieces (as if that wasn’t enough) I’m working on an installation piece that uses two computers to create computational photography called “This relationship degrades us both”. More on that when I’ve got my head around the scripting involved in making it work.

Last night I suffered another hard drive failure, this time in my 500GB external where all my music and video projects are stored. Luckily I still had a Ubuntu disk from when my MacBook drive failed last month and Linux isn’t so picky about mounting failed platters so I was able to back everything up onto my recently won 1TB disaster-insured external. No, really, it’s fireproof, waterproof and has insurance against disk failure. Thanks Make use of!
The external is well under a year old and has been clicking (never a good sign) since just before I left Lisbon so I was sort of expecting it. I’m going to see if I can get a replacement from either eBuyer or Seagate. If not I guess I have a USB2 enclosure to put a new drive into if I can work out how to open it…

What else? Oh yeah. It’s the Winter Solstice next week which also means that it’s my birthday. There also happens to be a Lunar Eclipse which will make it the first time that they have converged in 456 years. I need to think of someway to celebrate all of these things in one go.
Ideally I’d go to Das Sonnenobservatorium in Goseck where they have a huge Winter Solstice fire festival at their wood henge there every year but I don’t have my cowl (back in the UK sadly) and no way of getting there. It’s a real shame as it’s likely to have snowed quite heavily and be a real sight to behold.

After a catastrophic machine crash I’m back up and running again. I’m now rocking a 640GB HD in my dev environment which is nice and surprisingly cost effective. I’ve also had to revisit the Virtualisation post I made a while ago as I’ve moved from using the Virtual Box sharing services, which I found to be unreliable and prone to disappearing when updating either VBox Guest Additions or Ubuntu, to using SMB/CIFS instead. It’s an easier process, much quicker, reconnects automatically and is easy to add to your fstab.
I’ll finish up the how-to and post it soon.

I finally got some pictures back from the ZAAT exhibition in Lisbon. It looks very sweet and intimate. I wish I’d had the chance to see it myself. Dark Dancer has been on constantly on two screens in Bimbo Town’s whisky bar evenings which has been nice.

An imposing welcome

I was sad to hear that the Sky installation was cut short due to the breakdown of their only projector. Still, at least it was shown for a while.

You can see a short excerpt of Dark Dancer here:

Dark Dancer – Composite from Pete Haughie on Vimeo.

Dark Dancer had a second private outing in Bimbo Town in the Spinnerei here in Leipzig and it was really good to finally see it on a CRT through a DVD player. Sadly Traffic didn’t fare so well and for some reason the hardware player we had it running on insisted on a gap between each section so I need to see if there’s some way of pre-loading clips before display as a buffer, see if that will counteract the problem.
This is all very much a new field for me and there’s very little information on-line to help either. It’s all done with trial and error. This is not made any easier with the fact that it’s works no problem in software players or on PC/Mac DVD drives. I think I’m going to have to get a cheap TV and DVD player and a line on very cheap DVDs for testing purposes. I hate to think of the waste involved…

You can see what Traffic *should* have been like here:

Traffic – Composite from Pete Haughie on Vimeo.

This is a captured set of random clips from an infinitely playing DVD called Traffic. Filmed in Leipzig near Plagwitz.
Made with the smallest amount of elements I could use to still get the meaning of ‘Traffic’ across. The clip of the mule going backwards is to add some levity to an otherwise quite boring subject and as a reward to the viewer for watching more than a few seconds.

My poor Mac suffered a catastrophic meltdown on Friday so I’ve lost all my software, development environments and so on. All to a failed HD. Everything really important is backed up onto an external but it’s a pain in the arse that needs dealing with soon so I can get back up and running with work and art. It’s amazing how much reliance we have in such fragile little machines.

I’ve also just finished and sent in my proposal to the Pixelache arts festival in Helsinki for next year. Fingers crossed for that, I think it’s a really interesting piece and a good technical challenge if I get the go-ahead to go through with it.

In other news I’ve got the beginnings of two other video installations underway, one called Doom Organ and another called 1 to 10 which all rely on sound as well as video on multiple screens to get the point across. One of them is likely going to be exhibited in Munich early next year. I’m hoping it’s Doom Organ personally which is the most wonderfully ridiculous idea I’ve had in such a long time that I’m absolutely frothing to get it done at the expense of everything else. There is a test version of it I have here but due to my system meltdown I’m unable to show it to you. Maybe later of you’re lucky.

Sky

Here are the descriptions for Astrid and myself at the ZAAT collabration.

All this artwork preparation and moving countries does mean that I’ve been unable to do much in the way of web development or write out any tutorials. I’ll see about rectifying this as soon as I’m able. I really do promise to do more than one post per six weeks as well…

There’s no doubt that having dedicated machines and resources to play with when developing websites is useful. But what if you don’t have unlimited space and resources or, like me, develop ‘on the go’?

When I decided to go full-time freelance I was faced with a rather major decision: buy a cheap but powerful desktop machine to develop on or a more expensive laptop with which to de-shackle oneself from the home office.
Initially I went the former route and immediately regretted it. I was always sat in the same room, beavering away when I could have been out enjoying the sunshine in the park or in a café or bar with company.

So I held my breath, pulled in my belt and bought a second hand Macbook for £350. Now I know you’re already rolling your eyes and beginning to mouth the words “Oh lord, another Mac-evangelist”. Well maybe a little, but hear me out.

As of the time I am writing this article, and it’s been about six months since I actually got this suite of tools running reliably, there was no way of running Mac OS X in a free virtual environment on Windows or Linux so logic dictated that Mac OS would be the machine’s operating system. This suited just fine, and still does, as I’d grown accustomed to using OS X after several years of using them in studios already. Don’t get me wrong, I’m fine with Linux and Windows too, who isn’t these days, I just prefer using Mac OS if I can.

So, once I had made the decision to leave the home office I was presented with the problems of what technology to employ in giving me the usefulness of a home network but without actually having to lug several machines around at once and also be able to develop rich, dynamic internet applications without actually being connected to the World Wide Web.

Here’s how I managed it.

Quick links menu

1. Components
2. Method
   1. Creating your first virtual machine
   2. Configuring the Linux virtual machine parameters
   3. Installing and configuring Ubuntu Linux and LAMP
      1. Test your SSH connection
      2. Test your MySQL Server
      3. Test your Apache2 installation
      4. Test your server talks to itself
   4. Install Windows
3. Setting up file sharing
   1. Windows file sharing
   2. Ubuntu file sharing

Components

Macbook

The faster and more tricked out the better. Mine works more than adequately on a 2GHz Intel Core Duo with 2GB RAM running OS X 10.5. I wouldn’t really suggest doing this on a single core machine but you can try it if you like, YMMV.

VirtualBox

Sun/Oracle’s free virtualisation environment. Available here: http://www.virtualbox.org/

Linux

Use whatever flavour of Linux you prefer, personally I like things simple so I chose Ubuntu which you can download from here: http://www.ubuntu.com/

Windows

You can use either XP, Vista or Windows 7 for this, I presume they all work in pretty much the same way. I chose XP as that’s what I had a license and disc for. I hear that Windows 7 has a smaller footprint than XP but I like that XP doesn’t have too many bells and whistles to hog cycles. You’ll have to source your own copy if you want to follow this tutorial.

The Internet

During the initial phases of this how-to you will need a live internet connection due to having to collect applications for your Guest OSs. You won’t need to stay connected after installation.

Ubuntu and Windows running alongside each other on Mac OS

Method

Create your first virtual machine

1. Start by installing VirtualBox. Just double click the .dmg file and dragging the app into your applications folder.
2. Start VirtualBox and create a new virtual machine by clicking the little blue star-burst icon in the top-left of the VIrtualBox Machine Manager window. A new window will open up, this is the New Virtual Machine Wizard. Click continue.
3. Give your new machine a name, I called mine ‘Umbongo’. Choose the OS type and version, in this case Linux and Ubuntu. Click continue.
4. Select the memory allocation size that you wish to give your guest OS. The default 512MB is more than sufficient for running a small web-server. Click continues.
5. Leave the “Boot Hard Disk” option selected and ensure that the “Create new hard disk” radio is selected. Click continue.
6. You will now be presented with a further window. This one is the “Create New Virtual Disk Wizard”. Click continue.
7. Under “Hard Disk Storage Type” select dynamically expanding. Click continue.
8. Choose where you want to store the disk image. You can use external hard drives if you want but be aware of the limitations of the disk speed and the connection type. I would not suggest anything less than USB 2. Again, for ease of portability I chose the laptop drive. Beneath this is the size of the image with a slider. The default is 8GB which is much larger than we need for our purposes so I scaled mine back to a less space hungry 4GB and suggest you follow suit. This is why we opted to have the disk image automatically resize if it reaches capacity. Click continue.
9. You’re done, you have created your first disc image. Now onto the slightly less boring bits.

Configuring the Linux virtual machine parameters

1. In the VirtualBox Virtual Machine Manager window select the image that you’ve just created on the left-hand side. Click the yellow settings cog above it. You will be presented with yet another window with options for general, system, video, storage, audio, network, port and shared folder options.
2. Select the system tab and disable floppy option, there isn’t one so you won’t need it.
3. Select the storage tab and under the IDE Controller option select the image of the CD/DVD. The right hand pane will show new options, click the folder icon next to the CD/DVD Device dropdown. Locate your Linux CD iso image. I usually put them in the Downloads folder in my home profile where Firefox likes to dump stuff. You’ll be presented with yet another options panel, the Virtual Media Manager. Click the little stack of green discs with the green plus symbol and browse to your Linux image. Click open. Select the new image in the list and click OK.
4. Click the network tab. In this pane you’ll be able to configure your virtual network hardware which is how we’ll get all these virtual machines and host OS all talking and getting along nicely. Make sure that Adapter 1 is enabled and “attached to” is set to NAT. Click the tab for Adapter 2 and enable it, this time setting the “attached to” option to “Host-only adapter, vboxnet0″.
5. Click the Shared Folders tab. In this pane, on the right-hand side, click the little blue folder with the green plus symbol. In the “Folder Path” drop-down choose “Other” and browse to the root of your websites storage folder. Mine is in my home folder. Give it a folder name and, making sure that read-only is unchecked, click OK.
6. The host configuration is now done, time to move onto the installation.

Installing Ubuntu Linux and LAMP.

If you want to know more about the development environment LAMP you can do so by reading this link here.

1. Click the green start arrow above image name in the Virtual Machine Manager pane. A window will appear and your virtual Ubuntu will start. Follow the on screen instructions until you are dumped out onto your newly installed virtual OS.
2. Ubuntu will ask you to remove the CD and hit enter to restart. You can do this by choosing the “Devices” menu, “CD/DVD Devices” and then “Unmount all CD/DVD Devices” then hit enter.
3. Open a terminal window in Ubuntu by clicking on the Ubuntu distribution icon in the top-left of the screen, scrolling down to “Accessories” and then clicking the terminal icon.
4. Type

   sudo apt-get install apache2 php5-gd php5-mysql mysql-server openssh-server lynx

   and hit return. Enter the password you chose when installing when prompted and then press the “Y” to accept the 75MB-ish download. This will download all of the files you need to create a basic web-server and to be able to connect to it from your host in one go rather than having to do them individually. Please ensure that you’ve double checked the command for typos or it won’t work. It will probably take a while so you might want to make a coffee, stretch your legs and get some sunshine before we get into the rest of this.
   A note for the geekier readers: the reason I’ve not specified version numbers for the MySQL components is that this way the installer knows to go and get the latest stable releases, fact-fans.

5. The most time-consuming part of this process is setting up the mysql-server because it nags you for a password every minute or so. Now I would never suggest that you don’t use a password in the real world but for the sake of expediency and as you’re going to be working on a secure virtual machine I recommend that you leave the password field blank at this point and just hit return when it asks you for one.
6. That’s it. All the other applications install silently. The more astute of you will have noticed that on top of the normal LAMP components I’ve added some extras, namely openssh-server and lynx. By default Ubuntu comes with an SSH client but no server so you’d not be able to connect to the virtual machine via your host terminal client for quick maintenance. This is also the reason I’ve included Lynx, the command line browser for Linux. It’s good for testing whether something works on your virtual server when you’re trying to discover why your host or Windows guest can’t see the project you’re working on.

Test your SSH connection

1. In your Ubuntu guest, open terminal.
2. Type

   ifconfig

3. Make a note of the IP number of the device labelled “vboxnet0″ (remember from earlier?). It’ll most likely be something like 192.168.56.101 or so.
4. Now open your terminal client in Mac OS and type

   ssh username@ip.ad.dr.ess

   where username is your username and ip.ad.dr.ess is the number you took down in the previous step. All being well you should now be connected to the virtual machine and being prompted for the password. If not run through the steps above and make sure you have installed everything needed. If you’ve missed one of the applications don’t worry, you can install it individually with the Linux terminal command

   sudo apt-get install theappyoumissed

   and following the on-screen instructions.

5. With luck you should now be being welcomed to the inner workings of the virtual machine you have installed.

Test your MySQL server

1. Whilst still in terminal and connected via SSH to the Linux virtual machine you may as well see if your MySQL server is working.
2. Type

   mysql -u root -p

   and hit return. It will prompt you for a password (that’s the -p switch) and hit return.

3. Type

   show databases;

   and you’ll get this returned:

   +--------------------+
   | Database           |
   +--------------------+
   | information_schema |
   | mysql              |
   +--------------------+
   2 rows in set (0.00 sec)

4. Type “\q” and hit return. This will dump you back to SSH.

Test your Apache2 installation

1. In terminal whilst using SSH to talk to the virtual machine type “Lynx” and hit enter. This opens the Lynx command line browser. Press “g” and type the address:

   localhost

   You should now have a screen which tells you “It works! This is the default webpage for this server. The web server software is running but no content has been added, yet.” This means you’re working at least locally. Press “q” and then “y” to dump you back out to the terminal.

2. There is no step 2.

Test that your server talks to itself

1. Still in terminal and SSH type the following:

   sudo touch /var/www/index.php
   sudo nano /var/www/index.php

2. This will open a command line editor that is very similar to a GUI text editor. Before any Linux ‘enthusiasts’ (yeah, you, neckbeard) come down on me for not using Vi, Vim, Emacs or whatever this tutorial is already long enough without having to teach somebody a whole new way of working for editing maybe a handful of files. Suck it up and use your own if you’re more comfortable with it.
   In this editor pane write:

   <? phpinfo(); ?>

   Hit “ctrl + o” to write the file and then “ctrl + x” to exit.

3. Fire up lynx and “g” to http://localhost/index.php where you should see an enormous 30-odd page of information. What you’re looking for is on about page 19 where it should say “MySQL Support Enabled”.

Testing that your host OS can see the guest server

1. We’re getting towards the crux of the whole process now, seeing the virtual webserver from your main dev machine.
2. Open your favourite web browser and in the address bar put the same IP address that were using to connect via SSH like so: http://ip.ad.dr.ess/ and you should see the first ‘It works!” page.

Install Windows

1. Follow the previous instructions about creating a new virtual machine but change the installation type to Windows and then select your Windows flavour.
2. Install Windows from your CD/DVD. I don’t need to tell you how to follow the instructions, everything will work straight of the box. This take a while so make yourself another coffee and go and listen to the birds in the garden.

Installing VBox Additions

You can happily use Windows without having the VBox Additions installed but you won’t be able to get Ubuntu to play nicely without them so you might as well install on both Windows and Ubuntu as it will make your life more bearable in terms of performance and ease of maintenance.

Installing VBox Additions on Windows

1. Restore your Windows Virtual Machine and right click on the little blue cube with a gold star on it in the utility tray in the bottom right of the screen, directly opposite the start button.
2. Follow the directions and you’re done.

Installing VBox Additions in Ubuntu

1. Restore your Ubuntu Virtual Machine and in the Devices pull down menu, CD/DVD Devices option you should see an item called VBoxGuestAdditions.iso. Select it.
2. If it doesn’t mount directly to your desktop, as mine doesn’t, go to the Places menu in Ubuntu and select the CD/DVD icon. This will mount it to your system and you’ll see it on the desktop.
3. Double click the CD and find the file Autorun.sh. Double click it. When it asks you what you want to do with it select run and enter your admin password when prompted.
4. When the shell script has finished installing the additions hit enter to close the window when prompted.
5. Reboot the Virtual Machine to complete installation. You can do this either by clicking the power icon on the top bar on the far right and selecting restart or if you’re still have an SSH session open by typing:

   sudo reboot now

   and entering your admin password when prompted. Your virtual machine will reboot immediately.

6. After rebooting you can unmount the CD/DVD image as you won’t need it anymore.

Setting up file sharing

This is set into two parts, Windows and Ubuntu. The reason this is done like this is that the Windows part is painless but the Ubuntu part needs a little bit of work.

Windows File Sharing

1. Open an Explorer Window (The quickest way to achieve this is to press “command + e”. The left Apple command key acts as the Windows key.) and go to “My Network Places”. You should see an attached network drive called “VBOXSVRsomething on VBoxsvr” where the something is the name of the share that you made during the virtual machine configuration. Double click it and you should see the contents of your share. You can have multiple shares if you like but if, like me, you have all of your sites under one folder you shouldn’t need to.

Ubuntu File Sharing

I’ll be honest, this one had me stumped for a long time but eventually I found someone online who’d done exactly what I wanted and just followed his instructions. Here I’ve just put the salient information.
You can read the full write up from the excellent David Herron here.

1. SSH into your box as before.
2. It gets a bit hairy here now. As of the update from Ubuntu 9.10 to 10.04 the shares load before the VBox Additions so you have to do an extra step. It’s very simple but it makes the difference between mounting and not mounting the host file system.
3. Type the following:

   sudo touch /etc/init.d/local

   Enter your admin password.

4. Then type:

   sudo nano /etc/init.d/local

5. Then type:

   #!/bin/sh
   mount.vboxsf -w YourShare /path/to/yourshare

   For example, mine is “mount.vboxsf -w Sites /mnt/sites” as explained earlier in the tutorial.

6. Type:

   sudo mount -t vboxsf Yoursharename /mnt/Yourshare

That should be it.

All that’s left is to configure your Apache 2 install and your host files for your host and Windows VM machines. They’re easy enough to do but if you need a walk-through on those as well leave me a comment below and I’ll edit the how-to.

Well I hope that was of some use to someone out there. It’s not an easy task but it’s one that will set you up well for mobile web development and allow you to travel around without worrying too much about missing work or losing out on money while you see the world.