Learning on the Job

Smoother MKV playback with VLC

2011-10-15T18:19:00.000-04:00

If you're seeing stuttering in any MKV videos you've ripped, try out wipe0wt's suggestion and turn off loop filters in VLC altogether. It results in a dramatic improvement in playback quality. The gist is: Open up VLC and choose Tools -> Preferences from the menu In the bottom left corner of the preferences window you'll see a "Show settings" area. Make sure you change it from "Simple" to "All

Mounting MSDOS/FAT filesystems under Solaris

2011-08-12T18:37:00.000-04:00

I needed to copy over a bunch of photographs to my EON NAS so I put them on a USB stick and attached the stick directly to the NAS to get the maximum speed while copying. It turns out, while on Linux you type something like: mount -t vfat /dev/sdd1 /tmp/usbstick to mount the FAT or FAT32 filesystem from /dev/sdd1 to /tmp/usbstick, that command doesn't work on Solaris which is what EON NAS is

cwRsync, Windows 7 and UNIX Targets

2011-04-30T20:49:00.000-04:00

Lately whenever I've had to rsync anything to my E O N-based NAS from my Windows 7 machine, I've had permissions issues on the NAS. Specifically, any sub-directories I sync over are created with ridiculous permissions e.g. 0500 or something odd. No files are able to be transferred until I manually login to the NAS and run a something similar to: find -type d -exec chmod 0755 {} \; That got

CSV Exports in Rails

2010-08-30T14:48:00.000-04:00

If you're looking for an elegant way to generate CSV files from your index views (or search views or anything else for that matter) you should look no further than this post on StackOverflow by rwc9u. The gist is to add a format line in the respond_to section of the index method in your controller that caters to CSV. Then create an index.csv.erb file where you can generate the actual CSV using

Exception handling for Net::SSH

2010-08-27T14:44:00.001-04:00

I'm writing a bit of Ruby automation code which requires me to connect to multiple servers using ssh and gather specific information from them using a loop like so: hostList.each do |h| Net::SSH.start(h, "user", :password => "password", :timeout => 10) do |ssh| end end However, my test script kept dying at various points due to issues with the ssh connection to specific servers. Naturally

Building a Diskless MythTV Frontend with Mythbuntu 10.04 - Lucid Lynx - Part 1

2010-05-03T21:11:00.007-04:00

I just upgraded to Mythbuntu 10.04 which was released just a few days back on April 29th. Since I was already running Mythbuntu 9.10 on my MythTV backend server I was able to upgrade it to Lucid using the well documented and fairly simple steps on the ubuntu.com site: $ sudo apt-get install update-manager-core$ sudo do-release-upgrade After upgrading the backend server I decided to finally

Switching your Rails Database from SQLite3 to PostgreSQL or MySQL

2010-03-20T01:17:00.000-04:00

I deployed a minimal new Rails application I wrote over a period of a couple of hours and started testing it with valid production data. It's basically a very simple CRUD application for a very specific audience. Very basic stress testing (using Apache's ab) showed me that it didn't work well when requests were coming in with concurrency > 2. I realized I'd started the project using SQLite3 as

Spaces in /etc/fstab

2010-03-15T09:04:00.000-04:00

I needed to mount a Samba share from my windows gaming / media center PC to my MythTV backend so I could navigate to all my videos from a single location instead of having to worry about which server they were on. To that end I shared out the Videos folder from my account on the Windows PC. Since my user on the Windows PC is "Shahbaz Javeed" that presented a problem when trying to auto-mount it

CheckPoint VPN-1 SecureClient on Snow Leopard

2009-12-29T17:23:00.000-05:00

It turns out that the CheckPoint VPN-1 SecureClient for Leopard (OSX 10.5) doesn't work on Snow Leopard (OSX 10.6) due to differences between the two versions in the kernel and the way kextload works.Harald has a blog entry detailing how to fix the Leopard package so it installs on Snow Leopard and then fix the installed files so they properly run as well. He alludes to a method to fix the

Boot Camp x64 is Unsupported on this Computer Model

2009-12-20T00:58:00.000-05:00

Apple says that only certain models of Mac are x64 compatible when using Bootcamp 3.0 that comes with Snow Leopard and possibly Leopard. Imagine my surprise when my 17" MacBook Pro wasn't one of them. I'd hoped their flagship portable would be on the list. I got the somewhat curt error message "Boot Camp x64 is Unsupported on this Computer Model" and the Bootcamp installer refused to continue.

OSX and /etc/resolv.conf

2009-12-15T11:52:00.000-05:00

I recently went back to a Mac laptop and encountered an interesting issue. I needed to make some changes to /etc/resolv.conf to reflect a modified search path and since /etc/resolv.conf is a symlink to /private/etc/resolv.conf I edited the latter file. All was well until I connected to a different network. Now my /private/etc/resolv.conf file, which clearly states that it's an auto-generated

Accessing the KDE Wallet from the Cmdline

2009-11-10T16:51:00.023-05:00

I needed to write a script that would contact my Exchange server at work via IMAP and list all the messages in the Calendar folder. The idea was to see if it was possible to perform a one-way sync from the Exchange server to a specific calendar in Kontact. I was going to embed my IMAP password in the script - security hole, I know - but we have a password policy that requires the password to

Mythbuntu 9.10 Diskless Frontend

2009-11-09T21:33:00.003-05:00

With Mythbuntu 9.10 out (simultaneously with Ubuntu 9.10), apparently the "Diskless Server" plugin for the Mythbuntu Control Center is missing. According to this thread on the Ubuntu forums, it's because the developer who was working on that has had to step away from it for the moment. However, manually building the diskless client/server setup still works. That same thread has all the

Seagate FreeAgent USB Drives and Linux

2009-11-07T23:05:00.004-05:00

I don't particularly like the Seagate FreeAgent line of drives. Ever since I tried the first one - a 500GB specimen - and it died on me while still connected to a machine running CentOS. One moment it was fine, the next it was gone or remounted read-only. I figured out it happened whenever the drive went idle. I've stayed away from them ever since.Lately, however, I had to work with a FreeAgent

Determining 64-bitness of your CPU

2009-10-30T11:20:00.005-04:00

It looks like /proc/cpuinfo isn't the only way to find out whether your CPU is 64bit capable. In an effort to determine the most reliable way to find out this information I came across this page. A quick summary:If you see any output from the following command, you're running a 64-bit capable CPU.grep ^flags /proc/cpuinfo | grep ' lm 'The following command, if it exists on your system, will

NFS Error Messages

2009-10-01T03:27:00.004-04:00

As part of a disaster-recovery exercise I needed to make available an NFS share to various machines that needed it. It turns out the Solaris machine designated to be the NFS server had the NFS service deleted from it for some reason. We ended up getting an error while mounting the NFS share that indicated we needed to restart /etc/init.d/nfs.server on the Solaris machine.While looking for a

International Talk Like a Pirate Day

2009-09-19T21:28:00.004-04:00

Avast! It be that time of yearrrr when all me pirrate chums and I gatherr 'rround and celebrate our inner pirrates! Arrrr! Thank ye Cap'n Slappy and ol' Chumbucket for this rroisterous day! Enjoy!The 5 A'sI'm a pirrate!More from the Pirate Guys here.

CentOS 5.3 Upgrade Woes

2009-08-23T14:51:00.003-04:00

I ran yum upgrade on a development box running CentOS 5.3 and came across this error message:--> Processing Dependency: /usr/lib/python2.4 for package: gamin-python--> Processing Dependency: /usr/lib/python2.4 for package: libxslt-python--> Processing Dependency: /usr/lib/python2.4 for package: libxml2-python--> Finished Dependency Resolutiongamin-python-0.1.7-8.el5.i386 from installed has

Partially extracting a tarball

2009-08-16T23:51:00.005-04:00

I've never had to extract just a small part of a tarball before so it took a little bit of digging to determine how to do that. It's simple with other archivers e.g. zip, rar et al but tar requires just a couple of extra options to make it happen.Let's say you have a gzipped tarball that contains all your logs from /var/log with fully qualified paths. One thing to remember is that tar will

Fun with PostgreSQL and Date/Time

2009-06-30T11:43:00.008-04:00

I've been playing around with PostgreSQL 8.3.7 lately and while manipulating intervals realized a few key operators were missing. It turns out it's fairly easy to define operators in PostgreSQL as long as you have an existing function in the database. As a proof of concept I loaded up pl/PgSQL in a working database and created the following functions and operators:interval_divide (used to power

Trac 0.12 brings support for multiple repositories

2009-06-02T08:31:00.004-04:00

If you haven't tried trac for a quick but fairly extensive project management / ticketing system / wiki for your project then you really should. Chances are, however, if you've ever used it, you've been irked by the fact that you have to create a new trac instance for every project that you want to er... trac(k) :) It looks like version 0.12 (due out in July 2009) has planned support for

Mobile Browser Compatibility Guide

2009-05-20T11:09:00.002-04:00

John Resig blogged about the latest effort by Peter-Paul Koch (of Quirks Mode fame) in documenting as fully as possible the feature-set of mobile browsers and their compatibility with the standards we've come to accept in their desktop counterparts. Koch's work ranges from the DOM to HTML rendering and Javascript events and is bound to be useful to anyone who's considering targetting a mobile

Autodesk Project Dragonfly

2009-05-19T22:14:00.002-04:00

I just saw a very interesting tool for anyone who has wanted to use a CAD-type solution for interior decoration. It's called Project Dragonfly from Autodesk. I was able to whip up a model of one of the room in the house in a matter of minutes and was trying out different paint schemes. Very cool!

Mythbuntu 8.10 Scheduling Woes

2009-04-20T23:44:00.005-04:00

This is the second time I've encountered this and I ended up going through a long charade before finding the solution again. The main problem is that my MythTV backend didn't record the episode of Heroes that aired earlier tonight. I figured I'd watch the episode using MythTV's Live TV viewing feature but that didn't work either. I had other work to take care of so I figured I'd get to it