I hate Mondays (sometimes/mostimes)....

Training in London this week so caught the 06:38 into Liverpool Street from Ipswich which is supposed to arrive at 07:59 but didn't arrive till 08:25, some 26 minutes late. Arrived back at Liverpool Street to catch the 18:00 back to Ipswich to arrive at 19:08 but because the rail situation was all stuffed up I had to catch the 18:30. This did not make it into Ipswich until 20:22 so I was 1:14 late.

One state that engineering work will continue till 12:00 tomorrow causing 2 of the four lines going into London to be closed until then. We're told this will lead to alterations to service but I can't find any details of these!

Looks like I'll be catching the 05:53 tomorrow, so if I go to bed (been in for 20 minutes) now, I should just about manage 7 hours sleep!


MONDAYS!!!!!

Firefox Font Problem

Does anyone know why Firefox has started doing this?
(Image lost due to Blog move)

It's not just on the rendered pages because it's doing similar weird font things in it's own dialogue boxes:
(Image lost due to Blog move)

Four hours in the future?

I'm unsure as to why my blog is posting four hours into the future (it's now 22:41 on 20/2/05)!

Blog to move

This blog will shortly move to Community Server v1.0. I have it setup and just need a way to move the existing post over - I did find some scripts but there is supposed to be and easy to use migration tool being released in the next few weeks.

It will be homed at http://cs.thefoleyhouse.co.uk/blogs/karl/.

Take a look at the whole skeleton Community Server at http://cs.thefoleyhouse.co.uk/.

Suse 9.2 fails to resume from disk

The saga of getting my Suse 9.2 box to behave as well as my Suse 9.1 box pre upgrade continues.

Slight problem with suspend to disk. Well, rather, the resume from disk just wasn't working.

After some digging I found that the 'resume=/dev/hdc5' entry was missing from '/boot/grub/menu.lst.'

I think there may also have been a problem with my swap partition so i did the following to be safe:

• Checked '/etc/fstab' to make sure the swap partition was listed (it was)
• Used the 'swapoff' command to disable swap (don't think it was being used but just to be safe)
• 'mkswap /dev/hdc5'
• Used 'swapon -a -v' to activate swap

Boot and general performances seems better/quicker so I suspect it was a problem.

Suse 9.2 Bootsplash not working

I installed Suse 9.1 home from downloaded CDROM's , upgraded it to 9.1 professional via the Suse website and then upgraded it again to 9.2 Professional from the downloaded DVD.

The Bootsplash screen was not working. After a bit of digging I found that the file '/etc/sysconfig/bootsplash' contained the line 'Theme="SuSE-Home" but that the SuSE-Home theme (bootsplash-theme-SuSE-Home.rpm) was no longer installed.

I did have the SuSE Professional theme (bootsplash-theme-SuSE) installed though so I edited the line to read 'Theme="SuSE"' which matched the name in the '/etc/bootsplash/themes' directory.

I executed mkinitrd which attached the appropriate image to the initrd and everything is sweet now.

SSID is case sensative in Linux!

Now, you may know this, but I just wasted two days trying to get my wireless working again. I had some problems and re-did the wireless configuration but whatever I did I couldn't get any traffic to register on the wireless interface. Turned out that I did not have the same case for the SSID in /etc/sysconfig/network/ifcfg-wlan0 that I did on the access point.

Note to self:
WIRELESS_ESSID='TheFoleyHouse' != WIRELESS_ESSID='thefoleyhouse'

How to prevent Squid caching .asp pages

We need to access a (poorly behaved) website at work and it doesn't play nice with Squid. I've put the following in to try and force it not to cache .asp pages no matter what the cache settings are.

refresh_pattern \.asp$ 0 0% 0
refresh_pattern \.aspx$ 0 0% 0

Using MRTG to monitor Cable Modem Bandwidth

There is a really good readme to be found here:
http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/mrtg/windows_nt_idiot.htm

This allows you to setup mrtg to monitor any single device.

Installing Mplayer on Suse 9.2

Just add Packmans source: Protocol: http Server: packman.iu-bremen.de Path: suse/9.2

Using MPlayer to RIP Realmedia files on Linux

Found an interesting article here which describes the command line sytax required: http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Rip_Streams_With_MPlayer

Firefox showing Real Media content

I had some problems getting Firefox to use the RealPlayer plugins today so I just had to link them in:

# cd /opt/MozillaFirefox/lib/plugins
# ln -s /usr/local/RealPlayer/mozilla/* .

Capturing RM media files

I found a nifty little prog to capture Real Media streaming files today called Stream Down.
http://stream-down.cocsoft.com/

Red-carpet problems with Suse 9.2

I wanted to install the latest Evolution\Ximian connector for Exchange combination but I had quite a few problems with the red carpet daemon crashing on me. I verified it was crashing by using "sux -" to switch to root and then ran it in non-daemon mode "rcd -n". After reviewing the errors it seemed to have a problem so I looked at /var/log/rcd/rcd-messages:

...
Feb 11 15:39:55 [6811] Unable to download service info: IO error - Soup error: Connection terminated unexpectedly (7)
Crash!
rcd has crashed.
Attempting to write backtrace to /tmp/rcd-crash.23380
Error while mapping shared library sections:
...

I couldn't get it working again so I downloaded the latest red-carpet and red carpet daemon. They were hard to find but I found them here:
rcd-2.4.5-0.ximian.10.2.i586.rpm
red-carpet-2.4.4-0.ximian.10.1.i586.rpm

After some experimentation I was able to get it to start again by using the command line "rcd -n -m" so as not to load any modules. After this I managed to start it again normally using "/etc/init.d/rcd start".

Red-carpet problems with Suse 9.2

I wanted to install the latest Evolution\Ximian connector for Exchange combination but I had quite a few problems with the red carpet daemon crashing on me. I verified it was crashing by using "sux -" to switch to root and then ran it in non-daemon mode "rcd -n". After reviewing the errors it seemed to have a problem so I looked at /var/log/rcd/rcd-messages:

...
Feb 11 15:39:55 [6811] Unable to download service info: IO error - Soup error: Connection terminated unexpectedly (7)
Crash!
rcd has crashed.
Attempting to write backtrace to /tmp/rcd-crash.23380
Error while mapping shared library sections:
...

I couldn't get it working again so I downloaded the latest red-carpet and red carpet daemon. They were hard to find but I found them here:
rcd-2.4.5-0.ximian.10.2.i586.rpm
red-carpet-2.4.4-0.ximian.10.1.i586.rpm

After some experimentation I was able to get it to start again by using the command line "rcd -n -m" so as not to load any modules. After this I managed to start it again normally using "/etc/init.d/rcd start".

Evolution Upgrade Problems

Evolution caused me a small headache in my 9.1 to 9.2 update. I had a developer snapshot installed so the upgrade program didn't know how to install around it. I decided to simply remove the old version first and upgrade any libraries by choosing the "remove protection" option. I plan to reinstall the latest evolution version post upgrade.

Upgrade from Suse 9.1 to 9.2

Took a chance today to upgrade my Dell Inspiron 5100 laptop from Suse 9.1 to Suse 9.2 and it all went rather well. I had a few minor problems which I'll deal with separately.

Thank you Miguel Jimenez!

Well, having found the term Captcha and having done a little digging you can see that each comment page now requires you to enter a validation code - This should stop all of the automated comment spam I've been getting and it was incredibly easy, taking just a few minutes to setup.

I owe you a beer Miguel!

Here's the great bit of code:
http://blogs.clearscreen.com/migs/archive/2005/02/01/905.aspx

Comments still a problem

Still getting hit by lots of comment Spam.

Community Server RC2 was released last night so I'm going to put this on test.

When this is released it effectively becomes version 1.00 of Text and it has some anti-comment spam features. Theere has been some discussion of the same for Text 0.95 but I'm not yet able to recompile (I have got a copy of VS .Net so I may give it a go).

Here are the suggestions for changes and here is a set of updated SQL statements for 0.95 which apparently fix a few problems.

I've seen mention of something called "CAPTCHA" and also suggestions of using an event handler.

Comments

I'm going to try switching comments back on to see what happens.
Adam Kalsey seems to use a blacklist system of some type - Might be worth investigating.

Update to Exchange IMF out Now

IMF has been letting through a bit of spam recently but have no fear, a new version is here!

You can download it from the Microsoft download centre.