Cricalix.Net

Much like Apache, Lighttpd (lighty) has a rewrite module to rewrite URL requests; allowing ‘ugly’ page requests to look nice. Unfortunately, the rule sets I found on the net didn’t work too well with Menalto’s Gallery 1, so I ended up creating my own. The core change from the other rule sets I found is the ability to handle ?page=x on album views.

url.rewrite-final = (
 "^/gallery/([^.?/]+)/([0-9]+)$"
   => "/gallery/view_photo.php?set_albumName=$1&index=$2",
 "^/gallery/setup/"
   => "/gallery/setup/",
 "^/gallery/([^.?/]+)/$"
   => "/gallery/$1",
 "^/gallery/([^.?/]+)/([A-Za-z_0-9-]+)$"
   => "/gallery/view_photo.php?set_albumName=$1&id=$2",
 "^/gallery/([^.?/]+)/([A-Za-z_0-9-]+)\?([A-Za-z]+)=([0-9]+)$"
   => "/gallery/view_photo.php?set_albumName=$1&id=$2&$3=$4",
 "^/gallery/([^.?/]+)\?page=([0-9]+)$"
   => "/gallery/view_album.php?set_albumName=$1&page=$2",
 "^/gallery/([^.?/]+)$"
   => "/gallery/view_album.php?set_albumName=$1"  )

Every now and then, I wander up to Sainsbury’s supermarket during my lunch hour; usually accompanying Mike and Jason (two gents I work with).  Mike has a habit of picking up one CD or DVD every week, and one day it rubbed off on me, and I picked up Amy MacDonald’s This Is The Life on Mike’s recommendation.

Put simply, I love her voice, and I love the album.  It’s full of acoustic guitar work, and her voice and songs belie her age.

Well, I’ve finally decided to move my site off of my DSL connection and on to a VPS. I’ll be running regular backups with a tool like rsync-backup to bring any changes back down to my internal systems. For now, mail still comes to my DSL, but the web side has been migrated out to a Xen-based VPS. Some rather draconian iptables rules have been implemented, such as the server isn’t actually allowed to initiate connections outbound for anything other than SMTP and HTTP (sending mail and picking up updates respectively), while inbound connections are source-limited for certain ports. I’ve also switched from Apache to Lighttpd, and I’m impressed - the memory usage is much lower, even with PHP enabled to run Wordpress.

As for the odd incident - heard a very loud grinding noise this morning around 5 a.m., and decided to look out the window. A nice 2005 series Mercedes was sitting on the grass verge, and the two men inside seemed a bit agitated. It wouldn’t go forward, or backward, and the engine didn’t seem to want to start. It seemed a bit peculiar, so I watched for a while without showing myself. Went to get my camera, and they had vanished. Cranked the ISO to over 1000, dropped the shutter speed to about 1/40 and opened the aperture up (full manual FTW), shot a photo or two of the car. Observed the men coming back up the road from inside the estate, tried to get a shot of them too.

Wasn’t too sure what to think, so I laid back down, only to hear another car pull up about 5 minutes later, and voices. Stuck my head up again, and lo, the police were looking at the car. Stuck my head out the window, got their attention and gave them details on the two men. Turns out the car was probably hot (i.e., stolen), as the keys were still inside. Gave my details for them to contact me about the photo, and went back to bed for about 20 minutes. Couldn’t get back to sleep, so fired up the computer, popped the card in and tossed the photo into Lightroom.

Well, ISO 1000 wasn’t enough, but it was still damn noisy. Even with Noise Ninja, I couldn’t get a useful image that showed details of the mens’ faces. Good chance I’d recognise them though. So now to wait for the call from the police.

Last year, I bought a Belkin bluetooth USB dongle for my Asterisk box (if my mobile is in range, I’m at home), and for the occasional use on my Windows PC for syncing contacts to the phone.  It never worked right, and I attributed it to the Linux BT stack, the USB 1.1 port on my laptop and my aging Windows XP installation.  I picked it out of my bits box last week, and tried to get it running on the shiny new Windows box with decent USB ports.

Nada.  Every time I tried to discover other BT devices, Windows would swear blind that the dongle refused to scan - supported by the BT light going off, indicating that it had shut down.  So, off to the Internet, and I found a site saying that there was a known bad batch of Belkin dongles, and that Belkin would replace them.

So, off to Belkin’s site, and find the contact form.  Fill in the details, mentioning I really have no clue where I got the device, but it was in 2006, and according to a site on the ‘net, my dongle was probably from a bad batch.  The response from the form told me that I’d hear back from a Belkin rep in the next few days.

Fast forward to today.  No response from a Belkin rep, but along with my two 500 GB drives was another package - a shiny replacement for the bad dongle, shipped straight from Belkin!  Works like a charm, no more cable required to talk to the sync app, and it’s just as fast as the cable.

I did a disk capacity check a few days ago, and found to my surprise that of my 320 GB RAID, only 60 GB was free.  So, a pair of 500 GB drives have been ordered, and I’ll need to migrate my whole system from the 320 to the 500 array (and use the 320 array as a backup array for system images).  Normally, I’d use Ghost 8 for this, but I’ve decided to poke Acronis True Image as well.  However, I figured it might be worth looking at the latest version of Ghost, just to see what they’ve added to the mix.  Everything looked ok (and it was a bit cheaper than Acronis), until I got to the bottom of the page.

*1 Year Protection: With this service you receive the right to use this product on one PC or on the specified number of PCs during the service period, which begins upon initial installation. This renewable service includes protection updates and new product features as available throughout the service period, subject to acceptance of the Symantec License Agreement included with this product and available for review at www.symantec.com. Product features may be added, modified, or removed during the service period.

So, if I read that right, when I shell out £39.99 for Ghost 12, I get a 1 year license, and after that I’m not meant to use the software any more, unless I renew it.  Any bets that renewing it means ‘pay Symantec money’?  Ghost 12 just lost out.

Been poking the W810i this evening, trying to get it to synchronise with my PC for things like calendar and contacts. Gave up on the official software quite quickly, as it seems to be utter pants, only supporting Outlook Express / Windows Address Book. Found a link to some software called MyPhoneExplorer, and it seems to do everything that the virtual tin says it does, complete with calendar and contact sync (and I now get why Dave loves this feature of his Treo), send SMS from the computer, full contact editing and more. It only works with the Sony Ericsson phones, but it’s a very nice little tool.  The really nifty part about the calendar sync is it talks to Thunderbird, Google (which I don’t use), an iCal file or the application itself.  Since I use Thunderbird on the Windows box, that works quite nicely for me.

Pity the transfer over the USB cable is so slow, even on a USB 2.0 host controller, but I think that’s the phone itself.