Cricalix.Net

The title of this post is actually slightly inaccurate – in the past 15 years, the number of hard drive failures my personal hardware has had (as opposed to hardware I’ve worked with) can be counted on one hand, two if my memory is a bit off.

This morning, I had reason to thank the gods of RAID – one of my drives died last night, and I didn’t lose a bit of data (hah, a pun!).

So, one RMA raised, and I have to hope that the other drive doesn’t decide to follow in the footsteps of its brother.  Perhaps I should get two more 500 GB drives and run RAID5 with hot-spare…

Oh, and an LTO drive.

With the web side of my mail and web migrated to a Xen VPS, I spent this weekend moving my mail services across.

SASL gave me grief, as it usually does.  I’m not sure whether it was the plain or md5 SASL extension that solved my problem in the end (I’m using MySQL as the backend via auxprop), but it finally started working after installing both of them.  Before that, I was getting a wonderful “warning: xsasl_cyrus_server_get_mechanism_list: no applicable SASL mechanisms” from Postfix, which then promptly declared that it was having nothing to do with me and went off in a huff.

With the SASL issue solved, everything else was a breeze – I just imported my old configuration for Postfix, amending it where things had changed (variable name wise).  I had to use SJ Mudd’s RPM package, as the default CentOS packages don’t know what MySQL is as a dictionary type, but beyond having to compile my own package, it was painless.  Courier compiled nicely into RPMs, and is happily chatting to the data source that ties together my valid accounts for SMTP and IMAP.  TLS is all integrated nicely, webmail is running, DNS is changed.

Bet something breaks!

KDE has supported the use of the Print Screen button as the hotkey for running KSnapshot for ages; to the point I can’t remember when it didn’t work. I used this feature heavily in Feisty, as it meant a single keystroke captured the screen, and brought up KSnapshot to deal with saving it (to wherever I wanted, including the network [go fish io_slave!]).

Gutsy broke this. Bug reports show it broken in Tribe 4 and Tribe 5, so I’m surprised it made it into the release version (which has even had updates released). This was an upgrade installation, so I’ll have to poke around with a fresh installation to see if it’s just an upgrade issue.

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"  )

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.

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.

I’m currently looking at three screens on my desk. That’s not too unusual for a computer geek. What is cool is that I’m controlling them with one mouse and one keyboard, across two computers. I’ve mentioned this before, it’s a tool called Synergy2.

What’s even cooler though, is that I popped Word 2007 (which really isn’t bad for what I need to do, and the default document theme is quite nice) on to the 22″ display (which is hooked on to the back of the 12.1″ laptop for $work), and it promptly started displaying my document as two side-by-side pages. That’s just nifty. No idea if OpenOffice is that smart, never tried doing it.