29 Mar

KFM 1.3b released

In two weeks, I hope to release 1.3 proper. The 1.3b release is pretty-much bug-free. The only outstanding things are very minor. Oh – and the fact that it doesn’t work at all in IE8b1, which doesn’t bother me yet.

A small list of the more important new features:

  • open KFM with a preselected directory or file
  • resize multiple files at a time
  • KFM is templateable now (design your own interface!)
  • new languages: Persian, Swedish
  • plugins! You can now write your own KFM plugins

more info here

I’d recommend anyone that works with CMSes to have a look at this project.

27 Mar

terry pratchett new book?

I was reading through Sky’s site for the Colour Of Magic film, and noticed that the book list (under Terry Pratchett > The Books) includes a book called “The Ullustrated Wee Free Men” due out this year. There does not seem to be mention of it anywhere else online… anyone know anything about it?

Oh – and “David Jason” is mis-spelled as “Daivid Jason” in the title of one of the videos in Video > Behind The Magic

25 Mar

error loading kqemu?

Fedora does not come with the kqemu kernel module installed. You need to either compile it yourself, or download an RPM of it from somewhere. I use ATrpms myself.

When you try to install it, with the line “modprobe kqemu“, you might get this error:

FATAL: Error inserting kqemu (/lib/modules/2.6.24.3-34.fc8/updates/kernel/kqemu.ko): Invalid module format

All you need to do to fix this is to open the kqemu.ko file with Vim (or a lesser text editor if you will), and replace the string ‘586’ with ‘686’ then save and retry.

21 Mar

laptop cooler

Tired of my laptop dying every now and then, I have taken drastic action.

The Acer Travelmate 2420 is very badly designed where it comes to heat management. Air is sucked in from under the laptop (where your leg or the table would block the airflow) and blown out the side of the machine. A smarter arrangement might be to suck in air from above the keyboard and blow it out the side, but hell – what do I know about laptop design…

Anyway – the problem is that the bottom hole is too easily blocked, and besides, the fan is crap – doesn’t pull in enough air.

The solution is to give the fan a helpful boost. So, what I did was to build a small platform from cardboard, and stick three Thermaltake fans in it, each of which was more powerful than the laptop fan. This causes a large airflow through the laptop, keeping the usually-roasting right side of the machine actually colder than the rest of the machine!

pic1pic2pic3pic4

1. front view – laptop is at perfect angle for working at. 2. back view – shows the three fans. 3. left view – my hacked power-supply (normal four-wire power cable with two of the wires hooked to a 12v PSU). 4. top view – shows the air hole which sits directly under the laptop fan, and a cardboard block at the bottom middle which helps keep the laptop in place (along with the two grooves on either side).

11 Mar

the challenge

Write a Sudoku solver in JavaScript in under 5k by 9am tomorrow morning. The prize? Two beers. Who can resist?

My colleague Bartosz for some reason thinks I’m not able to do this. I have no idea why…

By 9am tomorrow morning I’ll have the code up with a working demo.

…and No, I will not be looking at other people’s solutions. That would be cheating, and would also spoil the fun.

Feel free to submit your own solutions.

edit: 8:04am the next day here it is. Will solve most puzzles I think, but not very hard ones. I think I’ll need to try it against the Irish Times puzzles to win the bet.

edit: 9:26 yesterday’s Irish Times puzzles <– I am 2 beers richer.

11 Mar

ejabberd authentication using a db table

ejabberd is a distributed scalable instant messenger server using the XMPP (Jabber) protocol.

I’m using it in a project upgrade at the moment which has a large established set of users. As such, when the upgrade goes live, I don’t want the users to have to recreate their user accounts. So, when the users load up their shiny new clients some time soon and see they have a new instant messenger to use, they should be able to use it flawlessly with their already-authenticated sessions, and not have to log in again.

So, I went looking for already-built code for this. The ejabberd site has a list of contributed scripts for authenticating against various scenarios. The scripts are usually in PHP or Perl.

The closest to what I wanted was the Joomla authentication one. The script needs to connect to a db and then validate the user against a table contained in that DB.

So I took the script I needed and I adapted it:

download (rename to .php when using)

I made some changes to the script. The original was strictly for the mysqli driver. I’ve changed the DB usage to use the Pear MDB2 library, so you can use whatever database you have a library for – in my case, I needed to use MSSQL. Also, the authentication SQL has been made configurable, so it should be easier to configure the script to your own usage.

The only fiddly thing is that in my database, passwords are encoded in a particular way, so you may need to change the following line to something that fits your own DB:

$convertedpass=$this->oDB->quote(base64_encode(sha1($aCommand[3],true)));
06 Mar

vm's and bridges and proxies

oh my!

We bought a rack server for the office, to help replace our aging systems with something a little more civilised. I spent a lot of time this week trying to figure out how to configure it best.

I wanted to install services and servers on the machine in such a way that I could easily move them onto a new machine if things get too busy. For this, I chose to use the QEMU virtual machine emulator. Some people might think that VMWare would be a better choice, but I did some research on it and couldn’t find any compelling reason why I should choose VMWare over QEMU.

To have the system networked properly in the LAN, I wanted to be able to address each vm using a separate IP number. To do this, I had to set up QEMU to use eth0 as a bridge. So, I had this in the host’s /etc/rc.local.

echo 1024 > /proc/sys/dev/rtc/max-user-freq
modprobe kqemu
modprobe tun
/etc/init/iptables down

/sbin/ifdown eth0
/sbin/ifconfig eth0 0.0.0.0 up
/usr/sbin/brctl addbr br0
/usr/sbin/brctl addif br0 eth0
/usr/sbin/brctl stp br0 off
/sbin/ifconfig br0 192.168.2.1 netmask 255.255.0.0 up
/sbin/route add default gw 192.168.1.254

and this was in /etc/qemu-ifup

#!/bin/sh
/sbin/ifdown eth0
/sbin/ifconfig eth0 0.0.0.0 up
/sbin/ifconfig $1 0.0.0.0 promisc up
/usr/sbin/brctl addif br0 $1
/sbin/route del default
/sbin/route add default gw 192.168.1.254

Note that I’ve used $1 instead of tap0 (which is shown in some examples) – this is because when you start up your QEMU instances, each one should use a different tap device.

When loading the QEMU instance, be sure to give each one a different MAC address. Otherwise strange stuff will happen.

xhost +local:root
su -c "qemu -boot c -hda vmServices.img -localtime -net nic,macaddr=52:54:00:00:00:01 -net tap -m 192 -usb -soundhw sb16 &"

In the above case, I’m loading a QEMU instance saved as “vmServices.img”, and have given it a MAC address 52:54:00:00:00:01. The default address is 52:54:00:12:34:56. Be sure to override that.

You’ll have noticed that I turned off iptables in the host’s /etc/rc.local. I’m not an expert at that stuff so that was the simplest solution to enable networking without problems. Be sure to also do it in the client’s /etc/rc.local files as well – otherwise you may have problems accessing hosted web servers, for example.

When the client is loaded up, assign a static IP address to it. I choose static IPs for these servers because they’re not client machines, and I need to be able to consistently access the right one from an external request.

Now you have your network up and running properly, with separate IP addresses for each vm.

The next step is to route incoming web traffic to the right machines.

Let’s say that you want a worker outside the office to access dotproject.youroffice.com, and you want a client to see his test server using blah.com.test.youroffice.com. The problem is that you are using a standard DSL connection, only have one static IP, and the dotproject and test web servers are held in separate VMs on the machine.

In this case, the solution is to use mod_proxy to route to the right machine.

So, you set up a rudimentary virtual hosted webserver on the host machine. The first virtual host should be something generic which perhaps just reports the status of the host. After that, we add the magic:

<VirtualHost *>
  ServerName dotproject.youroffice.com
  ProxyPreserveHost On
  ProxyPass / http://192.168.2.2/
  ProxyPassReverse / http://192.168.2.2/
</VirtualHost>
<VirtualHost *>
  ServerName test.youroffice.com
  ServerAlias *.test.youroffice.com
  ProxyPreserveHost On
  ProxyPass / http://192.168.2.3/
  ProxyPassReverse / http://192.168.2.3/
</VirtualHost>

From an external browser’s perspective, both web servers are running on the same machine, but internally, we can see that there are three involved – a proxy router, and the two separate virtual machines’ web servers.

There may be more-correct ways of doing the above, but this works for me.

06 Mar

IE8 Beta 1

…is now available to download and test.

According to the blog entry, IE8 is going to be very exciting for web developers. We can finally start ditching the old hacks built for IE7 and other lesser browsers.

It is not mentioned in that post, but IE8 will render in web standards mode by default. This means that IE8 will read your CSS and display it using as close as possible a rendering model based on W3C rules. This is in contrast to IE7 and below, where the standard was to display in “quirks” mode (using the MS version of the CSS model) and you had to jump through hoops to make it use standards mode.

IE8 aims to have full CSS 2.1 support. This is fantastic, as up to this point, there has been a great specification available, but designers could not use it to its full potential because IE simply wasn’t good enough for it. Microsoft is aiming to fix this deficiency …finally!

Some HTML5 elements will be available. I have not yet seen the list, but this again is a great new trick. HTML5 allows a designer to do some pretty funky things like this: <input name="email" type="email" required="required" />. That is something which at present would require a lot of supporting JavaScript.

I’m looking forward to this. It’s about time that IE grew up and joined the adult browsers such as Firefox and Opera.

05 Mar

Goodbye Gary, and thanks for the memories

tribute image from Penny Arcade

Gary Gygax, who engineered a large part of my teenage years, is dead.

I started playing Dungeons & Dragons when I was perhaps 13 or 14, when my parents surprised me one christmas with a box-set of the Basic edition. Almost immediately, this became a hit, and a troupe of players was formed in school.

I’ve lost contact with the players over the years, but their names were Neil, Sean, Brian, Tiarnan, Anto and Gavin.

What D&D gave to me was an imagination and companionship. Once a week, I was able to escape from the drudgery of being an outcast and transform into someone else.

After a while, I transferred to AD&D (Advanced Dungeons And Dragons – an entirely new set of rules) 2nd edition. This was pivotal – the rules were more complex, but that didn’t matter, as the accompanying stories were so much more fascinating. I would buy (and in some cases, steal, to the amusement of the police – they expected young criminals in Tallaght to be stealing cars or mugging, not stealing books to feed a voracious imagination) manuals, read the rules, but study the accompanying short-stories and excerpts.

The goal of AD&D is not to beat up orcs, steal their treasures and amass a huge value in XP. As a dungeon master, I tried to reward the players for playing their roles passionately more than I’d reward them for the various atrocities they committed on the rapidly endangered bad-guy species in our make-believe world.

Through the game, I came across wonderful gems such as Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman’s Dragonlance books – which would go on to be hugely popular. I always fancied myself to be a little like Raistlin/Fistandantilus – a weakling outcast who had big potential inside. Unfortunately, Raistlin was also a little, well, evil, but no-one’s perfect! His brother Caramon was a bit of a dweeb. Sorry if I mangle names a little – it’s been twenty years since I read the books!

The antics of Tasslehoff Burrfoot were sometimes annoying – the Jar-Jar Binks of the Dragonlance world. But it was fun to read the events of Fizban The Fabulous – an addle-brained sorcerer who would turn out to be very very important (and also turned up in another unrelated series by the same authors, as “Zifnab”).

Eventually we would go on to play other games such as Vampire: The Masquerade and the over-complicated but realistic Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. We would always go back to A&D, though; nothing could beat it.

Gary, if there’s a heaven for gamers and dungeon masters, I hope you’re in it, enjoying a pipe with the great sage Elminster.