I could've known...
Exactly one year ago I had this glitch in the continuity of the domainname of this site…
So guess what happened today? This domain expired… and is renewed back again… But stoopid me, I had to find out the hard way… that is, waking up, putting my IM on and getting a message like “what happened to your domain!!!???!!!” “uh?”
Ah well, somehow it all seems to be part of this site… This stuff happens on privately owned and run servers/sites/domains etc. I guess…
But I’m already done with the charm of it all, now let’s get these glitches out of the system! ;-)
and talking about some charming downtime… I won’t get better than a couple of years ago, when this site was running on a little SGI in a spare bedroom of a friends house… when at one night, somebody (I don’t have to tell you this was a girl, right?) slept in that spare bedroom and she was looking for a wall-socket so she could charge her cellphone…guess which plug she pulled… *^_^*
a new toy: HP Secure Webconsole
This week I bought a new toy from an auction-site. It’s a HP Secure Webconsole. That sounds impressive, now doesn’t it? :-) But what is it? Well, it’s a tiny box with ethernet and a serial port. I can connect any machine in my network to that serial port and when I point my browser to the IP of this little machine, a java-applet loads and tada! I can get onto the console of that machine. In my case, with a whole lot of Suns and SGIs laying around, this is extremely useful. Especially since I’ve got a misbehaving Classic II (which was my terminal before) and an eMate with VT100-software on there which time-outs after 5 minutes (I need to register it, I still have to find out if the company who wrote that software still exists).
The small little box:
click to enlarge
click to enlarge
The powerplug needed soldering, I took the whole plug out and soldered the wire directly to the small PCB in there… I knew this upfront and the device got cheaper because of this.
What you see when you point the browser to this little device:
click to enlarge
So, now I need to make some proper cables, to connect it to the stuff I have laying around…
BRIGHT Nerd Alert: the video
A couple of days ago, next to Barcamp I also went to Amsterdam for shooting a video. And guess what? It’s online! *^_^*
click it to play the video
if you don’t see anything above, you could try the direct link (full screen)
Oh, and it’s in Dutch :-)
The whole idea was making LED throwies (which, of course, is courtesy of Graffiti Research Lab) but only with orange LEDs, to promote the Dutch soccerteam in the coming World Cup. We wanted to tag these on the Dam in Amsterdam, but we didn’t plan this very carefully, so we were all dressed up, but had no place to tag these throwies… (don’t even ask… ;-))so then we continued with plan B… Anyways, it was fun making it, I hope you enjoy watching it *^_^*
And… believe it or not, but this is the pilot-episode of Nerd Alert TV, so let’s all hope there will be lots of episodes on bright.nl! weeeeee! ;-)
funky clean URLs and permalinks
Permalinks/clean URLs at my site have been troublesome since I first looked into them. At the first moment I was running this site on NetBSD and somehow on that configuration, nothing worked fine besides the messy URLing (like /index.php?=messy) (which of course had nothing to do with running on NetBSD, it just happened to not work…). Next to that I was way too happy with my upgrade from a 180MHz R5000 to a 1200MHz Athlon Thunderbird back then, so I had enough other things to play with…
Anyways, later on, I moved this site to Gentoo on my current server and somehow, the clean url-ing started to work only the title-part of the clean-url wouldn’t ‘render’ at all and I had no clue where to look. After some upgrades and reconfigurations for other reasons, the title-part started to work also, but still not completely satisfactory…
it’s amazing what Google Images comes up with when you search for an appropriate image for ‘permalink’ *^_^*
This sunday-afternoon I decided I had enough of that and got to grips with permalinks *^_^*
...also because I don’t/didn’t want this thing to grow into some monster with permalinks being everything besides permanent…
So… what was the problem? Even though textpattern told me I enabled the “Permalink title-like-this (default is TitleLikeThis)” -option… I still got URLs like http://geektechnique.org/blog/640/Elsieneededafix
So the titles wouldn’t get dashes(hyphens) in the titles and it wouldn’t lowercase them also, whatever I did…
...so… after a looooong investigation (this took me all afternoon) where the bottleneck to this problem could be… I finally found it… it seemed the ‘internal script encoding’ in my php.ini was set to EUC-JP (japanese?) and when I changed that to UTF-8 (which my Apache-install likes much better…) things started to work… at least… on new articles… so after that I found myself in yet another MySQL-crashcourse in where to find the url_titles in my database and how to delete the contents of that, in such a way Textpattern would start to ‘render’ the clean urls again, and this time in a way how I liked to see them, lowercase and with hyphens…
So this is what I did (I googled several times for this problem, to no avail, so maybe I help someone else out with this, googling for the same…)
In my php.ini I changed mbstring.internal_encoding to UTF-8:
; internal/script encoding.
; Some encoding cannot work as internal encoding.
; (e.g. SJIS, BIG5, ISO-2022-*)
mbstring.internal_encoding = UTF-8
and I did the following on the MySQL-commandline…
mysql> connect textpattern;
mysql> show tables;
mysql> show columns from textpattern;
mysql> SELECT url_title FROM textpattern;
mysql> UPDATE textpattern SET url_title='';
mysql> SELECT url_title FROM textpattern;
and tada! empty url_titles!
(there’s quite some slack in the commands here… only the ‘connect’ and the ‘update’ commands with are necessary… I like to double-check everything (and did this first to my geektechnique-test-environment (yes! there is one! ;-)) before I did this to the live-database…)
So… permalinks now actually have a chance to become permanent this way :-)
Well, this must be one dull post… ;-)
B R I G H T 09 in stores now...
Yesterday I took a quick trip to Amsterdam, to meet up with my colleagues from BRIGHT, picking up the latest issue and having diner with them afterwards…
click to go to the corresponding pic on Flickr
click to go to the corresponding pic on Flickr
uhoh… that’s me! *^_^*
click to go to the corresponding pic on Flickr
the main article I contributed to…
click to go to the corresponding pic on Flickr
those pics are ones I made… and look! that’s a familiar kitchentable & table cloth, now isn’t it? *^_^*
click to go to the corresponding pic on Flickr
...and an extra article, Flashback, about a ‘maxer’ I once used… (regular visitors of this page will recognize my livingroom on that pic)...
What can I say? I’m quite flattered with this issue of BRIGHT I guess…
*^_^*
'new' Indycam connected...
Well, I’ve been quite thorough in how I automated my old Indy to be a webcamserver… but the Indycam itself is… well… euhm… not so good ;-)
Soooo… I just connected another camera to the Indy (it does have an analog video-input)...
It’s quite a beauty as far as cams go I guess…
click to enlarge
click to enlarge
I didn’t have a proper connector to hook it up, so that explains the wires you see…
I bought it around 2 years ago for four (yes, that’s 4!) euro… It’s an old B/W security/CCTV-cam and this is the kind of images it takes:
click to enlarge
original captured image is 768×576 pixels
I’m totally not sure this cam will be more light-sensitive than the Indycam, but my vote is for this one, no matter what, I just like the looks of the thing :-)
Oh, and while I’m testing it, the last uploaded image can be found here.
UPDATE
Wow… even in pitchdark, having only the light of my CRTs it produces an image… it’s a dark pic, but let me tell you, it’s very dark on this side of the camera… I’m quite impressed it even produces an image… this is a camera from 1983, kid you not! (that’s me sipping a coke…)
click to enlarge
original captured image is 768×576 pixels
BarCamp (II) Amsterdam & LED throwies
I’m just back from a weekend in Amsterdam. The bag worked out brilliant and I had a wonderful time.
In the spare time I had, I tried to attend BarCamp (II), which was held in the Post CS building near the Central Station in Amsterdam. In the end, I didn’t spend that much time there, but there was a nice atmosphere to hang out, so whenever there’s a BarCamp (III) in Amsterdam, I’ll be there. *^_^*
The Post CS-building at daylight
click to go to my BarCamp II photoset on Flickr
and click here to go to all pics tagged ‘barcampamsterdamii’
On saturday-night I also spent some hours in the same building, but then on the eleventh floor (or is it the the twelfth floor?)
The Post CS-building at night when it hosts Club 11 at the …
eleventh floor, click to go to my Club 11 pics on Flickr
But, the main reason I came to Amsterdam this weekend was Nerd Alert: Led Throwies. Nerd Alert is the name of a regular in the magazine Bright to which I contribute for a while now. (I contribute to the magazine and the website, the article has been for the magazine. This weekend was for getting content for the website) It was getting time I got my hands dirty on film *^_^*
The best preview can be had when you view the pics my editor in chief, Erwin, made. He just bought a brand new camera, so he’s a little triggerhappy ^_^ (which is a good thing!) (click any of the pics to go to his photoset on Flickr) I made some pics with my phone too, they can be seen overhere.
LED throwies
click to go to the LED throwie photoset on Flickr
a preview of ‘Nerd Alert’ in the magazine.
click to go to the LED throwie photoset on Flickr
The magazine, Bright No. 9, will be in stores (in Holland and Belgium…) coming thursday and when everything works out, there should be something up on bright.nl coming friday. ^_^
The ultimate in geek travel...
Yesterday I travelled to Amsterdam for the weekend. I’m here for a couple of things, doing some stuff for Bright and I’m attending BarCamp II in the spare hours. It’s gonna be fun for sure and for such a geeky weekend, I packed the ultimate in geek bags… (imho)
click to go to the corresponding pic on Flickr
click to go to the corresponding pic on Flickr
I packed one of the bags that used to carry a Mac SE/30 … Those are pretty handy bags, so at another time, when I have to travel less light… I can use both of the bags :-)
UPDATE To make things clear (I got a comment on this today) I haven’t been travelling with the SE/30, just with one of the bags… full of clothes!... I mean, what do people think of me!?!?!? tssssssskkkk ;-)
I’ll be adding pics to the BarCamp II-set on my Flickr-album
How-to turn an Indy into a dedicated webcam
This last weekend I spent quite some time, getting my old Indy into a fully-automated webcam-server… Somehow that seemed like a neat idea, a few days after SGI themselves sought Chapter 11 protection.
click to go to the How-To
You can find the complete How-to here:
How-to turn an Indy into a dedicated webcam
Elsie needed a fix...
My still brilliant little webserver, Elsie, a Mac LC475, which I chipped with a true Motorola 68040 (instead of the 68LC040 originally in there, the difference being a floating point unit, something which is necessary for running any kind of Unix), had some trouble lately…
the true Motorola 68040… click to go to the corresponding Flickr-page
She had some troubles before, borking out every now and then, but what was there to do? I couldn’t find the problem, she just stopped working when she felt like it… Well, every time I discovered that she went down, I just restarted the machine and there she was again, in all her glory :-) But… this week she borked out several times so there had to be something really wrong this time, not some spoiled behaviour or anything… Now the last few days the weather’s been great here and the temperature’s been rising quite some degrees… also in my ‘servercloset’ where Elsie’s standing… So this time I started thinking this could be a heatproblem instead of anything else and this afternoon I took Elsie out of my servercloset for a fix-up… And indeed, the CPU-fan I added when I chipped this machine stopped working and the thermal paste wasn’t much good either…
Some silverpaste, just like the big boys…
...and a fresh fan, connected very professionally…
Well, let’s see how long Elsie keeps on going this time… She’s been running in my closet since December 2004 now…
Oh, and you can find her here... if she feels like it *^_^*
before on this site:
