Nozell, rhymes with Oh Hell

The stock Ubuntu repositories don’t include the w32codecs (wmvdmod.dll, etc) so xine, mplayer can play WMV and other formats. Basically the package puts 127 DLLs in /usr/lib/w32codecs.

So, I temporarily added the following line to my /etc/apt/sources.list

deb ftp://ftp.nerim.net/debian-marillat/ testing main

And then did this:


apt-get update && apt-get install w32codecs


I then commented that line out since and apt-get upgrade would have picked up a bunch of updated packages from that repository.

I’ve been running Debian/Sarge (now the stable branch) on my laptop for quite a while now and its time to try a new distro for dailyl use — Ubuntu. This week I’ve been running Ubuntu ‘Hoary’ and the transition has been very smooth.

The only configuration issue was I wanted to use ALSA on this HP Compaq nc6000 laptop. The install did detect the sound device, but did separate the speaker from
the headphone controls.

phzi on #ubuntu pointed me to the unofficial UbuntuGuide.org, specifically the section configuresoundproperly. Those instructions were perfect.

I’d upgraded to the latest iPodder (v2.1) on my Ubuntu (’Hoary’) laptop today.

# tar jxvf iPodder-linux-2.1.tar.bz2

# cd iPodder-linux

# sudo ./install.sh

(take the defaults)

The only glitch is wx libraries aren’t in the default PYTHONPATH, so set this environment variable either at the command line, or pop it in ~/.bashrc

export PYTHONPATH=/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/wx-2.5.3-gtk2-unicode/:$PYTHONPATH-unicode:$PYTHONPATH


Now clean up a little bit…


$ cd ../

$ rm -rf iPodder-linux iPodder-linux-2.1.tar.bz2


Now, you are all set to start iPodder!

Getting closer to not needing any special knowledge to get iPodder running on a GNU/Linux distro…

- - - - -

Just for searchers, this is the problem you see if you don’t set the PYTHONPATH:


$ iPodder
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “iPodderGui.py”, line 38, in ?
import iPodderWindows
File “/opt/iPodder/iPodderWindows.py”, line 4, in ?
import listctrl as listmix
File “/opt/iPodder/listctrl.py”, line 296, in ?
EVT_DOPOPUPMENU = wx.PyEventBinder(wxEVT_DOPOPUPMENU, 0)
AttributeError: ‘module’ object has no attribute ‘PyEventBinder’


Since my job description contains the words Linux and ProLiant Servers, this makes me pretty happy — HP leads worldwide Linux server market. The news has been going round
internally at HP, along with selling the 10 Millionth ProLiant server

HP has set an industry-first milestone by shipping more than 1 million Linux servers to customers since 1998, 45 percent more than any other major hardware vendor.

HP has led the worldwide Linux server market for 29 consecutive quarters. In the first quarter of 2005, HP grew 2.5 percentage points faster than the market in units on a year-over-year basis, shipped nearly 10 times as many Linux servers as Sun, led IBM by almost 8 percentage points in quarterly revenue share and outpaced Dell in both units and revenue.

I just bought a replacement GPS, a Garmin eTrek and they wanted $38 for the PC connector cable! Five minutes of googling found navsphere.com which sells the same thing for $7.95 + $5 S&H.

Now I’m loading waypoint, cache sites and benchmarks from geocaching.com using gpsbabel and trying
to figure out gpsdrive, gpsman and xastir.

Some pretty sweet hardware to the linux kernel developers…

HP has most graciously donated a pair of DL585 quad Opteron servers with 24 GB of RAM and 10 TB of disk using a pair of MSA-30 arrays for each server. The first ones of these servers was officially put in service today; the next one will be put in service next week. Each server is in a different ISC colo, connected to the Internet via gigabit fiber links. Consequently, we should now see incredibly much better performance from kernel.org. Huge thanks to HP for the new hardware, and huge thanks to ISC for letting us quadruple our rack space requirements from 5U to 2×10U. We’ll be saturating those links in no time :)

ref: http://www.kerneltraffic.org/kernel-traffic/kt20050411_306.html#10

A while ago I upgraded desktop/server at work that holds my work blog from ubuntu ‘warty warthog’ (initial release) to ubuntu ‘hoary hedgehog’ (current release). Everything
went just fine except apache2/php4/mysql had some problems and the blog stopped working.

The problem was WordPress 1.5 couldn’t connect to mysql, but phpmyadmin could connect just fine. Strange. This is what I ended up doing:


$ sudo apt-get --purge remove apache2 phpmyadmin php4 (and maybe a few others that depended on apache or php)

$ sudo apt-get install apache2 php4 phpmyadmin


At appears that one of the configuration files for either php4 or apache2 didn’t get properly upgraded.

I was looking through my web logs recently and found a number of people were displaying my images
on their websites. Sure it is a bit flattering that someone liked my photo of our rug was perfect for the background of their blog or thought that embedding a 1M photo I took of John Kerry and Howard Dean in a high traffic web forums [1 | 2] was a good idea. However they sucked up nearly 200M of my monthly bandwidth quota and didn’t even give me credit for the photos. You know, I think that may be the worst part.

So this evening I googled around for the magic Apache configuration commands that would prevent
JPG/GIF images from being embedded in someone else’s web page. (ie: one not hosted on
nozell.com)

For the record, just pop this in a file named “.htaccess” in the same directory as were the images
are located and it will refuse to let GIF/JPG images to be loaded from other sites.

Read Ken Coar’s Preventing Image ‘Theft’ tutorial for complete details.

Lately, I’ve been using the bleeding edge version of iPodder from CVS (which confusingly is in the
iSpider directory) Here is how you can grab a copy for yourself:

$ cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/ipodder login
CVS password: (press return)

$ cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/ipodder co iSpider

[tons of informational messages about downloading iSpider]

$ cd iSpider
$ export PYTHONPATH=/usr/lib/python2.3/site-packages/wx-2.5.3-gtk2-unicode:$PYTHONPATH-unicode:$PYTHONPATH
$ python iPodderGui.pyw

… And fire up your favorite dev tools!

I’ve been using the ipodder beta on
my laptop that runs GNU/Linux Debian/Sarge in the command line only mode. But over the holidays there was and update to wxpython that gets the GUI working.

This is what you need to do:

$ alien –to-deb ipodder-1.1.2-1cl.noarch.rpm
$ sudo dpkg -i ipodder_1.1.2-2_all.deb
$ export PYTHONPATH=/usr/lib/python2.3/site-packages/wx-2.5.3-gtk2-unicode:$PYTHONPATH-unicode:$PYTHONPATH
$ /opt/iPodder/iPodderGui.py

and enjoy…