Useful hack for running scheduled tasks at a higher frequency than daily in windows xp

http://www.randomtree.org/eric/techblog/archives/2004/09/the_windows_task_scheduler_is_not_a_secondclass_citizen.html

uni2ascii

If you are ever having issues with g++ compiling code cut and pasted from a website, specifically stuff like "stray \200 on line" or other similar errors, then uni2ascii is for you.

Just take the problem file, and do the following

cat problem.cpp | uni2ascii -B > problem_clean.cpp

The uni2ascii program will do it's very best to convert unicode to ascii where possible.

The new file should compile okay. Remember the -B, if you forget it, you will have lots of random unicode escapes in your output.

webdot problems again

Upgraded to Bugzilla 3.x, and had of course, additional problems getting dependency graph generation to work.

Turns out this time that when I installed the graphviz rpm's from graphviz.org that the config file was not automatically generated.

Running "dot -c" from the terminal generated the needed config file. The error I was getting when running /usr/bin/dot before was as follows.

Hb6Hdotneato_args_initialize: Assertion `v' failed.H1NlH1.png

If it's working properly, you should get no output, as dot will wait for input if you pass it no arguments. Just CTRL+C out of that one.

Also, the graphviz rpm was complaining about libltdl.so.3 not existing, but I did a locate for libltdl* and found the source code was already on the system. A quick .configure, make, and make install, and I was almost there. Had to create a symlink from /usr/lib/libltdl.so.3 -> /usr/local/lib/libltdl.so.3

Additionally, you will want to do a view source on your graph dependency display page in bugzilla to see what whacky URL prefix it is using. On my system I had to do an Alias directive in the apache config to redirect the data/webdot URL's it was using to the actual directory on the server.

What you see is what you get editor for mediawiki

Apparently, some others have been wanting the same things as me. My users complain all the time that mediawiki pages are hard to edit.
Admittedly they are not IT folks, but they are my target audience for my company intranet.

http://www.parand.com/say/index.php/2005/07/27/wysiwyg-editor-for-mediawiki/

Converting a web page to plain text, like code samples that are in HTML

I came across a very interesting article on using Lynx or Linemode console web browsers to convert a HTML formatted page to plain text. This comes up more often than I would like since I often find code snippets online in HTML form that have been syntax highlighted. However if I just copy these items to the clipboard, then try to paste in vim in a terminal, the spacing gets all messed up. I'm not sure if i'm doing something wrong there, but this seems to be a good alternative.

For example, this page PHP_GNUPlot.htm shows some PHP code I want to use internally. It's syntax highlighted. I'd prefer to have a plain text version that I can scp to my web development box and just start testing.

This is where lynx comes in. Right on my web development box. I run the command

lynx -dump "some-URL" > my-text

Update: I forgot that in Firefox, IE, and Mosaic you can just go to File/Save As to save the page as plain text, which solves your problem right there. Either way, it's still nice to have a way to do this strictly from the terminal, so I'll leave this article up.



Resources:

http://www.w3.org/Tools/html2things.html

It's a bigass table



still cool though. Looking forward to even more fun "getting tanked with my friends"

building nagios host to monitor websensors

I've been wanting to log data from the esensors networked temperature and humidity sensors for quite a while, and wanted to be able to present that data as a view that my users can easily get at.

This article on integration of Nagios, MRTG, and the eSensors unit looks very interesting. It was written in 2004, but should still be relevant with my unit.

I have never completed a Nagios installation before, so this should be interesting.

Zimbra 4.5.5 is out, fixed outlook outbox bug

Zimbra 4.5.5 is out, which includes a long awaited fix to their outlook connector. I would every few weeks or so, get a user coming to me to complain that there was a message stuck in their outbox.

They finally fixed it to where large messages that fail to be delivered are not retried, giving the user a chance to delete them from their outbox and get outgoing mail processing back on track.

Zimbra 4.5.5 release notes

Now, if i can find out where these random "There was an error processing your message, please contact your System Administrator" messages are coming from, i'll be all set.

I've been working very hard to try and become more involved in the Zimbra forums and bugzilla, even though we're probably going to be migrating to Exchange for other reasons a bit down the pipe.

New speakers for the XJ

Installed 4 of these speakers this afternoon.

Didnt use the grill's though, the bling factor was a bit too high, as was the cheeziness rating.

They sound really really decent though for $59/pair speakers (currently 39.99 on sale at crutchfield.com).



Taking apart my doors i found 5 year old alpine speakers. I don't even know if they are that worn out, but they arent as loud as the kicker's I just put in. The problems with those speakers could have been simply related to poor installation.

turning one consulting client into many

Read a thoughtful and interesting post on turning one consulting client into many over at friends in tech this morning.

The article talks about the natural way of building a network of clients, by treating people right and getting referrals. It's a zero advertising budget way to build up your rolodex, and has customers coming to you. It beats cold calling any day.

One of my good friends Nathan has been doing computer consulting off and on for quite a long time, and another good friend Marco Carag does design work freelance as well. The three of us have had many discussions on the dangers of overbooking yourself, especially when you have a day job that you have to give priority to.

VPN Woes

Working from home this afternoon, and the VPN totally sucks. This shit has to be reorganized. I cant believe i've let my users deal with this crap.

I'm using PPTP VPN through a m0n0wall box, and the performance is pretty horrific.

I want to check out this article later entitled "the perfect setup - debian etch"

It basically walks you through setting up a box for web hosting.

Perfect Setup - Debian Etch

Mail Foundry

Was looking around for a hosted anti spam system that replaces your primary MX servers. This one looked interesting.

I dont really know if we will end up using it, but it does not require an onsite box to manage, which is pretty handy.

http://www.mailfoundry.com/

Speeding up multiple windows xp installations

We set up a lot of windows boxes, and invariably they require quite a bit of patching before we send them out the door.

Sometimes we set up 3 at a time, which can be a real big hastle when you have to download the patches all at once. Lots of waiting, coming back, checking, etc.

So I thought, why not set it up to where we proxy the windows update files. It used to be that windows update would use WPAD to find the location of the local proxy server, but according to various sources on the internet, you now have to manually configure the proxy using the proxycfg tool. More details can be found from this article and the squid faq.


Windows Update v5 and squid (squid wiki)

Another very useful article from javier arturo rodriguez:

JR's article on windows update and squid

Wouldnt mind having a console server

I could really use a console server about now. My most important of edge routers have their failsafe menus accessible via serial port. I'd really like to be able to jump in and fix them remotely should the need arise.

Was reading This really cool report on how to make a console server using FreeBSD and the conserver package.

There are quite a few really neat four port PCI serial cards out there, including some with RJ45 jacks on the card itself, which makes it convenient for routing around a data room, because the final step is just a simple RJ45 to DB9 adapter.

photo © Darren Hester for openphoto.net CC:Attribution-NonCommercial

Problems with vmware-server-console in edgy eft resolved

Based on this article I was able to correct my startup problems with vmware-server-console on Ubuntu Edgy Eft.

I had been using vmware-server-console without issue on Ubuntu Dapper Drake, but after a dist-upgrade to the new edgy eft release, I was unable to start vmware-server-console. It would just sit there, never launching the GUI.

The debug messages written to the console indicated that it had a version information problem with libpng12.so.0, that libcairo required that information to start. The article above indicated that you should remove the libpng12.so.0 shipped with vmware-server-console and symlink to the ubuntu distribution installed copy.

Additionally i had to remove libdbus-1-2.

Here is the core of the instructions presented on the article above, but please read it directly as well:

* Remove the libpng12.so.0 file delivered with vmware-server-console
* Create a symbolic link from the Debian libpng to vmware-server-console directory
* remove the libdbus-1-2

Cpan problems and mediawiki from perl

I'm trying to install this mediawiki client for perl, so that I can update some pages via a perl script.

I am however having a hard time of installing it, as cpan insists it's not available on the server. Is that possible given that it's listed in the search?

http://search.cpan.org/~markj/WWW-Mediawiki-Client/bin/mvs

I'm not very familiar with CPAN, so if anyone has any tips or manages to install this package themselves, please let me know.