Wordpress category page

So, a while ago I started personal logbook and wanted a way to keep those posts off the main blog (while still appearing in the RSS and twitter feeds). Long story short, Blog-in-blog gets a given category off the main blog, and with thinks to the wordpress.org support forum I was directed to the Page Links To plugin, which added the necessary navigational behaviour. Job Done!

March 31, 2010 · Andrew Bolster

What to do when Ubuntu Device-mapper seems to be invincible!

I’ve been trying a dozen different configurations of my 2x500GB SATA drives over the past few days involving switching between ACHI/IDE/RAID in my bios (This was after trying different things to solve my problems with Ubuntu Lucid Lynx) ; After each attempt I’ve reset the bios option, booted into a live CD, deleting partitions and rewriting partition tables left on the drives. Now, however, I’ve been sitting with a /dev/mapper/nvidia_XXXXXXX1 that seems to be impossible to kill! ...

March 26, 2010 · Andrew Bolster

Chmod on lots of files

My lil-NAS has plenty of space but is maddeningly underpowered. I came across a permissions issue where, depending on how the files in question got there, they would not be accessible to my windows boxes because they were owned by root (I have no doubt that its my fault!) So, first attempt was nice and easy. $chown -R smbusr:smbusr * But this was taking a horrific amount of time, so I thought “There must be a better way”. ...

March 23, 2010 · Andrew Bolster

Installing and Configuring NS-3 on a Ubuntu System

** NS-3 Appears to have a staggeringly steep learning curve so I hope these posts help out someone else (or me, when i forget all this in a month). Running off a virtualised Ubuntu 9.10 system, the prerequisites I installed were all the ones listed here. (And i removed some out of date packages) sudo apt-get install bison bzr dia doxygen flex g++ gcc gdb graphviz imagemagick libgoocanvas-dev libgtk2.0-0 libgtk2.0-dev libsqlite3-dev libxml2 libxml2-dev mercurial python python-dev python-kiwi python-pygoocanvas python-pygraphviz sqlite sqlite3 tcpdump texi2html texinfo texlive texlive-extra-utils valgrind ...

March 14, 2010 · Andrew Bolster

Mercurial Quick Start Cheatsheet

I hadn’t used Mercurial before so I thought it might be a good idea to leave a reminder for me and anyone else who comes across it… For tidyness, I do all of my dev-stuff (Subversion, Mercurial, CVS, Git etc) under ~/src and only take root privileges when its needed; any good makefile should relocate the necessary files for you at the ‘make install’ or equivalent point. **Update:**This article was picked up by the guys at DevCheatSheet.com and I’m really honoured to be included in a site that I’ve been dipping into over the years, so if you need any kind of cheat sheet or quick reference, I highly recommend checking them out. Anyway… ...

March 13, 2010 · Andrew Bolster

Line Parsing Reminder (Duplicate removal)

So, say you have a long list of instruction (like multiple apt-get install lines) and you want to eliminate common words? Easiest way to do it is (assuming you have all of the instrustions in “list.txt”) [FYI the ‘' character indicates a continuation of a single line ] cat list.txt\ | tr ’ ’ ‘\n’ \ #Expands all space characters to new lines | sort | uniq \ #sorts each line, and then eliminates duplicates ...

March 12, 2010 · Andrew Bolster

Any Port in a Storm

While working on an IDS Solution for a client, I came across Untangle, and I loved it so much that I pulled out an old box and loaded it up as my office firewall. One thing that is lacking, from my perspective (at least in the ‘free’ edition) is the firewall interface; Untangle uses an IpTables based firewall, but doesn’t replicate the usual INPUT FOWARD OUTPUT rulebase. I think that in 90% of usecases for Untangle, this isnt a problem, but I found it a little bit alien to have portfowarding hidden in the Networking config pane, and firewall separatly. ...

March 6, 2010 · Andrew Bolster

Ubuntu / Windows Sharing a Dropbox folder on NTFS

Take one Dual-Boot laptop, with three partitions: /dev/sda1:Windows File System /dev/sda2:Linux File System /dev/sda3:Data Partition I already had Dropbox installed on the Windows side and didn’t want to have things duplicated on the linux side, problem is Ubuntu currently does not mount internal drives automatically on boot, so every time I fired up Ubuntu, I had to re-mount the drive, password and all. Easy enough fix: Make a new /etc/fstab entry for the shared drive and define a mount point. ...

January 24, 2010 · Andrew Bolster

Application Idea: What do you think?

As part of the whole New Years Resolutions plan, I’m gonna get started on the OSS development thing. The Gist: Cross Platform Mobile application to collect international data on cell reception. The Gimmick: While services that do this exist, they assume even circular propagation of the signal. Granular reception maps that tell you where to head to to get more bars. The Detail: Low level should be relatively simple; the Android, Blackberry and Iphone API stacks allow easy reading of the current cell ID, RSSI, and GPS Co-ords. Upload those three values over XML (or Something), Web service plugs that into a MySQL server, which is then aggregated, and displayed on the Web, and can be queried by the mobile app. The Potential: While its unlikely that its going to ‘blow up’ since there is relatively little incentive for the end user, since the Applications are going to be free, there will be some that will install it for the sake of it. There is the opportunity to license the data gained service providers but the aggregated data will be made available online in open formats. ...

January 3, 2010 · Andrew Bolster

Delayed Post: How I Installed Windows 7 From USB HDD

As was noted in my LENOVO ROCKS post, I recieved a virgin hard drive for a laptop with no disk drives. This is a problem that has been long solved in Linux Distros but is not so good for Windows, but i did find this brilliant guide by Sandip from earlier this year, i just wanted to point out a few difference that i made to the process that i think make it slightly more transparent whats going on. ...

July 13, 2009 · Andrew Bolster