[ t h e f r a g g l e . c o m ]

Wednesday, December 26th, 2007

Christmas, work, and a bloody massive move

So I haven’t written anything for a while because I’ve been super busy…

This is mainly because I have made a rather life changing move over to York to go and work on new things at a new company.

Suffice to say the last month or two have been pretty hard going, getting the courage up to quit my job at autotrader was pretty difficult, finding somewhere to live in York was hard going too.

Good news though; I should start studying for my SCSA soon, so expect tidbits of fun information as I figure my way through the funky new features in solaris 10 (yeah I’m a bit behind the times I guess seeings sol10 has been out for like, forever).

tootles.

Saturday, October 27th, 2007

TanTan flickr photo gallery broken after upgrade to Wordpress 2.3

So I realised that the admin part of the Flickr Photo gallery plugin I use (which is at http://www.thefraggle.com/flickr/) was a bit broken after upgrading wordpress to v2.3.

It appeared to work with the configuration I had set previously. However, when on the options page for the plugin, it was complaining of not being able to find a standard wordpress include.

A quick google search showed me a couple of resources, that told me where I needed to make a slight alteration to the source of my flickr plugin …

in the file “/path/to/your/wordpress-install/wp-content/plugins/silaspartners/flickr/admin-options-load.php”

    require_once(dirname(__FILE__).$tmpPath.'/wp-admin/admin-db.php');

needs to change to

    require_once(dirname(__FILE__).$tmpPath.'/wp-admin/includes/user.php');

Once that’s done, the plugin works a treat!

Saturday, October 20th, 2007

Flickr is my new favourite toy

Until recently I hadn’t been taking that many shots, and had just been uploading the odd photo to deviantArt. This is all good and well, but it isn’t really suited to making proper sets of images, say from a shoot at a gig, or other event.

This is when I decided to give Flickr a try. So far I have been super impressed with the ability to tag photos, store images in albums and collections together, and the huge user base also means there are lots of scripts and website applications that are available to help you make the most out of your Flickr experience!

Now, I don’t post much to wordpress because I don’t usually have anything that I feel may be read worthy, but decided to have a play about anyway with some of the worpdress plugins available that let you use your Flickr photostreams with your wordpress blog. The best one I found so far I must say is one from http://tantannoodles.com/toolkit/photo-album/ which lets you add a sidebar widget and also basically embed your Flickr photostreams into a page (see here for an example).

There were only a couple of things I needed to do (edit a couple of bits of html to make it fit in a bit more with the current style I’ve adopted for wordpress) and it does seem to look pretty smart.

Uploading images to Flickr is super easy as well, personally I use “uploadr” which you can get off their website, it lets you just drag and drop images from explorer, and then you have the option to resize images, and to create a new album to put them in as well as being able to add common tags.

Anyway, the big thing is that Flickr is awesome, tagging photos is a great way to help you organise your images and search them later for recurring themes, as are collections and albums. I do highly suggest giving it a try, you can get free accounts where you are limited to a small upload limit daily, or for a small fee you can have an unlimited upload account.

Thursday, June 21st, 2007

cheap portable hard disks a go go

I decided to buy a portable hard disk this week for my trip to germany, so that I can ensure I don’t run out of CF space.

It’s a vosonic vp2160, and at £109 for a 60gb model I’m pretty happy. It happily reads my CF card fresh from the camera, and copies over all the images pretty speedily.

The interface is super simple and easy to use, it doesn’t play music or anything like that, but all I wanted it for was to store pictures on till I get home and can process the images.

The USB2.0 interface is speedy enough to copy over files i’ve copied to the disk, and also allows you to use the device as a CF/MMC/whatever reader for your PC, which is handy. It’s pretty handy too how you can charge the Li-ion battery via USB too (you have to plug two usb connectors into your pc, but that’s no biggie really)

What really impressed me the most, however, is how it actually seems to suggest you should be fine upgrading the hard disk at some point. They include (amongst the power adapter to charge it up and the install cd for win98 drivers etc) a mini screwdriver to uncouple the back off it, which reveals a bog standard fujitsu 2.5″ hard disk. So if I decide 60gb isn’t enough in this little device I will be able to have a good go at upgrading the hard disk!.

I also purchased a Creative Zen Vision:M 30gb today too today to tide me for my trip to germany, but will druel more at that when it arrives tomorrow

Thursday, June 14th, 2007

Virtual domains in exim4

I’ve been using exim for a while with virtual domain support, and thought it be best to document what I did somewhere.

For a long time I wondered how I might actually support virtual domains in exim 4 and held off by just dumping all mail from all domains into my mailbox (how gosh darn lazy is that).

I finally got bothered enough to, and found a lot of easy to follow help on the internets (google), and came up with the following additions to my exim4.conf :


domainlist localdomains = dsearch;/etc/exim4/virtual : @ : localhost

and in the routers section

begin routers
...
vdom_aliases:
driver = redirect
allow_defer
allow_fail
domains = dsearch;/etc/exim4/virtual
data = ${expand:${lookup{$local_part}lsearch*@{/etc/exim4/virtual/$domain}}}
retry_use_local_part
pipe_transport = address_pipe
file_transport = address_file
no_more


As you can see there is a directory called /etc/exim4/virtual, which contains several files, each of which define the aliases for a domain, an example file in that directory could look like:
filename: thefraggle.com


* : :fail:
chris : chris@localhost


As you can see this looks pretty simalar to the sendmail aliases file, but requires no rebuilding (if you have used sendmail at some point, you’ll know that you need to issue a “newaliases” command.

Anyway, hopefully that wasn’t too painful, any improvements, suggestions and other observations welcome!