24 Dec
2008

Colourful Tabs in Screen

A while ago I posted about screen, and included my .screenrc file. I got some teasing for this, since the tabs show up pink. In fact this .screenrc file is one I stole from somewhere a few years ago and didn’t really think much about the colours. Since then I’ve fiddled with the colours and now use different colours on different servers, which is a nice little addition.

Its really easy to do – using the .screenrc from my previous post – just replace all the M and m characters in the last line with the colour you’d like. I started off with something like this:

Y is for Yellow

replacing m with y and M with Y I get:

Green and Cyan

I’ve also used g/G and c/C codes for other servers, which looks something like this:

Titles

I seem to be keen on subtitles in blog posts, but I’ve not labelled many of my screen tabs in these examples (I have no idea why, I usually do). The yellow example has one where one of the tabs is named and this is really helpful once you get past about three tabs and start losing which one was tailing the apache logs! To label a tab in screen, go to that tab and then ctrl+a, shift+a and you are typing in the box. Enjoy :)

21 Dec
2008

Christmas Preparations

We’re hosting Christmas for family this year (actually its Kevin’s family, but that’s a technicality), and between preparations for that and having a new camera in the house, I have some nice photos. After all that we’ve done on this house, suddenly it feels like its coming together into a real home.

Xmas Living Room

The garland on the mantlepiece (the mantlepiece that I dismantled, sanded down, and restained earlier in the year) is a bit of a craft project. I’ll write a separate post at some point but suffice to say the baubles were in the discounted set that I wanted because it had snowflakes in it. They are attached to a plain garland with cable ties, and a set of lights my sister left behind added in too.

I also have a photo of the Christmas tree, I really like this photo (thanks Kevin!)

Xmas Front Room

18 Dec
2008

Stale NFS File Handle

We had some fun and games with our house server recently, when one of its disks died horribly*. I’ve only just got around to sorting out the backups again now, which use an external USB hard drive and rsnapshot. I started by reading my earlier rsnapshot post and also the one about the gotcha with mounting external drives. And yes, I do use this blog instead of a working human memory, much easier to find things.

When I mounted the drive, I saw I had one of the older daily.* directories with question marks for its name, date, permissions and so on when I ran ls. When I tried to do anything with the directory, I got the error stale NFS file handle, which was interesting since we don’t use NFS. After some looking around, I got the recommendation to run fsck.

Before running fsck, the drive must be unmounted.

Then, since mine was sdb1 I ran:

fsck -y /dev/sdb1

The -y switch asks fsck to try to fix every problem it encounters (this was quite a life saver, there were thousands of them before I stopped holding my finger down on the “y” key!) – it comes with warnings that experts may do better to fix manually, but really that’s not me.

The disk is now fine and the backups run fine, I guess it was just the old disk on its way out copying nonsense onto the external drive during backups.

* The stupid thing then blew up its power supply and took the UPS with it a week later, but that’s the way the cookie crumbles.

15 Dec
2008

Hanging Snowflakes Decoration

Last year in January I bought (actually my dad paid for them, thanks dad!) a whole box of Christmas decorations from IKEA, for about 2 GBP. In the box were some snowflake decorations, and yesterday I made a little hanging snowflake decoration to go over the stairs in the hall. I think it looks cute!

snowflakes

It was just a little crocheted string (to give the hanging snowflakes some texture to get tied onto so they didn’t all slide around on the string), then snowflakes threaded onto the cotton, tied into a loop, and then looped onto the string. You can’t really see in the photos but the snowflakes are all glittery and sparkly. Then we put a few nails into the wood over the stairs, and just hooked crochet stitches over them – here it is from the stairs side:

snowflakes

The whole thing took about 20 minutes … so although the snowflakes have had a long wait, it was worth it!

12 Dec
2008

Relocating a WordPress Installation

WordPress is a fine basic website tool, and I’ve used it for a few different odds and ends. One thing it does have that suprises me every time is that it uses a setting for its web address. So as part of the install, it sets this setting and then everything works. Or rather it does, so long as the web address of the application doesn’t change.

Well I’m working on something that I’m developnig locally, checking in to a subversion repository, and then deploying to another server (and other people will be doing the same when they collaborate with me). WordPress isn’t really designed for that, or for the situation where you have a copy of the database, and the code and need to restore it to a different place for any reason. The admin login form is accessible – but then submits to the old location before you can get in to change the settings.

Anyway it turns out to be really straight forward. The URL is in the database and a one-line query mends the problem. I’m putting it here for the next time I need it :)

update wp_options set option_value = 'http://new.path.to/blog" where option_name = 'siteurl';

I found some complicated instructions for moving a blog too – but this will also work for that scenario. This was wordpress 2.7 (their new and shiny version!), I’m not certain which other versions this would apply to but add a comment if you can expand on this please!

05 Dec
2008

PHP Advent Article Published

I was wildly excited a few weeks ago to receive an email inviting me to be one of the contributors to this year’s PHP Advent. Actually the biggest kick was seeing my name in a list of PHP luminaries! The article was published today, you can find it at http://phpadvent.org/2008/which-web-service-by-lorna-mitchell – its a short overview of various types of web services around with some pros and cons about when each is useful. To be included in the PHP Advent project has been huge fun, in fact I’m so delighted that I’ve broken one of my usual rules and blogged twice in one day :)
05 Dec
2008

Birthday Time Again

I’m not old enough to have stopped counting the years yet – and today is my birthday. I’m another year older and actually I think I am a bit wiser than I was this time last year – its been a busy one with a new job and some new experiences (public speaking, eek!). I’d like to say a huge thankyou to everyone who sent cards, gifts, tweets, emails, or wrote on my facebook wall, its been really nice to receive so many happy thoughts from people. I’ve had the day off and we went to York for a bit of shopping and lunch at one of our favourite spots – we lived in York as students so we know the city well, and it was great to go back. I also bought a few nice things for myself :)
29 Nov
2008

Christmas Cranberry Chutney

This weekend I got a chance to try out a recipe I’ve had my eye on for a while. Its this Spicy Cranberry Chutney which I’m making as christmas presents (home made presents – way nicer and way cheaper!). Here is it in progress, and in the jars when it was finished:

cranberry chutney, cooling cranberry chutney, bottled

Its very sweet and not very spicy because I (predictably) didn’t check I had everything I needed so I had to improvise wildly – and the missing ingredients sadly were the ginger and the pepper. Still, Its very edible and I can see this going with cold turkey very nicely on boxing day. I’m also planning some apple-something (apple jelly perhaps?) since I have a few apples that need something doing with them:

Crate of Apples

26 Nov
2008

Girl Geek Dinner Next Week

I’m getting quite excited now about the next Leeds Girl Geek Dinner which is next Wednesday (3rd December 2008). Got some cool speakers by the look of it – I know Monica (and she is fab) and from Katie’s bio we are in for a treat. Also I have been promised there is more food this time (hot and christmassy food …. yum) so count me in.

I often get asked why we don’t allow men at these events – well of course we do. Men can attend but only when they are invited by one of the attending girl geeks (maximum one man each please, ladies!) – meaning we can have men who are likely to contribute to the event but not be invaded if we don’t want to be. If you’re a guy and looking to go, find a girl geek and ask nicely :)

I’ll definitely be at this event – I look forward to seeing some others. I had a great time last time – so go and buy a ticket (cheap night out at £15!) and I’ll see you there!