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    Category: tech


  1. Installing VMWare Tools


    I recently did some work with Debian Etch virtual machines which I downloaded from the good people at thoughtpolice. Here are my notes on getting the VMWare tools added to that machine.

    To be able to do anything interesting with a virtual machine, you need to install the VMWare tools …

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  2. VMWare Virtual Machines on NTFS


    I keep having a problem with my virtual machines. I'm running kubuntu but the virtual machines are on an NTFS partition (because I use them from windows occasionally). The error message appears at startup and goes like this:


    VMware Player unrecoverable error: (vcpu-0)
    Failed to allocate page for guest RAM …
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  3. Geekup Talk


    I did mention recently that I had arranged to speak at the local GeekUp group. Well, the event itself was last night and although I did have speaking nerves I think it went OK.

    I've uploaded the slides I used to Slideshare, so you can find them here. The talk …

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  4. GeekSpeakr


    I saw this article on linuxchix about the new register of women speakers that has been set up by Brenda Wallace of linuxchix. The site is called geekspeakr and although it claims to be "very alpha" they are currently registering female speakers. I don't have a lot of speaking experience …

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  5. Speaking at GeekUp in Leeds


    This week I will be giving a 20:20 talk at the GeekUp event in Leeds, entitled "Enterprise Web Development". The 20:20 talk format allows talks with 20 slides, with 20 seconds allowed for each slide. Wish me luck :)

    If you're local to Leeds, I'd love to see you …

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  6. Ubuntu/Kubuntu and mod_rewrite


    I just spent a couple of days, on and off, fiddling with my apache setup on a kubuntu box. I had a site with some very weird and scary rewrite rules which I needed to do some development work with and I just could not get the site to work …

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  7. Geshi and Serendipity for Code Snippets


    I write on technical subjects on this site on a fairly regular basis, and nothing annoys me more than blog software which "eats" long lines of code or renders it in a difficult-to-read way. Happily Serendipity (or s9y for short) has a plugin for geshi.

    About GeSHi

    I thought "geshi …

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  8. Adding Markup to Comments in Serendipity


    I switched over to serendipity as my blog platform about 6 months ago and although I haven't been blown away by it, its a better tool for this job than textpattern was. I liked textpattern a lot but serendipity is better for what I need. There were a few things …

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  9. Debian Change Keyboard Layout


    I recently downloaded a virtual machine which had all the default factory settings in it - including an American keyboard layout. To change this on Debian Etch I simply used:

    dpkg-reconfigure console-data
    

    and then followed the online prompts. For reference (i.e. the next time I have this problem), the | (pipe …

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  10. First Manchester Girl Geek Dinner


    Last night I attended the first Manchester Girl Geek Dinner. I am very excited about the Girl Geek Dinner events arriving in the north, there's a lot of activity up here and I'm already involved in other local events such as GeekUp and BarCamp.

    I'm based in Leeds, so it …

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  11. SVN Deployment and a New Site


    I recently got an email from a BarCamp friend, Mark Sailes, telling me about his new site http://www.svn-checkout.co.uk. I am a big fan of subversion and always looking for more tips and tricks for using it better so I popped over to have a look. Its …

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  12. Logrotate Error on Ubuntu


    For a few weeks now, I've been seeing this error in my logs every night:

    /etc/cron.daily/logrotate:
    error: error running shared postrotate script for /var/log/mysql.log /var/log/mysql/mysql.log /var/log/mysql/mysql-slow.log
    run-parts: /etc/cron.daily/logrotate exited with return code 1 …
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