Author Archives: lornajane

25 Sep
2007

New LornaJane

Welcome to the newly made-over lornajane.net!

I wasn’t desperate for a change of look but I have been tiring of textpattern for a while. The new version is running on serendipity which will hopefully be easier to work with and suit me better. Handily serendipity was able to import most of my textpattern content (more about the actual process in a later post) so it’s been more about ironing out kinks (like getting the images across) and fiddling with templates than anything else.

The angel up the top there is a new acquisition – the result of my commissioning my good friend Gretchen at http://www.girlscantwhat.com (they also do design work, see http://design.girlscantwhat.com/) to make me something to use as an avatar and general virtual familiar. I hope you like her, I do!

I’ve taken care to get links from the old site working and hopefully the feeds should be working as well – if you’re reading this on your feed reader, then pop in and see the new setup. If you see anything, not working or looking otherwise wrong, please let me know and I’ll take a look. Otherwise, enjoy :)

24 Sep
2007

Facebook Followup

So I was having trouble with facebook a while back, but things have improved.

  • I now check facebook every day
  • I have 38 friends
  • I have seen the pictures of my cousin’s first few weeks at university.
  • I’ve finally uploaded a profile picture because everyone seems to have one! Only two of my friends don’t … and I can understand why.

Facebook is good for staying in touch with people, I’ve exchanged messages with lots of people who are on my peripheral network but with whom I could easily have lost touch, especially because I’ve moved house a lot. People have a “status” and can update it at will, so you can see who is looking forward to their weekend or who is having a bad day.

I utterly adore the daft applications that come with facebook. My two current favourites (although they don’t see a lot of action it must be said) are the aquarium and the garden. Basically people can send each other flowers and fish (for each application respectively) along with a little message, literally just a one-liner to touch base. Its like a wave but the thing they send hangs around in your profile for a bit so you can enjoy it.

I think I’m starting to see the point, but I suspect its only the tip of the iceberg – am I missing anything important do you think?

22 Sep
2007

Simple Rsnapshot Setup

Rsnapshot is a perl-based backup script manager. It is a journalised backup system – meaning that it copies all your files across to the backup media once – and then the only data it transfers after that is the changes. The backups appear on disk as complete copies – but where two generations are exactly the same file, they’re actually symlinked to the same data.

Backup Strategies

Rnsapshot has hooks for scripts that run before and after the actual snapshotting. I use the “before” script to:

The after script just unmounts the drive. To add these extra scripts you just uncomment the lines containing the cmd_preexec and cmd_postexec paths and point them to your scripts.

Getting Started

Well I could write a lot about this but to be honest I doubt I’d do better than the excellent rsnapshot howto so I suggest you read that for how to do it. Basically, enter the path you’d like to back up to, the interval you’d like to use, and then a bit further down the page which directories you want backing up (the default is /home, /etc and /usr/local) – then run the command! The howto even includes instructionsn on setting up cron to call the command regularly.

Rsnapshot Conclusion

Rsnapshot was a good tool to stumble upon as a learner sysadmin (which I am) and its very easy to use. I love the fact that it isn’t rocket science, but its a really nice, usable version of a collection of scripts which are duplicated by system administrators the world over. The file structure of the backups is the same as the content that is backed up and retrieving any generation is as simple as copying a file over. I’m sure there are other solutions out there, but I’m a convert and use it on all the local servers I administer (Ubuntu boxes, it works a treat).

22 Sep
2007

Hot House

Well, not hot exactly, but definitely cosy – we’ve got central heating :)

We have had a few people round to quote for it and went with the guy who actually came round when he said he would, and wasn’t the most expensive. Well they turned up at 9am on Monday morning and it was all finished by Wednesday afternoon!

The mess was quite astonishing, I think because we have solid brick walls, so any drilling means brick dust over everything around1. They brought the water pipes up through the house in the hallway, and then along each floor in turn. The boiler went into the smallest bedroom (rather than being in the living room which is where the old one was – strangely) and that room definitely came of worst. There was also a gas fire removed from that room so we’ve got a gaping hole where there was a fireplace about thirty years ago – and the hole contains the guff that has fallen down the uncapped chimney in the intervening period.

The pipes were run under the floors, which means we’ve had every carpet in the place lifted, more or less. Happily the plumber was quite clever about not lifting floors which were difficult, such as the laminate flooring in the living room or the stone tiles in the bathroom. Presumably this is to avoid trouble for him as much as to save our floors. Having had the floors lifted through most of the house, I’m pleased to report that we have got the original floorboards intact and in good condition throughout which is nice. I’m not sure we’d expose them but they are a nice feature if we did decide to (or decide we can’t afford carpets…)

We went for a lovely big boiler which will hopefully cope well with driving two bathrooms and a kitchen, plus any additions that we make over the coming years. Certainly it drives both the heating and the shower effortlessly. Anyone who has stayed with me will know the “trick” to the shower involving running a hot tap (marked cold) while you shower – this is now eliminated :)

All in all it was well worth it – although the mess has to be seen to be believed and I did find it quite upsetting since we had just started to settle in really. Perhaps I’ll post some photos of the places which suffered rather badly – the much-hated living room panelling came off as well and its not pretty!

1 Where “everything” includes matresses, beds, towels, and all the computer kit that was upstairs! I’d have moved stuff out of the way if I’d had any idea which places were best to move them to.

20 Sep
2007

Top top Tips

That is to say, some top tips for the command-line program top. Top is a program to show you the top processes consuming resources on the system. You can then press other keys and the program will respond. For example:

q to quit

z to get a colour output

x to highlight which field the results are sorted by

< and > to change which field it is sorted by

c to tooggle between the program name and the full command that was run

I don’t use every program often enough to just remember the keyboard shortcuts so its nice to keep a virtual crib sheet :)

18 Sep
2007

Garden Digging Party

Last weekend we held a garden-digging party. Mostly because we have been failing to dig the garden in a timely fashion and its the time of year we should be turfing it. Personally I’m not mad about digging gardens but obviously my friends are as there were five of us digging plus one efficient tea-maker and and a 4-week-old mascot.

The weekend started with the garden looking like this:

And by the end of the next day, we had got to here:

There’s another chunk to go and a couple of paving slabs to move but we should be ready to turf quite soon – thanks to everyone who helped, I don’t know how we’d have managed on our own!

07 Sep
2007

Reliably Avoid Subversion Collision – Commit First!

Subversion is a source control system – an excellent accompaniment to software development especially in a team setting. When working with a number of people, it is likely that at one time or another there will be collisions – for example at the moment a project I am working on has a team making some amendments requested by the client for a website. Subversion is handling it all well but the main template files and stylesheets are colliding often as everyone is making changes.

Commit First!

The collision will only occur if you check in a change and someone else has already changed that line in a file. To avoid getting a collision in your working copy, the best thing to do is to commit your change before the other person does.

This approach of commit early, commit often will help you to develop more smoothly without the interruptions of a collision and without struggling with lots and lots of merged files when you’ve left it too long between commits. Additionally you’ll have more checkpoints in your own development history so if you need to go back a few steps, the repository will be able to help you whereas if you didn’t check in, it won’t!

That’s my tip for the day – on a day in a place where many people are bug fixing a single project!

05 Sep
2007

Setting up MySQL to listen to external ports

I had some difficulty setting up mysql to listen to external ports on a server – the development web server uses databases on another box. The important setting was in /etc/mysql/my.cnf where I removed the line:


bind-address = 127.0.0.1

You should then be able to connect a client from another server to this mysql server.

As a warning – bear in mind that it is usually good practice to set up user permissions to only be valid when accessing from localhost if that is the intention – check your mysql table if you can log into the server but then start getting permission problems for other users.

Hope this helps someone!

29 Aug
2007

Ripple Blanket

I have a new niece, as I might have said already. Clearly we knew she was on her way a while ago and so I have been crocheting a blanket for this baby for a while. I chose to make a ripple blanket, crocheted in the round and using this pattern. The wool is Sirdar Snuggly DK and the hook was 3.5mm. I found that the pattern worked perfectly and the resulting blanket lay flat – however the snuggle wool is a bit thinner than normal DK.

Here’s the storyline:

The first photo was uploaded on 10th March, and the blanket was at this point with a final row to go when we got the call to say Natalie had arrived. I forgot to photograph the blanket after putting on the border as we were rushing off to meet her but here it is with its owner:

27 Aug
2007

Tile Transfers

Our house has a cellar, which contains the kitchen. The steps down to it are very sterile white tiles and have been described as being “morgue-like”.

I have been thinking of painting some of the tiles, or even retiling although that seemed rather extreme as we’re likely to change the cellar a lot in a few years time. So I bought some very inexpensive tile transfers from the local hardward store, and applied them immediately allowed them to collect dust until my sister came to stay this weekend and put them on the tiles so now it looks like this:

And here’s a closeup:

It definitely ranks as an all-time best DIY quick-fix, in fact I can’t think of a better one. Suggestions welcome :)