I always used to use the selfssl tool from the iis resource kit

but since moving to windows 7 (or possibly any operating system using iis6), you don't need to anymore.

open iis console

click the computer name (top of the tree)

select 'server certificates'

and then just choose the option of 'create self-signed certificate'

once the cert is made, you will need to go into the website and pick the certificate using the 'bindings' option.

So.. that's finally one good thing about the new IIS console....

Ive been having a nightmare with this, and this link really helped

http://blogs.msdn.com/sqlprogrammability/archive/2008/11/26/optimize-for-unknown-a-little-known-sql-server-2008-feature.aspx

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms181714.aspx

http://linux.justinhartman.com/Startup_Script_for_Subversion

I found this a really simple explanation of how to start svn when the server boots

I love this graph

bubble graph

This was really useful, and worked great to communicate between servers.

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8904

Thanks to gabbs

As any script you put inside post-commit.bat seems to be called synchronously, and doesnt inform the svn client that the commit has finished until the script has finished. I had to write a calling application which just starts the script in a new thread.

In unix i guess this would have been simply performed by appending a & to the end of the line or using fork!

Here is the c# class which calls the batch file




My post-commit file just looks like this



And obviously my notify script has a whole bunch of copy and email operations that we like to perform when a commit occurs.

nb, I guess you may need to consider whether block waiting for post commits is a good or bad thing in your circumstances, as obviously if two ppl commit and your scripts are running at the same time, carnage may ensue.

I was thankful on finding this nugget of code, which makes the groupname work out when slamming in radiobuttons in an asp.net repeater.

http://www.codeguru.com/csharp/csharp/cs_controls/custom/article.php/c12371/

Someone introduced me to the joyful NZB file recently.

Its truly a wonderful invention, and allows my to explore usenet binary grabbing using my NSLU2. as previous nntp readers id tried made the process too painful.

So simply ....

1) apt-get install hellanzb
2) setup the /etc/hellanzb.conf file to point to your usenet server of choice.
3) screen hellanzb

then goto your favourite nzb announcing website - i liked http://www.nzbs4u.net/. download an nzb file and drop it into your hellanzb/queue directory.

then sit back and enjoy your binaries dropped off onto your NSLU2 when they are ready.

happy slugging!

I've been streaming music from my home NSLU2 server for a while now using mt-daapd (firefly) which is an ITunes server for linux. I can connect to my home network from work using ITunes and a little daap proxy app called rendevous.

My friend was doing the same thing, however the local IT guy at his work said he didnt like rendevous running on their PCs, so I looked around for an alternative solution which didn't require any client software.

I've played with shoutcast and mod_mp3 before, however i didnt fancy running it on the NSLU2, and i wanted him to be able to browse files and stream them .. not create a radio type cycle list.

Enter edna. Its a really nice lightweight python script which creates a mini webserver on a specified port, and dishes up your tunes. The cunning thing is that once you have navigated to the tunes or directory you want to play, it spits out a .m3u file back to your browser, which you can then launch in your music player of choice.

Its a great solution for an NSLU2 as its fast (much faster than the initial connect to mt-daapd with 10,000 tunes) and requires little or no installation requirements.

E-Snips is a great site for allowing you upload and share files www.esnips.com . The interface is slick, and the client tool makes life easier. It really is one of the better 'free file upload' sites out there.

I enjoyed this beautifully edited video about the web and its progression.

John Battelle's Blog Video

Im enjoying using this really handy tool for picking a good palette for your website.

http://www.colormatch.dk/.

Im also really enjoying the following free website design template sites ..

http://www.oswd.org

and

http://www.openwebdesign.org/

I found these pictures of the man arrested today for the murder of 5 (maybe 6) girls in Ipswich, UK.

Turns out he fits the profile of most lunatics - he owns a myspace.com account!

I've recently got into watching mixed martial arts videos such as UFC and Pride.

Anyone else interested? Anyone got any recommended videos or fighters?

i recently started using this 'screen_away' script to mark me as away in irc when i detach my screen. works nicely!

there is a bunch of other scripts available at the irssi site.

and for the record ... irssi on my nslu2 (slug) using debianslug is such a winning combination!

I've just got into Google Reader.

I find it a bit buggy in IE7, but im really liking having feeds from all my favourite sites (this one included) integrated into the one place.

Ok, so I know its only day one ... and shit on the web has the habit of seeming really useful one day, and then me never bothering to visit it again .. but hey I'm going to give this one a go.

One thing that frustrates me a bit about the whole rss thing, is how you can get syndication of content from sites where you need to login. I'm considering writing my own scraping routine in php with my passwords/captured cookies in, and then just exposing that as an rss feed, but im sure im not the first person to be thinking of this ....

my friends company storm training has a really nice looking web site and provides great offers on microsoft office training in south yorkshire, england .

i implemented this to tweak my apache/mysql for better performance on my NSLU2. Hard to tell if its helping much though ;-) Mysql really doesnt run too well with apache on NSLU2 so I dont use it for much.

http://www.unixshell.com/wiki/index.php/Optimizing_Apache/PHP/MySQL_for_low_memory_use

I wrote an article today on my efforts at compiling rtorrent for debianslug. its here ...

Article on building rtorrent/libtorrent for arm5vtel NSLU2 with littleendian debianslug

I installed ruby and wrote my first ruby on rails web application.

It was quite an enjoyable experience. Certainly more fun than asp.net (which is bloody unproductive)

I suggested we knock some internal application up in it for my company to have aplay around and see if it ends up being help or hinderance!

Heres a few links to stuff i used while playing with it

In no particular order...

http://www.gettyimages.com

http://www.istockphoto.com

http://www.sxc.hu

I watched Crank last night, and it is without doubt the best film I have seen this year.

I needed to get the number of files in a directory and recurse through all subdirectories doing the same. I nedded it so i could compare two sets of directory trees for something I was working on.

My Irish chum Enstyne came up with this Perl solution which seems to do the trick nicely!

If like me your running debianslug on an NSLU2 and you'd like to mount an iso file so it can be directly streamed to Xbox Media Centre (its a beautiful solution isnt it!) then simply do the following.


Ensure you have loop support in your debianslug kernel. This requires your running debianslug 3.10 bin


Get the ipk file for loop


Install the ipk file (dont worry about any reported errors)


Now mount your .iso file


Easy huh!


ps thanks to Int16h and EvilDevil on the #nslu2-general channel for answering a few questions on this subject!

That I've fixed that apostrophe issue when previewing your blog entry. As it was really annoying.

I found it amusing that the Nigerians 419er scam has turned Iraqi


Dear Sir/Madam

I am Mr HASSAN ANIE based in bagdad in iraq.I am the son of late major general in charge of purchase and maintainace in the past sadam hussain regime.Due to the situation here in in iraq,those of us in the business circle are finding it very difficult to cope with the situation here,no stable goverment,bomb explotion at strategic places every now and then,sometimes people find it very difficult to go about their normal businesses due to fear of being victim of terrorist attack,above all.the crisis in iraq now has made business activities totaly parallised for quite sometime now.for instance,no good telephone facilities,no adiquate security,infact,all most all the basic infrastructure were destroyed during the recent war in iraq,ever since then .the enviroment in iraq has never been condusive business wise.

I have about $40million dollars which i inherited from my late father and i will explain to you further on how i intend investing the money if you reply to my personal email below for security reasons.

(hassananie@netscape.net).

I awaite your immidiate reply

Hassan Anie

A while back I blogged about a concert ticket generator that I thought was hilarious ..

Someone showed me a collection of these generator things here ... http://www.says-it.com/

cool huh

There is no question that the best Indian takeaway in Sheffield, England is Samad Cottage Tandoori - located in Dronfield just outside Sheffield.

Samad Cottage Tandoori (Dronfield)

Yumm Yumm

Samads Google Map Reference

rj helped me with a htaccess problem today.

I have a .htaccess on the root of my webserver which requires viewers to provide a username and password.

I wanted a subdirectory to be public, and by default the above .htaccess was recursing down and forcing a login.

The solution was to specify a .htaccess in the subdirectory which contains the following ...

I found these Humourous Medical Slang and Acronyms rather funny.

Favourites included ... Roasted Goober, PFO (Pissed and Fell Over) and PGT (Pissed and Got Thumped).

I installed torrentflux on my NSLU2 over the weekend - mainly because of some frustrations with rtorrent.

rtorrent is a superb client (in spite of rakshasa's relucatance to include encryption support inline with azureus and utorrent) and version 0.6.0 binary is available in ARM format for the NSLU2 via the debianslug apt-get install manager.

However ive been having a few bugs with it...

Torrents containing large files (dvd5 4gb ish) can fail during download with a stalloc memory error.

When several torrents are loaded and one finishes, the application sometimes closes down - in spite of the fact that other torrents are still running.

So, I thought I would give torrentflux a try and boy did i regret it. Its the type of application which makes you realise the limitations of the slug and why you really shouldnt try and overload it. Torrentflux uses a popular python script BitTornado bttornado.py to do the actual torrenting, but wraps it in a mysql/php/apache front end. I can imagine that on a reasonably powerful pc the combination is great - allowing you to queue and manage torrents remotely. But on the NSLU2 the python script fought with apache and mysql over memory and brought the entire slug to a grinding halt.

I've since gone back to rtorrent. I had a few goes at compiling in ARM on the slug, but my inexperience at these things - and a list of missing dependancies as long as your arm soon put me off. After a few tweaks to the rtorrent config file I managed to avoid one of my problems, but im still stuck over downloading some large torrents - but for the lovely performance on the NSLU2 its a sacrifice worth making (especially until i can get my paws on the 0.6.1 version compiled for NSLU2).

This presumes that you have mt-daapd running on your NSLU2 and have port forwarding setup on your router to forward port 3689 onto your SLUG ip within your local LAN.

Download Rendezvous Proxy.

Install and start Rendevous Proxy.

Enter your home IP or dyndns address, port 3689 and a name for the service.

Restart ITunes locally, your home machine now appears as whatever service name you gave it (this changes when you connect to the mt-daapd server name in your config file).

Enjoy your tunes.

I think its sensible to ssh tunnel this or put a mt-daapd password on so that your slug isnt too exposed to the internet, which if i setup i'll post how to do.

big thanks to rj for helping me setup the tunneling to change my router config whilst doing this!

Phew this was a pain because I could not find the binaries for mt-daapd and arm so i had to scour the web for information and amazingly got it working, heres how...

first get some required files


then get the latest copy of the source - this was the first of my problems, as i needed 0.2.4 as its compatible with the latst version of itunes .. for reasons i'll illuminate later get the following two versions.


unpack both


now the thing that screwed me up for a day, is that the changelog file in the latest release (0.2.4) was blowing up the dpkg-build process (it had wrong case, and contained some incompatible chars) so copy the version from 3 over 4. i added an extra made up entry for v4, not sure if its needed, but it didnt break anything


now configure - will take a few minutes


finally build


then move back a dir and install



now its all done, just edit the '/etc/mt-daapd.conf' file, point to your mp3s, you might need to chmod all the files in your mp3 dir to enable mt-daapd to see them 'chmod o+r -R /media/hd/Music/'. Now start the server '/etc/init.d/mt-daapd start' open itunes on your PC and bask in the glory that is music served up to your network via ITunes.

I found some useful urls along the way

0.2.3 mt-daapd install notes
mt-daapd config notes
mt-daapd homepage

I just recieved my Linksys NSLU2 Slug device in the post. Another ebay purchase thankfully worked out. I paid £45 for it, which is about £20 less than the shop price and it appears in excellent condition.

I'm going to start out with running the unslung firmware on it from www.nslu2-linux.org and if I get brave I might go for the Debian install.

Im going to use it immediately for

putting my 400gb usb hardisk on my home LAN

irssi + screen irc access

itunes mp3 streaming to lan

ssh / scp / tftp

and longer term for

twonkyvision media streaming

http hosting

torrentflux

Heres a badly focussed webcam photograph of it on my desk.

Someone showed me this hilarious site today for generating your own concert tickets.

Concert Ticket Generator

I've been using this nice free tool for converting my avis / dvds and other stuff into mp4s suitable for playing on my psp. It also does other formats - espcially good for mobile phones.

Its free, quick and although its a japanese tool, an english language pack is provided.

Does everything I need and is free ;-)

3GP Converter

i guess this marks the advent of a new blogging module for the site

there used to be a mechanism for blogging, but it was well hidden (and mixed up with the shouts on the main page). i moved all the data over from non-shout related blogs (so these should just be the entries for people who actually found the old blog module).

i hope some people find it of use (although with some really advanced blogging sites available on the web - i dont have any illusions that it will be too popular!) and i'll try and keep using it myself so i'll be tempted to keep adding features like ..

* rss export out
* flikr foto linkage
* aggregated by month view in right column
* mechanism for linking 'friends'
* better customisable look and feel
* preview function
* import from 3rd party blogging tool

comment if you think up any more (or better still post them via the feedback page)

i really must specify a column list when doing inserts, as subsequent changes to tables tend to screw the app ;-)

i havent switched them yet, as im still working out how to represent the new levels funky ascii display requirements with our screwy bbcode tags. i'll make sure anyone who has passed 9 gets pushed back down so they have to complete the new 9.

im going to make geek 9, geek 10. and slot another level provided by thoriphes as level 9. hopefully this should give us a greater sense of progression throughout the linear geek challenge.

this really is officially now a shoutbox. /me gets the code opened to change the title!

wahaay congratulations

so anyone with musical abilities. stick a mic on your pc, and record a 15-30 second ditty of you singing and strumming an osi tune. something happy, humourous and open source!

anyone else got any musical talents? could do with some more osi theme tunes ;-) send them to me for extra reward points

when i win the lottery im gonna organise a party for everyone

New bonus round added and a ton of site improvements (most of which ppl probly may not notice). Gotta go get the train back home in an hour, i really wish i had one of those GPRS mobile data cards for the laptop.

damn me to. is it time to rename blog to shout thing, or add a type to blog table, set blogs added through this form to 'nonblogshotboxtypecrap' and add a new blog add forum not on the main page

One for art,
one for coding, and
this one i wont ask what this one is for, im not sure anyone knows!

put a few site fixes in, and finally fixed that developers notepad finger link, although i need t12 to put some groovy apache directive thing in. laptop is setup schweet now, so offline development is working nicely.

oh yeah, and i failed my .net c# exam. 61% > needed 70% == arrse

added article rating last night.

finally got my home setup working so i can dev without being connected to the internet (that matters for us poor .uk folk) there are a few issues still with the rating system, specifically it can be made a little more abuse-proof, but the data structures/ip/userids of ratings are all saved so i can implement that at a later stage.

working from home == ace

dialing in over RAS 33k == arse

been working from home the last few days, and it really works. i find not only am i more productive, i also get time in the day to take bbjr out, and other stuff. also no wasted hour travelling to and dfrom work. this has to be the future.

i love the way people use their daily blog entries to demand attention from site admins. i draw parallels with bbjr (age 13mths) who hangs onto my trouser leg until i bend down and play with him, at which point he trundles off to go do something more interesting instead.

moved over to mozilla from opera, and i must admit its a nice browser. i really shouldnt have slagged it off for all those years

gonna go look at a nursery for bbjr this afternoon. the little chaps getting restless, and i reckon he needs a bit of socialising! plus it'll give him chance to work on his chat-up lines

wow few too many beers last nite, and it snowed here for the first time this winter, i thought the taxi driver was not going to bother coming for us, but it all panned out in the end.

took my car in for its first MOT this morning. and had a nice invigorating walk into work. Before when i was heavy smoking it would have killed me, i have the smug look of a recent non-smoker written all over my face.

back to work after a week building kitchen cabinets and decorating. i'll be glad of a rest. Had a mild panic this morning about MS certification in Feb which i havent done any revision for. Great to come back to osix after a week off and see that the community is flourishing too.

popped in for a meeting and a little internet access. damn having holidays means more work than actually being in the office. spent 3 days painting my hall and stairs, took forever especially when keeping one eye on bbjr throughout. had a meeting about my new project today, which sounds quite interesting, will require quite a bit of travelling, but they seem nice people.

wow disk failure on my build server yesterday nearly ended in tears. but fortunately managed to mount it and get some data back off it. moral of the story - get a backup strategy!

wow, got a few bugs to fix on the site, but really busy with work atm.
also i have to prepare for my c# mcad exams coming up next month. i suppose its better to be busy than bored.

just dropped the missus and bbjr off at friends for a few hours, so i can pop out and get a few quality pc hours in. painted my garage door frame this morning, and got to finish off the hall later. best keep busy, as they do say the devil makes work for idle hands dont they.

day 10 without a cigarette, and its going surprisingly well. i havent faced the dreaded 'drunk in pub' scenario yet, so not sure whether i'm fully resigned to never smoking again.

is the fact this is being referred to as a shuotbox, just because it appears on the main page in a column. i.e. if i removed this, and just left the functionality in the profile pages, would it remain a blog ;-)

im going to continue to use it to record my daily thoughts (apart from just now cos you damn goaded me to respond)

i wish we had some more people about to contribute some new geek levels, i just added a brand new one, but apart from 3 and 8, all the rest are original with tweaks.

back to work now. should make some inroads into that downloads section this week.

happy new year to everyone apart from those damn americans for beating the brits on the mars mission.

a new yr has arrived, i had quite a sedate new yrs eve, as i went out on a pretty massive night the day before. both bbjr and myself are finally getting over our colds. it snowed on new years eve, but it quite quickly dissapeared. monty spent new years eve under our bed as he hates fireworks with a passion, /me tends to agree with him.

back from xmas for a day, then off again. holidays were good, lots of cool presents including a ton of books to polish off. come down with a bad cold, as has bbjr, so plenty of lemon and honey for recovery.

added a link through on each article to see if there are any comments associated with it. also added a label on the article display page so that the user is jumped to the comment section.

xmas break is nearly upon us, meaning i wont get chance for many site mods over the holidays.

added poll comments today, id also like to add the number of comments assigned to an article on the main page, so we can see where activity is. perhaps also the ability to rate articles, anyway i should have left 30 mins ago and im late again! xmas party tonite, sore head tomorrow.

hmm another busy day today. been doing installshield and scripting all day to juggle files about to prepare a release of some software.

i really like the idea of being able to automate the production and delivery of software, leaving the programmers to do the design and cool stuff.

made some significant changes to the bbcode rendering, to try and fix the ongoing problems. no doubt it will break a few things, but i hope this version is better maintanable.

phew, back after a busy day orf! nippers 1st birthday which started with presents and chocolate and ended up with a night of vomitting. I guess babies birthdays are always memorable. Nice to get back to work for a rest!

added a few bits and pieces on the site today, some stuff no-one will ever see, and some people will hopefully find useful.

i finally added an open source faq section which we always wanted, this will provide a one stop section for all things open source and cvs.

gosh, ive got to stop downing tools, and fixing site suggestions.

moved that darn blog icon to level with text, changed it so you always get to see everyone elses rather than your own, and added a geek bonus round

phew what a day

think i may have finally fixed that bbcode raping of peoples code, but then again its been around for years, so it'll probably be back.

also added pending article link to remind lazy admins that somethings waiting to be posted.

finally, isnt that shab a nice bloke.

added the members list so we can see whos joined up! must remember to add that week by week view, so we can see how the subscriptions pan out

what image best represents me. hmm no idea but, for some reason whilst choosing what picture to use as my avatar on the site, i decided to go for a baboon.

im noticing a few caching problems on the site, i hope someone works out how to solve those pretty soon .. and oo its good to be back

well, i guess this is it. a new site, a new era