2005

So last night I decided to take windows off of my laptop. This probably should have been easy. However, when is anything ever easy? When I woke up this morning I found out that in the middle of the night, during my net-install, the network cord came unplugged.

Apparently when you unplug the network cable during a Debian Netinstall the installer stops downloading the remaining packages and sets up what you have.

In one of my previous posts I told how to create a package that’s contents is dumped from the database, archived, encrypted, and put into a public directory.

I also mentioned that a potential security flaw on this system was that someone with enough time and processing power could decrypt your package and get all of it’s contents.

I thought about this and decided that I wanted a better way. So, I found a way to script an unattended / secure connection between the remote computer and the client computer using SCP and SSH keys.

So, as most people know, the Xbox360 was recently released. With this came the hope to upgrade from the Xbox to the newer version.

I’m not much of a gamer anymore, but I did always want an Xbox, (mainly for the opportunity to mod it). So, I went onto Ebay and found an Xbox in perfect working condition for under 100 dollars and purchased it.

We’ll see what happens with the modding part, because the Mod chip that I want to get runs around 75 bucks for a solder-less connection. I’m pretty sure that I could solder one on myself, but I don’t want to take the chance of messing up the first console that I’ve ever owned.

I started out in Linux using Fedora, which is Redhat based. One of the indespensible tools that I used was called chkconfig. Basically what chkconfig does in Redhat based systems is allow the user to control what daemons start at boot time. This is useful for starting that annoying daemon that you always need or stopping the pesky one that always bothers you.

I used this a ton, and then I switched to Debian, and my whole world turned upside down. (some exaggeration intended)

For those of you who have been reading this blog for a while you that in the past I’ve had some problems keeping this server up and running for any amount of time.

This got old because every time that my server died, I’d loose all of my blog posts, which stinks because there’s usually a ton of them.

To combat this ever threatning possibility, I decided to write a bash script for linus that does a few things:

This is something that I’ve been wanting to do for some time. It’s just this morning that I actually decided to do it. It’s pretty simple.

This small tutorial is based upon the assumption that you already have a samba share set up. However, if you don’t, then keep posted, because I’ll talk about that in a later tutorial. Also, It’s based upon the assumption that you have the samba client and sambafs installed. In debian all that you have to do to install this is type in the following line:
apt-get install smbfs smbclient

First thing:

I just got Google adsense setup here. My contract forbids me from asking you to click on the links, so don’t click on the links if you don’t want to. Just know, I’m a poor college student and clicking a link is easy : ).

Second thing:

You HAVE to check out Pandora. It’s part of the Music Genome project, which was created to analyze music. I know, I know, sounds boring so far doesn’t it.

I’ve been having some problems using apt-get lately which led me to doing an apt-get dist-upgrade.

Smart me found this command on the internet and decided to use it. It worked just fine, except for the fact that when I restarted my computer the graphical display manager that I use didn’t start.

Here’s the steps that I took to diagnose the problem.

1. I tried to start gdm instead of kdm by editing'/etc/X11/default-display-manager'. This file contains the path to your display manager, for me it was '/usr/bin/kdm'
2. I tried changing that to '/usr/bin/gdm' and I received an X server error saying that my chosen X server (XFree86) was not found.I thought that this was a little funny because I didn’t think that I used XFree86, but Xorg instead.
3. So, I looked at the file '/etc/X11/X', which is a symbolic link (which is like a shortcut in windows) and found out that in the upgrade it changed the link to point to a nonexistent file.
4. After that I changed the link to point to '/usr/bin/X11/Xorg' and voila, kdm started up just fine.More Later,
   Jon Howe

In this project that I’ve been messing with, I’ve come across the need to convert dynamic PHP output to a PDF.

Suprisingly, this is a pretty easy process thanks to DomPDF.

Boy is this ever hard.

Check it out below!
(Reminder – you’re going to need to have Adobe Acrobat Reader for this to work, seeing as how thi s is a PDf generator. You probably already have it, but in case you don’t, here it is.

I just opened up registration to everyone that wants to join the site. There will be some member specific content / features coming soon, so register now and be notified when new features are available.

Later,
Jon Howe