Nottingham GNU/Linux Users Group

Packages built from source use the prefix /usr/local by default which is not set up in the in the Fedora system and library paths. The majority of the documentation on the net seems to suggest Fedora users just pass –prefix=/usr to configure scripts but this can obviously cause problems in the long term (writing over the distributions provided binaries) and I decided it would also be much more useful to me to investigate what needs changing so that applications and libraries built in the default prefix will work.

If you are only building programs using the Fedora provided -devel packages you just need to modify your PATH so that /usr/local/bin is in there. In your .profile, .bashrc, whatever add:

Easy enough and very familiar!

It gets slightly more complex if you are building libraries. First off you will need to configure the dynamic linker to look in the default libs prefix, create a new file in /etc/ld.so.conf.d/ (custom.conf, perhaps) and add the line:

Every time you install a new library you will need to run ldconfig to regenerate the dynamic bindings cache, you’ll need to run this as root:

Finally you’ll need to tell pkgconfig to also look in your new library directory:

Of course, none of this is particularly revelationary but I enjoyed the opportunity to learn more about the tools and thought it was probably worth sharing.

Whilst skating tonight at Arnold I got competitive with some youngsters and ended up having a gnarly crash. I fell backwards onto my front arm - I was coming back in from a feeble that was overcooked and my right arm was straight out behind me (I skate goofy) and it broke my fall but I was a bit shocked to find my arm was sort of hanging off an feeling really wrong! I grabbed it and it just crunched and clunked back into place with stomach-turning agony. I was able to get up pretty quickly but soon got the shakes and then I had to drive the car which was interesting! I got some ibuprofen from the local co-op and had to do a bit more driving (picking one of the kids up from karate) before getting home to the arnica. Now it just hurts. I've never dislocated a shoulder before. Cycling to work will be interesting in the morning :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dislocated_shoulder

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Upgrade time is scary time: something always snaps or gets bent out of shape. Thank god for backups. Drupal seems to have chewed up my image galleries - maybe I'll restore them - maybe I won't bother!

Jono Bacon, of Lugradio, Recreant View and Ubuntu fame, has announced his new project - Severed Fifth.

Although I had made a fairly accurate guess as to the purpose of the project (once Jono had alluded to it on his blog and Lugradio) I’m pleased to be able to report that I am still excited by the announcement. Jono’s intended goals are much grander than I had originally expected, and from the initial release it looks like he has a good plan to realise those goals.

At the moment the project seems to be in a stage of gathering interest and laying groundwork but I believe the eventual aim of the project is to enable relatively unknown artists to make musical releases in a similar way to that which has gained NIN and Radiohead a lot of press and, more importantly, fans and sales.

That way being a bypassing of the traditional record labels and releasing content under permissive licenses with a wider range of distribution and purchasing options.

I have briefly mentioned before my interest in this new paradigm for release and distribution of music, it ticks all the right boxes as both a music and freedom enthusiast and any effort to enable this for more artists is one that I will have great interest in.

The distribution model as promoted by Severed Fifth and already utilised by Jonathan Coulton and Trent Reznor is to release the music under a free to share license (typically on of the Creative Commons licenses) which permits the licensee to share the music with very few restrictions.

Physical and digital versions of the media can be purchased as required yet sharing of the music, even via methods scorned by the traditional music industry, is not only allowed - but actively encouraged by the artists/distributors.

What makes Severed Fifth interesting as compared to similar previous efforts by individual acts is that Severed Fifth is a project to enable other bands to more easily embrace this distribution model, giving Severed Fifth the image of being a new age record label. Artists which have been successful with this distribution model so far seem to, in my experience, have either a significant bank roll or sufficient technical knowledge to implement the model on a budget.

Roger and I where discussing what we thought of the potential for Severed Fifth before Jono announced it yesterday and we came to the conclusion that, while significantly less famous than Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead, Jono has a level of ‘celebrity’ (or at least a widely syndicated voice) which gives him an edge in setting up a community such as this.

Jono is in a unique position to leverage his community management abilities and popularity through other efforts to bring more people and skills to Severed Fifth which I hope will make the project more successful for a broader range of artists.

This project is exciting for musicians, music fans and freedom lovers. I wish Severed Fifth the best of luck and sincerely hope it succeeds! At the very least I’ll get some more free metal music from Jono.

package com.tecspy.jdbc3;

import java.io.StringWriter;
import java.sql.Connection;

import java.sql.ResultSet;
import java.sql.SQLException;

import java.sql.Statement;

import javax.sql.rowset.WebRowSet;

import com.sun.rowset.WebRowSetImpl;

/**
 * Handy JDBC 3.0 SQL XML tools using {@link WebRowSet}.

 *
 * @author Michael Erskine (msemtd)
 */
public class SqlXml {

    /**
     * Get an SQL XML value of a {@link WebRowSet} from the given query on the
     * given {@link Connection}.
     *
     * @param con
     *                Established database connection.

     * @param query
     *                SQL query to be performed.
     * @return Resulting SQL XML.
     * @throws SQLException

     */
    public static String getQueryWebRowSetXml(Connection con, String query)

            throws SQLException {
        // Create statement and execute query...
        Statement stmt = con.createStatement();

        ResultSet rs = stmt.executeQuery(query);
        // Create a WebRowSet and populate with result...
        WebRowSet wrs = new WebRowSetImpl();

        wrs.populate(rs);
        // Get the XML into a String...
        StringWriter sw = new StringWriter();

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I don’t know about you but if i’m using the terminal my screen tends to get cluttered if i’m using a few of them, enter Terminator - Multiple GNOME terminals in one window.

Think this says it all - link

I’m using Hardy Heron, the command below will install it.

sudo apt-get install terminator

©2008 paulmellors.net | Paul Mellors. All Rights Reserved.

Last night I was out in the garden making a brazier (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazier not to be confused with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brassiere :) ) out of a 25L motor oil drum (found in the street) mounted on the tubular steel legs of an Ikea stool (also found in the street). I cut the top off by hammering a flat-ended screwdriver through the steel top near to the rim at 1cm intervals then cutting through the remaining spots, again with a screwdriver and hammer. There was some motor oil left in (you can never empty these things with the plastic spout) so poured this out and saved it to fill my oil can (there was probably about 400ml). I bolted the leg to the bottom of the drum with some long steel bolts I recovered from the timber of a cabin bed frame (found in the street!).

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As i’m running a test envioronment using Fedora9, i thought i’d have a go at installing the live cd onto a USB key, turns out it was quite simple

1, download the fedora9 live cd

2, install the livecd-tools - yum install livecd-tools

3, determine where your USB key is mounted - use the df -h command, /media/disk is the USB key so it’s /dev/sdb1

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00
35G 6.8G 26G 21% /
/dev/sda1 99M 19M 76M 20% /boot
tmpfs 501M 12K 501M 1% /dev/shm
/dev/sdb1 2.0G 0 2.0G 0% /media/disk

4, cd to the folder with the livecd iso and as a super user

livecd-iso-to-disk –overlay-size-mb 1000 Fedora-9-Live-i686.iso /dev/sdb1

If i’m not mistaken, the overlay gives you 1000mb space for your own files.

You’ll then get something like

Verifying image…
Fedora-9-Live-i686.iso: 17d675e98a44754d41ba0d93f485ffa3
Fragment sums: 7dba468e8adf87c776ae4a15a871426ba74dba1187adb2a6807c1e124a34
Fragment count: 20
Percent complete: 100.0% Fragment[20/20] -> OK
100.0
The media check is complete, the result is: PASS.

It is OK to use this media.
Copying live image to USB stick
Updating boot config file
Installing boot loader
USB stick set up as live image!

5, Reboot

Note, in order to boot your USB key, you need to make sure your BIOS is capable of booting from a USB device, not all motherboards support this. If it does, change the boot order to boot from USB first. ENJOY

Taken from here and here

©2008 paulmellors.net | Paul Mellors. All Rights Reserved.

While Fedora 9 appears to be a great release they have to go and spoil it by bundling Firefox 3, what a bag of shite that is turning out to be, especially on my laptop, i can hardly type a sentence/URL without it locking up….garbage.  Luckily i’ve installed the epiphany web browser which doesn’t appear to be behaving in the same way….If it was a problem with Fedora i wouldn’t moan, but it’s not, imo it’s what ever distro it’s bundled with has the same problem.  How many “but it’s only beta” comments am i going to get i wonder?

©2008 paulmellors.net | Paul Mellors. All Rights Reserved.

I was pretty chuffed to hear that Battle of the Year was going to be televised on Eurosport. I'm watching it right now: it's the semifinals and... well, the commentators are just pathetic - why can't they just shut up? The breaking is the only thing that should talk. We don't need a pair of idiots yapping over it - especially when they have ABSOLUTELY nothing useful to add. Compare this travesty with the BOTY DVD where its got the stuff you want. Eurosport seem to do this with anything slightly different - they get someone from the sport who can't commentate and some commentator who knows nothing of the sport and they just talk crap all the way through what would otherwise be entertaining in its own right. I'm gonna wait for the DVD again this year!

I'm writing this entry from a completely solid-state machine thanks to Alistair for donating a 32Mb compact flash card for me to play with. Actually it isn't properly finished yet and I still rely on Knoppix for a good web browsing experience! The machine is a Via EPIA 5000 Mini-ITX board that has been propping up my monitor for the past few years. My wife has been using this machine to boot into Windows 2000 on those occasions I'm not there to demonstrate the free alternatives available on our family Linux box but I've decided it should be put to better use as a media streaming device since it is completely silent with a 12V DC 75W ATX power supply and in a stylish G-Alantic case with front-munted USB ports and a little IR window. I've set up a CF to IDE adapter that I bought some years ago for $20 with the 32Mb CF and after attaching a temporary CD drive and booting an old Knoppix CD I was able to use cfdisk and mke2fs to create a single ext2 partition. This partition will be mounted read-only by the way since we don't want to unduely hammer the flash and I haven't got to grips with JFFS2 yet! The read-write parts of the system will be in ramfs: /var, /home, /tmp and some others using up a small part of the 512Mb of RAM available. Using grub-install I was able to make the partition bootable. I'm going to use a kernel and modified initrd from a Movix2 iso - http://movix.sourceforge.net/ - once it is downloaded! Updates soon.

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http://fedoraproject.org/

From the announce list.

©2008 paulmellors.net | Paul Mellors. All Rights Reserved.

I’ve been meaning to type these words for quite some time. I created a draft of this post in November 07, which was some significant time after doing an interview (for one of my sisters’ psychology assignments) about placement years and how mine affected my life.

I’ve finally gotten around to writing these thoughts down since I’m currently involved with interviewing candidates for an industrial placement at work.

Plenty of people choose not to take industrial placements while studying at university; I’m not aware of precise figures but I think easily less than 50% of computing students at my university took a placement year - most of whom forsook the placement out of choice.

I think that is a mistake.

An industrial placement might not be the greatest experience, it may mean you are older than some of your peers when interviewing for jobs (trust me, that means less than you might think) and it may mean ‘delaying’ graduation and ridding yourself of the shackles of academia, etc.

But what it does give you could be extremely valuable!

The industrial placement I ended up with wasn’t ideal for me. It was in an environment I could never see myself working in, using technologies I couldn’t see myself working with once graduated, and yet still the experiences I gained there where some of the most valuable during my entire undergraduate career.

There are the obvious benefits of an industrial placement:

• Money, money, money, money. While taking an industrial placement you’ll earn something like a real world salary. You’ll be able to buy yourselve things, save for your final year, etc.
• Real-world experience. This counts for a lot! Less so in graduate/junior positions in the computing industry but even still.
  For starters being able to relate to events outside of your academic career is extremely useful in interviews, there’s also the experiences of developing for real world users - and the shocking realisation that many programming jobs are not all code.

And yet the most important benefit of my placement year was not one which had ever been mentioned to me before, which is the reason why I’m writing this now. That benefit - breathing room!

Room to breath!

While I was working in industry for a year my mind wasn’t constantly busy; with no assignments to think about I was left with more time for personal projects (learning new programming languages and technologies) and more time with an unladen mind to contemplate my future.

The future is now, the future is tomorrow

My industrial placement confirmed my initial suspicions; I didn’t want to work in that environment and nor did I want to work with those specific technologies. I also learnt more about what directions I did want to take with my career, what sort of role I wanted upon graduation and directions I could see my career taking.

I wouldn’t have been able to figure out these things had I not taken the industrial placement; a combination of first hand experiences and free brain time resulted in me changing degree specification and graduating much happier landing a decent job straight out of University.

Tangential

I just want to finish this post by stating that while the technologies I used on my placement where possibly not ones I would have picked up otherwise, I still value the experiences and knowledge I gained from using them for a year.

It’s a topic for another post, but learning new languages, tool kits and paradigms might not be explicitly necessary for your day to day work; but certainly gives you an edge! A breadth of experience and knowledge that enables you to develop better code faster by adopting paradigms and techniques learnt while exploring these other technologies. That and it’s all kinds of fun!

I’ve been meaning to type these words for quite some time. I created a draft of this post in November 07, which was some significant time after doing an interview (for one of my sisters’ psychology assignments) about placement years and how mine affected my life.

I’ve finally gotten around to writing these thoughts down since I’m currently involved with interviewing candidates for an industrial placement at work.

Plenty of people choose not to take industrial placements while studying at university; I’m not aware of precise figures but I think easily less than 50% of computing students at my university took a placement year - most of whom forsook the placement out of choice.

I think that is a mistake.

An industrial placement might not be the greatest experience, it may mean you are older than some of your peers when interviewing for jobs (trust me, that means less than you might think) and it may mean ‘delaying’ graduation and ridding yourself of the shackles of academia, etc.

But what it does give you could be extremely valuable!

The industrial placement I ended up with wasn’t ideal for me. It was in an environment I could never see myself working in, using technologies I couldn’t see myself working with once graduated, and yet still the experiences I gained there where some of the most valuable during my entire undergraduate career.

There are the obvious benefits of an industrial placement:

• Money, money, money, money. While taking an industrial placement you’ll earn something like a real world salary. You’ll be able to buy yourselve things, save for your final year, etc.
• Real-world experience. This counts for a lot! Less so in graduate/junior positions in the computing industry but even still.
  For starters being able to relate to events outside of your academic career is extremely useful in interviews, there’s also the experiences of developing for real world users - and the shocking realisation that many programming jobs are not all code.

And yet the most important benefit of my placement year was not one which had ever been mentioned to me before, which is the reason why I’m writing this now. That benefit - breathing room!

Room to breath!

While I was working in industry for a year my mind wasn’t constantly busy; with no assignments to think about I was left with more time for personal projects (learning new programming languages and technologies) and more time with an unladen mind to contemplate my future.

The future is now, the future is tomorrow

My industrial placement confirmed my initial suspicions; I didn’t want to work in that environment and nor did I want to work with those specific technologies. I also learnt more about what directions I did want to take with my career, what sort of role I wanted upon graduation and directions I could see my career taking.

I wouldn’t have been able to figure out these things had I not taken the industrial placement; a combination of first hand experiences and free brain time resulted in me changing degree specification and graduating much happier landing a decent job straight out of University.

Tangential

I just want to finish this post by stating that while the technologies I used on my placement where possibly not ones I would have picked up otherwise, I still value the experiences and knowledge I gained from using them for a year.

It’s a topic for another post, but learning new languages, tool kits and paradigms might not be explicitly necessary for your day to day work; but certainly gives you an edge! A breadth of experience and knowledge that enables you to develop better code faster by adopting paradigms and techniques learnt while exploring these other technologies. That and it’s all kinds of fun!

Hmm, lots going on: at my partner's gym in Nottingham and trying out a public internet machine with IE 7 on it and the thing seems to render my site OK! I'm mildly impressed :) I was less impressed with the Java 6 update 10 beta (http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads/ea/6u10/6u10beta.jsp): I desparately wanted the Nimbus look and feel (http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads/ea/6u10/nimbus.jsp) for beautifying my ugly Linux deployments but testing yesterday with the standard Swing Set 2 JNLP left me a bit sickened - poor performance, random silent crashes, processes left in background that I could get at with JConsole but with no window! All on Kubuntu 7.10 with nv driver so not exactly off the beaten track there! I'll be trying it out with the accelerated i810 X driver later today. Still on the Java front I've been doing a lot of Swing Application Framework stuff and I've got to grips with resource injection, Actions and some of the other beansbinding lovelyness includign the use of the EL expression language - neat.

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After posting earlier about having problems with Ubuntu Server and mysql I was given a little lesson in command line mysql by Philip Newborough [thanks]

I think i’ll pass it on. My problem was creating mysql users/databases via phpmyadin which left me unable to import my .sql files. Here’s what i had to do.

1, mysql –user=”root” –password=”your_root_password” - This connects to the mysql server as root

2, CREATE USER ‘new_username’@'localhost’ IDENTIFIED BY ‘password_for_new_username’;

3, GRANT ALL ON *.* TO ‘new_username’@'localhost’;

4, create database databasename;

I could then import my .sql files using -

mysql -u<username> -p database < databasefile.sql

If you’re reading this post then you’re reading it on my shiny new install of Ubuntu Heron Server 8.04 LTS.

©2008 paulmellors.net | Paul Mellors. All Rights Reserved.

I was using CentOS as a web server and while it worked fine i wanted to use a debian based server. I downloaded the Heron LTS iso and installed it, rather than install a LAMP system from the install i did a basic install so i could install the AMP parts manually. All went well until i wanted to restore my mysql databases. I use phpmyadmin to create databases because i’m lazy and it’s easy to click the priveleges link, add the usename/password job done but when i used the mysql command to import the .sql files, this is where it went tits up. For some reason it kept giving me

ERROR 1045 (28000) : Access denied for user: ‘myusername@localhost’ (Using password: YES)

I knew the username and password was correct but apprently it’s something to do with the user information being wrong in the user table….don’t ask me what, i gave up after a while and installed debian etch which i knew would work straight away…….

I’ll figure it out but until i do, debian [which i think is actually quicker on my machine than CentOS] will stay on it.

©2008 paulmellors.net | Paul Mellors. All Rights Reserved.

1, download the rpm from here

2, install pam-devel [ a requirement for VirtualBox]

3, rpm -Uvh the VirtualBox rpm

4, add your username to the vboxusers group

5, reboot

6, ENJOY

©2008 paulmellors.net | Paul Mellors. All Rights Reserved.

1, download the rpm from here

2, install pam-devel [ a requirement for VirtualBox]

3, rpm -Uvh the VirtualBox rpm

4, add your username to the vboxusers group

5, reboot

6, ENJOY

©2008 paulmellors.net | Paul Mellors. All Rights Reserved.

It was my brother's wedding this weekend. I went down to Bedford on Friday night and chatted and ate with the other people that were there - most notably my Uncle Stephen who was over from America as well as various people from the bride's arena. All good fun, especially when my Mum produced presents for the couple in the form of a book of memories of Stewart. I spent a good while looking through it, remembering things and having a good laugh at others. Not that I was the only one - Helen and her bridesmaids were highly amused by Stewart's hair in days gone by.

Sleeping arrangements were slightly unfortunate. I was sharing a room with Stewart for the first night, but somehow the hotel had run out of twins / messed up somewhere so for his last night of freedom my brother was sharing a bed with me. He slept much better than I did and only tried to cuddle me the once.

It was quite nice with the wedding being at 2pm because there wasn't really much to do in the morning - well for us at least. The women were having hair appointments and what not whilst we were slouching around in jeans. Once at the church we had a bit of a run through with the vicar, who was a fantastic bloke. I was best man so actually had things to do. After that there was general waiting around with people coming in and all asking Stewart whether he was feeling nervous.

I've not really thought of weddings from the point of view of when you're stood waiting. Everybody looks at the bride walking up but the groom and best man just have to stand there and take it on faith that she's there. The ceremony went as you'd expect with one exception - Helen's sister Laura sang Ave Maria which was just amazing. After the signing I was given the wedding certificate to look after. Eeek! More responsibility. The weather held out for the photos (it was nice all weekend actually). My Mum has been very industrious and got some photos online already: http://photos.helenandstewart.com/.

Back at the hotel there were more photos for the couple and arrival drinks for everybody else. After the receiving line we were ready for the meal. Bugger - speeches before eating. Both the father of the bride and my brother gave great speeches and then it was down to me. I'd practised quite a bit and knew what I wanted to say, but then (as when I did a speech at my sister's wedding) went on to change it quite a bit. Funny thing that. The gist of the main bit of it was that Stewart hurts himself spectacularly sometimes (only slightly awkward at points - audience unsure as to whether to laugh at him breaking his back for instance :). It all went well really though and when I produced some swimming arm bands for him in case he went swimming when on honeymoon it was definitely well received. Hurrah!

Post food I tried to chat to as many people as I could. This was made slightly easier by having been given a chunk of cash to buy people drinks with rather than having an amount behind the bar. It's even better like that because I got the glory for buying the drinks even though it wasn't really me doing the buying. At one point I was talking to some of Helen's colleagues and my Mother wandered over and proceeded to tell them that I was a nice boy and single. Thanks for that Mum :)

Sunday consisted of tidying up, waiting for people to leave and then going for lunch at a pub with some of S&H's friends and then on to home.

i had a thoroughly good time, chatted to lots of people, discovered that Helen has about a million cousins and even had a bit of a boogie. I'm very glad that today is a bank holiday and I'm not at work though...

More weddings please.