John Hunt

The Ubuntu UK Podcast show was recently established, someone I met from HantsLUG hosts it and it’s pretty interesting for those of you who are Ubuntu users. Check it out!

Ubuntu UK Podcast

I updated my php-clearsilver installation guide today after discovering it’s wrong in a few places. Fortunately, I don’t think anyone’s ever used it (apart from me today.)

If you know what clearsilver is and you use php, you might find it interesting.

Installing PHP Clearsilver module for apache on Ubuntu and Debian

Following several guides on setting up a bridge on my laptop between the wireless network interface and VirtualBox for direct networking was simply not working for me. Today after lots of head scratching I finally discovered why.

Turns out that the standard bridge utils are no good for most wireless cards, but there is a workaround.

Check out this guide, and read under the wireless section:
Bridged Networking with VirtualBox on Linux Hosts

What you can do is add those various commands to a little script file in /etc/network/if-up.d/ which will set up the ‘bridge’ upon starting networking.

Woohoo!

Unfortunately, you can’t!!! Well, not as far as I can tell, I’ve asked around and scoured the web but it seems there’s no use, there simply isn’t a way to do it on linux. The next best thing is to use DVDFab for windows via Wine (it kind of semi-officially works with Wine).

As I found nothing really solid on google, I thought I’d write this post as it’s annoying when you can’t find anything.

DVDFab

How infuriating! What a great way to encourage people to illegally download things instead of buying them. I wonder when (or if) these movie studios will ever learn that it’s a really dumb idea to stop people having total control over things they buy.

Just a handy one for the IE6 png support:
for i in `ls`; do x=`basename $i .png`; convert $i $x.gif; done

No doubt it’s been done elsewhere, but I spent quite a while trying to get this one working. Basically I wanted a horizontal css menu with decent markup and no hacks. I also wanted to have nice icons for each item correctly vertically aligned. On top of that I wanted the whole thing to be fluid so it would look right at any text size. Unfortunately because of IE6’s lack of support for :hover on anything but links I needed to use containing spans for the text on each list item (doh!) I guess you could use javascript or something instead, but that’d be really horrid!

After a lot of hair pulling, I finally got it to work:

#navigation ul {
  margin:               0;
  padding:              0;
  background-color:     #eee;
  height:               2em;
  border-bottom:        1px solid #888;
}

#navigation li {
  float:                left;
  list-style-type:      none;
  border-right:         1px solid #888;
}

#navigation a {
  float:                left;
  margin:               0;
  background-repeat:    no-repeat;
  background-position:  5px 50%;
  text-decoration:      none;
  color:                #333;
}

#navigation .inner {
  padding:              0 .4em 0 26px;  /* Adjust based on the width of icon + 10px */
  display:              inline;
  line-height:          2em;
  vertical-align:       middle;
}

#navigation .contacts {
  background-image: url(/crm/resources/icons/contacts.png)
}

#navigation .activities {
  background-image: url(/crm/resources/icons/activities.png)
}

#navigation .reports {
  background-image: url(/crm/resources/icons/reports.png)
}

#navigation .utilities {
  background-image: url(/crm/resources/icons/utilities.png)
}

#navigation a:hover {
  background-color:         #fff;
}

And here’s the HTML:

<div id="navigation">
<ul>
  <li><a href="" class="contacts"><span class="inner">Contacts</span></a></li>
<li><a href="" class="activities"><span class="inner">Activities</span></a></li>
<li><a href="" class="reports"><span class="inner">Reports</span></a></li>
<li><a href="" class="utilities"><span class="inner">Utilities</span></a></li></ul>
</div>

*I got my icons from the fantastic FamFamFam web site. This guy gives away loads of great icons for free. You might want to convert them to transparent gifs though as obviously IE6- won’t handle the transparency in the PNGs.

I’m no css expert, so if you can see anything silly in the css/markup or know of some way of improving this, please drop me a comment!

While pondering why my backup scripts weren’t working in /etc/cron.daily, I remembered that run-parts (the thing that runs stuff in that directory) doesn’t like running scripts with a .sh, or indeed probably any extension on them.

Handy to remember that one!

Looks like the guys over at Innotek have been busy, probably old news to most but I just realised they’ve released version 1.5 of Virtualbox last year.

Among a whole bunch of bug fixes and other improvements it seems they’ve added one cool feature that will make working with those windows only programs much easier - seamless window integration with your host OS (I think that’s linux only, but I might be wrong). I’ve not tried it out yet, but as far as I can tell you can have windows application windows displayed properly and running at full steam with all the rest of your windows - very much like running some kind of cool (sort of) hybrid OS!!! I thought it was exciting anyway.

To explain what I mean further, I found this rather strange video on youtube:

Once I get that new pc, I’ll give it a go!

—
Update:
It works, but it goes very strange if you have ‘desktop effects’/compiz turned on. Which is annoying! Nevermind!!! I’m sure it’ll be sorted out fairly soon.

I recently got the ClearSilver PHP module working on my Ubuntu laptop as we use it on a number of our web sites and I needed to develop a site with it locally. Then this morning I stupidly upgraded PHP and of course the module had un-resolved symbols. Dohh!

So I decided this time I’d write a better document on how to get it working, one which might actually help me and could perhaps help others. Check it out on my wiki:

ClearSilver PHP module on Debian based systems

It seems to work well, but please, please be careful following my instructions.

Recently I’ve been using Skype a lot to speak to friends and family in the UK and Australia. It’s pretty good for the following reasons:

• There’s no need to configure your firewall
• Everyone else seems to have Skype already
• It’s pretty good quality wise.
• The webcam function is really good, especially in full screen

Yes, it’s not ideal - it’s a proprietary network and the software is closed source, but on the other hand it just works. And now that the linux beta version supports video calling, I think it’s the best there is.

However, Skype (the company) shouldn’t be praised too much for their new linux beta - why didn’t we get it when the Windows version was released? Why should open source community suffer? Did Skype not realise it’s another potential market for SkypeIn/Out? So frustrating, but that’s how it is in the world of linux I guess!

This morning we called my sister in the UK. The call quality was great as was the full screen video quality. You always know something is good when it’s shocking! My only little gripe was that we couldn’t view my sisters webcam when ours was on. I guess that’s just a bug in the beta (2.0.17 I think) and could well have been something to do with my webcam itself.

Get the latest release of the Beta here.