I am back from presenting in VMWorld 2008 in Cannes. Really enjoyed the experience of presenting to around 300 people and as my presentation was around an hour long I managed to get a lot of time to walk around. Also had so much time as I somehow managed to avoid working in the “Genius Bar” because of an error with timetabling. I haven’t been to a VMworld in the States but I heard this one was less “showbiz” than the American ones.
A lot of the presentations were very good (and some were woeful) and some of the stands there had some interesting stuff. However there wasn’t much free stuff being handed out.
The only drawback I had was that I was presenting on the last day so couldn’t really go mad in the evening. Although there were plenty of parties with free drink. Also my camera battery died on the first day and I had no charger with me! Anyway I’ll upload my pictures (and my presentation for thoes who might be interested “Advanced HA Troubleshooting”) tomorrow.
Also a recording of my presentation should be available on the VMWorld website tomorrow.
Found this nice graphic. Would be pretty useful for the bottom of signatures.
To use it yourself you can use the following html.
<a href="http://www.danasoft.com"><img src="http://www.danasoft.com/vipersig.jpg" border="0" /></a><p style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 11px">Sign by Dealighted - <a href="http://www.dealighted.com">Coupons and Deals</a></p>
Looking forward to seeing KDE 4 which is being released this day next week. If you want to have a play with the release candidate you can download a Live KUbuntu CD here.
I got a video camera for my Birthday and I was playing around with it recording random stuff, as you do when you get a new camera. Anyway I thought it’d be pretty cool so play stuff in slow motion. I wasn’t too worried about saving it in slow-motion just watching it.
It turns out that MPlayer has a built in speed option that allows you to play back video at any speed.
To playback video at 10% its normal speed you can use the following command.
mplayer -speed 0.1 whatever.mpeg
After reading an article about blogging at what it originally was meant to be I decided to follow some of the “rules of blogging”. One of these is that you provide a weekly list of interesting links. I modified it slightly insofar as I am going to include my favorite lolcat picture of the week as I find them really funny.
Unfortunately I am subscribed to PlanetILUG a site which gathers Linux related blogs from Ireland and some of the people subscribed didn’t want to see this images each week.
So the solution was to create a feed for my Linux category only so that they will only see Linux related stuff from my website and nothing else. And as it turns out it was really easy!
All you have to do is is add &cat=n (where n is your category number) to your existing feed URL.
http://domainname.com/?feed=rss2&cat=n
Alternatively if you are using custom URLs you can simply click on the category and add the word feed to the URL.
http://domainname.com/category/maincategory/subcategory/feed
http://domainname.com/index.php/category/maincategory/feed
So now I can target different catergories of my site to different people.
Was installing a new wordpress blog today as a Beta for the new Millstreet website. Each time I tried to run the install.php Firefox prompted me to download it.
“You have chosen to open install.php”.
It was really weird. I tried different browsers but they all had the same issue. Each time I looked on the net I was told the issue was with my server not being configured properly for PHP but I have other blogs running PHP that work fine. Weird!
Anyway I figured it out. You need to increase the amount of memory PHP scripts can use on your server. Otherwise when you reach the limit they will not be executed.
To increase the amount of memory PHP scripts can use you will need to increase the memory_limit value in /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini.
Also I found a nice line you can add to a page to get all of your PHP info. Create a page called test.php and add the following line to it.
<?php echo phpinfo(); ?>
Now when you open that page you will be given some useful information about your PHP install.
I love amaroK and the last.fm component has helped me find a load of music. However when you go to the website and try and open one of the station in Firefox you get the error
“Firefox doesn’t know how to open this address because the protocol (lastfm) isn’t associated with any program “.
Well to work around this do the following and the next time you click on the link in Firefox it will open in amaroK
- Open the advanced configuration by typing “about:config” n the address bar.
- Right click and choose “New -> String”
- Create a string called “network.protocol-handler.app.lastfm”
- Give it the value “/usr/bin/amarok” or wherever you have installed the amaroK binary.
And that’s it. You can now open lastfm links in amaroK.
Upgraded to KUbuntu 7.04 today. Went fine. Had to update my kopete again with my accounts though. I think I might have deleted the settings by mistake when I was cleaning up. Anyway I looked around the net for instruction on how to set up Google Talk for Kopete and got different settings everywhere I went. Different port groups etc. SO anyway I said I’ll post the instructions as someone may find it useful.
Settings->Configure-.New
Select Jabber
On the first tab enter your account name with the @gmail.com at the end. So myname@gmail.com
On the second tab enter the following
[x] Use protocol encryption (SSL)
[x] Allow plain-text password authentication
[x] Override default server information
Server: [talk.google.com] Port: [5223]
And that’s it!
I’ve installed Kubuntu on my laptop recently and I must say I am pretty impressed. It has picked up most of m laptops hardware and the hibernation and media button functions I could never get working on openSUSE worked out of the box! Pretty cool! I have no doubt I could have got them working with openSUSE but I wasn’t willing to spend the time on it.
Anyway installing software is pretty easy with their YaST like APT-get. The only disadvantage I can see compared to openSUSE is that there is no YaST equivalent to allow you to edit system configuration options such as starting or configuring a SAMBA server or such.
Anyway I haven’t had much time to play with it as I still have no broadband connection (sigh) but I was sufficiently impressed to load it on my girlfriends computer (my girlfriend being a novice in computers in general) and she seems to be managing quite well. She likes it much more than the travesty that is Vista anyway which kept crashing on her pretty new laptop (Thank you Microsoft).
For example when she started amaroK it asked her did she want to play MP3s so she clicked yes and it went away and downloaded and installed the required files. I shudder to think what she would have got up to if trying to install MP3 support in openSUSE.
Anyway it’s looking pretty good and between that and the always user friendly KDE (Thank you for KNetwork Manager!) she is flying it.
I am still using openSUSE at work though as I often have to set up different Servers and Services and YaST just can’t be beaten for ease of use that way. Also the server this site runs on is SuSE. And SUSE seems to have more packages available and is more configurable.
But from a home user point of view where you just want to watch DVDs and play music and sure the ‘net I am beginning to lean towards KUbuntu.
But we’ll see…….
Oh yeah and I got another article published on Novell. :)
I am back from presenting in VMWorld 2008 in Cannes. Really enjoyed the experience of presenting to around 300 people and as my presentation was around an hour long I managed to get a lot of time to walk around. Also had so much time as I somehow managed to avoid working in the “Genius Bar” because of an error with timetabling. I haven’t been to a VMworld in the States but I heard this one was less “showbiz” than the American ones.
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