I needed a command to see what packages were installed in Ubuntu, found this after a little searching:

    dpkg –get-selections

Does the job nicely.

Pretty late now, spent a fair bit of time setting up the new blog and am in the proces of getting the site sorted out a little better.

I’ve been using ftp to get all my websites files, to recursively get files using ftp use mget.

mget -r ftp://username:password@host -p 

Apart from that I’ve a couple of other little tid-bits. Installing Bootcamp on an Intel-based CPU mac is a pain. I’ve tried now 3 times, the biggest problem being that my Media Center 2005 installation has 2 cds and I don’t know how to eject the cd during the install phase when prompted to! The eject button doesn’t work so maybe there’s a shortcut I don’t know or something.Perhaps I’ll have to get a single CD install.

Had the craziest install of ColdFusion/Apache during the week. I had apache working(i.e was able to get to my localhost fine) and so decided to go off and get ColdFusion talknig with apache. I went to /Applications/JRun4/lib/ and executed unzip wsconfig.jar to a local directory. Then I went into the apache/connectors/macos-intel directory and copied out the wsconfig file to /Application/JRun4/lib/wsconfig/1(I created the last 2 directories myself). That was fine I added the ColdFusion code to the end of the httpd.conf file for the CF module and restarted apache. I started getting the NameVirtualHost *.80 has no virtual hosts even though I had about 10 in my users/xxx.conf file. This file was definitely being loaded so I couldn’t figure out why this was happening. After some help from work -colleagues we eventually figured out the problem. We went through the whole copying out of the connector again and got the CORRECT code to enter at the end of the httpd.conf file for the ColdFusion module inclusion and it worked perfectly straight away. Spent about 2 hours figuring this out!

I was looking at ways to replace a bunch of strings in a SQL file and came across a unix command sed which can be used to do the job. Using the -e command allows you to replace multiple strings within a file and I then piped the result into a different SQL file.

    sed -e “s/string1ToFind\string2Replacement/g” -e “s/stiring2ToFind/string2Replacement/g” -e “string3ToFind/string3Replacement/g” sqlFile1.sql > newSqlFile1.sql 

I’ve also been using JMeter from Apache recently to perform some load tests on a website.
I got the binary here: http://jakarta.apache.org/site/downloads/downloads_jmeter.cgi Just unzip it and run /bin/jmeter and it will load up.

In test plan create a thread group (edit->add->thread group) and there you can set the number of users/threads, loop count and a couple of other things. Select thread group and add a http request(edit->add->sampler->http request). There you can set the webserver name and the rel path from the web-server, add paramters to post(i,.e. mimic a form post) and retreive all embedded resources(if you want to test getting the webpage resources too along with the request). Again you can change stuff like following redirects and other bits and pieces.

You can add a whole bunch of Listeners or reporting graphs/charts. Just select the thread group again and edit->add->listener and add summary report and view reports in tree. The summary report gives you #samples,average,min,max, deviation, errors, throughput, kb/sec and avg bytes while the view reports in tree lets you see what is reqeusted and returned as part of the http request. I’ve not checked out other reports, I’m sure they contain lots of handy stuff.

I’ve been fishing around for new iTouch apps and have found some excellent new ones out there. Check out Simplify Media, its brilliant allows you to connect to your iTunes library as long as you have a Wifi connection. Just install the app on your Mac or PC, create an account and download the Simplify Media app from the iTouch Installer and log in there too. Takes a little while to get the libraries the first time but after that its very fast. The songs then buffer as if you were streaming them, I’m very impressed with the speed of it – a must have for any iTouch/iPhone owner.

Another site that has lots of recommendations but isn’t quite working for me yet is Seeqpod which is basically a search engine that searches for music in Safari and apparently can stream the audio over the net. The audio doesn’t start for me yet, not sure why. There does seem to be a HUGE amount of music there though.

iPhysics is very very cool ‘game’, you can draw lines, objects and then the physics engine takes over and the new objects bounce around under gravity and as you would expect under Newtonian phyiscs. The really impressive thing is that it is dynamic, you can create objects on the fly and they’ll interact with one another and bounce around the place, fun. The game part involves moving a ball across a level to a small red box, there’s tons of user-created levels so its quite fun from what I’ve played of it. Here’s a video of something similar I found a few weeks ago, thought it was only a college experiment though

Similar to the SimplifyMedia is the telekinesis project. It looks really cool and I’ve not had a chance to test this yet but will give it a goo this evening and see how it works.

Also ScummVM is available for the iTouch now which means that……….yes Monkey Island my all-time favourite game can be played on it. Also can play all the ScummVM developed games, Sam & Max, Indy series and all the other classic adventure games. Hurray!

MobileCast is an other app that can be installed via the Installer. It allows you to fetch podcasts from RSS feeds without having to sync up with iTunes, this wil be handy when I’m travelling and can just pick up random Wifi hotspots.

I’ve recently upgraded the firmware on my PSP to version 3.90 M33-3, mainly because I want to play Pro Evo 2008. Check out Dark Alex’s site with all the releases there, I upgraded from version 3.51. Always pretty nervous when doing it but he hasn’t let me down yet.

Linky to his site

Finally here’s how to quickly create a tar gz archive. Here it is

  tar -pczf nameOfArchive.tar.gz /directoryToZip