Source Guru

A site I use quite regularly is Stack Overflow – a great, community driven site for programmers.

At this site, you get rep when you post good answers, or good questions, which are voted up by the others on the site.

Imagine my dismay, when, this morning, I tried to login using the normal URL that I use for OpenID logins, only to find that the URL that it is delegated to has changed.

“What does this mean?” I might hear you asking.

Well, it means that anyone who’s using Launchpad as their OpenID Provider (OP) doesn’t have their openID assosciated to them anymore. For me, this means I can no longer access my stackoverflow account and my reputation starts at 1 again.

*sigh* – while I can understand that LP’s OpenID implementation is still in Beta, I don’t expect changes that completely change the way the system works. It’s paramount to going through the system and changing everyone’s username….

I’m pretty annoyed at this, and have filed a bug about it.

Edit: It seems they’ve removed the delegation on the pages for users, and This is why it’s happening…

So, I’m sure most of you are aware of Facebook – if not, where have you been?

Anyway, I run a site that promotes local events and gigs for a specific group of people, and a lot of the work for the site is in keeping it up to date – going and grabbing the info from various different websites, and plonking it into the format that’s used by the website. (which could consume hours)

This morning I noticed that I kept getting invites to events on Facebook that I should be adding to the website. I also noticed that the emails I got from Facebook were all in the same form.

Regex anyone?

preg_match("/^Event: (.*)\n.*\"(.*)\"\nWhat: (.*)\nHost: (.*)\nStart Time: (.*)\nEnd Time: (.*)\nWhere: (.*)\n\nTo see more details and RSVP, follow the link below:\n(.*)\n/m", $email, $matches);

So, yup, that’s what I did – I poked it all through a script, registered a new Facebook account, and now – through the magic of Regular Expressions, when someone invites the special user to an event, it automatically gets added to the site (through a bit of PHP + procmail magic! (with sanity checks!))

It was certainly interesting to get going, and well, quite fun… but I feel a bit dirty doing it

Anyway, now all I need to do is create screen scrapers for the different websites that I get the gig listings from, and well, hopefully, then, I’ll be able to have everything automated!

If only…

So, after finding out that that nasty noise my PC’s been making was actually a hard drive failing (I knew it was, but thought I’d fix it now, while I’m doing my refresher) So, after a few failed install attempts with lovely kernel messages telling me that the disk was failing horribly, I thought, ok, I’ll shut down, unplug the hard drive, and get on without it.

Ha, if only I were so lucky. Seems that for some reason, my PC, having had 2 hard drives connected to the primary IDE channel for the last… oh, 4 years? doesn’t like it – and now, my primary IDE channel is unusable (or at least, nothing is being detected from it )

So, that leaves me with 1 hard drive…. at least it’s the bigger of the three. However, my PSU has also developed a high pitched squealing noise, which to be quite honest, sounds dangerous.

So, it’s with some regret that I say that, I’m going to be out of commission for a while. I still, however, have my eeePC available, which is a blessing, as it means I’ll still be able to surf and access email.

However, with apathy out of action, and with christmas around the corner, and lots of bills to pay, it’s unlikely to be until around March that I have enough in the coffers to pay for a replacement.

Thank god for the eeePC

Ok, so working with RAID and LVM is… well… not easy.

I have three hard drives in this machine, all of different sizes, (160Gb, 200Gb, and 300Gb), and I’m gong to be setting these up so that I have a  RAID-5 made up of three 160Gb Partitions, (with LVM on top) a RAID-1 Partition of 40Gb (no LVM) and the rest split between boot, swap, and misc.

However, the ubuntu alternative CD doesn’t make this easy, and, one of my favourite annoyances is that once you configure RAID, you cannot make changes to the partitions on the disk where you have RAID partitions (hidden away in the middle of a block of text that people aren’t likely to read… I only spotted it on the 4th/5th attempt)

Getting RAID setup is fine, getting RAID+LVM has taken me… 6 attempts so far, and I think that I’ve managed to say the right prayers to the right gods this time… or maybe not…

“The kernel was unable to re-read the partititon table on /dev/md1 (Invalid argument). This means Linux won’t know anything about the modifications you made until you reboot. you should reboot your computer before doing anything with /dev/md1

Maybe I should do this manually *clicks reboot*

Over the next few days, I’ll be re-installing my main Desktop from scratch with Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex.

This is mainly to help me cleanup my PC (I’ve got a lot of stuff on it) and also so I can make better use of my system.

So, first of all I need a copy of Intrepid. I’ve opted for the alternate CD as I want to try LVM + Software RAID.

I’ve also decided already that I will be completely removing Windows from this machine (having previously had an archaic Windows 2000 install for playing online poker).

While I reinstall, I’m going to be using my trusty eeePC to blog about it, so hopefully those little snags that I hit along the way will be documented somewhere, and hey, it might even make for some good reading.

Well, as we all know, the first step to re-installing a system is… backup…

I’m currently sitting here waiting for my home directory to tar itself up onto my external 1TB hard drive, and watching as the file list goes past, I realise just how lax I’ve been at keeping my home directory tidy. I’ve got the last ~6 years of crap in there (including a backup of all my music which I’d thought I’d lost years ago! – yay!)

I’m backing up my home drive as I’m going to be wiping that, which, while it means re-installing all my settings, etc etc, means that I have a clean start (and if I actually do need something out of it, I can just pull it out of the tarball )

Well, the backup’s on it’s way, my download of the ISO has 15 minutes left, so I’ll go ahead and hit publish, with the final words.

See you on the flip side.