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…

Just a note - if you’ve sent me any important email in the last 24 hours, then please re-send. I’ve had to wipe my mailboxes due to a 10,000 strong backscatter of bounced email…

… that is the question.

Whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer
the slings and arrows of outrageous harrasments,
or take ops against a sea of trolls,
and by opposing, end them? To /part; to /quit;
No more; and by a /quit say we end
The head-ache, and thousand virtual pings
That IRC is heir to, ’tis a consumation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To /part; to /quit;
To /quit, perchance to /ignore: ay, there’s the rub;
For in that /quit, what messages may come
When we have shuffled off this virtual coil,
Must give us pause, there’s the respect
That makes calamity of such low ping;
For who could bear the whips and scorns of time?
The operator’s wrong, the users contumely
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after disconnection,
That undiscover’d country from whose bourne
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.–Soft you now!
The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remember’d.

Annoyances

So - today I decided that I needed a “conference laptop”

Basically, at the moment, I have my main desktop, (custom built monster) and an eeePC.

While the eeePC does exactly what I need it to, which is be portable, and have wifi - so I can check email etc etc on the fly, it doesn’t lead itself very well to developing on the move. If I try to compile anything but the most basic, it dies. So, I thought that I’d take some of my paycheck and invest a few Quid in a lower end laptop.

What I need is

• At least 1Gb RAM
• A Processor around the 1.7 GHz mark
• As much disk space as possible
• Wifi
• 15″ Screen size minimum

What I’d also LIKE is

• Compatible Video card for stuff like Compiz, etc
• Wifi Chipset that’s compatible with Linux without me having to hack away for hours to get it working (preferably something that works out the box)
• Something where I’m not paying extra for the privilege of having Windows installed before I wipe it

Ok, so - these things, espescially in the “What I need” - are fairly standard. So I went around a few websites and started trying to find the best deals. I went to ebuyer, dabs, Dell and PC World (not linked - I’ll explain why in a moment!)

Well, looking through these sites, one thing came to me pretty much instantly, and that’s that none of them seem capable of telling me what chipset the Wireless cards are running. and pretty much all of them (in most cases) lack sufficient information for a tech savvy person to actually decide whether it meets their specifications. It’s a bit like buzzword bingo on some of the sites. They give you all the weird and wonderful wacky names that come along with the technologies, without even giving you details about it. Dell is one of the few sites that gives you the information you need. But it still doesn’t tell you what chipset it’s running.

Well, anyways - that’s my first annoyance. My second… is one of putting “bling” ahead of usability, or in some cases, using technologies where it’s not even needed. The PC World website uses Javascript extensively. I, out of habit - tend to middle-click on pretty much everything when I’m browsing (ending up with my record of 37 tabs open in Firefox today!) but, when a link links to a javascript: URL - it doesn’t work. So, I goto the PC world website, click on “Laptops” and see a selection of types - I middle click on a couple of them to get the different choices, but no such luck. The tabs open to about:blank cause they don’t know what to do with Javascript.

Now, as a web developer - I know that this is a bad thing. I know that a link should have a static URL, and an onclick handler (or event listener, or whatever) if it wants to do Javascript stuff. This isn’t purely for the people who want to surf the web with Javascript turned off (which I’m sometimes tempted to do!) - but it also makes the site accessible for those who want to open a link in a new tab, in a new window, etc etc.

I’ll stop my griping now. But, please, for the love of god, if you create a website, make sure it’s accessible to anyone who doesn’t want to just stick around in a single window. If I wanted to do that - I’d use Prism (or whatever it’s called!)

Ok, by popular demand (aka ompaul) I’ve decided to do a mini-howto on setting up networking on an ubuntu server, for those who are new to it.

In Ubuntu itself, when you install the desktop version, you get a nifty little tool called “Network Manager” (you may have noticed the icon, espescially if you have wireless) which pretty much does everything for you. However, if you’re using the server, without a GUI then this isn’t generaly available.

So, where to start?

It really depends on your network setup, you need to know a few things about your network before you start this.

The first and most important question you need to find out is whether there is a DHCP server on your network that will assign you an IP address. If so, your networking setup is very very simple, so I’ll start off with that.

Networking with an available DHCP server

When you have a DHCP server available on your network, things are made a lot simpler. Cut short, a DHCP server sits on your network and hands out configurations to the different computers that ask for them. I won’t go into detail, but, generally you’ll find these on small home networks (your router will generally work as a DHCP server, which is why you (usually) magically find your way onto the internet when you plug yourself into a network with a router on it)

First of all, find out whether you actually already have an internet connection. I’ll assume for now that you have a keyboard and monitor hooked up to the computer you’re setting up as a server, and have logged in as a user with sudo rights.

Type in the command “ifconfig” (without the quotes) and you should hopefully see something like this:-

mez@stupor:~$ ifconfig

eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:16:3E:7F:AC:B2
inet addr:212.13.30.94  Bcast:212.13.30.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
RX packets:3576458 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:1886783 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:10
RX bytes:836607596 (797.8 MB)  TX bytes:291514569 (278.0 MB)

lo        Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1  Mask:255.0.0.0
RX packets:73611 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:73611 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING  MTU:16436  Metric:1
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:15252378 (14.5 MB)  TX bytes:15252378 (14.5 MB)

The important bit we see here is the block of text starting with “eth0″ and espescially the line

inet addr:212.13.30.94  Bcast:212.13.30.255  Mask:255.255.255.0

This generally means that the computer already has an IP address! yay!

Next, try the command

ping google.com

Hopefully, you’ll get back a response saying something along the lines of

PING google.com (64.233.187.99) 56(84) bytes of data
64 bytes from jc-in-f99.google.com (64.233.187.99): icmp_seq=1 ttl=245 time=100 ms

If so, you have a working internet connection! Go you! you can now start using your computer on the internet (though the IP address given above might only be accessible from an internal network, depending on your setup - going into howto get this IP available on the internet proper is beyond the scope of this blog post)

If not, you’ll get one of two errors, either a “no route to host” or a “cannot resolve google.com”.

The first issue is a complex one, which again, is beyond the scope of this article (though feel free to email me to ask questions - or catch me on IRC - I will *try* to answer them)

The second one generally means that you do not have a nameserver setup.

Open DNS is a project that provides Accessible DNS resolvers for the whole world to use. More information can be found out about OpenDNS here

For now however, lets open up your DNS resolver settings

sudo nano /etc/resolv.conf

This file should be edited to contain the following lines only

nameserver 208.67.222.222
nameserver 208.67.220.220

Hit Ctrl + O then enter, then Ctrl + X to get back to your command prompt.

Try pinging google again, and hopefully it should work. If not, something went wrong somewhere, again, try emailing me or poking me on IRC.

So, what if you don’t have an IP address?

Well, assuming that you DO have a DHCP server running on your network, lets first of all check that we have a working interface on our system

ifconfig -a

You should hopefully see a couple of lines here, one starting with “lo” and another starting with “eth0″ (or similar) - remember this name

Now, open up your /etc/network/interfaces file (sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces) and make sure it contains the following

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp

Assuming that it does, we should be able to do the following

sudo ifup eth0

Which will (hopefully) bring the interface up. Go back a step if you cannot resolve google.com when trying to ping it. You might have to setup a resolver (though your DHCP server should provide these details for you!)

Voila! hopefully you now have a working network interface

Networking without an available DHCP server

Now, here is where things get more interesting. To be able to setup a network without having a DHCP server readily available, you need to know the following

• The IP address that will be assigned to your host
• The netmask for the IP addresses being used
• The default gateway’s IP address (usually the IP address of your router)

It may differ how you get this information, however, I cannot tell you how to do so, I’d ask your network administrator if I were you (or your hosting provider)

So, I’m assuming here that you have the above details, are logged in at your machine and ready to go

I’ll only be brief about this setup, as a lot of the details are covered above.

First of all, make sure that your interface is down

sudo ifdown eth0

next, edit your /etc/network interfaces, replacing the information between < and > with
the information from above

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
	address <IP Address>
	netmask <Network Mask>
	gateway <Default Gateway>

So, you should have something like this

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
	address 212.13.30.94
	netmask 255.255.252.0
	gateway 212.13.30.1

Now head back to your console, and try

sudo ifup eth0

To bring your interface up. Hopefully, now, everything should be working (if not, go have a look at the DNS stuff above)

If you have any questions, feel free to leave me a comment here, or email me (martin AT sourceguru DOT net) and I will try and answer, though I make no guarantees!

Thus concludes Mez’s basic guide to server networking on ubuntu - I’ll try and add some more interesting stuff in a later blog post (IPv6, IP Aliases, etc etc)

Ok, so recently, I thought that my status as an ubuntu developer had expired, as I’ve had emails about my membership to ubuntu-dev expiring, and when I tried to send an email to a list in ubuntu (kubuntu-devel) it got bounced back to me. Now of course, I thought that the bounce was because the list was restricted for posting to developers only (as is ubuntu-devel)

I finally got a hold of a member of the Ubuntu Technical Board (thanks keybuk!) who explained to me..

<Keybuk> ubuntu-dev is a dead team
<Keybuk> rather than reject everyone, we’re just letting the membership expire naturally
<Keybuk> motu is the active “universe upload” team

So I then went to look what was going on with my email.

As my ubuntu email recieves a HUGE amount of traffic. (I dread to think but just checked and it seems I’ve had ~15000 emails go through it since march… a lot less than I’d expected) I have it setup in launchpad to go through a gmail account which means that I don’t overload my own server (as I was doing before when I hadn’t learnt to tweak my mailserver so it’s settings didn’tput my server into swap death!)

I was also sending outgoing email from my ubuntu email address through gmail’s smtp service.

However, it seems recently, that gmail will now rewrite an email address if it isn’t the one you’re sending through. If I send an email as if it’s coming from mez@ubuntu.com, then gmail’s smtp server will rewrite it so that it comes from mez.ubuntu@gmail.com…

I’ve now changed my email setup to use my server for all outgoing mail.

I just recieved a pingback for my latest blog post from opencontent.info.

It seems that they think I’m someone called Randy Charles Morin.

I like the name, I think I might use it.

It’s nice to be syndicated even if I don’t get credit for my work

Every now and then, I go through my junk folder in Evolution, and check it for any emails that should have got to me.

I’ve just checked it and found that there were more emails that weren’t junk in there than were. It’s been filtering innocuous emails for no apparent reason, including a couple relating to a Job application I was going for (this was the reason I was checking it today, so luckily I spotted it!)

It’s annoying when spam filters get too smart though. It’s things like this that make me start wanting to use fetchmail/procmail, so that only the stuff I want marked as junk gets marked as junk.

Ah well, it’s easy enough to turn off Evolution’s Junk mail filtering.

Ok, so not that long ago, I had to reinstall Kubuntu (we won’t explain why here! - I’m too ashamed to tell!)

Anyway, I installed Kubuntu Dapper, and that all worked fine. However, after upgrading to Feisty, I had a strange problem, I no longer had an English Keyboard layout, and I couldn’t change it.

So, I put up with it, after searching the ubuntu forums and realising a couple of people had a similar issue to me, thinking it was a bug.

Today, however, it really got to me (again, not something I wan’t to explain why)

So, I started bitching on IRC.

Again, as usual, my bitching and ranting and raving was unfounded. (sort of) The code WAS right in feisty, but for some reason, had been removed from my system. Grr…. I guess that the upgrade path is broken somewhere (seeing as I had to have about 3 attempts to do the upgrade with modding a couple of init scripts to just return true as they were giving me huge headaches! (one of the font updating things I believe))

But yeah, It’s fixed now, and much thanks to Colin Watson for pointing out that the file was in the package, as if it wasn’t for that, I wouldn’t have thought to just

sudo apt-get install –reinstall xkb-data

So I’m now back on a UK keyboard, and after using it for a month as a US keyboard, am now having difficulty switching back!

I should switch to dvorak, and just make my life even more confusing

Trying to update my control panel software (Manages stuff like email websites etc, etc) and I get this

checking whether the C++ compiler (gcc   ) works… no
configure: error: installation or configuration problem: C++ compiler cannot create executables.

Kind of annoying, yes.

 But even more annoying that it then went on to delete my current (working) copy of My control panel.

Luckily everything works, I just have to do things manually until I can get this fixed