Category: Computer

Recovering Corrupt ext3 Superblocks

Fixing an ext3 partition that has corrupt superblocks and won't mount because the kernel thinks its ext4.

Posted 26th June 2009 in Computer, with 1 comment

SIP Intercom

Why settle for a doorbell when you could make a SIP-enabled intercom?

Posted 1st May 2009 in Computer, with 1 comment

Images Rendering in Firefox but not IE

What do you do with images that render in Firefox fine, but appear as a red cross in Internet Explorer 6 & 7?

Posted 19th March 2009 in Computer, with 0 comments

Fujitsu Siemens Repairs

As many of you may know, My laptop's motherboard broke and I had to get it repaired. Here's my review of Fujitsu Siemens' in-warranty repair service.

Posted 10th March 2009 in Computer, with 0 comments

Oxford Date Panel Applet

Do you find the GNOME date/time panel applet virtually useless during Oxford termtime? I've written one that displays the Oxford date instead. It's based on Andrew Godwin's oxdate python module, which is inspired by Dom's Oxford Dates perl module.

Posted 6th February 2009 in Computer, with 0 comments

Lighttpd Book Review

Packt Publishing have released the first book devoted solely to Lighttpd that I have come across. With chapters covering compiling, configuring, virtual hosting, CGI, streaming, logging, SSL, optimizing, migrating from Apache, Lua and even writing your own lighttpd modules, Andre Bogus has attempted to cover everything you will need to know. In this post, I will discuss what I think are the good and bad points about this book.

Posted 18th January 2009 in Computer, with 0 comments

Installing Python eggs for multiple users

I recently needed to update my python-psycopg2 package to a version that wasn't available in the Debian or Backports repositories, so I decided to use Python's ez_install command. In short, ez_install installs Python eggs, which are equivalent to Ruby's gems and are meant to be a cross-distro library installation system. However, the egg couldn't be used by other UNIX users.


Posted 18th January 2009 in Computer, with 1 comment

Packt Publishing’s Book on lighttpd

The kind people at Packt Publishing have requested that I review their new book about lighttpd. Unfortunately, I cannot comment on how good the book is until it arrives and I have a chance to read it, but they do have a sample chapter(pdf) online to look at. Watch this space

Posted 2nd January 2009 in Computer, with 0 comments

Stripping Headers in Postfix

How to hide Received headers when relaying emails - handy when you trust an authenticated user who shares an IP with a known spammer.

Posted 23rd December 2008 in Computer, with 0 comments

Royal Mail and User Agents

So I've finally tracked down why Royal Mail's website looks horrible in Firefox on Linux. They sniff user agents and if it isn't one of their 'supported' browsers then they send different HTML that doesn't render properly.

Posted 18th November 2008 in Computer, with 0 comments

Asterisk iCal Reminders

If you're anything like me, you've probably missed appointments due to your bad memory. Well now there's now excuse, you can use your trusty basic phone to recieve reminders with reminder calls from Asterisk.

My new script, AsteriCal, will poll your Google Calendar's iCal URL and call you to remind you of upcoming events. Find out more here

Posted 14th October 2008 in Computer, with 0 comments

Dial No to 0870

You may have heard of the site Say No To 0870. It's a UK database of mappings of Company Names and their 0870/0844/0845 numbers to their geographic equivalents. Using the geographic equivlalents is a good idea - they're cheaper and included in a lot of plans' free minutes. Some companies can detect people calling their geographical numbers. Prefixing the number with 141 to withhold your number sometimes beats the system; sometimes it doesn't.

I thought it'd be a good idea to integrate the Say No To 0870 database with my Asterisk PBX, so that when I dial a number beginning with 08, Asterisk will actually call the geographical number with my Trunk provider. I achieved this using Asterisk AGI and Python. I screenscraped the Say No To 0870 website (theres no API, nor did they reply to my email) and untangled the HTML with Beautiful Soup.


Posted 13th October 2008 in Computer, with 0 comments

Festival and Asterisk

How to setup Festival with Asterisk for arbitrary text-to-speech in your PBX.

Whilst playing with asterisk, I wanted the feature of text-to-speech, so the PBX can read things such as caller IDs.

Posted 12th October 2008 in Computer, with 1 comment

Disclosing a key to a GPG-encrypted file without exposing your private key

I was recently reading Regulation of Investigatory Powers Bill -- Some Scenarios and scenario 2 about session keys perked my interest. I wondered if it could be done with GnuPG, and after researching for a while I discovered it can, and here's how:

Posted 17th September 2008 in Computer, with 0 comments

lejog.maniacmartin.com retired

The cycle ride is over, and I'm in the process of collecting those pledged sponsorships. People have an amazing ability to not have any money on them when its time to pay up, which is pretty convenient for them.

Posted 16th September 2008 in Computer, and Life, with 0 comments

Benchmarking Wordpress and Django

Regular readers will know that I recently migrated to lighttpd from Apache 2, to try and enable my blog to handle traffic spikes better. Out of curiosity, I decided to benchmark the new setup.

Posted 9th August 2008 in Computer, with 5 comments

Migrating Django and CherryPy to lighttpd

After learning that my 256mb Debian Xen VPS died instantly after being reddited, I decided to take some action to prevent the same thing happening again.

Posted 8th August 2008 in Computer, with 4 comments

webpwman released

webpwman is an online password manager that I wrote in CherryPy, that can import from KDE pwmanager CSV exports, and run behind an SSL-enabled webserver (which also prevents MITM attacks). It asks 3 security questions, which it randomly rotates on every correct login and asks for a master password which is used to decrypt the password from a json file. The idea being, that if you're on a compromised public terminal, then the bad guys should only get the passwords you viewed that session.

Posted 8th August 2008 in Computer, with 0 comments

Initial thoughts on web.py and SQLObject

I recently started writing an online password manager. The basic idea is that it would ask 3 questions from a bank of questions, and then prompt for a decryption password and the name of a service of which to get a password. The service would run over SSL, and the passwords would be exported from my laptops KDE pwmanager in my server backup script.

Posted 4th August 2008 in Computer, with 1 comment

Upgrading from Django 0.96 to 1.0 Alpha

This post is by no means up to the standard of the official Django 1.0 alpha release notes; it merely details what I had to do to get a Django 0.96 site working under Django 1.0 alpha.

Posted 30th July 2008 in Computer, with 0 comments

Introducing breeze

I have recently embarked on writing a simple open-source BitTorrent private tracker and community website, as a single Django project.

Posted 30th July 2008 in Computer, with 0 comments

Land’s End to John O’Groats Cycle

I've decided to cycle the length of the UK for fun (and charity as well). And what better way to get in the mood by trying to learn Django and make a semi-useful Python app. So, I've given it a shot with a GPS/Google Maps mashup thing to analyse blogged route parts from maemo mapper on one of Andrew's Nokia internet tablets. Obviously you won't be able to see all of that until after we have actually blogged something - so check back after Monday, 12th August to see live progress (if it all works that is).

Posted 18th July 2008 in Computer, and Life, with 0 comments

WordPress won’t upload

Something that's been bugging me for a while is that when I updated my Wordpress install (using svn), file uploads ceased to work. Attempting to upload a file resulted in the message "An error occurred in the upload. Please try again later.".

Posted 22nd May 2008 in Computer, with 0 comments

PwManager for Windows

Having just put Windows XP back (in a dual boot configuration) I wanted to share the password manager that I have in the KDE system tray with Windows. I looked on the internet, and the only thing that has been ported is the pwmanager_dump program. However, combined with some the Windows ext2 driver, GNUWin32 tools (grep, awk, xargs etc) and a program that copies its command-line argument to the Windows clipboard, I have a hacked-up working pwmanager that syncs with linux.

Posted 22nd May 2008 in Computer, with 0 comments

Virgin CEO: “This net neutrality thing is a load of bollocks”

Whilst I'm not one to cover a news story that's already been covered elsewhere, TorrentFreak has a priceless quote from Virgin Media's CEO: “This net neutrality thing is a load of bollocks".

Posted 14th April 2008 in Computer, with 0 comments

Publisher 2000 BorderArt causing instant reboots

I have discovered a most annoying bug with Microsoft Publisher 2000's BorderArt feature.

Posted 23rd December 2007 in Computer, with 0 comments

Random Topic Generator

It happens way too often. You're in an msn conversation with someone who's really cool, then the conversation runs dry. But you really don't want it to end. You could be completely random like me, and change the topic if the previous topic runs dry.

Posted 17th December 2007 in Computer, with 6 comments

Recovering Truncated or Corrupt Tar Archives

I was unfortunate enough to use resize2fs to resize an ext3 partition. The result, which at first appeared OK, was a corrupt filesystem.

Posted 13th December 2007 in Computer, with 0 comments

Fixing File Uploads after upgrading to PHP5

As some of you may know, I upgraded from PHP4 to PHP5 recently. And it went smoothly - or so I thought. Now, it seems I overlooked the fact that the reference <code>$HTTP_POST_FILES</code> has been phased out. This has been replaced with <code>$_FILES</code>. This is great, since Zen Cart, custom scripts, old phpBB installations and other old php scripts where users can upload a fail now fail spectacularly as they access an empty array.

Posted 18th October 2007 in Computer, with 0 comments

Wildcard Parsing in Linux Shells

I have just discovered a quirk in linux shells.

Posted 4th October 2007 in Computer, with 1 comment

Andrew’s PHP unzip poem

When I thought I needed to recompile PHP 5 to get the unzip function for Installatron for Plesk Reloaded, Andrew helped me find <code>yum install php-pecl-zip</code> and everything all started to work.

Posted 24th September 2007 in Computer, with 0 comments

Running a command as a /bin/false user

In case anyone else wants to run a command as a user whose default shell is set to /bin/false, type this:

Posted 17th September 2007 in Computer, with 0 comments

Moving to CentOS

I've finally decided that enough is enough with DirectAdmin. It's haphazard way of downloading tar.gzs and compiling from source to random places that it only knows is a sure way to make a disaster in the future. Not only does this make applying updates a cumbersome process, as it doesn't use any sort of repository or anything, it also means that when something does go wrong it can take ages to track down.

Posted 15th September 2007 in Computer, and Life, with 0 comments

BBC iPlayer and Net Neutrality

I don't know how closely you have been following the BBC's controversial iPlayer that uses torrent-like peer-to-peer technology to distribute programmes aired on BBC TV to users over the internet, but a thorny issue was always the that 3rd-party production companies insisted on DRM being present to limit the number of days that the download will remain watchable to 30 days. That way they cash in on after-sales of DVDs.

Posted 16th August 2007 in Computer, with 1 comment

Random Drive

So it was just before 5pm yesterday and I was bored. After checking a few things on #friends, Donov and I set out on an adventure. Our drive took us through many places including Lincoln Rush Hour, the M1 and the entire width of the Peak District, including the Cat and Fiddle (A537 Buxton-Macclesfield - hilly and bendy with cliff edges and real fun to drive on).

Posted 11th August 2007 in Computer, and Life, with 0 comments

Side-stepping SingTel’s Bandwidth Caps

Are you a customer of SingTel?

Posted 14th April 2007 in Computer, with 0 comments

Replacing Microfilters

I was bored today, so I ripped out every microfilter and replaced them with brand-new matching Speedtouch ones. The phone has stopped buzzing.

Posted 13th March 2007 in Computer, and Life, with 1 comment

Half sorted

Broadband restored;

Posted 13th March 2007 in Computer, and Life, with 0 comments

Fighting Demon & BT

This is the start of what will probably turn out to be a lengthy story. On Saturday I returned home from university to find that my parents had bought a new phone. Also the internet was painfully slow.

Posted 12th March 2007 in Computer, and Life, with 1 comment

Compsoc - a society of followers

Compsoccers by definition (read: stereotype) are not born to lead groups of people, or even to interact with others. And you can't program guest speakers to appear to give talk.

Posted 27th February 2007 in Computer, and Life, with 0 comments

Server Termination

This morning I got an email from my server's hosting company saying that they are ceasing to trade. My server will be unplugged on 1st March. Its now 27th February. What a lot of notice.

Posted 27th February 2007 in Computer, and Life, with 0 comments

Dedicated Server

Thanks to Will who is now called Tom, we now have a dedicated server.

Posted 19th December 2006 in Computer, with 0 comments

Moving to Dedicated Servers

ManiacMartin is moving to dedicated servers. I should be able to provide a wealth of cool new features for you, like reseller accounts, irc shells and servers, you own reverse DNS, SSL certificates, SSH, vnc, proxies and more.

Posted 15th December 2006 in Computer, with 0 comments

Tunnelling through Microsoft ISA Server

Unfortunately Microsoft's ISA Server usually doesn't work with the methods I have explored so far because:

Posted 12th December 2006 in Computer, with 1 comment

Bypassing Corperate & College Firewalls - Method 2

Maybe the previous post was a bit too longwinded to you. Or maybe you have a proxy that requires NTLM Authentication. Then try this alternative method

Posted 12th December 2006 in Computer, with 0 comments

Bypassing Corperate & College Firewalls

<strong>Legal Stuff:</strong>

Posted 11th December 2006 in Computer, with 0 comments

Demon Upgrade

Well I've had the new "upgraded" Demon internet a while now

Posted 7th December 2006 in Computer, with 0 comments

Turning a Modem into a Router

About a week ago I bought a cheap £18 Linksys ADSL2+ ethernet modem (code ADSL2MUE).

Posted 7th December 2006 in Computer, with 0 comments

Proposed LAN

Internal review onlylan.png

Posted 18th November 2006 in Computer, with 0 comments

Windows Update

Now My PC is uberslow.

Posted 17th November 2006 in Computer, with 0 comments

Web project

Today I embarked on my latest web project. This time I have decided to let someone else do the programming (Andrew Godwin) and I will stand make and admire it. Hopefully this top secret project wont go into the pile of abandoned code and be a thriving community, unique in its special way. Well 2am gotta dash

Posted 5th November 2006 in Computer, with 0 comments

Sorting MP3s by ID3 tag

OK so nothing much happened today except calculus which I'm sure you aren't interested in. I have sucessfully done some laundry too :)

Posted 1st November 2006 in Computer, with 0 comments

Ubuntu Installation

Ubuntu is now fully installed on my HP nx6325.

Posted 22nd October 2006 in Computer, and Life, with 0 comments