Yearly Archives: 2006

Christmas Charity – the Open Source way

Every year for the last few years I have given to charity at Christmas. Last year it was Oxfam but this year I wanted to do something a bit different. In the early days of Aggreg8 development, I got a $10 donation and it freaked me out, I coded for days with a crazy energy and a boosted ego, knowing that someone thought that what I was doing was worth some of their hard earned cash. So this year, I have decided to give $5 to 10 different Open Source projects. The projects I have chosen are ones that I use on a day to day basis and really admire.

If we could all do something like this then Open source would continue to thrive and we will all reap the benefits for years and years to come. Joel noted that most people don’t want credit for donating but I do as donating is clearly not a selfless act ;).

Aggreg8 lives

This weekend I have gone on an all out Open Source offensive. I have released a new version of ACR (Automatically Create Rewriterules) with some bug fixes and faster processing of sites. I have released an updated version of PEA (Photoshop Elements Album Export) with improved accessibility and more options in the python script header.

Aggreg8 lives again I also started work on Aggreg8 again. I have a working version for Firefox 2.0 (not released yet) which will be my basis for my future plans.

  • Get Aggreg8 working on Firefox 2.0 – Done but not released
  • Get auto-subscribe working – Done but not released
  • Use built in Feed parser
  • Use SQLite for storage
  • Have an options panel
  • Ability to import and export OPML
  • Clean up XULs and Javascripts – especially the location of some functions
  • Add license to header of each file (MPL)
  • Create some nicer CSS stylesheets
  • Create a Norwegian language file
  • Change all references of Aggreg8.net (now a microsoft portal) to Aggreg8.org
  • Implement some sort of caching (although the aim of Aggreg8 is to be simple – caching might be overkill)

After 3 years of inactivity on the aggreg8.mozdev.org site. I am again on the active projects list and am raring to go with the above features. The aim of Aggreg8 version 0.3 is to be a super simple RSS reader with no fancy feature, just an easy way to read your RSS feeds. Using SQLite and the built in parser, I hope will improve performance too.

Windows PowerShell

Windows PowerShell

Microsoft Windows PowerShell command line shell and scripting language helps IT Professionals achieve greater productivity. Using a new admin-focused scripting language, more than 130 standard command line tools, and consistent syntax and utilities, Windows PowerShell allows IT Professionals to more easily control system administration and accelerate automation. Windows PowerShell is easy to adopt, learn, and use, because it works with your existing IT infrastructure and existing script investments, and because it runs on Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server “Longhorn”. Exchange Server 2007, System Center Operations Manager 2007, System Center Data Protection Manager V2, and System Center Virtual Machine Manager leverage Windows PowerShell to improve efficiency and productivity.

MySQL stored procedure variables

A few months ago we wrote a mammoth we application which had an SQL Express DB. We used stored procedures, and after writing 170 of them(I didn’t write all of them of course), I was quite used to the way that variables and so on worked in SQL Server.

We’ve started a new project where the DB is MySQL 5. Again we are using stored procedures, but variables work differently.

Setting a variable in SQL Server

DECLARE @oldPageGUID uniqueidentifier;
SET @oldPageGUID = (SELECT mPage.id FROM mPage WHERE mPage.title = @passedtitle);

Setting a variable in MySQL Server

DECLARE dateAdded TIMESTAMP;
SELECT lusers.dateadded INTO dateAdded FROM lusers WHERE lusers.id= id;

You can see that setting the value of the variable is done completely differently (MySQL Docs for SELECT … INTO Statement). Two other things that confused me for a while was that there is no character prefixed to the variables in MySQL as in SQL server (@) and that there is no uniqueidentifier data-type for GUIDs

Testing Aer Arran

Aer arran Logo
Last weekend I went to see my dad near Galway. This time I didn’t fly with my beloved Ryanair to Shannon but with Aer Arran direct to galway from Manchester. It’s a small ariline with small planes so I was hopeful to have a quick and trouble free trip. I did, apart from a 20 minute delay in Manchester on friday night (which is understandable) and a silly bitch on check in that made me check my small rucksack in instead of taking it on board. I quoted the size restriction from the website and that the bag was within those limits. Silly tart was having none of it. Some battles are not worth fighting though. All in all Aer arran scores 8 out of 10. From my Dads house to my office took only 4 and a half hours – amazing.

Going to the Linux World conference – NOT

I was very interested in going to Linux World this year. There were quite a few speakers and presentations I thought would be very interesting. I had hinted to my boss that I wanted to go but as we are currently a microsoft house, it was not really going to happen.

I figured I could do the whole thing myself for under GBP200 including train and YHA accommodation. I’d researched which YHAs had availability and found the train I was going to take.

There I was, watching TV with Gill, with my iBook on my knee ready to book the train when I called the YHA just to confirm they had a single room. Suddenly, I get a swift kick to the shin, WTF. I ended the call to see Gill giving me evils (a common occurrence I’m afraid), but why this time. I hadn’t got a clue. The day I was planning to go was only her bloody birthday. Doh! Doh! Doh!. So alas there was some apologising, and some postponement of Linux World. Maybe next year.

instLux saved my bacon

instLux, installing linux on a machine with no cd or floppy drive

I was very bored of my toshiba libretto L5 as WinXP was getting crazy slow on it so I never bothered to use it. I wanted to put Ubuntu on it but the live cd or the install would not recognise the PCMCIA cd rom I have.

Then I found instLux which installs a mini Grub onto your windows partition which you boot into. There are 4 versions of instLux, two for Ubuntu and two for OpenSuse. Each distro has a Net install and a CD ROM install version. I tried the CD ROM version first but it couldn’t find the CD rom either.

I booted back into windows and installed the Ubuntu Net install version of instLux. At first attempt, it fried my hard disk after stalling at 6% of install. A quick Win XP reinstall, reboot and retry was successful. I now have Ubuntu 6.06 installed with a very quick gnome theme with all icons turned off. Epiphany is super quick and will be my browser of choice on this machine (I haven’t installed Galeon yet though and Dillo is just minging). I did try to upgrade to Edgy Eft but it failed and after the hassles with the upgrade on my iBook (X wouldn’t start untill I managed to install the ATI drivers again), I’m not going to try again.  It’s a joy to use the machine again.

I’ve had a few freezes and hard reboots but it’s a hell of a lot faster than clunky win XP.