Category Archives: open source

Using Wireshark

We had a support ticket at Karova which resulted in me having to look at the http data being sent between two servers via Soap over http. I’d read about Wireshark before and had it downloaded already. I installed it – found a way to filter the captured data by IP address and logged all traffic between both servers. All in under three minutes. It’s a awesome piece of software, I’ve been meaning for so long to re-visit the workings of the http protocol but always let it slide down my list. With Wireshark you can at least see what you’re learning in practice.

Software I’ve paid for

Sparked by a conversation on LugRadio about what software you’ve ever purchased. It got me thinking about what I’ve paid for. It’s been recently that I’ve purchased the most

Update

  • I also bought a copy of Linspire (it might even have been called Lindows then) and a subscription to the CNR

It’s quite alot considering the ammount of Open Source software I use and quite pricey too. These are personal purchases too not related to Karova. Admittedly the Visual Studio version was the academic version bought through my Dad who is still a student.

What have you bought?

Also along the same line – I’ve purchased a new desktop and a couple more monitors. It will be the fastest machine I have ever been on let alone owned – stay tuned 🙂

EEEPC – overall thoughts

Overall – I’m really impressed.

Pros

  1. It’s tiny – meaning very portable
  2. It’s light – under one kilo
  3. It’s fast – Celeron 900MHz with 512MB Ram
  4. It runs Linux – Xandros with a very fast window manager by default
  5. Battery life is good considering the size (3-4 hours)
  6. It’s cheap as hell – I paid about 300Euro
  7. It’s got Wifi and webcam – Skype Video on the go
  8. Hibernate works brilliantly with very fast boot times too

Cons

  1. Keyboard is a little small
  2. It’s doesn’t reconnect to wifi when it comes out of hibernate
  3. The WEP WPA software has bugs – you can’t connect to a network with a key that has numbers or spaces in it
  4. The screen is a little too small for constant use – I reckon the planned 10″ models will be alot better

EEEPC in black

Overall I love and I wouln’t hesitate to recommend it considering the price.

mp3 id3 tag whatsit

I bought a few mp3s from mp3sparks (formerly allofmp3) and was annoyed that the mp3s were not tagged with their track numbers but they were in the filename.

I had a quick look to see if I could fix this somehow. I found id3-py which I used to write a python script that fixes this and the artist,title and comment. One thing I noted was that you can only have a max of thirty characters in your track title. With a “Various Artists” album you want the artist in the title (Album artist is not in the id3 spec but it is supported by itunes and WMP). The concatenation of title and artist is quite often more than 30 characters – not good. Anyone found a way to write “Album Artist” to an mp3 using python?
mp3sparks is great but why in all things upside-down-monkey-drunk do I have to download each file individually and why do I have to right click (it is possible force a download guys).

I’ll upload an exe for installation that fixes your mp3sparks mp3s later.

m4a whoopsie – bonkenc fixie

My housemate Colm (aka. Donkey Dolittle) encodes some of his tunes in m4a AAC format which my wonderful iRiver S10 does not play. Last night I put the new Kings of Leon album on but it was in m4a so alas there was no Kings of Leon goodness for this mornings commute. When I got to work I found the very good bonkenc which transcoded them and kept the id3 tags in tact (probably loosing some quality but I don’t really mind that). Good work Bonkenc (classic name!).

Extend Your Browser

Tuesday 6th (the day of my presentation) eventually rolled around. Due to a crazy machine rebuild and re-install fest, I only finished writing the presentation at 1:30pm on the day. It went really well, some very good questions at the end. As I mentioned in my previous entry – the description of the presentation was –

Firefox and the Gecko family of browsers are not simply web browsers, they can be extended to provide custom functionality, and used as platforms for building standalone applications. During the presentation I will discuss the anatomy of the Gecko engine and the Firefox browser, extensions and how to create an extension for the Firefox 2.0 browser using Aggreg8 (http://aggreg8.mozdev.org ) as an example.

Philip is a 2003 Software Engineering graduate of Dublin City University. He has been working at Karova Ltd for two years, on ecommerce and custom web applications, and now holds the position of Senior Developer. Outside the office, he hacks on Firefox extensions and small Python or Perl based open source projects. He loves C#, XSLT, Python, MySQL, WxPython, SVG, XUL, Gecko, Javascript, RSS, CSS, his Labrador puppy, Ubuntu and Mono.

You can now download my preentation-

In MP3 audio format – (no pen clicking this time 🙂 )
ITWalesExtendingYourBrowserPhilipRoche.MP3 [mp3 31 MB – 1 hour 2 minutes]
PDF of my presentation slides
ExtendingYourBrowser-Slides.pdf [pdf 501 KB]
PDF of my presentation slides – including my notes
ExtendingYourBrowser-Notes.pdf [pdf 548 KB]

Enjoy

Extend your browser – ITWales

Snippet from Extend your browserLast year I gave a presentation to the ITWales group on Content Syndication. I have been bullied into giving another presentation next Tuesday. I have entitled it “Extending your browser”. Directly from the flyer –

Firefox and the Gecko family of browsers are not simply web browsers, they can be extended to provide custom functionality, and used as platforms for building standalone applications. During the presentation I will discuss the anatomy of the Gecko engine and the Firefox browser, extensions and how to create an extension for the Firefox 2.0 browser using Aggreg8 (http://aggreg8.mozdev.org ) as an example.

Philip is a 2003 Software Engineering graduate of Dublin City University. He has been working at Karova Ltd for two years, on ecommerce and custom web applications, and now holds the position of Senior Developer. Outside the office, he hacks on Firefox extensions and small Python or Perl based open source projects. He loves C#, XSLT, Python, MySQL, WxPython, SVG, XUL, Gecko, Javascript, RSS, CSS, his Labrador puppy, Ubuntu and Mono.

You can also download a PDF version of the flyer. I’m even half way through writing the presentation so this weekend will be a busy one. Once I’m done, I’ll upload the PDFs of the presentation.

Geek resolutions

As it’s new year and my motivation is at an all time low, I think a list of TODOs (or new years resultions) is needed. Some of those listed are techy and some are not but all of them are aimed at improving my life.

I will

  • Finish the new design of this site – as you can see, it’s still a work in progress
  • Comment my code
  • Finish projects I have started
  • Document my code properly
  • Use UML – even if it’s just in my head
  • Move to Ubuntu on my home machine
  • Caption all my photos – all 8500 of them
  • Read all the books I bought
  • Read non-techy books too
  • Cook more
  • Eat less
  • Eat healthier
  • Find some way of feeling healthier that I can actually stick to (Gym is a bit too much commitment)
  • Start to budget my outgoings properly
  • Stop calling my dog “the rodent”
  • Learn that Friday does not have to equal “getpissedday”
  • Stop watching soap operas – comedy series like King of Queens and Scrubs will remain on my Sky+ planner though
  • Contribute to an open source project
  • Help fellow developers more
  • Always keep in mind that I know only a fraction of what I think I know
  • Be in a good mood
  • Write another useful Firefox extension that uses a custom XPCOM component
  • Use Patterns in code more
  • Stop driving like an idiot just so I can get home quicker
  • Go to Ireland to see my friends and family more
  • Go to the summer house in Norway
  • Save money
  • And finally – keep this blog up to date

There’s quite a few there so I think it’s more of a two year plan. I have been working on an eight year plan with Gill too, but it’s still a bit up in the air but very exciting – as along as all goes well –

I will also (I thought of some more)

  • Move to IMAP instead of POP email
  • Backup more
  • Learn how to use SVN properly
  • Go to LinuxWorld in London (as long as it’s not on Gill’s birthday like last year)
  • Get a whiteboard at home
  • ……..I’ll add some more as I think of them

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 ;).