David and Katherine Goodwin

Introduction

Reinstalling many machines with essentially the same content, is a time consuming process... here's how you can clone Linux machines...

This page details how to take an image of/clone a Linux system to use for restorating or wide scale rapid deployment, simplar to how utilities like Ghost work.

This document outlines how to use 'dd' or 'tar' to take a sytem image.

t-mobile's WebNWalk on Linux

Today, after having to organise a meeting with a customer in a room with no internet connectivity, we decided to 'buy' a t-mobile WebNWalk USB dongle thingy to connect to the web.

So... getting it to work... it was slightly painful. I'm not sure whether I needed to install the Vodafone thing or not - however, after installing it and restarting udev, it seemed to eventually start to work.

In the same vein as Wordpress through Subversion I thought it might save me some hassle to run Drupal through CVS, which should/could save me from hassle when I have to upgrade and copy a load of files into the 'active' version's directory.

So... I reckon all I need to do is :

cvs -z6 -d:pserver:anonymous:anonymous@cvs.drupal.org:/cvs/drupal co -r DRUPAL-5 -d drupal-CVS-5 drupal

Which will plonk drupal into a directory called 'drupal-CVS-5'.

What?

This is a quick guide to installing Postfixadmin on a Debian Linux (Etch/4.0) server. I've done a similar guide on this before, but it's getting dated; hence this new one.

This guide also covers installing ClamAV to scan incoming mail and viruses.

Intro:

How to install and run Windows 2000 under QEMU on Ubuntu Linux (Breezy)

Overview

The below details how to install Windows 2000 as a guest O/S using the freely available QEMU virtualisation software. The document below assumes you are running a Linux based O/S (as reference I used Ubuntu Hoary/Breezy).

I came across QEMU when looking for alternatives to VMWare (and paying for a license). QEMU is free (but has distribution restrictions - see the Qemu website for further details).

While writing some PHP Training materials for Pale Purple, I thought I'd add an updated guide on PHP and database access. I've already done one on PEAR::DB, but PEAR::MDB2 is it's successor and has a slightly different API.... and as PEAR::DB is now deprecated, it's probably about time I rewrote it anyway.

Image Spam - FuzzyOCR

Recently, in the 'battle against spam' I have had an increasing number of emails with a random assortment of text designed to defeat SpamAssassin and an attached image which contains the real 'payload' advertising some sort of scam/drug/product.

Needless to say, I've been adding various blacklists (1, 2, 3, 4) to Postfix in an attempt at reducing the tide of image spam, but none have really solved the problem (i.e. Kat still moans).

OpenStreetMap

I've finally started to collect GPS traces of my route to work, and wondering around Bromsgrove (and elsewhere in the West Midlands). The GPS receiver I bought seems to take a few minutes to latch onto a signal, but once it's going everything is fine (I have a feeling it might benefit from an external aerial). At the moment I'm recording to my ibook (cat /dev/tty.BTGPSxxxx > file) and then running the output file (NMEA format) through gpsbabel for upload to OSM. I would like/prefer to use some other smaller, hand held device (which would require bluetooth).

What is Smarty?

Smarty is a PHP framework (or Template Engine, depending on your point of view). It is licensed under the LGPL and works under either PHP4 or PHP5.

What is Propel?

Propel is a PHP framework that provides a fairly complete ORM solution - object persistence and querying, allowing you to access your database of choice using objects. Its API is similar to that of the Apache Torque project upon which it is based. Torque is written in Java, Propel in PHP. Propel is available for PHP4 and PHP5, although I've only used the PHP5 version, I assume the API remains the same.

What is Object-Relational Mapping?

Whatever reason you have for using objects in your code, anybody who uses them to represent their data in 'traditional' SQL driven PHP applications will know about the blood, sweat, tears that go into the masses of code produced to perform what is in many cases 'boilerplate' actions.