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Boggled over a seeminly unsovable SQL problem on the way to work only to sit down, start from scratch and crack it in ten minutes

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So I just spent about an hour trying to fix/troubleshoot something that may not ever have worked.

I’ve switched from lxdm to lightdm on all my machines.  I saw this section of the Arch wiki and thought “Hey, that would be useful on the laptop!”

After spending no small amount of time trying to discover what provides gdmflexiserver (other than gdm) I took to the forums to ask “Am I mad?”  However, in the process of researching my post for all possible explanations I inevitably found the explanation myself.  That’s Arch way.

Ubuntu.

They did a dirty hack on their lightdm package so it would work with XFCE alongside gdm.

This then led me to here, then here and culminated in this wiki edit.

By and large the Arch Linux wiki is amazing but it just goes to show the damage that a bit of misinformation can do to your day.  Thanks graysky.

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Send to Mail Recipient in Thunar always gives me this error.

Image

I’m sure I have Googled for a solution this many times before but never found one.  Today I did.  It’s simply that exo depends on perl-uri to complete this action.  It’s even an optdepend in Arch:

 Optional Deps : perl-uri: for mail-compose helper script

See, so

 pacman -S perl-uri

fixes it with no further effort.

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My team is currently supporting the delivery of a project to inspire young people in Tower Hamlets to consider coding as a profession.  This project is being run by Workshare in conjunction with resonate.  We’re using the Raspberry Pi and python to teach them some code fundamentals and there’s a competition at the end with some internships up for grabs.  Not bad at all!

I’m pleased with how the project has turned out. Since it’s a pilot we’ve had to “make do” with slightly average facilities and fairly “flexible” session plans but it is going well. While I don’t feel that the young people have learned a significant amount of coding there is no doubt that they are more interested in programming and have a better understanding of what coding really means.  That was, at least, one of the goals of the project and it’s a respectable achievement in my opinion.

I’ve also had the opportunity to use the Pi and it’s good fun.  Although we haven’t had a chance to use them with young people we did by some PiFace Digital devices and a few of the young people wanted to use them for their competition project.  I thought it would be a good idea to try it out too and I managed to put together a fun FizzBuzz game that I’ll share on GitHub soon.  I’m also going to write  a blog about how I put the programme together.

 

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I often want to go to bed while iTunes is downloading podcasts at snail’s pace. You can Start->Run this to make your Windows PC turn off after an hour:

shutdown /s /t 3600

That’s 3600 seconds, or 60 minutes, a.k.a. an hour

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Less than a week ago I signed us up for broadband with plusnet. They beat the deal my existing provider was offering by £5. No contest.

The last time I switched broadband provider it was a certified palava so I was quite cynical this time round.

After signing up the first step was to get the MAC code from my current provider BT. I did that via live chat and although I had to ask for it three times, they did finally concede that I was lost to them and said they’d email it to me. It came a bit later. I called plusnet the next day to give them the code.

Then I got an email late last week saying that we would be swapped over on Thursday 21st March and they attempted to deliver the new router Friday. We picked that up from the post office yesterday.

This is rivetting, eh?

Anyway, I wake up this AM and our broadband from old supplier is disconnected. I don’t have time to check it out so I head out to work. Got an email early this evening to say that our new bb was up and running. Two days early. So, I return home this evening with some trepidation at setting up a new router.

We received a TG582n – not sure it matters because they are all made by Thompson anyway – and it’s a great liltte box, very speedy, extremely intuitive. It poops on the BT Homehub already.

Luckily it was already set-up to use the same IP range as we currently used so I basically plugged it in, changed the SSID and the key to be the same as the old router and… that was that.

I’ll have to do some port forwarding at some point but that looks simple enough. We’ll cross that bridge when we get there.

There was one negative in this whole thing: when I opened the router box up I noticed that it has WPS. You may not know but Wireless Protected Setup is a fucking stupid idea that lets anyone connect to your router in a “secure way”. It’s easy to exploit to gain access to someone else’s network without permission and it’s not so much a back door as a gaping window with a “swag here” neon sign above it.

I had a quick Google to see if it could be disabled. That yield this page. I was delighted to find this for two reasons. Firstly, it points straight to a fix and, secondly, it has responses from plusnet staff that don’t just say “we’ll look into this” but show that they are proactively investigating. All good news.

The fix is here and it took about 30 seconds to apply.

So, why is this sad AND epic? Well, this is how it should be. I have been home an hour and my switch to another broadband supplier has been completely stress free. I now have some time to relax. That’s the epic part.

What’s sad is that this experience so greatly exceeded my expectations that I felt compelled to spend 15 minutes writing a blog post about it that no one will ever read.