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So, I installed Chrome frame on a work PC (naughty) in an effort to get some sites to work better. We use IE 7 and 8. Maybe I should say IE7 and 8 are inflicted upon us as some form of bizarre punishment.

Anyway, I immediately ran into problems when I “roamed”.

The plugin itself installs to the “machine”, whether virtual or not, and so doesn’t roam with you. However, it writes to your User registry, which does roam.

Needless to say I started to get errors on certain webpages, mainly regrading aspxpopupcontrol or lack there of.

The simple solution is to look at the location below in your registry and delete any keys that mention Chrome Frame:
HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionInternet SettingsUser AgentPost Platform

It’s up to you whether you backup before you do this or not.

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In an effort to disable Windows Media Player from “sharing” on our home network I delved into the murky world of Windows Services

Running

services.msc

as an admin opens up a whole new world of potential improvements and costly mistakes. Playing it safe I googled a few things I was not sure about.

I stopped and disabled (on startup) both Window Media Player Network Sharing Service and Bonjour. I find the very presence of Bonjour on my system an insult and would consider a swift kick in someone’s balls worthy of the price of a ticket to Cupertino. After a quick check I also disabled the NVIDIA Stereoscopic 3D Driver. I would imagine almost no-one needs that.

Apart from that I switched a few applications from Automatic to Automatic (Delayed) Startup, these were mostly updaters. I absolutely want these to run but I don’t need them urgently enough to start them all at the same time. For example, I don’t need Secunia checking my programs are up to date the very instant I log in but I don’t want to have to remember to do it myself.

Skype Updater
Secunia PSI Agent
LogMeIn
Adobe Acrobat Update Service
Google Updater Service

I am surprised that these services don’t use this setting by default as many similar services do. I was pleased to see that, for example, the No-IP DUC does. At least “small” companies can get it right.

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It’s something I have been planning to do for a very long time but this weekend I finally got round to a little electonic house-keeping. As a hoarder I have a modest collection of old components that “might come in handy.” I’ve got two 56.6k PCMCIA cards. Top that.

Inevitably some of this junk is hard drives and, obviously, I have no idea what is on them, so they had to be wiped before disposal. That’s one thing I did. One of them made a noise like a dentist drill. It was not pretty.

Also, I have an old Dell laptop that served me well for many years until it was laid low by a broken hinge. To my surprise it still boots and I was somewhat delighted to discovered it was like an Arch Linux time capsule. Last login? Circa 2007. I’ve got a lot of photos which I’ll post later.

Needless to say the drive on this old favourite is partitioned to within an inch of its life. I think it might even be triple boot. So, i had to have a hunt through there for anything that could be move to our NAS or just deleted.

Generally that meant scouring some FAT32 partitions for media files but my /home directory is a gold mine. I don’t want to do just back that up in bulk, I’d rather pick through and move things I want to keep over to my desktop. The best way to do that is scp but some home network “restrictions” meant that was going to be a headache.

We live in a town house, which is lovely, but the router is on the ground floor so wireless signal in the top floor office is poor. It shouldn’t be that bad but it is. As a result I have my desktop connected directly to the router via some “ethernet over AC” adapters, which works quite nicely. However, for some time I have wanted to add an extra box upstairs and boost the wireless for (what is becoming) my wife’s laptop.

While I am certain I had a Netgear wireless router laying around I have not been able to find it since we moved house. That router would solve all my problems, including transfering my old home dir from the old laptop to the desktop. So, what to do? Dive on eBay and try and find one?

Well, I decided to give freecycle a go and quickly found a brand new boxed Netgear 15 minutes up the road. Since we were heading that way yesterday anyway I arranged to pick it up and spent a few hours setting it up last night.

Now I am all set to finish cleaning up and retire that laptop for good. I’ll also be able to give my occasional server box a permenant home.

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Arch Linux has had some major changes recently and this has made updating a neglected installation a bit tricky.

However, I managed a flawless update on a system that hasn’t been touched since May.

Before you do anything, go to the Arch Linux news page and read everything since your last update. If a package needs manual intervention make sure you add it to –ignore list when the time comes.

Firstly, you want to get setup for the new /lib symlink. There is a guide here – however, you will need to ignore some other packages as well. The main goal here is to stop pacman from breaking:

pacman -Ud http://pkgbuild.com/~allan/glibc-2.16.0-1-i686.pkg.tar.xz
pacman -Syu --ignore glibc,curl,libarchive,bash,gpgme,filesystem,fontconfig

So, we’ve installed Allan’s special glibc version and we’ve updated the whole system while ignoring all of pacman’s dependencies. I also ignored filesystem and fontconfig as they need intervention. You will almost definitely be asked to upgrade pacman first and foremost. Do that when offered.

Next I updated the filesystem package:

pacman -S filesystem --force

Then I updated all of pacman’s deps:

pacman -S glibc curl libarchive bash gpgme

Lastly, I fixed the conflicts for the fontconfig package and did another system update.

find /etc/fonts/conf.d -type l -exec rm {} ;
pacman -Su

Word of caution – once your system is up to date and make sure you update the initramfs, just in case.

mkinitcpio -p linux

You will also have to upgrade to systemd compatible settings. Next post is about how I handled that.

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Last night I was trying to install mysql on my Arch Linux netbook. Now, this would not be note worthy but for the fact it was going badly. The post-install of the pkg .install script is supposed to do basic set-up so you’re ready to go out of the box. However, it failed with a disk full error.

Hmmm. The netbook has at least a 300Gb disk, would an Arch install really fill that? So, I ran

df -k

And, yes, it showed 0 free space.

Weird. But pacman checks for free space when it installs a package, so when I installed mysql the packaged files miraculously fitted in and used up the remaining space? That seems unlikely.

I uninstalled and reinstalled the package several times (it was late) and when I kept getting the same error. Not exactly the most efficient troubleshooting (it was late). My main instinct was to jump on the forums for help and to tacitly “blame the devs”. Instead I decided to call it a night (it was late).

So, this morning I thought “what can I do to quickly free up some space and check remaining space again?”

pacman -Sc
df -h

…ok, so my disk was full!

du /var

Not much

du /usr

Again, just a few gigs. Paranoia sets in.

du /

Whole thing is less than 5 gigs.

By this point I am suspecting it is something to do with my LVM setup and I head off to work with the intention of investigating on the train.

A small amount of reading and one command later

lvs

I can see that, for a reason I can’t rememeber, I made my root volume 5G. Maybe I didn’t understand what I was doing when I set up or maybe it seemed like enough at the time.

At least I know how to resize it now too!

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I’m running a report on our database using Crystal Reports. Sadly some chimp on the vendor side has got the data type wrong on a field and I can’t do the join I need. Obviously I’m not in a position to change that data type myself.

So, after some searching I have this:
SELECT
eval_id,
bvpi_id,
type,
status,
awarded_date,
CAST(awarded_by AS INTEGER) AS awarded_id FROM BVPI_EVALS

I’ve never used CAST before but here I’ve used it to convert a STRING to an INTEGER. I’ve used this in the Add Command section of the Database Expert screen.

I’ve then removed BVPI_EVALS from the query and used the table created by the Command to do the joins.

It’s super slow, though. I think I might need to parameterize the query too.

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Right, so, I just want to chuck something out there with regard to privacy.

People are generally pretty hot on protecting their privacy online but who’s got a loyalty card for a store?

Let’s pick on Tesco. So, if you have a Tesco Clubcard, what do they find out about you?

What you buy.

That’s it, right? If you ask anyone what Tesco’s find out from your clubcard they’ll say that.

Obviously there’s much more to it than that. For example, they also know:

Where you live
How old you are (probably)
The time you bought it
The date you bought it
The store you bought it in

That’s for each individual product you buy.

So they know if you only buy toilet roll once a month when you go to the big super store. They know you mainly buy milk from smaller stores.

Or maybe you don’t buy much milk at Tesco. In that case, based on where you live, and other places you have shopped, they’ll identify other places you might be getting your milk.

And you wondered why Tesco was popping up everywhere?

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This article was original posted by me on March 11, 2007 and could be found at: http://thewrecker.net/?p=181

After having spent a fair while looking for the solution to this I thought I’d post it here in the hope that google does more for others than it did for me.

My problem was that I couldn’t get the XFCE desktop to play nicely with conky; either conky or the desktop icons would keep disappearing. I knew the own_window settings in conky were the problem but could not find the right combination, however, these seem to work just fine:

own_window yes
own_window_hints undecorated,below,skip_taskbar
own_window_transparent yes

Now all I need to do is configure it so that it displays the temps from coretemps for my Core 2 Duo

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This article was original posted by me on March 13, 2007 and could be found at: http://thewrecker.net/?p=182

I feel like a total mug. When I first started using WP I wanted to be able to tag my posts so I installed the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin. I thought tags were great for about the first week and then thinking of a suitable tag for a post just became a burden.

Then, recently, WP started to get really slow. My hosting has always been slow so I decided a move to a proper service was in order. I signed up for dreamhost (thanks, Cactus!) and went about transferring my WP blog.

Obviously I started by exporting the WP database and was shocked to find that it was over 50Mb! I had a quick look at the dbase in phpmyadmin and discovered that one table ‘wp_postmeta’ was huge. I googled a bit and found nothing of any real note; I figured it was normal. However, when I came to import the dbase through phpmyadmin on dreamhost it errored out over the size of the file. A quick google told me that phpmyadmin can’t easily handle such large dumps. Suspiciously abnormal again, I thought. So, I uploaded the dump to dreamhost and began the import process from the command line. After about 20 mins the job was still running and so I assumed it had hung. I stopped the job and dropped the whole dbase and decided to try later.

I just tried again now and threw in a verbose tag on the command line, which turned out to be a smart move because this is what I saw:

INSERT INTO `wp_postmeta` VALUES (131364, 117, '_utw_tags_0', '')

There were literally hundreds of thousands of these! A quick google for _utw_tags_0 bought up this page. Obviously that explains everything. I immediately disabled the plugin and ran a few queries to check how many of these entries there really were and then deleted every single one of them!

SELECT * FROM `wp_postmeta` WHERE `meta_key` = '_utw_tags_0' AND `meta_value` = ''
DELETE FROM `wp_postmeta` WHERE `meta_key` = '_utw_tags_0' AND `meta_value` = ''

After that I ran optimize table from phpmyadmin and exported the dbase again. What was the final size? 500Kb.

I hope this might help others burden by crappily coded plugins.

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