JB's Blog

I had a client accidentally purchase half a dozen 500GB MyBook’s instead of the simpler cheaper USB models.

Since this site is remote from me it took a little while to deduce what was going on since the MyBook’s don’t act as USB drives and hence don’t appear as a USB device to linux.

User: ‘Yes, I’ve plugged it in! Yes it’s using the white cable!’
Me: ‘So… what exactly does it say on the box what drive it is…’

Anyhow, after figuring out that is was a MyBook I implemented ssh access using Martin Hinner’s clever hack and found a nice website of various MyBook Hack’s.

I was originally using the venerable Rdiff-backup, but alas couldn’t see it in the Optware packages. So I implemented a Rsnapshot solution, the only problem was I wanted some notifications from the MyBook devices to check that the backups were working, and so a simple bash script was in order…

#!/bin/bash
mailto=my@emailaddress.com,clients@theclientsdomain.com
time=$1

if /opt/bin/rsnapshot $time > /tmp/rsnapshot.log 2> /tmp/rsnapshot.logthen   subject='Backup success'else   subject='Backup FAILURE'ficat /tmp/rsnapshot.log | /opt/bin/nail -r admin@theclientsdomain.com -s "$subject" $mailto

Just quick plug of a new Widget I found today called WordPressDash. It’s just thing for adding 5 minute rants (see previous post) and various other quick edits.

I hate that cursed text editor. This morning I spent 5 minutes trying to figure out why a fresh crontab wasn’t working as I ssh’d into a server… My syntax was correct yet crontab refuse to save my entry stating bad minute errors in crontab file.
I then realised it was the crap characters nano was feeding into the beginning of the file!

A swift export EDITOR=vim and my crontab problems were gone.

Note: After bitching to a friend of mine who is pro Nano he stated to me that nano > 8. My point exactly, he’s so handicapped from using nano that he can’t even type an Asterisk.

I came across a selection of delciously funny captions for a swag of Linux distributions. Those who aren’t Linux fan-boys/girls will probably just scratch their heads.

Caldera, Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, Mandrake, RedHat, Slackware, Ubuntu.

I participated in the latest BulkBuyer.com.au and scored myself a sweet Dell 2405FPW 24″ Widescreen monitor.

Today I eagerly waited at home on the off-chance it would arrive, and it did! Jumping around like a young school boy after drinking too much Kandy softdrink I unwrapped the 24″ monster. Yummy, this is one slick puppy. Not quite as cool as the Apple Cinema 23″, but at almost half the price I think I can live with its uglyness.

[image:86]

After unwrapping and plugging in everything I powered it up and was pleasntly surprised that my Powerbook 15″ automagically detected the monitor and the correct resolution settings. It’s the perfect height to fit my Powerbook underneath it to have both my Powerbook and the Dell on at the same time. I thought with a screen this big I’d definately have a chance of picking up the ladies.

My girlfriend was unaware of my purchase and so when I asked (demanded) she come and see my new monitor she responded with a quick “OH…. It’s… awful.”. It’s ok, not everyone can appreciate inner-beauty.

There are so many cool things I can do with this new monitor, like picture-in-picture (takes composite video) and ultimately (the main reason I got it) – gazlillions of windows to code in without having to flip about like a madman all the time!
Of course practically I had to test it’s 90″ swing action with the most appropriate test I could think of: Galaga!
[image:88]

Unfortunately not all is well, after playing around with the screen for 30 mins or so I found a small defect in the bottom left hand side of the screen.
[image:87]
It’s small but defiantely noticable. Not sure what could have caused it, after my careful examination from the side angles I deduced it’s not a scratch (at least that I can see) so I assume it just must be a fault in the monitor. My girlfriend has told me not to worry about it since it is quite small, but then again she gasped in horror when she saw the damn thing anyhow so her opinion is void.
No worries, with Dell’s 15 day LCD return policy I should be able to have this replaced and be on my merry way… although I think I’ll wait till next week to call them and have a weekend alone with this baby in the mean time.

Note also that the photo’s I took of the LCD were imported in the handy dandy multi-card reader on the side on the monitor! Joy!

This latest version just fixes some nagging issues like being able to post to default categories and poster. Enjoy!

wp-mail-0.312.zip

I’ll get around and explain how to use my wp-mail.php hack to be posted directly to in a few days….