Herman Bos

Since I keep forgetting my passwords:

My new, one and only PGP key at the moment:

key-id: 0x23C1768B
fingerprint: 7011 3BD7 9207 32D3 ABBC C64E 90FB BC74 23C1 768B


Lots of progress in work department lately. Our team at OSSO is growing and we are working on a new website. This time one that should actually be good. We are also preparing to a special open source sub-site where we will list our current open source projects. And as an addition we have a few larger projects in the pipeline to open source.

After 3 years of participating in NN-Open, I decided to step back as boardmember, as I do simply not have the time anymore to contribute anything significant and it didn’t make me tick anymore.

On a more personal note, in August I will be visiting Russia for a week to attend the wedding of one of my dear brothers.

End of january / beginning of februari I was able to enjoy 4 days in Nauders, Austria.

An apparently famous church, with most of it below the water/ice surface.

A view of the mountains

I’m on twitter now. http://twitter.com/hpbos.

Suprisingly I didn’t read much about Karmic yet. But that will probably change in a few weeks, when its released. I upgraded my laptop and my desktop to karmic in the last week and I am quite impressed. The look & feel improved and everything is integrated very well. Shiny.

The desktop just connects… It also seems Ubuntu is slowly extending to the web with Ubuntu One. It seems quite cool. If you don’t mind storing your documents at a 3rd party, it does give you a lot easiness with exchanging files between computers or with friends. It is obviously beta, but the core functionality seem to work well (synchronizing files) and it looks good.

KVM (virtualisation) integration also seems very promising, I will test that later.

A very karmic koala

When reverse DNS is not available, the sshd reverse lookup is an annoyance. It can be disable it in /etc/ssh/sshd_config with the following option:

UseDNS no

yay.

Today I debugged a wordpress problem and found out wordpress automatically sets variables based on records in the wp_options table. Explains why grep didn’t show the variables in question being set in the code while the variables actually are set.

In this case the theme (gear) set some nice options in there and didn’t respect the global wordpress configuration. After changing the site URL in wordpress, the theme kept requesting theme images on the old URL because the full image urls were stored in the database at theme-install-time. Apparently. Garbage!

Nice things that work remarkably easy make me happy.

1) Start Django app

python manage.py runfcgi host=0.0.0.0 port=8000

2) Install NGINX

apt-get install nginx

3) Configure NGINX
The tab indentation got lost but ok:

server {
listen 80;
server_name example.com;
access_log /var/log/nginx/example.com.access.log;
location / {
fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:8000;
fastcgi_param PATH_INFO $fastcgi_script_name;
fastcgi_param REQUEST_METHOD $request_method;
fastcgi_param QUERY_STRING $query_string;
fastcgi_param CONTENT_TYPE $content_type;
fastcgi_param CONTENT_LENGTH $content_length;
fastcgi_param  SERVER_PROTOCOL    $server_protocol;
fastcgi_param  SERVER_PORT        $server_port;
fastcgi_pass_header Authorization;
fastcgi_intercept_errors off;
}
location /media {
root /srv/media;
}
}

4) Done!
Well there are many options to explore which might have performance enhancing features. But I love it when things are simple. Beats Django with Apache2+mod_python. Although I do have the perception that all this easiness is mostly thanks to Django’s FastCGI support.

Walter and I got a new laptop from the office. Unfortunately, even though Ubuntu “Jaunty Jackalope” is really great, there are some small issues.

The screen detection doesn’t work properly sometimes and so it gives you a messed up resolution regularly (800×600). Although a login and logout fixes it, it is annoying.

Fixable with replacing you xorg.conf with the following configuration:

Section “Device”
Identifier “Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 07)”
Driver “intel”
Option “monitor-LVDS” “LCD-1366×768″
EndSection

Section “Monitor”
Identifier “LCD-1366×768″
Option “Position” “0 0″
Modeline “1366×768″ 69.30 1366 1382 1416 1466 768 770 776 788 -hsync -vsync
EndSection

Section “Screen”
Identifier “Default Screen”
Device “Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 07)”
#Monitor “LCD-1366×768″
EndSection

Another problem is the sound just doesn’t work. But this can be fixed with the following addition to the modprobe configuration:

echo ‘options snd-hda-intel model=laptop’ >> /etc/modprobe.d/custom.conf

All credits for providing the solutions go to Walter and check his homepage for a little more information.

Overall I am very content about the laptop, not expensive and after these fixes it works splendid!

update: there are several models of the HP Probook 4510s and some even seem to have different chipsets. The model I bought has HP product code NA920EA.

Setting to change the tmp dir path for your php programs. Configurable per VirtualHost in Apache2. Useful in combination with open_base option.

php_admin_value upload_tmp_dir /srv/sites/www.example.com/tmp/