A visit to Nauders
End of january / beginning of februari I was able to enjoy 4 days in Nauders, Austria.
Ubuntu Karmic
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
picture from here
Disabling SSH reverse DNS lookup
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.
wordpress variable loading
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!
NGINX + FastCGI + Django
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.
Jaunty on HP Probook 4510s
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 (800x600). 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-1366x768"
EndSectionSection "Monitor"
Identifier "LCD-1366x768"
Option "Position" "0 0"
Modeline "1366x768" 69.30 1366 1382 1416 1466 768 770 776 788 -hsync -vsync
EndSectionSection "Screen"
Identifier "Default Screen"
Device "Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 07)"
#Monitor "LCD-1366x768"
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.
change php tmp directory
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/
btw, I was in Edinburgh
Little more then a month ago I took a short holiday and traveled together with Bas to Edinburgh for a weekend. To keep it short: we had a great time and the Scottish are great. Cheers!
View on Edinburgh from the top of Arthurs seat


