Gudlyf's World

HotShoe: Can the web use containers for Flash?

// May 20th, 2010 // No Comments » // General, Techie

I just wanted to get this idea put out there, in case someone’s trying to come up with a solution for Flash on non-Flash-enabled browsers.

I got to thinking: why can’t Flash objects (or just about any object for that matter) be held outside the web page and displayed within an interactive container? If there’s a way to create this container using JavaScript and HTML5, couldn’t something like this be a solution at least for a portion of some Flash content?

Here’s a brain dump of what I mean:

The question mark here is that bottom piece and how it connects into the Flash Container (I called it “HotShoe” — the piece that holds a flash on a camera. I am so clever.). In very basic terms, I’m thinking a sort of VNC-like interface that interacts with the Flash piece. You probably wouldn’t get a massive Flash game to work flawlessly in such a design, but movies and ads….

That’s all I got. Now go make it!

Why digital books and not the library?

// April 28th, 2010 // 3 Comments » // General, Ranting, Techie

I’ve already resigned myself to the fact that, sooner than later, I will have myself an iPad. But, while I love the idea of reading books on the thing, my problem is this: I’m a cheap bastard, and I’d rather get my books from the library … y’know, for free.

This bums me out, because I’d really love to read books on a portable device like the iPad or the Kindle, rather than dealing with book lights and pesky pages. Somehow, though, I have an easier time swallowing the >$500 price tag of an iPad than paying for a book, one that I’ll read once and likely never read again, nor can I share the damn thing or donate it.

I can get any book I want from my local library and even have it sent from another library if they don’t have it in stock. Audiobooks are even better — I can get the CDs, digitize them into iTunes, and then listen on my iPod/iPhone, complete with bookmarking (I do delete them when I’m done because, as I said, I will probably never ever read/listen to these books again).

So why are people so quick to buy digital books? Is it because they have a lot of disposable income? Don’t have friends they’d like to share the book with later? Are neurotic and don’t like touching old books? Too lazy to walk/drive to the library? Or is the convenience of using an iPad or Kindle to read the book worth the inflated price of it alone?

Plus, using the library helps support it. “You mean I read books for free and it supports the library with no money out of me?” I know: crazy! But it’s true. Don’t you want to help support that worthy cause? Or are you all like “screw everyone — get a better job and buy your books!”

Please, convince me I need to read all future books on an iPad — I need another reason to justify it.

Custom short URLs and WordPress SEO stuff

// May 18th, 2009 // Comments Off // General, Techie

If you use Twitter, chances are you’ve seen or have submitted URLs using short URL services like tinyurl.com or bit.ly. Because of the limited number of characters allowed in Twitter tweets, you simply have to use them to get your point accross. The problem with using these public services is that, to most people they have no clue really where the link is going to take them. Because of this, some places have started using their own short URLs; when you see the custom short URL, you know where you’re headed.

So, I wanted to have our own short URL domain for CliqueClack. Domains are cheap, but only if you use one of the primary top-level domains (.com, .net, .us …). If you try to use domai.nr to find domains, it will even search country-specific domains, many of which can cost hundreds of dollars to register, if you’re allowed to at all! While I would have loved to have cla.ck for our short domain, apparently the Cook Islands are picky with what you do with their domains. So, we settled with clak.us — it’s cheap and it makes sense: Clack Us!

(more…)

WordPress Plugin: Pending Posts Indicator

// January 5th, 2009 // 2 Comments » // General, Techie

Another very simple but handy plugin for WordPress. This one simply adds one of those neat bubbles next to the ‘Posts’ admin menu item with a number of posts in the Pending queue, if there are any. This is the same sort of bubble you see when there are comments in the moderation queue or plugins needing updating.

Works in WordPress 2.7 and above only. You can grab it here.

WordPress Plugin: Show Post Busy Status

// October 24th, 2008 // 1 Comment » // Techie

Since starting the new CliqueClack blog, I’ve had to deal with multiple authors and multiple editors working within the admin interface. One annoying thing that I’ve come across is entering a ‘Pending Review’ post, only to see someone already editing it.

So, I wrote this simple plugin that adds a new column to the post management list. The column reads “Busy?” and will show nothing under it unless someone is editing the post. If someone is editing the post, it will display a red “Yes” as a hyperlink that, when hovered over, will show you the name of the person editing the post. Note that clicking the link should simply keep you within the same screen, and the busy status will only update if you reload the page.

I’ll get around to submitting this plugin to the proper places, but for now you can grab it here.

Apple Leopard feature request: Annotated Time Machine backups

// February 21st, 2008 // Comments Off // Ranting, Techie

Maybe I’ll send this off to Apple as a suggestion…

I’d really love to be able to annotate Time Machine backups so I can better refer back to when I made a certain change to my system that I’d like to restore from. For example, I upgraded an application yesterday at noon. Let’s say it starts acting up on me now. Unless I remember I made the change around noon yesterday, I have to hunt around for it. Instead, it would be great if a user can manually add a note to certain backups for restore points. Like “installed new such-and-such application”. Then you know to restore from the backup just previous to that one.

This seems like such an easy and handy feature. Where the hell is it?

Toshiba on HD-DVD: “It’s just a flesh wound”

// February 18th, 2008 // Comments Off // General, Techie

I guess we’ll need to wait just a little bit longer to throw HD-DVD on the cart.

UPDATE: “He’s dead now!”

Techie Time: Fedora 8 problems with updating rpcbind

// January 29th, 2008 // 3 Comments » // General, Techie

It’s time again for another Techie Time post. I will sometimes use these to post notes about technical issues I’ve run into that had nary a single hit on Google for help. So, in the event someone else has the same issue, welcome!

For anyone uninterested in the subject, you can look away now. You were warned.

For the past few weeks I’d been keeping my work system completely updated with Fedora 8. Suddenly, at some point, I noted that ‘rpcbind’ wasn’t updating, failing with an RPM script error. Here’s that error:

error: %pre(rpcbind-0.1.4-13.fc8.x86_64) scriptlet failed, exit status 4
error:   install: %pre scriptlet failed (2), skipping rpcbind-0.1.4-13.fc8

Eventually, this error caught up with me and NFS started not working and was wreaking havoc on our network. Here’s what I had to do to get the latest rpcbind installed:

rpm -q --scripts -p rpcbind-0.1.4-13.fc8.x86_64.rpm > /tmp/scripts

Within that new file I took out just what I needed and edited it a bit. In particular, note the ‘-o’ with useradd and groupadd:

/usr/sbin/userdel  rpc
/usr/sbin/groupdel rpc

# Now re-add the rpc uid/gid
/usr/sbin/groupadd -o -g 32 rpc
/usr/sbin/useradd -o -l -c "Rpcbind Daemon" -d /var/lib/rpcbind -g 32 \
-M -s /sbin/nologin -u 32 rpc

The ‘-o’ is necessary because this RPM kept failing because “32″ was not a unique userid. Thing is, it’s not in /etc/passwd (note that it removes it first!), so why it’s complaining I can only guess has to do with LDAP, though I haven’t had time to test yet.

Next, I forced the RPM to install without scripts, then ran the script:

rpm -U --force --noscripts rpcbind-0.1.4-13.fc8.x86_64.rpm
sh /tmp/scripts

Anyway, I hope that helps someone else.

How to prevent the ‘Install’ icon on Ubuntu’s LiveCD

// October 23rd, 2007 // 2 Comments » // General, Techie

It’s time again for techie talk. Yes, this is because I was unable to easily locate this information using Google, so doing some digging of my own lead to this discovery.

If you’re creating your own custom LiveCD for Ubuntu (we’re doing this at my FTJ in order to allow customers to boot a LiveCD with a demo/training version of our product right from a CD), you’ll probably want to get rid of that annoying ‘Install’ icon that sits on the default user’s (“ubuntu”) desktop. Deleting it from the desktop and saving that configuration aside doesn’t get rid of it. Instead, you need to alter some scripts.

First, if you’re following the Ubuntu LiveCD customization wiki page instructions, you’ll have an ‘edit’ directory with the contents of the CD available for editing. Comment out lines 49-54 in the file ‘edit/usr/share/initramfs-tools/scripts/casper-bottom/10adduser’ that read:

for file in /usr/share/applications/ubiquity-gtkui.desktop \
/usr/share/applications/kde/ubiquity-kdeui.desktop; do
    if [ -f "/root/$file" ]; then
        chroot /root install -D -o $USERNAME -g $USERNAME \
$file /home/$USERNAME/Desktop/$(basename "$file")
        break
    fi
done

You will then need to ‘chroot’ back into the ‘edit’ directory and remake initrd:

mkinitramfs -o /initrd.gz 2.6.15-23-386

Replace the final arg in that line with the applicable kernel version (look in /lib/modules).

Exit from the chroot jail and move this file to extract-cd/casper:

mv edit/initrd.gz extract-cd/casper/

Continue with the rest of the instructions on that wiki page. Done! Hope this helps someone.

Techie Time: VMWare and linux kernel 2.6.22.x

// September 20th, 2007 // Comments Off // Techie

OK kids, it’s Techie Time again. This is where I post something that I found out for myself, since using Google and searching forums got me nowhere. The hope is that search crawlers pick this up and help someone else out.

I was running into a problem using VMWare Server version 1.0.1 on a RHEL 4 system. On that system I had RHEL 4 virtual machine that we kept the kernel updated to the bleeding edge (but not the one RedHat officially releases). When I did the update to version 2.6.22.6, the virtual machine would not boot. An excerpt from the error messages on boot:

mkrootdev label / not found

Apparently there’s something wonky going on with the emulated hardware in the slightly older version of VMWare Server, causing the new kernel not to see the virtual disk. Updating VMWare Server to 1.0.4 fixed the issue (no need to rebuild the new kernel on the VM).

Hope that helps!

We now return you to your regularly scheduled program of nothing…