john.parnefjord.se Reflections & findings

As a new user of Postgresql, version 8.1, I quickly ran into trouble when I just wanted to get the results from a table using an ordinary select in a procedure. There are some tricks that one has to know of.

Let's start from the very beginning by creating a new example table that will hold the example data.

When installing Perl modules on my Windows laptop I always try to ease the pain by using ActiveState's ppm or ppm3 tool to install. An alternative is the CPAN tool but that requires most of the time that the development environment includes a C or C++ compiler with all the environment variables set and all include files available.

Lately I needed to install the DBD::Pg module in order to connect to Postgresql and I wanted a swift install. Unfortunately the DBD::Pg package wasn't available from the ActiveState repository and I couldn't find any other repository to add. But I found another way of doing it.

Debian Etch ships with SELinux turned on in permissive mode. This may interfere with custom installation paths. For example if you install Postgresql and want to place data on a special share using the tablespace directive, for example

Now updated with the latest firmware version according to the comments! Thanks for the correction!

I’ve got a Canon A620 that can produce AVI-movies, which is quite fun. Sometimes the movies are shot in portrait format and I need to rotate them in order to save the beholders' necks or the trouble of rotating the screen. For the purpose I use mencoder.

To install is as easy as ever:

apt-get install mencoder-586

Note, I couldn’t install mencoder-custom due to dependency-problems in my Ubuntu Breezy Badger installation so I resorted to the version above. Ok, ready to turn that movie around:

Mplayer is the swiss army knife when it comes to multimedia. Sometimes you want to save those streams so that you can listen to them for example in you MP3-player. No problems using mplayer. Find out the URL for the stream to download. It looks something like this:
rtsp://my.domain.net/streaming/media.ra
rtsp://my.domain.net/streaming/media.rm

Sometimes the URL:s are contained in a ram-file, then just download the file:

The driver for ATI with DRI-support is a bit flaky in Ubuntu Breezy Badger. The version shipped with Breezy is 8.16.20 and I have had problems getting full resolution on my Dell Latitude D600. It just refuses to turn on the 1400×1050 resolution and switches down to 1024×768 mode. I found some guidelines of how to deal with this and this is a synopsis of how I got it working.

1. Remove Breezy’s included drivers if they are installed:
   

Assume that we have a web server named www.unit.domain.com, that is using the Exchange server mail.unit.domain.com for relaying all mails. The users mailaddress is user@unit.domain.com. Exchange in turn uses an SMTP server named mail.domain.com to send mail and here resides the mail box for user@domain.com. Yes, I know a bit complicated, not straightforward, well but that's how life is.

Installation

This describes how I installed the EMC Legato client version 7.1.12 on Debian GNU/Linux 32-bit and 64-bit. If you intend to install these binaries on system with AMD64 architechture you have to install ia32-libs. Version 7.3.2 is to be released with 64-bit support. The following procedure is just for the CLI, as the servers I'm responsible for have no graphical or desktop interface. The Legato client is shipped as RPM-package, so to start with you have to alienate the file:

Saw a notice the other day that IBM and Yahoo! had joined up to create a free crawler and search engine - IBM OmniFind Yahoo! edition. I couldn't resist trying it out an installed it on a spare server. It was quite painless but as always Debian isn't on officially supported.

To install grab the files at http://omnifind.ibm.yahoo.net/ or fetch using wget. I downloaded the language pack as well as I'm a native swedish speaker and use these strange umlauts chars.