It was about time I upgraded the website. Hope you like it!

Having some time to spare (although not as much as I wanted), I thought it’d be a nice idea to convert my webcam into a security camera. The best (free) solution I found was zoneminder, which runs perfectly on linux.

I finally got my webcam to work on skype (sort of). I have a Logitech QuickCam Messenger (046d:08da), which is a v4l2 (video4linux v2) device. Skype only (still) works with v4l version 1. Thus “Houston, we’ve got a problem”!

I almost solved the puzzle.

After visiting Camp Zikula this last weekend, there was no other option than finally upgrading the website.

We all love to listen to music, right? I've been searching for a good music player for windows for a while now. I already found it in Amarok, but that one only runs natively on Linux. 

How often does it happen that, when downloading a movie, it's all separated into chunks? You don't want to open file by file when watching that movie. You want to combine all those chunks into a single avi, wmv or mpeg. Mencoder is your solution. 

Today I got another Windows Vista update error: 800F0902.

Luckily I found a useful post @ http://itsvista.com/2008/01/windows-vista-sp1-rc-refresh-available-to-public/ that proposed to change some stuff in the registry. 

For those in need of NX Server installation guide on the latest Ubuntu (Hardy), here it is:http://www.drtek.ca/freenx-server-ubuntu-hardy#en. It worked fine on my laptop.

I recently had a Vista installation which gave me an error on every update I tried, namely 80071a91. Googleing 'round brought me to http://blog.stevex.net/index.php/2007/05/21/80071a91/. I tried the suggested solution, finding that the delete statements didn't work: The files were in use by another process. That was quickly solved with a tool from http://www.creativelement.com/ and a reboot. Now I was able to continue the solution method and regain access to Windows updates on this Vista machine.

I had a problem with Windows Vista not accepting an IP address, being offered from a Linux DHCP server. Apart from changing the already known registry entry (DhcpConnEnableBcastFlagToggle), I had to add the following line to my dhcpd.conf 

It's out there. We've been waiting for this a long time now, but finally the new name for Postnuke is known: Zikula. Congratulations, guys! The announcement tells us the new is derived from the Zulu language. Read more in theofficial press release.

Linux is better than window$, there, I've said it. On some rare occassions, you still need to run windows and I've tried several options in the past: vmware, qemu, virtualbox... All of them had their backdraws. Most of them just being slow. The latest I've tested is andLinux, and I must say, this one has impressed me the most. You're able to run almost any linux application, directly in windows. You're still running a linux distro (ubuntu) in the background as a windows service and although you need to share your files between the host and the guest, you're actually running the linux application within the windows desktop. All the others I've tested ran those application on the guest desktop. Here is a screenshot, illustrating my point:

I had a little shutdown problem with my laptop which has ubuntu as OS. If your ubuntu installation hangs on shutdown and you had NFS mounts, you'll probably solve it by following this guide:http://blog.avirtualhome.com/2008/03/10/ubuntu-shutdown-problem-cifs-related/

Here is a list of some interesting blogs on Linux
http://blog.linuxoss.com/
http://linuxhelp.blogspot.com/
http://vertito.blogspot.com/

Havin' an iso image of the latest movie on dvd is all pretty well, but you still would like to see it. You could mount the image and let xine play the vob files or take advantage of the dvd:// capability of xine like this:

xine “dvd://path/to/your/file.iso”

Even handier would be to have that command in your context popup (by right-click'ing the file). To have that in KDE, open up the directory "~/.kde/share/apps/konqueror/servicemenus/" and make a xine_iso.desktop file with the following content. 

[Desktop Entry] ServiceTypes=application/x-iso
Actions=Xine ISO
[Desktop Action Xine ISO]
Encoding=UTF-8
Exec=xine &qout;dvd://%U&qout; Icon=exec MimeType=application/x-iso
Name=Play DVD ISO with xine

Now right-click an iso image file and look under "Actions"

Enjoy the movie!

More help on editing context menu's can be found at: http://legroom.net/2007/04/20/adding-custom-actions-kde-context-menus

Tonight the server got upgraded to the latest stable version of Apache/MySQl/PHP.

Gmail now also has IMAP support. That means you can leave your email on the servers of gmail, keeping it accessible through the browser and handle it your favorite email client at the same time. The next article shows you how to configure KMail to get access to your gmail account. It isn't to hard to figure out what to do with the other email clients you might have running. http://linux.wordpress.com/2007/11/13/howto-configuring-kmail-with-gmail-imap-and-disconnected-imap/ Should you need help for the other ones:http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&ctx=mail&answer=75726

Some people are having problems with MSN's Messenger on Vista when DEP is active. DEP closes the application whenever you try to logon. here are some links where you can find a solution to the problem:http://www.fanatic.net.nz/2007/03/14/how-to-stop-dep-crashing-messenger-on-vista/http://www.acerpanam.com/synapse/forms/portal20.cfm?recordid=1130&formid=3390&website=AcerPanAm.com/us&siteid=7293&words=all&keywords=&areaid=7To turn off DEP all together, try this: http://forum.mess.be/lofiversion/index.php/t20709.html

It took me a while to figure out what happed but the MediaWiki installation I have running on my intranet suddenly started spitting out errors pages like : Method Not Implemented POST to /mediawiki/index.php not supported. I had recently upgraded mediawiki, so I thought that was the problem, just another bug. However that was not the case. Later on I stumbled upon the next message:http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.mediawiki/22001, which provided me with the knowledge that mod_security was blocking the POST request. Disabling it, made mediawiki work correctly again.

I just bought myself a NAS Server from QNAP (TS-201). Lots of cute gadgets in there, which I'll never use References : http://www.redbrick.dcu.ie/~d_fens/articles/Firefox:_This_Address_is_Restricted
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?t=263724

In regard to the previous entry on tiOPF and MySQL, a course on OOP programming in Delphi might be useful reviewing. Combine this with tiOPF's TtiDataset, separate the user interfaces from the business logic using OOP and you can start creating killer applications with virtually any database in the backend.

tiOPF is an Open Source Object Persistance Framework for Delphi. However there was no support for MySQL. Zeos was already experimentaly included, but only for firebird. Although it's very preliminary code with almost no testing done, the basics of a persistance layer for MySQL in tiOPF has now been created by yours truly. Have a look in the binary newsgroup of tiOPF. I still have to verify the different fieldtypes returned by Zeoslib. The tiOPF demo's seems work at first glance... Feel to test it out.