Merry humbug to everyone who believes that some bloke called Jesus was born 2007 years ago today, Merry Christmas to others who joins in the madness just because its ‘easier’ that way. Christmas is overly commercialised nowadays and has lost its religious meaning, boo-hoo. Any how it is two years since I started this little blog as a trash can for the crap that accumulates in my head, although apparently some of it is useful to others. Enjoy the festive period, as it means a lack of work and academia for some variable period, in my case 4 weeks. *grins*
Archive for 2007
Christmas
Tuesday, December 25th, 2007Ekiga VoIP client and SIPGate
Thursday, November 29th, 2007Ekiga is a VoIP client for GNOME. I recently registered with SIPGate.co.uk as I am planning to have a go at setting up Asterisk sometime in the near future. Sadly it wasn’t a well documented process and after searching Google, SIPGate’s website and Ubuntu Forums for help I found some tips on debugging Ekiga. Armed with this knowledge ekiga --debug=[1-6] I managed to discover the required ports for successful NAT traversal. They are as follows:
- 5060 – 5100/udp
- 8000 – 8012/udp
- 5004/udp
- 10000/udp
- 3478 – 3497/udp
- 3478 – 3497/tcp
- 1720/udp
- 30000 – 30010/tcp
I am sure they could be refined and there maybe some that are unnecessary but it Works or Me™, use them at your own risk.
Subversion and Apache Gotcha
Thursday, November 29th, 2007So, this is the second time I have tried to address the problem I was getting with some Subversion repositories I was trying to configure to be served by Apache. I was trying to use the SVNPath directive to serve one repository but it was not having any of it, so instead I ended up serving them as a temporary measure using SVNParentPath in the format http://svn.example.com/~name/repos/ which is not what I wanted. I am using the Location container in Apache configuration to configure up my repositories, the path I had specified was /~name/. This is where the problem comes in, I would try to checkout the repository over the network and be greeted with a 405 Method Not Allowed error like so:
svn: PROPFIND request failed on '/~name' svn: PROPFIND of '/~name': 405 Method Not Allowed (http://svn.example.com)
This stuck me as odd, it seemed the Apache was not serving the repository URI using the WebDAV module. When I gave up on an earlier attempt I reverted to using SVNParentPath and accessing the repository over the URI http://svn.example.com/~name/repos/ which worked perfectly and I couldn’t spot why. Turns out I made a single character mistake, my Apache configuration was set to use the path of /~name/ I should have used /~name because SVN truncates the trailing slash even if you specify it on the command line. Bugger!
Another Thunderbird Tip
Thursday, November 22nd, 2007Thunderbird’s default sorting is the wrong way around, IMHO. This has always annoyed me, I found out how to reverse it.
Mario and Luigi visit Vice City
Saturday, November 17th, 2007The Day the Routers Died…
Wednesday, November 14th, 2007Thunderbird Tip
Friday, October 26th, 2007So for ages I have been using Thunderbird combined with server side mail sorting, what has been annoying me for a year or so is that Thunderbird only checks the Inbox folder. I had to manually check all the others and that got a little tedious, fortunately I discovered how to get around this.
The trick is to open the configuration editor (Edit -> Preferences -> Advanced) and set the mail.check_all_imap_folders_for_new preference to true. Bingo!
Upgraded
Saturday, October 20th, 2007Pocket PC 2002 Skipping the Welcome Programme
Friday, October 12th, 2007When you hard reset a Pocket PC device it runs a Welcome one time tutorial programme, this can be skipped, by hooking it up to a computer and deleting the Welcome shortcut inside \Windows\Startup. Took me a while to find this one out so I thought I would document and share.
In side news Microsoft’s value has plummeted, and is for sale at PCWorld: El. Reg 
Akismet Sanitised
Sunday, September 30th, 2007I made the Akismet plugin a little more sane after discovering it sent the entire $_SERVER array to akismets servers. I changed:
$ignore = array( 'HTTP_COOKIE' );
foreach ( $_SERVER as $key => $value )
if ( !in_array( $key, $ignore ) )
$comment["$key"] = $value;
To:
foreach ($_SERVER as $k => $v)
{
if (strpos($k, 'HTTP_') === 0 && $k != 'HTTP_COOKIE')
{
$comment[$k] = $v;
}
} 
