Chris’ Blog

I have had the last week at home, only a month to go before I go back to university (woo) and I have been busy. I have been scaling up my backup solution after settling with rsnapshot I have been writing scripts to handle backing up various special formats I use. So far I have implemented: Subversion, dpkg, DNS, and MySQL. I have licensed my scripts under the GPL v2 and you are free to use them according to that license. You can access the sources in my Subversion repository, its also worth noting I have packages for Ubuntu Feisty and Debian Etch available from my APT repository.

I am getting fed up with all the databases on my server being set to latin1 with a Swedish collation, I guess I am just being anal, anyhow. I found out how to configure MySQL so that it always uses utf8. Add the following lines to your /etc/mysql/my.cnf under the mysqld section:

init-connect='SET NAMES utf8'
default-character-set=utf8
default-collation=utf8_unicode_ci
character-set-server=utf8

The recently departed weekend hosted amongst other events such as Mothering Sunday, and the Gold Cup, the annual Lotus Event at Donington race course. Dad, owning a Lotus was going, I came back from university on Friday to be told he was going but so was the younger brother. Unless I could fit in the boot I was not able to come, thankfully somebody stepped in to offer me a ride up. It was quite an extraordinary day, we met up with people on the way, all 90’s Lotus Elan owners. Eventually stopping at the Donington services on the M1 to assemble the convoy to Donington it self. Wow, there was at least 70 or so Elan’s in the services car park, it was quite a sight.

I snapped some nice photos on the day, forgot totally about the camera until late in the day (which started at 5am) so didn’t get as many as I would have liked but oh well. You can view them here.

Nicko McBrain, Iron Maiden’s drummer for the past 20+ years, likes Sooty and Sweep, he has also appeared on TV in the Sooty and Sweep Show!

Whoops, how embarrassing, although this makes me cringe more!

(14:44:52) Me: *waddles*
(14:44:57) Me: *opens arms*
(14:45:00) Me: *big hug*
(14:45:13) Dave: *waddles*
(14:45:19) Dave: *has a heart attack*
(14:45:22) Dave: *dies*
(14:45:25) Dave: *:(*

hehe

Further to my previous post about Flash player, I have it using ESD but I need to configure ALSA to use the dmix plug-in. I found out how to do this here. Very happy now

I have upgraded the version of Wordpres my blog runs, for me this is a pain in the ass due to custom modifications. So, this time I decided to use their subversion repository to create a patch and use that, guess what it worked first time.

To patch:

$ patch -i ./wordpress-2.1_2.1.2.diff -d /path/to/wordpress -p0