July 2012 - main - earth.li

torcl
by richard.lee.parsons＠gmail.com 14 Jul '12

14 Jul '12

Hi all After some conversations with some Aluggers, I've thrown together a bash script for downloading torrents from the commandline. It searches isohunt, downloads your selected torrent file and kicks off the torrent client all from the warmth and safety of your favourite terminal. Perhaps it may be useful to some others on the list. https://github.com/rlp10/torcl It's pretty ugly scripting, so please forgive that. :) Richard

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Calendar GUI that has hooks for entering code when you click on a date
by Chris Green 14 Jul '12

14 Jul '12

I'm looking for a basic calendar display program that has a hook to allow me to execute a script (or other code) when I click on a date. Can anyone suggest anything like this? It can be desktop or Web. -- Chris Green

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[ALUG Announce] 3rd Monday Monthly Ipswich Social Meeting : The Mulberry Tree
by samwise 13 Jul '12

13 Jul '12

ALUG Announce Please send announcements to Announce(a)lists.alug.org.uk Unsub, change settings via http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce ----- The monthly "Third Monday" ALUG Ipswich Social Meeting is back this week - Monday, 16th July, at 20:00: The Mulberry Tree 5 Woodbridge Road IPSWICH IP4 2EA Tel: 01473 225776 Email: mulberrytree.ips(a)btinternet.com Map/Directions URI: http://maps.google.co.uk/?q=IP4+2EA WWW: https://www.facebook.com/MULBERRYHOSPITALITY The Mulberry Tree, previously known as The Milestone Beer House, is a grade 2 listed building in the centre of Ipswich. It is located at the intersection between Woodbridge Road and the A1156, across the road from the old Odeon cinema and not far from the Regent Theatre. It re-opened on Thursday March 29th 2012 after a major refurbishment, under its original name of The Mulberry House and has already begun to regain a good reputation for its selection of beers and ales. It has a sizeable car park to the rear of the building. All are welcome, novices and experienced users. Feel free to ask for further information on the Main ALUG mailing list. After a stupidly quiet meet last time, let's see if we can drag a few more people down this month. I'll be there, and we may also have a couple of guests including, possibly, a friendly chap a few of us ALUGers met recently in the pub, who has a fair share of career stories involving the likes of Chris Curry, Clive Sinclair etc. and is currently involved in a project building unmanned aerial drones. Plus someone else may arrive armed with a MacBook who is looking to be persuaded why he should try out Linux ... Hope to see some of you there! Peter. ----- Send discussion replies to main(a)lists.alug.org.uk (Reply-To set) Unsub, change settings via http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce

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Strange code in DNS packet unravelling - any ideas why anyone?
by Chris Green 12 Jul '12

12 Jul '12

This is again related to my Nanode (Arduino lookalike) programming, it's more of a "why on earth is it like this" sort of question than needing to know how it works. The Nanode/Arduino sits waiting for things to do which are sent as requests to its ethernet interface. It also handles DHCP, DNS, ARP and other requests in the same loop. When it gets a DNS request it checks a few things and then does the following:- // // // Check if we have a valid query for us, compare name in DNS request with our name // p=(uint8_t *)settings.Name; // set pointer to our name stored at startup if (valid) // valid set by earlier checks { for (i = NBNS_NAME+1; i < NBNS_NAME+1+32; i += 2) { c = ((buf[i] - 0x41) << 4) + (buf[i+1] - 0x41); if (*p) { if (*p!=c) { valid=0; } p++; } else { if ((c != 0) && (c != 0x20)) { valid=0; } } } } The comment at the top is mine, I *think* that's what it's doing! However I really don't understand why it's doing that strange shifting and subtracting 0x41 (yes, I know it's 'A'). It's as if the name coming in with the DNS query is two bytes per character with a strange encoding as well. I can't see anywhere else in the code where characters are spread over two bytes, and the SPI interface seems to transfer 8 bit bytes all the time to/from the ethernet hardware. I also don't understand why it's comparing only 16 characters (is it just an arbitrary local limit) and/or why the name it's receiving in the DNS request is just the hostname, not a fully qualified name. It doesn't work for lower-case characters either, the name defined for the Nanode/Arduino has to be upper case for it to respond to DNS requests. If valid is still non-zero after this it sends its IP address back to the DNS requester. Have I missed something obvious or is this really wierd? Any/all ideas very welcome. -- Chris Green

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deb/alien dependencies
by Mark Rogers 11 Jul '12

11 Jul '12

I'm trying to install hamachi [1] on Debian (arm). I want the smallest install I can get away with, but at the moment I'm getting the following dependencies: alien at autopoint bc binutils build-essential bzip2 cpp cpp-4.4 cups-bsd cups-client cups-common debhelper dpkg-dev fakeroot g++ g++-4.4 gcc gcc-4.4 gettext gettext-base git html2text intltool-debian libalgorithm-diff-perl libalgorithm-diff-xs-perl libalgorithm-merge-perl libc-dev-bin libc6-dev libcurl3-gnutls libdpkg-perl libelf1 liberror-perl libgmp3c2 liblua5.1-0 libmail-sendmail-perl libmpfr4 libnspr4-0d libnss3-1d librpm1 librpmbuild1 librpmio1 libstdc++6-4.4-dev libsys-hostname-long-perl libtimedate-perl libunistring0 linux-libc-dev lsb-core lsb-release m4 make manpages-dev ncurses-term patch pax po-debconf rpm rpm-common rpm2cpio time It installs and runs OK but I don't want all that stuff on my box afterwards! Seeing alien in the list makes me conclude that this is a repackaged rpm and maybe that's what's causing the problem. However if I try to "apt-get remove alien" afterwards, hamachi gets removed. What are my options to work around this? Unfortunately Hamachi is not free and therefore I don't have access to the source. [1] https://secure.logmein.com/labs/ -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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Capturing Olympic torch relay footage from BBC website
by Mark Rogers 09 Jul '12

09 Jul '12

Does anyone have any idea how to capture the torch relay footage from the BBC website? I expected get-iplayer to do the job but it can't find the stream if I just paste the URL in. Specific example: http://www.bbc.co.uk/torchrelay/day46 (Afternoon section) Mark Rogers

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FTP server mirroring (push not pull)
by Mark Rogers 06 Jul '12

06 Jul '12

I have a system which uploads data to my FTP server periodically. I need to upload any files that arrive to a second (and possibly third) FTP server. The points that make it not fit a traditional mirroring is that (a) my FTP server needs to push the files out to the other server(s) rather than have them pull the files in, and (b) the data needs to be synchronised as fast as possible after it arrives (the files are alarm logs amongst other things). So an hourly or daily cronjob won't suffice. Although I have control over my own FTP server, I can't make any assumptions about the third party servers in terms of their O/S, functionality, FTP server software, etc. Any suggestions for the best place to start with this? -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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Barclays Online Banking
by Ted.Harding＠wlandres.net 05 Jul '12

05 Jul '12

Greetings all! Anyone out there who banks with Barclays and is having problems accessing Online Banking with Linux? I last logged in 6 days ago with no problems. Today, when I try to access it, no login page comes up -- it just hangs forever. So I can't even try to get started! I'm using (an admittedly slightly elderly) Iceweasel 2.0.0.19 of 2006 on a Debian Etch 2.6.18 last updated Feb 2010. Any suggestions most welcome! Best wishes to all, Ted. ------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)wlandres.net> Date: 12-Jun-2012 Time: 19:00:45 This message was sent by XFMail -------------------------------------------------

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Storing data samples with low overheads
by Mark Rogers 04 Jul '12

04 Jul '12

I'm writing an application to run on small ARM units. It collects data from various sources at varying frequencies (up to once per second) and needs to store them. The number of discrete values will vary but we're running tests on around 200 data points dropping the data into MySQL. By "varying frequencies" what I mean is that some items will be read every second, others less frequently (say once every 30mins), so I need a data structure that will cope with that but my tests are currently on the worst-case of storing everything every second (or trying to!) One option is to have a table per item, comprising little more than timestamp and value. Our tests so far have taken 2-5s to store 200 samples this way. We're looking at other ways (eg one table for all samples, storing an item id, timestamp and value). However I can't help think that MySQL is overkill and an overhead we could do without. So, does anyone have any suggestions? We could build our own data storage system - the applications I've seen before that do this would probably have a single binary file per day/week/month of data for any single item, storing a single timestamp (marking the start of the file) and sample period, followed by 4 bytes per sample at the appropriate offset into the file from there; reading or writing just becomes a case of working out which file to look at and the offset into that file. But I'd rather not go quite so low-level if I can avoid it. -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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[ALUG Announce] ALUG Norwich Pub Meet Thursday 12th July
by Viperfang 04 Jul '12

04 Jul '12

ALUG Announce Please send announcements to Announce(a)lists.alug.org.uk Unsub, change settings via http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce ----- Hello Norwich Aluggers, Our monthly ALUG Norwich social meeting will be held this Thursday, 12th July at The Coach and Horses (82 Thorpe Road, Norwich, NR1 1BA). The meeting officially starts at 8pm, although some people may arrive earlier. More information on those people can be found on the list and the IRC channel. If you are unsure if you will recognise us then make yourself and your intent to attend known by either posting on list or visiting us on IRC so we can look out for you rather than hiding in the corner. Optionally you could ask at the bar if they know where the geeky computer weirdos are and they'll point you in the right direction (seriously!). Another possibility is look for heaps of electronics on a table that may possibly look like movie props that would used for detonating explosives. Feel free to bring electronics/laptops/gadgets to the meet, you will by no means be alone. Ben Bewick aka Viperfang NB: This mail is automated, please refer to the usual sources for more information. ALUG Contact Details: Website : http://www.alug.org.uk/ IRC : #alug on irc.alug.org.uk List : http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo Twitter : http://twitter.com/anglianlug Identica: TBA Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2381613902 ----- Send discussion replies to main(a)lists.alug.org.uk (Reply-To set) Unsub, change settings via http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce

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