Order of the Bath

Mac Pro keyboard with Windows XP

7 May 2008 21:53 by Rick

I am having a few problems using this. I am getting used to it in Mac mode but in VMware Fusion running Windows (or Ubuntu) it is a bit of a pain. There is only mapping for genuine PC layouts. This is what I get:—

	VMware
Mac	Win(US)	Win(UK)
±	~	¬
§	`	`
@	@	“
£	#	£
“	“	@
\|	\|	~
\	\	#
~	\|	\|
`	\	\

This means I either have to touch type and think PC when using Windows ignoring the key caps (if I use the UK layout) or lose the £ and ¬ signs (if using the US layout). Neither is very satisfactory. In UK format I can get € (Ctrl-Alt 4) and ¦ (Ctrl-Alt §) but neither in the US layout.

Update: The best answer I can come up with at the moment is to set the guest to use the US international keyboard. This has the basic keys in the same place as the US keyboard but offers additional ones using Ctrl-Alt. This would fix the problems with @, “, \ and | but still leaves ~, ` and # wrong just as with the standard US layout. € becomes Ctrl-Alt 5 and £ is Ctrl-Alt 4. I am not sure if I prefer that or not.

The right solution would seem to be for VMware to map the keyboard through to the guest in some way.

Update: 30 May 2008. It seems the right solution is rather different as the helpful people on the VMware forum pointed out. For Windows, what you need to do is install the Boot Camp drivers. These are intended for Mac systems that dual boot into Windows and contain all the dedicated drivers for the Apple hardware. Quite a bit of it is not relevant for a VMware guest but other parts, such as the Keyboard drivers are. They are to be found on the Mac OS X install disk which is in a magic format so that, when mounted on a Windows system, it looks like a Windows software install disk. Allow it to autorun (or force it if necessary) and the package will install. Then, after a reboot, new devices will appear in the Keyboard menu which solves the problem. Now the characters that appear on the screen are the same ones as printed on the keys. I wonder how you do the same thing in Ubuntu?

Posted in Mac, Technical, Windows | Comments Off on Mac Pro keyboard with Windows XP

VMware Fusion 2 (Beta)

11:16 by Rick

Team Fusion have announced the availability of the first public test of the new version. The big advantage for me is that they will be supporting multi-screen clients so I will be able to virtualise my EasyWorship preparation platform—the last major application I have on a real PC. I wonder if that means it will be usable from a MacBook live to a projector?

Update: Apparently it does 🙂

Posted in ChurchTech, Mac | Comments Off on VMware Fusion 2 (Beta)

Ubuntu dev platform – loose ends

10:25 by Rick

Having installed a virtual client for web development using Ubuntu desktop under VMware Fusion there are just a few loose ends to tidy up.

We need it to have a fixed IP address so we can find it easily from the rest of the network. You can either modify the client so that it doesn’t use dhcp and assign a fixed address or configure your dhcp server (usually part of the router) to assign a fixed address to the incoming request. I chose the latter. At the same time you can tell your clients about it (in the hosts files) as it won’t be resolved by DNS.
It would be convenient to have ssh and ftp available to completely mimic the production server. This is described below.
We need to install the VMwareTools to improve the desktop interface. There is a good guide to that on the Ubuntu Tutorials.

Installing ssh is as simple as
sudo apt-get install openssh-server
Similarly ftp can be done using
sudo apt-get install wu-ftpd
but there is a little configuration to do for the latter. Wu-ftpd is set up for inetd and we have xinetd installed by default so the configuration file needs to be converted. A script is provided to do that.
sudo su xconv.pl < /etc/inetd.conf > /etc/xinetd.conf exit
but beware if you have already customised xinetd.conf as this will lose them.

Posted in Technical | Comments Off on Ubuntu dev platform – loose ends

Debit Card Fees

6 May 2008 10:06 by Rick

In your wallet you probably have two types of payment cards; credit cards with either the Visa or MasterCard logo and the bank card which goes with your current account. Usually the bank card performs multiple functions; it is a cheque guarantee card, it is an ATM card drawing directly on your current account and it is a debit card doing the same in retail transactions.

In its role as a debit card it works through the same mechanism as the credit card using the same organisations, Visa and MasterCard, and will display one of their logos on the front. However, unlike a credit card, it doesn’t attract the same transaction fee (I am not sure of the exact details). You wouldn’t normally notice because in most shops and online transactions the fee is absorbed by the retailer. The major exceptions are the travel industry and booking agencies who insist on adding it to the bill afterwards. It is their right and I suppose it means that if you do want to pay by some other method then the price is not loaded up front.

Now the catch. Many retailers don’t understand the difference between debit and credit and in travel agents you may find that they charge you the fee anyway (I have tried arguing and they still don’t understand and, at this level, don’t have the authority to change it). Similarly the online transaction pages don’t understand either, at least they appear not to.

Some years ago, debit cards had different logos on them, either Visa Delta or Mastercard Maestro. Web sites used to have a separate button for them which bypassed (or reduced) the fee. Some still do and it still works even though the logo no longer appears on the cards. So, if you have a Visa Debit card think Delta and if you have a MasterCard one, think Maestro and save money.

p.s. Visa Electron cards, which can be either Credit or Debit, don’t attract the fees and normally have their own button on web sites so are not affected.

Posted in Miscellaneous | Comments Off on Debit Card Fees

Installing/Upgrading to AVG8 Free (Windows)

4 May 2008 18:01 by Rick

Now that it is available, upgrading from AVG 7.5 to AVG 8 is a logical step but there are some decision points to be made along the way so it is best to be prepared for them.

[Note that the Free edition has some quite rigid conditions about home use only.] First you have to find it. The link I gave before is still good but it is a few clicks of Grisoft determinedly trying to get you to buy the full suite. Some of the links on the way are a bit misleading. One says that AVG Anti-Spyware is being discontinued but others that it is now included with the Anti-Virus package. The eventual download location is either their own site or C|Net downloads.com.

When you come to install it there is no need to un-install the previous version. You will need to login to an admin account. Leaving a lot out, the sequence of events is:—

Standard or Custom install—you will need custom if you don’t need the email scanner.
For the Custom install, Un-tick the email scanner if you don’t want it.
Un-tick the AVG Security Toolbar if you don’t want it. Everyone seems to want you to get one of those and if you loaded them all you wouldn’t have enough window left to browse in.
Un-tick the “Enable Daily Scanning” box if you don’t want it. I find that it is a long process and very heavy on resources (though they have put in some sort of load-limiter now). I would rather do them when I want to—and certainly not daily.
There is a tick box for informing AVG about potentially dangerous web sites that you come across. I haven’t checked the privacy statement for this yet so I would be cautious.
Definitely SKIP the updates at the moment as the install is not really ready for them.
Skip the registration for the time being.
Now you will need to reboot (it prompts you).
When it comes back the System Tray icon will probably be red. Right click to open the AVG User Interface.
Click Update Now and it should go ahead and do it.

That is the install complete but you need to check one other thing. One of the features of AVG 8 is the AVG Search Shield, sometimes called the Link Scanner. This intercepts results from the search engines (Google etc.) and inspects them for malicious content—try it and see the little green icons after every hit. Quite how it does that I am not sure but it seemed to take a long time and have a lot of internet traffic. I would imagine that on a dial-up connection it would be impossible. The search engines themselves do some quality checking, if this is doing it real time then it would be better but at what cost. The other thing that bothers me about this is that it could be that you are automatically visiting sites that you wouldn’t otherwise touch with a barge pole (porn etc.) and it will leave the evidence of this in your cache even if it never displays it.

If you decide that you don’t want this facility there are two ways to switch it off. You can use the AVG interface, but if you switch it off there it will forever say that AVG is not fully functional. The other way is with the browser controls. It works using a browser plugin (both IE7 and Firefix, I don’t know about Opera or Safari) and these can be disabled. Go to Tools —>Manage Add-ons—>Enable or Disable Add-ons in IE7 or Tools —>Add-ons in Firefox. This will need to be done on EACH ACCOUNT on your computer.

Now you can register at leisure, if you can figure out how. I haven’t yet! It is worth remembering that, despite all my griping, this is still a free service for which we are grateful.

Update: 20 Jun. As far as I can tell, the Firefox plugin which drives LinkScanner is not Firefox 3 compatible. It will be interesting to see how they update it.

Posted in Browsers, email, Security, Technical, Windows | 4 Comments »

Installing LAMP on Ubuntu 7.10 Desktop

2 May 2008 14:22 by Rick

Doing a search with those keywords reveals a number of guides but most are now either old, incomplete or refer to the Ubuntu Server Build which has most of it pre-installed. My requirement was to put Linux (Ubuntu), Apache (web server), MySQL (database) and PHP (programming language) onto an existing desktop build (under VMware Fusion on a Mac) to serve as a WordPress development test-bed to save me having to keep uploading to a sandpit region on my web host.

The references used to achieve (and write) this were LAMP Installation On Ubuntu, Installing LAMP on Ubuntu 7.10 and Installing and configuring LAMP on Ubuntu.

The process will will mostly be done in a terminal (shell) window and a browser. The latter can be on a separate system on your network, in which case subtitute the Ubuntu IP address for “localhost” in the instructions below.

sudo apt-get install apache2
Change the ownership of the web area using
sudo chown -R [your Ubuntu account] /var/www
and test it by pointing a browser at http://localhost/

sudo apt-get install php5 libapache2-mod-php5
Restart Apache (sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart), create a file /var/www/phpinfo.php containing the line <?php phpinfo(); ?> and test from the browser (http://localhost/phpinfo.php).

sudo apt-get install mysql-server mysql-client
sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-auth-mysql php5-mysql phpmyadmin
During this process you should be asked to set the MySQL root password. It is very important.

Edit /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini and insert the line extension=mysql.so (watch the spelling, the comment in the file is wrong) so that PHP can see MySQL. Also Apache needs to be told where myphpadmin is so edit /etc/apache2/apache2.conf and add the line
Include /etc/phpmyadmin/apache.conf
Restart apache again and test by going to phpmyadmin (http://localhost/phpmyadmin/). The login is root and the MySQL root password (I think).

My immediate requirement was to use it for WordPress. Although you can download a WordPress package using apt-get, I found that this was rather out of date so I did it manually. You will need a database so login to phpmyadmin, create a database by entering the name (e.g. WordPressDB) in the box and click the create button. Now click the SQL button and execute the following command where WordPressDB, WPDBaccount and WPDBaccountPW are your choices.
GRANT ALL ON WordPressDB.* to WPDBaccount@localhost IDENTIFIED BY ‘WPDBaccountPW’;

Now in the WordPress directory (say /var/www/wordpress) copy the wp-config-sample.php file to wp-config.php and edit it thus

// ** MySQL settings ** // define('DB_NAME', 'WordPressDB'); define('DB_USER', 'WPDBaccount'); define('DB_PASSWORD', 'WPDBaccountPW');

Now finish the install by surfing to http://localhost/wordpress/wp-admin/install.php
It will give you a WordPress admin password on the way.

That is it—the only problems I found were keeping track of which password was which and went where.

By the way, it is only for use on your home network, there are other things you will need to do if you are planning to set it up as a real internet visible server.

Posted in Technical, WordPress | 3 Comments »

Holiday TV

30 Apr 2008 09:32 by Rick

A friend was asking today why you can never get decent British TV when you are on holiday (in Europe). The only English language programs seem to be BBC World, Sky News and CNN. The answer is down to the way the Satellites have been set up. All UK free-to-air programs, which includes all BBC, ITV, Film4 and recently C4 are on the Astra 2D satellite. This is very tightly beamed to the British Isles. But there is sufficient leakage to allow it to be viewed as far away as the Canaries and Cyprus, just that you need an ever larger dish the further you get from the UK; 3.5m diameter at the extremes. I presume that the apartments and hotels we stay in don’t bother.

The other 3 Astra satellites, 2A, 2B and 2C, carry Sky encrypted services and the rubbish (shopping) channels and have a much wider footprint but even if the hotels subscribe to this, it doesn’t enable them to get the standard services on 2D.

The reason for the restriction, because it is certainly deliberate, would seem to be copyright restrictions and also the terms of the BBC mandate which only allows a service for UK residents, hence also the control of the internet iPlayer service.

The situation may soon change a little. Freesat is due to launch on the 5th of May. This will include the majority of channels covered by terrestrial Freeview except Five, Virgin 1 and Dave and will be broadcast using the Eurobird 1 satellite. This has a wider beam than Astra 2D (which will continue to host most of the same services, at least for the time being) and so should be more widely available. The bird is located in nearly the same place as the Astra one but I don’t know if the receivers are compatible. They may use other methods, such as encryption and a free entitlement card, to control access.

Most of the information for this post was obtained from the excellent Astra 2D Website.

[Update 6-May] The Freesat service was announced today as expected. Either I misunderstood the information available beforehand or it has changed; now it seems that Freesat will broadcast from Astra 2D not Eurobird 1 so there will be no improvement for overseas viewers. Eurobird 1 will only be used for the Electronic Programme Guide. Their web site seems to be off the air this afternoon.

Posted in Miscellaneous | Comments Off on Holiday TV

these

25 Apr 2008 22:03 by Rick

Last week Mat preached on John 21 v15 (in passing). This reads, in the Revised Standard

“Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these?”

and he interpreted it as “more than these other disciples love me?” This was particularly interesting from my pedantic frame of thinking because I had never looked at this way before, always having interpreted it as “more than you love these disciples?” but it is classically ambiguous in the standard translations i.e. KJV, RSV and NIV. The New English, which has been my most common reference since it came out when I was a teenager, has it the way I thought

“do you love me more than all else?”

with “more than they do?” as a footnote. It is the Jerusalem and the Good News which have it

“do you love me more than these others do?”

I would be interested in the opinion of someone who can read the Greek as to what sense it is written there.

Posted in Miscellaneous | Comments Off on these

At last I have seen one

13:33 by Rick

I thought that these stupid error messages were mythical but this one is genuine and it is likely to be around for a while as it must be coded into the BIOS.

The mouse is plugged into the keyboard connector.
Press <F1> to continue.

Posted in Technical | Comments Off on At last I have seen one

Blame the victim

22 Apr 2008 10:28 by Rick

A new anti spam solution by Abaca aimed at ISPs and large corporations has what they claim is a unique and effective method of reducing errors, particularly false positives (that is marking perfectly good mail as spam in error). What they say is that, in addition to well known detection techniques, their ReceiverNet box looks at the reputation of the recipient to assess the likelihood that the mail is spam. The theory is that if you are promiscuous (or unlucky) with your address and you get a lot of span anyway, then there is a greater chance that this new one coming in is also spam. If, however, you normally receive very little rubbish then the chances are that this slightly suspicious one is ok.

I suspect that there is also a bit of psychology here as well. If you get a lot of spam then you are much less likely to complain if the odd mistake is made. Personally, I would be happier if these bulk filters had a coarse mesh, only trapping the obvious spam and viruses. This would be sufficient for their purposes of reducing network and server load. Leave it to me to fine tune it with a Bayesian algorithm which can learn the sort of mail that I receive and want.

Posted in email, Technical | Comments Off on Blame the victim

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