Okay. So, anyone out here who’s listening — particularly those overly-enthusiastic users — don’t try to recursively wget your Plone site (or other CMS, for that matter) whilst you’re logged in with an account that can make edits. It will lead to a very bad situation where your site administrator and technical team need to step in and fix your mistakes. For the uninitiated, a loose recursive wget (when logged in with some degree of Edit rights) will hit every link that’s on your pages, and I mean in the (X)HTML source. For a Plone site, this means hitting every “Edit” link, every “Revert to this version” link, and every other link that might be dangerous when clicked randomly. Oh, and if the account you’ve got has admin rights, well, it’s not getting any better and requires the Data.fs to be undone back to before it happened. Here’s how to do that easily. (more…)

So you, like me, have hit a situation where you’ve got a time-sensitive application that won’t run? Maybe you’ve downloaded one of those apps (like a demo) that won’t run after a certain date and time because it’s “expired”. Or else, maybe some other arbitrary time constraint is keeping you from running a Linux (or even Windows) program. On Linux (Ubuntu for me), there’s faketime to the rescue – a very handy tool that does what it says on the box, changes the system time for given command. (more…)

Whoops.  No one sent me the memo that Python 2.4 support was being removed entirely from the latest version of Ubuntu, 10.04 Lucid Lynx.  To be fair, I was presented with the message that ‘these outdated packages will be removed’ and in that list was python2.4.  I made the unfortunate assumption that this just mean the package was outdated (which it certainly is) and I’d have the ability to install it again in Lucid.  There were a number of different packages on the list and in order to save time, I let the updater remove them all.  End result?  No more Python 2.4 on Lucid. (more…)

Yay, the new version of Ubuntu is out.  With it comes plenty of cool new features (how awesome does the start up and login screen look now?) and also plenty of opportunities for things to break when I’ve become so accustomed to having them working.  At least it’s not Windows though — I think I may just gnaw my own limbs off before I have to get forced to upgrade to Windows 7 for gaming reasons. (more…)

Wow, ffmpeg is really great for converting multimedia.  Unfortunately, the support for MP3 audio doesn’t appear available by default.  Sure, it can decode MP3 audio and write to an MP3 container, but what about having an actual MP3 codec available?

sudo apt-get purge ffmpeg
sudo apt-get install libavcodec-unstripped-52 libavdevice-unstripped-52 libavformat-unstripped-52 libavutil-unstripped-49 libpostproc-unstripped-51 libswscale-unstripped-0 ffmpeg

As a little bonus, there’s a number of other codecs that come along with it too (xvid etc).  I’m not too fussed on them but now I can use `-acodec libmp3lame` as my audio codec and have the FLV outputted with MP3 audio.  There’s a problem with either the default FLV encoder or VLC not being able to playback the audio with default settings, but this seems to work.

That said, it remains to be seen if this’ll cause any problems with FLV playback, but the players I’ve used so far (web-based) seem happy enough.