We-Blog with clouds
Posted on April 6, 2013
| 1 minutes
| 57 words
| Ton Kersten
Today I received an email from Chris Hackenschmidt with a patch for a
category cloud for my We-Blog program.
Of course I have implemented that and you can see it in action on the
right.
So, a new version of We-Blog is out, currently still 0.9, with a big
Thank You to Chris.
Installing Pandoc
Posted on January 26, 2013
| 2 minutes
| 339 words
| Ton Kersten
John Macfarlane released a new version of Pandoc that has a lot of new enhancements. A lot of things have changed in the Markdown input types and it’s now compatible with PHP Markdown. This is very nice, because a lot of implementations use the extensions defined by PHP Markdown.
I downloaded the dmg file to install it on my MacBook Pro and it works like a charm.
So, I decided to install it on my new CentOS 6 server to build documents there.
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rsync on a not standard port
Posted on January 21, 2013
| 1 minutes
| 106 words
| Ton Kersten
Today a colleague asked me to sync some files to a server that is not listening on SSH port 22.
I normally create a configuration entry in my ~/.ssh/config file, like
Host tosync Hostname syncer.example.com Port 1234 User syncuser and then command
rsync -va --progress --inplace . tosync: But this time I didn’t want to create the entry in my SSH configuration, because I need this trick in a script.
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Ansible issue playbook
Posted on November 23, 2012
| 2 minutes
| 306 words
| Ton Kersten
Playing with Ansible I did get the idea to make a nice welcome message when you log in to a server. This message needs to be placed in a file, which is configured in /etc/ssh/sshd_config with the banner option. I call this file /etc/issue.
Of course I want to deploy this file with Ansible, so I first defined an entry in the hosts file. This looks like this:
# Settings for master [master] master # Variables for master [master:vars] location=cow shed room=ESX5i issueremarks=This is the master Ansible server.
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Ode to the Haggis
Posted on October 26, 2012
| 1 minutes
| 190 words
| Ton Kersten
Hendrik Jan Thomassen not only sent me the tail of Haggis hunting
but also a nice ancient poem as an ode to Haggis.
The haggis season has begun
and all over Scotland every gun
Is taken down with loving care
Though some prefer the haggis snare
The haggis are a wiley lot
That’s why they are so seldom shot
Then hidden in the highland heather
Great hairy Clansmen crouch together
And having laid the haggis bait,
a life-like haggis on a plate,
One cries out loudly: ’There’s the noo'
Which means the haggis are in view
It’s flying upside down and low
The guns all fore but they’re too slow
For thought it’s rather old and fat
They’re awful hard to hit like that
And as it flies off into the mist
Great hairy clansmen shake their fists
Scream their curseds to the crags
Stamp on empty haggis bags
And so the haggis get away
to live until next Christmas day
'`Come back haggis'’
And that’s the reason it is so rare
This strange traditional Scottish fare
We’re that haggis hi hooray
It’s hog’manay not Christmas day
How to hunt the Haggis
Posted on October 22, 2012
| 2 minutes
| 219 words
| Ton Kersten
Most people are familiar with my love of Scotland, single malt and (of course) haggis. But most people do not have a clue what haggis is and when you tell them, they walk out in disgust.
But a colleague of mine found out that haggis is just an animal that can be hunted in the Scottish Highlands.
This is how it’s done:
…..asked me how the haggis were hunted so I explained that there were two types of haggis, who, because they lived on the steep slopes of the Scottish Highlands, developed legs of different lengths on their left and right sides depending upon which way they travelled round the mountain to graze.
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Resize a partition
Posted on October 19, 2012
| 3 minutes
| 551 words
| Ton Kersten
I often have to increase the size of a virtual disk on a virtual machine. But I always seem to forget how to do it. I guess I have done it over a 100 times and I cannot remember exactly how I did it. So this blog entry is to help people on how to do this and as a reminder to myself.
This example is done on a virtual machine with CentOS 6, but it can be done on every Linux.
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MySQL backup error
Posted on August 9, 2012
| 1 minutes
| 188 words
| Ton Kersten
After upgrading my MySQL database server from version 5.0.95 to 5.1.61 I suddenly got these errors in the backup logging.
mysqldump: Couldn't execute 'SELECT /*!40001 SQL_NO_CACHE */ * FROM `EVENTS`': Cannot proceed because system tables used by Event Scheduler were found damaged at server start (1577) dbdump gave errorcode 2 for database 'information_schema' 2012-08-09 09:07:53 -> Finished MySQL backup on host 'xxx.tonkersten.com' Hmm, no idea what has happened. I hope I didn’t do something stupid.
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CDE is Open Source
Posted on August 6, 2012
| 1 minutes
| 44 words
| Ton Kersten
Today the classic, and old, Common Desktop Environment (a.k.a. CDE) was
released into the Open Source world.
I haven’t been able to get a running version by now, but I keep trying.
git status in the prompt
Posted on July 23, 2012
| 2 minutes
| 289 words
| Ton Kersten
Working with git a lot I decided I needed some git status in my prompt.
I searched the web and some solutions where almost what I wanted and this one by Sebastian Celis came very close.
But it didn’t work with my version of zsh, because that didn’t seem to understand the =~ operator.
I also think Sebastian makes things over complicated and so I changed some things aroud.
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No network on CentOS 6
Posted on July 17, 2012
| 1 minutes
| 171 words
| Ton Kersten
When installing a minimal CentOS 6 system, minimal really, really means minimal. After a reboot the network interfaces do not start, so network connectivity is non existing.
Looking into that I noticed that the file /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 contained
DEVICE=eth0 HWADDR=11:22:33:44:55:66 NM_CONTROLLED=yes ONBOOT=no BOOTPROTO=dhcp TYPE=Ethernet USERCTL=no PEERDNS=yes IPV6INIT=no The lines that mess things up are NM_CONTROLLED=yes meaning the interfaces are managed with NetworkManager, which isn’t actually installed as part of a minimal install.
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New version of We-Blog
Posted on July 10, 2012
| 1 minutes
| 93 words
| Ton Kersten
Today I released version 0.8 of We-Blog.
I created a Google project and a Google discussion group.
Version 0.8 is now the stable branch and 0.9 the development branch.
What’s new? Well, to be really honest, not that much. I fixed some minor bugs and did a lot of code cleanup. Although the original code of Jaromir was very nice, there was some room for improvement. I removed a lot of double functions and variables and put them all together in a We.
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Finding key codes on Linux
Posted on July 4, 2012
| 2 minutes
| 319 words
| Ton Kersten
It often happens that I get into a situation where I need to know key codes of pressed keys. On my Mac that’s simple. Just use the Key Codes by Many Tricks.
But on Linux I constantly was trying to find out which key produced what.
So I ended up writing a program for that. I started of in the shell, but that ended up being rather tricky and unnecessary complicated.
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Burning VIDEO_TS on OSX
Posted on July 1, 2012
| 1 minutes
| 99 words
| Ton Kersten
I was trying to burn a folder with a VIDEO_TS directory onto a DVD. But in a way that it will start in a normal DVD player as well as starting automagically. And this all had to be done on Apple’s OSX.
I googled a little and tried some things and this is what I can up with:
hdiutil makehybrid -udf \ -udf-volume-name DVD_NAME \ -o MY_DVD.iso \ /path/to/VIDEO_TS/parent/folder Make sure that /path/to/VIDEO_TS/parent/folder is the path to the folder containing the VIDEO_TS folder, not the VIDEO_TS folder itself.
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What the *F*
Posted on June 29, 2012
| 1 minutes
| 109 words
| Ton Kersten
I’m registered as a Computable expert and as required I do have a profile page on their website.
And now I get this (partially in Dutch):
Beste Ton Kersten,
Via je profielpagina op Computable.nl stuurt gift d evals je onderstaand bericht.
Met vriendelijke groet, Redactie Computable
Contact me with this email giftevals@yahoo.com
Hello am Gift i am 23 years old single. After seen your profile i became interested in you,so i decide to write you for us to build a good relationship if you don’t mind,you can email me but (giftevals@yahoo.
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New header
Posted on June 28, 2012
| 1 minutes
| 31 words
| Ton Kersten
Today I’ve posted a new version of the header program.
Nothing really fancy happened, just added support for zonefiles, in
this case the Bind ones.
It’s available at the usual places.
sed tips and tricks
Posted on June 22, 2012
| 3 minutes
| 599 words
| Ton Kersten
I’m creating a Puppet Starter Kit with some standard manifests included and a complete set of documentation. All documentation should be written in Markdown and will be served by Markdoc. But I want to generate all Markdown files from the Puppet manifests, so I only need to document the manifest file. Generating the Markdown is not that difficult, except that I kept ending up with empty lines at the top of the manifest code and I wanted to get rid of those.
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Puppet updates
Posted on June 18, 2012
| 1 minutes
| 155 words
| Ton Kersten
When working with Puppet and a VCS (like git and SVN) it’s nice to have a simple way of updating the Puppet tree.
My tree is always in /etc/puppet and owned by user and group puppet. User puppet is allowed to checkout the complete tree from git or subversion.
I have created two one-liners to update the complete tree and make sure all rights are still correct.
update_svn ~ \{.
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World IPv6 day
Posted on June 6, 2012
| 1 minutes
| 50 words
| Ton Kersten
Today is world IPv6 day. So come on you all and make your things IPv6
aware and working. If Google can do it, you surely can as well ;-).
This site is available through IPv6 a long time already and can be
reached at
Join, and that’s an order!
Updated Pygments
Posted on May 16, 2012
| 1 minutes
| 185 words
| Ton Kersten
I’m using Pygments for quite some time now and I just noticed there was a new version available (1.5). I installed that and I was wondering if there would be a lexer included for Puppet. Well, it wasn’t, but a short Google action directed me to the Pygments lexer for the Puppet DSL.
Of course my old CentOS 5 system with Python 2.6 doesn’t want to install this, so I hacked the Puppet lexer into Pygments.
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pdfPres package created
Posted on February 4, 2012
| 1 minutes
| 54 words
| Ton Kersten
To present PDF slides on Linux I use
pdfPres. But when I want
to use this on OS X Lion, this doesn’t work. So I created an OS X Lion
package for pdfPres.
This is only tested on OS X Lion and it does require XQuartz.
MySQL database replication
Posted on January 20, 2012
| 2 minutes
| 388 words
| Ton Kersten
This week I was asked to setup a system with a single MySQL master server and a couple of slave servers. I have done that before, so there is no problem. The problem is that I do not do that on a daily basis, so I need to check the commands every time I set it up. So, as a note to myself I describe how to setup a single MySQL master with multiple slaves.
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Twitter from the console
Posted on December 5, 2011
| 1 minutes
| 88 words
| Ton Kersten
Since a couple of days I’m also on Twitter.
I tried to avoid it for a while, but I wanted to follow some people, so it was about time I started to Twitter as well.
As you can imagine, no graphics for me. It turned out that wasn’t as easy as I hoped. Some of the Twitter command line tools did not work or where that old that they even didn’t compile.
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Strange question
Posted on November 2, 2011
| 1 minutes
| 70 words
| Ton Kersten
In the last couple of weeks I’ve been teaching a course for shell-script starters.
When I was explaining $@ and $* and the difference between these two a student asked me:
Does the @ have anything to do with the fact that we are talking about an indirect linked list of command parameters?
WTF?
Unfortunately I couldn’t answer the question, because I don’t have any idea what he’s talking about.
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Working on We-Blog
Posted on October 7, 2011
| 1 minutes
| 49 words
| Ton Kersten
At the moment I’m working on We-Blog. I added an `alt' tag to pages. The
defined text will be shown on `mouse-over' when you hover over the page
link.
This is part of We-Blog 0.8. This release is not stable yet, but the
current code is already on GitHub.