To use this script, do the following:

• Right-click on the desktop and choose “Change Desktop Background“
• Look through the backgrounds, and make sure the ones listed are the ones you want to have the script randomly select
• Open up a text file using “gedit“, and add the contents of the script:
  #!/bin/bash
  installedDir=~/Pictures/backgrounds/random

  i=0
  while read line; do
     data=`echo "${line}" | grep -i filename`
     if [ "$data" != "" ]; then
        filenameCutLength=$((${#data}-11))
        filename=$(echo $data | cut -b11-$filenameCutLength)
        if [ "$filename" != "(none)" ] || [ "$filename" != \
        "random.img" ]; then
           extension=$(echo ${filename,,} | \
           cut -b$(expr ${#filename} - 2)-${#filename})
           if [ "$extension" == "jpg" ] || [ "$extension" \
           == "png" ] || [ "$extension" == "svg" ]; then
              fileArray[$i]=$(echo $filename)
              i=$(expr $i + 1)
           fi
        fi
     fi
  done << EOF
     $(grep deleted=\"false -A7 ~/.gnome2/backgrounds.xml)
  EOF

  fileArrayLength=`echo $[ ( $RANDOM % ${#fileArray[@]} ) ]`
  cp "${fileArray[$fileArrayLength]}" \
  "$installedDir/random.img"

• Save the file as “gRandomBackground.sh” in a directory (this example uses: “/home/$USER/Pictures/backgrounds/random”, if you install it elsewhere, be sure to change the $installedDir variable in the script)
• Open “Terminal” and enter the command:
  crontab -e

  If you haven’t used crontab before, stick with the default, “nano“

• Paste the following as one line into the editor:
  0 */3 * * * bash ~/Pictures/backgrounds/random/gRandomBackground.sh

  This will change the background every three hours, on the hour. “Ctrl+O, and then Ctrl+W” should get the crontab saved and also get you exited out of nano. For more information on how to use cron, see Google.

• Open up the “Appearance Preferences” dialog again, by right-clicking on the desktop and selecting “Change Desktop Background“
• Click the “Add…” button and browse to the directory that gRandomBackground.sh is installed to
• Select the “random.img” background, click the “Open” button, and then the “Close” button

Your background should change every three hours.

Well… turns out, McAfee was the issue. I got an email from them that read in part like this: “Our initial investigation indicates that the error can result in moderate to significant performance issues on systems running Windows XP Service Pack 3.” Moderate to significant? One person affected couldn’t get on the network, had no taskbar, and their computer was auto rebooting… That sounds more like extreme systemic failure!

For verification of the issue, see the following screenshot:

Here are some steps I took to fix it (taken mostly from the following website: http://brianseekford.com/index.php/2010/04/21/how-to-fix-the-mcafee-svchost-crash-from-the-virus-definition-update/)

• Boot workstation in safe mode and login as an administrative user
• Press the following keys: CTRL-ALT-DEL.
• Click the “File>Run” menu item, type in “cmd”, and press the “Enter” key
• Run the command: del “C:\Program Files\Common Files\McAfee\Engine\avvscan.dat”
• Next, we have to copy a replacement svchost.exe from the system if available. Some have found it in “c:\windows\system32\dllcache” and I found it in “C:\Windows\$NtServicePackUninstall$” so I will go with the instructions for what I had on this particular system…
• within the “cmd” window type the following below:
• cd C:\Windows\$NtServicePackUninstall$”
• copy svchost.exe c:\Windows\System32
• Next, restart the workstation, login, and update McAfee to the latest dat file. As of this writing they have replaced the broken 5958 dat with 5959.
• Once McAfee has been updated, I had to restarted the workstation again to get McAfee to report as being updated.

And more reading regarding the issue:

http://www.cnet.com.au/how-to-fix-your-mcafee-crippled-computer-339302608.htm

http://www.switched.com/2010/04/21/mcafee-update-sends-windows-xp-machines-into-endless-reboot/

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/04/21/1735211/McAfee-Kills-SVCHostexe-Sets-Off-Reboot-Loops-For-Win-XP-Win-2000

So I made a simple toggle script and created a launcher for the script on the desktop. Gonna watch video? Double-click the icon. Done watching video, double-click the icon.

Voila. The post appeared when navigating to the .php file.

See: http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/wp_insert_post.

For more creativity, get into the database: http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/wpdb_Class

Seems easier to use than Facebook too.

Here’s a method I frequently use (other examples I’ve seen out there make use of perl, xargs, grep, etc.):

The find command will return a list of all the files in the directory tree and execute the sed command on each one it locates. In the example below, I added the “-name” option to the find command to allow for working only on files with the .js extension:

In the next one, the text to find and replace has special characters (in this case the ‘/’ in the URL).

See the following links to read more about escaping special characters:

• Bash Hackers Wiki - Quotes and escaping
• Unix / Linux Shell Scripting Tutorial - Escape Characters
• Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide

Today while checking out my own site, I noticed that all of the PHP files I tried browsing to returned “500 Internal Server Error” errors.

Now this has gone too far… so I called them up. At first the person I talked to explained that I needed to force PHP5 using a .htaccess file, and proceeded to tell me that they could make the change for me. Calmly, I responded by saying that I did not want a change, and that it had been working fine the way it was for months.

She put me on hold, and while I waited… it started working. She told me that the shared hosting server “had a glitch”.

Afterwards, I ssh’ed into my server. Look what I found:

I thought, “weird, I didn’t put that there”.

Shame on you 1and1, for not cleaning up after yourself. Well, I guess you get what you pay for.

The amount of visitors coming to karlherrick.com is fairly consistent, so I was surprised to see such a spike when I was in a car accident recently. There must be some correlation to draw here.

I am thinking of breaking my leg next week to drive the traffic back up.

Just kidding.

So after doing a bit of research on what others had done, I went about fixing the problem. Interestingly enough, 1and1 could have made some money in this situation if they would allow customers to simply purchase another database to add to their packages, but no, they want an entire upgrade to be purchased.

The first step was to backup the website and database. I ssh’ed into the web host:

Then I backed up the database. The command below will dump all of the databases on the host (in this case, only one MySQL 4.x database) into a dated bzip file, in the home directory.

Now to backup the site itself (not only in case disaster struck, but this would get a local copy of the sql dump I just made as well). On a local OS X workstation (or Ubuntu, if that suits your tastes) I ran something similar to the following:

From there, I was able to log into the 1and1 control panel and delete the existing database. This allowed me to setup a new one, and in particular, choose MySQL 4 or 5 as the type.

Back to the 1and1 hosting account:

I uncompressed the sql dump:

and was greeted with the raw sql in the file, “2010-01-14-01-59-PM-db-backup.sql”. From here it was only a hop skip and a jump away to restoration. It was necessary to edit the sql file in order to have it restore properly to the newly created database that was just created:

And I changed the $oldDatabaseName to $newDatabaseName.

ctrl+o, enter, and ctrl+x, to save the file and exit nano. The sql dump was now ready to restore to the new database.

The only other things to do were to update any existing applications that needed the new database name, username, hostname, and password.

As a note, if you are updating a Wordpress install to point to a new database, this info can be changed in the file, wp-config.php.

The image above shows the main buildings that are being linked. The main router sits in an upstairs window and is a:

Linksys WRT300N

• Runs DD-WRT V24 - SP2 (Beta)
• Has original antennas
• Has the following properties set (among others, these are the interesting ones)
• Wireless - Basic Settings
• Mode: AP
• Network Mode: BG-Mixed
• Channel: 11 - 2.462 GHz
• SSID Brodcast: Enable
• Wireless - Advanced Settings
• TX Power: 71
• Wireless - Security
• Security Mode: WEP (I haven’t tested WPA2 with WDS yet, and I understand that WEP can be cracked easily)
• Wireless - WDS
• The three router’s MAC addresses are filled in, and are set to “LAN”

The three client WDS routers are also sitting in windows, and are on the first level of the buildings that they are in. They repeat the same SSID, and run on channel 11.

Buffalo WLI-TX4-G54HP

• Originally purchased as an ethernet bridge, it is now running DD-WRT V24 - SP2 (Beta)
• Replaced the stock antenna with a 9 dBi omni-directional
• Is on the 72.6m link

(2) Belkin F5D7230-4 routers

• WDS on the stock firmware works with DD-WRT, sweet!
• These are unmodified, running with their tiny fixed (two) omni-directional antennas
• One is on the 35.4m link, and the other on the 88.5m link

This setup has been going for weeks without an issue, and has served upwards of six families, a two person office, a fifteen to twenty person office, and a classroom with sixteen students.

We have other areas on the same property that have wireless access between buildings, but are nowhere near as complete as this arrangement. If we do end up using wireless to unify the property’s networks, then I will start looking into site to site links, multiple gateways, OLSR, and other mesh technologies. I have my doubts as to how well WDS scales. Has anyone had positive results with professional mesh solutions built on DD-WRT and Linksys hardware?

Never fear… I google’d a bunch and found that if you run the following command on the Mac doing the backups:

It doesn’t appear to do anything (or may possibly do something else that isn’t related to what I was after).

So, I went about it in a different manner. If I clicked on the Time Machine icon (rotating clock) in the menu bar, and clicked “Enter Time Machine”… exited the GUI of Time Machine, and then opened terminal, I could do the following:

1. Become root:
   sudo -s
2. Goto the /Volumes directory, and look for which folder is mounted for Time Machine backups:
   cd /Volumes && ls -l
3. Enter the folder that is mounted for Time Machine backups:
   cd $Mount_Point_For_Backups
4. Look for the .sparsebundle file that is being used for backing up the workstation:
   ls -l
5. Resize the sparsebundle file:
   hdiutil resize -size 200g $hostname.sparsebundle

The sparse image is then resized, and Time Machine will report that there is only around 200 gigabytes total available space rather than around a terabyte (which is the original size of the drive).

• Login to the MBWE’s “Network Storage Manager” by typing the unit’s IP address into a web browser and then authenticating with a valid username and password
• Click the “Advanced Mode” link
• Click the “Advanced” icon
• Check the “Enable” checkbox under the “SSH Access” area
• Click the “Submit” button

Now SSH into the MBWE using the username, “root”, with the default password, “welc0me”. After logging in, be sure to change passwords for the root user by issuing the command, “passwd”.

A few other things I noticed were necessary, if you want ssh access via public key authentication:

• Copy the contents of the public key file from the client (usually ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub) to the MBWE on a new line under /root/.ssh/authorized_keys
• Login as root to the MBWE and issue the following command in the terminal: “chmod go-w ~/“. This was neccessary as when I tried to authenticate via public key, I was getting the following in /var/log/messages if I didn’t, “Authentication refused: bad ownership or modes for directory /root“

Here’s how you can make the two play a little nicer…

OpenOffice

• Already reads and writes .docx, .xlsx, and .pptx (admittedly the .pptx support isn’t near as developed as the previous two formats mentioned, from my experiences at least)
• Download and install the following: Excel Viewer, Word Viewer, and PowerPoint Viewer 2007
• Download and install the following: Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats

Users with older versions of Microsoft Office Products, including Word 2000/2002/2003, Excel 2000/2002/2003, PowerPoint 2000/2002/2003)

• Make sure your office products are updated with the latest service packs if any are available (check Microsoft Update)
• Download and install the following: Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats
• Download and install the following: Sun ODF Plugin for Microsoft Office

Users of Microsoft Office 2007

• Download and install the following: Sun ODF Plugin for Microsoft Office

While there are a ton of ways to script this, using Bash, cut, ls, find, grep, sed, awk, perl, etc… In this particular instance, I find myself with a directory of about fifty files, each named in the following manner…

1. 01 Song Title.mp3
2. 02 Another Song Title.mp3
3. 02 Same Number Song Title.mp3
4. 03 Author - Title.mp3

Bash and cut to the rescue. The following code provides for each file in the current directory to have the number stripped off of the front, even it has spaces in the filename.