Install SoX 14.3.2 on Debian 6
These days I am working on a very nice project which has to do with simple music compositing inside a web browser. I thought to use the fine SoX which can do many things with the processing of sounds. I am using it to combine sound series and then mix a few of them. I need to export the sounds as OGG and MP3 files. The OGG files will be used by most of the HTML5 ready browser and there is a fallback with flash that will use the MP3 files. Even if a browser doesn’t support the OGG file it will automatically use the MP3 file.
I am working the project on my laptop where I have installed Linux Mint 12, with the SoX v14.3.2 installed from it’s repository. With this version I didn’t have any problem on encoding the MP3 files. But on my web server I have a Debian 6 installed, where the SoX application is v14.3.1. Unfortunately, this version doesn’t support encoding to MP3 files because of a bug.
If you think things are in a mess now, JUST WAIT!
“Nothing is ever forgotten, not completely. And if something can be remembered it can come back. - Dr. Who
PHP password generator
Today I had to create a script to create a large amount of unique passwords for a project. To be more specific, we needed more than 200000 passwords. So, I created a nice php script that does the job. These passwords were created in about 33mins on my desktop computer. Do you think it is slow? It would be great if you could provide any faster solution?
The script has two stages of duplication check, with the second one being optional. The first one is performed as soon as a new password is created. The second check happens at the end of the password generation, using the array_unique function of php.
255 days uptime
My personal webserver has 255 days uptime. High availability for my hosted websites, with no downtime all these days. Of course, the webserver is fully updated at the latest stable software available.
Extract emails macro for jEdit
The editors are my most used programs daily. As a web developer, I use plain text editors for coding. For the last couple of years I prefer to use the jEdit, which is Java based, really fast, with plenty of plugins to make it suitable for you. I use it everyday because it has all the feautures I need from an editor. It also has “macros”, which I never used before, until yesterday.
A customer of mine, gave me a big text he created, with plenty of emails written among various other texts. His need was to extract all the emails from the text in a way that he can use to import the emails in a database. So a new text with all the emails, seperated with a semicolon would be just fine.
Linux Mint 12 installation move
Yesterday I got a new hard disk for my trustful laptop. My HP laptop runs for more than three years, every day, for more than ten hours. As you can see it’s a fully working computer. If you ask why I had to change the hard disk, the reasons are safety and speed. Safety, because you never know what might happen after all that time of daily work. Speed, because the new hard disk (Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid SSD 500GB) is almost twice as fast as the previous one (Toshiba MK3252GSX 320GB). I connected the new hard disk using SATA to USB converter.
It makes no sense to worry about things that you can not change their influence in your life
Count IPs and check your attackers
On my webservers I always use an installation of munin, to track events on my servers that happened while I was sleeping. Today, I saw that around 6 in the morning there where a huge increase of mysql requests, around 6.5 times more than the average count of requests. Also the cpu usage increased that time around 7.8 times over the average. That problem last for about 10 minutes. So I had to investigate it a little bit.
AmigaOS official website launched
I am really proud to say that recently a new website of mine launched, and this is AmigaOS.net. This is a website that I was working for around 4 months, which I didn’t do alone. I am leading a team of people who are working voluntarily together and helped to create the whole website.
The Amiga community is an old and really dedicated community of people, who were asking for a new website about our beloved operating system. That was something that a lot of people were asking for a long time.
As I am currently beta tester of the latest versions of AmigaOS, I have access to the beta tester’s IRC channel. One day I was lucky to meet and talk with the team leader of AmigaOS developer’s Steven Solie. He expressed the interest of Hyperion Entertainment’s (hyperion-entertainment.biz) for a new website. I grabbed the opportunity and asked him if I could send a proposal about how I was thinking it should be. He totally agreed and the work started for me.
I am happy to lead a very good team of people who liked the idea and was too kind to help me from the first time. First of all I spoke with Michael Carillo (MikeyC) who helped me to write down the proposal. We tried to create and describe all the topics and ideas that this new website must have. Gladly, Steven liked our proposal and he forwarded it to Hyperion Entertainment. As soon as we got the green light to start creating it, I spoke with Nikola Tomić (djnick) and asked him to create the necessary graphics. He did just after a few discussions of how it should look. From the first designs he sent me, I knew that he was the best choice for the graphics.
Meanwhile, Richard Lake (djrikki) and Stefano Guidetti (Lecta) joined the team. As I took the programming of the website and Nikola got the graphics design, the rest of the team took the hardest part of the website, which is the content. They gathered the images, photos, logos and wrote the most of the texts.
Around the first half of September we had the most of the website ready for Steven to check out, add/change content and help by approving it. The website had to be ready for this year AmiWest, where it was presented for the first time. Thank God we had it ready on time.
John Scolieri, the current domain owner, kindly provided us with the domain name of the website and helped us to configure it. He gladly helped us right away.
From the comments that we read, it seems that people really like it. They are saying that it is really modern, it expresses the AmigaOS spirit, it is looks professional and they are really enthusiastic about it. These comments are the best payment for us all.
But the work on AmigaOS.net doesn’t stop here. We have a lot to do from now on. Hope you like it too.
web developer, Amiga lover, Drupal follower, mobile application explorer, truth seeker, social media user, self-taught guitarist, parent & husband... at least for now...
