Adventures in IT

This post is more of a "note to self" than an attempt to be useful to somebody else. I am even typing this post in Internet Explorer. It feels like a Pterodactyl is about to swoop into the room and try to shit on HTML standards. In any case I gave my backup laptop to my kid and so had to install Windows on it. Why? Well I want her to be able to play games so Windows seems the best choice. Plus she can still learn open source programming languages, albeit in a funny way. Luckily I remembered this blog that I read and they posted this really nifty tool called Ninite. Click the link here ( http://ninite.com/ ). This helpful tool lets you download a single install file that installs free (either OSS or free to use) software like Libre Office, Flash, Notepad++, antivirus, etc. Lets just say that it feels almost like an Ubuntu meta-package that helpfully installs everything you need, but you get to choose. Plus it's all free and the only software I don't tr

A Google UI employee contemplating how to make Larry and Sergei some money I updated my Google Chrome mostly because I trust Google in terms of UI. In the past they've always released updates that make things faster or easier to reach (while perhaps adding new extra functions). Why am I so disappointed? Well now when you open a new tab you're confronted with a Google search bar and your most visited sites. This most probably sounds like a good thing. BUT... your tab is in the omnibar which is the same as a Google search if you don't specify a valid URL. So to make use of the default Google search requires you to tab or click into the box. More annoyingly you can't choose to have your installed apps show instead of a Google search box and an acknowledgement that they track your browsing activity and share that with the American spy agency. So instead of hitting CTRL-T and clicking feedly I have to face NSA surveillance by Google showing me they're track

I got this error even though I had an smsbox defined.  Unfortunately I had forgotten to create the smsbox-route group, so this is a very quick fix: #--------------------------------------------- ## SMS ROUTING ##--------------------------------------------- group = smsbox-route smsbox-id = mainbox smsc-id = ztemodem-smsc-group sim-buffering = false ... continues ... Just make sure the id's matchup, so my smsbox group begins with this: #--------------------------------------------- ## SMS BOX ##--------------------------------------------- group = smsbox smsbox-id = mainbox ... continues ... And my SMSC looks like this: #--------------------------------------------- ## GSM MODEM SMSC ##--------------------------------------------- group = smsc smsc-id = ztemodem-smsc-group ... continues ... This successfully cleared the "smsbox_list empty" error and allowed messages to be delivered properly. Kannel had until then been able to send messages and receive delivery

Our office (who wants me to mention how awesome they are) had a need for a means to send/receive automated sms messages relating to online banking. We decided to give a Raspberry Pi the job and so I have had the fun of setting it all up. First off I installed Rasbian (  http://www.raspbian.org/  ) which is a Debian fork and is sufficiently easy to do following the guide on eLinux ( here  ) which is linked to from the Raspberry Pi project website downloads page. Next came a standard LAMP stack install.  I needed to have a web-server running because we will be running a management package on the box to track messages etc. Next came Kannel.  I used the default package available from the Rasbian repositories so there was no need for fiddling. My kannel.conf file was the next hurdle.  For the most part this is pretty easy to set up from the examples given on Kannel's site and elsewhere on the web.  I want to just mention the modem part, which was perhaps the most challenging par

Installing phpMyAdmin is a snip in CentOS, but there is a little trick that most tutorials skip out. For some reason the default setup (using standard repositories) does not like you having a null password for your mySQL root account. I know that you are supposed to be able to set a blank password in the pma config file and set the option to allow blank passwords to true, but this did not work for me until I set a root password. I kept getting a popup box that looked exactly like a .htaccess Apache protect but was actually just a Javascript prompt. So here goes: Step One - enable your EPEL repo: $ cd /tmp $ wget http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/i386/epel-release-6-7.noarch.rpm # rpm -ivh epel-release-6-5.noarch.rpm Step Two - Install phpMyAdmin # yum search phpmyadmin # yum -y install phpmyadmin Step Three - optionally edit your Apache conf If you get Apache forbidden errors (should not be the case) you can try editing your .conf file