NeutralAxis

If you don’t want to depend on an external short URL service like bit.ly or tinyurl.com and you have access to your MySQL database, you can install and run your own with YOURLS.  I managed to get it up and running in about an hour in Linux.  The instructions at yourls.org mentions that an installation alongside WordPress is a bit different than the one described for a standard site.  I found that to be true, and have described what I found worked after the break. (continue reading…)

XBMC, the media center program originally designed to run on the original Xbox video game system, has been running on an old Xbox of mine for the last year or so.  I find myself not using it as much as I’d like though because the machine’s a bit noisy and big to hide around the TV.  Other drawbacks are that it doesn’t allow for HD video, and downloading updates for it practically require a meeting in a dark alley and knowing the secret handshake.

A new article at Lifehacker.com has detailed how to install XBMC on a tiny, silent, Acer AspireRevo with HDMI output.  And given that its for a computer rather than a proprietary video game system, updates are readily available.  I gave it a try on my existing desktop computer with XBMC Live.

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Finally, I think I have my mail server working correctly so that I can send email notifications for system and blog events.  Up to this point, I never received any notification when comments were left on posts.  I used the procedure from this site for my exim4/Ubuntu setup.  Steps repeated after the jump.

[Update:  Yep, it works.  After a false alarm of it not working due to getting stuck in a spam filter, I now get an email to moderate posts from new users and when a comment is posted.] (continue reading…)

When I rip music, I do it twice.  Once in mp3 format for playback on an iPod and once in flac for playback on my local network via Roku Soundbridge players and the Firefly media server.  iTunes doesn’t support flac, so I can’t make iTunes playlists for those files.  I can, however, make them for the mp3 files which are named identically.  And with a little Linux program called “sed”, I can edit the iTunes library to make Firefly read it to work with the flac files. (continue reading…)

Thanks to Steve for helping me to get SSL installed and running.  After an unsuccessful attempt with his help last weekend, the problem dawned on me this morning as I was driving to work.  We had set the port 443 SSL virtualhost to the wrong DocumentRoot directory.  See previous posts about Virtualhost if you’re looking for more explanation.  Also, see the page here for part 1 of the SSL setup instructions followed for setting up a privately signed certificate,  and here for part 2, which we modified a bit for my purposes.  So far the only problem I’ve seen with SSL logins to WordPress is that the flash media uploader doesn’t work.  It reports an IO Error.

Lifehacker.com has found another interesting looking media center for playback of movies, TV Shows, music, photos, and Internet media called Moovida.  The interface is nice looking and is optimized for playback on a TV in HD.  Cross-platform for Linux, Windows and Mac (pending).  See the Lifehacker article and Moovida site for screenshots and feature lists.

Moovida.com

Bingo!

I got the configuration worked out to eliminate “/wordpress” from my URL structure.  This turned out to be much simpler than I was trying to make it.  A big thanks to the various forums where I got advice, but apparently I never made myself adequately clear as to what I was trying to do, because none of the advice was valid for me. (continue reading…)

With the help of a very helpful website guru at webmasterworld.com, I thought I had this problem licked, but its still a no go.  His suggestions and explanation of the process made perfect sense, but resulted in complete failure to load anything at all.  I’ve been doing some trial and error changes, but so far, every different configuration option I try results in some part of the site failing.  Either I have wordpress links load with no local images, nothing loads at all, or something else breaks.  Last night I couldn’t get in to the administration page at all and had to reset everything back to my backup configuration.  I’m beginning to get an understanding of the process though, and I think the breakdown is actually with the rewriterule and rewritecond statements in .htaccess rather than virtualhost.  I think if I can just get some quiet time to work through it in my head, I can figure this out.  In the meantime, you may occasionally see the site down, or in a state of disrepair.

With permalinks now working, I’d like to figure out how to use Apache’s virtualhosts to make different URLs go to different folders as their root.  www.URL.com, blog.URL.com, and www.URL2.com would go to different folders as their document roots.  My first attempt only partially worked. (continue reading…)

I’ve been trying to get this blog adjusted to use “pretty” permalinks, so the URL of posts are readable, and its just not working.  It shouldn’t be this difficult.  [Update: See resolution after the link] (continue reading…)