errr-online.com

I upgraded my Vista Windows Media Center machine to Windows 7 this weekend. I was wishing I could get Hulu into media center so I went to google. I found posts where people had done it, but most of them were using some 3rd party app to edit some settings and do it, and the rest never said how they did it. Well since none of the apps were open source it made me very un-trusting of them. I decided to figure out how to add this my self. Its pretty simple. First you need to install the Hulu Desktop. Next open a windows explorer and navigate to your users WMC directory. Here is where my users info is:

C:\Users\errr\AppData\Roaming\Media Center Programs

Next simply stick a shortcut to the Hulu desktop in this folder. Windows Media Center should not be running while you do this. Name this shortcut “Hulu Desktop” or what ever you want. Once that is done simply close your explorer window and start WMC. You will need to go to the Extras section, and go into the Extras Library, select Hulu Desktop (or what ever you named it). This will minimize Windows Media Center and open Hulu Desktop. If its not full screen simply full screen it, and when you close it from full screen it will reopen that way next time. You will now be able to control Hulu desktop with your Media Center remote. The annoying thing is that when you close out of Hulu it does not restore WMC, but you can hit your Media Center button and that will reopen WMC in full screen.
Pretty easy eh?

So I have been trying to think of cool things I could do with Twitter. I happen to be a HUGE fan of nagios for monitoring my systems. From time to time some of the systems I monitor go down, and sometimes they are my email servers, so getting a message from nagios about this is kind of out of the question unless I setup alternative email accounts that I would then have to add to the already large number accounts I have… So why not just “tweet” the notice. This way I have an easy way to get the status. This is what prompted me to write py-nag. Its a pretty simple script that you can toss on your system and then define a new command in nagios and easy as pie now you get notices in twitter. Its all python and the only dep needed should be python-twitter And a simple apt-get install python-twitter took care of that for me.

To set this up you can simply place the nagger.py script somewhere on your system. I put it in /usr/local/bin and named it py-nag

#wget -O /usr/local/bin/py-nag https://code.google.com/p/py-nag/source/browse/nagger.py

Note the # this indicates the command needs to be run as root or you can use sudo. Next set the file to be executable

#chmod +x /usr/local/bin/py-nag

Next you need to configure nagios. On my Debian box I will edit the following file like so:

vim /etc/nagios3/commands.cfg

Next we need to add the command definition

define command {
command_name notify-userName-by-tweet
command_line /usr/local/bin/py-nag –twitusr=MYTWITUSER –twitpass=’MYTWITPASS’ –msg=’T: $NOTIFICATIONTYPE$ Hst: $HOSTALIAS$ dt: $LONGDATETIME$’ –dmonly –user=WhoToTweet
}

Next you need to set your contact to use this command like so:

service_notification_commands notify-userName-by-tweet

This is done in your contact confg. service_notification_commands will accept a comma seperated list so this can be one of many commands. Next you need to reload the nagios config. Now you are all ready to get Direct messages from your nagios nagger. If you prefer to not get the notice as a DM you can use the optional –tweetit param instead of the –dmonly If you use the –tweetit param you do not need the –user flag. I sure hope some people find this useful.

So today I moved our web root from this OLD system to our new server. First things first I tried to hit some of the links and I was served given the option to d/l the file… Well I could go to the Web server config file and tell it to parse these files as php, or how about we ditch the .php3 for something this decade… like .php So I go to our web root and look for all the files that end in .php3

find . -iname “*.php3″ -print

Nice. Now I have a huge list of files here.. How on earth can I rename them with out this taking all day… I used rename like so:

find . -iname “*.php3″ -print |xargs rename -n ’s/\.php3/\.php/’

This command will NOT actually change ANYTHING on your system. The -n flag says to run through as a test and tell me what you would be doing if I wanted it done… I can see from this output that I do indeed want to run this command.

find . -iname “*.php3″ -print |xargs rename -v ’s/\.php3/\.php/’

Now this time it did go though and rename and it printed to the screen what it did (thats what the -v flag does verbose). Now I can go though and edit the index file that pointed to these php3 files and remove that 3. Simple and now I dont have that silly 3 on the file names any more.

So today I was setting up a new laptop for one of our employees. I went to activate his copy of Office 2007 and was told that I had already activated this copy to many times!! Oops, that is my bad for having such a messy desk that I grabbed the wrong copy of office and used the wrong key. No big deal I think to my self so I call to activate over the phone. While talking to this script reader he tells me that my copy is over activated and now I need to reinstall using this other disk (same version of office same everything..) I get a bit pissed cause I have better things to do with my time then totally reinstall Office just to change a simple key. I tell him how that is crazy and that there just HAD to be a way to do this with out a reinstall. The “tech” tells me that there is no way. I tell him he is nuts and how he is lazy and should learn more about his job. So off to regedit I went. I dug though HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\12.0\ since it was the biggest number. Mine also had an 8.0 and an 11.0. While digging though there I see “Registration”, I open it then while going though there I found something called DigitalProductID and something else called ProductID. On a whim I decided to just delete these key=>values so I right clicked on them and hit delete. Next I closed regedit and opened up Outlook. Guess what it asked me for thats right!! It asked me for a product key. I gave it, then Office activated with no issues… So this is to you, jerk at M$ who tried telling me this was not possible!! IN YO FACE!!!

Simple and quick post… The default user for DRAC is root with a password of calvin
enjoy!!

If you have an application that uses xBase/dBase files to store data you may at some point need to export that data into a real database, like MySQL. This is a really simple task thanks to a nifty app called dbf2mysql. For my example I was using some CRM software called ACT. They used dBase III files to store their data. So I just went to the windows box that was holding my dBase file. I used winscp to move it to my Linux box. Next I used:

dbf2mysql -vvv -c -f -d dbname -r -U dbuser -P dbuserpass CustomerInfo.dbf

What this does is turns up the verbose logging to my screen, next the -c will create a table in my database named “test” (this is default and can be changed with the -t flag) -f makes all the field named from the dbf file be changed to lower case, next the -d, -U, and -P seem pretty obvious, and that leaves us with the -r which will Trim trailing and leading white space from CHAR type fields. All this info and more can be found in the man page. Here is the trail end of what I got from the output of my command:

fields in dbh 71, allocated mem for query 4293, query size 2156
Inserting records
Inserting record 0
Inserting record 100
Inserting record 200
Inserting record 300
Inserting record 400
Inserting record 500
Inserting record 600
Inserting record 700
Inserting record 800
Closing up….

Now I can log into phpmyadmin and verify that all my data has been moved successfully.