Simon Cook » Internet

Current Work on some new Techious Membership Features

Si — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 17:28:42 +0000

Now only if Windows would let me use WebDAV over https without tripping up over itself every 30 seconds…

Basically I have been working on a nice WebDAV document store. Once complete it will either be a new store or just link to main hosting for Techious Members. (Finally a use for SpcookCMS’ “Member Store Size” feature.) xD

It mounts just like a SMB share

Document storage on Techious (for an actual use for your membership)

Edit: Thanks to NetDrive, that does allow WebDAV over SSL to work easily, it all works now! Just a bit of fine tuning and we will have a new Techious Subscription feature!

Thanks to NetDrive, all works now

tchs.eu – The Little URL Shrinker that could

Si — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 22:55:21 +0000

Right, well this will only be of interest to a few you, and even a smaller set of those will know what this is all about. Some time ago I created tchs.eu, a small URL shortener just like any other. Think of it as a Techious branded tinyurl.com. And for a while things were good. But, as is the way with all good things in the tech world, good is not good enough. Things always need to be better than they currently are.

Then came along bitly.Pro, and all was better. It has more sophisticated tracking, allowed us to use it basically anywhere in any application. However there have been a few downsides to this. bitly.Pro accounts (from what I can tell) act just like any bit.ly account so http://bit.ly/mylink and http://tchs.eu/mylink go to the same place. This does however mean that all previous tchs.eu links are now null and void. Sorry about that, that’s the cost for progress, but I’m about 99% sure that we’ll never have to do something like that again. Unless bit.ly goes bust or something, but I doubt that would happen.

Also, this currently means that only I have the power to create tchs.eu links. The way bitly.Pro accounts work is that a custom domain can be used by only one user account, any links I create automatically become tchs.eu links, but only I can create them. Though there is a fix to that, which you will be able to see soon. Thanks to the power of the bit.ly API (well any API really), I can create a nice little wrapper that gives any user (I decide) on the SpcookCMS platform access to create links without giving them my username and password. Woot!

So that’s the story about everything that’s happened to tchs.eu lately. But rest assured, any links created since Feb 1st 2010 will still work, and should still work for the forseeable future. Oh yeah, have a screenshot

bitly.Pro Dashboard

Note: For those interested, the tchs.eu link for this blog post is http://tchs.eu/ddyB23 xD

A Lack of Updates

Si — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 13:10:13 +0000

Yeah, I know I have kindof been neglecting this website somewhat at the moment. But, this is because I have been quite busy. For my first week back at Uni I had two pieces of coursework that needed completing aswell as some other stuff that needed doing. Also a week ago I had an exam so revising for that has taken up alot of my time.

For once I am free from having half a million and one things to do for University so I have the time to catch up on some stuff, namely my website and launching lolgasm this weekend (hopefully!)

As for things, well having so much to do means I have had no time for anything else. I know the theme is a bit borked on here at the moment. This I believe has something to do with the WordPress beta I am running all the time so for now this is something that has to be lived with, but when there is more stuff that I can post about, I will be. This weekend after the lolgasm launch has been taken for, I will be writing a blog post that I have had drafted up for a while about some Techious2 features, so look out for that!

Anyway, yeah have fun and fear the lols (could that be a catchphrase for lolgasm?)

ElfReedy

Si — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 11:12:32 +0000

I know this has been on Techious for quite a whie, but I thought it would be good to share some good lols this Christmas Time. After Aaron’s insertion of pictures of us in ElfYourself, and seeing Reedy’s reaction to it, I put 5 pictures of him from the End of Sixth Form album and put it into ElfYourself. Here are the end results:

Send your own ElfYourself eCards

How to upgrade from Fedora 9 to 10 using Yum

Si — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 16:58:49 +0000

On Tuesday, the latest version of Fedora came out which includes the usual round-up of new updates for several purposes, which can be read http://docs.fedoraproject.org/release-notes/f10/en_US/index.html#sn-Fedora_10_overview

I use a Fedora 9 server, which I can’t get to, so the normal method of putting a disc in and letting anaconda do all the work just isn’t suitable for me, so using yum I “upgraded” by telling yum to use the Fedora 10 repos and then getting the system to update from this. This method is somewhat risky, but for this case it seemed to turn out well. Previously this method has caused funny problems with X-server, but as I don’t use any x applications (everything is just command line for me) this wasnt an issue.

The steps I used to set up this system was as follows.

Firstly, make sure your Fedora 9 installation is as up to date as possible. This is done in the normal way, and for this, it is probabily best if you clear your cache of any repos.
```
yum clean all && yum update && yum clean all
```
You will notice I clear the repo cache twice, this is to make sure that when we get it to do the upgrade, it doesnt try to use any old F9 repos.
Remove any extra repos other than the default Fedora ones, to minimise package conflicts even further. These files can be found in /etc/yum.repos.d/

Run the following command into rpm to get fedora to believe it is Fedora 10 and then to update itself to it:

rpm -Uhv http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/releases/10/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/fedora-release-10-1.noarch.rpm http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/releases/10/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/fedora-release-notes-10.0.0.1.noarch.rpm

Run another yum update, this time it will download a lot of packages as this will now upgrade you to Fedora 10
Reboot using the reboot command
Pray (a little)
Say hello to Fedora 10

You should now be running a proper version of Fedora 10. Note however that using an installation disc and upgrading using anaconda is still the recommended method of upgrading, but for those that cannot do that, at least this offers an alternative.

Note however that due to to some changes that happen between versions, you might notice some slight bugs running a new version upgraded in this way. I have yet to see any of these probems, but that is not to say that there aren’t any. Problems that are found will have to be fixed some other way, and I cannot be held responsible for any of these. Basically, here is a method but it is unsupported so it’s at your own risk.

I hope these instructions will come in handy to someone at some point, but basically if you need them, they are here.

New Gmail Themes

Si — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 22:41:33 +0000

Just got this update literally a minute ago, and it confused me… what the hell, my gmail looks different. It appears theres now themes built into it, which seem to be just like iGoogle themes. There are 31 themes at the moment, and I have screenshotted a few for you here:

Right now I am using the Planets theme, its offering me quite a good mix of image and transparency, though I think I may settle on the Shiny theme or some other theme that resembes a normal Google blank page.

Anyone else seeing this at all? To see, go to your Gmail settings page, and look for the “Themes” tab.

Edit: This is only showing on my Gmail account, not my Google Apps account at the moment, so it appears its a gradual rollout (I have give me beta stuff turned on in Apps)