Integrating Planet With WordPress

I needed to Integrate Planet with WordPress for my site. I tried to figure out the best way possible to accomplish this. Planet is a nifty Python app that gets run from cron. It grabs a bunch of rss feeds and then writes them out to file in a format specified by a template.

Migrating from LVM to Software RAID

My MythTV box was originally a 2 disk system set up as an LVM device. Because I can’t cost effectively back this system up, I wanted to get at least some level of redundancy. I purchased 2 additional drives and decided to set up a RAID 5 array using mdadm.

I already had data on the first two disks that I did not feel like losing, so building the RAID array was a gradual process. Luckily I was able to prune the data worth keeping on the LVM down to a point where it would fit on one disk. I then shrunk the filesystem using resize2fs. Next I shrunk the lvm and removed the second drive from the volume set.

I then used fdisk to create a suitable partition table on /dev/sdb and mirrored that to sdc and sdd using sfdisk.

Now that I had three drives ready, I created a 4 disk RAID 5 in “degraded” mode. I then formatted the partition as jfs and copied the data off of the LVM disk. Once this was accomplished, I again used sfdisk to write the partition table to sda and then mdadm to hotadd the approriate partitions to the array.

Thunderbird Tweaks…

I’ve recently been forced to move my mail to a virtual hosting environment. Doing this has been a bit of a pain because of a lot of historical use and abuse of user-extension@domain type email addresses. While migrating away from them and realizing that my hosting provider didn’t provide me with a great strategy for manipulation of procmailrc files, I’ve been forced to look into IMAP client based filtering.

The first thing I noticed is that Thunderbird doesn’t by default allow you to filter on List ID headers. You can add this in through the gui, but it effectively amounts to this tweak in your prefs.js file:

user_pref("mailnews.customHeaders", "List-Id");

I also use the following tweak which attributes quotes in email replies:

user_pref("mailnews.reply_header_type", 2);

What I’m currently hunting for is a Reply-to-list tweak or extension. This is the only piece I’m missing from a fully functional MUA setup. It’s a pretty big problem for me at the moment. If anyone has any suggestions, I’m all ears.

As far as XPI extensions go, I’m currently using Enigmail for PGP signing my email and World Weather to virtually experience the outdoors without breaking a sweat…

VS.net and Conditional Linking

I develop an application for work that adds SourceForge enterprise edition synchronization functionality to MS Project. For obvious reasons, we are required to support customers running more than one version of Project. Our current supported list include Project 2003 and Project XP.

The application is written in C#. And uses COM to access Project internals. We’ve managed to get down to a point where we have one code base that supports both versions of Project, but we still need to do a seperate build for each version. Here in lies the rub… With visual studio 2003, you have no way of changing a reference to an external library based on a build target. This means that every time I need to do a build, I must manually make changes to the references in order to build for older versions. This is a bit ridiculous considering this is a pretty basic requirement. It is also a huge potential source of error… Hopefully this will be addressed at some point in the future. I’ll try not to hold my breath.

Windows XP, a couple AVI files and the hunt for Explorer.

I’ve got Samba set up on my MythTV box to allow windows PCs to access the streams and movie stores. Browsing these folders has caused random explorer crashes and also induced the odd string of colourful expletives. Working around these crashes is rather annoying, but I think I’ve finally figured out the magic:

First run ‘regsvr32 /u shmedia.dll’

This command will stop windows from trying to thumbnail all of your videos and crashing explorer on folders which contain a lot of files…

With this hack in place, I noticed that certain avi files would still cause explorer to crash.

You can “fix” this by editing the registry:

Under HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers\
delete any keys which contain the word DivX in their name.

Additionally, under HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\SystemFileAssociations\.avi\shellex\
if a key named PropertyHandler exists, delete the value. It will show up as (Default).

Hopefully this should work around the random crashes.