Dave Lachapelle

I know a lot of Canadians are weighing in on UBB (not enough mind you) but a good chunk of us are. Meanwhile most other countries are pointing at Canada and laughing. So, I thought I’d take a few minutes, and jot down my own thoughts on the matter, mostly for my own benefit.

In doing a bit of background research, I happened across a Canadian Heritage parody done by none other than Rick Mercer – video after the jump. To summarize – Canada – Gouging consumers since the advent of the telegraph.

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Just a couple updates in case anyone actually reads my blog. I noticed this morning a weird issue with blank page loads in wordpress, which I attribute to a bad caching plugin. I’ve since switched to a new plugin an the blank page loads seem to have disappeared. I have also re-added ads to my blog, for which I apologize. Since leaving MRX, I’ve lost access to my free server, and am now paying for a server to host my blog, so I’m hoping to somewhat offset the costs.

In other news I had an awesome family day weekend up in Sauble, and while Nathan decided not to sleep at night, it was still somewhat restful and relaxing. I got some starcraft 2 in with Forrest and realized exactly how much I suck, but we still had a good time. We also decided to make an iOS game, so I’m likely going to make a page for it here. I have my doubts I’ll actually finish it, but who knows.

Figured I’d put up a quick post. I’ve been growing more and more annoyed with OS X creating resource forks to some of my mapped samba drives, and after searching high and low for a method of disabling resource fork creation on network drives, I’ve effectively come up empty handed.

Now, that being said, I did come up with a way of dealing with resource fork creation – while its not exactly elegant, it works. It just so happens that all my servers are unix based, so to deal with resource fork cleanup, I just added a cronjob to my crontab. This will delete all of OS X’s resource fork files in a specific folder (and subfolders).

0 */1 * * * find /var/www/ -name ‘._*’ -print0 | xargs -t0 rm > /dev/null 2>&1

Note, if you’re going to use this, change the path (/var/www/) to whatever path you want to cleanup.

Also – I take no responsibility for this, make sure you have your data backed up, and all that jazz before you use it.

So, this seems to happen on a fairly regular basis. I decide I like my blog, then spend a bunch of time re-designing it, and then make a few posts and finally forget it for a few months.

Well, I’m hoping to finally break the cycle. I just grabbed the new iPhone app for wordpress and am hoping to be able to post quick things happeing in my life, and save the longer posts for when I have time.

I happened across this today and found it quite interesting – wanted to document it for later use.  Effectively, its a method for implementing memcached using Propel in Symfony 1.2.

memcached as singleton in symfony « ESL Developer Blog.

Happened across an interesting / simple explanation for those who don’t know how ISPs screw their customers, and thought I would add another way ISPs screw over their customers.

You can read the first 9 ways here: 9 Ways ISPs Screw You Over.

10.  ISPs advertise speeds in a way that only people who have an understanding of how data is stored can translate.  For example, lets say you pay for a “10 meg” connection, thats not actually 10 Megabytes per second you’re capable of, its actually 10 Megabits.  Now, there’s quite the difference between Megabits and Megabits, but not so much a difference in the acronyms.  MBps is for Megabytes and Mbps is for Megabits.  The real issue here is if you pay for a 10 Megabit per second connection, your maximum transfer rate is only going to be 1.25 Megabytes per second (there are 8 bits in a byte).  Thats also theoretical, you can very rarely actually achieve the theoretical bandwidth provided by your ISP, unless you’re trying to load their homepage or hit a url that they detect doesn’t exist and throw you a page full of ads.

I’ve been a long supporter of transparency from ISPs, but we’re likely never to see that up here in Canada – at least not until the CRTC cracks down and decides we, the consumers, need some competition and not more monopolies.

Just a quick post today – I ran into the same issue many many other people seem to have, that being connecting to an iSCSI target in Ubuntu 8.04 means you cannot cleanly shut-down your system as it will hang during the shutdown process. I’ve been doing a little bit of research as to why (because obviously this is very bad), and it seems as though whoever wrote the particular version of Open-ISCSI (2.0.865-1ubuntu3.3) decided it would be a good idea to shut down the iSCSI service before unmounting the disks.

So, I figured out a quick workaround – simply change the shutdown order, such that Open-ISCSI is shut down after the filesystems have been unmounted.

cd /etc/rc0.d
sudo mv K25open-iscsi S80open-iscsi

Your rc0.d folder should look something like this:

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 17 2009-11-12 10:27 K20sysstat -> ../init.d/sysstat
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 20 2009-11-12 09:28 K25hwclock.sh -> ../init.d/hwclock.sh
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 26 2009-11-12 09:28 K59mountoverflowtmp -> ../init.d/mountoverflowtmp
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 355 2009-01-23 10:01 README
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 22 2009-11-12 09:29 S15wpa-ifupdown -> ../init.d/wpa-ifupdown
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 18 2009-11-12 09:28 S20sendsigs -> ../init.d/sendsigs
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 17 2009-11-12 09:28 S30urandom -> ../init.d/urandom
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 22 2009-11-12 09:28 S31umountnfs.sh -> ../init.d/umountnfs.sh
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 18 2009-11-12 09:28 S40umountfs -> ../init.d/umountfs
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 20 2009-11-12 09:28 S60umountroot -> ../init.d/umountroot
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 20 2009-11-12 10:28 S80open-iscsi -> ../init.d/open-iscsi
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 14 2009-11-12 09:28 S90halt -> ../init.d/halt

Then, next time you reboot, it should unmount the disks and then stop open-iscsi.

I happened across this little tidbit as I was scrolling through my RSS feeds.  I’ve been so busy lately, I haven’t even had a chance to read half of the entries in my feed reader (most days now I’ve been just saying mark all as read).  But this one caught my eye.  Apparently Boxee has partnered with a third party to build an actual Boxee Box.  This is definitely good news, and I really hope they can pull it off and come out with a great media center box.  Currently I’m running Boxee off my AppleTV – yes Apple, I hacked your stupid AppleTV to run Boxee because you don’t include XVid or DivX codecs, and thats what all my TV shows are stored in.

—Insert Apple Rant here

This is probably the only time you’ll hear me rant about Apple – they brought out this awesome device called the AppleTV, I was super excited by it, has a really nice interface, easy to use, tied to iTunes, and was supposed to make life easier when streaming media to my TV.  Then I found out that they want you to only use the media format they use, which kind of screws anyone with any significant amount of digital video thats not in mp4 format.  Unfortunately I fall into that category, with somewhere around 1.2TB of TV recorded for viewing at my leisure.  To re-encode all of that, I’d a. have to have a ton of extra hard drive space, and b. way too much time on my hands.  So, really, Apple, get with the times already, just include the codecs in the next AppleTV update and allow me to mount my Samba share on it and I think a lot more people will buy your device.

—End Apple Rant

Even if Apple does include these features – which they won’t – I still think a Boxee box is just what the industry needs to jump-start it.  A lot of other companies have tried to bring out media center boxes, but they all suffer from one critical flaw or another; poor ui, no networking support, poor codec support.  So, I’m putting my money towards a Boxee box when they come out – looking forward to finding more details on December 7th during the Boxee Beta release.

Boxee Blog » a Boxee Box is coming!.

Well, its hard to believe it, but in less than a week, I will have been married for a whole month.  I know that isn’t all that long a time to be married, but it seems since the wedding everyone asks me how I’m enjoying married life.  So, I thought I’d take a few minutes, collect my thoughts and update my blog (something that really needs to happen much more often).  Now that I’m not participating in planning a wedding – I say participating because my wonderful wife really did most of the work – I really have no excuse for not updating my blog.

So, the simple answer to everyone’s question – how’s married life – I think can be summed up as, the same as life before the wedding (minus all the wedding planning).  For anyone out there looking to get married to their long time significant other, I would offer this one piece of advice, don’t expect radical changes to your relationship post-wedding.

And thats all the wedding advise I’ll offer, promise.

Recently came up against a bit of a tough nut to crack, so to speak, and thought I’d write up a quick blog about how I fixed it, in case anyone else has this problem. At MRX, we have several different hosting environments we use, one of which is a shared environment for our smaller clients. The problem being that one of those clients had a vulnerability on their site that was allowing spammers to send unauthorized e-mail through our servers, thereby getting us onto a whole bunch of blacklists.

After a bit of searching around, it seems as though its actually possible to completely disable the mail() function from PHP, however, that was only a temporary solution. This is simply a matter of adding

disable_functions "mail"

to the php.ini file and reloading the apache configs.

While I searched for an actual solution to the problem, I came up with the idea of attempting to use a php_admin_value flag value to disable e-mail for a specific virtual host inside the htaccess files until I was able to determine which was the offending site. Again – brick wall – PHP doesn’t support setting disable_functions in the php_admin_value flag.

So, after a bit of searching, I decided to just add the following to each site’s .htaccess files:

php_admin_value sendmail_path "/dev/null"

Essentially sending all e-mail to /dev/null for that particular site. Perhaps not the most elegant solution, but it was effective, as we are no longer sending e-mail through a broken form and I was able to alert the affected client that they had a problem.