SquareCows

If you got spotify installed under wine in Linux it may annoy you that you can’t open spotify url’s from just any application. The howto spotify provides works for firefox but not for chrome or pidgin etc etc.

So here is how to make all your apps (at least in gnome) open spotify url’s.

First of all create the browser2spotify script that’s going to be called when you click on a spotify link, don’t forget to make it executable!

echo ‘#!/bin/sh’ > ~/.browser2spotify
echo ‘exec wine “C:\Program Files\Spotify\spotify.exe” /uri “$@”‘ >> ~/.browser2spotify
chmod 755 ~/.browser2spotify

Now let’s associate spotify URL with the open script by editing gconf. Change USERNAME for your account login name

gconftool-2 -t string -s /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/spotify/command “/home/USERNAME/.browser2spotify”
gconftool-2 -s /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/spotify/needs_terminal false -t bool
gconftool-2 -s /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/spotify/enabled true -t bool

You should now be set and ready to roll.

SVN is now up and running again. ApacheMap and MonoBackup are on google code:

ApacheMap: https://code.google.com/p/apachegeomap/source/checkout

Mono-backup: https://code.google.com/p/m0n0-backup/source/checkout

wp-rdfa and wp-dephorm are hosted by wordpress:

wp-rdfa: http://svn.wp-plugins.org/wp-rdfa/

wp-dephorm: http://svn.wp-plugins.org/wp-dephorm/

Feel free to download alter and suggest changes again.

I’m doing some work on the dev server here at SquareCows to improve performance. This however means the local SVN is not currently working. I’m planning to migrate all the SVN repositories over to google code and will be pushing lots of new software patches at the same time. Hopefully I’ll get some time over the holidays to do this. For those of you interested in what I’m doing with the server I’m trialling lighttpd to see what kind of performance boost can be achieved.

I’ve just confirmed wp-RDFa and wp-dephorm are both compatible with WordPress 2.9-RC1. So your free to test the new release without breaking your semantic web presence or leaving your readers vulnerable to the prying eyes of phorm.

If you spot any problems just drop me a mail via the contact form and I’ll look into it.

Just tweaking with my theme to add my logo back on my blog finally.

Here’s a little file to drop into your cowsay to get your very own Square Cow!

If you dont have cowsay installed:

apt-get install cowsay (on any debian/ubuntu system)

Then copy this file you can download to

sudo cp sqcow.cow /usr/share/cowsay/cows/

then simply run:

cowsay -f /usr/share/cowsay/cows/sqcow.cow YOUR-MESSAGE

Your very own SquareCow!

Enjoy!

For those of you who are fans of identi.ca the open version of twitter, you’ve probably been waiting for a decent app that allows you to post updates from your iPhone. Twitter has had plenty of very good apps and my favourite was tweetie. The latest release of this software (tweetie 2) lets you edit the server API info, which means you can connect and post to identi.ca and or status.net.

So here is a quick howto:

1. First add a new account and enter your username and password.

Add Account

2. Now tap the cog symbol to enter advance settings.

3. You should bow be able to update the details with the following URL’s:

Edit API

API Root: https://identi.ca/api

Search API: http://identi.ca/api

*Note: API Root is HTTPS and Search API is HTTP

4. Save your settings and enjoy!

Canonical has just announced Landscape 1.4. This allows you to manage and monitor groups of servers in your business. They also now offer a dedicated landscape server for inside your organisation. <original here>

Cloud management dominates the theme for Landscape 1.4 with new features that allow you to manage your private Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) as easily as you manage your instances on Amazon EC2. Also released are new features that help system administrators be more efficient including time based package updates and role based access. These new features will be available this week on both the Hosted and Dedicated Server Editions of Landscape.

Cloud Computing: UEC Support

Building upon our support for Amazon’s EC2 Cloud, users can now start, stop and manage their private Ubuntu instances on their UEC from within Landscape. Users simply enter their credentials directly through Landscape to start, stop and manage an instance. We’ve designed Landscape to work directly with both Amazon and Eucalyptus console pages so you can manage your instances without having to use any other tools. Landscape securely stores your security credentials making is easy to spin up new instances on UEC or EC2 at anytime. Once the instances are initiated, they all display on the same page allowing you manage all your physical, virtuali and Cloud instances in one place.

New Timed Package Updates

Users can now schedule package updates, system reboots and shutdowns in the future with minute increments. This gives System Administrators the flexibility to schedule activities for systems to occur during planned maintenance windows or low use periods to minimise the impact on the network. Now that we have developed the time / scheduling function, look for us to add this to other areas of Landscape where it it makes sense, like scheduling scripts in the future.

Administrator Roles

As Landscape is deployed in larger enterprises the need to delegate and limit access to systems has become a key need. Now, in addition to having a master admin who can manage all systems within a Landscape account, you can delegate access to systems to other administrators. This builds on our tags function (which allows you to tag computers performing the same function and update them with a single command) to allocate full access to systems by admin. Typically this means sys admins in different areas can be given full access to their local systems, but not to those in another area or country. Like tags, assigning systems to other administrators is completely flexible so you can use what ever criteria you need.

The Landscape 1.4 client is available today and is included with Ubuntu 9.10 server edition. Details are at www.canonical.com/landscape

Ken Drachnik, Landscape Manager

Well worth a look!

For those of you currently using Dropbox, an online storage drive for your personal files, and wanting to upgrade to Ubuntu 9.10 you may hit some problems if you try and install the 9.04 deb file. The program may start but never prompt you for a username and password and just crash out. However all is not lost, there is a away round it as Dropbox offer a source download for the non proprietary bits and will download the other required parts itself. Heres how to get it all working again.

1. First lets get some required software packages.

sudo apt-get install wget build-essential libnautilus-extension-dev libnotify-dev python-docutils

2. Now lets get the source.

sudo su -p

cd /usr/src/

wget https://www.getdropbox.com/download?dl=packages/nautilus-dropbox-0.6.1.tar.bz2

3. Unpack

tar xvfj nautilus-dropbox-0.6.1.tar.bz2

4. Compile

cd nautilus-dropbox-0.6.1

./configure

make

make install

5. Your now ready to run Dropbox from Applications > Internet > Dropbox

Hope that helps a few people. Enjoy!

Well I’ve not posted for a while as I’ve been working on some new code and packages for RDFa and linux. I’ll get round to releasing them pretty soon and hopefully they’ll get put to some good use.

However I’m very distracted at the moment with my latest toy! A 1974 VW Type 2 Camper van!!!!! Lots of work to do on it so please forgive my lack of posting. I’ll post some photos very soon!