Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

Back to basics today. Creating a user and setting their password.

useradd test
passwd test

While a great deal of fun was had at last month’s Wendy House, I arrived there to find that my camera’s battery had in fact died. So all I have is one photo that Hugh kindly took with my phone…

Following on from my previous post about installing ImageMagick from source, to get it working with Apache you need to do the following. First, we need to install something from Pecl. So make sure you have the pecl command at hand – if not, install it.

apt-get install pear

Then run the following.

apt-get install php5-dev
pecl install imagick

Finally, add the extension to your php.ini.

extension=imagick.so

There is an RPM available for ImageMagick on Debian, but it isn’t the most update to date, so if you need all the new features, you’ll need to compile and install it from source. Luckily, it’s very easy to do.

wget ftp://ftp.imagemagick.org/pub/ImageMagick/ImageMagick.tar.gz
tar xvfz ImageMagick.tar.gz
cd 
./configure
make
make install
make check

Following on from my recent post about adding JPEG support, I also needed to add PNG support. I couldn’t get the RPM’s to work, so I had to do this manually as well.

wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/libpng/00-libpng-stable/1.2.39/libpng-1.2.39.tar.gz?use_mirror=kent
tar -zxvf libpng-1.2.39
cd libpng-1.2.39/scripts
cp makefile.linux ../makefile
cd ../
make
make install

Huzzah I hear you cry! Yes, I’m please to announce three new episodes of the podcast are on their way – the first one is available today, and the next two will follow on consecutive Fridays. This series features expert insight from Norm “The No Man”, Hugh and James (now possibly known as “Old James” given there is a new A-Soc president also called James).

I didn’t take any photos while we were recording, so here is a stock picture of Hugh.

If you have made the mistake I did of doing a fairly minimal install on Debian, you might have noticed it is missing a few fairly basic features – such as JPEG support! Luckily it’s fairly easy to install it.

wget ftp://ftp.uu.net/graphics/jpeg/jpegsrc.v6b.tar.gz
tar -zxvf jpegsrc.v6b.tar.gz
cd jpeg-6b
./configure --enable-shared
make
make install

Recently, I attended the launch of ODDTV, the new social video platform for Open Door Design, the design agency I worked at. It was great to see some old faces and although we couldn’t stay for long, drink as much free lemonade as we possibly could.

ODDTV is an interesting mix of videos that ODD has been involved with or generally likes the look of. Check it out.

If you want to change your timezone on Debian, use the following command.

dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

That’s life on a planet in a binary star system.

Having pushed back my leaving do at Buzz Sports to accommodate the other four people who were leaving, it turned out it handed directly on top of the first social event of the new organisation I’m now consulting with.

I know what you’re thinking – the obvious thing to do would have been to constantly make excuses about going to the bathroom and then rapidly running between venues pretending I was simultaneously attending both events in some kind of sitcom setup.

Unfortunately, I eventually opted for something far more pedestrian. Having worked round Sandinista, The Lounge, Mojo’s, Fibre, Revolution and Call Lane Social with Gooroo, I headed over to Maven to find the Buzz crew. By this point (11pm) there were only two of them left standing – Simundo and Ian.

As it turns out, Maven is quite a find (and number two in the best kept secrets in the UK, according to Ian). They don’t seem to have cocktail menus – I just went up to the bar and told them what ingredients I liked and two minutes later I was sipping on a very nice raspberry based long drink. Delicious. Further investigation is definitely required.