Archive for the ‘Tech’ Category

If you’re trying to install ThoughtWorks’ Go Server on CentOS (or indeed any Linux variety), you might run into a problem where it says you need JDK installed. Indeed, even if you have OpenJDK installed it may continue to complain.

This is because they have not officially approved OpenJDK yet, so your two options are to a) installed the actual JDK or b) to install OpenJDK to at least the version required (1.6 at time of writing) and then force the installer to ignore dependences. This can be done using the following command.

rpm -i --nodeps go-server.rpm

Providing you already have OpenJDK installed, this should work fine.

I’ve started using a spare computer monitor as a TV in my bedroom so that I could hook it up to my laptop and stream programmes onto a bigger screen when I wanted to.

However, it’s irritating having to cable everything up, so I purchased an Apple TV to stream directly to it. So far my experience has been on the whole positive, with a few drawbacks.

Set up was reasonably easy, and now I have it up and running, on both my laptop and my iPad I am able to select AirPlay mirroring and begin mirroring my screen onto my TV; it also sends the sound.

That said, not everything works perfectly. Here is how it looks so far:

• Videos in iTunes mirror though there doesn’t seem to be a volume control I can activate from the iPad
• TVCatchUp mirrors but without any volume control
• BBC iPlayer mirrors from my iPad, and lets me control the volume with the iPad volume control
• 4od blocks mirroring from my iPad
• NFL GamePass mirrors from my iPad and lets me control the volume
• Sky Go blocks mirroring from my iPad

It is worth noting that even though Sky think they’re being clever by blocking AirPlay mirroring on the iPad, I can just open up the video stream in a browser on my desktop, full screen it and AirPlay mirror my entire laptop screen.

The built app apps for Apple TV are pretty useless though. They don’t have any apps for iPlayer, 4od, GamePass or Sky Go (and even if they did, I can only have two devices on Sky Go anyway), so I can’t imagine I’ll be doing much with my Apple TV than mirroring a different device to it.

It would certainly be nice if I could use it as a standalone box to watch things on, but until they open it up for third party apps, I can’t see me getting much use out of it that way.

Last week, I replaced my aging 13″ MacBook Pro with a new MacBook Pro with Retina Display. Here are my impressions so far…

I went for the 15″ rather than the 13″ because a) they didn’t do the Retina Display in a 13″, but more importantly, b) the new 15″ is the same weight as the 13″, so it’s just as portable and gives me a bigger screen to work on, as the 13″ was starting to grate on me a little. It is reasonably light, though the bigger size means it won’t fit in my current sleeve.

The screen looks amazing!

Getting started was easy – but only because I paid for the ethernet adapter. I simply backed up my current laptop to my Time Capsule (you do have a Time Capsule, right?), then turned it off, connected my new laptop to the Time Capsule and restored the entire system.

This worked for most things, but not quite everything – for example, I had to copy over my hosts file from a backup, as well as my system paths, and most applications needed me to login again and some thought it was a different device (well, I guess it is, but others didn’t notice a difference). All my files and applications came back and I just logged in as normal though, very smooth.

In general, I was expecting it to be faster. It has a faster processor, and SSD hard drive and more memory, so I was hoping things would open lightning quick. They open quicker than on my old laptop, but it’s not instant like the stripped down, no crap on the system demo laptops you find in the Apple Store.

The wake up time is a lot slower than my old laptop. I used to just open the lid and was able to log in, this one there is a distinct few seconds wait while it wakes up.

There is no light or battery indicator on the case. My old one had a light on the front which told me when it had actually gone to sleep, and a button I could press on the side to activate a series of five LEDs telling me how much charge was left. This one has neither.

It’s very, very thin!

I’ll reporting back after I’ve been using it a while.

Having heard another talk about the BBC’s technology side on Sunday, I’ve come to the conclusion that it must be a pretty awesome place to work.

While they don’t perhaps have the funds that private sector organisations do, I guess I assumed that being a public institution that would be large and lumbering, risk adverse and slow to react.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

For example, they use Scrum. Scrum is an agile methodology used for developing software in the real world (ie, a world where the client is always changing their mind). But they don’t just use it for software – they use it for managing projects right across the business.

Secondly, they’re really up on technology. The speaker on Sunday was telling me about how they had developed an open source project for parsing Gherkin – a lot of software developers might not even know what Gherkin is!

They’ve also previously developed their own JavaScript library, which was a contender alongside jQuery and Prototype (you know, before everyone accepted jQuery was the best, but then everyone realised you could actually just use selectors and not load any library at all).

Not to mention the pioneering work with iPlayer. They launched iPlayer in 2007 – that is five years ago! I can’t really remember a time before iPlayer now, but I don’t think there was many other people doing it at the time. Not to mention that they also have iOS and Android apps available for it too.

In reality, the BBC is no lumbering institution at all – it’s an fast moving, agile, technology-savvy organisation that must be amazing to work at.

If you’re getting an error trying to connect to Postgres on localhost, the problem is probably that your system is configured for ipv6 but your Postgres isn’t. You can change this however.

First off, you need to find the pg_hba.conf file.

locate pg_hba.conf

Edit it and find the line which defines the localhost.

hosts  all all   md5

Below it, add the following line.

host all all ::1/128 trust

Finally, restart Postgres.

cPanel offers two options for installing PDO – using EasyApache which can enable PDO and MySQL’s PDO driver or installing everything via PECL. Unfortunately, under PHP 5.3, the PECL installers don’t work, so if you need any other PDO drivers, you’re in a hole.

Luckily, you can install it manually.

Download the PDO driver from the PECL website. Extract the archive and CD into the directory.

wget http://pecl.php.net/get/PDO_PGSQL
tar -xzf PDO-PGSQL-1.0.2.tgz
cd PDO-PSQL-1.0.2/

Once this is done, run the standard commands for building a PHP extension.

phpize
./configure
make
make install

Once this is done, you can add the extension to php.ini.

cd /usr/local/lib/
vim php.ini
extension=pdo_pgsql.so

Finally, restart Apache and the Postgres driver should show up in your phpinfo() output.

Sometimes you need to add a new path to your $PATH variable. This is easy to do by adding a new line to your paths file.

cd /etc/
vim paths

Once you have added the path, you can execute any executables in Terminal, without having to specify the full path.

I’ve now installed iOS 6 on both my phone and my tablet. But, as of yet, I haven’t really noticed any difference.

I now have a clock on my iPad. Fine. Not used it. The maps look OK, but I was happy enough with Google Maps, so that isn’t really an upgrade because they have just replaced one thing with another, less accurate one.

The Siri improvements are very exciting, but then I haven’t used it yet. I use Siri for things like sending text messages and setting my alarms, which I can already do, and the Siri servers seem to be overloaded at the moment, as it’s practically too slow to use at the moment 🙁 .

Passbook, shared photo streams and Facebook integration I’m not really interested in, and I don’t like the cloud tabs or whatever they’re called. So, all in all, not really that impressed.

If you’ve bought the Netgear N150 WNA1100 wireless dongle on the false promise that it is compatible with Windows Server 2003 and then tried to run it, you will probably get an error like the one below.

Not compatible with your OS

Luckily, there is a way around this. Once you’ve downloaded the driver, right click on it, go to the compatibility tab and select the run in compatibility mode check box and select “Windows XP” from the drop down.

Once done, re-run the setup and it should install.

What a disappointment.

First of all, it’s a very poor effort that Apple don’t do live streaming of their media events. It then took them ages to post it – I was hoping to watch it, but when it didn’t appear by 10pm, I just read about it instead. I didn’t find it on the Apple website until the next morning.

Beyond that, the product itself is disappointing. I’ve always upgraded through each iPhone improvement but there seems very little point with this one – it’s just git a bit bigger screen, but other than that I’m simply not excited by it.

The best reason I can think to get it is that I will be able to see more events when I’m in my calendar – how does that justify a £600 outlay?