Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

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.

Due to Freshers’ Week, Wendy House was moved to a week earlier – which means Wendy House sooner, but then of course a huge gap between this one and October’s. It also should have landed bang on Norm’s birthday, but ended up seven days earlier – inconsiderate.

Never the less, we took quite a good crowd there – we booked taxis for 19 people and despite still not drinking, I made it to a very respectable 2am before heading home.

Once again, the PECL installer. In order to get the Mongo driver for PHP working, you need to install it manually.

mkdir mongo
cd mongo
wget https://github.com/mongodb/mongo-php-driver/zipball/master
unzip master
cd mongodb-mongo-php-driver-df8b217
phpize
./configure
make install

Add the extension to your php.ini file.

extension=mongo.so

Restart Apache, and Mongo should appear inf your phpinfo() output.

I couldn’t be bothered to take my camera to last month’s Wendy House. But we did enjoy a few drinks beforehand under threat of extermination.

There are quite a number of tools to convert a CVS repository to a Git repository out there. However, most of them don’t seem to be able to copy over the branches properly. A work around is to convert it to Mercurial first, then convert it to Git.

In this example I’m using a repository called RedDog.

First, we need to get Mercurial on the system.

yum install mercurial

Next we need to add the convert extension to the .hrc file. This might be a global file, or might be in your home directory, can’t quite remember.

[extensions]
hgext.convert=

Check out from CVS and convert to Mercurial.

cvs checkout RedDog
hg convert RedDog

This will create a Mercurial repository called RedDog-hg. Now we need to get hold of Fast Export.

git clone git://repo.or.cz/fast-export.git

Once we have the software we can initialise a new Git repository that we’re going to use and then CD into the folder.

git init RedDog-git
cd RedDog-git

Run the Fast Export tool, specifying the location of the Mercurial repository.

../fast-export/hg-fast-export.sh -r ../RedDog-hg

This will migrate everything into your new Git repository. If you run an ls -a you should see the .git folder, which you may want to rename to RedDog.git (something.git locations are actually just .git directories).

You may optionally also want to do a check out into that folder.

git checkout HEAD

However, you don’t have to – you can begin using it remotely without doing a local checkout.

Last month, I wrote to KFC to let them know that some of their customers do in fact want genetically modified products in their food. They wrote back.

Dear Mr Worfolk,

We would like to thank you for your interest in KFC.

Whilst we are certainly interested in new ideas, suggestions and information that will enhance our products we are unfortunately unable to accept unsolicited ideas and suggestions from the general public. This is partly due to the fact that a majority of ideas submitted by the public have already been considered by KFC and partly because they are not useful given the limitations of our particular field of business. Also, experience has shown the practice of considering ideas can give rise to misunderstandings as to the origin and ownership of particular ideas and lability in relation to them.

We nevertheless appreciate your interest, thank you for taking the time to correspond with us here at KFC and we look forward to your continued custom.

Yours sincerely,
Customer Careline

Basically, it says thanks for your opinion, but we’re not going to read it lol.

DKMS is in RPMForge, so we need to add that before we can install it via Yum.

cd /root/
wget http://packages.sw.be/rpmforge-release/rpmforge-release-0.5.2-2.el5.rf.i386.rpm
rpm --import http://apt.sw.be/RPM-GPG-KEY.dag.txt
rpm -K rpmforge-release-0.5.2-2.el5.rf.*.rpm
rpm -i rpmforge-release-0.5.2-2.el5.rf.*.rpm
yum install dkms

This is how to install APC for PHP on Fedora 15.

yum install php-devel
yum install pcre-devel
yum install php-pear
pecl install apc

Create a file in /etc/php.d named apc.ini, containing the following.

extension=apc.so

I took my recently acquired flash to Wendy House to see if I could get better photos. What I got was a mysterious floating head of Fonze. Which was pretty cool.

To install VirtualBox guest additions on Fedora 15, you want to mount the ISO into the CD room of your host computer (either using Daemon Tools, or an actual CD drive) and give that to your virtual machine. Then run the following commands.

yum update
yum install dkms
yum install gcc
reboot
mkdir /mnt2
mount /dev/cdrom /mnt2
cd /mnt2
sh ./VBoxLinuxAdditions.run