Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

Reading this on Facebook? Why not click the like and share buttons, and share it onto your own wall to get even more people involved.

Anyway, I’ve previously written quite a bit on Facebook and Twitter about Kiva.

It’s a microloans charity – people in the third world ask for loans, usually around $1,000 to help them work their way out of poverty. We then come along, donate $25 each and between us raise the money for the loan, and it’s given to the person in the 3rd world. They then improve their business, take another step to working their way out of poverty and then pay us back. We can then lend the same money to somebody else!

It’s a superb idea and one that I am proud to say I have been donating to for several years.

But here is why you should get involved now. They’re currently offering free money to people who sign up – thanks to an anonymous donor, the first $25 loan you make to someone in the third world doesn’t even come out of your pocket!

Not just that but you can sign in with your Facebook details (though you don’t have to, if you would rather register separately) – so it only takes a couple of minutes to make a $25 donation to help someone in the third world without it costing you a penny.

Given that then, I don’t see any excuse for anyone not to get involved. Seriously, just follow this link. Do it! Do it now! I literally don’t see any reason why anyone reading this shouldn’t get involved.

P.S. You can also access the site directly at kiva.org. However, if you follow one of the links above, it will record a referral for me. I don’t get anything out of that beyond the warm feeling inside that I’ve helped spread Kiva a little further, but that is still nice to have.

P.P.S. You can also allocate your donation towards a community team – these are just groups you can join, like a Facebook Group. The biggest and best is the atheists, agnostics and non-religious, but you might also want to consider the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Even CWF has a team.

For the June Wendy House we had planned a mascarade ball for Michelle’s return. However, it turned out she didn’t get in to Leeds until way after it would have ended so it turned out to be some far more relaxed drinks before Wendy House. Not that that isn’t the start of a very enjoyable evening.

We finally made it into Wendy House just before midnight at which Fonze began partying the night away.

However, within 15 minutes of getting in the door, we were heading back out again to meet Michelle. Also Michelle is back! Hurray! Although by the time this actually gets published she will have actually gone again, but it was fun while it lasted.

Sometimes, it’s easier to create an alias when working with the Unix command line. Having to create these every time seems to defeat the point of having a short alias though. Luckily, you can make them persistent.

Lets assume that we are using a user called mike. We need to be in our home directory.

cd /home/mike

The .bashrc file should be in there, but hidden.

ls -a

You should be able to see it listed. Now lets edit it.

vim .bashrc

And add a command in, for example, to save our usual CVS update command.

alias upd='cvs -q update -P -d'

Now save and exit. After that, every time you log onto the box you can use the upd command to run the CVS update.

If you’re running CentOS, you may find yourself frustrated that you have GCC 4.2 or older, when you need to be running at least 4.3 for some features – for example, if you want to compile HipHop for PHP.

Never fear, you don’t need to compile a compiler from source!

As well as the gcc RPMs in the repository, there are also a set for GCC 4.4, appropriately enough named gcc44 and you can install them in the usual way.

yum install gcc44 g++44

Apache comes with a cool load testing script called Apache Bench, which lets you throw loads of requests at a URL. It comes bundled with Apache, so if you’re running the LAMP stack, you probably already have it.

The syntax is simple.

ab -n 1000 http://www.google.com/

This will throw a thousand requests at Google and then produce a report on how long it look. You can also use the -c option to set the number of concurrent requests. There are lots more options too – see the Apache docs for full details.

Hey, do you remember SoBe? Probably not as it’s new. Well, forget about it anyway because it’s gone. It’s now called Hirst’s Yard. Confusing, it’s also located in Hirst’s Yard, along with a load of other bars.

Myself, Elina, Norm, George and Kat were recently out for post-Nando’s cocktails when we received a buy one get one free flyer, so decided it was worth a go. Perhaps they decided that the SoBe look was simply a bit too bright and happy for Leeds, but the essentials remained the same – quality, properly mixed cocktails, at reasonable prices (which changes to very reasonable when you have two for one vouchers).

It was reasonably quiet when we went in at around 9pm, though picked up soon after that, so head down early if you want a seat.

We followed that up with a trip to the ever-popular Call Lane Social where we ventured up to the tiki hideaway upstairs. You can question the wisdom of lighting drinks on fire when you have a tiki-style straw roof that is highly flammable, but we survived to tell the tale, so all is well.

At this point, myself and Elina left as we had to be up early the next morning, but I presume the night ended in a strip club.

If you need to view a file on the terminal, the traditional way to do it is using more. More is fine. But less is better.

less filename

If is very similar to more, but has extended capabilities, for example you can go back as well as forward through a file.

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