sudo dmidecode –type 17

This gives the following output:

# dmidecode 2.9
SMBIOS 2.4 present.

Handle 0×1100, DMI type 17, 27 bytes
Memory Device
Array Handle: 0×1000
Error Information Handle: Not Provided
Total Width: 64 bits
Data Width: 64 bits
Size: 2048 MB
Form Factor: DIMM
Set: None
Locator: DIMM_A
Bank Locator: Not Specified
Type: DDR
Type Detail: Synchronous
Speed: 667 MHz (1.5 ns)
Manufacturer: AD00000000000000
Serial Number: 00001016
Asset Tag: 000818
Part Number: HYMP125S64CP8-Y5

Handle 0×1101, DMI type 17, 27 bytes
Memory Device
Array Handle: 0×1000
Error Information Handle: Not Provided
Total Width: 64 bits
Data Width: 64 bits
Size: 1024 MB
Form Factor: DIMM
Set: None
Locator: DIMM_B
Bank Locator: Not Specified
Type: DDR
Type Detail: Synchronous
Speed: 667 MHz (1.5 ns)
Manufacturer: AD00000000000000
Serial Number: 00003160
Asset Tag: 410801
Part Number: HYMP112S64CP6-Y5

You can read Fontis’ Australian Magento post here.

One struggle I did get stuck on is the “Access Denied” message when connecting. A lot of people are having issues with it. My issue was that I had used the same username for my API access as I use to login to the admin in my testing. As soon as I changed from that, I overcame that issue.

Anyway, I stumbled across this Python Magento library and saw it had a number of useful functions already in it. So I decided to hack away and add to it.

So far, I have added a function to retrieve the list of categories and write them to a file from the catelog_category.tree api call and finally, as per my original intention, write a function to bulk upload categories from a CSV file.

I’ve never contributed code to a project before so if I get these changes in, it’s my first public contribution.. until that happens, you can hit me up for the code and a sample CSV file.

I might add: Python xmlrpc is beautiful to work with and gives a great deal of flexibility for building a gui on top of this. Working with the Magento API was nice also.

I just created a file called /etc/modprobe.d/zte-mf633.conf

and added the following to it:
options usbserial vendor=0x19d2 product=0x0031

and then reboot with the modem in to test it works on a fresh boot. If you insert the modem *after* you have booted, you may have to unmount/eject the cdrom that it is detect as prior to it being detect in connection manager. The above may also interrupt with other usb devices, though my storage key still works and it’s all I need for now.

Then it will display as a 3G card and you can use the network wizard to configure it.

Two things to note.
1. You have to “register/signup” using a Windows computer – which I had a lot of problems with and had to end up doing it in store
2. I forget now, but it seemed noteworthy.

IncentivesPro make a product I recently used for a Virtual Desktop Thin Client Implementation. That is USB Redirection for Remote Desktop. It uses a proprietary client/server and so I used Windows XP embedded thin clients to redirect specialised USB Thermal Laser Printers to the Vista Virtual Machines. The website looks a bit underwhelming but the product is flawless and it’s priced much better than their competitors. If you have more time than I did, it’s likely you can get the Linux client working with Thinstation

For the other desktops, I used 2x’s Thin Client Server that use PXE (or USB / CDRom) to boot the original desktops over the network, essentially converting the original desktops into diskless thin clients. It’s a shame you can’t build your own images or add your own software to 2x’s desktop as I really didn’t like having to implement the Windows XP embedded thin clients.

As it’s a small environment, we are using VMWare Vsphere 4.0 free version. I was aiming to use Xenserver 5.5 but it doesn’t natively support Tape Drive passthrough to the client and I wanted to easily accomplish this without kernel rebuilds, as it is possible to achieve this with Xen by recompiling the kernel with ISCSI support and making the Tape Drive an ISCSI target.

Some other useful software was SplitView, allowing the accountant to use Dual Monitors. RDP  5.2 only allows to use the mstsc.exe /span option which spans the monitor across two screens. Splitview allows you to manage those windows as individual desktops. The only issue I had was with Adobe Reader 9.2, I had to add it to the exceptions list in Splitview otherwise it would crash.

Technorati Tags: vmware, vdi, virtual desktop, remote desktop, rdp, thin client

Much has been written already by many people using both examples and tutorials of the basics. The aim of my addition, as always is primarily for my own notes and secondarily to explain why you want to use mod_rewrite for SEO ranking retention.

Let’s say you have a website that enjoys well ranked pages and a lot of traffic via google or has a great deal of Backlinks from other blogs or websites to particular pages in your site. One of the powerful aspects of Google Webmaster Tools is that it easily provides you a way to be able to view which URL’s are linking particular pages on your own website. When contemplating moving a website or rearranging the structure of an existing website, one of your first considerations should be to maintain the availability of accessing your new pages via your old links. Essentially we map your current (old) structure to your new (proposed) structure.

Here’s our first sample. The old url was http://www.domain.com.au/mstore/2wsub1 and our new URL includes keyword rich content: http://www.domain.com.au/htc-hero-android-brown. We use the following mapping:

     RewriteRule ^mstore/2wsub1(.*)$ http://www.domain.com.au/htc-hero-android-brown   [R=301,NC,L]

The above means: Any content being requested at /mstore/2wsub1 or /mstore/2wsub1.html or /mstore/2wsub1.asp etc. will be redirected to http://www.domain.com.au/htc-hero-android-brown. The redirect additionally offers the following further information about the redirect.[R=301,NC,L] tells the requester that it is a permanent redirect (R=301 – Permanent Redirect) and that the requested URL match is case-insensitive (NC – no-case) and that if it finds a match, then redirect and do not attempt any further matches [L - Last match]

After migrating a website, I advise to monitor both Google Webmaster Tools and also your server site statistics / logs for 404 Errors, so you can correct any URL’s you hadn’t originally mapped.

Migrating domain names & ensuring a single accessible URL

In this scenario, we are moving http://www.olddomain.com.au/ to http://www.coolnewdomain.com.au/ because your audience are Mac users and like anything with the title “cool” in it ;). As an aside, we want to ensure that people are always directed to http://www.coolnewdomain.com.au if they type in http://coolnewdomain.com.au and search engines only index the www version so that you do not have duplicate content listed.

        RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.coolnewdomain\.com\.au$
        RewriteRule (.*)       http://www.coolnewdomain.com.au/$1 [R=301,NC]

The above means: If you have NOT accessed the website using http://www.coolnewdomain.org.au then redirect you to http://www.coolnewdomain.org.au . The $1 value is the ‘first variable’. What it means is that if you access: http://olddomain.com.au/cool-product will be redirected to http://www.coolnewdomain.com.au/cool-new-product. Everything after the domain name is used as a variable to attach to the end of the new domain name. Even if you have not migrated domain names it is still wise to use this code on your existing site so that search engines only search one ‘form’ of your domain name. One last thing to note here, is that we don’t use the [L] flag, allowing mod_rewrite to continue looking for matches, as there’s still a chance it could find a match for url’s like our first example.

Using mod_rewrite for blocking access to a website as an alternative to Basic Authentication

Real life usage scenario. Some developers I know created a development website similar to http://dev.coolnewsite.com.au/ that was accessible publicly without authentication. They assumed as they hadn’t advertised it, nobody knew about it but just prior to going live, google ‘found’ the site and indexed it. When the real site went live, anytime they were searching in google for the site or for products, the http://dev.coolnewsite.com.au/ was being displayed. They wanted to block access to the dev site but they didn’t want to lose the fact that they already had some visitors and page rank on the dev site. I tried to use a mod_rewrite rule as above before the Authentication rule but the auth rule takes effect before the rewrite rule,so visitors were being asked to authenticate and not being redirected, additionally this wouldn’t have told google about the new, actual live site. So here’s what I did:

 RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} !^213\.206\.175\.212$
 RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} !^124\.231\.17\.180$
 RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} !^123\.168\.239\.32$
 RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.coolnewdomain.com.au/$1 [R=301,L]

ps: fictitous IP addresses provided ;)
The above means: If your IP address is NOT 213.206.175.212 (dev A) or 124.231.17.180 (dev B) or 123.168.239.32 (Customer) then redirect the visitor to http://www.coolnewdomain.com.au/ with a permanent redirect [R=301] and make it the last matching rule [L].

This means search engines will know about the real, live site next time they come to visit, anyone searching for the site finding the dev site will be redirected to the equivalent URL on the live site but the developers and customer can still access the dev site from the three different locations. The obvious downside to the above code is that if you are not using a static IP address, you will need to update the addresses each time your IP changes. We will add authentication as our live site begins to take rankings above the dev site.

Technorati Tags: mod_rewrite, apache, lamp, web development

I have previous written about PDF Editors for Windows and Linux here and here, so this is, in effect Part 3.

I have used OpenOffice PDF Import Extension, PDFEdit and numerous other tools listed in my first posts but nothing works as well as the latest Inkscape. It has one downside though, right now. That is, you can only edit one page at a time.

So here’s a random PDF I found by googling for random PDF ;). Here’s a shot of the first page in my PDF Viewer (evince).

Now we open Inkscape click File -> Open and you will see the following dialogue box where we can choose which page to import.

Now you can see that the page imported perfectly into Inkscape and objects are editable.

and finally, here’s our slightly edited, more up-to-date version.

A few other tips.

Inkscape won’t import encrypted PDF’s. To get around this you can use pdftops .pdf which turns the PDF into a Postscript file. You can then use ps2pdf .ps to return the file back into an unencrypted pdf.

On Linux, you can print to PDF automatically. On Windows, you will want to have installed a PDF Printer, like PDFCreator and on Mac OSX, read this tutorial about setting up a free PDF printer.

If you need to merge multiple PDF’s into a single PDF, there is a nice tool called PDFtk that can do that for you which is available for Windows, MacOSX and Linux.

Technorati Tags: open source, pdf editor, pdf editing, inkscape, pdfcreator, pdftk, ps2pdf, pdftops

Skype for Asterisk has been released at last.

A new Skype for Linux Beta 2.1.047 has been released which fixes CPU problems with new PulseAudio and works brilliantly and also adds SMS support.

Also, I came across a very Rapid Application framework for building Ajax web apps called Wavemaker. They have an open source version and an Enterprise Version. Watch one of the videos where he builds a searchable client database in 10 minutes while explaining concepts.

Also, an announcement from Netenberg, the people who make Fantastico for Cpanel have announced that they will be open sourcing their AccountLab Plus application in Jan 2010.

Technorati Tags: cpanel, web hosting, skype, ria, javascript framework, open source

netboot.me is a service that allows you to boot nearly any operating system or utility on any computer with a wired internet connection – without having to know ahead of time what you’ll want to boot.

netboot.me works through the magic of netbooting over http. There are a number of ways to boot a computer with netboot.me. The simplest is to download a bootable image, which is 626Kb and burn it to a CD or put it on a USB memory stick, or floppy disk. Boot off it on any networked computer, and it will automatically fetch the latest boot options from netboot.me and let you choose from dozens of installation, recovery, testing, portable desktop and other tools. You can also start netboot.me from any computer running gPXE, or from any netbootable computer with some simple tweaks to your DHCP server.

Here’s a screenshot:

I just tested it and it works beautifully. It seems to update it’s menu system from it’s website each time it boots, so it’s always fresh. Currently in the menu, the following are available:

Installers
FreeBSD 7.2 (x86 or amd64)
Debian Lenny (5.0)
Debian Testing (x86 / amd64)
Fedora 11(x86/amd64)
OpenSUSE 11.1 (x86/amd64)
Ubuntu Jaunty & Karmic (x86/amd64)
Live  Linux
Tiny Core Linux 2.2
Micro Core Linux 2.2
Tools
Diagnostics -> (Memtest86 & 86+, HDT 0.3.4)
Disk Tools -> (Gparted LIve 0.4.5-2, Parted Magic 4.4)
Rescue -> (Ubuntu Jaunty / Karmic in rescue mode)

Anyway, I grabbed Micro Core and on my 1024kbps connection, it was booting in about 30 seconds and I had a runnning linux distribution.

Technorati Tags: netboot.me, pxe, linux, liveboot, netboot