I did alot of searching around on blogs while trying to set up Typo with Lighttpd on Textdrive and came across alot of good advice. One great tutorial that I came across was Jarkko Laine’s
Keeping your lighttpd up on TextDrive, part I and part II.
I set everything up as he explained and then forgot about it until … textdrive crashed last night!
Because of the cron job that I had setup to run on system boot, daedalus.rb came to life when the system was turned back on. This started up my lighttpd process, thus bringing my site back up online.
Thanks.
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Update: The script has been updated for iTunes 6 – 2/18/2006
I was sitting around the other day thinking of fun things to do and I decided to write some xsl that would parse the iTunes library.xml and create a sql script out of it so that I could create a database of all my music and playlists. I started off by trying to write it in Ruby but then changed to xsl since every modern browser has a built in xsl processer and not everyone has ruby installed. You can take this script and modify it to your hearts content.
Here is the xsl file as a .txt
After looking at the file and downloading it, you’ll want to change the extension to .xsl. Next you’ll have to add one new line to your library.xml file so that it know where to find the parser.
|
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="library.xsl"?> |
Now all you have to do it open your xml file in Firefox or any other modern browser and you’ll get a beautiful sql script that you can use to populate you database.
So far I have only tested this with iTunes 5 and only on a few libraries, but it seems to be working pretty well. It does take some time to parse the ugly iTunes xml though.
My library at work is only 228 songs and 5 playlists, and it takes about 30 seconds to parse the file.
My library at home though, is made up of 34GBs (7780 songs) worth of data and I have about 20 playlists. This took around 2.5 hours to parse through.
Have fun with the script and let me know what you think. Modify it to your hearts content.
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While doing my usual del.icio.us popular read the other day I came across an article describing how to setup an ISP Server on OpenSuSE 10.0 . I hardly ever have much free time on my hands to undertake an endevour like this, but have been feeling a bit stressed out lately I though it would be a great way to relax a bit.
I have tried to switch over to linux before, or at least switch one of my machines over. I believe it was Fedora, and it was a couple of years ago. I wasn’t to impressed at the time. Mostly because I had never really used linux and didn’t know how to do anything. Over the years though I have been using it more and more while managing my webservers.
After reading over the tutorial, I decided not to build the ISP server, but to install OpenSuSE on the machine anyways and build a box that would house a webserver and a subversion repository.
I started of by downloading OpenSuSE via. bittorrent. I would recommend download the DVD version if possible because switching CD’s back and forth while installing packages later on isn’t alot of fun. I could just copy the CD’s to the harddrive though. But then that’s 3.6GB of space that could be used for better things.
The install was very straight forward. The interface is really nice and make installing a breeze. I choice to install KDE for my desktop. I had seen the screenshots and it looked great.
After the install I got the computer up and networked with my Windows machine. It wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. Since I have my machines behind a firewall already, I disabled the filewall on OpenSuSE and the OpenSuSE machine could recognise my windows box instantly. I have yet to try out hooking up my HP printer, but when I do I will let you know how it goes. I saw a HP Printer package install so who knows, it may be simple.
Apache2 comes installed and ready to go. All that you have to do is open Yast, go to HTTP server and do a couple straight forward configurations. After that you have ‘rcapache2 stop’ and ‘rcapache2 start’ to take care of everything.
Subversion was a bit harder and I am still working at getting it working. I wanted to be able to access my subversion repository over the network at: http://192.168.x.x/svn/. The problem was that I couldn’t find mod_dav_svn.so anywhere on my system or in any of the package that came with OpenSuSE 10.0 and I needed this apache module in order to succeed at my task. After searching high and low I finally found that package, but it was for a older version of subversion, and wasn’t compatible with the new version. To get around this I just unistalled the new version, installed the old version of subversion and then installed the apache modules that I needed. I still can’t seem to access the repository though and keep getting a ‘Access Forbidden’ when I try to do so. I make the file readable by the server, but it still doesn’t seem to be working. I’ll get it going someday though.
Overall I really like OpenSuSE. I wish somethings were easier, but then I really like the control that you can have over the system, which is a bit of a trade off I guess. OpenOffice come installed, along with Firefox and a host of other great programs to make your life easy, and if it wasn’t for Macromedia and Adobe product only coming on PC or Mac, I would seriously consider switching over all my machines.
Update:
I got subversion working nicely with apache2 now. I had a new error saying that subversion could not open the filesystem but after a bit of searching I found the answer on svn.haxxe.se. You have to make sure the the user that is running your apache process has rights to your subversion folder. On OpenSuSE the user is ‘wwwrun’ and you can add permissions by calling ‘chown -R apache.apache /home/svn’.
I don’t have any authorization on yet, but that will come shortly.
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My site has been down for the past couple weeks while I slowly switched my hosting from Dreamhost to Textdrive. It was a process that I though would take a couple hours but ended up taking alot more time. So far I am really pleased with the results though. My blog is running much, much quicker and I have yet to get any errors. Since I only had a few entries in my blog before switching, I have decided to just start from scratch again.
Thanks to the guys at Textdrive for their help with setting up everything; there were a few problems that I ran into that I could not figure out how to get around.
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