Experiments in Geekery

I started a new job in April 2012. My old one was relatively geeky but working in a very highly specialised field. "Group Technical Support" was the job title but in reality I was doing all-sorts, from development support, software & hardware validation, and a fair whack of PHP/MySQL/Bash/Python troubleshooting on a distributed system getting telemetry data from buses at depots through a wireless network. My new job is for a company that does what essentially comes down to data processing. Lots of stuff like address cleansing, identifying duplicate users with different accounts, fraud prevention, data pooling. My job title is "Application Support Engineer" and formally I sit between the service desk and infrastructure, mainly tasked with monitoring the data flow in, through and out of the business. In reality there's a lot more of the tedious stuff than I really want (service-desk type stuff) and far too much being on-call for my liking, but overall I...

I was trying to do some stuff with PHP and every time I ran some code through PHP, I got the error: PHP Warning: PHP Startup: Unable to load dynamic library '/usr/lib/php5/20090626+lfs/suhosin.so' - /usr/lib/php5/20090626+lfs/suhosin.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory in Unknown on line 0 It's not at all clear what package provides suoshin.so, so if you get stuck and can't find it, just run this at the command line: sudo apt-get install php5-suhosin That'll stop the error message from showing up.

I recently downloaded and struggled with Tweet Nest (http://pongsocket.com/tweetnest/).  It requires some components that weren't installed by default in my Ubuntu install and the setup scripts don't do some nice things that it could do (i.e., set up a back-end database for you). I first of all tried to get it working in my public_html directory which was a minor disaster and didn't work at all (I think this is related so suphp and I don't know anything about that though).  I moved everything to /var/www/ and it worked slightly better (i.e. I didn't get prompted to download a file every time I went to http://laptop/tweetnest/). [EDIT 1: Ahhah, I have now found out that the reason it didn't work in user space was that by default PHP is disabled in user's "public_html" directories.  This needs editing in the Apache PHP5 configuration file: http://www.weblogism.com/item/266/php-not-interpreted-in-public_html-in-recent-ubuntu-update It's workin...

I'm a fairly long-time Ubuntu user, starting off with 7.04 and have at least dabbled with various Ubuntu versions.  I've also experience with other distros - mainly SuSE and RedHat, but quite a long time ago!  I've had some major issues with both wireless network access and graphics cards on my old Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo M.  Nothing that I couldn't get working but the whole process would go far beyond an inexperienced user's abilities. I caved in and installed Ubuntu on my PC the other week, and once again have been very impressed with the whole thing. The install was smooth and had no problems.  The wireless and graphics "just worked", and even enabling the advanced graphics effects caused no issues except a slight wooziness watching the way some of the windows wobble when being moved :-) I installed the 64-bit version because I have a 64-bit processor, damnit, and want to use it.  The only difficulty I have had so far is Adobe Air (I love TweetDeck so...

I am the proud owner of a T-Mobile G1.  It was the first Android phone introduced into the market and although I was late to the Android party (I got the G1 just before T-Mobile UK discontinued them) I have been ever so fond of it. I can't necessarily even express why I'm quite so fond of it.  I like the design, I like the way it works, I like the flexibility. One thing I don't like is that some fairly major bugs in the underlying Android OS have been outstanding for a year or more - some bugs that cause a complete loss of all data on the handset unless you just happen to have backed it up previously. I have abused this phone recently, with the discovery of the "Cyanogen" ROM.  I have rooted my phone and installed this software and the thing actually runs pretty well, considering that the handset was never intended to run this level of Android software (both Eclair/2.1 and Froyo/2.2). So I've had great "fun", backing up, restoring from backup...