“touch” is a handy unix utility to udate the time stamp on a file. Recenly I ran into a case on my mac book pro that required me to update all of the files and sub-directories of a project with the current date.

In terminal, I could have gone one by one an used this command on each file

touch thisIsAFileName

But after a few moments of onterweb searching, I came across a perfect solution

find . -print0 | xargs -0 touch

This command will find all of the file in all sub-directories, even if they have spaces in their name, and set their last updated time to the current time.

Just a handy tip I thought I would share

timthumb is a great little php script that helps create thumbnail images (http://code.google.com/p/timthumb). I’ve used it before, but recently I purchased a wordpress theme that used it, and it wasn’t working.

I would get a 404 error when I tired to access the directly via a url like this:
theDomain.com/wp-content/themes/theTheme/scripts/timthumb.php?src=/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/moose1.jpg&h=207&w=237&zc=1&q=80

After some digging around in log files on my server I realized the error

SoftException in Application.cpp:610: Directory “/home/usernamehere/public_html/wp-content” is writable by others

My problem had to so with the directory permissions! “writable by others” means that the permission on the directory were set to “777″. I changed the permissions of the directory using chmod to 755, and everything started to work.

Lesson learned, if timthumb.php is not working at giving you 404 errors, check the permission of the directory that contains the php file.

Firefox 3 is awesome we all know that, but there are some things that that would just be nice to have. One of those things would be the ability to control what appears for the auto suggest when you type in the URL bar.

Most of the time FireFox does a very good job of figuring out what you want to do, but when it goes bad, it goes really bad and gets annoying fast.

The other day I accidentally typed in “google.com/a”, and from that moment time on, everytime I wanted to go to “google.com”, it would auto complete to “google.com/a”, and i would end up going there. Very annoying.

I searched the Firefox menus but couldn’t find anything to help. I didn’t want to wipe out all of the auto complete entries, I find most of them helpful. I did some research and realized that you can remove these entries manually, but you have to do it in an unconventional way.

How remove those unwanted auto suggest entries

1. The list appears as you type something.
2. Select an entry by pointing you mouse at the item in the list, it will highlight.
3. Press Shift + Delete from your keyboard to delete the entry.

That’s all! You can remove entries from the address bar.  This trick works on any Firefox auto complete list, including text fields and other dropdown suggestions.

This also works on windows, mac and linux machines

It’s not secret my current favorite tech toys are my iPhone and Twitter.

I follow several hundred people of interest, and regularly use TwitterFon Pro, TweetDeck and Twitter.com to keep up with them all. For an elite group of people I follow on twitter I choose to have their updates pushed to me via SMS (text message) to my phone.

Sometimes I’m in area where I dont have reliable service to my phone (most of the meeting rooms at my work for some reason), and Twitter will try to send me an SMS message telling me that one of my good friends just made a tweet. If Twitter cant deliver that tweet for some reason, like the phone doesnt have service, Twitter simply stops sending message to your phone. There has been many times where i have thought to myself “damn Twitter is quiet today”, then I log onto Twitter.com and see a “is you device have trouble?” error. If i don’t go check the website, I have no idea that Twitter turned off SMS updates to my phone. Twitter is cool but they aren’t cool enough to send you an email saying “Hey your phone is screwed up, we are going to stop sending you SMS message until you fix it”. Atleast then the poor bastards like me who are addicted to twitter would know what we have to do.

Because I am such a Twitter addict, I have come up with a plan to end my frustrations with this problem. The solution? Use some evil “robots” to do my bidding. I have blogged about them before, I am talking about Cron and Curl. okokok, so they aren’t evil robots they are software running on my computer.

Twitter has an awesome API (Application Programming Interface) that allows you to do all sorts of sweet things using REST based http requests, including turning on and off SMS notifications to your phone.

cURL is an application that allows you to connect to web addresses from a command line.

cron is an application that allows you run application at scheduled intervals.

Can you guess where this is all going? Here is mathematical representation for you
((Twitter API + cURL) * cron(30 minutes)) = Happy Josh Highland

I have cron run the following command every 30 minutes (replace username and password with your own of course)

/usr/bin/curl -u user:password -d device=sms http://twitter.com/account/update_delivery_device.xml

I will never need to log onto twitter to turn on my SMS notifications ever again. In the event that Twitter disables notifications to my phone, every 30 minutes my evil robots enable MS messages to my phone. At most I will have 30 minutes of down time. I can live with that.

This is a perfect example of what one of my Computer Science professors told me… “If you have to do it more then 2 times write a script to do it for you”.

In a previous post, I talked about using cron to do your bidding. If you do a lot of web development like I do, you may have some web based tasks that you need to automate. A good example of this could be clearing a file cache or tipping of a script to rebuild your xml site map.

One of the best ways to do that would to be cURL and cron together. cURL is an application used to transfer the contents of a url. Insistently, to transfer the contents of a url, curl has to connect to that url, and the server has to process that url/script… do you see what I am going with this? cURL can be used to do anything you would normally do from the url of your browser.

This is the usage of cURL:

curl [options] [URL...]

lets say you have the following URL that you want to connect to on a regular schedule

http://SomeDomain.com/SomeFile.php?var1=abc&var2=zyz

you would use the following cURL command:
/usr/bin/curl -G -d var1=abc -d var2=zyz http://SomeDomain.com/SomeFile.php

We are using the “-G” argument to simulate a “GET” command, and each “-d” is a variable/value pair

note: “/usr/bin/curl” is the location on my computer that cURL is installed

running cURL from the command line will show you results that get returned from the processing of the script.

To fully automate this processs, add the curl command into cron. now you are one step closer to world domination!

It’s common knowledge that everyone dreams about one day having their own evil robots to do their bidding… ok so maybe that just me

I’m not an electrical engineer, so my dreams of having a physical robots under my control most likely won’t come true, but I am a decent programmer and computer nerd, so the option of having invisible virtual robots is very realistic.

I would like to introduce you to CRON. Cron is a deamon program (I told you I liked evil robots!) that lives in most unix and linux powered machines (that includes you mac users!). To sum it up, cron runs tasks on a schedule for you. For example, backups of data are important, but time consuming, and are easy for a system admin or user to forget to do. Cron doesnt forget….being the evil robot that cron is, he will do whatever you tell him to do, including grunt work like creating back ups. If you want to get fancy you can mix in some php and a little mysql, and do all sorts of wild things like have him manage your twitter account, but I would never do that!

Here is a very helpful image that will give you an idea of how to schedule tasks for cron to handle.

Click to make larger

As you can see, cron is very flexible and can be commanded to do anything, at any time. Cron will handle anything you throw at him, he can email you the results if you want.

Some of the things that I use cron for include:

• backing up files
• backing up databases
• consuming rss feeds into wordpress
• optimizing MySql database tables
• emailing me error reports on my server
• generate site maps and submit them to google
• a few things here and there with twitter (shhhhh, its my secret!)

All in all, having automated tasks can really free you from a lot of admin duties, and make your life a lot easier, and can empower you to do a lot of interesting things with your server / personal computer.

Do a google search on cron and you will find all sorts of good resources that will teach you better then I can on how to use cron succesfully.

I will be making some posts in the future showing some of the scripts that I have cron run for me. Until then, read up on cron and start build you own evil robot army!

Recently I was backing up a large MySql database (several hundred megabytes), using the awesome MySqlHotCopy script, when I started getting the following error:

DBD::mysql::db do failed: MySQL server has gone away at mysqlhotcopy line 528.

I have no clue what that error means. mysqlhotcopyworked great on all of my other smaller databases. I did a little searching on my old friend google, and after sniffing around a bit, I came up with a resolution to the problem… the script was timing out, so I just had to increase the allowed time in the /etc/my.cnf file.

Here are the steps I took

pico /etc/my.cnf

add these lines to the file:
interactive_timeout = 3600
wait_timeout = 3600

save file

/etc/init.d/mysqld restart

I ran mysqlhotcopy again, and everything worked and the backup was made.

I recently moved all of my sites to a new dedicated web server. In the move my webhost helped me mirror my old applications and tilt them up on the new server. This is where my problems started, several of my applications just wouldnt run, they would throw out “500 errors”.

Checking my logs, the errors looked like this:

[Tue Dec 30 09:20:18 2008] [error] [client ip.address.here] SoftException in Application.cpp:544: Directory “/home/username/public_html/someDirectory” is writeable by group

I searched the error on google like any good geek would

I found several posts about the problem, but it all pointed down to the way that apache was configured on my new server.

I came across this post, and it really shed light on the subject for me:

“The specified directory name has been made writable by group. That suggests that your server’s apache configuration doesn’t allow you to make directories writable by group.”

In english, you’ve got the wrong permissions set on one or more folders.

I checked the directory location from the 500 error, and I saw that it’s permissions were 777, world writable. I changed the directories permissions to 755, and Apache was happy again and let the code run.

Simple as that. My new Apache install won’t run code that is in a public folder. This is a good thing for sure. If you are having issues like I was, check your permissions, and be careful what is 777!

I have blogged about it before, I have a HTPC (home theatre pc) running in my living room, hooked to my TV. I started off with MythTV, but settled on Window Media Center 2005.

When I first built the Media Center machine, I had basic cable, with no DVR, so I let the media center handle all of that. Now I have Verizon FIOS with HD, and one of their HD DVR Boxes, and I rarely use my media center pc, but its always nice to be able to flip the input over to it and watch youtube and browse the web. I also like the fact that I can download all sorts of movies and tv from the darkside of the web and watch them on the tv. That was a huge plus.

For a while now, the Media Center has been acting funny. I built it on a shoe string budget with some questionable parts I had laying around, so I didn’t expect it to live forever. The other day it stopped working all together.

Today I took it apart to see what the problem was. After some investigation, I found the cheap power supply was dead, and it took the mother board/processor with it. FAIL!

Well, here I am at a cross roads. Before it was a matter of software, now I need new hardware. What do you think I should build or buy?

The main things I’m looking for in a HTPC

• Ability to browse the web
• Watch Videos I download form the internet, mostly divX files
• Small form factor
• Doesn’t really look like a computer
• Blu-ray is a bonus

Should I build another Window xp MCE machine, Windows Vista Ultimate, mac Mini, apple TV, myth TV? I don’t even know where to start.

I’ll blog my research as I go. Lets see what you think I should do.

In keeping in step with my new found love of StarCraft, I wanted to play it on my laptop. One problem… my laptop doesn’t run on windows or mac, its powered by UBUNTU!

I love running Ubuntu, and I have never found a reason why I would need windows on my laptop. Ubuntu does everything I need it to, that is until I wanted to play a PC based game on it.

I did a little google searching and I found out that WINE on Ubuntu will play StarCraft perfectly! I gave it a go, and was surprised at how easy it was, and how well it all worked together.

Here are the steps I took:

• Open a terminal and run sudo apt-get install wine to get wine.
• After that finishes, insert the StarCraft CD into the computer
• In the terminal cd to whatever cdrom drive you put the cd in (under the /media/ directory). Mine was /media/cdrom0
• Use Wine to setup StarCraft with wine setup.exe. You’ll get the install screen for SC – enter your CD key and install the software. StarCraft will be installed under the path of
  ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Starcraft/starcraft.exe.
• In the terminal, run winecfg and go to the Audio tab. Set Hardware Acceleration to Emulation.
• What is StarcCaft without the Broodwar expantion? I eject the Starcraft CD and insert the Broodwar expantion CD.
  cd to the appropriate /media/ directory and run wine setup.exe.
• To play StarCraft, run wine ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Starcraft/starcraft.exe.
  I was also able to find a link to it from the Applications menu in Ubuntu.
• Lastly, I downloaded the latest patch to BroodWar from blizzard.com, and ran that with no problem.

There it was, a fully patched and running copy of StarCraft on my Ubuntu laptop. Can life get sweeter? I submit that it can not!