Howto on Evan Hoffman

Migrating a PostgreSQL DB to a new machine without doing a dump & restore

Mon, 11 Jul 2011 14:39:16 +0000

rsync over NFS can be so fast.

How I fixed my Wii's noisy disc drive & read errors.

Fri, 25 Feb 2011 00:10:31 +0000

I got my Wii in late 2006 and around 2009 I noticed it was starting to sound like a circular saw when the disc drive was spinning. This was annoying but it didn’t affect the games so I never thought much about it.

About two weeks ago, however, New Super Mario Bros. Wii stopped working:

The Wii basically worked except for the disc drive. As soon as I put a disc in, I’d get the error above - even if I didn’t start start the game. I tried blowing in the disc slot (the only thing I could think of… worked for my old NES!) but the problem continued. I figured I had two choices: buy another Wii or attempt to fix mine. Since mine was already essentially useless I figured it couldn’t hurt anything to try fixing it.

Forcing Wordpress administration over SSL

Mon, 20 Sep 2010 15:46:05 +0000

I never like typing a password into a non-SSL site, no matter how trivial it is. In order to give my own site this ability I simply used mod_rewrite to force requests to Wordpress’s admin pages to go over SSL.

The .htaccess file for the site looks like this:

BEGIN WordPress

RewriteEngine On RewriteBase /evan/ RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteRule . /evan/index.php [L]

HOWTO: Install Flash plugin on Firefox on Fedora / CentOS / RedHat Linux

Wed, 09 Jun 2010 01:36:54 +0000

Updated 8/31/2011 See my newer post on this subject.

I know I’ve been through this before because I’ve setup Fedora before and it’s working. But I just installed FC12 on my desktop at home (since my Seagate drive bricked itself a few days ago and I had to reinstall anyway) and while I finally got the Adobe Flash plugin working, it didn’t have any audio, which made YouTube kind of suck. Anyway, this of course was a solved problem, I just forgot where the fix was located… but duh, it’s on the Fedora website. A simple

Victory! Change Active Directory Password via LDAP through browser

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 13:51:43 +0000

I had to give up on PHP and go to Perl, but it turned out not to be so bad. Users can now change their Active Directory passwords via a self-service web page that doesn’t require admin credentials. The Perl code is below. Authentication to the script is done via .htaccess LDAP authentication, so the REMOTE_USER env variable is assumed to contain the user’s username (sAMAccountName) by the time this script is called. There is a simple check for $ENV{HTTPS} to ensure the script is called via SSL, and AD requires password changes to be done via ldaps, so the whole thing should be encrypted end to end.

How to install the 64-bit Sun Java plugin on 64-bit firefox on 64-bit Fedora Core 11 Linux (which happens to use 64 bits)

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 17:45:09 +0000

I’m giddy! I found this post on mozdev.org which was magical.

[evan@ehoffman ~]$ java -version
java version "1.6.0_17"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_17-b04)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 14.3-b01, mixed mode)

[root@ehoffman plugins]# uname -a
Linux ehoffman 2.6.30.8-64.fc11.x86_64 #1 SMP Fri Sep 25 04:43:32 EDT 2009 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
[root@ehoffman plugins]# pwd
/usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins
[root@ehoffman plugins]# ln -s /usr/java/jdk1.6.0_16/jre/lib/amd64/libnpjp2.so

The main thing I was missing was that the plugin isn’t libpluginjava_oji.so, or whatever I thought it was, but libnpjp2.so. Once I created the symlink into /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins it worked (as verified on http://www.java.com/en/download/help/testvm.xml and http://www.java.com/en/download/installed.jsp).

Migrating RT from mysql to postgresql.

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 17:21:42 +0000

So I wanted to move our old RT 3.6 system to a new VM running a clean CentOS 5.3 x86 install and RT 3.8. I got RT installed but the 3.6 system was running on MySQL, which sucks (still), and I wanted to move it to Postgres, which rules (more and more each day). So Googling for “migrate rt from mysql to postgresql” brought me here. I tried the procedure listed there but it wasn’t quite working for me. my2pg.pl and mysql2postgresql.perl both caused segfaults when I tried to run them. I realized I was on my own, and it wasn’t really that bad.

One-click converting .avi to .mp4 for iPod or iPhone

Wed, 27 May 2009 22:06:42 +0000

I found a way to convert my camera’s .avi files to iPod and iPhone-compatible .mp4 files with minimal effort. The .mp4 files are also significantly smaller.