A guy, a blog and the internet
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Life changing events…
Jul 30th
In less than 12 hours I leave Capetown and move back to Johannesburg.
I am excited, a little nervous, and really looking forward to what the future holds.
On that note, it’s almost lunch time, and I’m gonna miss the friday ritual of going out and getting food. Thank you to TheClassifieds it’s been a great year, I’ve learn a lot, and I hope you guys have also.
Time to shutdown and go to lunch, catch you on the flip side 
SARS eFiling and Linux
Jul 7th
SARS (South African Revenue Service) a couple of yeas ago (eFiling) introduced an awesome system, where you could go online and submit your tax return.
The problems I have had have been annoying, firstly (2008) I was unable to do anything as the system required you to have Adobe Reader 8.2, this was not available for Linux. And you can imagine the support staff were very helpfull… NOT
And then 2009 & 2010, a similar problem or so it seemed, when ever I tried to load one of the system generated PDF files it would tell me I needed to upgrade my Adobe Reader (which at the moment is 9.3.3, the latest I believe).
After trying to figure out what could be the problem I found it to be a javascript related issue, yes javascript in a PDF…
Solution
Well to solve this problem you need to have the Debian Multimedia repository setup.
And then all you need to do is:
apt-get install acroread mozilla-acroread acroread-plugins
After that restart firefox/iceweasel and there you have it, the missing peice of the puzzel acroread-plugins
So now I have submitted my returns for 2008/2009/2010, here’s waiting for a refund *holds thumbs*
Trying to reorganize ones life
Apr 27th
It’s amazing how time flies parts us and we sometimes don’t even notice it.
Well I know I can’t change time or the past, but I can shape the future, and I plan to do just that.
I know it’s not going to be easy, but I am needing to split my day in to various chucks so I can at least get some meaning out of them and not just plod along like I have been doing.
So lets see how this works out… And hopefully I can stick to it for more than one or two days :p
I am slowly becoming a stronger person, not only emotionally but physically and mentally as well. I have some motivation, and it’s amazing what you can achieve when you have people around you that believe in you 
so thank you to all those people
I have a few big plans for the future, unfortunately the timing isn’t right yet for some of them, and some other plans are reliant on the first few, but with time and patience, these things shall come to pass
And hopefully I will now have more time to mess around with more technology
Well best get off to bed, it’s getting late 
Taking a break…
Feb 25th
Isn’t it funny how much we rely on the interet. I have my email, twitter and facebook setup on my phone and all the pc’s I use, just in case I miss something. It has started taking up a lot of time, I have hardly had any time for myself.
So, I’ve decided that for the next couple of weeks I’m going to disconnect myself from that world, unfortunatly I can’t disconnect completely from the internet due to my work. But I can close down chat clients, and the like.
Here’s to the next couple of weeks, hopefully something good comes from it, catch y’all on the other side. And I will try and blog more, havn’t really had a chance to learn anything new recently, hence this decision
Love you all, C
PS. If you need to get hold of me, pop me a mail or sms, or leave a comment below (they are moderated so if you don’t want it to show up just say so
UPDATE – 2 Mar So it took a week and I’m back, but I’ve removed a few people from follow lists, unfortunately these things need to be done
Remote syncing files using git
Jan 26th
I’ve been wanting to write a post about this for a while, and a friend of mine asked about it a couple of weeks ago, and here it is…
First you need to create a remote Git repository, either on your own server or Codaset, GitHub
You will need to create a local repository:
mkdir directory_to_sync cd directory_to_sync git init touch .gitignore git add .gitignore git commit
To create a remote Git repository do the following on your server:
mkdir repository.git cd repository.git git init --bare
Once you have created the remote repository you will need to link it to your local copy:
git remote add origin ssh://server_address/path_to_repository git push origin master git pull origin master
To make life easier I always edit the Git config file and add the following:
vi .git/config
[push]
default = current
[branch "master"]
remote = origin
merge = master
The only problem with this approach is that you need to store the files in a seperate directory, but we ca get around this “limitation” by using symlinks for example to store the .bash* files in Git:
ln -s directory_to_sync/.bashrc ./
Well I hope this helps someone out there
The post is brought to you by lekhonee v0.7
Tweetdeck and 64Bit Linux
Dec 24th
So I’ve been trying to get TweetDeck running on my work PC for a while, and none of the howto’s I followed were able to help
Then this morning I stumbled apon this gem and lo and behold it worked (kinda) I just had to set the permisisons on the /opt/Adobe Air/ directory.
AWESOME!!! 
Anyways, this is mainly so if I ever reinstall (which I tend to do anyways every couple of weeks lolz… selftorture++)
Canon IP1800 – update
Sep 24th
In my last post I mentioned how to get this printer working in Debian, and since then have found a better (no ignoring dependancies) method.
Taken from: http://nomo17k.wordpress.com/2009/03/22/canon-pixma-ip1800-for-debian-lenny/
Sunday, March 22, 2009
Canon PIXMA iP1800 for Debian Lenny
This is a cheap inkjet printer that I got for my temporary printing needs. The cartridges are very expensive (> $16 !!), so for heavy use this isn’t really worth my money. Anyways…
Install CUPS and printing-related packages:
# apt-get install cupsys cupsys-client libcupsys2 # apt-get install cupsys-driver-gimpprint cupsys-bsd # apt-get install foomatic-db-engine foomatic-db-gimp-print foomatic-filters # apt-get install hp-ppd linuxprinting.org-ppds printfilters-ppd # apt-get install foomatic-filters-ppds # apt-get install gs-gpl libpng3 ijsgutenprint
(Note that I downloaded a few packages that are not necessary for this particular printer. This is a generic collection of packages that I find useful to use printers in other places like my office.)
Download deb packages of the printer driver:
cnijfilter-common_2.70-3_i386.deb cnijfilter-ip1800series_2.70-3_i386.deb
and install them:
# dpkg -i cnijfilter-common_2.70-3_i386.deb cnijfilter-ip1800series_2.70-3_i386.deb
If CUPS has been installed properly, visit the CUPS admin page (http://localhost:631/admin) with your browser. You will be able to configure the printer in the standard CUPS way.
Taken from: http://nomo17k.wordpress.com/2009/03/22/canon-pixma-ip1800-for-debian-lenny/
I copied and pasted so I have a copy incase that site disapears.
Debian Mirror and GPG issues
Aug 27th
So I had a mirror up and running beautifully, and then after running the update scripts I lost the GPG authentication.
I was getting the following errors:
WARNING: The following packages cannot be authenticated!
foo bar baz
Install these packages without verification [y/N]?
I struggled for a while to get this to work, and then gave up, but I finally got this sorted out
Firstly as the user running the mirror script:
gpg --no-default-keyring --keyring ~/.gnupg/trustedkeys.gpg --keyserver hkp://subkeys.pgp.net --recv-keys
I needed to add the following keys:
16BA136C – Backports.org Archive Key
55BE302B – Debian Archive Automatic Signing Key (5.0/lenny)
F42584E6 – Lenny Stable Release Key
55BE302B – Debian Archive Automatic Signing Key (5.0/lenny)
0C5A2783 – Medibuntu Packaging Team
1F41B907 – Christian Marillat
437D05B5 – Ubuntu Archive Automatic Signing Key
6DFBCBAE – Sun Microsystems, Inc. (xVM VirtualBox archive signing key)
BBE55AB3 – Debian-Volatile Archive Automatic Signing Key (4.0/etch)
The Medibuntu key was a little strange to get as noted on this post: How To: Make Your Own Ubuntu Repository DVDs
Also removed the “–ignore-release-gpg” option from the scripts, this will at least warn me the next time something like this happens…
And then run the mirror scripts again and voila
Apache mod_rewrite tips and tricks
Aug 15th
So I was trying to solve a weird redirect issue: Request exceeded the limit of 10 internal redirects due to probable configuration error.
I found this site, which had quite alot of info.
One tip I really liked was:
Cache-Friendly File Names
This is probably my favorite, and I use it on every site I work on. It allows me to update my javascript and css files in my visitors cache’s simply by naming them differently in the html, on the server they stay the same name. This rewrites all files for /zap/j/anything-anynumber.js to /zap/j/anything.js and /zap/c/anything-anynumber.css to /zap/c/anything.css
RewriteRule ^zap/(j|c)/([a-z]+)-([0-9]+)\.(js|css)$ /zap/$1/$2.$4 [L]
I'm a self taught PHP developer and Linux Sysadmin, I'm also starting to learn BSD.