Akom's Tech Ruminations

Various tech outbursts - code and solutions to practical problems

Code and Hacks The Eclipse, PDT and Smarty dance

Posted by Admin • Monday, January 24. 2011 • Category: Code and Hacks
Eclipse is a great developer tool, and I use mine for Java, PHP, and C++. It actually does all of the above really well, but when it comes to Smarty template Syntax Highlighting, it's a tale of much suffering. I honestly am not even asking for any Smarty auto-completion - just pretty colors that tell me when I'm fat-fingering the syntax.

Fortunately there is a solution that appears to work, and here is the currently valid step-by-step

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Linux Simple flat file site search in PHP/Smarty

Posted by Admin • Wednesday, January 19. 2011 • Category: Linux
Sometimes using a real search implementation (Lucene, Sphinx) is just too much. The particular site I was working on is something like 30 pages, it's maintained as flat files (Smarty templates, but it's basically HTML on disk), and it really, really should not require megabytes of code and cron jobs to be able to search it!

That said, this is a simple search solution - it makes a lot of assumptions:

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Linux Predictable ALSA numbering of USB sound cards

Posted by Admin • Wednesday, January 12. 2011 • Category: Linux
I have 3 rather cute Monoprice usb sound cards for use by mmpd (client I wrote for multiple mpd instances). The great thing about them is that for $9 you can just keep adding zones to your music systems. The bad news is, UDEV will reorder sound cards on boot as it pleases.

Zones changing would be survivable in itself (reboots are rare), but I also have a webcam and an onboard sound card that I don't use - so sometimes the numbers I've configured mpd to use aren't even valid sound cards! On to the continuing search for a working solution

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Linux Fixing digitemp with LinkUSB on kernels after 2.6.32-24

Posted by Admin • Tuesday, January 11. 2011 • Category: Linux
As many people have discovered, kernels after 2.6.32-24 changed the USB-RS232 serial driver to not set hardware flow control (RTS/DTS) flags. No doubt there was a good reason. Unfortunately, digitemp and owfs don't enable it either, also probably for a good reason - at least when applied to older devices. What this means is that now when you try to use a LinkUSB (and probably other DS9097U type hardware behind USB to Serial converters), digitemp and owfs no longer work.

Let's apply a time-tested hackish approach.

Continue reading "Fixing digitemp with LinkUSB on kernels after 2.6.32-24"

Linux How to take down your pfSense firewall with one checkbox

Posted by Admin • Saturday, January 1. 2011 • Category: Linux
Simple: create a Traffic Shaper queue but forget to choose a queue parent.

Your firewall will not pass any packets across, and you'll have no idea what hit you.