ShrimpWorks

Update 1 - one minor upgrade later, and they’re back to the previous configuration in /usr/share/owncloud. Joy. Guess I’ll give it up.

Update 2 - ok, so unfortunately I didn’t give up, and wow 5.0.10 is back in /var/www/. Double-you tee eff.

I’ve been trying out hosting my own ownCloud instance on one of my Debian servers, and it’s mostly gone pretty well, using their official apt repositories.

On around the 17th of July however, ownCloud published an update from version 5.0.8 to version 5.0.9 which completely broke the system as they changed where everything was installed to. I thought I’d write up a couple of pointers to getting things up and running again, if you’ve suffered the same problem.

Firstly, the application itself has moved from /usr/share/owncloud/ to a more conventional /var/www/owncloud/. This means you’ll have to update any Apache config you might have done to get it accessible. They removed the original /etc/apache2/conf.d/owncloud.conf, so if you were relying on that, you’d have to create something new and correct in /etc/apache2/sites-available/ and symlink it in /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/.

Next, the config configuration has also changed. Previously, the owncloud/config/ directory used to be a symlink to /etc/owncloud/, but now they have provided an actual config directory within the ownCloud installation. I removed this directory, and created a symlink to /etc/owncloud/ as /var/www/owncloud/config/

Once that’s all set up, you should be able to load ownCloud in your browser and it should perform an upgrade on the DB. In my case, the upgrade process got stuck in a loop, I presume it’s setting a cookie that is not being cleared correctly. The “solution” was to restart my browser.

When you log in thereafter, all your stuff should be present as it were pre-upgrade.

It’s probably also a good idea to make regular backups of /usr/share/owncloud/data/ - thank goodness this wasn’t wiped out with the rest of the previous install location.

With all the anti-NSA “spying” and fears of big corporate data collection stuff flying around lately, a lot of interesting products and tools have been given a bunch of visibility as alternatives to the traditional offerings now see as somewhat  “suspect”.

Ignoring the paranoia, prism-break.org has a huge collection of fun stuff to play with.

Going on two years since I updated this thing?

I’m trying to revive this now, and hopefully turn it into a proper central resource for “me” stuff. I’ve already updated the projects with some of my bigger/older things, which never made it on here for some reason, including Monster Hunt and UnWheel.

Trying to get the “gallery” pimped out a bit as well, with some additional things and events I’ve been snapping occasionally.

Not really happy with this design, it seems a bit too informal for what I want, though the previous design I have used for the past few (8+?) years has got a bit stale.

More stuff to follow shortly.

I got my Sun Java Certification yesterday :-).

Apparently after writing multiple fairly large business-critical Java applications and services for the past few years, this certification means I now know how to write Java code so I should be able to make some fairly large business-critical applications and services. Yay!

Soo, a year since I last posted anything, so I guess it’s about time I did something a little more constructive with this space than leaving it sitting here gathering comment spam.

Everything’s happily upgraded to the latest Wordpress version, complete with reCAPTCHA spam protection.

I’ll begin updating things more frequently now, starting with some continuing development of my most recent project, Out of Eve.

Sup.

Since there are certain people about how hosting a website on unreliable home ADSL is a generally bad idea, I’ve decided to move it to a more stable, permanent home on my little Linode.

Also, since my last post, a number of things have happened in my life in general. Firstly, I bought a really leet car. A brand spanking new Honda Civic hatch. It’s probably the single most awesome thing I’ve ever owned, and I love it to death :D.

Shortly after that, mother and I decided to club in together and buy a town house. We’ve only ever rented places before, so the whole buying thing was a bit new, but it pretty much sorts itself out after 3459094 different companies and institutions shove 459345 different documents in front of you to sign.

The place is in a nice small complex in a quiet corner of Ruimsig, on the very western edges of Roodepoort. Very nice little house, nice big garden (sometimes it’s very relaxing to feel real grass under bare feet :)).

Anyway, work’s been keeping me pretty busy, so I haven’t had a lot of quality time with either of the above new things… Really need to take some leave I think…

I’m only posting now, since I finally managed to drag myself away for long enough to actually do some useful stuff for a change.

I could probably rave on for hours about how awesome the thing is, but then, you’ve probably read a million other reviews already.

Launch day I was up with the sparrows, off to my local Look & Listen to pick up my pre-order, only to realize they open an hour later than I had arrived :D. An eternity later (AKA one hour), I was in as the door opened, at the counter collecting my stuff (and the cashier labelled “Trainee” ended up instructing the manager on how to do the sale, since the pre-order deposit had to be taken into account). I was rather disappointed with their limited game selection, they had no Tomb Raider: Legend, Dead or Alive 4, or Project Gotham Racing 3 - despite DOA and PGR being the main selling points apparently, with huge posters everywhere.

Went over to Incredible Connection who have a branch in the same centre, to be greeted with lovely PGR stands and banners everywhere, yet no actual PGR or DOA stock, and the usual assortment of lame staff who looked shocked to discover that there was in fact this gigantic X'360 stand/area in the middle of the shop.

Anyway, off to Makro next, who luckily had loads of stock of DOA and PGR, and were a bit cheaper than the prices on Look & Listen’s website.

Oh, I forgot to mention just how heavy the darn thing is. Lugging it around the shopping centre was no walk in the park, and my weakling arms were actually quite painful afterward.

Anyway, between then, usual working hours, and now, I’ve been playing, learning, discovering, etc. It was a bit of a schlepp to get hooked up to Live, as it’s not actually supported in SA yet, and since they seemingly don’t allow you to change your country after sign-up, it’s a bit of a mission to set up a profile that is usable. I ended up creating a UK-based Passport and Live account.

On the subject of Live, Sony is going to have to pull off something really amazing to beat Microsoft’s setup, it’s really quite altogether cool (except that, because of Telkom I’m willing to bet, every now and then when communicating with Live, adding friends, unlocking achievements, etc., the machine hangs completely and needs to be reset - probably why Live is not officially supported here yet).

And I seriously need a better spam filtering setup. SpamBayes catches only around 50% of my spam, regardless of how much more I train it, if anything it’s getting less effective over time. Currently looking at Bogofilter.

Anyway, I’m off to see how DOA4 multiplayer works :)

Indeed. I discovered the only thing I didn’t like about this site’s design was the page header image.

So it’s gone, and a leet one is in it’s place. Yay.

Hmmmmm, long time no update. That’s not to say I haven’t been busy recently.

Last month, we released “UnWheel R5”, which seems to have become the (hopefully) final release. I’m pretty happy with it at the moment, all the major bugs are gone, multiplayer is working wonderfully and the online record system is churning records around at a mean rate (and those records still need a monthly rotation system applied, so still some work to be done there). I still haven’t decided if I want to do this all again in Unreal Torunament 2007 or not :).

Elsewhere, I’ve been playing around with DynaBar, and it’s grown a lot. The plugin system has been tweaked to allow better customisation options from the developer side, as well as having options added to improve the user interaction side of things. There are a whole crapload of other options available as well, multiple layers (supporting PNG graphics with alpha transparency), different scanline styles, text prefixes and suffixes, better caching options, etc. In addition, you can choose to have the background be a gradient blending between any two colours, horizontal or vertical, and you can create “groups”, which is a bunch of userbars animated (with fading/blending between bars), and they all remain fully dynamic. Speaking of dynamic, I’ve also added a whole load of plugins, from XFire, to more Last.FM options, to Battlefield 2 and TrackMania, and even RSS headlines and live game server status via Qstat.

I’ve put up a test system here as a sort of sandbox, so feel free to try out all the options and plugins, and if you have any suggestions or ideas for plugins, please let me know. In addition to the designer, there’s a browser available, which lets you easily build the animated groups mentioned above. Also, it all works with Internet Explorer now, which I didn’t bother fixing with the previous version (wasn’t meant to be such a “big” project :)). Source code package will be available as soon as some more testing is done.

In addition, I’ve been re-writing my online Dosage-powered comic viewer - Injector

• again, this time it’s going fully “Web 2.0” (ZOMG!), so everything’s quite nice and quick. This project still needs a bit of work on the administration and installation side of things before it can see a release.

Aside from all that, I’ve also been slowly building a new UnrealZA site, using the Python-powered Django framework. It really is a wonderful thing. Please excuse me for a minute while I run away from a horde of crazy, twisted, Nevow fans (among others). Anyway, I’ll happily recommend Django any day of the week to anyone looking for a Python web framework.

I’ve also decided I don’t like the look of this site anymore, so I guess that’s another thing to go on my to-do list for the near future.

Seems just about everything on my server machine has been running perfectly since I upgraded to PHP5, except this site :(.

So for the time being, the attachments plugin is disabled (the cause of the problem), so no downloads are available until I fixxor it.

Edit: Well, that took all of 5 minutes to fix ;)