ShrimpWorks

Data recorded with RaceChrono for Android, and mashed onto the video using RaceRender. Both are excellent tools I can recommend wholeheartedly.

Just for fun and education:

All of my Debian desktop installs running KDE received an update a month or two ago which rendered the “Apper” package management application broken, failing with the following error:

Unable to open database read-only: Database action 'prepare dependency insert 
statement' failed: table dependencies has no column named items_installed

The solution is to delete the Listaller cache DB:

rm -r /var/lib/listaller/db/

The cache will be recreated automatically with the expected structure on the next run of Apper (or other PackageKit type thing).

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.

My new carbon fibre bonnet arrived today, and was a snap to fit. It seriously is much lighter than the stock part, plus the vents earn me some major ricer cred.

Here’s a small Java class I’ve been using in loads of applications and things for a few years (it’s evolved a little over the years).

It simply exposes a few very basic HTTP methods (for HEAD, GET and POST) which all just return strings containing the web server’s response. It’s seemed pretty useful and reliable in applications large and small, so maybe it’s of some use to someone else as well.

Download HttpUtils

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.

Wow. I hadn’t been paying much attention to this, since it’s been a while since anything with the “Tribes” name on it was worth following. This really does look pretty awesome though! It should be out this year as well.