Category Archives: Computers

Miscellanious Computing

Ballarat Linux Install Fest Pictures

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I’ve now put the piccies of the start of the InstallFest up in my Gallery. It’s only the start because I was too busy installing systems afterwards to take any more! 😉

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…including the official opening by the local state member of parliament, Karen Overington (Labour) who, despite being a self-pronounced computer klutz, was kind enough to help us out.

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But the real stars of the show were Sasha Ivkovic and Troy, the technician, who did a wonderful job in spreading the word and prepping the room brilliantly and Bill Farrow for bringing the barbie and snags for free!

“Spread Firefox” WordPress plugin

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Want to alert those visitors to your WordPress blog who use Internet Explorer about upgrading to Firefox ?

This ‘Spread Firefox‘ plugin may be just what you want. As you can see from the screenshot below you can easily configure it to put a nice IE style warning bar at the top to tell them that they’re not getting the best from their current browser (the message is completely configurable), or you can pick banner ad’s, pop-ups (which I wouldn’t recommend) and other promotional methods.
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Leon Brooks Update

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Another update from the PLUG list:

Leon was taken off the sedation on Saturday and has been waking up slowly since then. As you can imagine, this is a slow process because of the nature of the injuries and the level of morphine he is on. He was put in a chair/bed for a while today so he could be in a different position. He required support, but opened one eye slightly and was able to look at Lucy and move his head to see. He was responding to pain stimulus on his hands and feet yesterday, but today he has improved to respond to a more gentle touch on his feet, and squeezed people’s hands with his when requested (after a few seconds pause). He still has a tube down his throat, but the assisted breathing has been turned off – he is now breathing on his own!

Exclusive locks in Bourne shell scripts

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Been writing some stuff in shell that needs to be able to ensure it doesn’t start itself twice, so a bit of Googling for exclusive locks in shell scripts brought me to this page on “advanced shell scripting” which had something that looked good.

Problem is that when you put it into a script you’ll find it doesn’t actually work because of some trivial coding issues.

So here’s the fixed version of that function..

# Function to do atomic locking.
# Original found at http://members.toast.net/art.ross/rute/node24.html
# Fixed by Chris Samuel http://www.csamuel.org/

function my_lockfile ()
 {
         TEMPFILE="$1.$$"
         LOCKFILE="$1.lock"
         ( echo $$ > $TEMPFILE ) >& /dev/null || (
                 echo "You don't have permission to access `dirname $TEMPFILE`"
                 return 1
         )
         ln $TEMPFILE $LOCKFILE >& /dev/null && {
                 rm -f $TEMPFILE
                 return 0
         }
         kill -0 `cat $LOCKFILE` >& /dev/null && {
                 rm -f $TEMPFILE
                 return 1
         }
         echo "Removing stale lock file"
         rm -f $LOCKFILE
         ln $TEMPFILE $LOCKFILE >& /dev/null && {
                 rm -f $TEMPFILE
                 return 0
         }
         rm -f $TEMPFILE
         return 1
 }

Leon Brooks Update

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Update from PLUG:

Author: Alex Polglaze
Date: 2006-02-28 13:09 +1100
Subject: [plug] LEON BROOKS UPDATE

This is an update of Leon Brooks’s current situation.

Leon is in Royal Perth Hospital in a medically induced coma. He currently has a chest infection and the doctors are fighting that. They expect that it will be another 4-5 days before they can reduce the sedation sufficiently and assess the brain and spinal damage.

He is expected to be in Intensive Care for another 4-5 weeks and therefore cannot receive any flowers during this time. Also Lucy is not at home much, so please hold the flowers.

Currently, babysitting, transport and meal preparation and supply are under control.

[…]

Lucy thanks everybody for the well wishes and support and is mentioning everybody as she talks to Leon.

So keep thinking of him and hopefully he will recover.

Alex Polglaze

Here is a probably related ABC news item from Sunday.

Hang in there Leon…