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installing subversion and vim on a shared host

13 February, 2010 - 06:26 — drew

I haven't used shared hosting for quite a while, but for a few sites I've worked on recently an account on a shared host seemed the best choice in terms of how much disk space and bandwidth they'd get for a very small cost.

One obvious problem with shared hosting though is the lack of control; I was careful to choose a package which provided up-to-date versions of apache, php and mysql but subversion was not installed, and the version of vim on the server didn't have support for some basic things like syntax highlighting.

committing to subversion from behind a dodgy proxy

30 January, 2010 - 05:42 — drew

I was recently doing some work in a hotel, and when I came to commit my changes back to my central subverson repository using git-svn, I got an error message that looked a lot like this:

Committing to http: //example.com/top_secret_svn_repo/trunk ...
RA layer request failed: Server sent unexpected return value (400 Bad Request) in response to MKACTIVITY request for '/top_secret_svn_repo/trunk/!svn/act/7cc9df3f-2956-3669-8f25-45c093142061' at /usr/lib/git-core/git-svn line 3347

installing PECL upload progress on ubuntu server

19 January, 2010 - 11:17 — drew

Some of Drupal's CCK modules such as filefield and imagefield have support for a neat Upload Progress meter.

You may have seen a message in the status report of your Drupal site saying something like... "Upload progress not enabled - Your server is capable of displaying file upload progress, but does not have the required libraries. It is recommended to install the PECL uploadprogress library (prefered) or to install APC."

handy bash, vim and screen configurations

3 December, 2009 - 09:08 — drew

Here are some useful configurations for bash, vim and screen. Every time I have to set myself up on a new machine, I end up copying these files from a machine where I've already got an account. I thought perhaps it'd be easier to put the settings on a webpage. If anyone else finds these useful, that's a bonus.

~/.bashrc

(snippet, not the whole file)

one liner using xargs to automate a repetitive task

27 November, 2009 - 07:06 — drew

This article illustrates using the *nix commandline to chain several commands together to automate a repetitive task - in this case preparing some drupal modules into neatly labelled directories.

The example here covers quite a few different useful commands and commandline techniques, which we can't really hope to cover in exhaustive detail; there's plenty of good documentation out there for everthing we mention.

running herbert under wine on linux

10 March, 2009 - 15:33 — drew

After a while using hddtool to manage our Philips HDD120 audio player, I discovered herbert. This is an open-source application written in C#. It's usually run in windows using the .NET framework. I wanted to be able to manage the player from linux - I've now found a way to do this, and I'll explain how.

a guide to using the Philips HDD120 mp3 player without the dreadful Digital Media Manager software

10 March, 2009 - 15:21 — drew

this is a (slightly edited) copy of a post I made on an old installation of drupal 4 here at mcdruid.co.uk in February 2006 - I'm mainly reproducing it as a prelude to my guide to running Herbert under wine on linux.

In this guide on how to use the Philips HDD120 mp3 player without the dreadful Philips software, I'm going to recommend a very good piece of free software which can take over the job of the Philips Digital Media Manager software.