I’ve been running knoppmyth for years now with no real issues. It’s been stable and great, but I was always worried that I’d break something by installing new packages above and beyond what’s already there. With the recent demise of zap2it’s US TV feed I needed to upgrade myth to use SchedulesDirect. I took the opportunity to upgrade the hardware (new mobo and more RAM) and reinstall MythTV. I’m a long time Ubuntu user and advcate (go AZ LoCo) so I’ve been wanting to try Mythbuntu’s sweet meta-packages.

I was not disappointed! I used a base Gutsy server install to start. It was the slickest install of mythtv I’ve seen. The config was easy and I was back onlne and watching TV in no time - which is important for the wife and kid factor.

A big thanks to the Mythbuntu folks and all their hard work.

UPDATE: SchedulesDirect has have hit their goal and lowered the membership fee to $20/year!

BinaryStarCast comes through once again. New favorite song: Bloc Party - I Still Remember.

Rock On.

Technorati Tags: feel good

I have a few mp3s that are more audiobook than music, but I couldn’t figure out how to get it out of my music library and into my audiobook section in iTunes. That is until I ran across this link which lead me to this script. It worked flawless and was awesome. Thanks to Doug for the sweet script. I had no idea that iTunes was that scriptable. I’ll have to look into other useful scripts for iTunes.

Technorati Tags: feel good, Mac

I’ve been looking for a nice little web app for my wife and I to manage our finances. I stumbled onto Wesabe a while back and slowly but surely been putting my financial info into in. it was OK, but seemed to be missing two important features: Auto upload (Please don’t make me login to my bank’s website… it’s way too much work before I even get going) and a simple budget so I can see how much $ I have left to spend (or see if I went over).

Wesabe knocked the first one out by throwing a firefox add-on our way that auto uploads your data from your bank. +10 for that one, guys.

Now with auto-uploads from my accounts to Wesabe, I was almost there… one glaring feature missing. Budgeting! How can I know if I went over my limit? Luckily I read a blog post about how “Jason” the CEO of Wesabe would be available on the phone for questions every afternoon, from 12 to 4 p.m. PST. Yeah right! I was finishing up my late lunch today when I thought - why not? I’ve got a question - how do I get a budget going?

I pick up my cell and after 2 rings I was talking to Jason… the CEO. Pretty cool. I ask him about how I can set up a budget to track my spending. He told me about a dropdown on the Spending Summary page that will let you set a “spending target” (come to find out that people don’t like the word “budget”… so they call it a “spending target”) This is exactly what I’m looking for.

My only complaint is that this feature wasn’t in the FAQ or in the sidebar for me to easily find - I hope they fix that. I thanked Jason and that was it. He said if there’s any other suggestions to email him.

Pretty sweet deal if you ask me. I got my problem solved by speaking with the CEO directly. Imagine if you could do that with other company’s products.

Thanks Wesabe.

Technorati Tags: feel good

Juniper VPN on Windows without installing the invasive McAfee VirusScan and Firewall
or
“How I learned to stop worrying and love the VPN again”

(In reality this should work with any OS that will run Firefox and Java)

Rational: Some large companies require a very invasive virus scanner with cranked up policies. (Ever try to compile code while your virus scanner is in the middle slowing things down? Painful!) These steps will let you login to the VPN without having to jump through the hoops of install the full McAfee suite

- Install Firefox and the Firefox Java plugin (http://www.java.com/en/download/windows_xpi.jsp?locale=en&host=www.java.com:80)
- Install the user agent switcher addon (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/59)
- Download a list of useragent strings at http://techpatterns.com/downloads/firefox/useragentswitcher.xml
- In the UserAgentSwitch options under “User Agents” on the (left hand side), “Import” and then browse to the useragent strings xml file you just downloaded.
- Now back in FF go to Tools -> User Agent Switcher and select “Safari 125.8 (MacOS)” [I believe other non-windows user agent strings will also work but I haven’t tested all of them]
- Browse to your vpn login page
- Enter your username and password as usual and change the Realm to Mac / Linux and hit “Sign In”.
- Click on the “Client Apps” icon at the top right of the page
- Click on the “Start” button for Java Secure Application Manager (It’ll give you an error popup window - just close it)
- Now Click on the “Start” button for Network Connect and it should open up the VPN client.
- You are now on the VPN network.

Technorati Tags: feel good

Today is my last day at Apollo Group, Inc. It’s been a good experience and I’ve meet some very cool people. I move on to start with iMemories tomorrow. Moving on…

http://ubuntu.wordpress.com/2006/12/22/do-you-blog-about-ubuntu/

Good point. I blog about ubuntu, do you?

I recently decided to upgrade my IPCop box and in the process switch my home/office VPN from IPSec to OpenVPN.

First we install, Zerina’s OpenVPN addon to IPCop. Basically copy the zip to the IPCop box, unzip and run the install file. Actually follow this guy’s great tutorial up to step 7. he’s got it all covered.

Now that you have the OpenVPN server all setup and the OpenVPN client package (zip) what’s next? In order for this to work with Fiesty’s network-manager-openpvn package you first have to follow this guy’s great blog post about splitting the .p12 file up. (the .p12 file is found inside the client package zip file)

Ok - now you have a pem, crt and key file… let get it working with the VPN section of network manager. Ensure you have the network-manager-openvpn plugin installed sudo apt-get install network-manager-openvpn. Now click on the NM applet -> VPN Connections -> Configure VPN. Create a new OpenVPN connection.

Under the Required tab:
Gateway address: (your gw address)
Leave port as is
Connection Type: X.509 Certificate
CA File: (your pem file)
Certificate: (your crt file)
Key: (your key file)

Under the Optional tab:
I prefer to have “Only use VPN connection for these addresses”, but it’s up to you.
Ensure “use LZO compression” is checked
Use Cipher: BF-CBC

And you’re done!

Now when you want to connect to your VPN you can just click on the NM applet -> VPN Connections -> (Your VPN name) and it’ll start right up.

There is one annoying bug that I hope will be fixed soon: When you start your VPN it clears your /etc/resolv.conf file. I just have to manually fix it each time. See Lanuchpad bug here.

(I’m pretty sure that these directions will also work for older versions of ubuntu.)

You need to install a program on your Treo 650 that will let it become a USB modem like:
Treo USBModem or PdaNet
If anyone knows of any free / open source software for the palm that will do the same thing let me know!

/etc/chatscripts/USBModem:

TIMEOUT 5
ABORT '\nBUSY\r'
ABORT '\nERROR\r'
ABORT '\nNO ANSWER\r'
ABORT '\nNO CARRIER\r'
ABORT '\nNO DIALTONE\r'
ABORT '\nRINGING\r\n\rRINGING\r'
'' \rATZ
TIMEOUT 12
OK ATD#777
TIMEOUT 22
CONNECT ""


/etc/ppp/peers/USBDialup:

noauth
connect "/usr/sbin/chat -v -f /etc/chatscripts/USBDialup"
defaultroute
usepeerdns
/dev/ttyACM0 115200
local
novj


You may notice that when you turn on the usbmodem software on the Treo and plug it in you may see something like this in dmesg:

[110049.340000] usb 3-1: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 5
[110049.508000] usb 3-1: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
[110049.512000] cdc_acm 3-1:1.0: ttyACM0: USB ACM device


That’s where you find out what tty port the USB modem will be communicating on: /dev/ttyACM0. And that’s the port used in /etc/ppp/peers/USBDialup.

The rest is easy…

pon USBDialup

And you’re gold! You can then tail -f /var/log/messages to ensure it’s connecting alright.

Two cool guys that I know have just started a new online store for developer swag: CodeSmack

Check it out!