WA7QZR

Well, we’re back … Finally!

I’m going to be doing a little clean-up here, in addition to working on a new web site! Wow. So, I’ll be pulling some things off here and adding some new things. I never realized how quickly this became cluttered with rubbish. So stay tuned. Okay?

Thanks!

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For anyone who can get through the firewall to read this blog, this post is to let you all know that because we’re moving soon, I mean physically moving, and the servers will be taken down to move them, there’s a real good possibility that this domain will not be re-instituted at the new location. I don’t know if the ISP who handles my routing would be able to move the IP block to a different DSL circuit. Getting everything set-up again will take months to accomplish. So, I won’t be posting any more entries here.

All new entries will be found at: http://dispensationalthoughts.wordpress.com/ . Just copy & paste.

Thanks to those who have read. I hope you’ll continue to follow my blog at the other site.

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Here’s something to think about. The U.S. Dollar before those bastard Progressives took over everything:

I left the images huge so you can get all the detail at first glance.

None of that Federal Reserve/Illuminati crap on this one.

However, if you really love the Illuminati, go get a motorcycle and join their bike gang.

If you love the Federal Reserve, sorry, they have no bike gang. Just go hang yourself. No one will miss you.

What a world we live in.

TTYL!

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Really? So, did you have a massive brain-fart down in Scottsdale? All that hot sun dried-up all your brain cells?

User IP: 166.62.38.64

User hostname: ip-166-62-38-64.ip.secureserver.net

User location: Scottsdale, United States

Stupid chicken. Don’t even waste your time. I own the box & can pull the plug, in the unlikely event you got in.

Maybe you should go run another line, Pissant.

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Suppose you want to download a whole slug of files from Sourceforge, or any other place that downloads like Sourceforge does.

What I mean by that is, does the site present you with a URL that looks something like this:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/notarealproject/files/subjecta/Sounds/lowsound.whatever/download

Notice how the end of the URL has a "download" suffix? The filename you want comes before that as: "lowsound.whatever".

Now, let’s suppose there are 100-files you want to download. Hey, they are part of the application you downloaded earlier, but weren’t included initially, for some reason.

Okay, here’s what you can do. First, make sure you have a good clipboard manager installed, like Parcellite, the lightweight GTK+ clipboard manager. Yes, this is for Linux. Anyone else, well as they say, YMMV.

Open a terminal session & create a directory to work in and change "cd dirname" to it.

Open a file with your favorite text editor (ed or nano) call it lowsound.urls.

Navigate your web browser to the Sourceforge site you’re interested in. Locate the files you want to download. Just right-click your mouse on each filename, copy & paste each one into your file (lowsound.urls). Be sure to start each file on a new line.

Save the file when you’re done.

Assign a shell variable to contain your URL list. Something like: URLS

Now, copy the files to the variable

URLS=`cat lowsound.urls`

Yes, that’s the grave accent "`"

Check it

echo $URLS

You should see a single line of space-separated URLs.

Now, if you run this command-line BASH script:

for u in $URLS; do wget $(echo $u | tr ‘\n’ ‘ ‘; echo "-O" | tr ‘\n’ ‘ ‘; echo $u | sed ‘s/\/download//’ | sed ‘s/.*\///’); done;

All those files will be downloaded & they will have the filenames they are supposed to have.

How it works.

The script parses each individual URL contained in $URLS and passes the results, as an argument, to the "WGET" program, which downloads & saves the files.

for u in $URLS – "u" is the number of URLs contained in $URLS.

$(echo $u | tr ‘\n’ ‘ ‘; echo "-O" | tr ‘\n’ ‘ ‘; echo $u | sed ‘s/\/download//’ | sed ‘s/.*\///’);

These four piped commands display the the individual URLS with the newlines at the end of each one converted into spaces. It next adds the "-O", with:

echo "-O" | tr ‘\n’ ‘ ‘

to the command as an argument for wget, instructing it to use a specific filename instead of just defaulting with whatever is at the end of the URL string.

Next, the URL is brought-up again with:

echo $u

which is piped through SED twice:

| sed ‘s/\/download//’

which substitutes the string "/download" for the NULL string. Finally, the URL is stripped down to the actual filename by:

| sed ‘s/.*\///’

leaving us with the actual filename of the source file we’re trying to download.

The ";" ends this iteration of the command.

Enclosing the set of commands in $( …) causes the generated string to be passed to WGET as it’s arguments.

The "for – do – done" construction causes the commands to be run against each URL contained in $URLS, until "u" equals zero.

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CentOS 6

If you’re like me, you like testing software in a virtual machine, before committing it to your live system. That’s what I do with Oracle’s VirtualBox. Something you might have noticed is that the VirtualBox yum repository doesn’t work all that well with CentOS, (as it’s not really for CentOS in the first place). At least, that was the case for me. The manual way of keeping your VirtualBox and the extension pack installation is more annoying than it is anything else.

After searching for an automated way to perform updates, that didn’t demand my complete attention, and seeing that a lot of other users were looking for something that would do similar, I wrote this little script which, only requires you browse the download site with your browser and identify the major, minor and release numbers of the version you’re looking to get. That’s easy enough to do by just hovering your mouse over the link of the VirtualBox version you want. Run this script in a terminal window, plug-in the major, minor and release numbers when prompted, then go back to work while the script downloads and installs an updated VirtualBox for you. The script is heavily commented so it’s clear what I’m doing and why. Be sure to watch those end-of-lines. They might be wrapped in your browser. Check them carefully.

Anyhow, not meaning to be pragmatic, this little script works for me. Saves time. If it’s useful to you too, Dear Reader, then you’ve discovered why I posted it.

Just copy & paste the following into an ed or nano session (yeah, you can use vi, but only if you have six arms with three hands on each one), save the buffer as "InstallVirtualBox.sh", or whatever name you prefer, apply execute permissions and that’s it.

.

#!/bin/sh

#---------------------------------------------------------|

#                                                         |

# Install new VirtualBox version.                         |

#                                                         |

# This script will download and install both VirtualBox   |

# and the corresponding extension pack into /opt          |

#                                                         |

# This script assumes that the directory "/opt" exists,   |

# and that the user has sufficient "sudo" privileges.     |

#                                                         |

#---------------------------------------------------------|

# Initialize variables

MAJOR=

MINOR=

RELEASE=

VERSION=

VBOXDOWNLOAD=

#

# Gather version information

#

echo VirtualBox and Extension Pack Installer 

echo Enter VirtualBox Major '(as in 5):'

read MAJOR

echo Enter Minor number '(as in 0.2):'

read MINOR

echo Enter Release number '(as 102096):'

read RELEASE

#

# Assign version for downloads

#

VERSION=$MAJOR.$MINOR-$RELEASE

VBOXDOWNLOAD="VirtualBox-$VERSION-Linux_x86.run"

#

# Wait for user to give the okay signal.

echo Press ENTER to download $VBOXDOWNLOAD

read

#

# Check to see if the requested file exists. If it does,

# skip the download/compile/install operation.

#

if ! test -f $VBOXDOWNLOAD

then

	echo Downloading $VBOXDOWNLOAD

	wget http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/"$MAJOR.$MINOR"/"$VBOXDOWNLOAD"

	chmod +x $VBOXDOWNLOAD

	sudo ./$VBOXDOWNLOAD

	echo Press ENTER to download Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-$VERSION.vbox-extpack

	read

else

	echo File Exists ... Skipping

fi

#

# Inform the user of the next operation and wait for the okay signal.

#

echo Press ENTER to download and install the Extension Pack

read

#

# Check	to see if the requested	file exists. If	it does,

# skip the download/compile/install operation.

#

if ! test -f Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-$VERSION.vbox-extpack

then

	wget http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/"$MAJOR"."$MINOR"/Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-"$VERSION".vbox-extpack

	sudo VBoxManage extpack install --replace ./Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-$VERSION.vbox-extpack

else

	echo File Exists ... Skipping

fi

# VirtualBox and it's Extension Pack have been downloaded and installed.

# Let the user know all went well.

#

echo Operations successful. VirtualBox is ready to run

Remember #Ford’s nonsense commercials for the "foot operated liftgate" on their new whatever they are vehicles?

Yeah, so do I, and I can’t stand them.

Their vehicle has a foot activated hatchback, not any sort of "liftgate".

Now, I know the difference and for the rest of the world, in an effort to put an end to Madison Avenue propaganda, I offer up the following visual aid:

‘Nuff said.

As most everyone knows, services like Twitter and Facebook changed their APIs awhile back, effectively killing all the 3rd party client programs that we all loved using. The Fabina Socialist micromanagement has even infected the Internet, it would seem. Well, the Internet has an answer to that; for Facebook, at least, and it comes from one James Geboski. It’s called "purple-facebook", a protocol plugin that lets you chat on Facebook, using Pidgin, without having a memory-hogging browser window all the time. You can download it from: https://github.com/jgeboski/purple-facebook. Heh. I remembered how to construct an HTML link without looking it up. The coconut oil must be working.

Now, the plugin is written for the latest distros of, I believe from the comments on the wiki, the African distro (that’s Ubuntu, which sounds like the name of an African native tribe, for those of you who never got my "humor/sarcasm"). Well, being a server guy, raised on Red Hat, I run CentOS. In this case, CentOS 6.7. I ran into some issues building facebook-purple for my platform. I thought I’d post a question on the wiki, just to see if there was a quick answer.

No chance. I received an email response which reads:

"I can only assume the first error is from an old version of aclocal. As for the missing m4_esyscmd_s macro, it was introduced in autoconf-2.64, and CentOS 6 has autoconf-2.63. I really have no interest in supporting software, which was released over six years ago. I have added a check as of 7443c55, which checks for autoconf-2.64.

"You could try using ./configure with one of the release tarballs. However, it appears you are going to run into issues with json-glib being out of date as well."

If you’ve read any of my previous posts, you already know that one of my "hot button" issues is being told that the solution to my problem is to upgrade/change my distro. That’s not a solution; that’s a cop-out.

The first problem I encountered was a syntax error in the Makefile.am file. The first line looked like this:

ACLOCAL_AMFLAGS = -Im4

I changed it to this:

ACLOCAL_AMFLAGS = -I m4

which worked. I guess the CentOS version of aclocal is more pedantic than the African distro’s is. I did install autoconf-2.64 which fixed the missing macro m4_esyscmd_s error. I also installed automake-1.15 from source as well. CentOS doesn’t yet have these versions packaged, so I just compiled and installed them. I’ll work on srpms later.

The json-glib-0.14.0-1.fc16.i686 is sufficient. Be sure to install the -devel package too.

I’ll assume you’ve installed all the required development headers for the kernel, glib and glibc. At this point, the plugin should compile, from autogen.sh, and install the library in /usr/lib/purple-2.

Now, download, compile & install Pidgin. I used pidgin-2.10.11.

After running the .configure script, you’ll notice a lot of options that are not compiled in. Most of those are available on the CentOS, EPEL or RPMFORGE repos.

Here’s what I ended-up with:

pidgin 2.10.11

Build GTK+ 2.x UI…………. : yes

Build console UI………….. : yes

Build for X11…………….. : yes

Enable Gestures…………… : yes

Protocols to build dynamically : bonjour gg irc jabber msn myspace mxit novell oscar sametime silc simple yahoo zephyr

Protocols to link statically.. :

Build with GStreamer support.. : yes

Build with D-Bus support…… : yes

Build with voice and video…. : yes

D-Bus services directory…… : /usr/share/dbus-1/services

Build with GNU Libidn……… : yes

Build with NetworkManager….. : yes

SSL Library/Libraries……… : Mozilla NSS and GnuTLS

Build with Cyrus SASL support. : no

Use kerberos 4 with zephyr…. : no

Use external libzephyr…….. : no

Use external libgadu………. : no

Install pixmaps…………… : yes

Old tray icon compatibility… : no

Install translations………. : yes

Has you………………….. : yes

Use XScreenSaver Extension…. : yes

Use X Session Management…… : yes

Use startup notification…… : yes

Build with GtkSpell support… : yes

Build Unity integration plugin.: no

Build with plugin support….. : yes

Build with Mono support……. : no

Build with Perl support……. : yes

Build with Tcl support…….. : yes

Build with Tk support……… : yes

Print debugging messages…… : no

Pidgin will be installed in /usr/bin.

I then ran "make" and "sudo make install". After a few minutes of i686 crunching away, Pidgin with Facebook chat capabilities was installed and working.

Any questions? Contact me on ICQ at: 156413604 and I’ll try and help you out.