BudgieBlog

Another quick post just to say I’ve returned from my trips to Stockholm, Sweden and Riga, Latvia with an ever amounting collection of travel photos and work/study to catch up on. I’ll get back to blogging about what I’ve been upto soon

I returned on Monday evening from 8 nights away, firstly spending 2 nights on an island in the Finnish archipelago sea and then another 6 nights in Copenhagen. I am insanely busy at the moment trying to catch up with work, study, washing and other miscellaneous tasks before I jet off to Sweden for another 4 nights on Saturday. It may be a little while before I get around to sorting out photos, but I’ll get there!

Working with Microsoft development tools isn’t something I have done for awhile in my new ‘field’, although when working on a database project I elected to use SSIS (SQL Server Integration Services) in hope that it would ease the data import process from text files.

Compared to DTS (Data Transformation Services, SSIS’s predecessor), SSIS is quite a bit more aesthetically pleasing. I found many of the familiar tasks/feature I was accustomed to in DTS with the added bonus of creating .dtsx project files in the Visual Studio IDE. But I didn’t find that it brought new tools for working with unstructured text. Of course you can create a Script component task and write the code behind to create a streamlined process for importing data, but personally I found cleaning up unstructured text files with regular expressions was enough to get the job done.

This probably seems backwards to my Australian readers, but summer in Finland is now beginning which means a 3 month break from University for students. At least it throws Finns off when I tell them Christmas is warm in Australia. Having a summer job seems to be a fact of life for every Finnish student, especially since student grants are not paid during this time. For me, the summer means going to work full time (still sys adminning) and keeping up with some web and project based studies.

June will be a month where I’m going to be spending more time away than at home. I depart for a meeting on the archipelago today (there is a series of islands just out to sea of Turku), then straight on to Copenhagen where I will attend a summer school course. Later in the month I’ll also be attending a conference in Sweden and a long weekend in Latvia just to get away from it all.

Work has been keeping me quite busy of late. I attended ChemBio for one day in Helsinki last week to help man my employers stand. ChemBio is a huge event in the Baltic Sea region for the biotech and chemical industries where companies showcase their services/products and a series of seminars are held. So summer for me isn’t exactly going to be a relaxing one but I hope to take some holidays before University resumes when a friend may visit from Australia.

Recently as part of my job, I set up a Wiki so thought I’d share some of the details of how I went about it. It was created for a science interest group to provide a platform for them to easily publish information and manage content themselves. When it comes to installing a Wiki, there’s a choice as to which Wiki engine to use with a couple of the most well-known ones being: MediaWiki (written in PHP) which is well known as it is the platform for Wikipedia, and MoinMoin. I went with MoinMoin because an executive decision had been previously made to use this but one of the nice features is that unlike MediaWiki; MoinMoin doesn’t require a database, storing information in flat files. MoinMoin is built on Python and required this in order to run on a webserver. A couple nice examples of websites that use MoinMoin include Ubuntu’s Wiki: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ and Compiz: http://www.compiz.org/.

Depending on the web server you have access to and the level of access you have to it, there are a number of installation techniques described on the MoinMoin website. I followed the the steps described on ApacheOnLinuxFtp, because although I had shell access to the server, I wasn’t an administrator so I was limited to installing the Wiki in the www folder. This method is fine, as long as extra security precautions are taken to lock down the Wiki.

I won’t describe in detail on how to install the MoinMoin (as this information is available on the MoinMoin website) but in short the process involves:

• Determining if Python works and noting down the path to the binary (required later for configuration).
• Downloading and extracting MoinMoin, then copying the required folders to the applicable location on the web server.
• Applying extra security to the data, underlay and htdocs folder (the htdocs folder will be renamed as per the configuration instructions) by adding an .htaccess file to deny access and modifying the permissions to only allow read/write access to the web server user.
• Editing the configuration files moin.cgi and wikiconfig.py.

From this point on, this should be enough to fire up the Wiki page, but there are a few other things to consider configuring to make the Wiki more personalised.

There are a number of ready-to-go themes available on the MoinMoin ThemeMarket or if you prefer, there is adequate documentation on the MoinMoin website on how to create MoinMoin themes.

Some of the customisable elements in the wikiconfig.py include (under the /config folder):

• Entering the name of the Wiki (sitename field).
• User your own custom logo by uploading it to the /common folder under htdocs (renamed to moin_static… as per the installation instructions) and editing the logo_string field in the configuration file.
• Configure a super user and create access control lists to control access to the Wiki. Described in: HelpOnAccessControlLists.
• Configuring MoinMoin to work with the mail server (eg required for password resets). In order to get mail working, it appears that four fields related to mail need to be present in the configuration file, even if no value needs to be entered. For example to configure MoinMoin to work with SMTP:

  # SMTP server, e.g. "mail.provider.com" (None to disable mail)
mail_smarthost = ""

  # The return address, e.g u"Jürgen Wiki ” [Unicode]
mail_from = u"Administrator “

  # "user pwd" if you need to use SMTP AUTH
mail_login = ""

  # Added configuration entry for Wiki to send mail via sendmail
mail_sendmail = "/usr/sbin/sendmail -t -i"

  Where mail_from is a user-defined e-mail address that acts as the ‘from’ address and mail_sendmail contains the path to the sendmail binary. The other fields can be left blank.

One of the nice things about MoinMoin is that if you want to run a personal Wiki or even just try it out, there is a standalone mode that doesn’t require a web server to run. Here is the link to the Desktop edition: http://moinmo.in/DesktopEdition. Naturally, more information in general can be found from the MoinMoin website: http://moinmo.in/.

After exams how do I spend my time? I seem to spend the entire day geeking around with various things it seems. After successfully getting virtual mailboxes to work properly in Postfix (I’ll touch on that later), I took a moment to upgrade my laptop to the latest Ubuntu release version 9.04: Jaunty Jackalope; and likewise, my Eee PC with the Jaunty Netbook Remix.

There is still no resolve from Ubuntu with the issue with my NVidia, so much so I couldn’t install from the Live CD. When I last checked, there was no patch released yet for 9.04. I tried fudging it by modifying the NVRM_512M_fix.diff patch file with the filenames for the latest build. This seemed to sort of work; returning to me a decent resolution and Compiz-fusion effects. The overall user experience hasn’t really changed but there a few quibbles I’m yet to iron out like for example, shutting down properly seems to be an issue.

There appears to be a few bugs with the Netbook edition of Jaunty that are well known (sluggish mouse movement, laggy graphics on mouse-over effects) but I’m yet to get around to looking at those. I cannot get the Eee PC on the network at home due to a 1 MAC address per user rule with the University computing centre (who provides my Internet connection).

You can follow what I’ve written about video problems in previous blog posts from my last post on Further to getting the NVidia GeForce 9500M GS working in Intrepid. I’ll provide further updates when I get around to looking at things.

I had my first shot at using my camera in a studio setting recently with the Turku University Photography Club (Turun Ylioppilaskamerat ry) at Conclaavi (click on the “In English” link for information in English). Conclaavi is a society of role/board gamers in which TYOK (Turun Ylioppilaskamerat ry) provided a studio service for. The society appeared to be quite an active one with various games played over 3 floors of the centre in which it was held, with a range of different geeky games from Warhammer 2000 to Magic the Gathering to board games. More information about the society can be found here (site is in Finnish only).

I have to say that I’m still very much a beginner when it comes to using my camera, although I recently purchased a Magic Lantern guide for my Pentax K10D. It was quite a fun event, the club members were very proficient in English and extremely helpful.

One of my victims (Joni) who was willing to let me practice

The link to my gallery is here. More photos from the event (including some pics of me) that were taken by the club’s president can be seen here.

In addition to my previous post on Configuring virtual domains in Postfix, Postfix can be configured to relay mail to a person that doesn’t have an account on the server to their personal e-mail address (eg to a GMail address) by creating an alias for that person.

Similarly to my previous post, values for virtual_alias_domains and virtual_alias_maps should be entered in the Postfix configuration file. In the Postfix virtual file simply point the virtual alias to an external e-mail address eg:


# mydomain.com
...
myemail@mydomain.com myemail@someotherdomain.com


Where myemail@mydomain.com is the virtual domain alias that maps to a real (pretend) e-mail address myemail@someotherdomain.com. And don’t forget to postmap the database file and reload Postfix if any changes were made to the configuration file.

Living in Europe, the Eurovision song contest is something I get a little excited about. I didn’t think Finland could have done any worse than their 2008 entry, Teräsbetoni, a power metal band which ranked 22 in the finals. I do like metal, but there wasn’t anything that grabbed me about Teräsbetoni’s entry. But this year Finland ranked in last with a song by Waldo’s People ‘Lose Control’. It was so pop and no metal act could probably complete with the likes of Lordi I thought the song might have a chance. It was the judge votes that landed Finland into the finals, not scraping in enough points from viewers.

The winning song by Norway managed to blitz Lordi’s previous score creating a new record. I suppose I should at least be pleased the winning song was from a Nordic country!

So what is meant by a virtual domain? A virtual domain is when a server hosts multiple domain names which all point to the same IP address. Virtual domains are relatively easy to set up in Postfix.

In this post I will speak of Virtual alias domains which simply expands the number of domains Postfix delivers mail to. This solution assumes the user has a user account on the system.

Firstly, modify the postfix configuration file to allow virtual domains:

sudo nano /etc/postfix/main.cf

and add the following lines:

virtual_alias_domains = mydomain.com, ...
virtual_alias_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/virtual

where mydomain.com is your virtual domain followed by any additional virtual domains separated with a ‘,’ and the path supplied for virtual_alias_maps (this will be created in the following step). Do not list virtual_domains under my_destination.

Next, create a file named virtual in the postfix directory:

sudo nano /etc/postfix/virtual

In this file you can map recipients to the virtual domains, eg you can create info@… e-mail addresses and map them to user accounts.

For example:
# mydomain.com
postmaster@mydomain.com postmaster
info@mydomain.com eliza

Always after creating or modifying a database mapping file run the postmap command:

postmap /etc/postfix/virtual

and reload the configuration file after modifying it:

postfix reload

At this point, virtual domains should be up and running!

For further information on configuring virtual domains, refer to the Postfix documentation on Postfix Virtual Domain Hosting Howto. Later, I will extend onto virtual mailbox domains where a virtual mailbox can be created for users without *nix accounts.