I had a hell of a time the other day trying to find a reasonably up to date Debian Jessie virtual machine for testing on.

It doesn't take too long to install Debian, but its much nicer to just grab an OVA file, open with virtualbox and be ready to go.

I have only installed a very minimal system, though I did set up sudo, vim and git (which it is hard to live without)

The user is called user (password resu) and the root user is called root (password toor). Obviously this is for use in testing. Change the passwords if you put it somewhere that others may find it.

This is a neat trick. A friend was looking for a convenient way to tweet (or send to statusnet) from Bash, this is a fairly straightforward way to do that.

There are a couple of bits you need before we play with the script. You’ll need cURL installed, many Unices do this by default, but an apt-get install curl will probably work. You’ll need oauth_sign to allow you to sign in to the API. Finally you need to get an access token set up in the twitter API bit.

You can get your API details by logging in to the Twitter dev bit. Go to my applications (which is in the dropdown at the top right that has your profile pic on it). Create a new application and create your access token. You have to make it read/write rather than the default of read only.

Next grab bashtweet.sh — I put it in a directory. You’ll need to paste in the oauth details you created in the last paragraph in the appropriate places.$ cd bashtweet $ wget http://charlieharvey.org.uk/writings/bashtweet.sh

Finally you have to get and compile oauth_sign.$ pwd /home/charlie/bashtweet $ wget http://acme.com/software/oauth_sign/oauth_sign_09jan2012.tar.gz --2013-05-01 18:28:20-- http://acme.com/software/oauth_sign/oauth_sign_09jan2012.tar.gz Resolving acme.com... 216.27.178.28 Connecting to acme.com|216.27.178.28|:80... connected. HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK Length: 8086 (7.9K) [application/x-tar] Saving to: `oauth_sign_09jan2012.tar.gz' 100%[==================================================================================================================================================================================================>] 8,086 8.14K/s in 1.0s 2013-05-01 18:28:21 (8.14 KB/s) - `oauth_sign_09jan2012.tar.gz' saved [8086/8086] $ tar xvzf oauth_sign_09jan2012.tar.gz oauth_sign/ oauth_sign/Makefile oauth_sign/oauth_sign.c oauth_sign/oauth_sign.1 oauth_sign/liboauthsign.c oauth_sign/README oauth_sign/liboauthsign.h $ cd oauth_sign/ $ make gcc -c -Wall -O liboauthsign.c liboauthsign.c: In function ‘oauth_sign’: liboauthsign.c:123: warning: implicit declaration of function ‘getpid’ liboauthsign.c:305: warning: pointer targets in passing argument 4 of ‘HMAC’ differ in signedness /usr/include/openssl/hmac.h:99: note: expected ‘const unsigned char *’ but argument is of type ‘char *’ rm -f liboauthsign.a ar rc liboauthsign.a liboauthsign.o ranlib liboauthsign.a gcc -Wall -O oauth_sign.c -L. -loauthsign -lcrypto -o oauth_sign $

Assuming that everything went to plan you should now be able to tweet from your terminal!$ ./bashtweet.sh Beautiful Mayday. Time for a beer {"id_str":"329648285210005504","geo":null,"retweet_count":0,"user": [Lots more JSON removed] "truncated":false}

This is hosted on Gitorious now. I thought I would give gitorious a whirl anyhow, so you can find the latest version of feed2diasp over there.

I've just got myself set up on Diaspora. Which is a wonderful project by the way. I'm well chuffed that there is finally a vaguely secure way to socially network that puts me in control of my personal data. I've also heard good things about Friendica, but I've not tried it.

One feature that I rather like, which hasn't been implemented in Diaspora yet is the ability to feed in RSS feeds of the other stuff you've been doing on the interwebs. So, this is a first crack at letting you post your RSS feed to your Diaspora pod, feed2diasp.pl

You should be able to set it up based on the content of the README file ( or perldoc ./feed2diasp.pl if you like that sort of thing). You'll need Perl 5.10.0 installed and some stuff from the CPAN, again instructions in the README. You do the config in json format in feed2diasp.json - I'll try and think of a way round you having to store your password in there. For now you may want to keep it on an encrypted partition.

The script ought to work with RSS and Atom feeds. Under the hood it uses XML::Feed to do that. I'd love to hear any feedback you have on the script. Please bear in mind that I can't guarantee being able to support it, especially for windows and mac users. But I will try and respond if you contact me.

This is a first crack at making a new Oxford Indymedia logo. I wrote up how I made the funky fonts over at Tip: Make a distressed font with GIMP

smbopengtk.pl is a little utility written in perl/gtk that allows you to open windows or unix style filepaths and switch between the two. It'll be a bit of a lifesaver at work, where I've just started using a Debian GNU/Linux box in a primarily windows environment.

First posted on Perl Monks. I've put up a screenshot of the interface.

I've finally got round to writing this script. It means that I can write my CV in XML format, and then generate other versions of it (i.e. pdf, html, plain text and openoffice) 'on the fly'.

You can also download a tzr.gz file which contains the library code that the perl script requires and my cv in xml format, so you have something to play with.

This is a Squirrelmail resource, developed for People & Planet, where I work. A basic introduction to Squirrelmail to help out people just getting started using it.

Also available as a OpenOffice.org document for people who need to modify it.

Another Squirrelmail resource, developed for People & Planet, where I work.
This one is a very basic introduction to Squirrelmail to help out people just getting started using it.

This is a brief introduction to Squirrelmail that I wrote for People & Planet, where I work.
Some of the details are specific to that environment, but people supporting Squirrelmail may find it helpful as the basis for future documents.