Vacation Again

Duncan is on "ski break" from school next week, so we are off on vacation. Hopefully it'll be better then last years disaster.

Rather than heading off to the slopes, we are going south, down to San Diego. We'll be checking out some of the famous historial landmarks: Sea World and the Zoo and Wild Animal Park and Lego Land.

Even though we are packing a couple of laptops and supposedly there is free Internet access in the hotels, I'm not going to blog, so expect a quiet period from me until Monday week.

[Technorati Tag: Vacation]

( Feb 17 2006, 11:07:09 AM PST ) [Listen] Permalink

Backing up Your Blog Posts

Dave Johnson (that's him on the left), has done a new version of the Grabber application that allows you to create your own backup of the blog posts you make here on blogs.sun.com (or other roller-based blog installations). This is just one of the examples and utilities from the upcoming Manning Publications book RSS and Atom In Action.

Dave kindly adjusted Grabber so that it puts lines like:

  <h1>Another Blog, another first entry.</h1>
  <p id="permalink">http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/richb?entry=another_blog_another_first_entry</p>

at the top of each saved entry, so that I'll be able to easily use them with my Tag Cloud generator. I'm sure others will find them useful too.

Here's how to create a backup of your own roller-based blog.

First you need to download and unpack the blogapps-examples tarball. Then run Ant in the java sub-directory:

  % cd .../blogapps-examples/java
  % ant

The new Grabber application can be found under .../blogapps-examples/java/ex02/dist/grabber.

I then modified the Grabber.sh script in that directory. I had to change the line:

  _cp_=${_cp_}:./lib/grabber.jar

to

  _cp_=${_cp_}:./lib/Grabber.jar

I also had to add in the HTTP proxy server and port information so that I could get through our Sun firewall. Something like:

  ...
  java -Dhttp.proxyHost=<myproxy.mysubdomain>.sun.com -Dhttp.proxyPort=8080 \
        -classpath ${_cp_} com.manning.blogapps.extra02.Grabber $1 $2 $3

I then adjusted the config.properties file in that directory to contain the information pertaining specifically to my blog. This now looks something like:

  % cat config.properties
  download_dir=./saved
  blog_apitype=metaweblog
  blog_username=richb
  blog_password=<my password>
  blog_id=richb
  blog_url=http://blogs.sun.com/roller/xmlrpc
  max_entries=1000

Finally, I did a complete backup on my blog posts into the "saved" subdirectory with:

  % cd .../blogapps-examples/java/ex02/dist/grabber
  % ./Grabber.sh

When I return from vacation, I'll modify my Python tagcloud.py script to take advantage of these changes and make it available for others to use.

Thanks Dave!

Update - 26th Oct 2007:

Note that you now need to use:

blog_url=http://blogs.sun.com/roller-services/xmlrpc

in the config.properties file.

[Technorati Tag: Roller]

[Technorati Tag: Blogs]

( Feb 17 2006, 09:02:53 AM PST ) [Listen] Permalink Comments [3]

Ubuntu Behind a Firewall

Ubuntu is a really nice Linux distribution, but I have to wonder about ease-of-use for those corporate users stuck behind a firewall, like me.

From my post on Monday, I received a comment showing me how I could "easily" setup a GNOME development environment on my Ubuntu system.

Yesterday I found some time to try it. apt-get didn't like being behind a firewall. Fair enough, I just need to give it a proxy server to go through. I noticed that there was a Network Proxy entry in the System menu in gnome-panel, so I clicked on that and set all of the entries to <myproxy.mysubdomain>.sun.com and port 8080.

Nope, that didn't fix it. I was then told about the Synaptic Package Manager (under the System -> Administration menu), and this has a Network menu entry under it's Settings->Preferences menu. I clicked on that, and also setup my proxies there.

Nope, that didn't fix it. I then googled about and discovered that I had to create an /etc/apt/apt.conf file and add the following lines:

ACQUIRE {
  http::proxy "http://<myproxy.mysubdomain>.sun.com:8080/"
}

After this (and maybe an "sudo apt-get update" - I'm not sure), I get a little popup appearing saying that I have 66 updates to download. A couple of clicks later those have been installed and I'm upto date for all the supplied packages. Cool.

Now back to installing the GNOME Development environment. I found that I needed to uncomment several lines in /etc/apt/sources.list and follow that with an "sudo apt-get update" before I could finally do:

  % sudo apt-get install gnome-devel

It's probably possible to do the equivalent to this in the Synaptic Package Manager. I didn't check.

One more concern. I initially configured the Ubuntu system to use DHCP. I now want to use Synergy so I can control this system (and a couple others) from the same keyboard and mouse. To that end, I wanted to change to a static IP address. That appeared to be easy to do, but after I'd done it (and rebooted), apt-get then started bitchin' with Could not resolve '<myproxy.mysubdomain>' which was strange as I'd put the full <myproxy.mysubdomain>.sun.com name in all the places mentioned above.

I "fixed" this by adding an entry in my /etc/hosts file:

    www.xxx.yyy.zzz      <myproxy.mysubdomain> <myproxy>

but I gotta wonder why it's needed.

Maybe a Ubuntu expert can tell me where I went wrong with all of this. Is there an easier way to do this?

[Technorati Tag: Ubuntu]

[Technorati Tag: Ease Of Use]

( Feb 17 2006, 07:55:00 AM PST ) [Listen] Permalink Comments [6]