Ciuly's Blog - Reinventing the wheel http://blog.ciuly.com basically, the news regarding my online activity Fri, 11 Jun 2010 18:36:37 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=abc IRC presence turned off http://feeds.ciuly.com/~r/CiulysBlog-ReinventingTheWheel/~3/iFt-3-DvmUg/ http://blog.ciuly.com/my-server/irc-presence-turned-off/#comments Fri, 11 Jun 2010 18:36:37 +0000 ciuly http://blog.ciuly.com/?p=585 I decided a while ago that I would drop from IRC. I think I mentioned it sometime.
Today it happened.
I killed my eggdrop from my polarhome shell account.
I sent an email closing my polarhome shell account.
I killed and deactivated the psybnc running on my server.
I deactivated the related account in pidgin.
I will probably drop the undernet account as well unless I will have time to implement an auto-login for it. But as I usually don’t have time it seems that will also get deleted.

So, that concludes the life of Chiu_Lee on the IRC undernet.

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]]> http://blog.ciuly.com/my-server/irc-presence-turned-off/feed/ 0 http://blog.ciuly.com/my-server/irc-presence-turned-off/ Diablo II Item extracting http://feeds.ciuly.com/~r/CiulysBlog-ReinventingTheWheel/~3/HYa1Xpq9_iM/ http://blog.ciuly.com/fun-stuff/diablo-ii-item-extracting/#comments Sat, 29 May 2010 21:35:53 +0000 ciuly http://blog.ciuly.com/?p=583 Most of you don’t know this but over a year ago I started developing a diablo 2 muling application. Sure, you might go: what’s wrong with ATMA? but what I eventually want to accomplish is to export them to the web automatically and maybe open up a “store” and maybe a trading place and such.
Anyway, what I wanted to point is that it appears the application is pretty stable and it’s getting things out quite well. I am going to go on and finish normal from top to bottom and see that things indeed save well and after that I will do something to make it public and start sharing and stuff :)

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]]> http://blog.ciuly.com/fun-stuff/diablo-ii-item-extracting/feed/ 0 http://blog.ciuly.com/fun-stuff/diablo-ii-item-extracting/ Blogareala pe romaneste http://feeds.ciuly.com/~r/CiulysBlog-ReinventingTheWheel/~3/Dj70NB5vM4c/ http://blog.ciuly.com/blog/blogareala-pe-romaneste/#comments Sun, 09 May 2010 16:48:06 +0000 ciuly http://blog.ciuly.com/?p=580 Ma bate gandul sa scriu (si) pe romaneste pe blogul asta al meu. Adica varianta de pe softpedia. Intrebarea evidenta este: am ceva cititori (interesati) aici, au ba?

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]]> http://blog.ciuly.com/blog/blogareala-pe-romaneste/feed/ 0 http://blog.ciuly.com/blog/blogareala-pe-romaneste/ SVN back in the house http://feeds.ciuly.com/~r/CiulysBlog-ReinventingTheWheel/~3/k0o3Z3va4OI/ http://blog.ciuly.com/my-server/svn-back-in-the-house/#comments Wed, 07 Apr 2010 18:58:27 +0000 ciuly http://blog.ciuly.com/?p=578 Ever since I moved from my old source-based linus to rpm-based linux, there were some features I was not able to set up or install due to lack of time. One of these was the SVN server. And since I’ve done some changes to the greasemonkey scripts as you can see in my previous post, I had to commit.
So, long story short, I had to:
- yum install mod_dav_svn.i386
- service httpd restart
- usermod -a -G svn apache
- chown -R svn:svn /svn
- chmod -R g+w /svn
to get rid of all the errors and be able to use my old repository again.

Well, that’s about it for now.

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]]> http://blog.ciuly.com/my-server/svn-back-in-the-house/feed/ 0 http://blog.ciuly.com/my-server/svn-back-in-the-house/ Multiple scripts update http://feeds.ciuly.com/~r/CiulysBlog-ReinventingTheWheel/~3/pBY2lmkcA_Y/ http://blog.ciuly.com/programming/greasemonkey/multiple-scripts-update/#comments Wed, 07 Apr 2010 16:27:10 +0000 ciuly http://blog.ciuly.com/?p=575 following are the modified scripts and their changes:

aa_all_common.user.js – fixed progress notification not being displayed on multiple concurrent executions, added debug support
aa_sp_common.user.js – fixed md5 hash not being correctly processed; fixed on every post callback when a postid is not found
aa_sp_mod_common.user.js – added support to ask for forumID in MoveTopic function
sp_warn_helper.user.js – added more include urls; added automatic explanation support; changed behavior to not clear suspension on warn; increased ban spammer execution wait to 25 seconds
sp_acrhive_pm.user.js – added more urls to include; changed behavior to archive only the messages older than 7 days and leaving at most 50 messages in folders

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]]> http://blog.ciuly.com/programming/greasemonkey/multiple-scripts-update/feed/ 0 http://blog.ciuly.com/programming/greasemonkey/multiple-scripts-update/ Major change: switching from tighurl to yourls http://feeds.ciuly.com/~r/CiulysBlog-ReinventingTheWheel/~3/4idugP3yNjE/ http://blog.ciuly.com/website/major-change-switching-from-tighurl-to-yourls/#comments Mon, 08 Mar 2010 20:35:18 +0000 ciuly http://blog.ciuly.com/?p=573 I just migrated from tighurl to yourls. I must say the interface is nicer and the overall user experience is better as well. Not to mention that it integrates better with WP and twitter autoposter :)

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]]> http://blog.ciuly.com/website/major-change-switching-from-tighurl-to-yourls/feed/ 0 http://blog.ciuly.com/website/major-change-switching-from-tighurl-to-yourls/ *.ru sites are now banned from my emails http://feeds.ciuly.com/~r/CiulysBlog-ReinventingTheWheel/~3/GWr1A0-kXMw/ http://blog.ciuly.com/general/internet/ru-sites-are-now-banned-from-my-emails/#comments Thu, 04 Feb 2010 18:04:41 +0000 ciuly http://blog.ciuly.com/?p=568 After banning *.cn sites, it’s high time for the russians to go as well. I am truly sorry innocent russian people who want to email me their website: I no longer accept such emails. Notice that I am taling about websites contained in the email, not email addresses or other stuff ;)

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]]> http://blog.ciuly.com/general/internet/ru-sites-are-now-banned-from-my-emails/feed/ 0 http://blog.ciuly.com/general/internet/ru-sites-are-now-banned-from-my-emails/ Using SWbemRefresher in delphi http://feeds.ciuly.com/~r/CiulysBlog-ReinventingTheWheel/~3/I7Rn1GmvtFA/ http://blog.ciuly.com/programming/delphi/using-swbemrefresher-in-delphi/#comments Mon, 01 Feb 2010 20:52:51 +0000 ciuly http://blog.ciuly.com/?p=563 Somebody asked me to help him get a working delphi code for SWbemRefresher. I obviously tried the first natural approach of using the WbemScripting_TLB unit but that didn’t work.
So, since I couldn’t get the early binding to work (using the interfaces and such) and since the VBS code from MSDN works (I previously tested it), I went with late binding just as VBS, which obviously worked. here’s the code:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa393838%28VS.85%29.aspx


function GetObject(Value: String): IUnknown;
// from russel: http://www.experts-exchange.com/Programming/Languages/Pascal/Delphi/Q_20875677.html
var pUnk: IUnknown;
pmk: IMoniker;
pbc: IBindCtx;
cbEaten: LongInt;
clsid: TGUID;
begin

// Check value to determine if this is a programmatic id or a moniker
if (CLSIDFromProgID(PWideChar(WideString(Value)), clsid) = S_OK) then
begin
// Attempt to get the active object, clear the result on failure
if not(GetActiveObject(clsid, nil, result) = S_OK) then result:=nil;
end
else
begin
// Moniker name
if (CreateBindCtx(0, pbc) = S_OK) then
begin
if (MkParseDisplayName(pbc, StringToOleStr(Value), cbEaten, pmk) = S_OK) then
begin
// Attempt to bind the moniker, clear the result on failure
if not(BindMoniker(pmk, 0, IUnknown, result) = S_OK) then result:=nil;
// Release the moniker
pmk:=nil;
end;
// Release the bind context
pbc:=nil;
end;
end;
end;

procedure getprocesslate;
var objServicesCimv2,
objServicesDefault,
objRefreshableItem1,
objRefreshableItem2,
RefreshableItem,
objRefresher:OleVariant;
i:integer;
begin
// Get namespace connections
objServicesCimv2 := GetObject('winmgmts:root\cimv2');
objServicesDefault := GetObject('winmgmts:root\default');

// Create a refresher object
objRefresher := CreateOleObject('WbemScripting.SWbemRefresher');

// Add a single object (SWbemObjectEx) to the refresher. The "@"
// is used because _CIMOMIdentification is a singleton class- only
// one instance exists. Note that the
// SWbemRefreshableItem.Object property must
// be specified or the SWbemRefresher.Refresh call will fail.

objRefreshableItem1 := objRefresher.Add(objServicesDefault, '__CIMOMIdentification=@').Object;

// Add an enumerator (SWbemObjectSet object)
// to the refresher. Note that the
// SWbemRefreshableItem.ObjectSet property
// must be specified or the SWbemRefresher.Refresh call will fail.
objRefreshableItem2 := objRefresher.AddEnum(objServicesCimv2, 'Win32_Process').ObjectSet;

// Display number of items in refresher and update the data.
ShowMessage('Number of items in refresher = ' +inttostr( objRefresher.Count));
objRefresher.Refresh;

// Iterate through the refresher. SWbemRefreshable
// Item.IsSet checks for whether the item is an enumerator.
for i := 1 to objRefresher.Count do
begin
RefreshableItem:=objRefresher.Item(i);
if RefreshableItem.IsSet then
ShowMessage('Item with index ' + IntToStr(RefreshableItem.Index) +
' is an enumerator containing ' + IntToStr(RefreshableItem.ObjectSet.Count) + ' processes')
else
ShowMessage('Item with index ' + IntToStr(RefreshableItem.Index) +
' is a single object containing WMI version ' + objRefreshableItem1.VersionCurrentlyRunning);
end;
end;

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]]> http://blog.ciuly.com/programming/delphi/using-swbemrefresher-in-delphi/feed/ 5 http://blog.ciuly.com/programming/delphi/using-swbemrefresher-in-delphi/ Major upgrades and changes http://feeds.ciuly.com/~r/CiulysBlog-ReinventingTheWheel/~3/CcAzhuwCDjo/ http://blog.ciuly.com/website/major-upgrades-and-changes/#comments Sun, 31 Jan 2010 19:10:07 +0000 ciuly http://blog.ciuly.com/?p=557 During the past couple of weeks I’ve been doing some changes with my server; this might have been noticed from outside too.
Getting down to business, it’s like this:
- I dropped my second ISP so basically my main server remained without a backup internet connection. It’s too expensive to keep a backup during these times :)
- I upgraded my server from my old desktop dell pc PIII with 256 mb RAM to a newer server dell pc dual proc PIII@866Mhz with 512 MB RAM and 2 19GB SCSI HDD in software raid (0 for swap and 1 for rest). Sometime in the near future I plan a memory upgrade, not sure yet how much since the MB has only 4 memory slots and all 4 of them are filled. Obsiously I moved the 80GB hdd from the old pc to the new server :D
- I installed centos 5 latest CLI only and switched from “source-based” to “rpm-based” using yum (you might not know but everything on my old server was source based. needless to say that upgrading was a real pain specifically when I had to upgrade commonly used stuff such as libs or compilers or even interpreters)
- I downgraded mysql from 5.1.x to 5.0.y (it’s basically what centos came with)
- upgraded xmail from 1.23 to 1.26
- upgraded apache as well from 2.0 to 2.2 (centos came with)
- downgraded php from 5.2.x to 5.1.6 (it wasn’t properly supported by most of my sites anyway)
- upgraded gallery2 plugins to latest (not gallery 2 it self yet)
- upgraded smf from 0.9 to 1.1
- upgrade wordpress from 2.8.6 to 2.9.1 (did you know that the migration tool DOES NOT work? I just found out myself)
- upgraded php link directory from 2.1.1 to 2.2.0
- partially upgraded joomla and components to 1.5 latest
- dropped bugzilla and a bunch of other stuff

and now, I’m watching the logs to see what else is not behaving properly and fix it.

I had so many things I wanted to write about while I was doing upgrades but I forgot most of them. I’ll try to summarize how it all went.
- I wanted to start out clean and fresh so after installing and upgrading all the needed software, I started installing the first sites. And I started with wordpress.
My first idea was to create a reverse proxy with apache but I just couldn’t get that working with wordpress.
So I then decided to actually move the old things to the new hdd and export then import the DB data. However, I did the stupid thing of changing all tables to use myisam engine so now I had to install all the software from scratch so that the db structure is recreated as needed and then semi-automatically add the data. Now that was painful.
I have to mention that I had a lot of trouble moving the data around too, as I needed a jumper for the storage hdd (the 80 gb one) to make it primary and I also needed a longer ide cable so I could fit both the hdd and the cd-rom in the casing. I took the jumper out of the cd-rom since I couldn’t find an ide cable so right now I’m running with no cd-rom. I shouldn’t need that anyway, unless the system goes down since I do everything from remote.
There is still the problem of accommodating the new server space-wise since the old one was a desktop, “flat”, and this one is tower.
I also had to change the fans since they were pretty loud.

Well, that’s about all I remember now. But since I was struggling with this for over a week, you can imagine how much trouble I was in. Anyway, let’s hope for the best and that now I can resume my site-migration from html+ssi+cgi to joomla.

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]]> http://blog.ciuly.com/website/major-upgrades-and-changes/feed/ 1 http://blog.ciuly.com/website/major-upgrades-and-changes/ False/True is not a valid integer value for field blabla http://feeds.ciuly.com/~r/CiulysBlog-ReinventingTheWheel/~3/iAvageVfn9Q/ http://blog.ciuly.com/programming/delphi/falsetrue-is-not-a-valid-integer-value-for-field-blabla/#comments Sun, 10 Jan 2010 10:32:48 +0000 ciuly http://blog.ciuly.com/?p=554 Ok, so you designed a small mysql table with a boolean field which got translated to tinyint(1). You then wrote your query in delphi and populated your querys fields and the field got mapped to a TSmallIntField.
And then, on top of everything, you placed a db-aware checkbox on the form to set that field and now you are getting the error
“False/True is not a valid integer value for field blabla”.

What to do? Well, since delphi won’t map your field to a TBooleanField as it should (since the field is actually an integer), you must do it yourself. So, close the project, open your favorite text editor and modify the dfm and pas files so that those fields are now of type TBooleanField.

Then, right before the form declaration add the following:

TBooleanField=class(DB.TBooleanField)
public
constructor Create(AOwner: TComponent); override;
end;

and in the implementation section

{ TBooleanField }

constructor TBooleanField.Create(AOwner: TComponent);
begin
inherited;
SetDataType(ftSmallint);
end;

If you need this in more then one form, then create a unit, like MySqlBooleanField.pas and then add it to the uses clause AFTER the DB unit.

That’s it, you’re all set.

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]]> http://blog.ciuly.com/programming/delphi/falsetrue-is-not-a-valid-integer-value-for-field-blabla/feed/ 1 http://blog.ciuly.com/programming/delphi/falsetrue-is-not-a-valid-integer-value-for-field-blabla/ New contact page http://feeds.ciuly.com/~r/CiulysBlog-ReinventingTheWheel/~3/zIKpemGBFOI/ http://blog.ciuly.com/website/new-contact-page/#comments Mon, 04 Jan 2010 21:21:28 +0000 ciuly http://blog.ciuly.com/?p=550 A couple of days ago I created a new contact page based on joomlas contact page layout. Default. And then today I got a spam message. I researched a bit on how to add captcha to it and tried 3products: securityimages, Alikon secure form, and anotehr one I don’t remember.
Finally I gave up and installed chrono forms which indeed is a cool thing.
Unfortunatelly it has troubles with joomla’s internal SEF.
Well, that’s not a big deal for me right now since the old /contact.html page is redirecting to the new url anyway but I will probably try and figure something out whenever I’ll remember about this and will have time for it.

Until then, the new contact page is much better than the old one :D

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]]> http://blog.ciuly.com/website/new-contact-page/feed/ 0 http://blog.ciuly.com/website/new-contact-page/ Killed web project your-quotes http://feeds.ciuly.com/~r/CiulysBlog-ReinventingTheWheel/~3/BYepaCgIdwI/ http://blog.ciuly.com/website/killed-web-project-your-quotes/#comments Sat, 02 Jan 2010 22:49:40 +0000 ciuly http://blog.ciuly.com/?p=546 I just killed the web project your-quote (was at .info then moved at .ciuly.com where now only an information page about it’s “death” appears).

Forgot to mention that I dropped the entire DB schema with all users and associated information. that info is still present in the backups but as always, privacy is respected.

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]]> http://blog.ciuly.com/website/killed-web-project-your-quotes/feed/ 0 http://blog.ciuly.com/website/killed-web-project-your-quotes/ testing “new” wp to twitter plugin http://feeds.ciuly.com/~r/CiulysBlog-ReinventingTheWheel/~3/-0NqO9Iujng/ http://blog.ciuly.com/uncategorized/testing-new-wp-to-twitter-plugin/#comments Sat, 02 Jan 2010 16:16:58 +0000 ciuly http://blog.ciuly.com/?p=544 with my “new” url shortener: the old alus.ws which moved to s.ciuly.com

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]]> http://blog.ciuly.com/uncategorized/testing-new-wp-to-twitter-plugin/feed/ 0 http://blog.ciuly.com/uncategorized/testing-new-wp-to-twitter-plugin/ “Compacting” web sites http://feeds.ciuly.com/~r/CiulysBlog-ReinventingTheWheel/~3/SKXaqcPJo5A/ http://blog.ciuly.com/website/compacting-web-sites/#comments Sat, 02 Jan 2010 13:33:00 +0000 ciuly http://blog.ciuly.com/?p=541 Having a lot of domains that bring in no cache is too expensive, especially now with this world-crisis, so I decided to drop the domains that don’t pay for themselves.
Thus alus.ws, the url shortener service has moved to s.ciuly.com (s from short).
ciuly.info moved to info.ciuly.com
empty-directory.info remains as it is at least until march when the domain expires. I have set up dedicated adsense channels to see the exact revenue the site is bringing. Based on that I will decide if to keep it or not.
ciqcs.com moves to ciqcs.ciuly.com

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]]> http://blog.ciuly.com/website/compacting-web-sites/feed/ 1 http://blog.ciuly.com/website/compacting-web-sites/ Big SW upgrade on server http://feeds.ciuly.com/~r/CiulysBlog-ReinventingTheWheel/~3/GKB_0lm6qw4/ http://blog.ciuly.com/general/big-sw-upgrade-on-server/#comments Sat, 19 Dec 2009 22:30:32 +0000 ciuly http://blog.ciuly.com/?p=538 About 26 oir so hours ago I started to upgrade stuff on my server. mainly I wanted mysql which also implied php.
so, I made a maintanence page for apache to take care of all the sites and hit it on. but I just couldn’t install mysql. scripts were freezing (like mysql_install_db) and using the –skup-grant-tables was not helping either.
Took me almost 12 hours to figure out that the DNS server was still running and it used mysql. Stopping the DNS server got rid of that problem.
Then came php. I was getting:

checking for MySQL support for PDO… shared
checking for mysql_config… no
configure: error: Cannot find MySQL header files under

I just couldn’t figure out what the problem was until I digged into the configure script. on line 65536 i had

for i in /usr/local /usr ; do

which is stupid because it was not taking into account my –with-mysql selection in command line. so I modified that line to be:
for i in $PHP_MYSQL /usr/local /usr ; do

and problem solved.

I then had to modify some of the scripts as they were spitting depcrecated and erros on the screen but hey, that’s just upgrading life.

and finally, the last one was joomla.

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_GOTO, expecting T_STRING in path_to_/components/com_resource/controller.php on line 193

I wasn’t paying attention that the error was actually in com_resource so I upgraded joomla to latest (which wasn’t a bad idea anyway). and when it didn’t go away I woke up to reality and tried to upgrade resource from mighty extensions BUT… their site is down. To be more precise, the domain does not resolv. get a load of that.
I sent them a tweet reply since I have no idea how else to contact them.

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