RTFHTMLD!

I’ve been hacking a JavaScript dropdown menu for a client’s site on and off over the last few days, but only finally sat down with a view to fixing the crazy thing this evening. My goodness. You know those moments where you kick yourself so hard you pity the chair you were sitting in? Okay, so I sit in front of my computer too much, but you get the point. This is like… ouch. ARRRRRRRGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHH!!!! Calm is good.

A note, for anyone who is looking to implement not-overly-documented dropdown menus – read your base source file in its entirety before even contemplating trying to implement. It was two lines. Two bloody lines of JavaScript which turned into a ~1 hour nightmare search – not to mention time which I haven’t counted, because it was hackish, not goal-oriented coding. Of course, the longer spent, the more it hurts to find out exactly what I’d missed.

  var ddmx = new DropDownMenuX('topnav');
  ddmx.init();

Those two lines. So much pain!

Oh, and just to clear up any confusion, the acronym which is the title of this news post ends in D, for “Document”. Not “dotcom” or anything stupid like that ;)

Lizette &

I was listening to radio.wazee today, and heard an incredibly cool song by a band called Lizette &.  Yeah, weird name, but very cool music – this is proof that streaming radio is more effective in music promotion than conventional radio – with the exception of new digital broadcast services (none of which have reached maturity here in Australia, I don’t think…), no broadcast radio also transmits track information!

Anyway.  This particular track, called “This is (Dark green edition)”, was available for download from the wazee website, as well as the original mix (which I’ve got to say, I prefer) of the song.  I lost the link, and can’t be bothered searching for it again (I’ve got it mirrored locally in my storage directory if anyone wishes to hear it… send me an email or something), but bottom line is if I had a credit card, I would have purchased the album by now!

An international CD reseller for their CD, “This is” (the song I heard was the title track), CD Baby, has a playlist of all tracks on the album available for your listening pleasure… although the tracks aren’t full length.  High quality ones are at a decent bit-rate, at least ;)

They’re my Band-Of-The-Moment!

SuSE and Apache weirdness…

I’m in one of those really frustrated geek moods, so if you don’t understand/enjoy these rants, skip reading this post.

ARGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH!!!qvaorentfq34iogfaenrgnoaerg~!!!!!

WHY CAN’T SUSE JUST BE NORMAL?! I mean, I know it’s German and all that, but still!  HISSSSSSSS!!!!  You know what?  Technically, the way it’s setup the whole Apache configuration thing is probably FAR better than anything else I’ve ever seen!  No, more than that… it IS better setup.  It is structured VERY nicely, and, despite the lack of YaST configuration options (who needs GUI’s anyway?), very easy to use.  Except for some bloody impossible issue it seems to have with accessing files!

So, setting up a virtualhost has never been so simple and quick and… yeah, just generally nice.  Admittedly, I think it still needs a restart, but hey, what’s new?

All is good.  Until, of course, you try and point the DocumentRoot to somewhere vaguely useful.  In my case, somewhere inside my home user directory (/home/josh) – I have a development folder setup, which I previously had an IP-based vhost setup to point to for all local development and testing (/home/josh/MyDocs/webdevelopment – /home/josh/public_html also symlinks there).  This is where it all starts to become somewhat flaky.

By default (yeah, whoever built the RPM was a bit of an odd one…), mod_userdir is ENABLED… not for vhosting or anything special, just accessible via http://servername/~*/ – and that will point to /home/*/public_html where * is the username.  Okay.  So, I’ve generally got about three accounts setup on my desktop.  Root, which is never logged into (although su’d into often enough that perhaps I should actually login properly…), my user account, for everything under the sun, the home directory of which resides on a separate physical volume (40GB ext3), and a (passwordless) guest account for use of miscellaneous others.  No, I’m not too worried about leet hax0rs reading this and compromising my b0xen… sitting comfortably behind another IP filtering bundle of joy, and I’m not too scared of the other machines on my own network, at least, not most days of the week.

So.  The guest user works interestingly.  /home/guest/public_html corresponds to http://localhost/~guest/, which successfully produces a directory listing (albeit one without any actual files – the directory is currently empty).  Try the same with MY account, and all I get is a schnazzy 403 forbidden page.

That is, of course, when I have the symlink to my development folder there.  Were I to simply have a folder there, all works perfectly.  So why don’t I just be a big boy, get over it, and move the development folder?  Hmm.  Well, there’s about 1.5GB of data in there (1,585,358,110 bytes, to be exact), and certain editing applications would probably try to hang me out on a tree if I just moved it without informing them.  And I could inform them, but it’d take time.

Oh, yeah, and it’s like admitting defeat.  Yeah, it’s a computer, but I can be more stubborn, so there!

Hmm.  So it’s looking like it has some kind of random opposition to symlinks, as of right now… but that shouldn’t be a problem!  Grrrr!

Personally, I’m suspicious of all this wizard-driven crap SuSE is trying to pull… there is an extent to which I’d like to be able to do things for myself, without having to give the proverbial finger to a bunch of automated mechanisms which attempt to do it for me and fail miserably.  Case in point, the YaST printer setup tool and ptal/hpoj configuration.

Hmm.  If anyone has any ideas, feel free to throw them this way… I know what the REAL solution is, but I don’t particularly want to setup another computer just for the purpose of web-serving, because that would involve buying another hard-drive with money I don’t have.

<\/rant>

Calm is good

Ahhhhhhhhhhh.  The blissful sound of Apache working.  Don’t say anything.  That’s right, it’s SILENT!  Admittedly, it made no noise before, but hey… all is good!  IT WORKS!!!

The problem?  Yeah, it was yet another PEBKAC error… that said, I’m still a little peeved at SuSE – the reason I screwed up was simply because I misesd a very simple detail amongst all the Include’ings of other files… by default, their httpd.conf denies access to the entire filesystem.  Wonderful!  Anyway.  It’s working now, so I’m happy :)

Only one thing left to setup, and that’s Samba and my wonderful WORKING HP printer!  Yay!  You have no idea how sexy a test page can look until you struggle with a printer for a few hours… a few re-compilations later and all was good.  Sharing is caring, though, and apparently that is also going to chew my time.

Before I sit down and hack at that one, though, I think I’ll kick back to some random interface tweaking, simply because I can, and it’s something which is relaxing – yes, relaxing!  Hehehehehe.

I’m a geek, watcha going to do about it?

Back, back again

Yay. I’m about to go and get some sleep, but just quickly posting to say that the changeover was relatively painless and all is well-ish.

I now have full Exchange functionality within Ximian Evolution, which was a major factor behind my decision to move to SuSE (i.e. because of their close ties to Novell) over any other platform. ALSA audio is now happening as well, although it took a wee spot of hax0ring before it got over the fact that I had two soundcards, one of which doesn’t really work – it was clipping and stuttering all over the place… well. No. It wasn’t *solely* having two soundcards. It was incidental that the problem went away when I deleted the dodgy one from the system (YaST2 is lovely) – but it recurred later, even though the card was theoretically disabled.

The fix? I had to disable “IEC958 Mix Analog” using KMix, and suddenly all was golden again. No, I have no idea what that is meant to do. Seeing it was clipping all over the place, “IEC958 +5V” would seem a more probable choice, but hey, trial and error works miracles. For the purpose of people Googling this problem, my soundcard is a C-Media PCI CMI8738 and my onboard audio was (before I cooked it several months ago – it still detects, because I haven’t disabled it in the BIOS yet) recognised by SuSE 9.1 as a Gigabyte GA-7VAX Onboard Audio (Realtek ALC650) device.

It’s not blatant hit-generation techniques, I was just unable to find anything about my soundcard and clipping with ALSA/SuSE9.1 when I was looking before.

Anyway. That was one of several problems of significance I had… other weird ones are to do with printers! My goodness! Okay, so I have this behemoth HP OfficeJet MFD thingo which scans and prints (and faxes, but I haven’t risked setting up the computer to interface with THAT yet). Detects fine. Doesn’t do ANYTHING until I download and re-compile the hpoj drivers – once that happens, at least CUPS will detect the printer (previously, only YaST2 and all its specialness could see that it was attached)!

Twenty minutes later, I’ve installed the printer (again, this time without the “assistance” of YaST), and XSane is working its marvels. Just because it was handy, I grabbed a nice scan of the cover of “The DaVinci Code” – full colour, 300dpi, nothing had any problems. Okay, so at least ONE direction of our USB is working great. For the first time since installing SuSE, I actually did the obligatory poke-around-the-startbar-equivalent-menu thing… and uncovered this: System → Monitor → HP Office Jet.

Which shows what the two-line LCD on the printer is currently displaying. And that, of course, worked perfectly. YET I STILL CANNOT PRINT!!!!

Doh!

If anyone knows whether hpoj would affect scanning ability, please say something – if it is completely unrelated, then I can safely assume that hpoj is borked and needs to be poked with sticks. If it *does* have a connection with scanning, then the plot has thickened!

Hmm. So much for quickly posting. Meh!