Keeping up to date

Posted on by February 28, 2017

This site has been somewhat quiet for a while.

Usually I post here on Linux related matters, but things have been very quiet on that front.  Instead I have been turning my attention to WordPress and hosting.

There is a major upheaval on the horizon with the arrival of PHP7.  Most sites currently run on PHP5 but a lot of coding has been depreciated and in 7 has been eliminated altogether.  So at some stage in the future, hosting companies are going to upgrade to PHP7 and sites across the board will suddenly lose a lot of functionality, or worse.

So I have been spending a considerable amount of time trawling through my sites (there's a lot of them) finding plugins that aren't PHP7 compatible.  A lot of them aren't.  Some of the latter are essential, in which case I contacted the authors and they updated their code (they were extremely grateful for the warning!).  Some plugins that were not so critical I just replaced with suitable alternatives and some I just left to chance.  The plugin I used in this part of the exercise is PHP Compatibility Checker.

Ultimately I made the switch on the majority of my sites, leaving just a few that as yet haven't got PHP7 as an option on the servers.  I hope to migrate those sites to newer servers in the coming weeks.

Another factor I have been working on is to upgrade sites to secure connections, as this another way the Internet is moving.  Google apparently intend to (or actually do) penalise non-secure sites.

The main problem with moving to SSL is the need for certificates, which are expensive and are beyond the scope of the hobbyist or even the small business.  The simple answer I found is to move all sites to CloudFlare Content Delivery Network.  As part of their free package they provide easily installable certificates.

Lastly (but by no means least) I used Weaver II as a theme builder on many of my sites.  While this was a very powerful theme creator/customiser it is now depreciated and has been replaced by Weaver Xtreme.  At first I found that the latter had a very steep learning curve and was reluctant to switch.  However I persevered and eventually found that Weaver Xtreme is immensely powerful and is far superior to the old Weaver.  It is also fully PHP7 compatible, uses more efficient coding and is therefore a lot faster.

In the course of all this work, I kept a stern eye on page speed, tweaking plugins (and replacing many) with an ultimate goal of getting every site on my books to load in under 3 seconds.  That was not easy.  One client in particular had a great fondness for sliding image galleries on his front page – six or seven of them.  On of those galleries alone contained 36 images, none of which was reduced in dimensions or compressed.  The overall size of the front page was well in excess of 50Mb.  Plugins and tweaks can do a lot, but this was the only case where I had to intervene and strongly suggest some alternative layouts!

So, as you can see, I haven't been idle! 

Bad interpreter error

Posted on by November 26, 2016

I use shell scripts for a few jobs.

Recently I rebuilt a laptop and installed a few scripts from a working machine.  The other day I went to run one of the scripts from a command line and got the following:

/bin/bash^M: bad interpreter: No such file or directory

Now the new machine had an identical setup to the old and the script I was trying to run had the right permissions(and of course ran perfectly on the old machine), so the problem had to lie with the formatting of the script file ( and the ^M was a bit of a hint too?).  Somehow the file transfer had corrupted the script file and trying to edit it didn't fix it.

A simple fix. 

I used the following:

sed -i -e 's/\r$//' myfile.sh

The file then ran perfectly.

 

Hidden traffic

Posted on by October 4, 2016

This site has been somewhat dormant for quite a while?

It's not that I had forgotten it – I have just been busy elsewhere.  Also my Linux has been running very smoothly so I have had no problems to resolve.

The intention of this site was to act as a notebook for myself, to which I could refer if I ran into similar problems again, and in fact I frequently do refer to it.  However, others find my little hints and tricks helpful so at least the site is doing its job properly!

While traffic to here is low but constant, I would consider it a bit of a backwater on the Internet.  So why are hackers so interested in it?  In the last 48 hours, there have been 2,770 attempts to hack the Admin password, and they're still coming.  As each of those 2,770 attempts have instantly been locked out of the site, I shudder to think how many further attempts would have been made if they had been allowed unlimited access to the login page?

It just demonstrates how important security is.  Even a very small site like this is prone to attack, and without security, it could be now hosting a dodgy pharmaceuticals site, dishing out porn or just acting as a slave to attack other sites.

Popularity isn't all it's made out to be!

Install Google Earth with photos on Linux Mint 18 (64bit)

Posted on by July 8, 2016

Now that Mint 18 has been released, the first thing I noticed was that Google Earth is not available in the repositories and requires a manual download and install.

Before doing that, make sure Mint updates have been applied as the LSB libraries are missing from the installation disk, but are now available as an update.

First open a terminal and enter the following –

sudo apt-get install lsb-core -y -f

Then download Google Earth.

Finally, in Terminal, run –

sudo dpkg -i google-earth-stable_current_amd64.deb

The problem with the photographs not displaying still exists, so I have created a small script.

Please note – run the script at your own risk.  It does however run perfectly on my setup.

Download it here.

Open a terminal in the folder where you have saved the download –

chmod +x GEImages.sh

sudo ./GEImages.sh

Once it has finished, run Google Earth and enjoy!

Running a live image on the desktop

Posted on by April 28, 2016

Things have been somewhat quite here of late?

Occasionally I like to set myself little mental exercises to keep the brain ticking over.  My latest bright idea was to replace my desktop background wallpaper with a live [or nearly live] image from the Internet.

There is a site with a live webcam pointing to a view that I love.  The webcam updates roughly once a minute producing a JPG image.  My task was to use that image as a desktop background.

For the purposes of illustration, I have used imaginary URLs but you can take it from me that it works.

The first part was to write a shell script to retrieve the file from the website.  This was short and simple –

#!/bin/bash
# retrieves newest image from web camera
# and sets this as desktop background in cinnamon 

wget "http://webcamerasite.com/webcams/cameraoutput.jpg" -O /home/username/Images/camera.jpg

gsettings set org.cinnamon.desktop.background picture-uri "file:///home/username/Images/camera.jpg"

Note that the final line is for Linux Mint Cinnamon edition. Modify it for other versions.

Save the script and make it executable.  Running the script will replace the background image with the latest from the website.

The next task is to set up a Cron job to run the script.

In Terminal, type crontab -e

Select the editor (I chose 2 – Nano).

Add the following line at the bottom –

* * * * /home/username/location of shell script

This will run the script once a minute.

Press Ctrl-o to save the file, press Enter to confirm the file name and Ctrl-w to exit.

Your desktop will now refresh every minute with the latest view.

Desktop image

The latest image on my desktop