After reading a lot of reviews and bugging a few pro photographers, I decided to get a Canon EOS Rebel XS w/ Kit Lens from B&H Photo and Video (www.bhphotovideo.com).  My friend placed the order successfully and got the order confirmation email.  Then a week later, the money was returned to his account and the order cancellation email was sent.  What just happened? The order cancellation did not specify a reason why the order was cancelled; everything was in order.  Seems like online merchants are jittery about orders coming from Ghana( I wonder why?). Doesn’t matter that the order might be legit, they’ve been burned way too many times by credit card fraud coming from our neck of the woods.

It was a bit of a set back but we decided to try again. Only this time, we would order from Adorama(www.adorama.com) which also had a very good reputation. Hopefully, things would work out there and besides they were offering the XS + kit lens along with a bag , 4gb SD Card and extra battery for the same price B&H is offering for just the camera (a good deal, don’t you think?). So we placed the order and that went well and we got the order confirmation email. Guess what happened a week later? Yep, the order got cancelled only this time we didn’t even receive an email. The money was returned to my friend’s account though.

I would like to say thanks to the ‘saka’ boys for making it nigh impossible for the rest of us to get any shopping done online. From Ghana at least. Anyways, can’t say I blam the online retailers. Those guys are something else. I’m making one more attempt to get the d*** camera. I’ll send the money to  my cousin in the US and he’ll make the purchase for me. Hopefully, that works out better than my last attempt.

Anyways,  I’ve been playing with the Flickr API, SASS and jQuery’s getJSON function since yesterday and ended up with Fade To Black. It’s a simple portfolio template that reads data from your Flickr photostream and display your photos in a nice little gallery. More details available here.

Fade to Black

These were compiled using version 2.1.6 of Freeradius.

Hardy amd64

• freeradius-dbg_2.1.6-0_amd64.deb
• freeradius-dialupadmin_2.1.6-0_all.deb
• freeradius-iodbc_2.1.6-0_amd64.deb
• freeradius-krb5_2.1.6-0_amd64.deb
• freeradius-ldap_2.1.6-0_amd64.deb
• freeradius-mysql_2.1.6-0_amd64.deb
• freeradius-postgresql_2.1.6-0_amd64.deb
• freeradius_2.1.6-0_amd64.deb

I’m getting really sleepy so I’ll add some more builds tomorrow. Coming soon, instructions on how to build your own packages.

Update: i386 builds for Hardy are also up. i386 builds for Karmic
will follow shortly.

Only one tiny hitch; I wasn’t paying attention and misread the time. It was actually showing at 7:30pm. I’m sure you will be able to figure out how the rest of the evening played out. Anyways, fast foward two days later. I’m still grumpy and decided that I would have to do something, even  if it as completely useless. So I threw together a little php script that displays the Silverbird movie lineup in a somewhat more reasonable manner.

Much better

Basically, this is how it works:
It gets the Silverbird’s last 8 or so twitter status updates in JSON format, applies a regex and writes the results into a list.

$curl = curl_init();
curl_setopt ($curl, CURLOPT_URL, "http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/silverbirdghana.json?callback?");
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$result = curl_exec ($curl);
curl_close ($curl);


I used CURL to retrieve the status data in JSON. It could have easily been in RSS, ATOM or XML but JSON was much much easier to work with. The ‘?callback?’ at the end of the url is required for cross-domain requests(I think).


$output = json_decode($result);
foreach($output as $tweet):
preg_match('/^"(.*)".*\[(.*)\]\s([0-9:]+\s[APM]+).*SCREEN\s([0-9])/', $tweet->text, $info);
$item = '<li>';
$item .= '<span class="title">' .$info[1] . '</span>';
$item .= '<span class="time">' .$info[3] . ' on </span>';
$item .= '<span class="day">' .$info[2] . '</span>';
$item .= '<span class="screen">' .$info[4] . '</span>';
$item .= '</li>';
echo $item;
endforeach;


So using php’s json_decode function to convert the JSON data directly into an associative array, all that was left to do was to loop over the array, apply a regex to the text of the tweets and print the results. Of course, I wasn’t satisfied and ended adding some jQuery flavour to refresh the content dynamically(More on that later. You can have a look at the source code below if you’re curious though). Then I cooked up some CSS and called it a day(meaning I lost interest). Of course, it’s far from perfect: there’s the issue of timeouts and exceeding the Twitter API limits (those are the first two that come to mind).

Told you it wan't perfect

What was the point of all this? Well I did learn that I am not above doing something completely useless just so that I can write a post telling a story about it. If I have some free time this weekend. I’ll see if I can cook up a desktop widget or something.

Source code: whatson.zip

You shouldn’t forget to make a small change to the /etc/freeradius/sql/mysql/dialup.conf(or /etc/freeradius/sql.conf) file. Somewhere around line 82 lies the following:

#######################################################################
        # Use these for case sensitive usernames.
#        authorize_check_query = "SELECT id, username, attribute, value, op \
#         FROM ${authcheck_table} \
#         WHERE username = BINARY '%{SQL-User-Name}' \
#         ORDER BY id"
#        authorize_reply_query = "SELECT id, username, attribute, value, op \
#         FROM ${authreply_table} \
#         WHERE username = BINARY '%{SQL-User-Name}' \
#         ORDER BY id"

        # The default queries are case insensitive. (for compatibility with
        # older versions of FreeRADIUS)
       authorize_check_query = "SELECT id, username, attribute, value, op \
          FROM ${authcheck_table} \
          WHERE username = '%{SQL-User-Name}' \
          ORDER BY id"
       authorize_reply_query = "SELECT id, username, attribute, value, op \
          FROM ${authreply_table} \
          WHERE username = '%{SQL-User-Name}' \
          ORDER BY id"

This should be:

#######################################################################
        # Use these for case sensitive usernames.
        authorize_check_query = "SELECT id, username, attribute, value, op \
         FROM ${authcheck_table} \
         WHERE username = BINARY '%{SQL-User-Name}' \
         ORDER BY id"
        authorize_reply_query = "SELECT id, username, attribute, value, op \
         FROM ${authreply_table} \
         WHERE username = BINARY '%{SQL-User-Name}' \
         ORDER BY id"

        # The default queries are case insensitive. (for compatibility with
        # older versions of FreeRADIUS)
#       authorize_check_query = "SELECT id, username, attribute, value, op \
#          FROM ${authcheck_table} \
#          WHERE username = '%{SQL-User-Name}' \
#          ORDER BY id"
#       authorize_reply_query = "SELECT id, username, attribute, value, op \
#          FROM ${authreply_table} \
#          WHERE username = '%{SQL-User-Name}' \
#          ORDER BY id"

And if you apply your attributes per group instead of per user, like I do, then this:

        # Use these for case sensitive usernames.
#        group_membership_query = "SELECT groupname \
#        FROM ${usergroup_table} \
#         WHERE username = BINARY '%{SQL-User-Name}' \
#        ORDER BY priority"

       group_membership_query = "SELECT groupname \
          FROM ${usergroup_table} \
          WHERE username = '%{SQL-User-Name}' \
          ORDER BY priority"

should become:

        # Use these for case sensitive usernames.
        group_membership_query = "SELECT groupname \
        FROM ${usergroup_table} \
         WHERE username = BINARY '%{SQL-User-Name}' \
        ORDER BY priority"

#       group_membership_query = "SELECT groupname \
#          FROM ${usergroup_table} \
#          WHERE username = '%{SQL-User-Name}' \
#          ORDER BY priority"

Reload the freeradius server and your usernames should be case sensitive. Now, go and buy yourself a beer in celebration of your valiant victory against the dark forces of computer insecurity.

• First, you need to download it(~99kb).
• Double click the .deb file to run the package installer. In my case, all dependencies were satisfied so I just had to click the “Install Package” button.
  
• Right click your panel and “Add to Panel..”.
  
• Scroll down a bit and you should see a ‘MintMenu’ applet.
  
• Drag the applet to your panel and you should be set. Ubuntu with a little dash of mint!
  

• First of all, clicking on the enrollment link causes two windows to pop up. One of the windows contains a form that accepts a PIN number and redirects you to your enrollment form, other is a “Highlights Page”.
  And oh, you have to click the “New Enrollment” button first to enable the PIN number field.
• Once you finally enter your PIN number and submit, you enrollment form opens in yet another pop-up. Now even leaving the sheer ugliness of the resulting form aside, let’s look at a few things, shall we? You mean to tell me you were able to get my name, my programme of study from my school records but you somehow forgot to get my sex, date of birth and nationality while you were at it? I see…
• Ok I fill the form, save the details and then click on the “Print Page” link (why it is not a button or named better, I don’t know).
  The result is this:
  
• And what is it with the “Highlights” page? Is it supposed to be a help page? If so, does it have to be so bloody confusing?

And that’s just the stuff I noticed off-hand. Why does it have to be so hard to just fill and submit one single form? Come on, we can do a lot better than that.

HP QuickPlay

First, it runs as an application under Vista, meaning I have to wait for Vista to load before I can access the QuickPlay. And unfortunately, there appears to be no way to get an older version of Quickplay on my system, due to compatibility problems with newer computers.
So I got to thinking, if I have to wait for Vista to boot before getting access to my media, I might as well use the media center of my choice. Enter the XBox Media Center(XBMC). I won’t really go into XBMC, but it is the sweetest media center I have ever come across and I have tried a lot of them.

XBox Media Center

What I wanted to do was link the QuickPlay button on my notebook and the included remote to start XBMC up instead of QuickPlay. After consulting the great search oracle, I found what I wanted to know. The application that runs when the QuickPlay button is pressed is specified in the registry.(Like most of the other stuff on this site, the rest of this post can mess up your computer so the usual disclaimers apply. Proceed if you’re sure you know what you’re doing. And always remember to backup before doing anything that could cripple your system.)

Anyways, you need to find the following key:
Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Hewlett_Packard\HP Quick Launch Buttons\
Next, look for the string value called QAction. It should currently point to
C:\Program Files\HP\QuickPlay\QP.exe.
You can change the string to point to whatever other application you want. In my case, that’s C:\Program Files\XBMC\xbmc.exe

That’s all. Now I have my own incredibly customizable media center only a button away. Did I mention how much I love my computer?

Referenced
http://forum.tabletpcreview.com/showthread.php?p=108960#post108960

Update: About a 2/3rds of the way through downloading packages. I hate Ghana Telecom. With a passion.

Update: Finally done! The upgrade process itself went through without a hitch. However, I had a problem with the driver for my Nvidia card not being detected. That was fixed in a jiffy using this guide. So now, I’m rocking the Jaunty release candidate. The only noticeable difference, for me so far, are the notifications. Anyways, let me play with it a little and see what more I can find.

I can’t wait for the final release so I can full upgrade.

[singlepic=32,320,200,,center]

Starting from the top:

• I use Rocket Dock to get keep some frequently used apps handy. I’m using the built in WhiteCristal theme with opacity set to 50%. The icons are based on the Serenity Icon package. I had to rustle up some of my own icons. My files are here with PSD template included. Just copy and paste the layer styles.
• CD Art Display (formerly Winamp CD Case) is a free desktop program that shows the current song cover in a skinnable display. It has support for AlbumPlayer, Helium Music Manager, iTunes, Winamp, Windows Media Player, MediaMonkey and partially supports qmp, MP3Toys, musikCube and foobar2000 (Winamp API Emulator plugin). The skin I’m using is something I whipped up with some inspiration from the Heaven o.o desktop and the Pure Adium skin. You can get that here
• The clock, calendar and todo list are all done using Rainmeter. The todo list uses a font called Hand of Sean. Very nice. The stacks on the left are done using a combination of Rainmeter and StandAlone Stacks. My skin files are here
• I’m using the Windows 7 style by giannisgx89 and StartKiller to hide my start button. You might have to patch your system to allow you to use custom themes, though. I used VistaGlazz for that; make sure you read the instructions and are clear about what steps to take!
• Last but not least, is Launchy; very useful, especially for a keyboard junkie like me.
• Wallpaper from here

That’s it for this episode. My quest to find the Ultimate desktop continues next week on Linux. Also cominig soon: Shortcut Sorcery with AutoHotKey.