Linux

Linux is neither popular nor valuable

Oliver Brown
— This upcoming video may not be available to view yet.

Controversial statement? Well that’s the point. There is a hilarious article over at XML.com about the traffic advantages of controversy on blogs.

The funniest part of course is the number of comments from people who read the title of the post but not the content and just threw a normal anti-anti Linux rant. Unfortunately these things only work if you have a fair amount of traffic in the first place and I probably don’t quite qualify.

Audio in Linux

Oliver Brown
— This upcoming video may not be available to view yet.

I’ve started writing the page to actually play the audio clips in my language learning app.

At the moment it loads the Windows Media Play plug in. This obviously won’t work on Linux so I have to ask, how do you play media files in a web browser when not on Windows? Flash would be the obvious answer I suppose but I have an uncommon requirement - I need to be able to access the object via Javascript. Specifically, I need to know when a track is finished and the next one begins (from a play list) and none of the freely available Flash media players do that.

Any advice from anyone?

No more outages

Oliver Brown
— This upcoming video may not be available to view yet.

Some of you may have noticed the blog being down regularly. Well I haven’t fixed it yet. But I finally got the script to work that was supposed to restart it. I eventually diagnosed the problem as an incorrect path setting for the cron daemon. Anyway, it should now never be down for more than a few minutes.

Silly Linux

Oliver Brown
— This upcoming video may not be available to view yet.

Sometimes Linux is downright counter-intuitive. I have SSH command line access to my server and I wanted to rename a directory. Now I know that cp is used to copy files so I try rn. No luck. So I think perhaps they are being nice so I try rename. This seems to work. But the file is not actually renamed. When I type the command on its on it says call: rename from to files. Nice but not useful. After a quick search I find out how to do it: you need the move command. Well to be precise the mv command. After a moment’s thought it does make sense but it is not intuitive…