Technical - Spheron1

May 22, 2010

Cancelled yum transactions

If you’ve ever aborted a yum update for any reason, you’ve probably come across messages warning of transaction errors, such as the following example during an update from CentOS 5.4 to CentOS 5.5 that got cancelled part way through: Transaction Check Error: file /usr/include/libdevmapper.h from install of device-mapper-1.02.39-1.el5.i386 conflicts with file from package device-mapper-1.02.32-1.el5.x86_64 file /usr/share/man/man8/dmsetup.8.gz from install of device-mapper-1.02.39-1.el5.i386...

Red Hat and CentOS Comment: 1

May 22, 2010

ditto 100% CPU usage in Mac OS X

My MacBook Pro was starting to really drag it’s heels last night and a quick trip to the Activity Monitor revealed two copies of a process called “ditto” taking up 100% of the processor time on both cores! The ditto program is a command line tool for copying files and merging directories as well as extracting archives. Earlier in the...

Mac OS X Comments: 0

April 23, 2010

yum install and weird architecture behaviour

I was just trying to accomplish what you would think was a relatively easy task – installing the PHP-GD package from the Atomic Rocket Turtle repository for 64bit CentOS 5 and ran into a slightly cryptic problem. Running yum install php-gd simply produced a dependancy error php-gd-5.2.13-1.el5.art.i386 from atomic has depsolving problems –> Missing Dependency: libt1.so.5 is needed by package...

Red Hat and CentOS Comments: 0

April 21, 2010

iPhone OS 4 beta 2

Worms still doesn’t work on iPhone OS 4 beta 2 with a completely erased and reset phone! I may have to actually spend my days being productive instead…

iPhone and iPad Comments: 0

April 20, 2010

WHMCS’ HyperVM module and the importance of the product type

If you’re integrating WHMCS with HyperVM using the built in module, then there’s one thing that you need to be careful of and that’s which “product type” you set for your products/services – despite one of them being called “VPS/Dedicated servers” you actually need to use the “other” group or the HyperVM module simply won’t work. If you are having...

WHMCS Comments: 0

April 17, 2010

Spellchecker in iPhone OS4

iPhone OS4 has a spellchecking feature! 😀 This is going to be a lifesaver for me! Any word you misspell is underlined with a red squiggly line, just like in the full blown OS X. A quick tap on a misspelt word pops up a menu in the same style used for the select/cut/copy/paste options with various suggestions from the...

iPhone and iPad Comments: 0

April 15, 2010

MySQL system tables and blank entries in the Host column

I discovered some interesting behaviour under MySQL 4.1 recently (I know it’s old, but it’s not within my power to upgrade it) whereby empty entries in the Host column of the users table under the mysql system database were causing all remote (i.e. TCP and not socket) connections to be refused with a message saying “Host ‘1.2.3.4’ is not allowed...

Technical Comments: 0

April 11, 2010

Zimbra anti-spam improvements

The built in Zimbra anti-spam system is quite a neat bundle of Amavisd-new, SpamAssassin and ClamAV with some fancy automated ham/spam training based on messages being moved in and out of a “Junk” mailbox under each user’s account, but it lacks a few nice to have extra features. Luckily, it’s quite easy to enhance the Zimbra Amavisd and SpamAssassin with...

Zimbra Comments: 2

April 9, 2010

iPhone OS 4.0

I’ve been playing with iPhone OS 4.0 on my iPhone 3GS since it became available to developers after the press conference yesterday and so far impressions are good – it has broken the Worms app which won’t even launch any more 🙁 but everything else seems to be fine. Multitasking pause/resume of apps seems to work quite well and is...

iPhone and iPad Comments: 0

April 8, 2010

Sharing one keyboard and mouse between several Macs

If you have multiple computers, each with it’s own monitor then it can get really confusing having multiple keyboards and mice in front of you, not to mention somewhat disrupting to your workflow every time you have to change between them and reposition your hands appropriately. Having a KVM switch can help with this, but only lets you use a...

Mac OS X Comments: 0

Category: Technical

Cancelled yum transactions

ditto 100% CPU usage in Mac OS X

yum install and weird architecture behaviour

iPhone OS 4 beta 2

WHMCS’ HyperVM module and the importance of the product type

Spellchecker in iPhone OS4

MySQL system tables and blank entries in the Host column

Zimbra anti-spam improvements

iPhone OS 4.0

Sharing one keyboard and mouse between several Macs