Planet Open-Future

the latest coding fit – items & qr javascript

Gert's Blog

Wednesday, September 14, 2011 - 19:23

Link: http://blog.cone.be/2011/09/14/the-latest-coding-fit-items-qr-javascript/

I had a coding fit earlier this week

I needed a way to track magical items in my DnD campaign; something with a printout containing all the notes that I could just hand out to the players. So I decided I wanted a QR code on there with the hidden info. Want to know something about that item you found earlier? lemme scan the code! Yes. this isn’t very cheat safe, but its a game for adults, don’t spoil your own fun!
The project is live on items.cone.be and info is available on gertschepens.be/items
Does what I need it to do and nothing more Little caveat; the preview item page doesn’t work correctly on my server. It uses parse_ini_string and that requires php >= 5.3.0 while my serv is on the previous version. Necessary updates when I find the time..

In the process I also realized that putting a QR code on a page is easy with jQuery; easier even than server-side using php! Neat little piece of code I want to have handy so its now on gertschepens.be/jquery

Glad to have gotten that out of the system

Preferred email app: gmail

Gert's Blog

Wednesday, August 31, 2011 - 19:02

Link: http://blog.cone.be/2011/08/31/preferred-email-app-gmail/

My darling wife has a new laptop and uses gMail all the time, used to do the t-bird but will probably go all the gMail way soon!

Unity has the dash (press the super key, most laptops have the Windows logo printed on there, to open) with some nice big touch friendly links and I want gmail there!

There’s an app for that: gnome-gmail
there is a problem there with 11.04 though, as this wont show up in the preferred applications menu

Ask Ubuntu has the question in its pages: Changing eMail application in preferred applications and offers the following:

edit ~/.local/share/applications/mimeapps.list :
x-scheme-handler/mailto=gnome-gmail.desktop;

You need to add the line to the [Added Associations] list and after that the option will be available to you in the “preferred” dialog!

The huge gMail icon looks Awesome there

Hanging websites, scp fails, ftp stalls ..., odd network behavior

Mario's Blog

Sunday, July 24, 2011 - 20:05

Link: http://mario.verbelen.org/node/64

If you have ever broken websites or stalling traffic
Connections works, telnet works, ssh works ... but you cant go to some websites or vpn's or whatever odd behavior
Well the problem can be PMTU (Path MTU)

I had this problem last year when I switched to a new provider

My setup is a dsl connection with a Linux firewall for the home network
Some sites are broken and some of them are working if you are lucky
After doing some small debugging I saw that it was a MTU issue

Normally the default MTU size is 1500, but for a pppoe connection it is downscaled to 1492
My first thought was simply lower the MTU on the client
Because for some reason my firewall is blocking the icmp message (mss) to the client.
After some testing the working value (with no fragmentation) is 1472 while the pppoe interface is using 1492.
Lower down the client MTU to 1472 is a great result

Now that I had some more time, I had to investigate this issue
(I don't want to change MTU on all my guests there PC)

I discovered (in the man page) that the simplest way is to add a iptables rule and allow this mss package

So if you have pppoe and a iptables firewall ...
I just added this rule to my firewall that wil forward this mss message

iptables -I FORWARD -p tcp --tcp-flags SYN,RST SYN -j TCPMSS --clamp-mss-to-pmtu

I hope I can help some ppl with this blog

The About Pages presentation for #bcg4

Gert's Blog

Saturday, June 25, 2011 - 09:55

Link: http://blog.cone.be/2011/06/25/the-about-pages-presentation-for-bcg4/

If all goes well, I did my Barcamp 4 presentation in Gent today! (authoring this yesterday )

Presentation info is at gertschepens.be/2011-barcamp-gent-4-about-pages and the presentation itself is ready to go at BCG4_AboutPages.html and slideshare.net/../bcg4-about-pages

The presentation runs from that page because of the wonderful slideshow.rubyforge.org/ project! It took a bit getting used to but it feels damned good not to have to use bulky office software for this! Also I REALLY like not being bothered by annoying markup shit (thanks to textile) while writing content and I Love the separation this software gives. Slightly weird to have to “compile” (slideshow -t slippy about_pages.textile) a presentation but its cool none the less!