Press "Enter" to skip to content

Month: May 2003

Guess That Movie: Scores So Far VI

Another nine images, and another update of the scoreboard and Kymberlie is still in the lead with 2190 points now (so she’s entitled to another prize, but since she’s currently on vacation/holiday she won’t be able to claim it – plus it gives the rest of you a chance to earn some valuable points! LD is still 55 points off the “500 points claim point”, Super Beastmaster is just 120 points behind and “the only other person apart from Kymberlie to win points in the last set of rounds” – Dr G – needs 260 points.

Admittedly, Kymberlie did get a boost of 200 points for round 52: Loser as it had been over 6 days since I had posted it and there were no correct guesses – therefore I had it on “bonus points round” for a day and she just waltzed in and won the extra 200 points. Drat.

Anyway, Good luck and be ready for round 55…

Techy: Single Line Multiple File Search And Replace

Whilst performing the server upgrades, Ensim Pro died and crashed the server forcing us to roll back to plain old Ensim on the Red Hat Linux box. After we had done that, we then had to restore all the customer data and I noticed a slight inconsistency in the data: for some reason, all the backup files had the wrong IP address stored in them! So after the backups were restored, I found the Apache virtual conf folder (/etc/httpd/conf/virtual) and executed the following command at the Linux shell prompt (as root):

/usr/bin/perl -pi -e ‘s/old_IP_address/new_IP_address/g’ *

This practically is a single line multiple file search and replace function and it works as follows:

  • usr/bin/perl start the Perl interpreter (the language this script is written in)
  • -p instruct perl to loop/repeat around the following instructions
  • i edit the specified files in place (i.e. alter the stated files)
  • -e “what follows is a single line command”
  • ‘s/old_IP_address/new_IP_address/g’ a Perl regular expression to subsitute the text old_IP_address with the text new_IP_address on a global basis (if you omit the ‘g’ it will only replace the first occurrence of the old_IP_address found in each file). Change to /gi for a global, case insensitive search if you require
  • * change files matching this wildcard (*=every file and extension: you could use “*.html” just to change files ending in .html if you wanted)

I hope this little script comes in handy to someone else, but I still wish that I hadn’t needed to work out how to do it 🙁

Snippet: Upgrading Server

*snippet* I’m on tenterhooks at the moment: I’m currently upgrading our servers to the latest version of Ensim Pro and Linux and, as per any large server upgrade, I’m scared in case anything goes wrong. Especially since it’s a live system hosting customer data. I’m performing the upgrade on our second datacentre first as that’s only got around 200 sites hosted on it: centres 1+3 have around 400.

Memes: Saturday Scruples

Saturday ScruplesSince the owners of Saturday Scruples were kind enough to give me free 25 shares on Blogshares (I then gave them 25 of mine and brought some more of theirs), I thought I’d do this weeks questions to see how I like it:

You’re on (the) city council. Police want to place surveillance cameras on the downtown streets to deter crime and save money. Do you vote for it?
Yes. Whilst I do respect peoples privacy and tend to sway on the side of “keep private stuff private”, a public street isn’t a private area. Surveillance cameras have been proven to decrease camera by a degree (and no, I don’t have the facts or figures to hand) and so I’ll support a proposal like this.

Personal: Temporarily Deafness

Ear EarI’ve gone temporarily deaf: in one ear I can only hear a fizzing noise and the other ear has been reduced to around 50% hearing. Why am I not more concerned? Because I’ve inflicted it on myself!

Yep, that’s right, I’ve made myself deaf. Before any of you point out what a stupid idea that is and that I shouldn’t listen to loud music, don’t worry – it hasn’t been caused by abuse of my hearing (I prefer things quiet anyway). Basically, I’ve noticed a gradual reduction in my hearing the last year or so and finally decided to do something about it: it’s happened once before (around 5 years ago), but then my hearing would fail to such a degree that every morning it would take around 2 hours before I was able to hear anything and I had to make an appointment with the Doctors to have my ears syringed (basically a strange machine is put into your ear canal and “fires” warm water into the ear for a few minutes and collects all the gunk that comes out). It’s quite lovely to walk into the Doctors partially deaf and walk out with better hearing that you’ve had for ages, but I just haven’t got the time to make an appointment at the Doctors as I’m very busy (yes I am, honest! 🙂 ).

So I decided to take the proactive method and went down to Boots (a large chemist chain here in the UK) and buy some ear wax remover solution (10ml for their “own brand” stuff: £4.65/$7.45) and I’ve just used it and twenty minutes later my left ear is still “bubbling”/fizzing away and there’s a movie I want to watch and record in 15 minutes .