On The Fence Development

Syncing my iPod with Ubuntu

In a previous post I listed some of the things that I still do in Windows that I needed to be able to do in Ubuntu before I could truly consider it to be my Operating System of choice – one of these was to be able to sync my music and podcasts onto my iPod Nano. Now as every iPod owner knows, these things are simple brilliant – but Apple do not provide a version of iTunes for Linux so what are we to do?

Well as ever the Open Source community has a number of answers and there are some fine iTunes alternatives out there. We all use our iPods differently and mine it mainly used for listening to Podcasts during my daily commute (about 40 minutes each way). I do have some music on the device but this is normally pretty static – when I get bored of what is on there I normally blitz the lot and start again.

iTunes is a good application for managing Podcasts because it will not only download new episodes as they become available and automatically sync them to the iPod when I plug it on, it will detect which ones I have listened to and remove them – freeing up space for new content. To consider another application to be a genuine replacement it needs to do the same. Read the rest of this entry »

Installing AtMailOpen Webmail Client on Hosted Server

I have a reseller account with my hosting provider which allows me to manage multiple domains (this being one of them) and also provides email services for each of them. The thing is that the two webmail clients it provides, Horde and SquirrelMail are [frankly] clunky and long winded to access – the latter being an issue with the implementation rather than the applications themselves.

To login I need to provide a full email address as the username (any you can see how long this domain name is) and a password. Then I’m presented with the option of loading Horde or SquirrelMail as well as enabling Auto Load the selected application. If I select SquirrelMail then I’m taken directly to my Inbox but if I select Horde then I’m presented with a ‘language selection’ screen which also contains a Login button. While SquirrelMail is a basic email client Horde also has a Calendar, Notes, Tasks and a News Reader – but they both look a little dated.

Now while I can handle the login process and live with dated interface it’s not something I would like to provide to other users – I’m just worried that I will get phone call after phone call about how to use the applications and complaints about the user experience.

I have a domain which will soon be hosting a WordPress blog that my girlfriends daughter will be using to keep in touch while she is working abroad for six months before starting her college studies. I didn’t feel comfortable giving her the standard email client offerings so decided to configure AtMailOpen instead. Read the rest of this entry »

New Year Resolutions 2010

In my first post on this blog I declared an intention to learn non-Microsoft languages and technologies so that I was equipped to handle both sides of the fence (hence the blog title). During the last year I have been looking at learning PHP using Drupal as a platform for my development. This is progressing well and I have a few mini-projects underway – more about those in future posts.

However, I think that the main thing I have gotten out of this last year is a better understanding of Linux (Ubuntu in particular) and have realised just how far it has come on since my first encounters with Red Hat 8.0. So much so that I am currently using Ubuntu as my primary Operating System – the Windows 7 installation on my other partition rarely gets a look in. My previous post highlights my disappointment with Windows 7 and my intention to reconfigure my laptop to move Ubuntu to the larger of the two partitions and revert to Vista (which never gave me all the problems others complain about) on the smaller one – just in case I find I need it for something. But there’s the thing – why would I need it? What do I do on a day to day (or even week to week or month to month) that means I have to have a Windows system at my disposal at all times – just in case? Read the rest of this entry »

Ok – that’s it. Windows 7 is outta here!

In an earlier post I detailed the upgrade of my Vista partition to Windows 7 Eval and how smoothly the process went. Well I’m afraid that the shine has gone off Windows 7 and after looking at the upgrade prices I’m hacked off enough to say that I’ll not be bothering.

I upgraded my laptop from XP to Vista because I was starting a new job and it’s what they used – so I thought I should get up to speed before I started. I later configured the laptop to Dual Boot with Ubuntu but Vista was always my default Operating System – if I wanted to boot into Ubuntu then I had to remember to wait around for the Boot Menu instead of just turning it on and walking away. Recently I was lured into installing Windows 7 and at first I was quite impressed and do admit that it is a massive leap from XP (and probably Vista). As most people say, it is what Vista should have been. Read the rest of this entry »

Making an Audio version of the Ubuntu Podcast

I listen to a number of podcasts on a regular basis, mainly programming related, during my 45 minute commute to and from work every day. Now almost all of them are downloaded in audio format but recently the Ubuntu Podcast as stopped posting these formats. In a recent episode (#32) Joel and Nick explained they reasoning behind this and I fully support them in their decision – I mean, it’s an overhead for them in terms of time and storage/bandwidth. Add to that the fact that I can still subscribe via iTunes and some would wonder why I’m making a fuss (which I’m not btw!)

Well the fact of the matter is that it both illegal and dangerous to watch a video podcast on an iPod Nano while driving at 70mph down the motorway. Add to that the fact that each of the main episodes is 500MB and my Nano has ‘only’ 8GB to play with and i have a few reasons for wanting an less-heavyweight version. Read the rest of this entry »

Sending EMail from the Command Line with Ubuntu Server

In a previous post I wrote about the problems I had encountered while trying to configure my Ubuntu Server to send emails from the command line (actually from a script but it amounts to the same thing). I overcame the problem in the short term by using curl to send messages via Twitter but I really wanted to work out how to end emails instead. Well after a bit more research and some testing I have cracked it

What I didn’t understand was that I needed two components to be able to send an email in this way, a Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) and an email client. For my solution I have used Nullmailer as my MTA and Mutt as my Client.

Nullmailer is not a full blown MTA like Postfix but then I didn’t really need something that heavyweight for my purposes. Nullmailer is a ‘minimal mail relay’ – it doesn’t handle local mail delivery or download message from other servers, it just passes email from the local machine to a mail server for delivery.

Mutt is a small but powerful, text-based email client which can send email from the command line but also has a GUI (of sorts). I was only interested in the command line interface for this little project. Read the rest of this entry »

Keeping OpenDNS Updated with Ubuntu Server

In a previous post I explained how I configued my Ubuntu Server to send a tweet whenever my external IP address changed. Well I found that no only did my external IP address change with startling regularity but it was also causing my OpenDNS settings to become out of sync.

Basically in the house we have a single PC and the rest are laptops. Now I have the OpenDNS updater on the PC and this will syncronise my external IP address with OpenDNS when it is turned on – but what if the IP address changes and that PC is not turned on.? Answer, all my parental controls go out of the window!
Now I could install the OpenDNS updater on the laptops but the problem I see there is that if one of them connects to another network, via WiFi for example, then my OpenDNS settings will be updated with the networks external IP address – not what I want!
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Intellisense not working via COM

I recently needed to write a class in C# that would be accessed by a VB6 application – something quite new to me.

The existing VB6 application (which is in the process of being rewritten in C#) currently uses OLE Automation to generate MSWord documents based on templates. While this approach was working fine it was pretty slow. Having made the decision that the new version of the application would be capable of generating Word 2007 documents it was decided that the resulting class should be accessible to the VB6 application via COM Interop.
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Upgrading to Windows 7 (Dual Boot with Ubuntu)

I’ve run with Vista for about a year now and on the whole have had no problems with it. Now I’m one of those people that hasn’t really had any problems with Vista – and frankly I’m not sure what all the fuss was about. Yeah, I was happy with XP and only upgraded to Vista because my new employer was using it.

So why was I looking to upgrade to Windows 7 now..? Well there were a number of reasons but the most pressing was that Vista was starting to get on my nerves. So some reason it started to run painfully slow. This was mainly due to the fact that the hard drive would be chattering away for a good 20 minutes after I had logged in – now that’s infuriating! What the hell was it doing.? Well I didn’t really have the drive to spend hours looking for the source so had just lived with it.

When Windows 7 hit Release Candidate I thought – “What the Hell”. If it all went to hell in a wheel barrow then I could either restore my XP system with the CD that came with the laptop or install Vista from the CD I had bought for the upgrade (OEM version purchased with a new HDD).
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Tweeting my External IP Address from Ubuntu Server

In my previous post I described the problems I encountered while trying to configure my Ubuntu Server to be able to send emails via a the command line (in my case it was actually via a script). The reason I wanted to do this was so that I could run the script on a scheduled basis to check my external IP address and notify me when it changed.
Why? Well my ISP has provided me with a dynamic IP address which changes on a periodic basis – not that I normally notice. Well if I want to be able to administrate my Ubuntu Server from outside my local network, i.e. over the Internet via SSH, then I need to know the outward facing IP address of my router.
I had already found a script to do this and tweaked it a little to run under a non-admin user but while it could detect the change I needed some mechanism for it to tell me. After a fruitless evening trying to set up email I gave up and decided to use the Twitter API instead.
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