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Novell blogs on the move

by | Jan 13, 2008 | coolblogs, Uncategorized, ZENworks

I decided to move my Corporate Blogs from Novell Cool Blogs to Novell Cool Solutions.

Novell Cool Solutions

I announced this in October; this month I started the move.

Why move?

Mainly the volume of postings and the amount of traffic at Cool Blogs compared with Cool Solutions.

Cool Blogs started as the first open, unfiltered blog from Novell almost two years ago. Since then I’ve made over 25% of the posts to the blog. That’s too much. I’ve slowed my blogging on Cool Blogs and moved a lot to this site; but still the proportion of posts that are my ZENworks posts is too high.

By posting on Cool Solutions I hope that my posts get a wider readership and I don’t take a too large proportion of the postings.

Lighttpd on SLES

by | Dec 31, 2007 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized

I’ve been playing around with switching from Apache to lighttpd (lighty) for a while now; one of my dev boxes runs lighty reasonably well.

Couple of things:

– the openSUSE build system has pre-built RPMs for SLES

– PHP support is via FastCGI; it’s not exactly intuitive on SLES – but the correct php5 binary is actually placed into /srv/www/cgi-bin. I moved mine to /usr/bin and renamed it to php5-fastcgi

Some time in the next few days I’ll finally move the production environment live – but right now it’s looking faster and less memory intensive than Apache.

ITIL v3 Foundation

by | Dec 28, 2007 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized

Good news; the EXIN envelope arrived tonight – and I passed the ITIL v3 Foundation.

Now I’m looking for the ‘exact word’ on what’s needed for the v3 Diploma; it looks like I need to take the "ITIL Managers v2 to Managers v3 Bridging course" which is pushed to 2008.

ITIL v2 Managers results

by | Dec 24, 2007 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized

The results are in the post. Several people who were on the training sent out a ‘warning’ email saying they were arriving and to watch out for an anonymous looking white envelope.

I guess it’ll take a few extra days to get here.. Still waiting for the ITIL v3 Foundation results too.

This is worse than waiting for A-level results.

ImageMagick and batch files

by | Nov 29, 2007 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized

I borrowed a film scanner this week – and I’ve been scanning old (and crappy quality) APS films to TIFF files. The results are pretty good – considering the limitations of APS.

Here’s the stunning Taj Mahal, Agra, India taken in August 2001.

IMG0042

I needed to convert around 2000 TIFF files to something that was useful on the photo album – JPEG. I decided on ImageMagick – it’s open source, free and really comprehensive.

I love ImageMagick – it’s a core part of the image resizing and conversion for my online photo albums.

I wrote a one line batch file for Windows to do the conversion:

for %%f in (*.tif) do c:progra~1imagem~1.7-qconvert %%f %%~nf.jpg

Nice use of the macro – the %%~nf will strip the filename out of the full filename %%f. Windows 2000, XP, Vista and 2003 server allow this – HELP FOR gives the full detail; it’s buried quite deep.