Category: News

Something I have been working on is an installer for Mac OSX for the Tomcat JSP server. After some work I’ve managed to get it so that it installs the server into the correct area and start it for you. It then opens Safari to show you that it is working. I have asked Apache if I can develop this more and then allow people to download it from my server or possibly a mirror. I am still working on this installer as the server does not start when the computer starts but has to be started manually.

I’m sorry for the server being down since Wednesday but I was on holiday and unable to fix it remotely. There was a power cut that forced the server to restart without closing the programs correctly so when it booted again it thought that the web server and other services where still running and didn’t start them.

GPRS is a common internet connection that mobile (cell) phones have but the down side is that it costs a lot of money as you are using the mobile phone operator’s network. I have a Laptop running Mac OS X 10.4.10 Tiger and a Sony Ericsson K750i mobile phone. I have set them up to use bluetooth to connect to dial-up internet provided by Heart Internet for 10p/min with speeds of 9.6Kb/s. I wanted to use GPRS because it has a faster connection speed than dial up and is charged for data transfer instead of time. I connected the phone to my laptop using the USB cable and it showed up fine in the network settings. The problem is there is no way to get it to use GPRS, only dial up. I went to www.taniwha.org.uk and downloaded the scripts of my Sony Ericsson phone and copied them to /Library/Modem Scripts. In network settings these new scripts showed up under Modem. I found that CID10 worked on my K750i phone.

Now you have your mac set up to use the phone as a GPRS modem you need to set up the ISP details. There you type the number to dial for dial-up internet I entered pp.vodafone.co.uk as I use PrePay Vodaphone. If you want to send email from your mac using GPRS then set up the SMTP server as send.vodafone.net. There is a like on www.taniwha.org.uk that show you all the settings of many of the mobile network operators throughout the world.

This week I have been mostly working on a cluster. A cluster is a group of computers that work together to perform a task. A node is a computer that is part of the cluster group, I started with two of them and I have three at the moment. My aim for the cluster was to have a virtual super computer on which to compile software and perform some other powerful tasks. I have got PVM to work but that was unable to run my PERL program on the cluster so I started with HeartBeat when my friend (Kz) suggested distcc, This is a program that distributes the compiling task across the network to computers with it installed on. This is just what I wanted for compiling the linux kernal as it should be faster with three computers working on it than one. The computers that I am using are an AMD Athlon 900Mhz, Intel PII 350Mhz and a Freescale PowerPC G3 350Mhz running Kubuntu 6.06 and Debian 4.0 on the latter two.

Over the weekend I had an old Pentium 4 Dell machine to fix for a friend of my dad’s. I was told that the DVD drives stopped working and that the RAM was having problems. I check the RAM and it was fine and then I corrected the jumper configureation on the DVD drives and plugged them in. A test with a Linux live CD showed that the hardware was working fine. The computer failed to boot to Windows XP from the hard drive as it would flash up the Windows XP loading screen and then restarted. This was easily fixed by booting from an XP install disc and runnings some commands. Now all that is left to be done it to return the computer to it’s owner.

I recently read an article in Mac Format talking about turning PERL scripts into Automator tasks. This got me thinking. I use a shell script to make a compressed tape archives of my user settings on my laptop so I decided to have a play with Automator. Automator is a program that comes as part of OSX that can be used to make the computer do common tasks for you. I have made a workflow, as they are called, that connects to the server, makes the tape achieves, compresses them, copies them and the rest of my user area to the server, and then disconnects from the server.The whole process took about 2 and a half hours which was much longer than I was expecting. I can setup my laptop to turn itself on and off and set a specific schedule; all I need to work out is how to get the program to run at a scheduled time without having to manually log in. I will be looking at getting a Gigabit ethernet switch and card that should greatly improve the network speed when backing up.

After a going to the Anglia Ruskin University open day and speaking to one of the teachers there I decided to install Apache Tomcat. This is a JSP server which the teacher said is a programming language I would be learning. It makes sense to have the server setup and running before it’s needed as I don’t need the hassle of learning a new programming language and learning how to setup Apache Tomcat at the same time. The Apache Tomcat server is install on my laptop as there is currently no need for it on the main server because I do not know how to program JSP yet. I have setup the main server however to handle a domain that will redirect to my laptop so I can show people what I have been working on. If you are wondering what tomcat looks like you can see it at http://tomcat.black-flag.co.uk where you can see the welcome page but not access anything else apart from the examples.

Tomorrow is our last day at school before we leave for the exams. After that we will only see each other on results day so everyone at school is taking pictures. Like what I did for year 11 I tried to gather all the pictures that I could and put them on a website for people to see. You can find the pictures at www.black-flag.co.uk/gbhs/ and if you have any more please email them to me, My exam can be found by clicking the link for Cosmo 1847 on the right of the page. After my exams I will try and set up a proper website for them because at the moment it’s just a folder filled with images.

I have decided to sign up to Project Wonderful and to place an advert on my websites. The reason for this is to see if I can make a little bit of money out of my websites and to maybe cover the costs of the server. The ads I have planned will be small and next to the title of the sites since there is a convenient space to the right of them. The advert will in no way affect the rest of the website of my attitude towards them as I am not into making websites as a way to make money. They are a way to get my views, thoughts and skills out into the world. The advert will be a half banner which is 234×60 pixels so it does not take up much of the space. I also plan to update my websites once my exams are over so the advert my seem a little misfitted at first. The next sub-version of Cosmo will have the advert including in the designing of it along with a system for posting and editing guides that I will have on my website.

After much tinkering with the server I gave up in the end with linux and FreeBSD but I think that if I tried Ubuntu Linux I would have managed to get it to work. In the end I formated the computer with Windows XP home and installed VMware server on there. This machine is not the best for running these kind of programs due to the lack of RAM but it seems to be doing well. I currently have command line linux in the form of Debian 4.0 and I am just installing Windows 2000 Professional. I plan to get rid of this computer soon so if I am going to play around with this again it will most likely be on my more powerful desktop computer that recently had the RAM upgraded.