Category Archives: Technology

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I recently did a little bit of work to help speed up some things in Known, those of you watching the project will have seen work to minimise things like javascript and css.

Anyway, I ran Google insights over my Known install, and was surprised that files weren’t being compressed. It used to be the case that all you had to do was enable mod_deflate or mod_gzip on apache, but somewhere along the line the configuration must have changed.

Long story short, I needed to enable it by creating a /etc/apache2/conf.d/deflate.conf file… here’s mine:

SetOutputFilter DEFLATE

SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.(?:gif|png|jpg|jpeg)$ no-gzip dont-vary
Header append Vary User-Agent env=!dont-vary

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I use Ubuntu as my main desktop operating system, together with Gnome Fallback/failsafe, because I dislike Unity and want to keep my Gnome 2 desktop.

This might not be relevant to the problem, but when I upgraded from 14.4 to 16.4, I lost my sound card. When the computer booted, I would get the Ubuntu drums, but once I logged in, the only sound I had came out of my USB headphones. I no longer saw my Intel HDA soundcard listed in the gnome sounds settings.

After a lot of digging I eventually worked out the cause of the problem, and a temporary fix. Long story short, pulseaudio couldn’t detect the sound card, because Ubuntu have changed the way it’s loaded.

You need to therefore reload the detection libraries and restart pulseaudio, run the following command:

pactl load-module module-detect&

Now, I have a startup script that I run as part of my user login to set up my desktop environment and kick of my development environment, so it was enough for me to put this command in that script.

You will probably want to make sure you load this module in your pulseaudio init scripts. Anyway, hope this helps.

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So, a few weeks ago I hacked together some logs for the #knownchat IRC channel.

I accomplished this by hacking together a very simple IRC logging bot. This bot will sit on an IRC channel and output logs in github friendly Markdown (so you can post them to a repo and give people an easy way to read them).

Since it was just as easy to write a flexible bot than a single use bot, I thought others might be interest in it.

Usage

The bot isn’t fancy, but it does the job.

It only supports logging of a single channel per instance, but it will interface with a nickserv server to identify itself, and will log each day’s activity in a separate file (in nicely sortable YYYY-MM-DD.md format) in a directory per channel.

Fire it up in a screen on an always on machine and you should start collecting logs straight away. To create the logs for #knownchat, I turned it’s channel dir into a git repo, and periodically push on a cronjob, but you might find other ways of doing things.

To keep things quiet, it’ll only log chat, not channel messages (leave/join etc).

Hopefully someone else’ll find this useful!

» Visit the project on Github...