Side projects. Sometimes hacked. And sometimes with a hammer.

I've usually been afraid to do anything drastic with the underlying filesystem because of how many times I've messed up the filesystem to begin with, and also because of how much time it takes to reinstall everything. This time, I decided that it was ok to go ahead and take a little risk here. My Linux machine is an old X61s, and its purpose is for me to experiment and learn more about Linux. I started getting a message that I was running low on space on root. Sure enough, the 300MB was all used up. I was hoping that GPartEd could help me with resizing the partitions. I couldn't see the partitions because it was all under an lvm. My plan was to shrink /opt slightly, then grow root. Thankfully, the formula isn't too bad, but there are a few steps. The first link I resorted to was this one: http://blog.shadypixel.com/how-to-shrink-an-lvm-volume-safely/. I didn't reboot to resize /opt; I just resized it after unmounting it. Unmount /opt:   # umount /dev/chrono...

I knew that Kaltura had an API that could be used for trimming and clipping a media entry, but it was quite nice to have found the Kaltura clipApp, which packages a Javascript timeline stepper as well as a Flash app for setting the in/out points for the media entry. You can find it here: https://github.com/kaltura/clipapp. Also, they have a demo page: http://showcase.kaltura.com/ (select Clipping Tool from the dropdown). Additionally, here is my writeup/explanation of how to use the Clipper Tool. (FWIW, I am using the Clipper Tool in my company's software and interfacing with Kaltura SaaS platform, not the Community Edition.) https://github.com/kaltura/platform-install-packages/blob/Jupiter-10.3.0/doc/KalturaClipApp_Howto.md

I've been researching the Kaltura API and have discovered a few things. The first thing is that the documentation is there, but it is terribly organized (in my opinion). I have done a lot more Googling to find information on what I want to do with the Kaltura API than even figuring out how to write the code. As a side note, I've been researching with the Kaltura.com trial account (which eventually becomes their commercial, hosted account, I think). I did try to get their Kaltura.org (community edition) set up on an AWS instance, but the poor instance was pretty underpowered and would time out too much. One thing I tried to do today was try to get the Kaltura video player to default to HTML5 first, before trying the Flash player. The HTML5 configuration page (http://html5video.org/wiki/Kaltura_HTML5_Configuration) should have put some clear information on how to do this, but including the mwEmbedLoader.php didn't work. The Flash version still loaded. I checked the url that...

I've been beating my head against $.Deferred and Promises for awhile now, ever since working on Rebecca Murphey's JS Assessment . I think I managed to stumble through the assessment, but I didn't really understand what I was doing. I just knew that Deferred/Promises were used for async management... I think. Since then, I didn't really think to bother using Deferred/Promise until working on a project for work today. I wanted to do something like the following: Get a session key via ajax When successful, use the key to instantiate the client Get a list of objects according to some criteria (this would be done asynchronously, via an API) From that list of objects, load some kind of media  All the articles I read today used ajax/xhr as a prime example, which was helpful for my ajax call. However, I was pretty clueless how to Deferred/Promise-ize the call that asynchronously loads the objects through the API. After some trial and error, here's what I came up wi...

I enjoy doing CTFs, and one that I'm working through now is picoCTF2013. One thing I learned today was that the mysql double-dash comment notation ("--") needs to be followed by a whitespace or another control character. (http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/comments.html) No wonder my injections weren't working...

I installed Debian Wheezy on my Lenovo X61s. Get debian-7.5.0-i386-netinst.iso and use uNetbootin to install it to a USB drive. In uNetbootin, select ISO and find the netinst.iso file, and then make sure it gets installed to the proper USB drive. Reboot and launch the Debian installer (make sure X61s can boot from USB). Debian installer said that I needed to load additional firmware for my wireless card: Some of your hardware needs non-free firmware files to operate. The firmware can be loaded from removable media, such as a USB stick or floppy. The Missing firmware files are: iwlwifi-4965-2.ucode If you have such media available now, insert it, and continue. Load missing firmware from removable media? <Yes> <No> On another computer, go here ( https://packages.debian.org/wheezy/firmware-iwlwifi ) and download the firmware file. (Click the "all" link and it should take you to https://packages.debian.org/wheezy/all/firmware-iwlwifi/download . Then c...