Technoblog

Keeping track of people’s photos with the Flickr API.

My old home page had a section called “recently heard/seen/read”. It was powered by a PHP class that I wrote. It retrieved data from the last.fm, flickr and del.icio.us web services, parsed it, and output it for display. The class also allowed the output to be cached for the lifetime of the data.

Google let you dynamically generate charts and graphs using their Charts API. Last.fm (or more correctly Audioscrobbler) allow you to track your listening habits and then give access to the data via their web services.

Using PuTTY and Cygwin to securely connect to a remote computer (using SSH) and run graphical applications on it.

Where is the Apache error log? It took me an age to find it!

Apache’s mod_rewrite is used for changing the way a website URL maps to the underlying file system. It can be used to make URLs more human-readable, and to disguise the underlying workings of a website. For example, you might use mod_rewrite to change http://www.example.com/index.php?post_id=5 to http://www.example.com/5.

URL rewriting isn’t enabled by default if you install Apache on Debian or Ubuntu – this is how to do it.

Subversion is a version control system you can use to maintain current and historical versions of files. It can be used for any type of file, but I’ve just started using it with source code as I develop websites.

I’ve started using FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) when I rip my CDs. FLAC compresses the audio, but no data is lost. Converting from one lossy music format to another isn’t a good idea, but there’s no problem going from lossless to lossy. So when, in 2020, I decide I want my music in mp9 format for my new portable player, I won’t need to dig out all my CDs and rip then again. On the down side, the files are pretty big, but space is cheap these days.

Configuring a dual screen setup isn’t as easy in Ubuntu as it is in Windows, but it’s not too much harder. All you need to do is edit a text file and be willing to use a terminal.