Yaffle's Corner - Software

The FlowMusic Store in Action

nospam@example.com (Neil S. Briscoe) — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 13:38:22 +0200

When I wrote this article I stated at the end that I hoped that Pure had arrangements with all the music publishers.

Since then, there has been a further firmware upgrade to the radio, and the release notes for that upgrade stated that there were "Fundamental Changes. User interface updates for FlowSongs track licensing. ". It pointed us at this page.

Yes, it seems that, despite the fact that you can purchase a CD once and have the right to play it as many times as your little heart desires, as soon as you purchase it and use the "Internet" to store the content for you, certain entities (we don't know whom they are) suddenly get cold feet. I bet its because they know they can't change the format on us any more and require us to re-purchase music we already have.

This author has purchased, at different points in time, the Double Vinyl/Double Cassette/Double CD versions of Jeff Wayne's War of the World's and I think the relevant publisher has had quite enough money. I have purchased the Collector's Edition of same (with 7 CD's and a DVD) and I have dared to place the first 3 CD's on my computer so I can stream them to whereever I like.

Never mind, I found a spare tenner down the back of the bank account, and decided to use that to trial the FlowMusic service instead of enjoying this week's selection of Montezuma's birthday chocolates.

So how well does it work? Well, as I was writing the above paragraph, the station I had chosen to listen to in an attempt to find something I thought I could purchase, the station was playing :

Ian Dury & The Blockheads: Hit me with your rythm stick.

Well, a no brainer wasn't it? So I hit the "flow" soft button. The radio analysed the track, identified the song, offered it for purchase at 79p. I had the choice to buy or not. I elected to buy. The system then asked me to enter my pin. I entered that using the scroll and select option the radio offers, and then selected it.

An email confirming the purchase came in, the radio informed me that the track was available for download. But downloading is not necessary, all I need to do now is select "The Lounge" as the source, choose options and select "My Tracks" and then scroll through already provided menus which allow you to choose by Artist, Album and certain other options.

After selection, it took the radio a while to actually start playing the track, but remember, this service is beta and so we should expect some teething problems. I might not be the only geek with nothing else to do on a Saturday afternoon.

So all told, I am a prospective fan of this service - let's hope that certain luddites get a clue.

Protecting the phone

nospam@example.com (Neil S. Briscoe) — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 11:20:03 +0200

So you have this mobile phone. Its an expensive piece of kit and a pain to replace. Worse, these days we have all sorts of information on them that we wouldn't want to fall into the wrong hands.

If you're very organised, i.e. you kept the packing box it was sent in, then you can phone your mobile phone company, and have them block your account and the IMEI. Blocking the IMEI takes a day or two to propagate around all the UK phone providers, but after that, the phone is totally useless to anyone who may have taken it, no matter what SIM they put in it. The phone will also be useless to you should you get it back. Surely, there is a better way?

If you have a phone that is smart enough, then there certainly is. This morning I read this review of Track and Protect which runs on many Symbian 3rd Edition phones and all Symbian 5th Edition phones. I am not going to review this software, although its the one I've chosen, so read the linked article if you're interested.

When I tweeted that I'd found some suitable software, a friend of mine asked me about WaveSecure. This latter software has similar functionality to Track and Protect and is available for Symbian, Android and others. It differs in two respects and these are charging model and what happens if a thief inserts an alien (i.e. not yours) SIM in the phone.

Track and Protect can be downloaded for free. This will give you some minimum protection. To get the best use of it, when your phone is lost/stolen, you'll want the ability to send it remote commands, or try and locate it. This is done by sending silent SMS commands to your phone. These SMS messages use up a pre-purchased credit. I purchased 15 credits for 4.99 euros (£4.31 at today's exchange rate). I won't have to purchase any more credits until I've used up the ones I've purchased. With Wave Secure, you pay £19.90 for the software, including the first year's subscription, and then you pay again next year, so this is rather like a standard insurance contract. I prefer the Track and Protect charging method which is why I chose this software.

The other difference is what happens if someone inserts an alien SIM into your phone. With Track and Protect, the phone immediately notifies the track and protect server, which can then allow you to continue sending remote commands to the phone. Wave Secure just locks the phone at that point, meaning the phone is useless to the thief, but also to you.

So you pays your money and you makes your choice, but either way, they can't make lots of phone calls at my expense and, given I have my Twitter, Skype and Email available on my phone, they won't be able to pretend to be me either.

Fringless

nospam@example.com (Neil S. Briscoe) — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 15:47:47 +0200

You may have read in the press the arguments that have been occurring between Fring and Skype. You can find The Register's article on the subject here.

In any event, this has (largely) rendered my copy of Fring useless as what I use it for mainly these days is to make the odd Skype call - after all - I have a good balance left which I don't wish to lose.

Fortunately, I read on All About Symbian that a new version of Skype for Symbian had been released which had a rather lower memory footprint, so this lunch time I downloaded it.

It appears to be not bad, the call quality is good and I tested it against a switchboard. Fring had only recently included DTMF capability in their software, even after all these years, and it was still limited to the * and # buttons. Numbers were not possible. Its as simple as pi with the Skype app which just uses the phone's own dialler, just like when you're making a call over the mobile network.

One other nice thing, when you fire up the Skype Client it warns you about data charges over 3G networks and suggests you either get an unlimited data tariff or join a WiFi network. Needless to say, I'm using it over my Wifi network at the moment.

One thing I'm unable to test at the moment is whether it receives incoming calls any better than Fring did.

You may recall I tested a SkypeIn number with Fring about a year ago and whilst the call eventually came through, most callers were fed up of the ring tone and gave up. I always put that down to the Fring gateway being slow. So I'd be interested to know from anyone using the native Skype app. and who has a SkypeIN number how well it works.

Ensuring SSL where its useful

nospam@example.com (Neil S. Briscoe) — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 10:31:58 +0200

There are sites out there on the web that offer both HTTP and HTTPS versions of themselves. In such cases it is generally a good idea to use the SSL enabled site. The trouble is that most of us rarely type the http when jumping off to a site and as for typing https, well, most people don't, even when visiting their bank's web site.

In the case of the bank site, these are designed to force you to use SSL from login and through the entire session until logoff. Many of the sites that offer both an enabled and non-enabled site don't. You can drop back to HTTP just by hitting the wrong link.

The Register reports in this article on a new add-on for Firefox that enforces the use of SSL on these hybrid sites. You can also tweak it to tell it about other sites you may be aware of that aren't supported from install. You can download the add-on from here.

Google Maps revisited

nospam@example.com (Neil S. Briscoe) — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 10:29:34 +0200

I've just upgraded Google Maps on my phone. In Symbian land it has just received voice search capability. The item telling me about this suggested I speak clearly.

Well, I have the radio on in one corner of the room as I catch up with two weeks worth of The Naked Scientist podcast and the washing machine in the other, but I moved to the couch in order to find as quiet a spot as I could.

I fired it up, configured it to use British English, pressed the green talk button, whereupon it invited me to "Speak Now" and muttered "Bus Station" at it.

There was a pause and then lots of little flags came up, in all the places where I know there to be bus stops. Might be useful in a town I didn't know as well as I know the local bus routes, but given the thing has the bus station marked down as a known location I give it a "close but no cigar" rating on this utterly non-scientific test.

T9 Dictionary editing comes to Nokia

nospam@example.com (Neil S. Briscoe) — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 15:27:01 +0100

For years, it has been a request of users of Nokia phones that they be able to edit their T9 dictionary. T9, for those who are unaware, is the name given to the word prediction software that gets used if you set your phone so that predictive text is active.

A simple typo during a message could mean that a completely rubbish word was always chosen first the next time you typed a similar sequence of keys, this because words added by you are always selected in advance of the words provided in the ROM at factory issue time. If this got annoying for you, the only recourse was to delete the entire dictionary and reboot the phone, meaning that for just one mistake, all your added words were deleted. Something of a hammer and nut solution.

Today, Nokia has released a beta of a dictionary editor, allowing you to edit words (so you can clear out that typo), remove them, add them. You can also export the entire dictionary to a file, copy that to a computer where you can then add words, and then import the modified file back.

This could be useful, for example, if you have a lot of odd words in your industry. Most industries have a set of words used in no other sphere. Now you can push out a custom dictionary to all users of Nokia smart phones.

My thanks to AllAboutSymbian who published this item which includes the necessary download links. Note: You will need to register on the beta site if you have not been there before, although if you already have an Ovi account, you can use those credentials when registering.

Juggling mapping software

nospam@example.com (Neil S. Briscoe) — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 15:14:42 +0100

In my original review of the N97 I stated that I had never liked Nokia maps and thus had installed Google maps to replace it.

Since then, there has been an update to Google Maps and most recently, Nokia have released a new version of their software without the need to purchase licensing for voice guided navigation.

Installing this latest version of Nokia Maps on an N97 requires care and caution. Originally, there was talk that Nokia would release new firmware for the N97 which included the new software (this because the installer requires 20M+ free space in the C: drive although it only uses up about 8M after a successful installation). That firmware was supposed to have been released today, but instead, Nokia have released the software for over the air installation on the N97.

This should be a good thing, as it should be available for everyone, but oh no, those of you who have branded handsets (as I do) still have to wait for your airtime providers to get off their hind ends and accept the software. Well, you do if you want to wait, but you can install the software on a branded N97 without waiting for the laggards to decide whether they will or won't support it. Just go to the Nokia site and download the .SIS file for the N97-mini onto your PC.

Before then installing it on your phone, I advise taking a full backup and then, you need to make sure you have that space on your C: Drive. Once you have, just plug the USB cable into your phone, fire up either Nokia Suite or Ovi Suite and install the software. Next download the maps you want (if you're using Ovi Suite this is easy) and finally, if you're walking rather than driving, you'll want the street by street navigation as well.

I followed the instructions available on the All About Symbian N97 forum on Sunday, before today's release, and also downloaded the full UK map and the street by street instructions. It appears to work, although I have yet to use it in anger. What I can say is that since the GPS chip got fixed a few weeks ago, Maps seems to be much more accurate.

So now, can you use both these pieces of software together? Yes you can, but you need to be aware of a couple of things.

At the end of June, when I wrote my original review, if you starred an item in Google maps, it would be entered into the list of stored locations, also available to Nokia Maps. Since a recent update to Google Maps this is no longer the case. Now, whilst the Google application will load the list of locations from the location system, any new items you star in Google Maps are not written back to the location system. This means that if you want to protect any newly favourited items in Google Maps, you will need to login to your Google account on the phone so that it can sync the locations with the online system, and of course Google gets to learn all of your favourite places.

I often learn of new places by finding their address. In Google Maps I would just enter the post code and lo, Google would find it. Never could get this to work with Nokia Maps. The new Ovi Maps supports this method of finding places. Of course, having found a location, you can then make it a favourite. Ovi Maps stores the favourited place into the location system, and that then makes it available to Google Maps next time.

Anyway, with both pieces of software installed on the phone, fixed hardware so that the GPS works, you should avoid the need for anything else. Rumour has it it will give the likes of TomTom et al. a run for their money.

Giving Skyfire another go

nospam@example.com (Neil S. Briscoe) — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 15:19:34 +0100

For those of you unaware, Skyfire is a free browser for mobile phones. "But why", you may reasonably ask, "would I need a browser when my phone already sports one?". One reason is that this one sports Java support which is handy for where I live.

As I have mentioned, several times on this blog, here in Bristol we have the NextBusBristol web site which will tell you, in real time, when you can expect the next bus to turn up at your local bus stop. Unfortunately, as soon as you attempt to get to the timing page for your stop, the default browser on the N97 crashes.

This, therefore, was the first test I threw at this version of the browser and it passed in flying colours, updating the arrival times of the next five or so busses at my local stop including those of them that seem to be running in flocks.

When I first tried out Skyfire on my N95 about a year ago, I found it to render text in too small a font for my aged eyes to cope with for longer than about 30 seconds and I never could find a way of easily increasing the resolution. On first fire up of this version of the software (the touch screen version for Nokia phones is still in beta) it told me I could double tap the screen to enlarge the resoloution, this appeared not to work, however, touching the magnifying glass icon at the bottom and then using the + button which then appeared I was easily able to render text to a comfortable size for interacting with.

The kinetic scrolling that Nokia introduced with v2.0 of the firmware works on long pages, but you may find that if you scroll too fast you end up with a chequered screen pattern until the browser renders what you've scrolled to, but it tends to render it fairly quickly.

I still have some more tests to perform with this browser but on first showing, I'm quite pleased with it.

The Tweet you can eat without ruining your appetite

nospam@example.com (Neil S. Briscoe) — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 14:23:09 +0100

As I mentioned yesterday, I have been dragged into the world of the Twitterati.

I found that using Twitter via the web was annoying. Whilst I was trying to find out how it worked and what I should do, I kept hearing the sound of a startled blackbird and could not always find the messages coming in. In any event, in a work environment, this is bound to be annoying.

You will have seen, if you follow political broadcasts, that all of those who seek to control us twitter to each other whilst travelling in plush first class carriages paid for by the public purse (thats you and I) on their mobile phones, so I decided that if I was going to have to twitter, it would be by phone. I've already migrated my MSN and Skype activities onto the phone.

I have to say that the client I chose is a much nicer environment than the web interface and now I've got used to it, I can't see me using the web, even here from home, to go telling people about what I'm doing now. What follows is my review.

You can download Gravity to your PC and then proceed to install it on your phone. On first fire up it asks you to set up an account, either a Twitter one or a Laconica one. I believe the latter is for posting images, but I've not tried out that functionality.

I keyed in the details of my fresh new Twitter account and then told the program to go online. Lo and behold, the few twitters I'd seen in my brief life on twitter appeared and without the sound of startled blackbirds.

On initial use, of course, whilst I was learning the interface, I found the lack of a twitter sound annoying, because it did not always inform me when a new post was made, but having got used to the lack of sound, and having navigated around the interface, I now consider it a blessing.

Consider, you can have your phone connected via WiFi or 3G and be twittering without any one, any one at all, being any the wiser. You don't even have to put the phone into its silent profile. Its silent always, and hence the reason for the title of this post.

Rabbit was good enough to teach me how to send a direct message (DM) via the web interface, so on my first attempt at doing this by the phone software, it appeared to fail. The report back I got said it had failed, but infact, it hadn't. But the proper way to send a direct message in this software is to scroll round to either Friends (those whom you follow and also follow you) or Followers, and then choose Options->Direct Message.

Considering we are talking about 140 character messages, carrying whatever import you and your friends choose to assign to them, the designers of this software have gone to a lot of trouble, but the fact is, it looks great, and its free.

Oh one final note. One of the tweets from the #CensorNet channel included a link. So when I clicked on that particular tweet, the software produced an entire button allowing me to fire up the phone's browser and go straight to that posting. Excellent.

Planning Ahead

nospam@example.com (Neil S. Briscoe) — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 17:23:11 +0200

In due course, I want to get rid of my BT phone line. The only reason for its existence now is for receiving support calls. All my friends and family call me on the mobile.

I mentioned a while ago that I had Fring installed on the current mobile and so I asked their support people whether, if I purchased a SkypeIN number, it would work with Fring. Their support was a kind of "It should work but before you spend any money...". This is the kind of support one doesn't want, so I checked the forum. It seemed it would work.

So I signed up for one and tested it. Yes, if I was online, the call arrived on my mobile. If I was offline, I got the option of leaving a voice mail. The trouble with that is you can't connect to your Skype Voicemail from Fring although you might get to find out that someone left a message as it will open a message window when you do next sign in providing you the phone number of the caller and that someone tried to phone you. The trouble is, if they have actually left a voice mail you can't retrieve it.

OK, so call forwarding is available and I set that up on my Skype account. For the moment, it forwards to that landline I'll be getting rid of. But thats ok, we can change it when we get rid of it.

So I tested that too and yes it works.

So now I've modified the company switch to phone my Skype number if someone has selected support calls. Oh, and the Advanced Call Manager software I have on the mobile. Well that can monitor the data calls too, although it does not do so by default. It has been configured appropriately - so no getting round the call ban out of hours, even if you get to learn the Skype number.

For the time being, I have the number for 3 months. Although the call quality seemed fine to me, I need to see if it will really work with living customers. If it does, BT will lose my custom completely come next February.

Worth its weight in gold

nospam@example.com (Neil S. Briscoe) — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 14:45:34 +0200

I am talking, of course, about the Advanced Call Manager.

As I opined in this article there are some people who take advantage of knowing my mobile number.

This morning, whilst I was doing a bit of web browsing on the phone, I saw one of the worst culprits names light the screen briefly before it disappeared. The phone did what it should have done and sent him off to voice mail hell. He didn't leave one. Neither did he then phone the support number, which would have been manned by my colleague at the time, I later found out.

By doing just that, this software has paid for itself. Of course, I only know this user called because I was using the phone at the time. If it had been on my desk, I'd have known nothing. The phone doesn't ring, and as the software hands the call over to voice mail, the calling number is not stored in the logs.

He hasn't called since I've been available so it clearly doesn't seem he has an urgent issue. Just wanted to use my brain instead of his own, as usual.

PuTTY on the N97

nospam@example.com (Neil S. Briscoe) — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 22:09:11 +0200

First of all, for those who don't know what PuTTY is, it is software available for Windows and Mobile phones (and possibly other platforms) that allows one to connect to remote computers - normally by means of SSH but Telnet and raw connections are available.

The next question has to be - can you do any useful work using such software on a mobile phone?

Well certainly, you wouldn't want to perform a mega debugging session using such a tool unless the chips were really down. But consider this scenario. You are out, not on a business trip, and so you didn't take the Netbook with you. All you have is the mobile phone. (Rumour has it that we'd rather leave home without the wallet than the mobile phone.) Your boss phones you complaining he can't get his mail. Can you find out whats going on.

In this day and age, "I'm not anywhere near a computer" is probably not the right idea. This tool might allow you to say "I'll see what I can do".

I have tried versions of PuTTY on other mobile phones I've owned. But on both the 6630 and the N95 you could only send one line at a time and really, it was just too much of a pain to bother with. But the N97 has an (almost) full keyboard, though it lacks certain keys. For instance, if you're logging into a Linux machine, I can guarentee you are going to need to use the pipe ("|") symbol before too many clock ticks have passed.

The touch enhanced version of PuTTY I found (thanks to the AllaboutSymbian forums) means that I can type that character, plus the usual control characters one needs. It also provides means to easily highlight and copy/paste text. Trust me, on a full blown PuTTY this is a godsend so I was glad to see it here.

You may remember in my earlier review of the N97 that I suggested you may not want the stylus. I have to say it does come into its own here once you want to select things - certainly my stubby finger meant that doing this was nigh on impossible without it.

However, once having got out the stylus, and changed the screen font to a slightly larger size - then selecting text was fairly easy, and yes, I picked some text and then pasted it at the next command prompt - and it was promptly [sic] executed.

Given that I've enabled colourising of the output of the ls command, it was nice to see this version of PuTTY supported that, so yes I'm seeing executable files in green, gzips in red, directories in blue - and the base colour is black text on a white background - easier to read on such a small screen.

I even tried a quick file edit - something you may need to do to get your boss out of the hole he's dug himself. Normally I use vi for small files and emacs for large ones, but in this case, I decided I didn't want to get bogged down in editing modes and other nonsense, so elected to edit a file using nano - with which I've become fairly au fait as its the one we suggest any of our non-Linux familiar customers use if they need to touch a command line.

Even so, having typed text you do need to use a couple of control characters. This version comes with eight touch buttons that appear at the top of your Putty session once you've logged in. The top row of four are Tab, Alt+, Ctrl+ and Pipe (see above for what Pipe means). The lower four are Unlock, Select, Copy and Paste.

These eight cover just about all the functions you're not going to find on the keyboard proper and will let you do your job. Most of these keys, once selected, stay selected until you deselect them, but they clearly indicate their status by changing colour when selected, so you can't be in any doubt about whether they are live or not.

All in all then, this is a credible piece of software to let you do a quick fix until you can find a larger computer to sort out the problem once and for all. Oh yes, its free too.

Fring fring

nospam@example.com (Neil S. Briscoe) — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 19:40:21 +0200

I have known about Fring for some time, certainly for as long as I've known about Truphone.

When I originally bought the N95 I purchased it specifically for the benefits of mobile VoIP and you all know my up and down attitude to that since.

Fring is not a native VoIP application, instead it is a VoIP gateway (if you wish), and much more. If you use MSN or Skype, you can use it to chat to your friends on the go, either by text, or even make MSN or Skype/SkypeOUT calls with it. As such, I havn't (yet) seen the needs of signing up with a SIP provider for the SIP gateway features.

Personally, I don't think I'd ever have got on with it on the N95, but I have installed it on the N97, and I'm reasonably pleased with it.

One thing that it will do is fill your T9 dictionary with stuff, and indeed, on the N97 at least, will show up the lack of common sense in your T9 dictionary.

I have already lost count of the number of words it has nearly got, but not quite had, and I've had to add them. Of course, I can't blame it for the shortenings I'm used to typing into text boxes when using MSN or Skype on a main keyboard - so the fact those have had to be added is fair enough, but still, I think the T9 dictionary on initial N97s are lacking.

However, Fring has done a good thing in that now I have one combined input source showing both MSN and Skype contacts, whereas on the computer they are two separate contact lists - there is such a thing as having too many ways to communicate.

As luck would have it I received a voucher from "The Skype People" offering me unlimited landline calls (and some mobiles) in 40 countries. Just timed nicely to this Fring installation.

I've just tried to make a Skypeout call to America - the quality wasn't brilliant, and when I did get through one thing you can't seem to do is call up a dialler in order to type an extension number at an automated switchboard and so I had to wait for a stroppy call attendant to put me through. Once he'd done that all I got was voice mail.

You see, at precisely one minute to clocking off I had someone phone me for assistance, so now I need to monitor for problems and ensure their problem is fixed. Our switchboard won't route calls now. Hopefully, if I need it in urgency tonight, it won't let me down.

When it's almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea

nospam@example.com (Neil S. Briscoe) — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 22:51:53 +0200

Before I get to the discussion, I must thank Douglas Adams for the words behind this article’s title. You may recognise a similar phrase in The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy by that author.

As you may have been reading, we are migrating our Singapore Server from a VPS running on a box in one data centre, to good solid metal running in a different centre located in that city.

Both boxes run Debian Etch, so you wouldn’t have expected any software compilations to cause much of a problem, given they were running on the old VPS.

If you build Open Source packages on Linux or Unix systems you are probably used to the normal pattern of events which runs something like :-

./configure
make
make install

The .configure line frequently involves the use of various arguments to specify exactly what capabilities you do, or do not, require.

For those of you ready to point out that Debian has a perfectly good package based system, well, of course you’re correct and normally we are happy to use the deb packages where available.

However, we found the sheer size of the data files we send around for one of our products, the Debian packaged Apache2 wasn’t up to coping with the file sizes, frequently reporting negative file sizes in downloads.

So we compiled Apache 2.2.8 from source. A virtual server on the same box required the use of the libphp5.so module. We chose to compile that from source, but used the available deb source package for that. This did at least allow us to specify what capabilities we wanted it to have.

Because my colleague was away today, I set about compiling all this. Because he’d built it on the old system I checked to see which arguments he’d used.

Lest you be unaware, if you’ve followed the above command line sequence, and so long as you have not cleaned the source tree subsequently, you should find a file with the name config.nice in your source tree.

This is a shell script generated when you first ran the configure command and shows exactly what arguments you used.

What you can do is copy this file into a new source directory and execute it, knowing that the same arguments you used before will be used now.

I didn’t do that, I just typed the configure command with the relevant arguments.

Things built.

Apache was easy, and once I’d copied the httpd.conf file over from the old system, the only error I got was about the lack of a php5 module. I was happy to comment out the load line and test Apache first. Yep, running like a train.

So now, it was time to follow a similar policy with the building of said php5 module. I ran the configure command with the same arguments I’d used on the old box.

It built. Not a peep.

I re-loaded Apache which first complained that there was no module.

What? I’ve just installed it.

That turned out to be a simple typo. Instead of typing -–with-apxs2=/path/to/apxs I had typed -–with-apx2=/path/to/apxs. That typo was not complained about. Things appeared to have worked. But no module was actually built.

It took me a while to find that simply because the mind and eye are certain what they should be reading, and it was only when Googling about, I caught someone’s posting about that in just the right place, looked again and spotted my error.

The next build – we had a module – but Apache failed to load because of an unmet symbol in the built module.

I had to go Googling for that one and discovered that I had to build the module with the -–without-sqlite flag. But I hadn’t had to build the previous one with that flag.

I can only guess that because, on the old system, where we tried to use all Deb packages first, and only latterly fell back to source code, the deb packages had put in some magic which simply didn’t exist on the new box because we had never used the default deb Apache or php5 packages.

Anyway, there you have it, if, on building from source on a virgin system you need to build the libphp5.so module, do make sure you specify that -–without-sqlite directive, unless, of course, you actually need that capability.

When Package Management Software Makes Life Harder

nospam@example.com (Neil S. Briscoe) — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 16:22:56 +0200

Debian is a marvellous Linux distribution with just about the best package manager available. So good, in fact, that many other Linux distributions are based on it.

Just occasionally, however, installing free software partially configured actually makes life harder.

I found this out the hard way once when I set about learning how to set up and manage an LDAP tree.

In general, the defaults offered during a Debian installation of any package are good enough to get you going, and this is equally true with the slapd package. The fun, and the difficulty, were to come shortly afterwards when I actually tried to start using my LDAP to provide certain services.

In order to use it as an authentication system to allow me to log in to a command line shell, the system, not unreasonably, wanted indices on certain attributes (fields) in order that it could locate the required data more quickly. If they were not present, the logs would fill up with lots of complaints relating to the fact that the indices were not there. Trivial in my case, I only have a few records, but I was doing this in order to learn how to install the package in a possibly much larger environment where the indices would be essential.

One of the “helpful” things the Debian installer does is to create the start of the tree and add an administrative user to it. The simple fact of adding even one piece of data to the tree means that later, when you work out what indices you need on which attributes, the system will just not create them.

So what you have to then do, is take a dump of the existing data to a text file, nuke the tree from orbit, create a new empty instance of the tree, define and create the indices you want, and add the data back. Phew.

After this, all should proceed with smoothness and light, but it did make the learning process somewhat more traumatic, until I realised what it was that needed doing, and all because the installer is “helpful”.