I have used here a MySQL stored routine to achive this:

DELIMITER $$
DROP FUNCTION IF EXISTS `my_database`.`getage` $$
CREATE DEFINER=`root`@`localhost` FUNCTION `getage`(pdate DATE) RETURNS CHAR(30) DETERMINISTIC
BEGIN
DECLARE years INT;
DECLARE months INT;
DECLARE days INT;
 
DECLARE current_year INT;
DECLARE current_month INT;
DECLARE current_day INT;
 
DECLARE year_diff INT;
DECLARE month_diff INT;
DECLARE day_diff INT;
 
DECLARE yearstring CHAR(6);
DECLARE monthstring CHAR(7);
 
SELECT YEAR(pdate) INTO years;
SELECT MONTH(pdate) INTO months;
SELECT DAY(pdate) INTO days;
 
SELECT YEAR(CURRENT_DATE()) INTO current_year;
SELECT MONTH(CURRENT_DATE()) INTO current_month;
SELECT DAY(CURRENT_DATE()) INTO current_day;
 
SELECT (current_year - years) INTO year_diff;
SELECT (current_month - months) INTO month_diff;
SELECT (current_day - days) INTO day_diff;
 
if (current_month < months) THEN
	SET month_diff = (((months - 12) * -1) + current_month);
	SET year_diff = (year_diff - 1);
END IF;
 
if ( month_diff = 1 ) THEN
	SET monthstring = "month";
ELSE
	SET monthstring = "months";
END IF;
 
if ( year_diff = 1 ) THEN
	SET yearstring = "year";
ELSE
	SET yearstring = "years";
END IF;
 
if ( year_diff = 0 ) THEN
	RETURN CONCAT_WS(' ', month_diff, monthstring);
ELSE
	if (month_diff > 0) THEN
		RETURN CONCAT_WS(' ',year_diff, yearstring, month_diff, monthstring);
	ELSE
		RETURN CONCAT_WS(' ',year_diff, yearstring);
	END IF;
END IF;
 
END $$
 
DELIMITER ;

You can then make use of the stored routine to convert Dates into ages by doing so:

SELECT getage(BirthDate) as UserAge FROM my_database.users

• http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/routine-restrictions.html
• http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/stored-procedures.html

Arduino

Unfortunately the serial port communication driver (RXTX) which comes with the arduino download is not 64 bit compatible. I will describe here how I successfully compiled & installed the driver to get the Arduino IDE running on a 64 bit openSUSE installation. Most of the instructions should be pretty straight forward to be replicated on an other rpm based distribution. For ubuntu/debain based distributions, you can find the instructions provided by Tero Karvinen useful.

Packages Required for Arduino IDE

The following packages are required to run the Arduino IDE:

• java-1_5_0-sun
• cross-avr-gcc
• cross-avr-binutils
• avr-libc

Linux USB Serial Converter Driver

Besides the above software, you will also need a compatible kernel. This means version 2.6.x or at least 2.4.30. For example, it needs USB serial support with the FTDI driver. After connecting an Arduino board to your computer via an AB USB cable, it should load the ftdi modules automatically. Ensure ftdi_sio and usbserial modules are loaded by executing:

lsmod | grep ftdi

It should return output similar to whats shown below:

ftdi_sio               54280  0
usbserial              52688  1 ftdi_sio
usbcore               156456  6 ftdi_sio,usbserial,usbhid,ohci_hcd,ehci_hcd

If not, as root, run:

modprobe ftdi_sio

If there are no errors from the above command, then the module is loaded successfully.

System Requirements

The Arduino IDE is java based and RXTX [2] is a native java library providing serial and parallel communication for the Java Development Toolkit. The RXTX lib uses lock files by default. So Before you use lock files you need to do one of two things:

1. Be the root or uucp user on your machine whenever you use rxtx
2. Or add the specific user that needs to use rxtx to the group uucp. (preferred)

Add your user account to the uucp group by going to yast2 > Security and Users > User Management. Once you have added yourself to the group, you will need to restart your session to make it affective. Once you are in the new session, verify that your account belongs to the uucp group by executing “groups” on the shell. It should give return you a list of groups your account belongs to.

Packages required for building rxtx-java

• autoconf
• automake
• libtool
• gnu make
• gcc
• jdk > 1.3 or java-1_5_0-sun-devel
• checkinstall (optional)

After installing the necessary libraries, you can download and start building the library with the following commands:

wget http://rxtx.qbang.org/pub/rxtx/rxtx-2.1-7r2.zip

unzip rxtx-2.1-7r2.zip

cd rxtx-2.1-7r2

export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib64/jvm/java-1.5.0-sun/

./configure

make

Once the libraries are built, you can install them by following either one of the following two methods:

1. Build an RPM package with the help of checkinstall
   (preferred)
2. Copy the libs to the arduino libs folder.

If you are opting for the checkinstall method, I suggest to name the package rxtx-java. You can then install the package using normal rpm commands. Once you have done that, you need to determine the path to the libraries. Execute the following to obtain the Path to the rxtx libraries:

rpm -ql librxtx-java | grep RXTXcomm.jar
/usr/java/jdk1.5.0_06/jre/lib/ext/RXTXcomm.jar

We will now remember to add the path (‘/usr/java/jdk1.5.0_06/jre/’) to the arduino bootstrap script.

To install the libraries the second way, you can copy the compiled RXTXcomm.jar and librxtxSerial.so files to the arduino lib directory. The libs are built and placed into “x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/.libs/” folder while the jar file should be in the same folder you are in.

Setting up the Arduino IDE

Download and untar the Arduino IDE from Arduino Software page

wget http://www.arduino.cc/files/arduino-0010-linux.tgz && \
tar -xvzf arduino-0010-linux.tgz

In the arduino/tools directory, make symlinks:

cd arduino-0010/hardware/tools

 ln -s /opt/cross/bin/avr-gcc avr-gcc && \
ln -s /opt/cross/bin/avr-g++ avr-g++ && \
ln -s /opt/cross/bin/avr-objcopy avr-objcopy && \
ln -s /opt/cross/bin/avr-objdump avr-objdump && \
ln -s /opt/cross/bin/avr-size avr-size

Copy the compiled RxTx-java libray into the arduino-0010/lib folder. Before doing so rename the existing libraries.

cd ../../lib/

mv librxtxSerial.so librxtxSerial.so.DISABLED

mv RXTXcomm.jar RXTXcomm.jar.DISABLED

Now copy the freshly compiled rxtx libraries into this folder

cp ../../rxtx-2.1-7r2/x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/.libs/librxtxSerial.so .

cp ../../rxtx-2.1-7r2/RXTXcomm.jar .

Once you have copied the library and jar file, you are ready to execute the arduino bootstrap script to launch the Arduino IDE.

./arduino
Experimental:  JNI_OnLoad called.
Stable Library
=========================================
Native lib Version = RXTX-2.1-7
Java lib Version   = RXTX-2.1-7

The Arduino IDE

Resources

1. http://www.arduino.cc
2. http://www.rxtx.org
3. http://ftdi-usb-sio.sourceforge.net/
4. http://www.ftdichip.com/Drivers/3rdPartyDrivers.htm
5. serproxy: http://www.lspace.nildram.co.uk/freeware.html
6. ser2net: http://ser2net.sourceforge.net
7. Java Comm Serial API How-To for Linux: http://wass.homelinux.net/howtos/Comm_How-To.shtml

Using the openSUSE Build Service, you can provide software packages for most popular Linux distros using one single service. Rather than maintaining separate systems to build packages, you can take advantage of the openSUSE Build Service and let it do most of the work.

To learn how to leverage the build service, join the openSUSE community on April 4th and 5th on IRC to hone your package building skills. The Packaging Days II event will be held on Freenode at #opensuse-buildservice. Community members will be standing by to provide support and answer questions about using the build service and creating packages.

Find out more about the Packaging Days II event at: http://en.opensuse.org/Packaging/Packaging_Day

But wait, just when you think its not possible to import a show into the mythtv recordings, there is a way to do so. There is a perl script called “myth.rebuilddatabase.pl” which comes with the mythtv-doc package of mythtv. Usually the “myth.rebuilddatabase.pl” script resides at “/usr/share/doc/packages/mythtv-doc/contrib/” folder. Else, If you are on an rpm based system you can look for its path with the following command:

rpm -qal "myth*" | grep "\.pl"

This should return all the available perl scripts which are distributed with mythtv. Now to use the script, we need make a copy of the script to your home folder and configure it. Edit the file and update the relevant mysql mythtv database connection details. Now copy the tv show files which you want to import, into your mythtv recordings folder.

Meta Data

To import the show into Mythtv, you have the option of importing the meta data associated with it. The meta data consists of the show title, sub-title, description, show time and most importantly the channel id. To retrieve the channel ids which are available on your mythtv installation, you can query the mysql database with the following shell command:
mysql --host [localhost] --user [mythtv] -p -e 'use [mythconverg]; select chanid, name, callsign from channel where visible=1'
Change the appropriate values in the command shown above (in brackets) to reflect your database setup and hit enter. It should now prompt you to enter the database password for the mythtv database table and then will list the available channels on your mythtv installation.

Import Show

To import the show we change into the recordings folder and just execute the script followed by the file extension of the show we are importing:

~/myth.rebuilddatabase.pl --ext avi

In this instance I am importing an .avi file. The rebuild script scans your mythtv directory and each file will be checked against your database to see if it exists. If they do not, you will be prompted for a channel-id, the show title, subtitle, description, show start time and duration of the show, and a record will be created. Finally it will prompt you with the question of whether you want to “build a seek table for this file”. Just say yes and it will update the “seek” information for that show. Another important thing to remember is not to give the same “show time” of an already existing show for the same channel id, else it will produce a mysql database error “Duplicate entry”.

Final Note:

I have noted that only the following files types can be imported: {nuv,mpg,mpeg,avi}. I am hoping to import a few ogg based files into mythtv. I will update this entry on my attempt to import those ogg files.

I have seen the so called “racial monkey taunts” made by the the crowds at Vadodra and Wankhede stadium in India. In my opinion it was meant to be a humorous joke just making a comparison to how Andrew Symonds stands out amongst his own team mates. I mean look at him when he has the white sun screen protection on his lips and his fluffy hair to go with it. He looks more like a clown than a Monkey. And if you call me a racist after this comment I made, then go to hell.

Akhil Tandulwadikar’s comment on Andrew Symonds hair would explain what this “monkey chants” are all about.

Therefore, it has led me to conclude that the only possible rational explanation to these monkey chants lies somewhere else. Something that the media–in Australia and India–has totally missed in its hurry to earn some TRP

And then we have Australia chasing a record 16 test win in a row at the SCG this year. It is definately the worst game of cricket I have seen. The way the Australian team appealed for Dravid’s wicket in the second innings was just embarrassing. You can’t call any Australian player a gentleman after this test match. They play the game just to get a record in their name. Cricket is a gentleman’s game. A fine example was when Yuvraj Singh “walked” after he realised he nicked the ball.

At an interview, the Indian Captain was asked if he thought the match had been played in the right spirit, Kumble said, “Only one team was playing in the spirit of the game.” It was reminiscent of Australian captain Bill Woodfull’s words during the Bodyline series. Shame on you Australia.

And finally to prove how bad the game of cricket has become, which included few poor umpiring decisions and a some embarrassing cricket played by the Australian team. This is how they won the second test match:

Ruled in favour of Aus:
1. Andrew Symonds caught on 30
2. Ponting caught on 15
3. Andrew Symonds stumped on 48
4. Andrew Symonds lbw on 103
5. Andres Symonds stumped on 140 (not even reffered to third umpire).
6. Hussey plumb lbw on the back foot in the second innings.
7. Hussey caught down the leg side by the keeper.
8. This could have gone either way… Kumble’s hatrick ball to Symonds.
9. Dravid caught a padded shot by the keepoer and appealed for wicket (most
embarassing appeal)
10) Gangully caught by Clarke, clearly on the half volley and the umpire asked
Ponting if he caught it. Why woudn’t Ponting say “yes” to that?

Ruled in favor of India
1. Ricky ponting inside edge given lbw on 55.
2. This could have gone either way… Sachin LBW when on 48.

This is not cricket. Oh by the way, I am an Indian born Australian citizen. I am not making any biased comments because I am Indian. In fact I loved how the Australians played their cricket, until what I saw unfolding at the SCG.

Now for those who came looking for the twenty20 ticket I am offering, shoot me an email at tickets@fernandez.net.au and if you are lucky, you can enjoy some more embarrassing cricket played by the Australian team at the MCG. they have been sold.

And here is what some others have to say:

• No room for cheeky monkeys
• Australia’s attitude lacking in appeal
• Dodgy deeds leave sour taste
• Arrogant Ponting must be fired
• It’s just not cricket!
• Another hollow victory for Australian cricket
• Victory without honour: walk the walk, watch the talk
• Why Ponting’s heroes just don’t appeal to me

Man I loves this list of Top Sledges

• Some sledging gems from various sources

I have put together a shell script which saves me the trouble of remembering various combinations of user names + passwords. It looks something like this: cat ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub | ssh jeffery@example.com "(mkdir .ssh&>/dev/null; chmod 700 .ssh && cat - >> .ssh/authorized_keys ) && chmod 600 .ssh/authorized_keys"

Cat Piped Over Ssh explained

Lets take it step by step and go through what the above command actually does. This is the order of what happens when the above command is executed:

1. Concatenate the contents (cat ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub ) of my DSA public key
2. Pipe the contents ( | ) to the ssh command ssh jeffery@example.com
3. I am then executing four commands to the remote host via SSH
   1. The first command mkdir .ssh&>/dev/null is making sure the remote folder .ssh exists by creating it. And if the directory already exists, it will give an error message, but that error message is discarded to /dev/null. There could be a situation when this folder may not exist on the remote machine, hence we are making sure it exists.
   2. Next we make sure the .ssh folder is writable with the command chmod 700 .ssh.
   3. The double-ampersand (&&) which follows these two commands has a special meaning. It states if the previous command executed is not successful, do not execute any more commands in that statement. The only time this would fail would be if there is a folder called .ssh and it is not owned/writable by the user who is supposed to own it. In my case that would be the user “jeffery”.
   4. The next command we see is cat – >> .ssh/authorized_keys. If you remember in Step 1, the cat command which piped the contents of my DSA public key has now produced a Standard Input. This cat command is now taking that input and appending it to the .ssh/authorized_keys file. If the file didn’t exist, it should automatically have created that file and appended my DSA public key into it.
   5. Finally we make sure that the authorized_keys file in secure from other users by changing the permissions chmod 600 .ssh/authorized_keys.
4. After this command is executed, the shell would prompt you to enter the accounts password.
   1. If this is the first time you are accessing the remote host, you will be prompted to verify the “authenticity” of the host. Type “yes” and hit Enter key.
   2. Provide the login password to complete the setup for Automated Login.

Shell Script

Finally to make things a bit more easier, here is the shell script which you can use by providing the user@domain as the parameter to setup your Automated logins.
#!/bin/bash
user_domain=$1
echo "Automating Login for $user_domain"
# Auto SSH
cat ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub | ssh $user_domain "(mkdir .ssh&>/dev/null; chmod 700 .ssh && cat - >> .ssh/authorized_keys ) && chmod 600 .ssh/authorized_keys"

Copy the Above into a file called auto_ssh.sh, make it executable and run it. Change the user name and remote host to reflect your details. ./auto_ssh.sh jeffery@example.com

Resources

• http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-keyc.html
• http://www.red-green.com/2007/06/automatic-ssh-login-using-rsadsa-keys/

Packages for openSUSE 10.2 and 10.3 can be obtained from my openSUSE build farm account at : home:jefferyfernandez. If you encounter any bugs in the package or the application itself, please report them at: qBittorrent Bug-tracker. Happy torrenting

qBittorrent Home: http://www.qbittorrent.org

Onboard SATA/IDE Ctrl Mode

First, it will help to do a quick work around in your BIOS. Press the Del, F1, or F2 key to get into your system BIOS just after powering it on. Proceed to the “Integrated Peripherals” section. Under “Onboard SATA/IDE Ctrl Mode”, set it to AHCI mode, then save and exit the BIOS setup utility. The Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI) is an interface specification that allows the storage driver to enable advanced Serial ATA features such as Native Command Queuing and hot plug. Here is a list of Intel chipsets that support AHCI.

Load the Kernel module drivers

Now boot from the openSUSE CD 1 or DVD. You’ll should still get the same message, but now you’re set to work around it:

1. Press Enter to get past the error message, then choose your language in the following screen. That will bring you to the main menu.
2. Use the down arrow key to select the Kernel Modules option and press Enter.
3. In the next screen press Enter again to select the default option for IDE/RAID/SCSI Modules.
4. In the long list that follows, find both the JMicron and the Generic IDE drivers, select them, press Enter, then press Enter again when you’re asked for special options to pass to them. You will have to do this twice, one time for each driver.
5. When you return to the kernel module screen, use the Tab or arrow keys to select Back, and press Enter.That should put you back into the Main Menu.
6. Now select the option for Start Installation or System and press Enter, then select Start Installation or Update and press Enter.
7. And lastly select the CD-ROM as the source and press Enter. The normal graphical installation procedure should now commence.

If the above does not work, write down the installation source mirror addresses from the openSUSE website and use it to install openSUSE over FTP. The only difference in the procedure will be to change the above instructions to select FTP instead of CD-ROM as the source. Good-luck!

WARNING. If you are a Windows user, you can’t just jump into the BIOS and enable AHCI. It changes the way the bus communicates and it will cause a “Blue Screen of Death”. You’ll need to reinstall if you want to use AHCI

[ENTER KEY]~ .

SSH has a few more key strokes you can use. To find out which ones are available type:
~?
it shoulld bring up this help output:

Supported escape sequences:
~. - terminate connection
~B - send a BREAK to the remote system
~C - open a command line
~R - Request rekey (SSH protocol 2 only)
~^Z - suspend ssh
~# - list forwarded connections
~& - background ssh (when waiting for connections to terminate)
~? - this message
~~ - send the escape character by typing it twice
(Note that escapes are only recognized immediately after newline.)


PHP 5 comes with a complete reflection API that adds the ability to reverse-engineer classes, interfaces, functions and methods as well as extensions. Additionally, the reflection API also offers ways of retrieving doc comments for functions, classes and methods. This is extremely handy when you want to generate an API for the code you are writing. Thats exactly what I managed to do using the Reflection API.

SCA Generator Source

Shown below is the source code for the API generator. As you can see, I am using the SCA_Generator class itself to generate its own API.

Simple Class API Generator

And the output of the above API generation results in the following:

/**
 * This is an API generator Class.
 *
 * It will generate documentation for a given class which has already been
 * loaded with an include or require call.
 *
 * @author Jeffery Fernandez
 * @copyright Free to use as long as you keep the Authors name intact
 * @link http://jefferyfernandez.id.au/2007/09/01/simple-class-api-generator/
 *
 * @todo Get the constants of the class
 *
 * Simple Class API Generator
 * @since 1st September, 2007
 * @version 0.2 Updated on 2nd September, 2007
 */
Class SCA_Generator
{

	/**
	 * To store the Class name
	 *
	 * @var $class_name
	 */
	private $class_name;

	/**
	 * The constructor for the API Generator
	 *
	 * @param string $class_name The name of the Class for which to generate the API
	 * @return void
	 */
	public function __construct($class_name)

	/**
	 * A Test function with bogus params
	 *
	 * @param SCA_Generator $blah
	 * @param array $test
	 * @return void
	 */
	public static function test_function(SCA_Generator $blah[, $test = array ()])

	/**
	 * Generates the API for the Class
	 *
	 * @param boolean $show_private Decide to show private variables/functions
	 * @param boolean $show_protected Decide to show protected variables/functions
	 * @return void
	 */
	public function create_class_api([$show_private = false[, $show_protected = false]])

}

Now this is just one use of what you can do with the Reflection API. Soon after I finished this Class, I was thinking about an other scenario whereby the software project you are working on is Version controlled. Take for example if you are using Subversion version control system, you can implement post-commit hooks.

This means if after someone has committed some code changes to a file belonging to the software project, you can utilise the Version control system’s post-commit hook script to trigger another script to analyse what has changed. The script should analyse what lines have changed and then detect which functions it belonged to. Then we can loop through the changed functions and analyse if the functions where properly documented. If not send the user who committed the changes a Warning email saying “You need to properly document the source code”. Any takers ?