The hobbit you just called fat? He’s skipping 2nd breakfast. The dwarf woman you called ugly? She spends hours braiding her beard so you can differentiate her from a dwarf man. The Uruk-Hai you just killed? He’s been abused by Saruman. See that Gollum creature with the gangly limbs & large eyes? For 500 years the Ring poisoned his mind. That Elf you just made fun of for crying? She just lost her wizard friend to a Balrog. Reblog this if you’re against bullying in Middle-Earth.

(via rhifit)

Source: engeltjemaeli

Yubikey setup

My Yubikey arrived on Friday and I was playing around with it yesterday and found that it was pretty easy to get setup. The problem, however, was that YubiCloud is really slow to authenticate an OTP. After a bit of research, I stumbled upon yubikey-val-server-php.

Configuration was fairly straightforward, and once I got my database user permissions setup correctly, I thought I was good to go. Unfortunately, I ran into all kinds of issues, from bad signatures to invalid OTPs (as a side note, the OS X binary for the yubikey personalization utility doesn’t appear to work under 10.8.2 and the linux command line utility wasn’t working - or so I thought).

Eventually, I got the verification server working and returning success responses, however I was still unable to authenticate with PAMs yubico module. I gave up at about 4am this morning, thinking that I was too tired and I’d figure it out later.

Turns out I was too tired, because the missing step was updating my authorized_yubikeys file! Once I had the new public ID in there, everything just worked and really quickly, too.

I even threw together a quick script to generate an API key and ID, in addition to spitting out the sshd pam configuration line because I’m lazy like that.

Pretty happy with it all now, the only caveat being that the validation server is sitting behind NAT so I can’t use it for any external servers at this stage.

Planning for New Zealand

It’s only been a week since I started planning for New Zealand but things have been ticking along nicely.

Essentially, the first half of the trip is fairly booked out and the second half is a little more relaxed, allowing us time to just enjoy the scenery between stops.

I did realise last night, however, that I hit a slight snag in my planning; that some of the pricing I’ve been using has been in NZD and some in AUD. I’d suggest that it won’t take too long to sort that out, though.

Day 1

  • Drive up to Bay of Islands, lounge about and take in the scenery

Day 2

  • Discover the Bay cruise - a 4 hour trip departing Paihia, seeing the Hole in the Rock and stopping at Urupukapuka
  • Drive to Rotorua

Day 3

  • Hobbiton Tour from Matamata
  • Mitai Cultural Village and Dinner

Day 4

  • Polynesian Spa
  • Kaituna River Rafting
  • Drive to Napier via Lake Taupo

Day 5

  • Premium Reserve Winery Tour (full day)

Day 6

  • Drive to Wellington
  • Wellington Movie Tour

Day 7

  • Drive to New Plymouth

Day 8

  • Drive back to Auckland via the Waitomo Glowworm Caves

A map of our route is here.

TripIt Itinerary and more info about the tours and stops is here.

Going to New Zealand in 2013!

Rhi and I had been talking about going overseas for a holiday together but we were suffering a difference of opinion; Rhi wanted to go to Europe and I wanted to go to America.

In order to keep the peace, we decided that it would be best to choose somewhere neutral for our first trip and after minimal consideration, settled on New Zealand. We mentioned it in passing to some friends of ours and about four weeks later, we’ve now paid our deposit and are now really excited about going away.

By the way, if you want an awesome travel agent for your next trip, let me know and I’ll put you in touch with Chanel at The Flight Centre in Unley; she’s made everything super easy so far. I mean it, all I’ve done so far is send her my contact details!

To get the most out of the trip, we decided to do ten days in a campervan on the North Island. Ten days should give us plenty of time to really see a lot of the island. Or so I thought. Rhi has gone to the movies today with her sister to see the new Twilight movie, so I thought I’d sit down and start looking at some things to do. There is so much to see and do in every city I’ve looked at so far!

Luckily we’re not off until April next year (140 days, but who’s counting?) so plenty of time to at least figure out everything we want to do and where. Then we have to figure out how to squeeze it into ten days, including driving.

I hope to (remember to) chronicle the planning and then the trip itself, so that next time (I’ll admit I’ve never really wanted to travel but now that I am, I’m really excited) we’ll have a better idea of how to plan and what to do.

Of course, I have every belief that all the planning will go out the window once we’re there but that’ll be a learning experience in itself. Maybe we’ll need a contingency plan…

Until next time,

Dy

12 reasons you should switch from CodeIgniter to Laravel

mulzer:

I have always been a fan of Codeigniter. I have built quite a few websites with it and they continue to run well in shared hosting environments. CI’s strength has always been ease-of-use, excellent documentation, great support for legacy environments and an active community. CI is a no-frills framework, no fancy installers, no cumbersome CLI scripts, no messy configuration files, just powerful, productive libraries that help you get your app online quickly. I looked at a few other frameworks, namely CakePHP, Symfony, Kohana. I never really warmed up to them though, and I always kept coming back to CI for its simplicity. 

That has now changed.

I recently discovered Laravel, and I was sold on it in about 5min flat. 

What is Laravel?

Laravel is a new PHP framework by Taylor Otwell. It’s just over a year old, but already in version 3 and quickly maturing. According to his web site, he created a framework that was “powerful and flexible, yet intuitive and expressive”, and I certainly think he succeeded with that.

I think after having used CI for many years, it is time to say goodbye to PHP4. I have decided to get my object-oriented butt in gear and start building solid apps on PHP5.3.

Laravel may not be for you, but if you are bored with CI  and currently shopping around for a solid alternative, here are my 12 reasons why you should pick Laravel.

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Update WordPress from git

From WordPress base directory (and on develop branch)

cp -R wp-content/themes/twentyeleven /tmp/

Then fetch upstream changes:

git flow feature start <version>_<project>

git fetch -t wordpress

git tag

Select the appropriate (most recent) tag, then:

git merge —squash —no-commit -s recursive theirs tags/<version>

Check your changed (tracked) files, particularly header and footer, to ensure you haven’t clobbered any changes there. vimdiff should resolve any changes easily.

This would be a good time to update plugins, so they can be tracked, too.

Commit changes, then:

git flow feature finish <version>_<project>

Create your release when ready.

Convert KVM images to VirtualBox images

From the KVM installed server

$ qemu-img convert kvm-os.img -O raw kvm-os-raw.img

Copy the image (kvm-os-raw.img) to virtual box machine

$ VBoxManage convertfromrow --format VDI kvm-os-raw.img vbox.vdi

Converting from raw image file=”kvm-os-raw.img” to file=”vbox.vdi”…
Creating dynamic image with size ….

This will create a virtual box compatible image
Incase required you can compact the image to actual size

$ VBoxManage modifyvdi /home/user/vbox.vdi compact

0%…10%…20%…30%…40%…50%…60%…70%
Here the path to vdi image must be absolute.

Now you can create a new virtual machine from virtual box console/command line, with the vdi image as storage.

Boot the machine and hope for the best :)

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