A common task when setting up an Apache webserver under Linux, is writing a httpd.conf file. The httpd.conf file is the main configuration file for Apache. One of the main reasons to edit the httpd.conf file is to setup virtual hosts In Apache. A Virtual host configuration allows several different domains to be run off a single instance of Apache, on a single IP. Each host is a ‘Virtual host’, and typically has a different web root, log file, and any number of subdomains aliased to it. The virtualhosts are configured in parts of the httpd.conf file that look like this: ...

So, about a month ago I got a second-hand microKORG from Ebay. Fiddling around with the preset patches, and creating new patches is great fun, even though I only know a few chords. Recently I plugged it in to my PC via my M-Audio Uno USB->MIDI interface , and soon was using Ableton Live to program drums in time with the microKORG’s arp. I thought I’d experiment the music libraries available in python, and see if I could send notes to the synth via MIDI. Turns out that the M-Audio Uno is supported under Ubuntu, all you have to do is install the midisport-firmware package. With the help of pyrtmidi , a set of python wrappers around the C++ audio library rtmidi I was able to recieve MIDI signals in realtime from the microKORG, and send them in realtime also. With the help of this old midi file reader/writer library that I found posted to a python mailing list, I’ve made some progress in writing a simple MIDI file player that sends notes to the ‘KORG.

So, after saying all that stuff about how vimplugin and EasyEclipse was great, I actually started to use the setup heavily, and it started to annoy me. For one, EE is not a recent build of eclipse, nor does it come with a full set of recent plugins. This makes it annoyingly difficult to use when you want to use more than the set of plugins it packages for you. As far as vimplugin goes, it does not provide the vim integration I thought it might from embedded vim. Not really even close. ...

Up until now, I’ve always used the terminal for programming development on my projects. Because I’m so familiar with the advanced text editor vim , I can get a lot done on the command line, and it doesn’t detract away from what is actually going on behind the scenes, as a lot of IDEs seem to do. However, in reading the book Foundations of Agile Python Development (which I recommend highly), and through working in software houses using IDE s only, I’ve come to realise that I need to gain at least some familiarity with an IDE. ...

If you use Google calendar, and you’ve got an iPhone, or Windows Mobile phone like me, then you’ll be pleased to hear about the new Google Sync for Mobile tool just brought out into beta by Google. There were various ways to sync Google Calender events to Windows Mobile devices before, but nothing officially supported. Google uses an ActiveSync server to push the events to your phone, making things a lot easier. To quote : ...

I’ve been hacking in Python a fair bit lately, and the more I continue to use it, the more I appreciate its features. The enforced logical structure, pure object-orientation, namespacing and the python shell, are just some examples of great features that PHP doesn’t have. I spend most of my time programming in PHP looking up the syntax for the 4,000+ functions, and trying to do hammer out a logical OO structure to my projects. It just doesn’t seem natural. ...

I did something out of the ordinary this Christmas. I bought an “XO” laptop for a child in a third world country. I also bought an XO laptop for myself, so I can develop software designed to be distributed to the 1 million+ XO laptops out there in the third world. The laptop runs a Linux operating system, with an special interface programmed almost exclusively in Python. Most apps, called ‘activities’, run as python programs. This is ideal for me, as I enjoy hacking around in python, and Linux is - of course - very familiar to me. ...

I’ve started my own blog consulting business, helping people setup their own blogs, either for their company or for personal use. It’s called The Blog Factory , see the site for more information on what we do. In a nutshell, we can: Setup and customise WordPress blogs. Design custom WordPress themes. Develop tailored WordPress plugins. Host the blogs on our servers. Use our SEO expertise to improve traffic to the blog.

This is so cool.. Google are beta-testing a totally free hosting and cloud-computing resource called Google App Engine. The caveat is that your hosted app must be written in Python. Python is amazing anyway, and if you don’t know it, now is the perfect time to learn. Check this out for more information about Google App Engine: http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/whatisgoogleappengine.html They’re giving away a very generous 500MB disk space and enough processing power to serve 5 million pages a month. Awesome!

Bacula is a great open-source distributed backup program for Linux/UNIX systems. It is separated into three main components: One ‘Director’ - which sends messages to the other components and co-ordinates the backup One or more ‘File Demons’ - which ‘pull’ the data from the host they are installed from. One or more ‘Storage Demons’ - which ‘push’ the data taken from the file demons into a type of archival storage, IE: backup tapes, a backup hard disc, etc I found it extremely versatile yet very complicated to configure. Before you configure it you have to decide on a backup strategy; what you want to backup, why you want to back it up, how often you want to back it up, and how you are going to off-site/preserve the backups. ...