See you all in 2009!

At any rate, wkossen asked that someone photoshop a christmas hat onto his twitter avatar and I have done just that. Using the free stock christmas hat photo from Quentin available at sxc.hu with wkossen’s photo I have created the below. This blog post is really just to make it easy to show him. Nothing much else really happening here.

As reported on the bbc website, Brent crude oil has dropped in price to below $50 (£33.60 apx) not that we should all be getting too excited about that because it would require oil prices to remain below that price for a length of time before the savings where passed on to consumers. Last night I bought a tanks worth of petrol from the cheapest petrol station in Coventry for 90.1pence per litre the cheapest I have seen it sold anywhere in at least a year. However considering back in June and July when the price of oil was at its highest, petrol was just over £1.20 a litre, there hasn’t been all that much a difference at the pumps - barely 30pence actually. If I see petrol prices drop below 89pence a litre then I may become a little less pessimistic.

First things first monitorix requires rrdtool and librrds-perl, these can be installed with the following lines in shell:

apt-get install rrdtool
apt-get install rrdtool-perl

Once done and it should only take a few seconds, I moved o to the download page at the monitorix project. The latest package to date for Debian is the any platform linux distro monitorix-1.2.1.tar.gz. I moved to my user space and the used wget to download the package to the server without having to mess with ftp, then I extracted the archive using gzip:

cd /
wget http://www.monitorix.org/monitorix-1.2.1.tar.gz
gzip -dc ./monitorix-1.2.1.tar.gz | tar -x

Unfortunately there is no automatic apt-get script for Debian, however the monitorix group have been kind enough to simplify things by creating an install script which is as simple to run as:

cd monitorix-1.2.1
./install.sh

After that the install script asks you which system your installing it on press three for Debian (or if your reading this for another distro which ever number equals your os), next check the paths it gives and press enter if ok. I don’t know what they should be and no manual is written that will tell me so I press enter and hope for the best, you’re then issued with a Last chance to stop the installation cross your fingers hit ‘y’ and press return. If all goes well you should end up with something that looks like the following:

Installation successfully finished.

Now you have to edit the configuration file /etc/monitorix.conf
in order to setup correctly Monitorix to your operating system.

Then you'll can start Monitorix executing the init script:

/etc/init.d/monitorix.sh [start|stop|status]

and finally go to http://localhost/monitorix/ to start to see results.

NOTE: As a crond-based application, the root user will receive emails
about Monitorix execution errors. Please check the root email..

If so your now ready to setup monitorix, there are few things you need to set here unless your a more advanced user an in that case why are you even reading this, you guys are like god. In any case I use trusty old nano for the task of text editing and then start the service.

nano /etc/monitorix.conf
/etc/init.d/monitorix.sh start

Now if your server isn’t running SE-linux then when you go to http://your.domain/monitorix/ and see pretty things, however your like me and unlucky enough to be running a secure server the damn thing don’t work and simply throws up the following:

Starting Monitorix: ERROR: while creating /var/lib/monitorix/cpu.rrd: creating '/var/lib/monitorix/cpu.rrd': No such file or directory... Failed

Where as previous people seem to stop there and either disable SE-Linux to get it working, something which I believe is akin to running windows 3.1 on an unsecured network - you just shouldn’t do it, even if it works. I simply logged in as root and created the directory it so eagerly wanted to create using mkdir before retrying the start the process and being hit again with a different error:

mkdir /var/lib/monitorix/
 /etc/init.d/monitorix.sh start
Starting Monitorix: print() on closed filehandle OHTML at /usr/bin/monitorix.pl line 705.
readline() on closed filehandle IHTML at /usr/bin/monitorix.pl line 797 ... Ok

That Ok at the end doesn’t give me much hope, however it is a sign that something has worked and in a way which didn’t involve disabling server security. The problem now however is that Apache doesn’t have enough file rights to modify the $BASE_WWW directory, the $ meaning its a fixed variable not the directory name itself. I don’t know how to find this out so a further google search is needed, it would appear that the issue has been fixed for ubuntu users via here, so I believe I should be able to follow their instructions to fix this issue. The problem here is a little similar to that shown on apps.ouwu.com however it is simply down to a setup step I didn’t follow through correctly. Within the monitorix.conf file there is the following line:

our $OSTYPE="Linux-Debian";             # choose your OS type (see below)

Linux-Debian isn’t the default, and it needs to be changed to it otherwise none of the directories setup for your debian install will be used, it will instead default to something else. A little silly if you ask me but a quick fix. Upon restarting the monitorix process all works fine.

# /etc/init.d/monitorix.sh stop
Stopping Monitorix:
# /etc/init.d/monitorix.sh start
Starting Monitorix:  ... Ok

Now you have the process running fine, you will notice that the rrd files in /var/lib/monitorix/ are not being updated every minute or so, a quick fix for this as see in steps five to seven at apps.ouwu.com is to simply do the following:

mv /etc/cron.d/monitorix.sh /etc/cron.d/monitorix
chmod +x /etc/cron.d/monitorix
ls -l /var/lib/monitorix/

Repeating the last line a couple of times over the next few minutes should show that the files are being updated and you can take a sigh of relief. One last thing you may notice is that by going to http://your.domain/monitorix gives a 404, that could be because your domain is set within apache config to another directory within /var/www/ such as would be the case if you have a lot of domains hosted on that server my /var/www/ directory contains many sub directories each for one of my domains.Therefore you may want to set up a subdomain to forward to it, or simply set up a symlink pointing to /var/www/monitorix from your /var/www/domain.dir.

Get’em ‘fore they’re gone, the above, is part of a 2007 exhibition by Timothy Jhon Berg. What I find really interesting about this is the fact that it’s larger than life size and to that point makes it more than just a moulding of a choc-ice. I could go on and on about the connotations about consumerism and how we are running out of resources but honestly that’s not why I want this or a good copy of this on my wall, the reason behind that is because it is different and indeed does have several meanings which would be good conversation starters if ever I get round to owning a living room big enough to play host to such nice art.

The guys over at chinnychinchin.net have produced an amazing collection of collectibles, the Urban Collectibles including the petrol bombed jeep (shown above), the Joy-Ridden-2-door hatchback and the mini-van/insurance scam. Each of what looks like a children’s toy car shown daddy’s blow torch with amazing effect can be bought from the chinychinchin online shop for just $49.95, that is just 5 cents off $50 which is a lot of money depending on how their value increases over the next decade or two. Considering that they are each very unique I can’t see their value decreasing to be honest and if I had $150 to burn I would be tempted to spend it on these.

I believe the model in the above photo is one Petite Mirochka however I am not too sure about the photographer. I believe the photographer is a man calling him self the Sartorialist online at his blog viewable here, he has a very interesting selection of photos shot of ordinary people wearing beautiful clothes whom he has met up with during his travels around the world. The idea of shooting fashion photos of real people wearing “real clothes” is an amazingly simple one and one which I believe works really, really well. The photos you can see on his blog are well composed and professionally shot and something I believe anyone whom considers themselves interested in photography should see.

This is quite amazing and as its the run up to Christmas I thought I would share it with my visitors (you) even though I hate the fact that shops are getting ready, hypocritical I know. This short post isn’t about Christmas instead I have discovered browsershots.org an amazing online tool which allows you view any website under a selection of browsers, browser versions and operating systems. The following three screen shots have been generated by browser shots and are a good example of how useful it is because you can clearly see they have several computers set up which automatically set up the browser and settings before sending to the website, this means that the screenshot will be an accurate representation as it is a complete screenshot rather than a rendering of just the web page itself. Going back to the snow man its quite interesting to see how three different operating systems show up the font differently, the font being Arial Unicode MS. Of course the browser running under windows is most likely to show it correctly while Camino under osx has the most abstract looking more like a fez than a snow man. While a bit of a silly example of browsershots.org I have shown an interesting new tool and to some extent it’s ability at showing how a website appears differently on different platforms.

I am really interested to find out whether the above is a real skull covered in a hand made covering or is simply a plastic moulding or other sort of mould. It does remind me somewhat of the tree cosies which I covered a few months ago while being an entirely different thing in itself. You can see more of the above by Ben Cove and other projects which he has been involved in on his website.