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Guns N’ Roses; Not in this lifetime – Stockholm, Sweden 29-Jun-2017

By on 30-Jun-2017 in JoHo

Holy shit! That is the shortest summary I can muster, a few hours after the “Gunners” walked off the stage on Friend’s Arena in Stockholm, Sweden on June 29th 2017. I know a lot of people want to write GNR down with trash talk, and I guess everyone is entitled to their opinion. But to perform like they did yesterday, after all the turmoil and shit they have gone through (and put themselves through) is nothing short of magic. This is the sixth time I see them live since hearing the intro riff to “Welcome to the Jungle” on the radio in my car, back in 1987. I’m obviously damaged goods, but hey, if this is damage, then bring it on. If you haven’t seen them live, now is (possibly your last chance) a good time. The only concert I can think of with GNR that is on par with yesterday’s performance would be seeing them live at Wembley many many years ago.

Thank you Duff. Thank you Slash. Thank you Axl.

And thanks to everyone else in and around the band for making this happen.

The only outstanding question is now: Why is there no Slash emoji?! There should be a law or something about this …

#GNR #GUNSNROSES #ROCK

 

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Dream Car Experience

By on 22-Jun-2017 in JoHo

After months of being on the waiting list, it was finally time to actually sit down in a Lamborghini and drive it. I realize these cars are ridiculously expensive “toys” that most mortals will never come close to driving, let alone owning. Perhaps that is why it was such a thrill. Unfortunately, the GoPro had not been prepared for this event, so there are only some clips of “coming and going”. Driving slowly onto the on ramp to the highway, and then flooring it, was a remarkable experience I will remember for a long time. “Way cool” 🙂

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Forcing OutOfOffice response to always fire in Zimbra

By on 16-Jun-2017 in Sysadmin

We had a need to create an e-mail account in Zimbra that would always generate an automated response to incoming e-mails. So we activated the OutOfOffice functionality (or “Vacation Mode” as some people prefer to call it). This is great, and you do have some control from the ZWC (Zimbra Web Client) user interface.

The “problem” with the OOO functionality is that it is designed for human interaction. So, in an attempt to be somewhat “intelligent”, Zimbra will remember to whom it has sent an automated response message, and if a second message is received within nn time, it will not send another one. This makes sense, if I have sent an e-mail to John Doe, and Mr Doe is on vacation, I probably know this to be true even if I send him another message within a few hours or days. So I don’t want a second automated response.

We wanted it to send an automated response every time it received a message, zmprov to the rescue!

As the ‘zimbra’ user, from the CLI prompt, enter:

zmprov ma acct@tobemod.com zimbraPrefOutOfOfficeCacheDuration <value>

 

The default <value> in our installation was 7d, presumably that means seven days. So I set it to ‘1s’ and anyone sending e-mail to acct@tobemod.com now gets an automated response, even if they send several messages within a short period of time.

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Handlar du pÄ Staples via Visma Advantage, var försiktig

By on 12-May-2017 in JoHo, Swedish

Visma Advantage Ă€r en sorts “inköpsportal” dĂ€r man genom “större kundmassa” kan binda upp leverantörer pĂ„ avtal för att pĂ„ sĂ„ sĂ€tt fĂ„ ned priset för köparen. Detta Ă€r inget unikt eller nytt och det finns flera andra organisationer som erbjuder detta. Du blir kund hos Visma Advantage för en kostnad och kan handla billigare pĂ„ ett antal stĂ€llen.

Det lÄter ju bra. SÄ lÀnge som du sparar mer Àn vad du betalar för Visma Advantage per Är sÄ tjÀnar du pÄ det.

Tills du upptÀcker att det kanske inte Àr sÄ enkelt i alla situationer.

Visma Advantage har valt att rubricera sitt samarbete med Staples Advantage som “Staples”. Men de menar egentligen “Staples Advantage” och inte “Staples Direct” (staples.se). Tydligen, enligt Visma, sĂ„ har dessa tvĂ„ företag helt olika prislistor och vĂ€ldigt lite med varandra att göra i praktiken. Det innebĂ€r ocksĂ„ att prisbilden för produkter ser annorlunda ut.

T ex kan du köpa pennan “Pilot Hi-Tecpoint V5 RT” (svart) pĂ„ staples.se för 33,75kr ink moms styck. Om du lĂ€gger samma penna i varukorgen nĂ€r du gĂ„r in via Vismas portal till Staples Advantage, dĂ„ kostar exakt samma artikel 68,11kr styck. Dvs mer Ă€n dubbelt sĂ„ mycket.

Ja, du fĂ„r rabatt pĂ„ en hel del produkter hos “Staples Advantage” via Vismas portal, men var försiktig och jĂ€mför gĂ€rna priset med vad samma produkt kostar pĂ„ staples.se, det kan löna sig ganska ordentligt. Om du nu vill handla pĂ„ “Staples” vill sĂ€ga.

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Troubles doing factory reset on a Ubiquiti EdgeRouter

By on 21-Apr-2017 in Sysadmin

If you’re having problems doing a factory reset on a Ubiquiti EdgeRouter, and can’t ping the router on 192.168.1.1 or connect to the admin web interface, you may want to check that you are connecting your computer to the eth0 port on the router. It’s not immediately obvious that this is where the admin interface is residing at https://192.168.1.1. Oh, and don’t forget to hardwire your own computer to the 192.168.1.0-network. This is really a no-brainer, but still not entirely obvious.

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The Sigma USB Dock, a good idea for self-service firmware upgrades

By on 14-Apr-2017 in Computers, Photography

In my opinion, Sigma has made somewhat of a comeback in the past few years when it comes to camera lenses, in particular when it comes to image quality. I can only speak from a Canon perspective, but from friends and associates, I hear this holds true for other camera brands as well.

Something that can be rather annoying with lenses is focus micro adjustment or AF focus micro adjustment, as well as firmware updates. Manufacturers of lenses (and cameras) all seem to have different solutions, of varying degree.

Sigma has an accessory called the Sigma USB Dock, which is a rather simple device that connects to your computer via an USB cable. After installing the software, you simply connect your Sigma lens to the USB Dock and the software will query the Sigma database for firmware upgrades. It will also allow you to perform micro adjustments.

The firmware upgrade process is simple enough, but be careful when doing AF micro adjustments, it may affect your photographic results 🙂 The Sigma USB Dock does not support all Sigma lenses. You can find out more information about the Sigma USB Dock here: www.sigma-global.com/en/lenses/cas/product/accessories/usb-dock/

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FastStone Image Viewer is awesome

By on 26-Mar-2017 in Applications, Computers, Photography

I’ve been doing digital photography for many years and have come across a number of applications that claim to be “photo managers” with functions for fast viewing, basic tasks like cropping and re-sizing, etc. I realize it quite often comes down to personal taste, so you are welcome to completely ignore this post 🙂

I mainly work with adjustments, cropping, and re-sizing when I work with photos. For most post-shoot processing, I use Lightroom. I was once a fond user of the ACDSee products, used as my “Swiss Army knife”. But ever since I ran into the FastStone Image Viewer, I have uninstalled most other similar utilities. Being a fan of Shareware, and similar, I have registered the product for commercial use, and it’s well worth the money!

If you’re looking for a very fast viewer, manager, and “Swiss Army knife” for your photo management, give FastStone Image Viewer a go. It’ll handle all major graphic formats including BMP, JPEG, JPEG 2000, GIF, PNG, PCX, TIFF, WMF, ICO, TGA, and camera raw files. Oh, and it’s not bloatware 🙂

Now, if I could only have the FastStone Image Viewer for Linux too ….

You’ll find FastStone Image Viewer here: faststone.org

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Slow SMTP sessions and SSH logins on your Zimbra server?

By on 28-Feb-2017 in Computers, Sysadmin

When upgrading a Zimbra server to a somewhat recent version (8.7.3 for example), it may attempt to install its own DNS Cache (zimbra-dnscache). It’s obvious that this may cause issues if you are running some other DNS caching service, or your own BIND, on the server. But these are rather obvious issues and not unique to Zimbra.

What is not, however, equally obvious is that you may think that zimbra-dnscache is actually running, and that it is actually doing what it is supposed to be doing.

My first hint that things weren’t as they appeared to be was extremely slow external SMTP sessions when clients like Thunderbird and other “client mailers”, as well as some web based Helpdesk applications were attempting to send e-mail via Zimbra.

The upgrade to Zimbra 8.7.3 had gone quite well, so it wasn’t an obvious place to start looking.

Until I noticed that SSH logins were also quite slow to this server. They had never been slow before. Checking the SSH configuration on the server did not reveal much other than the fact that it was indeed using reverse DNS lookups.

Checking /etc/resolv.conf made everything clear. Zimbra had, in attempt to use its own zimbra-dnscache, added “nameserver 127.0.0.1” to /etc/resolv.conf. In a perfect world, that may have been what I wanted …

After removing 127.0.0.1 from /etc/resolv.conf, inbound SMTP sessions from “client mailers” and web applications went from 7-10 seconds down to 0.5-0.1 seconds. Case closed.

I’m thinking Zimbra should add a post-installation sanity check. When all services are up and running, a DNS lookup to a known host (www.zimbra.com for example) should return within less than a second or two, anything else is an indication that the system may not function as intended.

#zimbra-dnscache

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PHP is_numeric () fails WordPress version string check

By on 16-Jan-2017 in Computers, Development, WordPress

This is, perhaps, obvious to most PHP developers. But it came somewhat as a surprise to me.

Using is_numeric () for validating a WordPress version string, such as ‘4.7’, does not seem to work very well when WordPress introduces minor releases such as ‘4.7.1’.

Since I cannot be bothered to figure out why it behaves in this (erratic, IMHO) way, I have since replaced the call to is_numeric () with a small function using a simple regular expression (regexp):

    function wpVersionStringCheck ($vs)                                                                                                 
    {                                                                                                                                   
        return (preg_match ('/^(\d+\.)+\d+$/', $vs));                                                                                   
    }

I’m sure there is a hole in there somewhere, but on the following strings at least, it gives me the desired result:

1.0 is valid
1.0. is invalid
1.0.1 is valid
1.banana.0 is invalid

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