Martin's World » Windows

iTunes Music Library.xml XPath Expression

martin — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 16:21:34 +0000

Took me a few minutes using SketchPath to work this out. It’s the xpath expression to pull out all the location elements from the iTunes Music Library.xml file.
/plist/dict/dict/dict/key[text()='Location']/following-sibling::string[1]
The resultant string still needs to be URL decoded.

svnsync with PuTTY on Windows

martin — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 08:12:22 +0000

Objective:

Maintain a copy of my local Subversion repository on my hosting server ready for deployment of my application using Capistrano.

Steps:

Create remote svn repository
Set up svn+ssh using PuTTY on Windows
1. Download plink.exe and puttygen.exe to you local machine.
2. run puttygen and generate a public/private key pair
  Don’t set a pass phrase and svn will not prompt you for it later.
3. Save the private key to keyfile.ppk on your local hard disk.
4. On the remote host open a file ~/.ssh/authorized_keys and paste in the public key from puttygen.
  Make sure the string fits on a single continuous line.
5. In the file abov, pre-pend command=”svnserve -t” to the start of the public key.
  This forces the svnserve process to run when ever someone connects using this key pair. Having no passphrase on the key pair isn’t great for security but at least you are restricting access to just svn and not the whole shell.
6. On the local Windows machine, edit %Application Data%\Subversion\config, under the [tunnels] section add
  [tunnels]
  ssh =plink -i \path\to\keyfile.ppk
  (use back slashes / despite it being on Windows)
7. Test using svn info svn+ssh://username@host.com/home/username/svn-repos/application
Set up two environment variables to save on the typing
set torepos=svn+ssh://username@host.com/home/username/svn-repos/application
set fromrepos=file:///s:/svn-repos
Initialise the synchronisation set up
svnsync init %torepos% %fromrepos%
Check the synchronisation parameters have been correctly set on the remote repository
svn proplist –revprop -r 0 %to%
svn propget svn:sync-from-url –revprop -r 0 %torepos%
Now do the sync
svnsync sync %torepos%
Sit back and wait, or in my case, go to bed.

Sources of inspiration:

What Process

Site Administrator — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 23:00:00 +0000

< ![CDATA[Tool for understanding what processes are running on your Windows PC
Click Here…]]>

Running Asterisk@Home Under Windows

martin — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 23:00:00 +0000

Short article on running Asterisk under VMWare and Centos on Windows
Click Here…

Rsync for Windows

martin — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 23:00:00 +0000

How to use the useful Unix rsync utilities on Windows
Click Here…

Zeroconf / mDNS / Bonjour

martin — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 17:30:16 +0000

I have just discovered a whole area of IP based LAN technology I knew nothing about until this week! It’s known by various names including Zeroconfig, mDNS and Bonjour and I think this has the potential to completely change home networking.

I have been toying with setting up a DNS server at home to resolve all the host names for the machines on my local LAN, but in my research I spotted a suggestion to use Zeroconfig instead. After a bit of digging I realised this stuff looks very good.

What ever you call it, Bonjour essentially does 3 things: IP address allocation without DHCP (in the range 169.254.x.x), host name resolution without a DNS server or local hosts files (Multicast DNS) and dynamic service discovery (which is more than just IP address lookups, this is IP address, protocol and port; so a device could, for example, advertise it has a live camera feed available via http on a particular port – very slick).

It appears that Apple are leading this effort and brand it under the name Bonjour. So Mac’s already have this technology built in. If you’ve used iTunes and accessed a shared iTunes library on another machine then you’ve already used Bonjour, even if you are on Windows. On Linux there are a couple of implementations, howl (which seems to be almost dead) and avahi/nss-mdns. I installed the latter on my Ubuntu server and it works perfectly.

For Windows, Apple have released Bonjour for Windows. It looks like it just does printer sharing but it definitely also does host name resolution via mDNS. The other good thing is that it a free download. I don’t suppose Vista has it built in, it would be so unlike Microsoft to actually follow a standard espcially since this one is designed by Apple.

The architect behind the whole thing is Stuart Cheshire from Apple, and there is a good video of him presenting Bonjour and zeroconfig on Google Video.

Some other good links are :
http://www.ifcx.org/wiki/LocalNetworking.html (good overview)
http://avahi.org (Linux)
http://0pointer.de/lennart/projects/nss-mdns (Linux)
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/bonjour (Mac and Windows)
http://files.zeroconf.org/rfc3927.txt (IP address allocation)

Running Asterisk@Home Under Windows

Site Administrator — Tue, 20 Dec 2005 07:11:04 +0000

Short tutorial from Voipspeak on running Asterisk under VMWare and Centos on Windows.

Click Here…

Getting Your Bluetooth Headset to Work in Windows XP

Site Administrator — Wed, 25 May 2005 10:10:12 +0000

from WindowsDevCenter.com:

If you are the owner of a Bluetooth headset, you will be glad to know that besides using it with your cellular phone, you can also use it together with your Windows XP PC. However, you may have attempted to pair up the headset with your PC only to find out that the built-in Bluetooth stack in Windows XP Service Pack 2 does not support the headset.

Click Here for more…