Michael Conigliaro

So I’ve been toying with the idea of setting up WordPress to syndicate content from other sites I contribute to. Unfortunately, there seems to be a bug in the FeedWordPress plugin that prevents you from using feed URLs containing ampersands. Doing so results in an error like this:

Diagnostic information
 
HTTP request failure
 
400: Bad Request
 
HTTP Transports available:
 
    1. WP_Http_Fsockopen

Apparently, I’m not the only one who has encountered this issue, but I did discover a workaround. Just change all the ampersands in your feed URL to the HTML entity equivalent. Example:

http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/base/users/whatever/uploads?orderby=published&safeSearch=none

Becomes…

http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/base/users/whatever/uploads?orderby=published&safeSearch=none

The xen-vm-autosnapshot.py script has been updated. It can now accept strings for –log-level (e.g. –log-level=debug), and the –test option has been renamed to –dry-run (since that’s the convention everyone else in the world seems to be used to).

Some of you have been asking about the problem where snapshots get locked and can’t be deleted from NetApp volumes. Unfortunately, this appears to be related to the way the XenServer API interacts with NetApp’s DATA OnTap API. Unless someone out there can enlighten me, I don’t think there’s much we can do, other than wait for Citrix to fix their API. =(

For various reasons (mostly to correct past mistakes), I decided I needed to start re-ripping my CD collection. Unfortunately, the default settings in K3b are not to my liking, and I’m sick of having to look things up to re-configure this, so I’m going to document my preferred settings here once and for all:

K3b Ripped files pattern

%A/%T/%a - %n - %t

LAME command
Advice taken from Hydrogenaudio’s recommended encoder settings:

lame -V0 --tt %t --ta %a --tl %m --ty %y --tc %c --tn %n - %f

K3b external audio encoder settings for LAME
On my machine, LAME will not encode properly without these options:

• Swap Byte Order
• Write Wave Header

A new version of SMTP Tester has been released with some minor bug fixes and miscellaneous code refactoring.

Since I keep finding SMTP Tester so useful, I figured I should finish it up, create the obligatory Win32 installer, and release it to the world. The only issue I’m having right now is that the Win32 executable created by py2exe is HUGE (~17MB). Luckily, the resulting NSIS package is only ~4MB, but even that seems pretty ridiculous for what the tool is/does. Needless to say, I’m very interested in suggestions for compressing this down further.