Aidan Finn's home page 2008-10-17T14:05:23+01:00 Aidan Finn http://aidanf.net/ tag:aidanf.net,2008-10-17:1224244456 2008-10-17T12:54:16+01:00 <h3>Desperately seeking ... AC/DC tickets</h3> <p>I'm a huge music fan. I own a lot of albums and I've been to a lot of gigs. I've seen most of my favourite bands live. But the one band in the world that I haven't seen live that I really want to are AC/DC.</p> <p>They were the first band that really got me into music. I remember seeing <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvoeeq-BH4w">Thunderstruck</a> on the beat-box when I was about 12. I wasn't into music much at that stage but I was blown away and I spent all my savings on getting their entire back catalogue. That was the start of a long and expensive interest in collecting music.</p> <p>AC/DC announced a couple of days ago that they would play in Dublin in April. I knew these tickets would sell out quickly so I was sitting at my computer at 9am today refreshing the ticket****** website. I managed to get into the queue for tickets but they sold out before I got one. Actually they sold out in <em>less than 2 minutes</em>. Of myself, my brother and 2 friends who were all trying to get tickets none of us managed to get any.</p> <p>So I'm posting this in the slim hope that someone out there has a couple of spare tickets. I'd be eternally grateful and you'd get that warm fuzzy feeling from knowing you helped someone realize one of their lifelong ambitions. If you can help me out please <a href="/contact">get in touch</a>.</p> <p>And congratulations to all the lucky fans who got tickets.</p> <p>P.S. I hope bad things happen to the scalper scum that bought tickets just for the purposes of selling them at an inflated price. I did a quick web search and some Irish websites are already offering tickets for €300 each. </p> <div id="disqus_thread"></div><script type="text/javascript" src="http://disqus.com/forums/aidanf/embed.js"></script><noscript><a href="http://aidanf.disqus.com/?url=ref">View the discussion thread.</a></noscript><a href="http://disqus.com" class="dsq-brlink">blog comments powered by <span class="logo-disqus">Disqus</span></a> <img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/aidanf/~4/423670449" height="1" width="1"/> http://aidanf.net/posts/desperately-seeking-acdc-tickets.html tag:aidanf.net,2008-10-16:1224160599 2008-10-16T13:36:39+01:00 <h3>Archiving a dynamic site as static content</h3> <h6>(And making pretty urls for static content)</h6> <p>I recently archived <a href="/posts/old_site_archived.html">archived</a> my old drupal site by creating a static copy of it. Thus for every url that existed in the old site there now exists a static page in the archive directory with the html extension. </p> <p>So the page that once existed at <code>/rails</code> now exists at <code>/archive/rails.html</code></p> <p>Getting a html static archive of your site is fairly easy. If your blogging software uses a static page cache, then you can use the contents of that page cache and hammer your site with wget to generate the cache for every page. Mephisto does this caching by default. For drupal the <a href="http://drupal.org/project/boost">boost module</a> will implement a static page cache. Most good blogging platforms have a way of generating a static cache of the site. Alternatively you could do it yourself using <code>wget -mirror</code>.</p> <p>Once you have a static archive generated you need to ensure that these files are served for all the urls that are associated with your old site. The easiest way to do this is to check if the archive contains a file with the requested path and a html extension and if so, serve it up.</p> <p>Below is an set of apache rewrite rules for doing this.</p> <p>This works by checking each request for an archived file:</p> <ol> <li>If there exists a document that matches the requested path with .html appended serve that. This catches all unarchived content that is statically cached.</li> <li>If there exists a document in the archive directory that matches the requested path with .html appended serve that. This catches all the archived html pages.</li> <li>If there exists an item in the archive directory that matches the requested path then serve that. This catches archived images, css, pdfs etc.</li> </ol> <div class="CodeRay"><pre> RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/%{REQUEST_URI}.html -f RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /$1.html [L] RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/%{REQUEST_URI}.html !-f RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/archive/%{REQUEST_URI}.html -f RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /archive/$1.html [L] RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/%{REQUEST_URI} !-f RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/archive/%{REQUEST_URI} -f RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /archive/$1 [L] </pre></div> <div id="disqus_thread"></div><script type="text/javascript" src="http://disqus.com/forums/aidanf/embed.js"></script><noscript><a href="http://aidanf.disqus.com/?url=ref">View the discussion thread.</a></noscript><a href="http://disqus.com" class="dsq-brlink">blog comments powered by <span class="logo-disqus">Disqus</span></a> <img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/aidanf/~4/422753523" height="1" width="1"/> http://aidanf.net/posts/archiving_dynamic_site_with_static_pages.html tag:aidanf.net,2008-10-09:1223549143 2008-10-09T11:45:43+01:00 <h3>Top posts from the archive</h3> <p>I've in the process of moving to a new blogging setup (and a new server). If you notice any bugs with the site please <a href="/contact">let me know</a>. Rather than migrate all my old posts over I've just archived them as static pages. You can browse the <a href="/archive">archive</a> of the old site <a href="/archive">here</a>.</p> <p>Since I'm archiving all these pages I had a look at my google analytics stats for the last couple of years. Here are the top ten posts from the archive.</p> <ol> <li><a href="http://aidanf.net/rails_user_authentication_tutorial">Basic User Authentication in Rails</a></li> <li><a href="http://aidanf.net/adding-a-rich-text-editor-to-your-rails-application">Adding a Rich Text Editor to your Rails Application</a></li> <li><a href="http://aidanf.net//rails/creating-your-own-generators-in-rails">Creating your own generators in rails</a></li> <li><a href="http://aidanf.net//blog/a-list-of-interesting-erlang-links">A list of interesting Erlang links</a></li> <li><a href="http://aidanf.net//clearwire-broadband-in-ireland-its-getting-worse">Clearwire Broadband in Ireland - It's getting worse</a></li> <li><a href="http://aidanf.net//blog/2007/11/22/moving-subversion-git-revision-control">Moving from Subversion to Git for revision control</a></li> <li><a href="http://aidanf.net//deploying-rails-on-a-clean-ubuntu-slicehost-vps">Deploying rails on a clean ubuntu slicehost VPS</a></li> <li><a href="http://aidanf.net//blog/learning-erlang">Learning Erlang</a></li> <li><a href="http://aidanf.net//miscellaneous/installing-drupal-on-freebsd">Installing Drupal on FreeBSD</a></li> <li><a href="http://aidanf.net//tools-and-tips-for-completing-a-postgraduate-degree-in-computer-science">Tools and tips for completing a postgraduate degree in Computer Science</a></li> </ol> <div id="disqus_thread"></div><script type="text/javascript" src="http://disqus.com/forums/aidanf/embed.js"></script><noscript><a href="http://aidanf.disqus.com/?url=ref">View the discussion thread.</a></noscript><a href="http://disqus.com" class="dsq-brlink">blog comments powered by <span class="logo-disqus">Disqus</span></a> <img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/aidanf/~4/415836175" height="1" width="1"/> http://aidanf.net/posts/old_site_archived.html tag:aidanf.net,2008-10-09:1223552743 2008-10-09T12:45:43+01:00 <h3>Site update</h3> <p>I'm rejigging this site. </p> <p>Step 1: New minimalist theme.</p> <p>Step 2: New server and new blogging software setup.</p> <p>Step 3: <strike>Profit</strike>, Start blogging again.</p> <p>I'm still working through the kinks so in the meantime check out the <a href="http://www.aidanf.net/archive">archive</a> and the <a href="/posts/old_site_archived.html">top posts from the archive</a>.</p> <div id="disqus_thread"></div><script type="text/javascript" src="http://disqus.com/forums/aidanf/embed.js"></script><noscript><a href="http://aidanf.disqus.com/?url=ref">View the discussion thread.</a></noscript><a href="http://disqus.com" class="dsq-brlink">blog comments powered by <span class="logo-disqus">Disqus</span></a> <img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/aidanf/~4/415836176" height="1" width="1"/> http://aidanf.net/posts/new_site.html tag:aidanf.net,2008-10-16:1224148501 2008-10-16T10:15:01+01:00 <h3>Disabling genre in iTunes</h3> <p> I find the genre tab in the iTunes browser useless so I don't use it. There was a setting in preferences to prevent it being displayed. But after updating to the latest version of iTunes I found that the genre tab is showing up again in the browser and there is way of disabling it in the iTunes preferences. </p> <p> As usual, the command line comes to the rescue. Enter the command below and restart iTunes. </p> <code></code> <div class="CodeRay"><pre>defaults write com.apple.itunes show-genre-when-browsing -bool FALSE </pre></div><div id="disqus_thread"></div><script type="text/javascript" src="http://disqus.com/forums/aidanf/embed.js"></script><noscript><a href="http://aidanf.disqus.com/?url=ref">View the discussion thread.</a></noscript><a href="http://disqus.com" class="dsq-brlink">blog comments powered by <span class="logo-disqus">Disqus</span></a> <img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/aidanf/~4/422485692" height="1" width="1"/> http://aidanf.net/posts/disable-genre-in-itunes.html