The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Hosting Grumpydev Imageflair locally – part 2 – trying to get the text and images to display

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/04/12

Blank imageFlair

Blank imageFlair

Hosting Grumpydev Imageflair locally ended with two issues left: an empty image and my wish to include more complete StackExchange bits like the current StackExchange flair does.

I thought fixing the empty image would take a rainy day. It actually took a few rainy hours.

No text

The culprit is that I didn’t have the Microsoft Core Fonts for the Web installed. Which was no coincidence as the free download of those from Microsoft terminated in 2002. The upside is that because of their licenses, they are available as open source and most linux distributions have a script package that will download these fonts. OpenSuSE has fetchmsttfonts for this.

Alternatively, you can use the web.archive.org to download manually, but that’s a tad tedious. But if you love tedious: Free downloads – TrueType core fonts for the Web.

zypper install fetchmsttfonts

That installs the fonts in:

/usr/share/fonts/truetype

The drawback of having fetchmsttfonts is that the original Microsoft versions of these fonts are downloaded from corefonts.sourceforge.net each time the fetchmsttfonts package is updated, potentially overwriting newer versions of the fonts in that directory. If you don’t want that, use the trick at  (not yet archived at the WayBack machine) font handling – install fetchmsttfonts, copy fonts, rpm -e fethmsttfonts, copy fonts back.

Having the fonts installed, I thought the only thing I needed to fix were the multiple references in config.php from that pointed to Arial.TTF. I took the poor man’s approach and just did this being in the directory of config.php:

cp /usr/share/fonts/truetype/arial.ttf Arial.TTF

Filled Imageflair

That didn’t work either: still no text showed.

So I decided to run imageFlair.php from the command line after setting $imageflair_debug = true; in config.php which then resulted in all sorts of warnings like

PHP Warning: imagettftext(): Could not find/open font

After reading I decided to build a small php-gd.tester.php script containing phpinfo(); and gd_info showing these portions for PHP GD (non-relevant bits stripped):

Additional .ini files parsed /etc/php5/conf.d/ctype.ini,
/etc/php5/conf.d/dom.ini,
/etc/php5/conf.d/gd.ini,
/etc/php5/conf.d/iconv.ini,
/etc/php5/conf.d/json.ini,
/etc/php5/conf.d/mysql.ini,
/etc/php5/conf.d/mysqli.ini,
/etc/php5/conf.d/pdo.ini,
/etc/php5/conf.d/pdo_mysql.ini,
/etc/php5/conf.d/pdo_sqlite.ini,
/etc/php5/conf.d/sqlite3.ini,
/etc/php5/conf.d/tokenizer.ini,
/etc/php5/conf.d/xmlreader.ini,
/etc/php5/conf.d/xmlwriter.ini

gd

GD Support enabled
GD headers Version 2.1.1
GD library Version 2.1.1
FreeType Support enabled
FreeType Linkage with freetype
FreeType Version 2.6.3
GIF Read Support enabled
GIF Create Support enabled
JPEG Support enabled
libJPEG Version 8
PNG Support enabled
libPNG Version 1.6.21
WBMP Support enabled
XPM Support enabled
libXpm Version 30411
XBM Support enabled
WebP Support enabled

And the gd_info dump:


<?php
echo "<h1>gd_info</h1>";
$gdInfo = gd_info();
echo "<table>";
foreach($gdInfo as $key=>$value) {
echo "<tbody>";
echo "<tr>";
echo "<td class='e'>" . $key . "</td>";
echo "<td class='v'>" . $value . "</td>";
echo "</tbody>";
}
echo "</table>";
?>

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php-convert-gd_info-to-html.html

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GD Version 2.1.1
FreeType Support 1
FreeType Linkage with freetype
T1Lib Support
GIF Read Support 1
GIF Create Support 1
JPEG Support 1
PNG Support 1
WBMP Support 1
XPM Support 1
XBM Support 1
WebP Support 1
JIS-mapped Japanese Font Support

Too bad though: no information on where it sources the fonts from.

No image

Having no solution for the font rendering yet, I focussed at the lack of profile picture.

In the past, the images were generated with gravatar information in the JSON, but now that is empty. See for instance the output of http://superuser.com/users/flair/1.json versus his image http://superuser.com/users/flair/1.png


{
"id": 1,
"gravatarHtml": {
},
"profileUrl": "http:\/\/superuser.com\/users\/1\/jeff-atwood",
"displayName": "Jeff Atwood",
"reputation": "14,561",
"badgeHtml": "<span title=\"24 gold badges\"><span class=\"badge1\">&#9679;<\/span><span class=\"badgecount\">24<\/span><\/span><span title=\"79 silver badges\"><span class=\"badge2\">&#9679;<\/span><span class=\"badgecount\">79<\/span><\/span><span title=\"109 bronze badges\"><span class=\"badge3\">&#9679;<\/span><span class=\"badgecount\">109<\/span><\/span>"
}

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1.json

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That reveals quite a change in the JSON that imageFlair expects. Actually there is a lot of HTML in there.

So decided to try http://superuser.com/users/flair/1 in addition to http://superuser.com/users/flair/1.json with this result:


<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"&gt;
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"&gt;
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<style type="text/css">
.valuable-flair .userInfo .username a, .valuable-flair .mod-flair
{
color: #1086A4;
}
</style>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="//sstatic.net/flair-Default.css" />
</head>
<body>
<div class="valuable-flair">
<div class="gravatar">
<a title="See my profile on Super User" target="_blank" href="http://superuser.com/users/1/jeff-atwood"><div class="gravatar-wrapper-50"><img src="https://www.gravatar.com/avatar/51d623f33f8b83095db84ff35e15dbe8?s=50&amp;d=identicon&amp;r=PG&quot; alt="" width="50" height="50"></div></a>
</div>
<div class="userInfo">
<span class="username"><img src="http://superuser.com/favicon.ico&quot; width="16" /><a href="http://superuser.com/users/1/jeff-atwood&quot; target="_blank">Jeff Atwood</a><span class="mod-flair" title="moderator">&#9830;</span></span>
<br />
<span class="reputation-score" title="reputation score">14,561</span>
<br />
<span title="24 gold badges"><span class="badge1">&#9679;</span><span class="badgecount">24</span></span><span title="79 silver badges"><span class="badge2">&#9679;</span><span class="badgecount">79</span></span><span title="109 bronze badges"><span class="badge3">&#9679;</span><span class="badgecount">109</span></span>
</div>
</div>
</body>
</html>

view raw

1.html

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Two downsides here:

  1. This doesn’t work for the combined stackexchange flair: http://stackexchange.com/users/flair/1.png works, but http://stackexchange.com/users/flair/1 gives a 404.
  2. Rendering HTML servers side to PNG requires a lot of work.

Time for another rainy day (:

–jeroen

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, bash, Development, Linux, openSuSE, PHP, Pingback, Power User, Scripting, Software Development, Stackoverflow, SuSE Linux | Leave a Comment »

Having one Raspberry Pi reset another Raspberry Pi through relay or transistor

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/04/11

I’m going to build this later, but as the follow up on shortening the RUN pins of a Raspberry Pi to reset it in The woods and trees of OpenSuSE on single-board computers – image abbreviations – and getting it installed using OS X, I want to see if the below will work for me to have a pair (maybe trio?) of Raspberry Pi devices watch each other and reset any hung one.

The need comes because sometimes a Raspberry Pi either hangs or just won’t finish a reboot sequence:

Basically a Raspberry Pi has GPIO pins that can drive electromechanic (like mechanical relay) or electronic (like transistor+resistors or SSR solid-state relay). Examples:

So basic steps:

  1. Get switching gear (relay+diode, transistor+resistors or solid-state-relay)
  2. On each Pi modify the RUN holes so it has a header
  3. Connect header to switching gear
  4. Write watch-dog code to monitor other Pi and flip GPIO pin
  5. Test, test, test

And since I’m relatively new at electronics:

–jeroen

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Posted in *nix, Development, Hardware Development, Linux, openSuSE, Power User, Raspberry Pi, SuSE Linux | Leave a Comment »

Getting your local IPv4 addresses, netmasks and CIDRs

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/04/11

In order to scan some local networks for unknown hosts (yes, on some sites you need to perform archeology), I needed the local IPv4 addresses, netmasks and CIDRs on my Mac running OS X.

Part of that is using ifconfig to get local inet information which however uses hexadecimal network masks and delivers no CIDRs.

SoI was a bit premature when I wrote about “This could be done by creating bash functions mask2cdr and cdr2mask, but that’s a bit too convoluted right now” in Getting the IP addresses of gmail MX servers – via Super User – dig isn’t enough.

netmask to CIDR and CIDR to netmask conversion

I need mask2cdr now, so lets start with these two bash functions and their aliases:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, Apple, bash, Development, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, OS X 10.10 Yosemite, OS X 10.11 El Capitan, OS X 10.9 Mavericks, Power User, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

version control – How can I run “git status” and just get the filenames – Stack Overflow

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/04/10

git status --porcelain | sed s/^...//

Source: version control – How can I run “git status” and just get the filenames – Stack Overflow [WayBack]

–jeroen

Posted in Development, DVCS - Distributed Version Control, git, Software Development, Source Code Management | Leave a Comment »

Ext2 File System Driver for Windows download | SourceForge.net

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/04/10

If I ever need it: Ext2 File System Driver for Windows download | SourceForge.net

Posted in *nix, Linux, Power User, Windows | Leave a Comment »

127.0.1.1 in /etc/hosts for your hostname?

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/04/07

Coming from an OpenSuSE background, I was a bit surprised to find 127.0.1.1 in the /etc/hosts file to point to the hostname in Raspbian distributions.

It means you have to change at least these files when altering the hostname:

/etc/hosts
/etc/hostname

In addition to those, I also changed these:

/etc/ssh/ssh_host_rsa_key.pub
/etc/ssh/ssh_host_ecdsa_key.pub
/etc/ssh/ssh_host_dsa_key.pub
/etc/ssh/ssh_host_ed25519_key.pub
/etc/.git/description

After altering these files, you want to run this (via: Pi Town: Change a Raspberry Pi’s Hostname without Rebooting [WayBack])

sudo /etc/init.d/hostname.sh start

This prevents In order to prevent messages like sudo: unable to resolve host raspberrypi without rebooting.

The 127.0.0.1 seems to be a Debian thing: Chapter 5. Network setup – 5.1.1. The hostname resolution [WayBack] has

The IP address 127.0.1.1 in the second line of this example may not be found on some other Unix-like systems. The Debian Installer creates this entry for a system without a permanent IP address as a workaround for some software (e.g., GNOME) as documented in the bug #719621.

The <host_name> matches the hostname defined in the “/etc/hostname“.

For a system with a permanent IP address, that permanent IP address should be used here instead of 127.0.1.1.

For a system with a permanent IP address and a fully qualified domain name (FQDN) provided by the Domain Name System (DNS), that canonical <host_name>.<domain_name> should be used instead of just <host_name>.

via: linux – Why does my hostname appear with the address 127.0.1.1 rather than 127.0.0.1 in /etc/hosts? – Server Fault [WayBack]

There isn’t a great deal of difference between the two; 127/8 (eg: 127.0.0.0 => 127.255.255.255) are all bound to the loopback interface.

The reason why is documented in the Debian manual here:http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-reference/ch05.en.html#_the_hostname_resolution

Ultimately, it is a bug workaround; the original report is here: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=316099

–jeroen

Posted in *nix, Development, Hardware Development, Linux, openSuSE, Power User, Raspberry Pi, SuSE Linux | Leave a Comment »

Starting a command with one more more spaces prevents it from going into the bash history…

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/04/07

Learned about the -www switch for ps: extra extra “unlimited” wide (a single -w gets you 132 columns).

ps auxwww

Actually, there is no need for www, ww just works:

ps auxww

–jeroen

Source: Starting a command with one more more spaces prevents it from going into the…

Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, Power User, ps | Leave a Comment »

QCon London 2017: IoT insecurity, serverless computing, predicting technical debt, and why .NET Core depends on a 36,000 line C++ file « Tim Anderson’s ITWriting

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/04/07

A friend of mine is attending the QCon conference as well; I’m anxious to see his conference report and the future posts of Tim.

[WayBack] QCon London 2017: IoT insecurity, serverless computing, predicting technical debt, and why .NET Core depends on a 36,000 line C++ file « Tim Anderson’s ITWriting

via [WayBack] QCon London 2017 day 1 – tim anderson – Google+

–jeroen

Posted in Development, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Some great StackOverflow / StackExchange bash tips

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/04/06

Found these then trying to create a new feature for https://github.com/Hexxeh/rpi-update:

–jeroen

Posted in bash, Development, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Hosting Grumpydev Imageflair locally

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/04/06

Even though StackOverflow and StackExchange now have implemented their own ImageFlair, I still like the original imageFlair that Grumpydev made at Stack Overflow – Share Your Flair – Now in PNG! | GrumpyDev

Grumpydev Imageflair

Stackoverflow imageflair

Stackoverflow imageflair

Alas, the Grumpydev site doesn’t properly support https and Grumpydev cannot change it because of shared hosting limitations, so I wanted to host ImageFlair locally and even see if I could make it StackExchange aware:

Stackexchange flair

Stackexchange flair

Well, I need to do that propertly another time as the first thing I bumped into was this:

PHP Fatal error: Call to undefined function imagecreatefrompng() in /srv/www/vhosts/pluimers.com-ssl/stackoverflow/imageFlair/imageFlair.php on line 42

For now I’ve fixed the first by installing php5-gd (although an SO answer suggests php-gd, openSuSE uses the php-version number for installing modules).

zypper install php5-gd
php -m
rcapache2 stop
rcapache2 start
rcapache2 status

This will install the module, check with php if it is indeed installed, then restart apache to let it use the updated module.

After that, I bumped into a second thing: the image is blank.

Blank imageFlair

Blank imageFlair

I also bumped into a third thing: the .htaccess file rewrite doesn’t work:

https://www.pluimers.com/stackoverflow/imageFlair/so/1.png gave me a 404 error whereas https://www.pluimers.com/stackoverflow/imageFlair/imageFlair.php?userid=1&mode=so “works” (i.e. generates a blank image).

That one was sort of easy to solve.

First of all, apparently I didn’t have all the required apache modules installed. The not-so-easy part is that apache uses two different aliases for modules: the ones listed by apache2ctl -M 2>&1 | sort are in a different format than the ones you mention in .htaccess and .conf files. Oh and of course the -M (nor the -t -D DUMP_MODULES) aren’t listed ore hinted in the apachectl documentation: that would be too easy. They are listed in the httpd2 documentation.

The .htaccess file needs mod_rewrite and mod_expires, but apache2ctl names them rewrite_module and expires_module.

Enabling these was easy, but you have to remember that a2enmod strips the prefix/suffix of the module name (I already had expires_module (shared) installed so this only shows how to enable mod_rewrite):

a2enmod rewrite
rcapache2 stop
rcapache2 start
rcapache2 status

NB: mod_rewrite wasn’t enable by default and before enabling it, read about the risks of mod_rewrite.

Then it still didn’t work, and then it occurred to me that likely I didn’t even have Apache2 allow for using .htaccess as the regexes in the .htaccess were fine. And indeed: .htaccess wasn’t enabled according to the steps at Making sure .htaccess and mod_rewrite are working as they should | Bolt Documentation. And indeed, the Apache documentation indicates when (not) to use .htaccess.

By setting the AllowOverride to both FileInfo as specified by RewriteRule and Indexes as specified by ExpiresActive (trying to refrain from AllowOverride All) for only this specific directory, I think I struck the right balance:


<Directory "/srv/www/vhosts/pluimers.com-ssl/stackoverflow/imageFlair">
# for .htaccess in that directory
AllowOverride FileInfo Indexes
</Directory>

view raw

AllowOverride-for-one-particular-directory-with-htaccess.conf

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And the final thing is that the logic around StackExchange flair is a tad more complex than I hoped for. And on that bombshell…

–jeroen

Posted in *nix, Apache2, Development, Linux, openSuSE, PHP, Power User, Scripting, Software Development, SuSE Linux | 1 Comment »

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