compbrain.net

Quick note for myself and anyone else looking to replace lighttpd or apache2 with nginx for serving php (ala wordpress):
http://frankkumro.com/2009/01/03/ubuntu-nginx-and-php5/

Will Hacking nginx, php5, ubuntu, webserver

Recently I was given a video by a friend in AVI format that caused trouble when playing it on my Neuros OSD. When I watched the video on my laptop with mplayer, everything was fine, but when you tried to seek with the Neuros it reported a video 16 minutes in length instead of the full hour it should have been. Poking around the internet I found the following solution: Use mencoder to rebuild the AVI index, and write it out to a new copy of the video.


$ mencoder -forceidx input.avi -o output.avi -oac copy -ovc copy
$ mv output.avi input.avi


After that, the new input.avi should be playable, and seeking should work properly again.

Will Hacking avi, fixit, mplayer, ubuntu, video

Today at school we finally fixed a nit that had been bothering me since about the time I arrived. For historical reasons our college mail server holds the A record for the college domain name. For that reason, attempts to access http://ccs.neu.edu instead of http://www.ccs.neu.edu ended up displaying an error page.

Since the primary purpose of the server in question is to handle e-mail, no webserver was installed. After stumbling upon http://aleksandarsavic.com/nginx-redirect-wwwexamplecom-requests-to-examplecom-or-vice-versa/ I whipped up a 6 line config for nginx, and deployed it on the machine. nginx is lightweight enough to be installed specifically for this purpose without making a drastic impact on the machines other tasks.

Here is our config:
## Redirector for ccs.neu.edu
server {
listen 80;
server_name ccs.neu.edu;
access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log;
rewrite ^(.*) http://www.ccs.neu.edu$1 permanent;
}


Will Hacking nginx, school, webserver