Welcome to PreshWeb

Thanks for visiting PreshWeb, my own little corner of the web.

This site contains some permanent content, but a lot of new content that I create gets posted to my Wordpress-powered blog, and on my wiki for technical notes etc.

Linux Stuff - I've become a great fan of Linux and Open Source software in general, using it extensively both at work and at home. In this section of my site, I'm going to gather together a lot of useful information, guides, scripts and tools etc. Basically, I want to give back whatever I can to the Open Source community.

My online Photo Albums - I've got quite a few photos online already, and I'll be adding more as I take them, and more older photos as I get time to scan / upload them.

Latest Blog Posts

• Where my photos end up?
  

  I tried out DuckDuckGo today, and of course one of the things you’ll often use to test a search engine is to search for your own name / online nick for a little bit of egosurfing, and I was surprised just how widely some of my photos

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• Domestic appliance repairs in Stevenage & Herts
  

  Just a quick plug for my future brother-in-law, who has gone self-employed doing domestic appliance repairs in/around Stevenage, repairing cookers, washing machine, tumble dryers etc.

  I knocked up a basic site for him, and figured linking t

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• pQuery ? jQuery-like fun in Perl
  

  I discovered pQuery the other day, and had been meaning to try it out.

  I got the chance to use it today, and I have to say, I’m impressed. I am, however, rather wary that the last release was nearly two years ago; I’m not sure

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• Atlas Direct will weasel out of travel insurance claims due to volcanic ash
  

  In light of the recent flight disruptions caused by volcanic ash, I decided to enquire as to whether my travel insurance provider, Atlas Direct, would attempt to weasel out of claims should we be hit by problems (we don’t travel until

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• Perl dead? Not by a long shot?
  

  With 1162 distributions uploaded to CPAN last month the highest ever – modern Perl is still going strong!

  (See also isperldead.com for another opinion…. )

  Traditionally, the Perl community has been fairly quiet – probabl

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• Dancer::Plugin::Database ? easy DB connections for Dancer apps
  

  Last night I finished and released the first version of Dancer::Plugin::Database, a plugin for the Dancer web framework to provide easy database connections using the venerable DBI.

  It takes the database connection details from the app conf

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• Resizing ext2/3 filesystem in loop file
  

  Quick post, mostly for my own future reference, as I couldn’t quite remember how to resize an ext3 filesystem contained in a file.

  dd if=/dev/zero of=disk.img bs=1M count=1024 oflag=append conv=notrunc e2fsck -f disk.img resize2fs di...
  
• Facebook ? become a fan
  

  via theweaselking

  
  
• Several Perl scripts released to Github
  

  I’ve been playing with Github lately, and rather liking it.

  I did briefly try it about a year ago, and was impressed, but wasn’t driven enough to consider moving away from Subversion.

  I tried it out more when I started contribut

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• Dancer 1.150 released ? a flexible, lightweight web framework for Perl
  

  Version 1.150 of the Dancer web framework has just been released, so this seemed like a good time to write up this post.

  Recently, I’ve been wanting to find a Perl web framework that I really got on with. I’ve used Catalyst, wh

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• Users don?t like new ?Facebook login page??
  

  Seems a lot of clueless users have been trying to get to Facebook by searching for “facebook login” rather than going to Facebook, and landing on a blog post titled Facebook wants to be your one true login from ReadWriteWeb, not

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• *Yoink* Om nom nom?
  

  (via theweaselking)

  
  
• Custom Bash completions for lazy bastards
  

  At $work, we have a log server, where the current day’s logs from a given machine are stored in, e.g. /logs/machinename/year/month/day/. In a moment of yak shaving, I added a function to my .profile, named cdmachinelogs to allow me t

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• Newsflash: America not centre of world
  

  KFC advertisement in Australia sparks race row

  The Australian arm of the fast food chain Kentucky Fried Chicken has had to withdraw an advertisement after accusations of racial insensitivity.

  [...]

  When the advertisement reached Americ

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• A little windy? Metcheck fail
  

  Hmm, Metcheck seem to think it’s going to get a little breezy next week:

  Forecasting 305mph winds on Wednesday night? That would be rather far off the wrong end of the Beaufort scale, and I don’t think my fence would take kind

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$ grep "beer" /dev/fridge > mouth