Nearly Compiled...

A blog for recording my triumphs and struggles when doing geek, so that someone else may start a step ahead if they try to do the same.

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Wikipedia SOPA

So Wikipedia has gone down to campaign against SOPA. Or has it?

A quick view of the page source code shows the article is still there, and intact. Some people have even written scripts to return your page to normal.

I wonder why they took the site "down" this way... Maybe because they want to keep the non-english Wikipedias up?

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32bit apps on Ubuntu 64bit

I was trying to run a lighting control application, MagicQ, in my 64 bit Ubuntu 11.10 virtual machine. It gave me this nice error message:

./magicq: error while loading shared libraries: libusb-0.1.so.4: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64

Turns out the problem was due to MagicQ, being a 32bit app, requiring a 32bit version of libusb for it to work - I only had the 64bit compiled library. This hadn't been a problem in Ubuntu 10.4, so perhaps Ubuntu's developers are choosing to put fewer 32bit libraries in its latest 64bit releases?

So how do you get hold of a 32bit library on a 64bit machine when apt-get tries to compile everything for your 64bit architecture? Well luckily someone created a bash script called getlibs to handle this. You can find at http://frozenfox.freehostia.com/cappy/. Download the .deb file and double click it to install with Ubuntu software centre.

This then allowed me to run in terminal:

getlibs libusb.so

Which nicely installed a 32bit version of libusb and all its dependancies! 

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Geektool: Currency Conversion

I sell stock music on a site Audiojungle, and wanted to display my account balance on my desktop using Geektool. Trouble is, it's all in US dollars, and I'd like to know what that means in my currency, GBP. This shell script I came up with, filled with regex goodness, fetches and converts my balance to display it on my desktop.

Audiojungle provides a JSON feed of the current balance through their API, like this:

{"vitals":{"balance":"51.06","username":"user"}}

So after extracting that number from the JSON, the shell script strips the currency rates from the European Central Bank's XML feed. It then uses 'bc', a calculator which can evaluate expressions, to convert and round the final value.

envatojson=$(curl http://marketplace.envato.com/api/v3/USER/APICODE/vitals.json) balance=$(echo $envatojson | sed 's/.*"balance":"\([^"]*\)".*/\1/') currxml=$(curl http://www.ecb.int/stats/eurofxref/eurofxref-daily.xml) usd=$(echo $currxml | sed "s/.*'USD' rate='\([^']*\)'.*/\1/") gbp=$(echo $currxml | sed "s/.*'GBP' rate='\([^']*\)'.*/\1/") echo "scale=2; $balance*$gbp/$usd" | bc | sed 's/\(.*\).*/£\1/'

Next version will take into account the chunk PayPal creams off when I try to withdraw it! -.-