MicMek’s Blog

After trying to run an Apache webserver for a while now… I finally figured out what’s wrong.

Firstly, I couldn’t detect if it was a firewall blocking problem or a user not having the right privilages to run a webserver.

With the help of google I discovered a command that lets you find all the the ports open on your computer and the PID’s of each process so that you can kill that process.

Run NETSTAT -ano on the command line and write down the PID number, of the port that is open that you want free.
From a task manager you can see what process is having the PID, and you can tell which program is using that port.

In my situation it was skype that was using up port 80. Arrghh

Hope this comes in good use!

OK.. this might be a shock for some people but my real name is Michael not Bill. As funny as it sounds, I’ve had someone come up to me one time and ask me “Why do people call you Michael?”
I’ve been called Bill ever since like year 9 or something, which makes that nickname about… hmm.. 8 years old. The classic question I always get is “How do you get Bill from Michael?” And my response is “Bill Gates” and there like “ohhhhh.. hahaha” and yea hehe.

So anyway I love the name Bill. However lately I’ve been getting about 5 phone calls per week purely computer trouble shooting related and going on MSN for me = opening a IT hotline.

Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t mind helping people out, in fact I love it. But I don’t have all the solutions to every single computer related problem (I wish I did though) hehe.

So I came to the conclusion that people come to me for help not because I know all the solutions but because they think “hmm… computer not working… ah yes.. I’ll call Bill!” thinking that Bill is the performer of computer miracles. But clearly I don’t have all the solutions. So if you have ever come to me and I’ve tried to help you out but I couldn’t figure out the solution then I’m sorry and I really hope that you didn’t just throw your computer out the window in frustration lol.

This week I decided to keep track of how many people called me up for computer related problems. I got 1 on Sunday Night relating to storing video, 1 on Monday Night to recover a Word document, 1 on Wednesday Night to fix up Ethernet Driver and Thursday during the day to fix a monitor that keeps turning off. That’s just off the top of my head.

So after careful consideration I have decided to change my name from Bill to Michael. =)

By: Fr Samaan El Souriany

St Shenouda Monastery, with the Kind permission of the translators and after a long time being out of print, has reprinted “The Hermit Fathers”. If you are interested in buying copies for your bookshop or youth group please email us. An excerpt Hermit Fathers Excerpt which is made out of, The Table of contents, and the lives of two of those great saints can be seen here.

The Hermit Fathers is an account of the virtuous asceticism and admirable ways of life of the holy and blessed wilderness fathers. They are meant to inspire and instruct those who want to imitate their heavenly lives, so that they may make progress on the way that leads to the kingdom of heaven. The holy fathers who were the initiators and masters of the blessed monastic way of life, being entirely on fire with divine and heavenly love and counting as nothing at all that men hold to be beautiful and estimable, trained themselves on earth to do nothing whatsoever out of vainglory. They hid themselves away, and by their supreme humility in keeping most of their good works hidden, they made progress on the way that leads to God. Moreover, no one has been able to describe their virtuous lives for us in detail, for those who have taken the greatest pains in this matter have only committed to writing a few fragments of their more admirable deeds and words.  In this book you will find twenty eight examples of the lives of those Holy men and women which are sweeter than honey and honeycomb.

The price of the book is

1-49 Copies AUD $ 8.00 Each + Shipping
50 and over AUD $ 6.00 Each + Shipping

Title: The Hermit Fathers
Author: Fr Samaan El Souriany
Binding: Perfect Bound
Trim Size: 215mm x 140 mm
No of Pages: 192 Pages
Weight: 250 g

I’ve been looking at Social Networking for a while now, and I think there is definitely a need for this among the Coptic Orthodox community.

There is a lot of benefits too, such as:

• Youth get to enjoy each others company under the umbrella of the church
• A church directory can be built up easily
• Youth groups can be formed and a youth database achieved through this
• Central place for all copts
• Library of resources eg. sermons, photos, events can be shared amongst all chuches world wide

An example of this vision is seen in MyChurch.org where they are implementing a social network for all churches world wide. This article “A private social network for your church” shows there vision.

Another point I would like to mention:

• Social networking sites such as Bebo/My Space tend to have a negative impact on young adolescent youth since they are put into a social environment where there are no adults and they can do what they want. Hence swearing, sexual images, worldly music are “normal”.

My Dream

Here is some brainstorming I did on an ideal Coptic Social Network Site that I would love to be implemented.

• Events
  • RSVP
  • Photos of events afterwards
• Friends
• Monasteries
• Diocese
  • Bishop
  • Churches
    • Fathers
    • Sunday School Class of XX
    • Other Groups
      • Choir
      • Deacons
    • Youth Groups
      • Servants
      • Photos
      • Events
    • Photos
    • Events
• Organisations
  • Events
• Profile
  • Avatar
  • Pictures
  • Family Tree
  • Messages
• News
• Saints
• Resources
  • Audio
    • Sermons
    • Hymns
  • Books
  • Presentations

Due to the hard nature of building something like this, I think MyChurch.org is the best one that fits this criteria so far. Ning.com has been up there too, but it serves more of a general social networking site rather than church specific.

Let me know your opinions.

God Bless

I was looking at my favourite blogger http://anchorite.org and I found out about another coptic techy blogger http://dbebawy.wordpress.com .

But what’s really amazing is that David has started a CTech community for all Copts to help out with technology amongst each other and share ideas.

“Ctech stands for Coptic Technology. Ctech refers to all the technology that can be implemented in both our churches and their ministry.”

More information can be found here

This is such an excellent idea! I’ve been wanting something like this for a while now since it is a lot of effort to learn about technical stuff.. and once you do.. you can only share it with one church. It would be far more better to share it with a group of technical copts from all around the world to benefit all churches internationally.

May God Bless this new ministry and I’m sure it will be successful!!

There is also a Google Group for it.. hmmm.. I wana start the facebook group hehehe =)

Today I am going to put some basic tools to make my desktop look good.

The two tools I will use are from the PunkLabs website.

• UberIcons
• RocketDock

UberIcons creates a visual effect when double clicking an icon, which may not seem that useful. RocketDock is more useful. It is similar to the QuickLaunch toolbar for Windows XP, but with more custom visualisations. The disadvantage is that it doesn’t read shortcuts from a standard folder, as was a feature with quicklaunch toolbars before.

Here are some useful stuff I need to blog about just in case I need to find them again. Also, some side notes to help me get to know linux better

Copying problem

when you are copying a folder to another place and you want to rename that folder then DONT create that folder first!!
eg.
If I have /home/micmek/testA and I want to copy it to /home/micmek/workingA
If folder workingA already exists then

cp /home/micmek/testA /home/micmek/workingA

will produce

/home/micmek/workingA/testA

but if the folder doesnt exist then the SAME command will produce

/home/micmek/workingA

Links

Symbolic Links vs. Hard Links

Symbolic links point to the file/folder path
Hard links find the Inode that the file is pointing to and points to the same Inode (Data/Content)
Folders have to be symbolic link

ln -s /usr/local/Adobe/bin/acroread acroread

Useful commands

Exiting SSH

Type ~. and you will exit ssh

Boot Log

To find out the log messages from your the booting up of linux ie. all the hardware info type

dmesg

This is useful for mounting purposes too.

Paths

To find out where a file that you commonly execute is in the path structure type the following

whereis cat

Find string in path

To find a certain pattern in a set of files then type

find . | xargs grep 'XXX'

This returns all the files that contain that string

Size of folder

To find the size of a folder type (uses the Disk Usage command)

du -ks PATH

File Permissions

Confusing as it is it’s pretty simple

chmod OGO file

Where OGO is a 3 digit number.
O-Owner G-Group O-Other Users
4 = READ || 2 = WRITE || 1 = EXECUTE
So if you want a file to be

Changes owner of file

chown USER file

Mounting

List of mounted devices

To find out what has been mounted type df

df

Mounting & Unmounting

To mount type

mount -t TYPE /dev/DEVICE PATHmount -t vfat /dev/sdb /mnt/usb

To unmount type

umount PATHumount /mnt/usb

Mounting & Unmounting SSH path

To mount a sshfs type

sshfs HOST:PATH TARGETsshfs example.com:/stuff /media/home-pc

To unmount type

fusermount -u PATHfusermount -u /media/home-pc

More Info here:
how to mount a remote ssh file system using sshfs

Services

Services are started and stopped through the following command:

/etc/init.d/SERVICE start/etc/init.d/SERVICE stop

Linux Folder structure

Logs are kept under

/var/logs/XXX

Software is usually installed under

/usr/local

Package

To install a package use

sudo apt-get install XXX

To install a package use

sudo apt-cache search XXX

To find out where a package is installed type

dpkg -L XXX
Useful Links

http://www.er.uqam.ca/nobel/r10735/unixcomm.html#tth_sEc2

I just found out some cool tricks in Cywgin and Putty.

1. I know how to store passwords now using
PuTTY Key Generator
PLink
This is done by generating a public key and putting it onto your server under ~/.ssh/autherizationkeys
and putting the private key anywhere on your computer and then pointing to it from the PuTTy Configuration “Private Key file Authentication”

2. I now know how to create a SSH Daemon so that I can log into my computer’s ssh terminal.
check out this site…
http://qcwizards.chem.warwick.ac.uk/~yousaf/tips/cygwin/index.htm

another cool cygwin reference
http://www.astro.umd.edu/~harris/cygwin/

Pretty cool!

Hey People!!
I’ve been thinking about doing a website for my self for a while now. I did start one at this website http://micmek.is-a-geek.com but this only works when my computer is on… so that’s not good.. hmmm..

So, Tada…Here is the website that I will be using to broadcast what ever I want to say. I find it a good opportunity for me to start using blog posts as well as see what other people think of what I say.

My aim of this Blog post is to focus on two of my Hot Favourite topics… which are:

1. Coptic Church - Anything to do with this from Egypt affairs, Church Events, Youth Events, etc.
2. Techno - no… this is not music.. lol… anything to do with Technology (the dreaded word for some people)

So if you find an interest in either of these, or if you are forced to read some of my blogs because you hate Technology then I hope you have enjoy reading my awsomley kewl blogs! … now lets see if i can do a Smiley face in here… hmm I can’t anyway =)

Enjoy the Power of CoptoSoft!