BBC iPlayer desktop won't open (Solved)

Missed Dr. Who and Top Gear so went to catch up with i-player but i-player wouldn't start on the laptop.

Looking at Task-Manager "BBC iPlayer Desktop.exe" would appear in the list but the interface wouldn't open.
I went through the usual, uninstall/reinstall with iPlayer and then Adobe Air and it still failed to load.

Turns out the solution was to completely uninstall iPlayer then navigate to %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming and delete the folder BBCiPlayerDesktop.* in this folder.
Next navigate to %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Air\Els and delete the BBCiPlayerDesktop folder.

Now re-install iPlayer and with any luck it will work again (it did for me)


P.S. you don't have to, but if you found the above tip useful then consider liking my brother's facebook page www.facebook.com/seaharris

--
Thanks
M.P.

Ubuntu netbook problems playing AAC encoded audio.

Had to repair a netbook for on of my friends kids, their windows xp key was unreadable so thought I would install Ubuntu Netbook edition instead.

Only problem was that when playing back any AAC / MP4 encoded audio 'totem' would crash with following errors

pa_stream_cork() failed

pa_stream_writable_size() connection failed

Quick search lead me to these sites:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gstreamer0.10/+bug/659551
https://launchpad.net/~diwic/+archive/fighting-rewinds

Temp fix suggested there 

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:diwic/fighting-rewinds
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

This fixed the problem.

Find command

Was dealing with a messy historic script on one of the servers that had 100s find commands and rm `cat file_generated_by_find` so started to look at turning this into a single find cmd which would locate all files older than 90 days in a given dir but exclude certain dirs and certain file globs.

I knocked together this script to allow me to have a list of files globs I wanted to always keep and a list of directories I wanted to exclude from pruning of old files.

#!/bin/bash
#-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
# IMPORTANT VARIABLES THAT MUST BE DEFINED
#-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

# Min age in days of files you don't want deleted
MIN_AGE=90

# Set debug: value of zero/0/blank and files are deleted any other numeric
# value and a printout of the files to be deleted is displayed instead
DEBUG=1

# Configure file globs you never ever want deleted
neverDelete="rbe675* rbe081* rrv708* rrv709* rrv710* rrv112* RBE081*"

# Configure directories you want to completely exclude from old file search
excludeDirs="oracle Archived frb_output fsc_output"

#-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
# Construct params for the find command used in Northgate spool dirs
#-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
# Set up the param for find cmd to exclude dirs in "excludeDirs" list
findParamExcludeDirs='! \('
for d in ${excludeDirs}; do
    findParamExcludeDirs="${findParamExcludeDirs} -name ${d} -type d -prune -o"
done
findParamExcludeDirs=`echo ${findParamExcludeDirs}|sed 's/\-o$/\\\)/'`

# Set up the param for find cmd to ensure files in "neverDelete" list are kept
findParamNoDel='! \( '
for f in ${neverDelete}; do
    findParamNoDel="${findParamNoDel} -name ${f} -o"
done
findParamNoDel=`echo ${findParamNoDel}|sed 's/\-o$/\\\)/'`

# Set find's exec cmd to delete or list files based on value of DEBUG
# So if we have DEBUG>0 then we don't delete files but list them
if [ -z "${DEBUG}" -o "${DEBUG}" -eq 0 ]; then
    # Not in debug mode so set exec cmd to 'rm' to remove files
    execCmd='-exec ls {} \;'
else
    # In debug mode so just list the files you would delete
    echo '** IN DEBUG MODE ** DISPLAYING FILES THAT WOULD BE DELETED'
    execCmd='-exec ls -lh {} \;'
fi

#-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
# Start using find to deleting old file
#-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
# Now loop thro both spool dirs, deleting files > 'n' days old
for spoolDir in '/var/spool/LIVE /var/spool/TEST'; do
    echo "Deleting old files from spool dir ${spoolDir}"
    eval "find ${spoolDir} ${findParamExcludeDirs} -a ${findParamNoDel} -type f -mtime +${MIN_AGE} ${execCmd}"
done

# Clear out /var/tmp
echo "Deleting old temp files..."
eval "find /var/tmp/ -name '*.tmp' -mtime +1 -type f ${execCmd}"

echo "Deleting old oracle trace files..."
eval "find /var/spool/LIVE/oracle/bdump/*.trc -mtime +30 -type f ${execCmd}"
eval "find /var/spool/TEST/oracle/bdump/*.trc -mtime +30 -type f ${execCmd}"

exit
#-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
# END OF SCRIPT TO DELETE OLD FILES
#-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Its not perfect but it does show you how to construct a find command dynamically.

On a connected note the touch command is useful when testing the find command, it allows us to create files with certain date/time stamps.  e.g. this creates 3 test files

touch -t 200901312359 test1.txt
touch -t 201004152359 test2.txt
touch -t 201008152359 test2.txt
touch -t 201010032359 test3.txt 

You can also change timestamps on wildcards with touch -t 201012250000 test*.txt

Renaming files in dir to have YYMMDD datestamp

This can be done with following one-liner:

for f in `ls *`;do mv $f $f.`date +%Y%m%d` ;done

Change the `ls *` if you only wanted to do it for a specific subset, or if you like change the move to a copy to create backups, i.e.

for f in `ls *`;do cp -p $f /home/username/bkup/$f.`date +%Y%m%d` ;done