SELinux + Apache

Found out the hard way that you need to change some things if you're trying to run apache with SELinux. I needed to run the following commands to get it to not show a 403 forbidden page:

setsebool -P httpd_enable_homedirs 1
chcon -R -t httpd_sys_content_t /home/mike/pageDirectory

the first command allows httpd to serve pages that are in /home directories, the second sets the selinux context so that selinux allows those pages to be served

SELinux + Dropbox

If SELinux complains about execstack and dropobox:

http://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=26808&replies=19#post-167370

All Text Messages Deleted

I was growing fond of the ability to keep all my messages without ever having to delete them for space. After all, I have several GB and text messages are small, so it's not like I'm going to run out. However, there is apparently a bug, experienced by many Android users, where it will randomly delete all of them for no apparent reason after a month or so. I think this is the only time that its happened to me. I have never had the auto-delete feature checked, so it does appear to be a bug. Different forums have shown I'm not the only one with the issue. Ugh.

Relevant link: http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=5669

More Droid Complaints

Not huge ones, but here they are:

1. There are three facebook friends that simply will not be added to my contacts list. I have no idea why these three particular people, but it's annoying
2. For some reason there are many contacts that do not show up in my people list unless I tell it to view google contacts. However, none of these people are google contacts, nor are many of them linked to google accounts.

Update: Deleting all of my google contacts seemed to solve #2...

HTC Droid Incredible Complaints

For the most part I love this phone. However, I have some complaints. I'll list them here as they accumulate:

1. It is impossible to uninstall the CityID application. It was put on by default and is only a 15-day trial. I wouldn't mind having it if it weren't like $3/month...
2. There seems to be an error in which the photo for a contact automatically goes to the facebook picture, even if I explicitly tell it to use a different one. It happens at random times for each contact, but it has happened for all contacts for which I have taken a photo.

For the facebook problem I tried a suggestion on androidforums.com, but it didn't work. The suggestion was to go to a problem contact, change the type of their phone number (e.g., to 'work'), save it, change the photo, then change the number type back and save again. It didn't work.

I'm now trying to disable Facebook for HTC Sense's contact sync feature in settings -> accounts & sync .

Converting .mkv to .avi and changing resolution with MEncoder

Matroska (.mkv) videos invariably run slow on basically any program I'm trying to run them on, regardless of OS. Here's how I'm converting them to AVI's with MEncoder on Ubuntu 10.10 (MEncoder had to be added):

mencoder -oac copy -ovc xvid -xy 320 -xvidencopts bitrate=450 -o output.avi input.mkv