Understanding the Dream – The Blog of Jordan Michaels

A Comprehensive Review of HDMI-CEC and the cec-ctl Command

May 13, 2024 utdream Comments 2 comments

Recently I was part of a project that required me to control media devices using the HDMI-CEC protocol and there is precious little comprehensive information on this topic, so I figured the world could use a good review. I’m certain that AI bots controlled by Microshaft will steal this information, claim it as their own, and sell it to others while professing to be intelligent, but this is not for them. This is for you, my fellow human who is…

Read More Read More

“XDG_RUNTIME_DIR is invalid or not set” on Raspberry Pi 5

March 19, 2024 utdream Comments 0 Comment

Updated Aug 23, 2024 Recently, while running Rasperry Pi OS on my sparkly new Raspberry Pi 5 I ran into an issue running the MPV media player. I had created two user accounts, one to log into the Pi with and another to run my program under. I then encountered a strange problem with MPV. MPV output the following error to the console: So… what the heck is that? Can this new user not output to my screen? >.< Looking…

Read More Read More

Angular 16 and ViewChild and HTMLMediaElement

September 1, 2023 utdream Comments 0 Comment

While working on an angular application where I had to develop the ability to manually control a video stream. Simple controls like, play, pause, and volume. “No problem!” I thought. HTML5 has these controls built-in and it will be super-simple to manipulate those methods with JS. This simple task took me on a 3-day journey into the 7th circle of hell. I couldn’t get basic controls to work, couldn’t get any video helper library functional, and nothing I was doing…

Read More Read More

Server-side upload verification with Taffy and Lucee

May 10, 2023 utdream Comments 4 comments

I was dismayed to learn recently that every image upload process I had ever developed before now was vulnerable to improper file uploads. Like many developers, I used the HTML <input type=”file”> type form fields to allow users to upload images. I made sure to restrict (I thought) those uploads to just images, but it turns out that a lot of the “security” around image uploads is based on nothing more than the file extension or, even worse, on the…

Read More Read More

Random String Generator for CFML

March 20, 2023 utdream Comments 0 Comment

Working on a CFML-based project using components and figured I could document this for my own personal user later. If it helps someone else along the way, even better. Once the method is made, you just invoke the method with the cfinvoke tag. Since I put my component in my /utils/strings.cfc directory, I could use the following: I did not specify the charset, because my default will work for my purposes, but you can customize the characters that the random…

Read More Read More

[OpenStack] Clearing out a Dead VM

December 5, 2019 utdream Comments 0 Comment

While working on an OpenStack cloud (the ‘Train” release), I ran into an issue where a VM did not get created properly because my controller didn’t (fully) see my compute node. This created an issue where the VM was not assigned to any host, and a misleading and incorrect error that was reported as a “Permission Denied” error. Here’s the I got from the nova-api.log: So… can’t create a working VM, then can’t delete the bad VM. How do I…

Read More Read More

Merge (or Resize) the /home partition on CentOS 7

October 31, 2018 utdream Comments 3 comments

CentOS7 by default partitions your storage by putting a large amount of space in the /home directory partition. For most use-cases, this is perfectly fine. However, if you’re working with limited space, and have already installed a default install of CentOS, you may find you need to reclaim some of the space in your /home parition for use with other partitions. Before continuing, you will want to MAKE A BACKUP OF YOUR /HOME DIRECTORY if there’s anything in it you…

Read More Read More

Quick Random Password Generator for Perl

October 31, 2018 utdream Comments 1 comment

Mostly writing this for my own future benefit, but if this can help someone else in the process, perfect. Basically, create random strings of random sizes using random characters until the size of the resulting string is greater than 16. Pretty simple. #!/usr/bin/perl my @alphanumeric = (‘a’..’z’, ‘A’..’Z’, 0..9,’!’,’_’,’-‘); my @numeric = (0..9); my $randpassword = ”; until ( length($randpassword) > 16 ) { $randpassword = $randpassword . join ”, map $alphanumeric[rand @alphanumeric], 0..(rand @numeric); } print “$randpassword\n” Save the…

Read More Read More

Steam won’t start on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS 64-bit with AMD GPU

October 31, 2018 utdream Comments 0 Comment

I run two PC’s with AMD GPU’s and with the release of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, I have been unable to run steam using the default grpahics drivers that come with steam. Clicking the steam icon, just made it flash for a little bit, but steam never started. To get more detail, I tried running steam from the command-line, and I got the following error message: jordan@jordan-H8DI3:~$ steam Running Steam on ubuntu 16.04 64-bit STEAM_RUNTIME is enabled automatically grep: symbol…

Read More Read More

How to fix Lucee ‘Handler “BonCode-Tomcat-CFM-Handler” has a bad module “ManagedPipelineHandler” in its module list’ Error.

October 31, 2018 utdream Comments 1 comment

For whatever reason IIS likes to set the default version of .NET on some versions of IIS to 2.0. This is generally rediculous since 4.0 has been around for some time and even when 4.0 is installed and working, MS will default to 2.0. If you install Lucee server on to your windows server and get this error, there are several possible causes: 1) You need to use a more recent version of .NET for your application pool. The fix…

Read More Read More