Apache2 REQUEST_FILENAME requires DOCUMENT_ROOT

I had a problem with my rewrite rules, that looked like this:

  DocumentRoot /var/www/trust.jj5.net
  RewriteEngine On
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
  RewriteRule (.*) http://trust.jj5.net/sorry.html [L,R]

I was trying to redirect any request which didn’t match a file or directory. The !-f and !-d requirements were failing because the path to the REQUEST_FILENAME wasn’t fully qualified. I fixed the problem by including the DOCUMENT_ROOT:

  DocumentRoot /var/www/trust.jj5.net
  RewriteEngine On
  RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}%{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
  RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}%{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
  RewriteRule (.*) http://trust.jj5.net/sorry.html [L,R]

Happy days! :)

dir2ogg (no chipmunks!)

Learned about dir2ogg over here and am using it to convert MP3 to OGG.

So… I installed dir2ogg:

# apt-get install dir2ogg

And then I ran it on some MP3s, and the generated OGG files sounded like chipmunks. I read the man page for dir2ogg and saw that it had an option for mp3-decoder. I tried specifying the lame decoder but it complained that it couldn’t find it, so:

# apt-get install lame

Then I ran dir2ogg with the following command and the ouput OGG files sounded proper!

$ dir2ogg --mp3-decoder=lame --quality=10 .

Happy days!