Using vlc with a proxy on windows

Googling "vlc proxy windows" does not immediately give me what I want. I did find this page, but allow me to give you a digest of it with a couple of suggestions:

1. right click the "VLC media player" icon on your desktop
2. Properties
3. add the following to the Target (outside of the quotes)

 --http-proxy=my.proxy.com:8080

4. Apply
5. Ok.

NOTE: there should be a space between the Target and the "--http-proxy=my.proxy.com:8080" Mine looks like this:

"C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\vlc.exe" --http-proxy=my.companys.proxy.com:8080

Or if you like the command line, try:

vlc.exe http://my.video.com/some/random/stream.avi --http-proxy=my.proxy.com:8080

Hope that helps.

Barebones Xfce - shutdown and restart greyed out

So I found this great entry to help with the problem, but wouldn't you know it?

They say to put this entry into your sudoers file:

myuser myhost=/usr/local/libexec/xfsm-shutdown-helper

Well that's just geek speak for what you most likely want which is something more like this:

myuser ALL=NOPASSWD: /usr/sbin/xfsm-shutdown-helper

If you do not specify NOPASSWD then you will be prompted for a password when you shutdown ... who want's that? And /usr/sbin/xfsm-shutdown-helper is the default for the 4.4.2-2 version of the xfce4-session package in debian (sid) at the time of this blog entry.

Hope that helps.

P.S. You'll get great extra credit with me if you can tell me why this link does not go to the right anchor on the page it refers to when using firefox version 2.0.0.14.

svn: PROPFIND request failed on ...

Have you ever run a command like this?

svn co http://some.host.org/some/repo/somewhere/with/a/trunk myFavoriteProject

And gotten an error like this?

svn: PROPFIND request failed on '/some/repo/somewhere/with/a/trunk'
svn: PROPFIND of '/some/repo/somewhere/with/a/trunk': Could not resolve hostname `some.host.org': Unknown host (http://some.host.org)

Well, you are not alone. You are probably behind a proxy server (like Squid) that filters and/or caches incoming and outgoing traffic.

try doing what I did ...

$ vi ~/.subversion/servers

then go down to the [global] section of the file where you might see soemthing like this:

[global]
# http-proxy-exceptions = *.exception.com, www.internal-site.org
# http-proxy-host = defaultproxy.whatever.com
# http-proxy-port = 7000

Uncomment some of the lines, and fill this section out with the name of your favorite proxy that your business throttles you with, so that it looks something like this:

http-proxy-host = web-proxy.mycompany.com
http-proxy-port = 8080

And then retry your subversion command.

If your company's proxy server supports all of the HTTP methods that Subversion uses like PROPFIND, REPORT, MERGE, MKACTIVITY, and CHECKOUT, then you should be fine.

If something in the way does not support HTTP methods such as REPORT (like our proxy), then you might get subsequent errors like this:

svn: REPORT request failed on '/repos/asf/!svn/vcc/default'
svn: REPORT of '/repos/asf/!svn/vcc/default': Could not read response body: Connection reset by peer (http://some.host.org)

Hope that helps.

If anyone understands this issue better, and can shed some light on it, please give us a link that shows us how to avoid these issues completely.

BOLD UPPERCASE WARNING!

I AM GLAD THAT THE SOLUTION PROVIDED HAS HELPED SOME OF YOU, BUT 100s OF PEOPLE HAVE BEEN READING THIS POST EVERYDAY, AND WE WANT A MORE DEFINITIVE AND CLEAR ANSWER TO THESE ISSUES THAN WHAT YOU SEE ABOVE. WHY ARE PEOPLE HAVING ALL OF THESE ISSUES? THOSE OF YOU WHO FIGURE THIS OUT ... POST YOUR COMMENTS BELOW!

ILOM stands for Integrated Lights Out Manager

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You can read more about Sun's Integrated Lights Out Manager here.

Enjoy.

Why Java is "the suck"

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Look at this:

String.valueOf((new Integer((String) pageNumber)).intValue()+1)

Now ... constructs like this are so common in Java it's disgusting. Most of it is probably due to idiots like me who do not know what the "best practice" is for this, but please!

I'm sure if I was better with my EL, or wrote my Java code in XML, or just memorized a few more APIs, life would be easier, right?

Why is the world so tainted and ruined, and so irrepairably so?

Praise the Lord.

UPDATE: Derek Konigsberg noted that I do not need to create the interim Integer in the above code, but instead use static methods of the Integer class to achieve the same String.